1948 Internally Displaced Persons Palestinians
1948 Internally Displaced Persons Palestinians are an Integral Part of the Palestinian People and must be Included Equally in all Future Solutions
One cannot help notice that the Palestinian demand for the ‘Right of Return’, whether by individuals or communities, has not been silenced since 1948. The quest for return lives on, despite the fact that the majority of Palestinians have remained refugees, both inside and outside Palestine. Forced displacement which created the refugee issue, has been yet another dimension of the Zionist project to establish the state of Israel as a racist colonial entity.
This state could not have come into being without the taking of
homes, land and personal possessions of those displaced or left
behind. These individual acts are embodied in the act of the
occupation of the entire Palestinian national home, the
confiscation of its people’s properties and identity, and the
destruction of over 531 communities and villages.
Since the beginning of the Nakba (Palestinian Catastrophe) in 1948,
the notion of ‘Return’ has evolved from localized and
community-based initiatives for raising awareness to a political
force, represented and established worldwide. This evolution came
as a response to the Oslo process; a process created to alienate
the Palestinian people from their rights and their unified national
liberation movement.
It is also the result of the natural evolution of the political
consciousness of the Palestinian people, who have never ceased to
develop creative strategies for claiming their rights and
identity.
While the Oslo process addressed the two main groups of Palestinian
refugees - the refugees, theirright of return, restitution and
compensation as enshrined in UN Resolution 194, and Palestinians
living as Israeli citizens in 1948 occupied Palestine – it was
decided that the latter group would be treated as an internal
Israeli issue, as if outside the mandate of the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO). Displaced Palestinians in Israel
were forced to assimilate and work within the Israeli system, as
though their case was only a call for equal rights as citizens of
Israel. This, although the original platform of the Palestinian
national movement had considered Nazareth and Haifa as cities as
Palestinian as Rafah, East Jerusalem and Jenin.
It also considered Palestinians displaced within Israel as an
integral part of the Palestinian refugee question, i.e. one cause
for one national home. The Oslo Accords were an inevitable
manifestation of the disproportionate balance of power between the
parties and the main factor that led to the loss of vision of the
Palestinian national movement. In other terms, Oslo was a diversion
forced on the Palestinian leadership, albeit “temporarily”, which
destroyed the integrity of the Palestinian cause. Hence, the
unbalanced nature of the Oslo Accords raised serious questions
regarding the leadership’s desire for a just and peaceful
solution.
Palestinian Israeli citizens were excluded from the negotiations,
and therefore, marginalized from the national movement. Since then,
however, a new consciousness has emerged which rejects this state
of separation.
This consciousness also encourages people to be more independent
from the Palestinian negotiators and work towards solutions for
themselves. For Palestinians in Israel, this means that they have
to defend their rights and prevent an agreement based on power
relations rather than justice. In a deal based on power,
Palestinian internally displaced and refugees could lose their
inalienable right of return, and the ethnic Jewish character of
Israel and its institutional racism would be reinforced. In fact,
the negotiation process gave rise to new awareness among
Palestinians in Israel of two parallel needs: the need to build new
tools of struggle and the need to reinforce their own national
institutions.
The establishment of the Association for the Defence of the Rights
of the Internally Displaced Palestinians in Israel (ADRID) in 1995
represents an example from that period of time. Built by and for
the displaced in Israel, its charter is very clear. Their approach
does not address the status of Palestinian citizens of Israel, but
rather the core demands of the Palestinian movement, such as
the right of return as enshrined in UN Resolution 194 and
Palestinian national rights, including the internally displaced as
part of the overall Palestinian refugee question. In fact, the
internally displaced in Palestine and the refugees in exile do not
have separate identities.
They are part of the same communities, the same culture, and the
same families, and both were forcibly displaced during the
establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. In addition, towns,
villages and properties affected by the displacement do not belong
to the internally displaced alone, but rather to all the refugees.
They are in fact the property of the Palestinian people as a
whole.
Palestinian negotiators who supported the Oslo process, originally
for their own ambitions, were amongst those opposed to transforming
the dream of return into a political or national demand.
Because it stands for the darkest side of the Palestinian
dispossession, the right of return is a core component of the
Palestinian cause, and the basis of a just solution. However, these
negotiators and persons of influence in the Palestinian Authority
wanted to address the issue of the internally displaced in Israel
in a “practical” way and in line with the Israeli position that it
was a purely humanitarian issue. They aimed to separate the
internally displaced from the right of return and the Palestinian
political projectHence, the perception was that linking the issue
of the Palestinians in Israel with the Palestinian national
liberation would obstruct the negotiations and the “dream of Oslo”.
