Return, Resettlement, Repatriation:
The Future of Palestinian Refugees in the Peace Negotiations
Source: FOFOGNET Digest, 22 April 1996
by Salim Tamari, Institute
of Jerusalem Studies
Final Status Strategic Studies
Institute for Palestine Studies
Beirut, Washington, and Jerusalem
February 1996
II. The Scope of Negotiations
Altogether seven plenary meetings of the RWG took
place (Ottawa May and November of 1992; Oslo, May
1993; Tunis, October 1993; Cairo, May 1994; Antalya,
December 1994, and Geneva, December 1995), with an
additional 'intersessional' meetings to discuss specialized
themes preluding plenary meetings. The shift from
periodic to annual meetings of the plenaries reflected
a widely held view in the multilaterals that intersessionals
(in part because of their size) were more effective
in advancing issues discussed. To these we must add
another six meetings of the Quadripartite Committee
on Displaced Persons (Amman, Beer-Sheva, Cairo, Gaza
City, Amman, and Haifa) which was established by the
Oslo Accords, which will be discussed separately below.
Several issues were raised from the beginning about
the composition of the group and the scope of its
deliberations.
a. Representation:
The first battle of the RWG was over who represents
the Palestinians. Since the terms of the Madrid Conference
was seen by the Israelis as to exclude the Palestinian
delegates from the PLO, the exile community and Jerusalem
the first two meetings in Ottawa were occupied by
bickering over the heading of the Palestinian team
first by Elias Sanbar (from the exile community),
and then of Muhammad Hallaj (a PNC member). In every
case the Palestinian team had to appear under the
joint umbrella of the Jordanian-Palestinian team,
and were denied separate representation. The first
RWG meeting was boycotted by the Israelis, and the
second ended with a stalemate due the dominance of
discussion over representation.
The issue of representation was not resolved until
the Cairo meeting in May 1994 which came after the
signing of the DOP and the PLO became the direct negotiator
with the Israelis.
b. Defining the Mandate of the RWG:
Are Jews Also Refugees?
During the Second Plenary (in Ottawa November 1992)
the Israelis raised the issue of including Jewish
and other refugees in the deliberations of the RWG.
The US delegation to the Lisbon Steering Committee
(May 1992) also attempted to widen the scope of the
RWG to include non-Palestinian refugees, including
Cardias and Armenians. In particular the Israelis
saw it as an opportunity to treat the problem of final
status of the Palestinian refugee problem in the context
of population exchange. That is, by suggesting that
Palestinian refugees from Palestine have been replaced
by the influx of Jewish refugees from North Africa,
Yemen, Iraq, and other Arab countries. This position
is based on an earlier claim of quid pro quo made
in 1948 by David Ben Gurion:
"When the Arab states are ready to conclude
a peace treaty with Israel [the question of refugees
will come up for constructive solution as part of
the general settlement, and with due regard to our
counter-claims in respect of the destruction of Jewish
life and property..."
From the point of view of the Palestinian, and other
Arab delegations this was seen not as a humanitarian
gesture but an attempt to diffuse the work of the
committee, whose mandate was already established in
the Moscow steering Committee.
The Palestinian delegation countered this notion
of 'exchange' by stressing three points about Jewish
immigrants to Israel: (1) That Jews from Arab countries,
in the main, came voluntarily to Israel, while the
Palestinians were forcibly expelled from the homes;
(2) that Palestinians took refuge in a different host
countries than those from which the Jews emigrated
to Israel (primarily Iraq, Morocco, and Yemen); and
(3) Arab countries, at least in theory-- and in the
case of Morocco, in fact--have proclaimed the right
of their Jewish citizens to return to their countries.
In consequence the Palestinians raised the demand
that issues of compensation, repatriation and return
on the part of Jewish immigrants in Israel should
be raised bilaterally with the respective Arab countries,
just as the Palestinians will raise these issues bilaterally
with Israel during final status negotiations.
c. Themes: Humanitarian Aid vs. Political
Rights:
The two perspectives that dominated the debate about
the nature of the negotiations was whether the RWG
will focus on humanitarian aid in the direction of
integrating the refugees in the social structure of
the host countries, or one which would assert their
political rights. The resulting format was a compromise
in which seven themes were proposed in which conditions
of refugees in the occupied territories and the host
countries were addressed, 'without prejudicing the
final status deliberations of refugees'. This proviso,
became an essential component of the gavel's summary
of each plenary meeting. Just as the Palestinians
insisted on including in each of their opening statements
a reference to General Assembly Resolution 194 (the
Right of Return), which was always diluted into the
gavel's summary as a general reference to 'relevant
UN resolutions on refugees'.
Only one of the seven themes, family reunification,
dealt concretely with a political dimension of refugee
dispersion. The other six themes addressed issues
of community development and living conditions of
refugees. Each interested country 'shepherded' one
of these themes: Databases (Norway), Human Resources
Development/Job Creation (USA), Public Health (Italy),
Child Welfare (Sweden), Economic and Social Infrastructure
(European Union), and Family Reunification (France).
It soon became apparent that family reunification
was too explosive to be dealt with as a neutral issue
of ameliorating the status of refugees since it generated
a heated discussion around the issues of dispersal,
military laws of residency, and demographic control
of the size of the Palestinian population in the West
Bank and Gaza.
In the analysis below considerable attention will
be paid to three documents which have affected the
course of the multilateral negotiations, the first
concerns the debate on family reunification, which
proved to be a much more contentious issue than anticipated;
the second, on the Canadian perception of how to break
the deadlock in the negotiations (the 'vision paper');
and finally, on the European Union attempts to link
aid to refugees with creating options for integrating
refugees in the Arab host countries.
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