Ben-Gurion approved all the elements suggested except the last, which was not compatible with his priorities at the time. He addressed the issue in some detail at a meeting on 26 August 1948, stating that the Palestinian refugees should not be allowed to return because they would constitute a fifth column. The Arab multilateral talks, Israel has seemed unconcerned. Instead of countries should look after them. If Israel were pressured by the international community to return the refugees, it should resist this pressure. If forced, Israel would allow the return of a limited number of skilled urban dwellers, but it would not permit the return of any villagers (Abu Samra 1992).

A few weeks earlier, Moshe Shertok (later "Sharett"), Israel's first foreign minister, had rejected the recommendations for a refugee return made by Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator sent to Palestine to "promote a peaceful adjustment of the future situation of Palestine" and to "ensure the safety and well-being of the population" (United Nations General Assembly Resolution 186 (S-2) of 14 May 1948). Israeli writer Shamay Cahana (1993) summarizes Sharett's rejections as follows:

Israel feels for the pain and suffering of the refugees. However, in spite of this and due to security considerations and concern "for the stability of future peace prospects," Israel cannot agree to their return. Any repatriation, which is made on a humanitarian basis but ignores military, political and economic considerations, will miss its objective and adds further difficulties. The return of thousands of uprooted Arabs, while the war is still raging, will bestow military advantage on the attacking states and will harm Israel. The cause of the refugee problem is the refusal of the Arab League to recognize Israel's right to exist. (p. 11)

A month later, in September 1948, Count Bernadotte was assassinated in Palestine by the dissident Stern group led by Yitzhak Shamir, who later became prime minister of Israel. Bernadotte's recommendations, which cost him his life, made their way into UN Resolution 194 (III) with some modifications. In his original report Bernadotte called on Israel to facilitate the return of the refugees "at the earliest possible date" (Peretz 1993, 70). In contrast, Resolution 194 (III) stated that 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." As is shown below, Israeli writers and their supporters have made much of this distinction between the words "possible" and "practicable" and have interpreted the final text of Resolution 194 (III) as nonbinding and nonspecific with regard to the right of return.

Al-Zaru (1991) showed that almost twenty official Israeli plans dealing with Palestinian refugees--first the 1948 refugees and later those of 1967--were submitted between 1948 and the late 1980s. Moshe Sharett's proposal, made in 1956 during a visit to the United States, expressed Israel's readiness to consider the principle of compensation on condition that the refugees be settled in the host countries. In 1965, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol presented a plan to the Knesset calling for diverting aid to countries in the region in order to settle the refugees in them.

Between 1967 and 1987, the start of the intifada, no less than a dozen proposals were put forward to deal with the refugees in the occupied territories and elsewhere. They included the following:

• Proposals submitted in 1967 by Raanan Weitz, director of absorption in the Jewish Agency from 1963 to 1984, called for uprooting some of the refugees in Gaza and the West Bank to new locations in the West Bank.
• Abba Eban's proposal of 1968, made during a speech delivered at the United Nations, called upon the governments of the region to implement a five-year plan whose purpose would be to establish peace and settle the refugees in the Arab countries.
• In 1971, Ariel Sharon, who was the military commander in charge of Gaza at the time, embarked on a program of moving more than 40,000 refugees in the Gaza Strip to new locations (see also Aner 1984).
• In 1973, Israel Galili, then a minister in the Labor government, put forward a plan that called for rehabilitating the refugees by providing them with houses adjacent to the camps and by converting the camps into towns or amalgamating them with neighboring municipalities.
• The election platform of the Likud in 1975 proposed settling the refugee problem on the basis of an "exchange" of people and property between Palestinian refugees and Jewish immigrants from Arab countries.

In 1982, the Begin government appointed a ministerial committee headed by Mordechai Ben-Porath, an Iraqi Jew who now heads the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC), to look into refugee questions. It came up with the most detailed plan to integrate the refugees in the West Bank and Gaza in neighboring towns through the removal of twenty-eight camps and the uprooting of some 250,000 camp residents. Israel estimated the cost of the project at close to $2 billion, to be raised from the United States and the Europeans. This was by far the most ambitious plan, but nothing came of it because of Israel's protracted involvement in Lebanon and widespread opposition of the refugees, who learned of the plan from the Israeli press.

In addition to discussing the plans mentioned by Al-Zaru, Zvit Steinboim's The Palestinian Refugees: Portrait and Possible Solutions (1993) provided more details about Ben-Porath's "rehabilitation" project. Refugees living under Israeli control were to be assisted in building new houses located near their camps, with the assumption that those who built their own homes would not be tempted to join guerrilla activities. Ben-Porath's plan consisted of the following elements, to be carried out in phases over a five-year period:

• building new houses for camp residents in stages. Five percent of the population would be housed during the first year, 15 percent during the second year, 25 percent the third year, and 30 percent during each of the fourth and fifth years;
• giving an independent municipal status to the new housing settlement;
• giving land and aid under the motto "build your own home" in accordance with an overall plan;
• unifying health and social services in the West Bank and incorporating in stages UNRWA's educational services into existing governmental educational institutions; and
• ensuring the overall coordination of the project with UNRWA.

The intifada saw yet another series of proposals for dealing with the refugee issue. During a visit to the United States in 1989, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir called for the convening of an international conference to solve the refugee issue. Israel, he declared, would contribute expertise and ideas to the project, and the United States, the Arab countries, and the international community could fund it. Shamir's ideas were similar to those of Yitzhak Rabin, then minister of defense in the national unity government, who proposed removing camps that posed a security threat to Israel's control of the territories. Moshe Arens, who succeeded Rabin, also called on the United States to head a campaign to raise $2 billion in order to resettle the refugees.

With regard to the so-called Arab question, the Likud remained faithful to the historic stance of its precursor Herut, the revisionist right-wing party within the Zionist movement. On 31 October 1991, Shamir told delegates to the Madrid conference that the "Land of Israel is our true homeland" and that "any other country, no matter how hospitable, is still a Diaspora, a temporary place on the way home." Quoting from Mark Twain's travelogue while visiting the Middle East, he went on to dismiss other claims to Palestine. "To others," Shamir said, "it was not an attractive land; no one wanted it." In rejecting the legitimacy of Palestinian and refugee claims to Palestine, Shamir repeated the familiar official Israeli charge that the Palestinians were urged to leave by their leaders and that Arab governments were to blame for keeping the refugee issue alive by refusing to dismantle the camps and absorb their inhabitants (Shamir 1991). Not long after this speech, Shamir told The Jerusalem Post on 14 May 1992 that the "Palestinians' right of return will never happen" (cited in Takkenberg 1995, 2).

In October 1994, the Israeli government published a background paper on the refugee issue outlining well-known positions it had reiterated regularly since 1948:

• The 1948 refugee problem was the creation of neighboring Arab states.
• Close to 600,000 Jewish refugees had to flee Arab countries in the early 1950s and seek shelter in Israel.
• The number of displaced Palestinian refugees in the 1948 and 1967 wars was less than that claimed by the Arab side. According to Israeli figures, between 540,000 and 720,000 Palestinians were made refugees in 1948, and about 250,000 became refugees as a result of the 1967 war.
• The definition of refugee according to UN Resolution 194 (III) was imprecise and at variance with other international legal definitions of refugee status. For example, the 1948 International Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights related to individuals and not to a displaced collectivity of people (Government of Israel 1994).

The Israeli background paper emphasized a point to be discussed later, namely that

according to these same international documents, the right of return belongs to nationals, or at least permanent residents, of a state. The Palestinian refugees have never been nationals or permanent residents of Israel; they either fled before the establishment of the State in 1948, or before the areas where they lived came under Israeli control in 1948 or 1967. (Government of Israel 1994, 10)

The government paper also reproduced a statement made by David Ben-Gurion on 1 August 1948, in which he outlined Israel's enduring policies toward the refugees:

When the Arab states are ready to conclude a peace treaty with Israel, this question [of refugees] will come up for constructive solution as part of the general settlement, and with due regard to our counterclaims in respect of the destruction of Jewish life and property, the long-term interest of the Jewish and Arab populations, the stability of the State of Israel and the durability of the basis of peace between it and its neighbors, the actual position of the Jewish communities in the Arab countries, the responsibilities of the Arab governments for their war of aggression and their liability for reparations, will all be relevant to the question of whether, to what extent, and under what conditions the former Arab residents of the territory of Israel should be allowed to return. (Government of Israel 1994, 5)

Addressing the RWG for the first time in November 1992, the head of the Israeli delegation repeated the official position by calling a "travesty" the proposition that the "Palestinian refugee problem [was] the result of mass expulsion." However, he went on to say that "the Palestinian refugee problem was born as the land was bisected by the sword, not by design, Jewish and Arab. It was largely the inevitable by-product of Arab and Jewish fears, and the protracted bitter fighting" (Ben-Ami 1992, 3). This language, echoing Israeli historian Benny Morris's well-known formulation that the refugee problem was "born of war, not of design," represents an important departure in Israeli official thinking, even though it is overlaid with the symmetry of culpability and will likely not impress those who have languished for generations in camps, whether they were actually expelled from their homes or left for fear for their lives. Still, the statement does acknowledge some Israeli responsibility in what the head of the Israel delegation to the RWG called "the inherent immorality of the war" (Ben-Ami 1992, 5).

In an interview with the newspaper Ha-Aretz in July 1994, then Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin, generally known as a dove in Israeli Labor government circles, referred to Resolution 194 (III) as only "symbolically significant" for Israel and for the Arabs, including the Palestinians. Whereas Beilin's main concern was to dilute Resolution 194 (III), former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir was more direct in commenting on the Palestinian right of return. For Shamir,

[t]he term "right of return" is an empty phrase that is utterly meaningless . . . . It will never happen, in any way, shape or form. There is only a Jewish "right of return" to the land of Israel. (cited in Takkenberg 1995, 2-3)

After the PLO and Israel signed the second agreement in Washington, DC, on 28 September 1995, Joel Singer, a legal advisor to the Israeli foreign ministry, published a detailed paper reflecting his "personal" views regarding the meaning of the agreement, in particular the limitations it placed on the Palestinian Council's jurisdiction. The paper made no mention of the refugees, other than to note that they would be dealt with in the final status talks (Singer 1995). However, when the final status talks did open in Taba, Egypt on 5 May 1996, the remarks by Uri Savir, the director general of the Israeli foreign ministry, omitted any reference to them (Savir 1996). Moreover, the press reported that the leading Palestinian representative at the meeting, Mahmud Abbas, refrained from mentioning the refugees in his speech, as requested by Israel (Al-Hasan 1996).

Israeli writers whose research addressed the refugee issue have concluded, without exception, that the right of return mentioned in General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) is not sanctioned by international law, does not have the meaning and implication attributed to it by the Palestinians, and is impractical to implement and must be rejected because it means a fundamental transformation, if not the destruction, of Israel as a Jewish state.

Shlomo Gazit's report, The Palestinian Refugee Problem (published in 1994 by the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel-Aviv University) drew the attention of commentators because its author is a retired army general with a military intelligence background and a close friend of the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. The report was given added weight when its author was appointed as an advisor to the Israeli multilateral teams, with special reference to refugee issues. Because of the importance of the report, it is discussed in some detail below.

When dealing with the right of return, Gazit made the point that except for the "brief episode in 1949, . . . [t]he political establishment is unanimous in denying the right' of return to Israel" (Gazit 1994b, 12) Moreover, he stated, "Israel's position is very clear: the option of return' should, under no circumstances, be provided to the Palestinians" (p. 13). Should Israel allow a small number of returnees back, the Palestinians must have no role to play in deciding their numbers or the modalities of return. The criteria of admission are basically humanitarian and are secondary to Israeli security claims and national interest. The return of Palestinian refugees in any significant number to Israel "will threaten the Jewish character of the state" (p. 14). In sum, "the return of the refugees would significantly worsen this delicate balance, increase the irredentist threat, and even endanger Israel's 1967 borders" (p. 14).

Gazit adopted UNRWA's definition of Palestine refugees but relied on Efrat's data to claim that UNRWA's figures should be reduced by 14 percent because of its originally inflated estimates. Gazit claimed that UNRWA's 1992 figure of 2.7 million registered refugees includes 800,000 Palestinians who are Jordanian citizens and should not be counted in the refugee global figure. He deducted them from the figure of 2.7 million and further reduced the balance of 1.9 million by 14 percent to come up with a final figure of 1.63 million refugees.

UNRWA has been criticized by the Israelis on many levels, with accusations ranging from its inaccurate counting and politicizing of Palestinian refugees to "institutionalizing" their status. Gazit claims that

UNRWA institutionalized the refugees by using identification cards, establishing refugee camps with extra-territorial status separate from their local environment, and by regularly distributing food rations to all refugees. (Gazit 1994b, 4)

This theme, in which blame is put on UNRWA for keeping the refugee issue alive, forms part of the standard Israeli criticism of UNRWA (see Marx 1992).

Gazit singled out the Palestinians in Lebanon as being in need of assistance and viewed those in Jordan and Syria as being more or less integrated into their host societies. In his view, refugees in the West Bank and Gaza have been absorbed into the local economy, and once there is open passage between the two places, "the results of the free labor market will apply and help ameliorate the imbalance of the two areas" (p. 10). Once a Palestinian state is formed, Palestinians who might not want to return would also exercise their right to obtain a Palestinian passport.

Gazit (1994) argued that although the Palestinian leaders realize that it is unrealistic to exercise the right of return, this right should nevertheless be recognized in the abstract--thereby going beyond the official government stance. He was adamant, however, that

[n]o doubt it would be dangerous for Israel to allow the refugees the freedom of choice between the realization of their "right" of return into Israel and their actual "return" to a future Palestinian state (with adequate compensation). (p. 11)

Successive Israeli governments since the 1950s have refused to pay compensation to the refugees, even though (according to Gazit) "Israel greatly benefitted from Arab property which came under its control, and which formed an important element in the infrastructure that enabled absorption of massive Jewish immigration after the 1948 War of Independence" (pp. 14-15). Gazit noted that Israel subsequently invoked its settling of Jewish refugees from Arab countries without asking for compensation from those countries. He believed that Israel was right to claim compensation for Jews from Arab countries while considering compensation to Palestinian refugees but did not believe that a successful settlement could be built on linking the two issues.

