Ending the Palestinians- Circle of Misery - 2-Apr-2000

Translation Ha'aretz English edition

The reporter argues that there is no right of return home for the 1948 displaced Palestinian refugees, and there cannot be. Only a return to the homeland.

On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly approved a resolution to partition the land of Israel into two states, Palestinian and Israeli, with the territory equally divided between the two. The Jewish population, which then numbered about 600,000 - as opposed to about 1.3 million Palestinians - was allotted large swaths of the barren desert as a land reserve for the absorption of the numerous Jewish refugees waiting at the gates.While the Palestinian population was expected to grow through natural increase, the Jewish state, according to the international community that authorized its establishment, was to devote itself to finding a solution to the Jewish problem, taking in Jews of all nationalities, particularly Holocaust refugees. So despite the difference in their numbers, the land was almost equally divided between the two peoples, with more than 70 percent of the fertile land allocated to the Palestinians.

When the Palestinians failed in their war of aggression to wipe out the Jewish state, they called on the Arab armies to invade the Jewish state and eliminate it. Yet this move, too, was unsuccessful. The Jews heroically defended their territory, repulsed the invaders, and in certain places conquered areas that had been slated for the Palestinian state. (The Jewish state acquired about 6,000 square kilometers of the territory designated for the Palestinian state.) In the heat of battle, a Jewish minority was expelled from the few settlements that Palestinians occupied, as were many Palestinians from Jewish settlements.

In the final stages of the fighting, Palestinian areas were intentionally destroyed by the Israeli army and, with no military justification, their inhabitants were expelled by force to beyond the armistice line that was marked at the war's end in 1949.

Those who fled, and those who were expelled, both Jews and Palestinians, cannot accurately be called refugees, but rather displaced persons, for there is an essential difference between the two terms. A refugee is a person who has fled or been expelled from the land of his birth; a displaced person is someone who has fled or been expelled from his home, but remains within the bounds of the territory of his homeland. The Jews who fled or were expelled by Arabs from the Old City of Jerusalem, the Etzion Bloc, Atarot, Kfar Darom or Beit Ha'arava, into Israeli territory, were never refugees but only displaced persons, who were immediately allocated new homes in the Israeli homeland.

However the Palestinians did not call their uprooted people displaced persons. They were instead referred to as refugees, even though most remained in the Palestinian homeland and lived at most only 20 to 40 kilometers away from their homes. For example, the Arabs of Lod and Ramle moved to the Ramallah area, which is 30 or 40 kilometers away from these towns. There were also Palestinians who fled, or were expelled, from Palestine and went to Arab countries: Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. All of these refugees could have returned at least to their homeland, becoming displaced persons rather than refugees, and building themselves new homes in their homeland. This is the beginning of the tragedy of the Palestinians, for which they themselves and the Arab countries carry direct moral responsibility. Even if (from their point of view) they did have a legitimate hope that they would see the day when they would be able to eliminate the Jewish state and take back all of Palestine - or at least return to their homes just as the displaced persons from the Etzion Bloc and the Old City did - there was still nothing to prevent the Palestinian displaced persons from building real homes. They could have lived ordinary, respectable lives within their homeland, instead of humiliating provisional existences in miserable camps.

The Palestinians, who formulated their national identity toward the end of the 19th century, to this very day confuse the concept of homeland with the concept of home. They are not the only ones. There are Israelis on the right and on the left, but particularly on the right, who are trying to depict the return of the Palestinians as a return to their homes, and not to their homeland - which would dangle a sword over the state of Israel, as if every return implied the inundation of the state with another 3 million Palestinians.

Such Israelis are merely perpetuating this confusion. When, at the beginning of World War II, the Soviet Union conquered parts of Finland in an aggressive and unjust war, took over land and settlements and exiled Finnish citizens westward into the Finnish state, those Finns were not refugees but rather displaced persons. They immediately built new homes for themselves in their homeland, whatever their dreams of "return" might be. Of course the dream of return that the Palestinian displaced persons and refugees nurtured in their hearts had no connection at all to a political solution, or to the fact that they had embarked on an aggressive war against the Jews. For many years, they continued to reject the principle of the solution of the partition of the land, and until the Palestinian Liberation Organization decision of 1988, many did not recognize Israel.

In the meantime, however, they wanted to go home, literally. Accordingly, they sentenced themselves to a life of humiliation and poverty; a welfare existence without any basic rights. The Palestinian refugees in Syria, Lebanon and Egypt were not even granted citizenship, in order not to detract from their clamor to return. But there is no returning home for the displaced persons and refugees of 1948, and there cannot be such a return. There can only be a return to the homeland, and sometimes this may be truly possible.

When my Palestinian friends demand the right of return I tell them that I would be prepared to bring all the Palestinian refugees back to their homes in Israel on condition that they first bring back to life the 6,000 Israeli dead who were killed during the aggressive war of 1948, when Israel was pleading for its life after the UN partition plan and seeking peaceful coexistence.

Against the Palestinians' continuing confusion between home and homeland stands a nation that bears within it a near-opposite distortion. Throughout history, the Jews never ceased to wander among different homes and change their homelands the way most people change their clothes. From the time of the destruction of the First Temple, when many of the Babylonian exiles did not return to the land, the Jews began to adopt an approach that sees the world as a hotel chain. Instead of returning to the homeland in the land of Israel and clinging to it, the Jews, for existential or economic reasons, preferred to seek a new and more comfortable place for themselves, where they could settle easily. Therefore it is no wonder that the Jews scorned and alienated themselves from the sense of the real homeland (not home) of the Palestinians, and proposed that they settle in the Arab countries, as if it were really so easy to exchange a homeland for someplace else.

Borders must be drawn to separate the states, as has always been done. What is defined as the Palestinian state must be recognized when the time comes as the homeland to which, and only to which, all those defined as Palestinians by the Palestinian constitution will be allowed to return. The Arab states are just as responsible for the perpetuation of the refugee problem as Israel was when it was sovereign in the territory - from the Six-Day War until the Oslo agreements.

Everyone, including the Palestinians, must begin to solve the problem. First, the problems of the uprooted Palestinians living within the boundaries of the future Palestinian state must be addressed. After that, construction must get underway on an infrastructure to address the problems of the refugees now in the Arab states. This is a very lengthy, expensive process, that must be undertaken thoughtfully. However, it will certainly find great support both in Israel and abroad if this becomes the aim of worldwide fundraising.

A.B. Yehoshua's latest novel is "Voyage to the End of the Millennium".