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>The right of return, at last
>
>By Edward Said
>
>Now that all the cheery atmospherics connected with Ehud Barak's
>tenure in office have more or less dissipated, and he or his party
>faces prosecution for campaign corruption at home, and an
>increasing demand for results abroad, the true face of his regime is
>emerging with startling, not to say disquieting clarity. One knows
>certain things about Zionism as an ideology, but it is nevertheless
>shocking to encounter and re-encounter them repeatedly. One's
>surprise and dismay at so raw and primitive a state of inhuman
>denial should never be diminished, the better to be able to see it for
>what it is, something I am deeply sorry to say no Arab regime has
>had the courage to face up to. For me, one of the worst offenders in
>this moral blindness remains the Palestinian leadership, which has
>actually eased the way forward for Zionist arguments and plans,
>with scarce allowance for the sufferings of the huge mass of
>Palestinians who languish in camps, shantytowns, and makeshift
>houses in Palestine and in too many Arab countries to be counted.
>
>
>The by now notorious peace process finally has come down to the
>one issue that has been at the core of Palestinian depredations
>since 1948: the fate of the refugees who were displaced in 1948,
>again in 1967, and again in 1982 by naked Israeli ethnic cleansing.
>Any other description of those acts by the Israeli army is a travesty
>of the truth, no matter how many protestations are heard from the
>unyielding Zionist right-wing (assuming that the left is more likely to
>accept the truth). That the Palestinians have endured decades of
>dispossession and raw agonies rarely endured by other peoples --
>particularly because these agonies have either been ignored or
>denied, and even more poignantly, because the perpetrators of this
>tragedy are celebrated for social and political achievements that
>make no mention at all of where those achievements actually
>began -- is of course the locus of "the Palestinian problem," but it
>has been pushed very far down the agenda of negotiations until
>finally now, it has popped up to the surface.
>
>For the past several weeks, two contradictory sets of happenings
>have occurred which, in their stark, irreconcilable antithesis, tell
>almost the whole story of what is wrong with an unevolved Zionism
>on the one hand, and what is just as seriously wrong with the
>peace process on the other. Barak and several of his faceless
>underlings have been on record tirelessly in Israel, in Europe and
>elsewhere to affirm their increasingly strident disavowal of any
>responsibility for Palestinian dispossession. Here and there, a
>more humane Israeli official will, for example, temper these
>disavowals with an acknowledgement that Israel bears some
>responsibility for the "transfers" that took place in 1948 and 1967,
>but that "the Arabs" -- who presumably are supposed to have
>evicted Palestinians too: the notion is too preposterous to require
>rebuttal -- are also responsible, thereby preparing the way for a
>magnanimous offer for Israel to take back 100,000 of the nearly 4.5
>million refugees who now exist in the Arab world and beyond. But
>such individual declarations are remarkable for their infrequency
>and the lack of response they have engendered from Barak and his
>entourage, to say nothing of the Knesset majority, the settlers, and
>a dispiritingly large number of ordinary Israelis who seem to believe
>that, whatever happened in 1948, they will never have anything to
>do with it. It's not their problem, and so why should they have
>anything to say? That, of course, is precisely Barak's negotiating
>strategy: to refuse any discussion at all of the refugee claim to
>return, repatriation and/or compensation. Recent revelations by an
>Israeli researcher that a bigger 15 May 1948 massacre than the
>notorious one at Deir Yassin took place in Tantura, with over 200
>Palestinian civilian victims shot in cold blood by Zionist soldiers,
>has not shaken Barak's stony rejectionism an iota.
>
>The contradictory part of the issue is the snowballing effect of what
>is now a universal Palestinian demand heard literally all over the
>globe for the right of return. Petitions have been signed by the
>dozens, thousands of names in the Arab world, Europe, Africa and
>the Americas have been added to these lists on a daily basis, and
>for the first time ever, the right of return has been put squarely on
>the political agenda. Asaad Abdel-Rahman, the PLO's minister in
>charge of the refugee question for the peace process, has recently
>made some excellent strong statements about the absolute right of
>return for Palestinians evicted by Israel: these statements express
>the right kind of resolve and the right kind of moral indignation. After
>all, Abdel-Rahman says, a UN resolution (number 194) has been
>affirmed annually since 1948; it allows Palestinians the right of
>return and/or compensation. Why should there be a compromise
>by Palestinians given the world community's unanimity? Even the
>US has supported the resolution, with Israel the lone dissenter. The
>troubling thing, however, is that Abdel-Rahman hints that the PLO
>leadership may do a deal with Israel on the refugees behind his
>back which, in view of the long history of shabby Arafatian
>compromises whose net effect have been to sell out his people, is
>an allowable, not to say perfectly well-founded worry.