Gazit's views on the 1967 refugees were elaborated in a subsequent article published in the daily Yediot Aharonot (Gazit 1994a). He distinguished between the original inhabitants of the territories (i.e., the "permanent residents" of the West Bank and Gaza) who found themselves cut off from their homes as a result of the 1967 war, on the one hand, and the 1948 refugees who lived in the camps on the West Bank and Gaza and who became refugees for the second time because of the 1967 war, on the other. Gazit estimated that 280,000 people from the West Bank and Gaza became refugees, in addition to tens of thousands who had been outside the territories to study or work and were not allowed to return. Of the total number of displaced people, 70,000 were second-time refugees from 1948. Most of the rest had family members living in Jordan.

Taking into account natural increase, Gazit estimated the total number of 1967 displaced people and their descendants at between 500,000 and 600,000, after subtracting 88,000 who, he claimed, returned to the occupied territories between 1967 and June 1994. Gazit rejected the idea of allowing early return of second-time refugees, who will end up living in the West Bank and Gaza refugee camps for the third time. He argued that they must await the conclusion of the final status talks based on the Oslo Accord. He suggested that neither the Israeli government nor the Israeli public would object should the PA promise at a later stage to settle them in the former occupied territories over important element in the infrastructure that enabled a five-year period.

With regard to the immediate return of the residents of the territories, he predicted opposition by Israeli groups, who would claim that the return of the 1967 refugees would lower the percentage of the settlers in the territories from 12-13 percent to 8-9 percent. As long as issues of final borders and the status of the refugees have not been settled, Gazit suggested that Israel should "reject any acts that might precipitate these discussions" about the refugees regaining their property, in case the property had been confiscated by the Israeli government for the sake of Jewish settlements. In any case, he maintained, the return of this group of 1967 refugees should not be an uncontrolled process; Israel should be assured that the local economy can integrate and absorb them.

Gazit summarized an assortment of American positions enunciated by unnamed senior U.S. officials. He stressed the close alliance and convergence between the positions of Israel and America, quoting especially President Nixon's commitment to Golda Meir in 1971 that the U.S. "will not pressure Israel to accept a solution that could undermine the Jewish character of the state and endanger its security" (p. 21). Gazit points out that the U.S., which had supported UN Resolution 194 (III) from the beginning, has recently "become more realistic" and has left the matter to be decided by the parties themselves.

After having concluded that the solution to the refugee problem does not depend on the right of return, Gazit argued that any solution would require the cooperation of the Arab host countries. The final status negotiations must include the refugee problem with all its ramifications. Gazit mentioned several demands that Israel ought to make of the Palestinians in this eventuality, namely that the Palestinians and the PA must

1. issue a "renunciation" of the right of return;
2. dismantle UNRWA in the Gaza Strip and West Bank;
3. abolish the special status of refugees; and
4. absorb and rehabilitate the refugees residing in the West Bank and Gaza.

To placate the Palestinian refugees who will not be able to exercise their right of return to Israel proper, Gazit wanted Israel to issue a "moral-psychological acknowledgment" recognizing the suffering of the Palestinians in the last fifty years. Although Israel might not want to issue such a statement for fear of assuming culpability, Gazit believed it must do so. If Israel cannot bring itself to make an acknowledgement directly, he suggested that such a statement

could come as part of an international resolution, like a new UN General Assembly Resolution which would be supported by Israel, and would welcome Palestinian-Israeli agreement on the refugee problem, recognize severe sufferings of the Palestinians, and commend their realism and readiness to enter into an intensive rehabilitation program for the refugees, while relinquishing their claim to "right of return" to Israel. Such a resolution would also replace article 11 of UN Resolution 194 (III), which presently serves as the basis for Palestinian political demands. (p. 30)

Gazit also called on Israel to assume its share of the financial burden of rehabilitating the Palestinians, the danger of culpability notwithstanding. He suggested that one source for the funds could come from Israel's $5-$10 billion claim against East Germany, now part of Germany. If Israel would agree to channel part of these reparations payments to rehabilitate the Palestinian refugees, Germany might be more eager to pay and thus be seen as contributing to a solution to the Middle East conflict. In addition to Israel's contribution, Gazit called on the rich Arab states and the industrialized countries to assume their share. Israel's involvement in this rehabilitation scheme would contribute toward a normalization of its relationship with the Palestinians; it would put its experience in refugee absorption into effect and would make sure that third parties made their contribution. If the Arabs reject such direct and open Israeli participation, then it could be part of an international rehabilitation effort.

Gazit argued that if the Palestinians remain unwilling to abandon their claims under UN Resolution 194 (III), despite Israel's issuing of a statement which carries moral-psychological significance, the PA should dismantle UNRWA, continue to provide help for the needy on an individual but not on a collective basis as has been the case with UNRWA, provide housing, and create employment opportunities. As part of its bilateral agreement with Arab countries (in particular with Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon), Israel would ask that the refugees be integrated in those countries. If some Palestinians were deported by the host countries in the past, they should be allowed to return to the West Bank.

The international rehabilitation effort would also undertake a census of Palestinian refugees. Refugee compensation would be directed toward the building of houses, vocational training, and labor-intensive economic enterprises. UNRWA would be dismantled in the host countries once this international authority for rehabilitation is put in place. Compensation should be given at a fixed price of approximately $10,000 to each family and would not be based on the true value of property left in 1948.

Gazit concluded his paper by outlining several scenarios. First, if both parties refuse to yield on their demands regarding the law of return, then either the talks would be suspended or the parties should move on to other subjects in the hope that their positions will be modified in the interim period. Second, a change in government in Israel from Labor to Likud could result in the actual rolling back of the agreement concluded so far. Third, a refusal by the host Arab countries to cooperate in rehabilitating the refugees could prevent the peace process from achieving its longer term goals, but would not prevent the Palestinians and Israelis from continuing their bilateral talks. Fourth, the eruption of violence along the Israeli-Lebanese border could put the whole peace process in jeopardy. Finally, the use of quid quo pro between Palestinian property and Jewish property in the Arab world, though "justified," would not contribute to overcoming the Palestinian-Israeli impasse.

Legal and Economic Approaches

In the following discussion, we examine a number of Israeli writings that offer legal and economic analyses of the right of return and compensation for the refugees. These approaches are supplemented with an overview of anthropological-sociological studies of refugee camps carried out by Israeli social scientists. One of the earliest writers to deal with this issue was Ruth Lapidoth, a law professor at Hebrew University. She advanced the familiar Israeli interpretation (summarized at the beginning of this chapter) that rejects the applicability of Resolution 194 (III) on the grounds that "[t]he Palestinian Arab refugees have never been nationals or permanent residents of Israel: they either fled before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, or before the areas where they lived were occupied by Israel in 1948 or 1967" (Lapidoth 1986):

[T]he right of return is an individual right that does not apply to displaced masses of people. Last but not least, the general limitation of the clause of Article 29 of the [1948 Universal] Declaration [of Human Rights] permits the non-application of the right; the influx of more than one and a half million mostly hostile refugees would without doubt "violate the freedoms of others" in Israel, and it would damage "public order and the general welfare in a democratic society." (p. 114)

To those who would criticize Israel's 1950 Law of Return as being discriminatory against non-Jews, Lapidoth replied that the Law favors (Jewish) groups but excludes none. This does not, of course, address the question why this right should be given automatically to masses of people who were neither residents nor citizens of the country and simultaneously denied to the original inhabitants; the same reasoning that Lapidoth invoked to disqualify the legitimacy of the Palestinian right of return could also be used to disqualify the Jewish right to return to what became Israel, a country of which Jews were not previously citizens.

Lapidoth applied the same logic of nonreturn to the 1967 refugees. In her interpretation, UN Security Council Resolution 237 of 14 June 1967 (Tomeh 1975, 142) called on Israel "to facilitate the return" and not to grant the "right" of return to the refugees. After dispensing with the applicability of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the Palestinian case, she interpreted the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as also denying the Palestinian refugees the right of return on similar grounds. However, with respect to Israel's Law of Return, Lapidoth (predictably) found no inconsistency between it and any of the existing international instruments.

More recent legal assessments of the right of return and compensation are advanced by Benvenisti and Zamir (1995) and by Tadmor (1994), who followed in Lapidoth's footsteps. The former study distinguished between various legal categories of individuals and properties owned by both Arabs and Jews. Thus, on the Arab side, there are the 1948 refugees, the 1967 refugees, and the so-called "present absentees." The latter refer to a minority among the 1948 refugees who either were internally displaced during the 1948 war, or who were allowed to return to Israel under a family reunification program immediately following the end of hostilities but who remained classified as absent according to the 1950 Absentee Property Law. According to Benvenisti and Zamir (1995), the law defined as absentee

a person who, at any time after November 29, 1947, was a national or citizen of one of the Arab countries fighting against Israel, or was in one of those countries, or had left his or her ordinary place of residence in Eretz Yisrael (Palestine) for a place outside Eretz Yisrael or for a place in Eretz Yisrael held at the time by forces that were fighting against the State of Israel. (p. 300)

The annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967, deemed illegal under international law, highlighted a further contradiction in the 1950 Absentee Property Law. The unilateral annexation meant that, on the one hand, the residents of East Jerusalem were technically considered residents of Israel even though very few of them have applied for Israeli citizenship, but, on the other, they remained "absentees" according to the Absentee Property Law. The response to the anomaly created by the unilateral annexation was to enact the 1973 Absentee Property (Compensation) Law, which gave East Jerusalem residents and Palestinian "absentees" living in Israel proper the right to seek compensation. Very few Palestinians took advantage of the compensation offer, possibly because the offer was small and they did not wish to jeopardize their rights in any future settlement by bestowing legitimacy on Israeli actions.

An important reason for not returning abandoned property to its Arab owners, including property owned in West Jerusalem, is connected with the right of return. As Benvenisti and Zamir noted (1995):

Unilateral recognition of the rights of these people to regain the property they had abandoned within Israel in 1948 might have constituted a precedent for recognizing a general Palestinian "right of return" (or at least a "right of repossession"), a very problematic issue. (p. 310)

On the Jewish side, nearly all of the private property owned by Jews was located in what became Israel, except for "thirty or forty square kilometers of land and several hundred buildings (mainly in the West Bank)" (p. 298). Jewish-owned property in the West Bank and East Jerusalem was not returned by Israel to its Jewish owners when the territory was seized, although compensation was paid, and the property was used for "public purposes" (i.e., to accommodate incoming Jewish immigrants).

Despite the insignificant size of Jewish property in the West Bank and Gaza and the vast tracts of Arab land in Israel proper (Jews owned only 7 percent of the land in Mandatory Palestine on the eve of the 1948 war), the authors saw a parallel situation between the state's refusal to return Jewish-owned land to its Jewish owners in the West Bank after 1967 and its similar treatment of Arab-owned land in Israel proper. The upshot of their analysis is that payment of compensation is preferable to exercising the right of repossession or return. This is born out by "history" as well as by past interpretations, such as Lapidoth's, and relevant international agreements, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and even UN Resolution 194 (III). Repossession and right of return are more applicable to internally displaced refugees, the authors concluded. However, they did not address the predicament of the some 150,000 internally displaced Palestinian refugees within Israel.

The reference points for settling the entire Palestinian-Israeli dispute, according to Benvenisti and Zamir, are Resolutions 242 and 338, which, in the case of the former, referred to a "just settlement of the refugee problem" without mentioning the right of return. The authors saw a clear linkage between these resolutions and the 1993 Palestinian-Israeli agreement.

In accepting Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 as the basis for a permanent settlement, the Israeli-Palestinian accords imply a territorial compromise in Palestine/Eretz Yisrael, and a rejection of a general right to return or repossess property in Israel. (p. 327)

After having dispensed with the right of return and property repossession, the authors concluded by describing modalities for compensation. First, they argued that compensation must be collective and not individual; it should have a global rather than a rights-based approach. Second, although it must rely on concrete proof of property ownership, the agreement should be based on lump sum payment. Third, payment should be equitable and dictated by present and future needs of the refugees; in other words, it should reflect the so-called "adequate compensation" and not the true value of property at the time of abandonment. Finally, the authors called for settling compensation claims by a mechanism that includes Arab governments, the PLO, Israel, and the international community.

Yoav Tadmor's (1994) legal approach to the issues of compensation and return was similar in essence to the Israeli approaches outlined so far. Repatriation of the 1948 refugees to Israel would not be allowed other than in "exceptional circumstances." For Tadmor, Resolution 194 (III) did not imply the right of return under international law, because it is informed by moral considerations and international customary law. As such, it is advisory in nature and not legally binding. "Principles of international law and equity," as they apply to Resolution 194 (III), relate to compensation and not repatriation. The Refugee Convention is of little help in furthering the Palestinian case because of UNRWA's sole jurisdiction over the refugees. In any case, the intentions of the Convention are not to facilitate repatriation but to provide protection from expulsion and to ensure that refugees are given treatment similar to that accorded to citizens of the host countries. The application of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is rejected because it lacks legal force. Since the Declaration's application is contingent on safeguarding the integrity of the state, the return of masses of displaced Palestinian refugees to Israel will fundamentally change the character of the state and threaten public order.

How is it then, Tadmor asked, that Israel adheres to General Assembly Resolution 181 regarding the partition of Palestine which created the state of Israel, and General Assembly Resolution 173(III), which sanctioned Israel's admission to the United Nations with "unreserved" compliance with the UN Charter and its resolutions, yet it abstains from complying with General Assembly Resolution 194 (III)? After all, these are all nonbinding resolutions, according to Israeli interpretations. In other words, Israel selectively accepts some UN resolutions as binding and considers others to be nonbinding. The author did not give a satisfactory answer to this dilemma, other than to say that "Israel did not rely solely upon UN resolutions for its right to exist, and there are other factors which established that right" (p. 415).