The dream of liberation through Oslo, however, was quickly
destroyed by Israel, irrespective of the fact that the
Osloaffiliated Palestinian leadership continues holding on to it.
Indeed, this Palestinian leadership still regards the Oslo Accords
as the basis for negotiations with Israel, while the occupying
power has long stripped itself from all obligations under these
agreements.
According to Israel, the current balance of powers require that
positions of the Palestinian leadership must be approved by the
United States in order to be recognized by Israel. The Israeli
formula requires that the Palestinians change their positions for
the sake of advancing the peace process, irrespective of continued
occupation, aggression, forced displacement, racism and destruction
of the Palestinian identity by Israel. Of course, this situation
did not begin with the Palestinian Authority but is rather a
product of the vulnerability of the PLO. According to Shimon Peres,
the reason why Israel recognized the PLO was because the
organization was in a fragile position and could be easily
manipulated by Israel in the negotiations.
The integration of the cause of Palestinian citizens of Israel and
those in the 1967 occupied Palestinian territory contradicts the
Israeli-U.S. vision of partition that guided the Oslo Accords.
Israel and the United States wanted to limit the role of the PLO
and prevented it from raising the question of Palestinians inside
1948 Palestine (i.e. Israel) as part of the Palestinian national
movement.
Palestinian negotiators, moreover, underestimated the importance of
Israeli public opinion. They perceived the attitudes of Israeli
citizens as being fixed and static, rather than dependent upon
political and social developments. They also failed to consider
changes in Israeli public opinion, especially opinions which
expressed a sense of “danger”, i.e. the danger of granting
Palestinians some rights. The Palestinian leadership assumed that
if they separated the issue of the internally displaced in Israel
from the issue of the refugees, they would be portrayed in a
positive light in Israeli public opinion which allegedly supported
a just solution. Howe ver, the overwhelming majority of the Israeli
public is strongly opposed to granting rights to Palestinians, such
as the right of return, whenever they feel that such rights
challenge their own status. Israel was built on the destruction of
the Palestinian people.
This does not necessarily mean that the same strong opposition
exists with regard to rights and solutions that do not challenge
the notion of Israel as a Jewish state, and it may not be equally
strong if one tries to find a solution for both, Jews in Israel and
Palestinians, based on one of the various models of a one-state
solution.
The transformation of the struggle of the Palestinian-Arab popular
movement from an issue-based into an organized political struggle
for the national agenda is a matter of great importance and
complexity. The transformation of the issue of the internally
displaced in Israel into a project of national struggle requires
certain conditions, such as the creation of a community-based
ovement of institutions capable of taking on a strategic national
project as part of the Palestinian vision. For this aim, the
popular movement must be transformed so that it relates to the core
of the political and national aspirations of the Palestinians in
Israel. While in the past it was the role of the political parties
to serve as the guardians of the issue of the refugees and
internally displaced and the issue of Islamic property,
organizations and committees for the rights of refugees and the
internally displaced have recently emerged.
They have organized annual “Right of Return” marches on the day
of Al- Nakba; memorials on the day of the establishment of the
state of Israel under the slogan, “Their Independence - Our
Catastrophe;” and, since 2003, “Right of Return” conferences in
Israel. All these activities aim to put the issue of the internally
displaced on the public agenda, build popular consciousness, and
make it an integral part of the Palestinian national
project.
The last ponit deserving mention is the relationship between
Palestinians in Israel and those in exile. The roots of this
relationship go back to the common experience of forced issue of
refugees and internally displaced must be developed based on these
roots. This is the task of all Palestinian people, not of the
refugees and displaced alone, and any attempt to break up or
separate the components of the Palestinian cause will weaken and
dilute the Palestinian national struggle as a whole.
In order to move forward, we need to transform our work for the
right of return by representing both Palestinian refugees and the
internally displaced within a unified Palestinian leadership
encompassing the needs of all Palestinians, irrespective of their
geographic location or status. In addition, we need to rebuild the
Palestinian national liberation movement with a vision based on the
principles of justice and reparations and aiming towards a future
based on our collective rights, memories and history as a
nation.
In 2008 we will commemorate 60 years of Nakba. Events will be
organized across Palestine, and this is an opportunity for a
reassessment of the long journey and the power of the right of
return. Amir Makhoul is a Palestinian writer and analyst, and
general director of Ittijah, the Union of Palestinian Associations
and Community-based Organizations based in Haifa. This article was
first published by BADIL in its Arabic-language magazine Haq
al-Awda.