>
>The one certain thing is that it is going to take a great deal of
>ingenuity, public relations spin-doctoring, and specious logic to
>convince any Palestinian that the deal to be made (as it will be) by
>the PLO is not in effect an abrogation of the right of return.
>Consider the logic of what has happened since 1991. On every
>major issue separating Palestinians from Israelis, it is the
>Palestinians who have given way. Yes, they have achieved small
>gains here and there, but all one needs to do is to look at the map
>of Gaza and the West Bank, then visit those places, then read the
>agreements, then listen to the Israelis and Americans, and one will
>have a pretty good idea of what has happened by way of
>compromise, flawed arrangements, and a general abrogation of full
>Palestinian self-determination. All this has been achieved because
>the Palestinian leadership has selfishly put its own self-interest,
>over-inflated squadrons of security guards, commercial monopolies,
>unseemly persistence in power, lawless despotism, anti-
>democratic greed and cruelty, before the collective Palestinian
>good. Until now, it has connived with Israel to let the refugee issue
>slither down the pole; but now that the final status era is upon us
>all, there's no more room down there. And so, as I said above,
>we're back to the basic, the irreconcilable, the irremediably
>interlocked contradiction between Palestinian and Israeli
>nationalism. Unfortunately, I have no faith whatever that our
>leadership will in fact maintain its facade of resistance and
>continue to let Abdel-Rahman and others like him carry the
>message forward. There is always another Abu Mazen-Yossi Beilin
>arrangement to be made, and if the Israelis can "persuade" Arafat's
>men that Abu Dis is in fact Jerusalem, why can't they also
>persuade them that the refugees will just have to remain refugees
>for a bit longer? Of course they can, and will.
>
>So that leaves the unanswered question before us all: is the
>Palestinian people as a whole -- you and I -- going to accept this
>final card being played against us, or not? Unfortunately, the short-
>run prognosis is not good: witness the wasted opportunity to
>impeach the Authority last November after the petition of 20 was
>signed, several of its signatories unlawfully imprisoned, the rest
>threatened. Very little happened by way of repercussion, and the
>Authority got away with its brazen strong-arm tactics. Arafat
>survives inside the Palestinian territories today for two main
>reasons: one, he is needed by the international supporters of the
>peace process, Israel, the US and the EU chief among them. He is
>needed to sign, and that, after all, is what he is good for. Nothing
>else: everyone knows this. He can deliver his people. The second
>reason is that because he is a master at corrupting even the best
>of his people, he has bought off or threatened all organised
>opposition (there are always individuals who cannot be coopted)
>and therefore removed them as a threat. The rest of the population
>is too uncertain and discouraged to do much. The Authority
>employs about 140,000 people; multiply that by five or six (the
>number of dependents of each employee) and you get close to a
>million people whose livelihood hangs by the string offered by
>Yasser Arafat. Much as he is disliked, disrespected and feared, he
>will remain so long as he has this leverage over an enormous
>number of people, who will not jeopardise their future just because
>they are ruled by a corrupt, inefficient and stupid dictatorship which
>cannot even deliver the essential services for daily civil life like
>water, health, electricity, food, etc.
>
>That leaves the Palestinian diaspora, which produced Arafat in the
>first place: it was from Kuwait and Cairo that he emerged to
>challenge Shukairy and Hajj Amin. A new leadership will almost
>certainly appear from the Palestinians who live elsewhere: they are
>a majority, none of them feels that Arafat represents them, all of
>them regard the Authority as without real legitimacy, and they are
>the ones with the most to gain from the right of return, which Arafat
>and his men are going to be forced to back down on. We must
>encourage ourselves to do the work of inventorying the desires and
>the number of refugees, cataloguing the property losses, compiling
>the list of destroyed villages, carrying forward the claims such as
>the petition now being circulated by BADIL. The extraordinary
>engineer and scholar Salman Abu Sitta has already done a lot of
>the work about property and demographics; others are following his
>lead, or supporting him. He works entirely on his own, or with the
>support of friends. To expect Yasser Arafat to take advantage of all
>this loyal expertise and authentic commitment is of course a pipe
>dream. What he has done is to contract out the final status
>negotiations to a right-wing London think tank, the Adam Smith
>Institute, which is paid for its services by the British Foreign Office,
>and has retained an American consulting firm, Arthur Andersen, to
>advertise its investment attractions. No other liberation group in
>history has sold itself to its enemies like this. We all have a stake
>in making sure that these shabby diversions will fail, and that the
>small handful of expert Palestinians who are now complicit in these
>arrangements will come to their senses and leave the Authority to
>sink terminally into the mud all around it. And then we will press
>the claims for return and compensation in earnest with new
>leaders.