Hebrew University economist Ruth Klinov (1995) focused mainly on compensation for Palestinian refugees. Three premises underlie her quantitative assessment:

1. although no ceiling is put on the number of refugees who are prepared to return to the West Bank and Gaza, many will choose to remain in their present locations; hence, the emphasis will be on rehabilitation;
2. Using the UNRWA data and the PLO's (1993) Program for Development of the Palestinian National Economy for the Years 1994-2000, she cited 500,000 as the number of expected returnees from the 1967 war between 1993 and 2000 and noted that more than 1,000,000 Palestinian refugees will continue to reside in Arab countries; and
3. the author assumed that the number of Palestinian refugees allowed to return to their homes in what is now Israel will be "negligible."

Klinov outlined four different approaches to calculating the amount of reparations and reached an overall sum that reflects a synthesis of three approaches. First, one can begin by identifying the donors and the extent and nature of the contributions that might be expected. Second, one can approach the amount of reparations in terms of the needs of the refugees as defined by UNRWA. A third approach would focus on regional investment and development, especially in four main sectors: housing, direct production, infrastructure, and human capital. The fourth approach would calculate the amount of reparations on the basis of the true value of Palestinian losses incurred as a result of the 1948 and 1967 wars. The last option was only mentioned briefly by the author and dismissed as unrealistic because "by all accounts the amount of past losses exceeds available resources by so much," and "in the majority of cases the difficulties in establishing title to lost property, and in assessing its worth, are insurmountable" (p. 4).

By beginning with an estimate of the amount needed to meet the housing requirements of the refugees (she adopted a figure of $20,000 per household), Klinov arrived at a total requirement of $2.56 billion to cover Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and the West Bank. Although this investment will create employment in the process of building houses, it will leave very little money to be spent in other job-creating fields. Because her interest is in a "regional" settlement of the refugee issue, she warned against "squandering" a large chunk of refugee reparations in a short period or on immediate consumption. Instead, she argued that building houses in Gaza and the West Bank should be spread over 10-20 years. She was not averse to the return of 1948 refugees to the West Bank and Gaza and pointed out that those returning will bring their compensations with them. This may have a positive effect on the receiving regions but a negative impact on the sending ones.

Toward the end of her paper, Klinov cited three figures relating to the value of abandoned Arab property:

1. the Conciliation Committee for Palestine's (CCP) estimate of the value of agricultural plus nonagricultural property at about $1.85 billion in 1990 prices;
2. a figure in a recent study estimating the value of agricultural property in 1993 prices at between $2.3 and $2.8 billion; and
3. the amount in Hadawi's study, which estimated the value of agricultural, nonagricultural, and public property, including the projected increase in the value of property after 1948, at $11.5 billion at 1990 prices.

By calculating the annual growth of investment in each of the regions under two scenarios (5 percent and 10 percent annual growth) over a decade (1995-2005), Klinov reached the conclusions that reparations will constitute (depending on whether the available sums of money for reparation are $2 or $4 billion) around 10.4 percent (lower figure) to 45 percent (upper figure) of investment in Jordan, a corresponding 15.2 percent to 70.6 percent of investment in the West Bank, 44.8 percent to 208 percent of investment in Gaza, and 7.3 percent to 57.6 percent for Lebanon. (Syria is excluded from the analysis due to lack of data on public and private investment.) In distributing the reparations, she recommended that between $3,700 and $7,000 be given to individual households and that the rest be administered by the authorities in question.

Toward the end of

This survey of nonofficial Israeli approaches to the refugee question was concluded with a brief mention of historian Ronald Zweig's references (1993) to Israel's experience with German reparations payments as a possible model around which to fashion Palestinian refugee compensation. Zweig distinguished between restitution, reparation, and indemnification, defining reparation as "payments between states, usually as compensation for damage caused in war," indemnification as "payment to individuals as compensation for suffering and non-material losses (loss of education, health, etc)," and restitution as "the return of material assets to their rightful owners or heirs" (p. 57). Although German reparations for Nazi victims encompassed all three types of compensation, Zweig would consider compensating Palestinian refugees only in terms of collective restitution, that is, compensation for material losses.

Anthropological-Sociological Approaches

Israeli approaches to the Palestinian refugees are primarily concerned with resettling the refugee population either through dismantling the camps or amalgamating them with their surroundings. This is true for the camps in the West Bank and Gaza as well as the surrounding Arab countries. Any right of return is dismissed out of hand. After the 1967 war, one of the early projects on the refugee camps was sponsored by the Rand Corporation and carried out by anthropologist Emanuel Marx and economist Yoram Ben-Porath. The results were reported in Some Sociological and Economical Aspects of Refugee Camps on the West Bank (1971). With historian Shimon Shamir, the above authors published (in Hebrew) A Refugee Camp on the Mountain Ridge (1974), a study of the Jalazoun camp on the West Bank. Amnon Cartin, a geographer, published a study of refugee resettlement in the Eastern Ghor in Jordan (1992). Among these authors, Marx was the most persistent in pursuing work on Palestinians refugees, and his work influenced subsequent Israeli academic research on the subject. In the early 1990s, he published two articles, one in Hebrew that focused on the Gaza Strip (1991), and the other a review article that summarized previous work and reiterated his views on the subject (1992). More recently, anthropologist Joseph Ginat (1994) from Haifa University discussed various Israeli and non-Israeli studies on Palestinian refugees with a similar purpose in mind--to solve the refugee problem through resettlement.

Marx's work was straightforward. He asserted that the distinction between camps and noncamps has disappeared. "One of our major findings," he wrote, "was that the refugees had been integrated in the economy and that the camps were becoming urban working class neighborhoods" (1992, 282). Moreover, UNRWA must bear responsibility for the fact that the refugee numbers have "grown over the years and why so many people still live in refugee camps'" (p. 281). A third theme was the interplay between Palestinian identity, ethnicity, and refugeehood. In the 1970s, when UNRWA's services declined, Palestinian identity reasserted itself and the refugees were willing to substitute houses provided by the Israeli occupation forces for their refugee dwellings. However, in the long run "UNRWA and certain Arab states intentionally, and Israel unintentionally, provided numerous situations which brought to the fore certain elements in the refugee ethnic identity" (p. 293). This contributed to the fusion between refugee identity and Palestinian nationalism. Thus, in Marx's words, "to be [a] refugee now meant to be in the forefront of the Palestinian struggle for national independence. The refugee identity had merged, for the moment, with the Palestinian one" (p. 292). Finally, as part of his argument for resettling refugees in neighboring countries, Marx made the extraordinary statement that "the refugee freedom of movement and employment was never restricted in other Arab countries" (p. 284).

Marx's work on Gaza (1991) was similar in its thrust. He argued that

1. the camps must be considered part of the cities, and camp houses should not be destroyed but improved with a view to granting them municipal status;
2. Israel should not construct exclusive refugee communities to replace the camps, because this would contribute to maintaining the distinction between refugees and nonrefugees;
3. illegal buildings in the camps should be licensed and proper urban planning undertaken through standardization of infrastructure services inside and outside the camps;
4. compensation should be paid to those who lost their dwellings and property in the 1948 war; and
5. there is no room left for additional Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip.

There are several problems with Marx's framework. One can hardly describe the disorganized, seasonal, and marginal labor force in the camps, either under Israeli control or in other locations such as Lebanon, as "working class." To do so would be to rob the concept of its sociological significance. It is more appropriate to label them "underclass." Not surprisingly, Marx leveled the standard Israeli criticism of UNRWA, accusing it of perpetuating the refugee problem. By contrast, Schiff's (1995) somber analysis of the agency produced a drastically different picture. Israeli social science writings on the Palestinians generally tend to subject them to identity deconstruction. For example, the tendency has been to engage in hair splitting as to whether the identity of Palestinians in Israel is Palestinian, Arab, Moslem, Israeli, or any combinations thereof. The same hair-splitting exercise is performed on Palestinian refugees, with the Israeli preference that the "Palestinian" identity would win over the "refugee" identity, as if the two were contradictory or mutually exclusive. Finally, Marx's comment about freedom of movement and work in the Arab countries must come as a surprise to many refugees, particularly those who live in Lebanon, Egypt, and those in the Gulf (see chapter 2), not to mention the West Bank and Gaza where closures, curfews, and other restrictions imposed by Israel have become the norm rather than the exception.

Ginat (1994), who is concerned with reaching a "constructive" solution to the 1948 refugee problem, shared Marx's views and extended them to the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, whom he visited under the auspices of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. He quoted from press reports that show the deep frustration felt by the refugees in Lebanon over the Oslo agreement. He argued that the exclusion of refugees from Lebanon among Palestinian negotiators was a mistake committed both by Israel and the Palestinian leadership. It is this exclusion, he claimed, which contributes to their current bitterness and opposition to the peace process. The truth is quite different on this score. The Palestinian leadership was willing and tried to add Palestinians from the camps in Lebanon to its delegations, but the opposition came from Israel and the refugees themselves. Ginat claimed that the right of return is adhered to more by the older than the younger generations of refugees and that the latter "understand that reality is different" (p. 7), a finding that flies in the face of evidence produced in chapter 2. The camps are no longer perceived as temporary places of residence but as normal urban centers, which include nonrefugees as well, Ginat argued; thus, "[t]he refugee camps should be systematically and methodically turned into permanent settlements. The camps adjacent or close to towns should be annexed to the local municipalities. The camps away from towns should be turned into permanent settlements and given an independent municipal status" (p. 9). Finally, when citizenship rights are granted to the Palestinian refugees in Arab countries, they will develop a sense of permanence and stability. Here again Ginat seemed oblivious to the tremendous problems encountered in granting citizenship rights in Arab countries to nonnationals. Even in those instances where the refugees are entitled to apply for citizenship such as Jordan, Cartin (1992) demonstrated that resettlement of the refugees was carried out without jeopardizing refugee rights and registration with UNRWA. In spite of all this, the results of the Ghor experiment in resettling refugees were mixed. What is peculiar about this cluster of proposed solutions is that the refugees themselves nowhere are offered a choice of compensation or return or a discussion of these and other modalities. Like their government, Israeli social scientists seem to know what is best and "realistic" for the refugees and are not concerned with giving them a choice.

4.  Palestinian Approaches to Refugees

Official and nonofficial Palestinian approaches to the refugee issue in general and the right of return in particular have evolved from a rejection of anything short of full implementation of Resolution 194 to an adoption of an accommodating stance toward Israel. The crucial turning point in Palestinian thinking on this matter came in 1988 during the nineteenth session of the Palestine National Council in Algiers, which served as the culmination of events initiated by the PLO as early as the mid-1970s. Needless to say, this accommodating stance remains unacceptable to a segment of the Palestinian constituency and (as stated in chapter 2) is far from being shared by the refugees themselves. Thus, the Palestinians entered the multilateral discussions on refugees without any clear notion of how to reconcile their political objectives with the mandate of the RWG and the Madrid formula. Moreover, refugee compensation, modalities of return, and resettlement were left unarticulated at the official level. Several scenarios were advanced unofficially to deal with the right of return and its various corollaries.

From the outset, Arab governments held Israel responsible for creating the refugee problem and demanded that the refugees be repatriated to their homes. In their view, any compensation that is considered and accepted by the refugees must be calculated on an individual basis and reflect the true value of the loss incurred; these, according to Arab estimates, amounted to 2 billion Palestinian pounds. The Arab states also considered that the United Nations bore responsibility for the creation of Israel through the November 1947 Partition resolution, and consequently should share in the payment of compensation. The refugees, they argued, had to be represented in any negotiations concerning compensation. Finally, those who were not repatriated had to receive their share of the value of public property left behind (Cattan 1969, 73-88; Peretz 1995, 73-88).

The issue of Palestinian refugees figured prominently in the evolution of the political claims of pan-Arabism as a state ideology. Its foremost champions were Egypt's Gamal Abd al-Nasser and the Ba`thists in Syria and Iraq (each with its own brand of Ba`thism). The massive defeat in the June 1967 war, which signaled the demise of pan-Arabism, was the final proof of the failure of the Arab states to redress Palestinian grievances, regain the lost homeland, and implement the refugees' right of return.

The evolution of Palestinian political goals, which began in the middle of the 1970s and culminated in the declaration of independence in Algiers in November 1988 and the mutual recognition of Israel in 1993, has been documented (e.g., R. Khalidi 1989). Suffice it to note that during the 1980s, Palestinian academics and political activists from inside and outside the territories began holding seminars and group encounters in Europe and North America with their Israeli counterparts from the peace camp. Although these meetings were labeled unofficial, they were sanctioned, if not encouraged, by the PLO, and they undoubtedly played a significant role in pushing the Palestinian position further along the road of concessions and mutual recognition. These meetings, dubbed as "confidence building" measures, became a kind of training ground for future participation by some of these same actors in real negotiations with Israel (see Said 1996, 32-91). The tangible results of such encounters were the clandestine meetings of the early 1990s between Israelis and Palestinians, including academics on both sides, as a prelude to the Oslo I agreement. A similar pattern appeared to be repeating itself with regard to the final status talks. Ze'ev Schiff, a correspondent of the Israeli daily Ha-Aretz, reported on 22 February 1990 that twenty such meetings were held during the last month of the Labor government to discuss issues such as Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, borders, and withdrawal of Israeli forces, and certain members of the earlier teams participated in them.

This evolution in Palestinian thinking led to acceptance of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 as the bases for future negotiations with Israel. Both of these resolutions intended to address the aftermath of the 1967 and 1973 wars, although Resolution 242 called for "achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem." The resolution left the definition of refugee intentionally vague. It could mean the 1967 refugees only, or it could encompass the 1948 and 1967 refugees. Israel clearly preferred the former interpretation, and the word displaced crept into the diplomatic jargon and is now used strictly to refer to the 1967 refugees. As far as the Palestinians were concerned, refugees meant all those affected by the wars with Israel, whether in 1948 or 1967; those who were prevented from returning to their homes after those wars; and those who were expelled from their homeland after Israel occupied the territories.

