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The Palestinian refugees: ending their lingering plight

By Alon Ben-Meir - posted Monday, 20 October 2014


The Arab states continue to exploit and manipulate the refugees for domestic consumption to distract their own public from their terrible socio-economic conditions and human rights violations.

Palestinian leaders have held the nearly two million refugees in the West Bank and Gaza as hostages. For nearly seven decades, they have insisted that the "right of return" of the refugees is sine qua non to the solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This flies in the face of the poll conducted in 2003 by Dr. Khalil Shikaki, which showed that only 10 percent of the refugees in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza would opt to return to Israel (their original place of residence). Since then, the number has more than likely further decreased as the prospect of returning is increasingly diminishing.

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Successive Israeli governments refused to assume any responsibility and made no effort to galvanize international support to resolve the plight of the refugees. Right-wing Israeli governments who opposed a two-state solution found the persisting refugee problem to be a convenient impediment.

Ironically, in every set of negotiations in 2000 at Camp David, in 2008/2009, and 2013-2014, both sides agreed that the right of return cannot be exercised literally, and only a few thousand could rejoin their extended families in Israel over a period of few years.

It should be noted that regardless of UNRWA's or any other entity's definition of who is a refugee, the Palestinian "refugees" in the West Bank and Gaza are not refugees, as more than 80 percent were born in their homeland-the West Bank and Gaza-and the rest are at best internally displaced.

Those Palestinians who insist that they will never forsake the right of return will have to wait forever, and every Arab and Palestinian leader knows this fact only too well.

Instead of trying to achieve a comprehensive solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has thus far proven to be elusive, a settlement of the refugee problem-for which there is only one solution, resettlement and or compensation-could pave the way for resolving in stages the other sticking issues.

However theoretical the right of return has become, it hangs over the Israelis' heads and even a reference to it in any future agreements will not be acceptable, as they view it as a threat to their national identity, if not the very existence of the state.

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A resolution to the refugee problem would provide an opening for the US and the EU to exert mounting pressure on Israel to make important concessions in return by starting the negotiations with borders, which the Palestinians rightfully insist upon, to define the contours of the future Palestinian state.

The donor countries should have insisted (and still can) that their contribution to rebuild much of Gaza focus on resettlement and compensation of the refugees, especially since 80 percent of Gaza's resident are registered as refugees. A similar effort will have to be made to resettle the refugees in the West Bank as well.

Prolonging the misery of the refugees does not offer a "just solution" as the Palestinians and Arab states advocate. A just solution is decades overdue and no Arab or Palestinian leaders can justify the decades-long despondency and despair of the refugees under the guise of the "right of return."

The Palestinian people are creative, vibrant, resourceful, and proud people; they must not continue to live in a state of contrived conditions of misery, fed with empty slogans and offered false hope about their "right of return," only to be crushed later with the truth.

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About the Author

Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies.

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