On the right of return

Sarah F. Waheed

In April of 1948, (Irgun) terror squads butchered 254 Palestinian women, children, and old men in the village of Deir Yassin, while young Arab men were working in the fields. In the days to come, the Zionist army massacred, looted and raped; destroyed entire Palestinian houses--village after village. By 1980 what was left of the ruins of Deir Yassin was bulldozed over to make a settlement for Orthodox Jews. The streets were named after the Irgun units that had massacred the Palestinians, and the Deir Yassin cemetery was bulldozed to make way for a new Jewish highway.

The massacre was led by Menachem Begin, twice-elected Premier of Israel. Chaim Weizmann, first president of Israel, is quoted to have said, "it was a miraculous clearing of the land."

In a process that would today be known as "ethnic cleansing" over 750,000 Palestinians fled from their homes and villages. That is how the state known as Israel declared its "independence".

Since then, over a series of "wars", violent conflicts, and uprisings, Palestinians have become the largest refugee group in the world. Today, there are 3.2 million Palestinian refugees registered on the UN. Many of them live in other Arab lands, not altogether sympathetic to them. Still, many others live under the dire hardship imposed on them by Israeli military occupation. The vast majority of Palestinians are not asking to go back in time and eliminate Israel altogether, as many Americans have been indoctrinated to believe. Most of them wish for a just peace, by asking for Israel to abide by the countless UN resolutions it has defied, most notably 242, 194, and 338. Palestinians are simply asking come back home--a basic human right.

This right has been denied to them by continued Israeli military aggression deemed illegal according to the UN while building of settlements continues at the Palestinians' expense. According to a report by Amnesty International, 2650 Palestinian houses have been destroyed since 1987 by Israel in the West Bank, including east Jerusalem, on the pretense of not having building permission.

Furthermore, thousands of acres owned by Palestinians have been confiscated to build settlements in the occupied territories in defiance of the 4th Geneva convention. Article 49 of the convention states that the "Occupying Power shall not transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." In fact, since the Oslo Accords were signed, the illegal building of Jewish settlements has increased by 50% according to Peace Now, a leading Israeli human rights organization. The budget for the new settlements has not been cut under Barak's leadership.

Palestinians have a right to return to their home, a right that has been usurped by the building of illegal settlements. The United Nations adopted Resolution 194 on December 11, 1948. Paragraph 11 states: "...the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date... compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return."

Resolution 194 was affirmed practically every year since with a universal consensus, except for Israel and the U.S.

This resolution is also explained by UN General Assembly Resolution 3236 which reaffirms in Subsection 2, "the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted, and calls for their return". Preventing their return is an act of aggression that merits condemnation by the Security Council. UN partition resolution 181 and Israel's later admission to the UN were based on the conditional acceptance of relevant UN resolutions including 194.

There is a widespread myth that the Palestinian right to return is not practically feasible, and would displace a large number of Israelis. However, research not only indicates that the right of the refugees is legal but also possible. A study on the demography of Israel demonstrates that 78% of Israelis are living in 14 percent of Israel and that the remaining 86% of the land in Israel is mostly land that belongs to the refugees on which 22% of the Israelis live.

However, according to Al-Awdah, 20% live in city centers, which are mostly Palestinian such as, Beer Al Saba', Ashdod, Majdal, Asqalan, Nazareth, Haifa, Acre, Tiberias and Safad. The remaining 20% live in kibbutzes and moshavs. These small communities control the fate of five million Palestinian refugees. There is simply no logic to having 2,400 refugees on one square kilometer in the Gaza Strip while any one of them could look over the barbed wire and see his land practically empty. This empty land then becomes used for cheaper settlements for Israeli residents, many of whom are ultra-orthodox nationalists.

If Gaza refugees were allowed to return to their homes in southern Palestine, no more than five percent of Jews in the center would be affected. If the refugees of Lebanon returned to their homes in the Galilee no more than one percent of Jews in the center would be affected.

The Palestinian people must have a homeland too. Until and unless Israel addresses its contravention of international law, and agrees to a just solution for the millions of Palestinian refugees who live under the Israeli military occupation, the violence and turmoil in the region will continue. And until and unless the U.S. press confronts these issues fairly, without solely pandering to staunchly pro-Israeli positions (as it is clearly guilty of), the American public will continue to believe in the fiction that has been fed to them.