The Palestinian interpretation was made clear at the opening of the Madrid conference in November 1991. In the eloquent words of Haider Abdul Shafi (1991), the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid conference came to Madrid "to narrate our story." This story had the theme of dispersal and refugeehood woven into it. "As we speak," he said, "the eyes of thousands of Palestinian refugees, deportees, and displaced persons since 1967 are haunting us, for exile is a cruel fate: bring them home. They have the right to return" (p. 3).

Very little was accomplished during the first few months of negotiations that began at Madrid and then moved to other venues, primarily Washington, DC. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir later revealed that his tactic at Madrid had been to delay and keep the negotiations in a holding pattern so as to allow Jewish settlements to keep expanding. The 1992 elections in Israel, which brought Yitzhak Rabin into office, changed the course of negotiations and saw the agreements between the PLO and Israel concluded. The election of Benjamin Netanyahu and the statements made by him so far suggest that the Israeli government will revert to the Likud negotiating tactic adopted by Shamir.

The Madrid conference was followed up with a steering committee meeting in Moscow, which established several technical committees at the multilateral level, one of which was dedicated to the refugees. This in itself promised at least to place the refugee item, with all the vagueness surrounding it, on the agenda for discussion. Indeed, the Palestinian delegation used this forum to reiterate General Assembly Resolution 194 at each of the eight meetings that followed. Although very little was accomplished as a result of this reiteration (partly because of the structure of the RWG and its basis in consensus), the Oslo I agreement between the PLO and Israel in September 1993 distinguished between the 1948 refugees and those displaced in 1967. The latter would be dealt with in the Quadripartite Committee, which included Egypt and Jordan, and the former bilaterally between the PLO and Israel as part of final status talks.

Several observations can be made about the official Palestinian position on the refugees. It was based on the right of return, as explained by Abdul Shafi and in a paper published by the Palestinian Information Ministry (1995). The paper argued that the Arab countries are economically incapable of absorbing the refugees and that the majority of the refugees, including those in the occupied territories, would prefer to go back to their original homes in Israel. The paper raised an important point, based on several studies, which runs contrary to the accepted wisdom in the debate over refugees. The paper showed that a majority of the refugees surveyed saw no contradiction between wanting to see their living conditions improved in the camps and wanting to return to their homes. Furthermore, not enough thought was given to clarifying how adherence to Resolution 194 fit with the Madrid formula. The result of the insistence on a reference to Resolution 194 was the gradual dilution of the force of the Resolution, and mentioning it eventually became a sort of ritual. To avoid rancor and abide by the consensus rule, Palestinian reference to Resolution 194 in final RWG statements was routinely accompanied, at the insistence of Israel and the United States, with qualifications that some members agreed to and others did not. Finally, because the RWG was meant to address nonpolitical (i.e., humanitarian and technical) aspects of the refugee question (with the possible exception of the family reunification theme), the meetings of the group gradually devolved into a recitation of the various studies carried out by the shepherd members of the RWG, which included databases, public health, vocational training, child welfare, and family reunification. Even so, in this ostensibly nonpolitical context, disagreements surfaced on several fronts. The Palestinians saw in the RWG a forum to deal with concrete issues; though humanitarian in their essence, the issues nevertheless had a political dimension to them, such as family reunification. Also, and equally important, the Palestinians were unwilling to divorce improvements in the living conditions, such as building new homes for the refugees, from their political implications.

After meeting for three years (1992-1995), the Canadian government, which chaired the meetings of the RWG under its gavelholder Marc Perron, issued a "vision paper" in March 1995 in order to give the stalled meetings a new and fresh impetus. The paper presented a vision of the nature of the problems facing the RWG in its deliberations and possible means of addressing them. A better Middle East, Perron argued in his paper, would be one in which there are no refugees. How this was to be achieved was the problem confronting not only Perron but the international community as a whole. For a start, the paper advanced the notion that the "taboo" should be lifted and questions of refugee return and resettlement addressed. From the Palestinian vantage point, merely raising the problems in this forum represented an advance, although doubt was expressed that the RWG could address these volatile issues. Perron's paper called for additional studies to assess absorption (without specifying where) of the refugees (housing, employment, etc.). The Israelis, through their Foreign Ministry, let it be known that the paper transgressed the mandate of the RWG and that these issues would be addressed in bilateral and quadripartite fora at the proper time. The paper was shelved, and Marc Perron was appointed Canada's ambassador to Mexico and replaced by Andrew Robinson, who until recently had been Canada's ambassador to Jordan.

Robinson tried to resuscitate one central idea of the vision paper. Instead of talking about the so-called "taboo" subjects of resettlement (which is unacceptable to the Palestinians) or absorption (which is unacceptable to the Israelis, unless of course it is confined to the Arab countries), he seized the notion of "adaptation." If Perron's vision paper caused consternation among the Israelis, Robinson's adaptation notion triggered suspicion among Palestinians.

The Palestinian position with regard to adaptation was twofold: first, that adaptation be confined to the West Bank and Gaza and should be aimed primarily at the returnees, first from the 1967 war and later from the 1948 war; and second, that adaptation must not mean altering the legal status of the refugees. During the eighth RWG meeting in Geneva in December 1995, the first meeting attended by Robinson as gavelholder, the topic of adaptation was initially introduced without considering its impact on the status of the refugees. The Palestinian delegation raised the issue and insured that, in keeping with its statement during the plenary session at the opening day of the conference in Geneva, any projects aimed at adaptation must ensure that the legitimate rights of the refugees are protected. A statement to this effect was introduced in the final communique of the conference. Two months later, Robinson floated a paper on adaptation written by Jill Tansley (1996), a researcher at the International Development Research Center in Ottawa, an arm of the Canadian government. Tansley's paper responded to Palestinian concerns by stating that adaptation will focus on the West Bank and Gaza and that "any initiative undertaken as an adaptation strategy must be entirely without prejudice to the rights and future status of the Palestinian refugees" (p. 1). It remains to be seen if and how the rhetoric of adaptation is translated into concrete policies without violating the historic rights of Palestinian refugees.

Overall, the official Palestinian position appears reactive: It responds to crises and initiatives from the outside, but it lacks an articulated agenda and a clear position on the refugee issue. In all likelihood, unofficial approaches may assume greater importance in further developing the official Palestinian position on the refugee issue, if and when final status talks resume.

The Palestinians entered the Madrid, Washington, and Oslo negotiations with a series of concessions behind them. Reference to the 1948 refugees' right of return was ritually made by Palestinian spokespersons in all international fora, but this right had no concrete expression in any of the agreements signed between the Palestinians and Israel.

Opposition to Oslo I and the secrecy in which it was negotiated emanated from various quarters within the Palestinian movement, not to mention the Arab world. Key figures within the PLO voiced public criticism of Arafat's leadership style. The "rejectionists" included George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Nayif Hawatmeh's wing within the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), and the Islamists; furthermore, mainstream elements within the PLO, including Faruq al-Qaddumi, who headed the PLO's Foreign Relations Department in Tunis, refused to join Arafat and his associates upon returning to Gaza in the wake of Oslo I.

Further criticism was levelled against the PLO under Arafat's leadership from Palestinian intellectuals and activists in the West and in the Middle East. Criticisms in the Middle East came from refugee communities, primarily in Lebanon, the Islamists, and left-wing radicals who saw in the Oslo agreement total capitulation to Israeli dictates. In the West, Palestinian intellectuals who had been active in furthering the Palestinian cause, such as Edward Said of Columbia University, mounted a campaign of criticism against Arafat's authoritarian leadership in handling the negotiations. In a book that appeared in Arabic in 1994 and in English in 1996, Said directed his scathing attacks of Arafat to a wider Arab audience. In his attack on the current PLO leadership, he was careful to state that he did not oppose peace with Israel, as long as the process was premised on democratic principles and recognition of Palestinian historic rights. A recent seminar organized by Palestinian intellectuals in Damascus, Syria offered similar criticism of the Oslo agreement, in particular its treatment of the refugee issue (Kayali 1996).

In addition to this split within the ranks of the PLO and its supporters, the "inside-outside" dichotomy within the Palestinian movement once again came into play. Critics on the "outside" were particularly disappointed that the Oslo Accord was vague on statehood, the fate of the 1948 refugees, Jerusalem, and the future of settlements. Belatedly, they adopted the strategy of adding their appointees to Palestinian delegations to the peace talks, as happened during the last two meetings of the RWG. In December 1994, Tunis sent Zuhdi Tarazi, at one time the PLO's representative in the UN, to attend the meeting in Antalya, Turkey, and in December 1995, Tunis sent Zakaria Abdul-Rahim, director general of the Repatriates' Affairs, to attend the multilateral meeting which was held in Geneva, Switzerland.

It became obvious that the "outside" critics' message with regard to the refugees centered on the fate of those who left in 1948. Tunis felt these people were being neglected in the ongoing bilateral and multilateral talks. Tarazi came to Antalya armed with copies of relevant UN resolutions on the Palestine question, in particular the refugee issue, and Abdul-Rahim insisted on the right of return in a speech delivered to the Plenary meeting in Geneva. However, it appears that Tunis's approach is unlikely to alter the course of events. The PLO "inside" appears to welcome participation from its "outside" elements as long as it comes in small doses and the organization is able to absorb the criticism.

In three recent articles, Rashid Khalidi (1990, 1994) and Ziad Abu Zayyad (1994) put forth approaches that may reflect the dominant Palestinian position. For Khalidi (1990), the issue was

to determine whether a symbolic acceptance that an injustice has been done to the Palestinian people, via acceptance of the right of return in principle, combined with an attempt to right it, via implementation of this right in some specific and clearly defined fashion, will satisfy a sufficient number of Palestinians, while remaining acceptable to a sufficient number of Israelis, to constitute a viable solution to this question. (p. 5)

The crux of the matter is to interpret the right of return in Resolution 194 (III) so as not to remain bound to a notion of absolute justice.

Such a formula can be found, according to Khalidi, by recognizing the "limitations" of Resolution 194 (III). First, the resolution offered Palestinian refugees the choice "not to return" in favor of compensation. Second, those who are allowed to exercise their wish to return to what is now Israel should agree, according to Resolution 194 (III), "to live at peace with their neighbors," by accepting Israeli sovereignty over one part of Palestine. Third, the return need not be to the homes from which the Palestinians were originally driven out, but to a Palestinian state that would be established elsewhere in former Mandatory Palestine. The last point is not so much an interpretation of Resolution 194 (III), which does call for the refugees' "return to their homes," as much as it is an interpretation by Khalidi of statements made by PLO officials.

Khalidi proceeded to outline the modalities for the application of the law of return. For the Palestinians in Jordan, whose number exceeds 1 million, their problem can be resolved by means of an arrangement whereby "the Palestinian state and Jordan are voluntarily linked in a confederation which includes open borders, an agreement on nationality and jurisdiction, and a form of economic union" (1990, 11). This will meet Palestinians' national aspirations by providing them with Palestinian nationality, while at the same time securing for them economic compensation. Other problematic groups are the Palestinians in Lebanon and those who were expelled from Kuwait. Khalidi suggested a combination of return of some Palestinians in Lebanon to the new state, a very limited number to Israel proper, and others to a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation.

In a subsequent article on the subject, Khalidi (1994) warned against a "cavalier treatment of history," which buries the refugee question, and with it the right of return, in obfuscated historical debate surrounding the conditions under which the refugees left their homeland. To say, as Israeli officials do, that the Israeli government is not responsible for the refugee question is to overlook recent Israeli revisionist history, not to mention overwhelming Palestinian research on the subject. Khalidi outlined five components of a solution of the problem:

1. There must be "symbolic" rectification to the problem, and this could be accomplished by having Israel acknowledge throughout its institutions (e.g., in the educational system and the military establishment) the injustice done to the Palestinians.
2. The Israelis must acknowledge in principle that the Palestinians have the right of return, even though it is difficult to implement in practice. In line with this principle, Israel should allow the return to their homes of a "few thousand or tens of thousands" on a regulated basis. This controlled entry will target the 1948 Palestinian refugees who have relatives in Israel or whose land and homes are still available. Khalidi revived the 1949 figure of 100,000 and suggested that "there is no earthly reason why today an Israel at peace with its neighbors and bestriding the region like an economic colossus cannot make such a simple gesture" (1994, 24).
3. Compensation should be paid to all Palestinians not wishing or unable to return to their homes. He cited several figures, ranging from $92 billion to $147 billion [as calculated by Hadawi and Kubursi (1988), whose work is summarized below], to his own suggestion of $40 billion on the basis of a payment of $20,000 to each refugee, encompassing "an arbitrary figure" of 2 million refugees.
4. The new state of Palestine will be the state of all Palestinians irrespective of where they live; for the refugees (and others) this means granting citizenship rights in principle to all Palestinians to live in this state and hold its passport.
5. The citizenship status of the Palestinians in Jordan must be regularized by granting them full citizenship rights as Jordanians or, in the case of a confederal arrangement, granting them Palestinian citizenship as citizens of the new Palestinian state.

Ziad Abu Zayyad (1994), a current member of the Palestinian Council, covered familiar terrain and advanced more or less the same arguments outlined above, although in less detail. He too distinguished between the principle and its implementation, as far as the right of return in UN Resolution 194 is concerned. In his view, Palestinians could enjoy the principle of the right of return to "Palestine as a national homeland" without literally returning to their actual homes, villages, and towns of pre-1948 Palestine.

The circumstances under which the Palestinian refugees have lived since 1948, and the suffering which they have endured and are still enduring, have forced many of them to view their return as the acquisition of national independence and dignity, and not necessarily as a literal return. (p. 77)

Zayyad suggested that the Palestinian return would be facilitated by the enactment of "a Palestinian Law of Return" to attract immigrants to the newly created state, with few returning to Israel itself. He emphasized that this formula is applicable to the 1948 refugees only, whereas the 1967 refugees should all be permitted to return

Khalid Muhammad Al-Az`ar (1995) presented a wide-ranging analysis of the refugee situation in the context of the Middle East peace process and the refugees' conditions in the Arab countries. He viewed the U.S. abstention in December 1993 from supporting Resolution 194 (III) and the lack of direct reference to crucial UN resolutions regarding the 1948 refugees as the result of the unfortunate absence of formal participation by the United Nations in the current peace process. Al-Az`ar noted that after UNRWA's recent decision to transfer its operations to the PA, confusion reigned among Palestinian refugees regarding their future status in the Arab countries. The consequences of this decision were felt in Syria, where the authorities clamped down on the refugees' freedom of movement; Libya, which witnessed a worsening in the treatment of its Palestinian community; Jordan, which suspended the new electoral law until the refugee issue is finally resolved; and Lebanon, whose government refused to approve the repair of shelters for refugees in the camps for fear that this would lead to their permanent resettlement in the country.

Al-Az`ar advanced various scenarios bearing on the future of the refugees. The first scenario posited the return on an individual basis of a limited number of 1948 refugees. He dismissed this scenario because it deprives the refugees of real equality. By accepting this solution, he maintained, the "refugees exchange unequal status as refugees to unequal status as citizens in a state [Israel] which is not theirs" (p. 30). He also noted the refugees' opposition to this option; Israel emphatically rejects it as well.

Al-Az`ar's second scenario allowed for the return of Palestinian refugees either in limited or expansive manner to the new Palestinian entity. The advantages include a solution to the refugees' immediate basic problems such as shelter, food, and employment, as well as the problem of infringements of human rights by the host societies. Many of the displaced and refugees would approve of this plan in exchange for their present conditions. The disadvantage of this scenario is that it compromises the refugees' historic right of return. The author noted that this "will not solve the deep-rooted problem as understood by generations of refugees themselves, that is the return to their birthplace" (p. 31), although he claimed that the return to the Palestinian entity could be construed as one step in the direction of reviving the original idea of return.

The third scenario involved an "open return" to a Palestinian-Jordanian federation or confederation, as the case may be. This is premised on the notion that because Israel objects to the total return of the refugees in the "direction of historical Palestine," such an arrangement would make possible the absorption of 4 million refugees in a larger, combined territory. "It is not far fetched," he wrote,

that the foreign and international community as well as Israel will accede to this scenario and express readiness to offer material and technical aid to resolve the problem. However, in the final analysis this scenario does not correspond to the real promise of return, neither does it address the historical rights as understood by the refugees, even though it does provide for a wider base from which to pursue [their] rights which the current situation is unlikely to deliver. (p. 32)

Al-Az`ar's fourth scenario consisted of an "open return" to a Palestinian-Israeli confederation, in which the historical rights of the Palestinians are addressed by means of a Palestinian-Israeli democratic entity. This scenario is very similar to what the Palestinians advanced in the early 1970s regarding the establishment of a unitary, secular, and democratic binational state for Arabs and Jews inside the territory of former Mandatory Palestine. This scenario, which permits the Palestinians to return, even if not to their original homes, makes possible the purchase of land in Palestine by those who do not wish to return and meets a great deal of Palestinian national aspirations. Needless to say, this last scenario has no chance of being remotely entertained by Israel, and it has long been abandoned by the Palestinian leadership.

The fifth scenario consisted of returning none of the refugees. It predicted the total collapse of the peace talks and further deterioration in the conditions of the Palestinian refugees and their rights in Arab countries. In the meantime, and in the absence of full return of the refugees, the author asked: What next? He dealt with the status of the refugees in the Arab countries on the basis of two related concepts: integration (idmaj) and resettlement, as understood by both Israel and the West, on the one hand, and the Arab states on the other. Whatever rights the Arab countries have granted to the refugees, such as the right to work, own property, and have access to education and health care (as for example in Syria and Iraq and to varying degrees in the Gulf countries, mainly prior to the Gulf War, and Egypt), only partial integration was implied, the assumption being that the refugees would retain their political identity and eventually return home. Jordan was the only exception in granting most of the refugees full rights.

In discussing compensation, Al-Az`ar noted only that compensation and the right of return are not mutually exclusive and that even those who are allowed to return are entitled to compensation. Their suffering over the years as refugees and the disruption of their normal existence are immeasurable in monetary terms. Israel, the author stated, is the main party that should be held accountable for paying compensation. For Israel, however, paying compensation is "the other face of resettlement." Compensation, for Israel, means accepting resettlement in lieu of return.

To strengthen the case of the refugees, alleviate their living conditions, and make sure that their rights are safeguarded (including the option to return), Al-Az`ar made a number of suggestions. Resolution of the refugee issue will take time, but short-term ways to alleviate their harsh day-to-day living conditions yet may be sought; this could be accomplished by implementing international standards of human rights regarding the protection of refugees and by harmonizing Arab state legislation toward refugees, bringing them in line with relevant international agreements. Additionally, UNRWA's work as a relief organization should be separate from recent attempts at carrying out aid programs in conjunction with the Middle East peace process, the so-called Peace Implementation Projects (PIPs); any move toward quick liquidation of UNRWA operations that does not take into account the necessary measures needed to cope with the ensuing vacuum will definitely lead to a worsening of the conditions of the refugees. When the refugees are brought under the umbrella of international protection and in line with the declaration of the Copenhagen Conference of 1995, the host states have the right to ask for assistance in alleviating refugee conditions.

During the phasing out of UNRWA, money obtained from Israel through compensation schemes should be channeled into supporting any curtailed or phased-out UNRWA services. Close coordination should be established between Palestinian refugees in the diaspora and those remaining under the PA in a manner similar to that between Israel and the Jewish diaspora. This coordination should be entrusted to a private body other than the PA. Finally, Al-Az`ar advocated offering the Palestinians protection through dual citizenship. Palestinians everywhere ought to be canvassed, and those not wishing to return ought to be compensated and given adequate legal protection under international law.

An unusual joint Palestinian-Israeli proposal for dealing with the refugees was offered by Mark Heller and Sari Nusseibeh, authors of No Trumpets, No Drums (1991). As an essential ingredient of their two-state solution, the authors proposed the following with regard to the refugees:

1. The new Palestinian state should prepare to absorb between 750,000 and 1 million returnees, most of whom are camp residents.
2. Palestinians who choose to remain where they are should be offered "citizenship and full political rights [in their host countries], while in no way detracting from any rights or privileges that such Palestinians may enjoy in the Palestinian State" (p. 88). This Palestinian citizenship should be offered to all Palestinians, regardless of where they live, including Palestinians who are citizens of Israel.
3. Israeli claims that the admission of close to 1 million returnees into the occupied territories may not be technically feasible should be rejected because of Israel's own plans under the Likud government at the time to settle an additional three-quarters of a million settlers in the occupied territory.
4. Selecting a small number of returnees for admission to Israel proper should be guided by humanitarian considerations and decided on a case-by-case basis.
5. An international body of assessors should be appointed to estimate the value of abandoned Palestinian property. Against this value, the authors suggest taking into account the cost of settling Palestinians in the occupied territories and elsewhere, and "perhaps even the value of Jewish properties in Arab countries" (p. 96).
6. The authors link the continued future existence of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories to the return of a limited number of Palestinians to Israel. This will not be a true reciprocal arrangement, however, because the Palestinians returning to Israel will live under full Israeli jurisdiction, whereas the settlers would continue to hold Israeli citizenship and the settlements would be given a measure of municipal autonomy under Israeli jurisdiction.
7. Jewish owners of property in the future Palestinian state, whether purchased before or after 1948, should be allowed to apply for Palestinian citizenship and live in the Palestinian state should they desire. Further Jewish acquisition of property in the future Palestinian state should not be restricted.

No survey of nonofficial Palestinian approaches would be complete without mentioning the work of Atef Kubursi, a Lebanese economist, and Sami Hadawi, a Palestinian land taxation official in the Mandatory Government of Palestine who was also employed in the early 1950s as a land-assessment expert with the UN Palestine Conciliation Commission in New York. In their book Palestinian Rights and Losses in 1948 (1988), they defined refugee compensation in terms of reparations, restitution, and indemnification. Four different components entered their calculations of Palestinian losses in 1948:

1. immovable property, which consists of public infrastructural property, privately and collectively owned land in urban as well as rural areas;
2. movable property, which covers items such as consumer durables and means of production;
3. lost opportunities, reflected in the loss of income due to lost business, job, and educational opportunities; and
4. psychological damage related to one's "security, safety, identity, and self-realization." Deprivation of the latter "commodities" have economic consequences because they "would force individuals to lower [their] levels of utility" (p. 121).

Kubursi and Hadawi's global figure of material and nonmaterial losses amounted to nearly 1.182 billion Palestinian pounds in 1948 prices. Conversion of this figure to U.S. dollars, and its adjustment for U.S. inflation rates, yields an all-inclusive figure of $147 billion at 1984 prices. The figure is reduced to $92 billion if compensation is limited to physical property valuation (p. 183). The authors were careful not to imply that compensation must be considered in lieu of implementation of the right of return according to Resolution 194 (III). Rather, they viewed compensation as one of the options delineated by the resolution, the other being the right of return.

5.  Other Approaches to Refugees

The question of Palestine attracted the attention of scholars well before the creation of the refugee problem in 1948. However, with the start of the Middle East peace talks in the early 1990s, research into the Palestine question in general and the status of refugees in particular has received heightened interest. In response to the needs of the multilateral working groups of the Middle East peace process, several bibliographies were prepared bearing on the politics, sociology, law, and economy of the Middle East. The Center for Refugee Studies at York University in Canada published in 1992 a bibliography commissioned by the RWG, which included almost 1,000 references grouped around the six main themes of the RWG. Another annotated bibliography, edited by Andrew Watson (1994) and published by the University of Toronto, listed nearly 2,000 references of direct and indirect relevance to Palestinian refugees, and the Norwegian Institute for Applied Social Science in Oslo distributed at the December 1995 meeting of the RWG the draft of an analytic bibliography dating back to 1991 with almost 500 references on Palestinian refugees culled from Arabic, Hebrew, English, and French sources (Endresen and Zureik 1995).

The literature on Palestinian refugees is voluminous. This chapter deals with the three main themes of the study--the right of return, compensation, and resettlement--as discussed by non-Palestinian and non-Israeli writers. Its purpose is to complement the discussions presented in chapters 3 and 4, which discuss Israeli and Palestinian approaches to the refugee issues, respectively. Although the views discussed below are presented independently, the policy implications derived from them tend to support indirectly (and in some instances directly) either the Palestinian or Israeli side of the debate.

The half dozen writers discussed in this chapter fall into two groups: One addresses the right of return, compensation, and resettlement in ways familiar to the thrust of the discussion so far, and the other approaches the right of return from the perspective of self-determination.

One of the early and most prolific writers on issues affecting Palestinian refugees is Don Peretz, professor emeritus of political science at Binghamton State University of New York. His Israel and the Palestine Arabs (1958), written almost forty years ago, was a reasonably balanced study that did not shy away from critically discussing the devastating impact of Israel's policies toward the refugees during the first decade of the state. Peretz's research offered insight into CCP attempts to set up a scheme for refugee compensation, Israel's Absentee Property Law (1950) and its Development Authority (1951), and the office of the Custodian of Absentee Property, which remains to this day. It also gave preliminary estimates of the size of lost Arab land and property.

Peretz's more recent work on the subject--notably a monograph giving an overview of the Palestine refugee issue prepared for the United States Institute of Peace (1993) and a shorter study on refugee compensation for the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine (1995)--draws on his earlier expertise. On crucial aspects of the debate, however, Peretz's conclusions regarding the right of return are not too dissimilar from those highlighted in mainstream Israeli approaches summarized above. He maintained that nowhere does Resolution 194 (III) say that refugees have a "right of return," but rather that the refugees "should be permitted" to return. The unfortunate implication is that the choice of return lies not so much with the dispossessed refugees but with those who are largely responsible for their dispersal.

Peretz also rejected the international law basis of the resolution's right of return. In his view, "international codes" stress the resettlement of refugees rather than their repatriation, and in any case, he argued, international law stipulates that the return should be to the country of which the refugee was or is a citizen. In essence, Peretz maintained that since international law is premised on state sovereignty, the "right of return" presupposes the existence of a "country" of which one is (was) a citizen and to which one can return. For Peretz (and others), this right does not apply to the Palestinian refugees; the Palestinians do not have the right of return because Israel is (was) not their state.

Peretz's 1995 study on refugee compensation acknowledged the historical dimension of Palestinian claims more forcefully but remained faithful to his notion that "while there is little dispute about the right of refugees unable or unwilling to return to their original homes to receive restitution for property left behind, this principle does not appear explicitly in international law" (1995, 1). He applied this same reasoning to the question of compensating Jewish immigrants from the Arab countries who settled in Israel. This group of immigrants, represented by WOJAC (which has official status in Israel), estimated the cost of Israel's absorption of Jewish immigrants from the Arab countries to be about $11.5 billion, an amount which, it argued, should be charged to the Arab governments; Peretz noted that this estimate of the value of Jewish property left behind in Arab countries is five times larger than that left by the Palestinian refugees. Efforts are underway in Israel to gather proof of Jewish property previously owned in Arab countries for future negotiations in a final settlement.

Peretz concluded that compensation is best handled on a collective rather than individual basis. He reached this conclusion through a slightly different route from the one adopted by other writers, arguing that it would be almost impossible to identify all the rightful owners. Land ownership records in Palestine are incomplete and in disarray; some were destroyed during the fighting in 1948, and "some of the microfilmed material sent to England was later found to be illegible, and many documents had certain basic omissions" (p. 16). In addition, most of the abandoned Arab land, amounting to close to 90 percent of the area of Palestine (23 out of 26 million dunums), was not properly registered, including most of the Arab-owned cultivable land amounting to 4,574,000 dunums. The situation was further complicated by the use in Palestine of the collective system of land ownership known as the musha`a, which extended to between 40 and 50 percent of the land in Palestine. Land inheritance across generations, in conjunction with the musha`a system, contributed to excessive fragmentation and parceling of land, which makes the task of identifying individual owners extremely difficult.

Peretz suggested that any global settlement of the refugee issue must be considered in a regional context. Aid for developing the economy of the region, he argued, must be fused with money paid for refugee compensation. He proposed setting up a refugee bank that would be in charge of distributing compensation money and making loans available with a view to encouraging the refugees to become self-sufficient through initiating income-generating projects. On the basis of UNRWA's experience in financing loans for income-generating projects, Peretz expected that the refugees would be prepared to "give up their refugee status" (p. 18). The final balance sheet resulting from any international efforts to come up with the needed money for global compensation should also include the value of Jewish property in Arab countries, value of Jewish property damaged during the war, and the price of vacated Jewish settlements in the prospective Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. conclusion through a slightly different route from the one adopted by ot

Several writers (Radley 1978; Hannum 1987; Frelick 1990) argued that human rights law does not apply to the Palestinian refugees' right of return. Radley, for example, described Article 13, paragraph 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as "irrelevant to the question whether a right exists on the part of the Palestinian refugees to return to Israel," whereas Hannum noted "the general inapplicability of the right of return set forth in article 12 of the Covenant to the resolution of situations such as that of the Palestinians." Both Hannum (1987) and Mubanga-Chipoya (1988) concurred that the best way of addressing Palestinian rights is through dealing with the issue of self-determination (cited in Takkenberg 1995, 25). In Mubanga-Chipoya's words (1988), "satisfaction of the principle [of self-determination] for the Arab Palestinians will also meet the right to return" (p. 25).

A much bolder attempt at dealing with refugee claims and status is undertaken by Donna Artz, a lawyer who teaches at Syracuse University. Based on work in progress for the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, she advocated in a recent op-ed piece for the Jordan Times (7 July 1995) a slight, though important, variation on the Israeli regional solution. Under an eye-catching title, "Negotiating the Last Taboo: Palestinian Refugees," Artz proposed settling most of the Palestinians in Jordan by giving them dual citizenship or at least a Palestinian identity card and providing them with compensation for property lost in 1948. Most of those in Syria, she wrote, "are virtual citizens," and that arrangement should be formalized. Between 1 and 1.5 million could be settled in the occupied territories, North Africa, and the Gulf. Finally, she argued, Israel should accept between 50,000 and 100,000 Palestinian refugees into Israel proper, as long as its neighbors are willing to accept a similar number of Palestinians for resettlement.

Howard Adelman (1993, 1988, 1985), a Canadian academic and philosopher by training, has been writing now for more than a decade on Palestinian refugees. Adelman, who has been consistently hostile to and critical of UNRWA, portrayed the organization as highly bureaucratized and self-serving, whose continued existence is due more to its "inertia" than to real needs of the refugees. Overall, Adelman contended, UNRWA has been an obstacle to resolving the refugee issue. It has created a highly dependent constituency from among the Palestinian refugee community, which is better served by having UNRWA dismantled and its aid channeled to the refugees directly so as to contribute to their economic self-sufficiency and eventual integration in the host societies.

Adelman's echoing of the Israeli approach to the refugee problem is equally evident in his insistence that UN Resolution 194(III) and other international instruments bearing on refugee rights do not translate into binding laws granting the Palestinians the right to return to their 1948 territory, let alone to their original homes. Thus, Adelman construed the right of return to mean the right to return to a "homeland" and argued that this homeland is the West Bank and Gaza.

Although these writers do not reflect consensus on the refugee issue, they clearly have a great deal in common among themselves and with the Israeli writers discussed in chapter 3. In contrast, the views presented below approach the refugee issue from international law and human rights perspectives, with the right to self determination being a cornerstone (Takkenberg 1995; Cassese 1993; UN 1978, 1979).

The United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People commissioned two studies with direct bearing on the issues at hand. The Right of Return of the Palestinian People (1978) and The Right of Self-Determination of the Palestinian People (1979) establish a link between individual right (which is the basis of the right of return) and collective right of return as it applied to a dispossessed national group. Refugee right of return, first enunciated in 1946 by the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, was reaffirmed in the Council's 1973 draft principle, which states:

1. Everyone is entitled, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, marriage or other social status, to return to his country.
2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality or forced to renounce his nationality as a means of divesting him of the right to return to his country.
3. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to return to his own country.
4. No one should be denied the right to return to his own country on the ground that he has no passport or other travel documents. (cited in UN 1978, 6)

The right of return, which is stipulated in Resolution 194 (III), is also affirmed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, a cornerstone of international law. Article 13 states that "1. Everyone has a right to freedom of movement and residence within boundaries of each state. 2. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country." More importantly, it should be noted that in 1974 the Palestinian right of return was linked, through General Assembly Resolution 3236 (XXIX), to their right of self-determination. What is significant about this resolution, as rightly pointed out by Tadmor (1994), is that it does not distinguish between the 1948 and 1967 refugees. It addresses Palestinian refugees' right of return as one group. The resolution states:

1. Reaffirming the inalienable right of the Palestinian people in Palestine, including:
   1. The right to self-determination without external interference;
   2. the right to national independence and sovereignty;
2. Reaffirms also 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. (UN 1979, 34)

Antonio Cassese, a renowned international jurist, overcame the shortcoming of Security Council Resolution 242 of 22 November 1967, which sidesteps the issue of right of return, not to mention self-determination. According to Cassese (1993), the 1974 General Assembly Resolution 3236 (XXIX) is crucial, because it moved the debate from the "individual's right of return' to the Palestinian people's right for self-determination" (p. 12). Moreover, in place of the phrase "Palestinian refugees," the Resolution now refers to the "Palestinian people." Cassese dealt with two likely objections to holding a plebiscite in order to ascertain, in the words of the International Court of Justice, whether the choice for self-determination reflects "the free and genuine expression of the peoples concerned" (p. 13). First, it could be objected that self-determination is contingent on sovereignty and (similar to the argument against the right of return) that self-determination cannot be exercised in this case because the West Bank and Gaza were not and have not been sovereign territories. "The response to this objection," wrote Cassese, "is that self-determination is not contingent on sovereignty; it is a concept geared to peoples, not to sovereign titles" (p. 13). Objections to self-determination may rely on a second familiar claim that the status of the territories has been altered due to the building of Jewish settlements in the area, which basically altered the population composition; however, Cassese rejected this objection as well "by noting that those settlements are illegal as being contrary to international norms on belligerent occupation" and that "Israeli settlers should not be permitted to take part in a possible referendum or plebiscite" (p. 13). However, he concluded by noting that in as much as the weight of international law and its moral force are compelling in favor of Palestinian rights, his suggestion remains "unworkable--unless it becomes part of a package deal' agreed upon by all the parties concerned" (p. 13). It remains to be seen whether the DOP, Oslo II, or the final status agreements are able to translate Palestinian rights into an expression of self-determination through statehood. So far, Israeli interpretations have insisted on autonomy devoid of legal independence and statehood. This is particularly true with regard to the Likud's position.

Takkenberg's (1995) patient and thorough analysis of international law as applied to the Palestinian situation has resulted in the following series of observations:

>
1. the right of return in general derives its legitimacy from customary international law, according to which "[f]or most individuals the actual practice of returning to one's home or country is so commonplace a part of everyday living that the right of return as a legal concept is given little attention" (Mallison and Mallison 1979, cited in Takkenberg 1995, 5);
2. the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 stipulate repatriation of war victims, whether civilians or military personnel;
3. of the "three durable" solutions advocated by UNHCR for solving the refugee problem--voluntary repatriation, integration in host countries, and resettlement in third countries--the first is singled out as the best solution; and
4. when refugee exodus was prompted by expulsion, as occurred with the Palestinians, "the right of return infers from the illegality of the expulsion itself.

Takkenberg disagreed with the restricted interpretations regarding the inapplicability of the law of return to the Palestinian situation. Like Artz and Zughaib (1993), he found the law of return relevant when interpreted to mean the return to one's own country or homeland. The right of return could thus be exercised in Palestine if not Israel. In other words, the right of return as a principle remains operable, although its territorial exercise would have to be defined. This raises the same question posed earlier: "What or where is Palestine?"

According to Cassese, Takkenberg, and others, the DOP of September 1993 has opened the way for subsuming the right of return under that of self-determination. Following mutual recognition, the PLO has been in a position to negotiate with Israel as the representative of the Palestinian people and has recognized Israel's right to exist. As the UN study (1979) The Right of Self-Determination of the Palestinian People pointed out, the response to Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967, which mentions in general terms "the refugee problem," was a succession of UN General Assembly resolutions that referred to the "inalienable rights of the Palestinian people" and that reaffirmed Palestinian rights as an "indispensable element in the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East" (1969 UNGA Resolution 2535-B[XXIV], 1970 UNGA Resolution 2672-C[XXV], cited in UN 1979, 33). The passage of the crucial General Assembly Resolution 3236(XXIX) on 22 November 1974 for the first time reaffirmed the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people in Palestine in terms of self-determination and the return of the refugees to their homes.

When attempts were made in 1976 to proceed with a similar resolution to the Security Council, the United States blocked adoption of the resolution. What was brought back into the DOP from the UN arsenal of resolutions on Palestine were Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, neither of which addresses the issue of return, let alone self-determination.

Under Israel's insistence, most of the activity pertaining to refugee return has been handled so far under family reunification, yet very little academic research has addressed the topic. Exceptions to this are the contributions by Quigley (1992) and Zedalis (1992). Both addressed the right of return to the 1967 occupied Palestinian lands. Quigley argued that there are four categories of refugees resulting from the 1967 war: those who were driven out by the Israelis during the fighting as confirmed by various United Nations and independent reports; those who happened to be outside the territories (studying, working, visiting) when the 1967 war broke out and were not allowed to return; those who left after 1967 to study, work, or live abroad temporarily and were not allowed back after their residency permits had expired; and those expelled by Israel on so-called security grounds. Only minute numbers in any of these categories have been allowed back by Israel. Israel's response has been threefold: first, to argue that those who left/were expelled in 1967 would not be allowed to return until the issue of borders is settled between Israel and her neighbors and that most of these refugees left voluntarily; second, that any returnees allowed to return would be admitted on a humanitarian, case-by-case basis; and third, that security considerations prevent Israel from allowing the return of the refugees. There is a familiar ring to these reasons: They are similar to those given by Israel in justifying its refusal to allow the return of the 1948 refugees.

Quigley based his right-of-return argument on familiar grounds: humanitarian law (as per the Hague Regulations and the Geneva Convention), human rights law (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Convention on the Rights of the Child, Convention on the Nationality of Married Women, and the Helsinki Family Act), UN Security Council Resolution 237, and international law (International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families). Humanitarian law is intended to deal with families separated by hostilities, but it does not deal with families who live under belligerent occupation where the split occurred after the occupation had taken place. Here Quigley relied on human rights instruments. He cited examples from several countries, including Israel within the Green Line, which show that family reunification is guaranteed to spouses and children, whether or not the applicant is a citizen of the intended country of residence. Quigley concluded his essay by noting that "[h]uman personal association is one of the most basic of rights. Individuals must be free to marry and establish a family with others of their own choosing. States may not interfere with that right by holding one spouse or child on the other side of the border. Israel's violation of these rights is a reminder of their importance and of the need for a more effective system for the international implementation of rights" (p. 251).

Israel has consistently refused to apply human rights law (the Universal Declaration, Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and Geneva Convention) or international law (the Geneva Civilians Convention of 1949) aimed at the return of the Palestinians (even though it is bound by these agreements). Zedalis (1992) argued that "Israel's refusal serves to modify its international legal obligations" (p. 515) and suggested that in these circumstances where "persistent objections free one from customary standards, and bona fide reservation works the same effect on standards of conven- tional sort," the right of the Palestinians to return "must rest exclusively on Article 49 of the Civilians Convention. If it is not, then human rights law must be invoked" (p. 516).

6.  Conclusions and Implications

As I write this final chapter in the spring of 1996, the situation on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza (not to mention Lebanon) has deteriorated significantly compared to a year ago, with the Palestinian population having turned its anger onto the PA and progress toward peace between Israel and the Palestinians remaining in limbo. Demonstrations by Palestinians against the PA have become frequent, at times resembling past scenes of confrontation and protest against Israeli occupation. It is not far-fetched to assume that this trend (if it continues) will fuel an internal crisis among the Palestinians and will further weaken the PA in its negotiations with Israel. There seems to be a feeling that the PA's concessions to Israel have resulted in a situation where the Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank and Gaza that grew out of Oslo II are being treated as colonies subject to unilateral Israeli decisions. Closures, curfews, sea blockade, mass arrests, and demolitions of Palestinian homes--vintage Israeli actions dating back to the days of the intifada--are once again becoming a regular Israeli staple in dealing with the Palestinian population. Improvements can hardly be expected under the new Likud government.

Palestinians fear that the issues of water, borders, Jerusalem, settlements, and refugees to be addressed in the final status talks will end on an already large heap of concessions made by the Palestinians to the Israelis in the two major agreements concluded so far: Oslo I and Oslo II. Given the Clinton administration's desire to go into the November 1996 American elections with some tangible results to show from Palestinian-Israeli talks, it will likely do its utmost to ensure that the peace process does not collapse or at least that it maintains the appearance of being alive. However, unless the situation on the ground improves for Palestinians (and for Israelis, though for different reasons), there are those who believe that a breakdown in the talks may be preferable to their continuation as envisaged by the Israelis.

Despite the negative signals of recent months, I proceed on the assumption that the peace talks will continue in one form or another, even if in a delayed, erratic fashion. The following issues will have relevance to the final status talks on refugees: future Palestinian population and refugee distribution; the right of return; family reunification; compensation; status of Palestinians in Arab countries; attitudes of refugees; and the future of UNRWA.

The foregoing analysis has shown that under a worst-case scenario--i.e., a modest number of Palestinians returning to the West Bank and Gaza and an almost negligible number of the 1948 refugees returning to Israel--the current Arab-Jewish population balance in historic Palestine will remain in Israel's favor in the short term. Within slightly more than a decade, the gap will close, and the estimated population of 10 million will be almost evenly split in Mandatory Palestine. In addition, slightly more than 5 million Palestinians will continue to reside in the diaspora, mainly Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, thus bringing the total number of Palestinians worldwide to at least 10 million in a decade. In other words, despite the various attempts to reduce the Palestinian presence in Palestine, including the expulsion and exodus of the 1948 war and the displacement of the 1967 war, and despite the obstructionist measures adopted by Israel on the refugee issue during the Middle East peace talks, a significant number of Palestinians will remain in their ancestral homes and are likely to become a majority in two decades, all things being equal.

My estimate is that there are currently close to 4 million Palestinian refugees and displaced persons, more than two-thirds of whom continue to reside outside historical Palestine. To the extent that Israel will allow the return of displaced people and refugees to the West Bank and Gaza, the numbers will be small, as we have seen in this study. Israel will invoke security considerations, absorptive capacity of the territories, and economic constraints to argue against admission of large numbers. However, the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, and the likely introduction of a Palestinian law of return, if carried out judiciously, will further accelerate the crystallization of a stable Palestinian presence in historic Palestine.

For this to happen, several things must take place. Assuming the eventual creation of a Palestinian state, a proper absorption ministry must be set up to plan the phased return of the 1967 displaced persons and the 1948 refugees and address their needs. Issues of housing, employment, education, and health, among others, must be tackled in a sober and systematic fashion. Thus, the evidence suggests that housing, unemployment, and matching the skills of returnees with labor market requirements may be some of the major adjustment problems facing the returnees.

Palestinian reliance on the Israeli labor market must be minimized in the future with a view to accomplishing two objectives. There is a need to develop Palestinian human resources and to gear them to nation building. This will not happen if Palestinian livelihood in the future Palestinian state continues to be dependent, as it is now, on the Israeli metropolis and its labor market--in which the Palestinians continue to be the hewers of wood and drawers of water for the Israeli economy. Severing the economic dependency on Israel will in the long run reverse Palestinian underdevelopment caused largely by systematic Israeli policies of exploitation and deprivation during more than a quarter of a century of occupation. These moves should be accompanied by proper use of natural resources, in particular land reclamation and revival of the agricultural sector, which all but perished under Israeli occupation. Above all, the proper use of human resources must be carried out to benefit both the future state and its Palestinian citizens--those who are already there and those who will be joining it. In this context, it is worth pointing out that, unless concrete plans are put in place to this effect, the new state is unlikely to attract highly skilled expatriate Palestinian manpower. Furthermore, in the face of continued violation of basic democratic principles by the PA and the absence of political stability, hopes once attached to Palestinian and other capital finding its way into investment projects will prove vain.

A concerted effort should be directed toward building the much-needed infrastructure to enhance the absorptive capacity of the West Bank and Gaza: roads, housing, telecommunications systems, schools, hospitals, and other infrastructure aspects of nation building. No less than fifty studies on infrastructure requirements have been carried out by private international organizations, UN agencies, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and Palestinian researchers.

Special job and vocational training and counselling programs should be put in place, for both returnees and those who are already in the West Bank and Gaza. The evidence so far is that, except for the police, the majority of the returnees are unable to find jobs or are unqualified for the jobs available (Zureik 1996). The returnees should be counselled and eventually trained for the kinds of jobs that are available or that will soon be in demand. This training must be an integral part of the returnees' adaptation program, if repatriation is to succeed

It is unlikely that the average returnee will have the financial resources necessary to start a business or build a home. The setting up of a small loan program at low interest rates is one way to attract qualified Palestinians to return and may encourage those who are already there to embark on business activities.

In accordance with the DOP, the fate of the 1948 refugees is to be dealt with in the final status negotiations that officially opened in May 1996. Chapters 3 and 5 have demonstrated that both official and nonofficial Israeli and pro-Israeli approaches to this question have tried to raise law-based doubts regarding the binding nature of UN resolutions on the Palestinians' collective right of return. It is distressing to note that this stance is also increasingly becoming the official American one.

It should be noted that this approach flies in the face of the interpretation of General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) advanced by the CCP, which was originally established by the same resolution to "facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation." For its part, the CCP offered the following authoritative interpretation of Resolution 194 (III):

The General Assembly had laid down the principle of the right of the refugees to exercise a free choice between returning to their homes and being compensated for the loss of or damage to their property on the one hand, or, on the other, of not returning to their homes and being adequately compensated for the value of property abandoned by them. (cited in UN 1978, 15)

Nothing that I have read or seen so far leads me to believe that Israel will allow the return of any Palestinian refugees from 1948 to Israel proper. Rumors have circulated that under certain conditions Israel may allow the return of between 50,000 and 75,000 refugees for symbolic reasons to placate international public opinion. Although such figures represent a minuscule percentage of the close to 3.2 million Palestine refugees registered with UNRWA, Israel is unlikely to agree. Allowing the return of even a token number of refugees is construed by Israel as an admission of guilt regarding their exodus in 1948, for which it officially denies any responsibility.

Some analysts, notably Shlomo Gazit, suggested that Israel should make a final gesture for ending its century-long conflict with the Palestinians by issuing a statement or being party to an international body, such as the UN General Assembly, which would pass a resolution to replace Resolution 194 (III). Such a resolution would acknowledge the suffering of the Palestine refugees without making any statement of culpability. The intent behind this proposal would be to address the psychological and moral aspects of the refugee issue, short of confirming any Israeli responsibility for the 1948 Palestine refugee exodus.

Whereas the Palestinian right of return remains the cornerstone of Palestinian and Arab approaches to the refugee issue (see chapter 4), a significant shift in the articulation of the Palestinian position has taken place in the last decade, from rejection of anything short of application of Resolution 194 (III) to acceptance of other modalities. However, the Arab side operates under a major weakness of the Madrid peace formula of 1991, which was lifted from the 1978 Camp David Accords: The Madrid conference was not officially held under UN auspices and the preamble to the Madrid declaration mentioned UN Resolutions 242 and 338, and not the crucial UN Resolution 194 (III), as the basis for the Middle East peace talks. In succumbing to the dictates of the Madrid conference, Palestinians have been framing the debate, implicitly if not explicitly, over the issue of the right of return not as one of whether the refugees should return to their 1948 homes, but rather as a debate over

1. whether there should be unhampered right of return for all refugees and displaced Palestinians to an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza;
2. how to compensate the refugees and normalize the civil and human rights of nonreturnees in neighboring countries;
3. whether to grant Palestinian passports to all refugees remaining in their places of refuge; and
4. how to get Israel to allow a symbolic return of some refugees from the 1948 war to Israel proper and to recognize that a historical injustice was done to the Palestinian people.

If the recent report by Ze'ev Schiff that was published in the Israeli daily Ha-Aretz on 22 February 1996 about secret talks taking place between the PA representatives and the Peres government is true, Israel suffering of the Palestine refugees without making any stwould have assisted in the resettlement of refugees outside its borders. The only concession the Labor government would have made to the 1948 refugees would have been to agree to a small number of family reunifications on a case-by-case basis. The other item relating to the refugee issue was that Palestinians would continue to call for the right of return but that Israel would not be bound by it. This item was in line with the Labor party's platform calling for "no recognition of Palestinian right of return."

In fact, the absorption of appreciable numbers of returnees to a future Palestinian state would be severely constrained by lack of space. The West Bank and Gaza constitute less than one-quarter of the area of Mandatory Palestine. With Gaza showing the highest population density anywhere in the world, the West Bank remains the only realistic place in which to absorb returnees. A look at the territorial division of the West Bank into three zones, according to the Oslo II agreement, reveals the following:

• ZONE A, which includes Arab cities, will be under Palestinian control.

• ZONE B, over which Israel will be in charge in terms of security but will gradually hand over authority after redeployment of its forces to the elected Palestinian Council, consists of Palestinian villages.

• ZONE C, comprised of military areas, settlements, roads and state lands, will remain under Israeli control until final-status negotiations begin, with a view to transferring authority over the zone to the Palestinians by May 1999 ("Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement" 1996).

According to press coverage of the details of this agreement as summarized by Chomsky (1996), Zone C covers 70 percent of the West Bank, Zone A between 1 and 5 percent, and Zone B the rest. Some 1.1 million Palestinians live in Zones A and B, whereas Zone C includes 140,000 Jewish settlers; an additional 150,000 live in areas classified by Israel as part of the Jerusalem municipality but which were part of the West Bank before 1967. Unless Israel yields during the final status talks on settlements and vacates Zone C, it is difficult to see how it would be possible to accommodate a significant number of Palestinian returnees.

The fate of the close to 150,000 Palestinian refugees from 1948 who live inside Israel proper, but who have been prevented from returning to their villages for nearly half a century, is not part of the negotiations over refugees. They amount to close to 20 percent of the Palestinian population in Israel proper. Being citizens of Israel has in a sense closed the doors before them in terms of appealing their case to a neutral, international adjudicating body and disadvantaged their claim to return to their homes. From the point of view of international and humanitarian law, they are the truly displaced and have an uncontested right to return to their homes; however, Israel contends that they are free to present their grievances to the courts in Israel, which they have done consistently, to no avail. When the courts recommended the return of some, the implementation of the order was frozen by the government.

In all its bilateral discussions with Israel, the PLO has shied away from even mentioning the internal refugees for fear of jeopardizing other, more pressing concerns as defined by the PLO, such as further withdrawal by Israel from the Palestinian areas and the culmination of a Palestinian state.

It is clear that in the initial phase, and until the Palestinian state becomes a reality, the return to the West Bank and Gaza will be guided by family reunification criteria. It is necessary to approach family reunification not as a privilege subject to myriad political and administrative criteria (the current approach), but as a right. Human rights law, for example, stresses the integrity of the unity of the family, and this should be brought to bear in the case of Palestinian repatriations.

Ensuring the unity of the family is not only based on a legal conception of such a right, which most countries enshrine in their immigration legislation, but it also has practical consequences. Inability of family members across state boundaries to draw on the psychological and social support of other family members exacerbates the personal and familial problems encountered by the returnees and makes the process of adaptation all the more difficult.

The criteria and decisions regarding family reunification must be made more transparent and accountable. Some of this is being accomplished (at least on paper) as a result of the ongoing discussions in the Quadripartite Committee involving Palestinians, Israelis, Jordanians, and Egyptians; however, some returnees interviewed by the author (Zureik 1996) felt that wasta (commissions paid to middlemen) and other nonuniversalistic or political criteria sometimes play an inordinate role in determining who is given a residency permit. Standardization and simplification of such procedures will lessen the monetary and social costs involved.

With regard to compensation, the debate revolves around determining the number of people who should receive it, how to calculate the amount, how to administer it, and the source of the money. I do not think Israel is likely to make an issue about the numbers of refugees, once the discussion is confined to resettlement and compensation. As noted above, Israel is likely to stress material, collective forms of compensation and to reject compensation that is based on the true value of individual losses and takes into account nonmaterial losses, i.e., indemnification. It will also insist on setting up an international monitoring body that will contribute to the fund, share in its administration, and ensure accountability. Israel will also insist that UNRWA be dismantled and that part of the compensation should be directed to revive the economies of the region.

The Arab side should present a maximal case for compensation, by stressing that it should be based on a calculation of individual losses, that each refugee claimant is entitled to receive the true value of losses incurred at current prices, and that these losses should reflect both material and nonmaterial losses. Serious attempts should be made to consult the CCP archives, the British and Arab records, and the refugees themselves to establish the magnitude of Palestinian losses in 1948. On the basis of this approach, preliminary estimates of the value of Palestinian lost property, movable and immovable, plus the cost of lost career opportunities and psychological damage incurred, come to about $147 billion in 1984 prices, compared to $92 billion if confined to material losses only. This is compared to a meager sum of $2 billion mentioned by Israeli researchers, where the frame of reference is the money pledged under the umbrella of the RWG.

It is worth noting in this regard that when Israeli settlers were evicted from the Sinai in the wake of the Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt, each settler household was compensated $250,000, yet Israeli researchers refer to a compensation package of $10,000-20,000 per refugee household, and some Palestinian researchers suggest $20,000 per refugee.

In host countries where Palestinian refugees have been granted citizenship status, such as Jordan, which has diplomatic relations with Israel, the host government will in all likelihood press for individual compensation for its citizens of Palestinian refugee origin. It is important, therefore, that Palestinian negotiators coordinate their strategy on this score, not only with Jordan, but ultimately with all Arab states that have significant Palestinian communities.

In addition to the losses caused by the 1948 and 1967 wars, the Palestinians are entitled to submit claims for property damage and personal indemnification as a result of Israel's conduct during its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Individual Palestinians have already initiated court action against Israel for damage caused by its forces during the intifada. The suggestion by members of the Israeli government so far has been to deal with such claims in a collective fashion and to prevent individual cases from ever reaching the courts.

The issue of Jewish losses in Arab countries is raised by Israeli and other writers and no doubt will be officially raised by Israel. The Palestinian position on compensation of Jewish losses in Arab countries was made clear by the head of the Palestinian delegation to the second RWG meeting in Ottawa (1992), who argued at the time that the relevant Arab governments, and not the Palestinian refugees, should bear responsibility for compensating Jewish immigrants from Arab countries.

The position of Arab governments with regard to possible solutions to the refugee problem is unclear, with the exception of Jordan and Lebanon. When the time comes, Arab governments that have hosted large numbers of refugees for nearly half a century undoubtedly will submit their own bills. In a recent paper based on the official Jordanian position, it was estimated that Jordan contributed around $300 million annually from its own budget to the refugees in Jordan (Jaber 1996).

The Lebanese have been the most vocal concerning the presence of Palestinian refugees in their midst. Practically all observers, including Israelis, have singled out the Palestinians in Lebanon as the most vulnerable group of Palestinian refugees. The attitude of the Lebanese government was spelled out in a series of statements made by high-level Lebanese officials. The gist of the Lebanese position is that Palestinian refugees must be fully repatriated, if not to their original homes or to a Palestinian state, then to third countries.

The most generous stance being mentioned in this regard would be to grant the Palestinians in Lebanon limited and specific civil and social rights, as long as they held Palestinian citizenship accorded to them by a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Under this proposal, Palestinians would not be allowed to vote, run for political office, or hold public sector jobs. They would also not be allowed to invest in sectors of the economy that have a direct bearing on national security, nor would they be allowed to own communications media. They would be permitted to seek employment opportunities and enjoy freedom of movement, as long as reciprocal arrangements were made with the Palestinian state, meaning that Lebanese nationals could enjoy similar rights in areas under Palestinian jurisdiction.

Once Syria reaches an agreement with Israel over the Golan Heights, the issue of Palestinian refugees in Syria would be resolved by giving them the option to return and live in the Palestinian state or to receive Syrian citizenship. For all intents and purposes, the Palestinians in Syria are treated on an equal footing with Syrian citizens and all that is needed, once an agreement is reached between Israel and Syria, is to formalize their status by giving them citizenship and political rights.

The Palestinians should seek from the Arab governments a harmonization of their citizenship and immigration laws with international conventions and protocols bearing on refugee protection. Until the modalities for refugee settlement are worked out, international protection in the areas of human and political rights must be guaranteed. Current Arab League regulations prohibiting dual Arab nationality must be re-examined in the light of international refugee law. It would be most unfortunate, and a sure recipe for future conflict, if the current exclusionary measures against Palestinians in various Arab countries remain in effect, thus creating ghettoized Palestinian communities.

Although no systematic studies of refugees' views regarding possible solutions are available, a series of small-scale surveys reflects the regional variations described in chapter 2. In Lebanon, for example, Palestinian refugees' first preference is to return to their homes. Failing this, many would like to stay in Lebanon as long as their rights are normalized and they are protected through the issuance of Palestinian identity cards. Most of the Palestinians in Lebanon came from the Galilee, and so very few expressed the desire to settle in the West Bank or Gaza.

In contrast, a majority of the Palestinians in Jordan expressed an interest in having closer links with the West Bank or even returning to the West Bank. This desire is guided by matters of "principle," not by any hostility to Jordan. This finding is confirmed in another Jordanian survey in which 95 percent of camp refugees believed that Jordanian-Palestinian relations are good, and a similar proportion endorsed closer relations between Jordan and a future Palestinian state. Jordan, which accords most Palestinian refugees full citizenship, is primarily concerned with facilitating the return of the 1967 displaced people, whose fate is being discussed by the Quadripartite Committee.

A small survey of forty-two families who have returned to the West Bank showed a gap between the returnees' expectations and the reality they faced (Zureik 1996). It did not make a difference whether the returnee had previously lived in or was familiar with the new environment. Feelings of disappointment concerning politics, economy, housing, and society in general were voiced by many who returned. Although these were not sufficient reasons to compel them to abandon their plans to return home, the continuation of unfavorable political and economic conditions could very well deter others from returning and make the whole process of refugee return and family reunification a bitter and protracted experience.

Since its inception in 1949, UNRWA has received both criticism and praise from various quarters (e.g., Viorst 1989). Palestinians praise UNRWA for providing much-needed services to the refugees, but they also have accused the organization of acting to liquidate their cause by providing education but not employment opportunities, thus contributing to the emigration of talented youth from the occupied territories in search of work elsewhere (Elnajjar 1993). On the other hand, Israel and even some Arab governments have accused UNRWA of nourishing a politicized environment in the camps, which became a breeding ground for political and military activism (Schiff 1989).

When UNRWA's comprehensive history is finally written (see B. Schiff 1995), there is no doubt that this unique organization, which has been vilified by many, will emerge as crucial in contributing to the survival of Palestinian identity in exile. Its schools and health-care system, which cater to more than 3 million registered refugees, must be credited with keeping illiteracy in check and fending off epidemics. Moreover, UNRWA has employed more than 20,000 Palestinian administrators, managers, teachers, nurses, and doctors, thus building a formidable structure for developing human resources. The rush to move UNRWA's headquarters from Vienna to Gaza in July 1996, and eventually to close its operations down within four years, may symbolically signify that the refugee problem has been solved. This may prove to be more wishful thinking than reality.

To expect the PA to carry out the task of nation building alone, with its limited resources, and without UNRWA, is to expect the impossible. At this stage, and for the coming few years, the PA is hardly capable of catering to the refugees' needs in the West Bank and Gaza, let alone in neighboring countries. UNRWA's operations must be phased out gradually, in order to ensure the orderly transfer of functions. Equally important, a task force should be set up in order to transfer to the PA the wealth of knowledge gained by UNRWA over almost half a century of service in the areas of health, education, vocational training, and management. A technical task force should be set up to preserve UNRWA's mammoth and unique archives, which chronicle in detail the history of Palestinian dispersal since 1948.

Postscript

The narrow election victory of Benjamin Netanyahu in May 1996 sent the Arab states, including the Palestinians, and the Americans, who staked so much on a Peres victory, scurrying for clues to the Likud's plans for the peace process. Netanyahu and his colleagues in the Likud party had already given ample evidence in their election platform of what is in store for the peace process in general and the Palestinians in particular. The Likud platform stressed Israeli sovereignty over the whole of Jerusalem, rejected the establishment of a Palestinian state, and promised to expand Jewish settlement in the territories and to maintain control of water resources, defense and foreign affairs. The platform envisaged some form of autonomy for the Palestinians in their daily lives and closer discussion with Jordan once final status negotiations with the Palestinians get underway. Conspicuously absent was any direct mention of the refugees (Likud Platform 1996).

After Netanyahu's election, his office released a statement on 17 June outlining his government's guidelines with regard to the peace process. The statement repeated the three "no's" (no to withdrawal from the territories, no to a Palestinian state, and no to an official Palestinian presence in Jerusalem) and added a fourth one: no to the refugees' right of return "to any part of the Land of Israel west of the Jordan River" (Guidelines, 17 June 1996). In the eyes of many observers, the peace process was dealt another blow when Netanyahu appointed to his government Raphael Eitan and Ariel Sharon, who distinguished themselves in the past by demonizing the Palestinians.

Although Likud policy will differ dramatically from Labor's on a number of issues, the issue of refugees will not be one of them. From the Palestinian point of view, the performance of Labor over the refugee issue in various bilateral and multilateral fora connected with the Middle East peace talks has been disappointing. Whether it is family reunification or the return of the displaced from 1967, Israel has yielded very little and has succeeded for the last four years in obfuscating the issues and keeping the discussion in a holding pattern without accomplishing anything tangible. The Likud's signal about its position on the refugee issue came during an intersessional meeting of the RWG held in Oslo in June 1996 to discuss the database theme that Norway shepherds. At the meeting, and for the first time, the Israeli delegation dismissed as unacceptable any mention of the returnees or displaced, let alone refugees, in the final statement of the conference. As a result, and for the first time in such meetings, no final statement was issued.

If there is any difference between Labor and Likud on the refugee problem, it will be minor in nature and mainly a matter of style and not substance. Under Labor, Israel would possibly have allowed more returnees to trickle back to the West Bank over a long, protracted period. The position of the two parties will be similar with regard to the 1948 refugees. In general, however, Likud will adopt a more public, uncompromising posture with regard to the refugees and displaced persons by shrouding the discourse with arguments over security and even "terrorism," whereas Labor would have achieved a not-too-dissimilar outcome by dragging the discussion endlessly and burying any prospects for resolving the refugee issue in committee meetings and bureaucratic procedures at the bilateral and multilateral levels.

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Appendix 1.  Map of Mandatory Palestine

Appendix 2.  Resolution No. 194 (III) of 11 December 1948

Establishing a U.N. Conciliation Commission, resolving that Jerusalem should be placed under a permanent international regime, and resolving that the refugees should be permitted to return to their homes (Text in Tomeh, pp. 15-17)

The General Assembly,
Having considered further the situation in Palestine,

1. Expresses its deep appreciation of the progress achieved through the good offices of the late United Nations Mediator in promoting a peaceful adjustment of the future situation of Palestine, for which cause he sacrificed his life; and
   Extends its thanks to the Acting Mediator and his staff for their continued efforts and devotion to duty in Palestine;

2. Establishes a Conciliation Commission consisting of three States Members of the United Nations which shall have the following functions:
   
   1. To assume, in so far as it considers necessary in existing circumstances, the functions given to the United Nations Mediator on Palestine by resolution 186 (S-2) of the General Assembly of 14 May 1948;
      
   2. To carry out the specific function and directives given to it by the present resolution and such additional functions and directives as may be given to it by the General Assembly or by the Security Council;
      
   3. To undertake, upon the request of the Security Council, any of the functions now assigned to the United Nations Mediator on Palestine or to the United Nations Truce Commission by resolutions of the Security Council; upon such request to the Conciliation Commission by the Security Council with respect to all the remaining functions of the United Nations Mediator on Palestine under Security Council resolutions, the office of the Mediator shall be terminated;
3. 3. Decides that a Committee of the Assembly, consisting of China, France, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United Kingdom and the United States of America, shall present, before the end of the first part of the present session of the General Assembly, for the approval of the Assembly, a proposal concerning the names of the three States which will constitute the Conciliation Commission;

4. Requests the Commission to begin its functions at once, with a view to the establishment of contact between the parties themselves and the Commission at the earliest possible date;
5. Calls upon the Governments and authorities concerned to extend the scope of negotiations provided for in the Security Council's resolution of 16 November 1948 and to seek agreement by negotiations conducted either with the Conciliation Commission or directly, with a view to the final settlement of all questions outstanding between them;
6. Instructs the Conciliation Commission to take steps to assist the Governments and authorities concerned to achieve a final settlement of all questions outstanding between them;
7. Resolves that the Holy Places--including Nazareth--religious buildings and sites in Palestine should be protected and free access to them assured, in accordance with existing rights and historical practice; that arrangements to this end should be under effective United Nations supervision; that the United Nations Conciliation Commission, in presenting to the fourth regular session of the General Assembly its detailed proposals for a permanent international regime for the territory of Jerusalem, should include recommendations concerning the Holy Places in that territory; that with regard to the Holy Places in the rest of Palestine the Commission should call upon the political authorities of the area concerned to give appropriate formal guarantees as to the protection of the Holy Places and access to them; and that these undertakings should be presented to the General Assembly for approval;
8. Resolves that, in view of its association with three world religions, the Jerusalem area, including the present municipality of Jerusalem plus the surrounding villages and towns, the most eastern of which shall be Abu Dis; the most southern, Bethlehem; the most western, Ein Karim (including also the built-up area of Mosta); and the most northern Shu'fat, should be accorded special and separate treatment from the rest of Palestine and should be placed under effective United Nations control;
   Requests the Security Council to take further steps to ensure the demilitarization of Jerusalem at the earliest possible date;
   Instructs the Commission to present to the fourth regular session of the General Assembly detailed proposals for a permanent international regime for the Jerusalem area which will provide for the maximum local autonomy for distinctive groups consistent with the special international status of the Jerusalem area;
   The Conciliation Commission is authorized to appoint a United Nations representative, who shall co-operate with the local authorities with respect to the interim administration of the Jerusalem area;
9. Resolves that, pending agreement on more detailed arrangements among the Governments and authorities concerned, the freest possible access to Jerusalem by road, rail or air should be accorded to all inhabitants of Palestine;
   Instructs the Conciliation Commission to report immediately to the Security Council, for appropriate action by that organ, any attempt by any party to impede such access;
10. Instructs the Conciliation Commission to seek arrangements among the Governments and authorities concerned which will facilitate the economic development of the area, including arrangements for access to ports and airfields and the use of transportation and communication facilities;
11. Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible;
    Instructs the Conciliation Commission to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of their compensation, and to maintain close relations with the Director of the United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees and, through him, with the appropriate organs and agencies of the United Nations;
12. Authorizes the Conciliation Commission to appoint such subsidiary bodies and to employ such technical experts, acting under its authority, as it may find necessary for the effective discharge of its functions and responsibilities under the present resolutions;
    The Conciliation Commission will have its official headquarters at Jerusalem. The authorities responsible for maintaining order in Jerusalem will be responsible for taking all measures necessary to ensure the security of the Commission. The Secretary-General will provide a limited number of guards for the protection of the staff and premises of the Commission;
13. Instructs the Conciliation Commission to render progress reports periodically to the Secretary-General for transmission to the Security Council and to the Members of the United Nations.
14. Calls upon all Governments and authorities concerned to co-operate with the Conciliation Commission and to take all possible steps to assist in the implementation of the present resolution;
15. Requests the Secretary-General to provide the necessary staff and facilities and to make appropriate arrangements to provide the necessary funds required in carrying out the terms of the present resolution.

Appendix 3.  Resolution No. 3236 (XXIX) of 22 November 1974

Recognizing The Rights of the Palestinian People
(Text in Tomeh, p. 111.)

The General Assembly,
Having considered the question of Palestine,
Having heard the statement of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the representative of the Palestinian people,
Having also heard other statements made during the debate,
Deeply concerned that no just solution to the problem of Palestine has yet been achieved and recognizing that the problem of Palestine continues to endanger international peace and security,
Recognizing that the Palestinian people is entitled to self-determination in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations,
Expressing its grave concern that the Palestinian people has been prevented from enjoying its inalienable rights, in particular its right to self-determination,
Guided by the purposes and principles of the Charter,
Recalling its relevant resolutions which affirm the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination,

1. Reaffirms the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people in Palestine, including:
   
   1. The right to self-determination without external interference;
      
   2. The right to national independence and sovereignty;
2. Reaffirms also 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;
3. Emphasizes that full respect for and the realization of these inalienable rights of the Palestinian people are indispensable for the solution of the question of Palestine;
4. Recognizes that the Palestinian people is a principal party in the establishment of a just and durable peace in the Middle East;
5. Further recognizes the right of the Palestinian people to regain its rights by all means in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations;
6. Appeals to all States and international organizations to extend their support to the Palestinian people in its struggle to restore its rights, in accordance with the Charter;
7. Requests the Secretary-General to establish contacts with the Palestine Liberation Organization on all matters concerning the question of Palestine;
8. Requests the Secretary-General to report to the General Assembly at its thirtieth session on the implementation of the present resolution;
9. Decides to include the item entitled "Question of Palestine" in the provisional agenda of its thirtieth session.