The Israel-Palestine Conflict

Parallel Discourses

Elizabeth Matthews

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136884313
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is considered intractable by many, and is frequently characterised by the violence between the two sides. In attempts at peace, the starting point for negotiations is a cessation of violence; beneath this, however, lies a plethora of other issues to be addressed.

This unique text brings together Israeli and Palestinian viewpoints on a number of key issues and topics, making clear the points of agreement as well as the views that divide. The chapters deal first with three issues that require compromise and resolution for a peace treaty to be realized - water, refugees, and borders, territory and settlements – and then with three important concepts that can either impede or promote peace: democracy, human rights, and peace culture and education. Thus, the book provides an invaluable opportunity to understand, at least in part, the divergent and even convergent interests and understandings of Israelis and Palestinians on issues and concepts important to the peace process. As such, it will be a valuable resource for courses on conflict resolution, the Middle East peace process, and political science.

PART I

Issues

Refugees

1

ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIAN
REFUGEE ISSUE

Joel Peters¹

Introduction

Since the beginning of the Oslo process in 1993 the relative weight and attention given by Israeli policy-makers to each of the final status issues has significantly evolved. Initially, the greatest political and conceptual challenge centered on the question of Palestinian statehood, and the territorial configuration of a future Palestinian state. The refugee issue was largely ignored by Israel and was postponed to the latter stages of the negotiations. Indeed, it was not until early summer 2000, just prior to the Camp David summit, that Israeli policy-makers undertook any significant preparatory work on this issue.

The convergence of various political, economic, and cultural forces has reshaped Israeli perceptions and expectations, however. Palestinian statehood is now generally accepted as a given by most Israelis. Questions of a territorial withdrawal from the West Bank and the division of Jerusalem, even the idea of shared sovereignty of the holy sites, have become central parts of the Israeli discourse on the peace process. The refugee issue, however, still receives scant attention in Israel. It remains highly sensitive and potential solutions are rarely discussed within the general public domain. Israeli academia and media have been largely silent on this question, and the little coverage there has been has uncritically repeated the dominant Israeli discourse as to the causes, and the possible outcomes, of the refugee problem.

Israel's approach to the refugee question is deeply conflicted. Israel has consistently tried to deflect international discussion of the issue, arguing that such discussions are inimical to Israel's interests, and has sought to frame any such discussions in purely humanitarian rather than political terms. At the same time, there is a quiet realization within decision-making circles that a failure to address the issue could ultimately prevent a final peace settlement with the Palestinians, thus closing the window of opportunity on what is still held as Israel's leading strategic objective – a negotiated, comprehensive permanent status agreement. Yet the limited expertise, inside and outside government, on the complexities involved in resolving the refugee question has resulted in a failure of Israel to articulate its interests clearly on the various components of the issue and to develop a critical assessment of the various policy choices it faces in resolving it.

Israeli discourse on the refugee issue

Of all the final status issues, the refugee question is seen by Israel as the most threatening. It touches on a number of socio-political elements that embody deep-seated Israeli fears that are both past and future oriented. While the basic framework for the peace process draws on concluding the historical conflict between Jews and Palestinians, the question of the refugees is the only core issue that relates directly to the events of 1948 rather than to those of 1967. In that regard, the outbreak of the 1948 war and its consequences touch on what both sides see as constituting events in their national identities – the establishment of the state of Israel for the Jews and the Naqba and the creation of the refugee problem for the Palestinians.²

Palestinian demands for the right of return and calls for compensation are seen by Israel as challenges to its legitimacy and to the moral foundation of the Jewish state. Confronting these issues forces an uncomfortable reexamination of historical narratives, collective identity, and constituting myths, and touches on questions of Israeli culpability and responsibility for the refugee problem. Whereas all other aspects of the conflict with the Palestinians have generated contending and contested positions in Israel, a common narrative, with little open dissent, has emerged on the refugee issue. Israel's approach to the refugee problem has centered on three guiding principles forged shortly after the war in 1948. Those principles have held true, and have directed much of Israeli thinking on this issue, ever since.

First, Israel has consistently maintained that the responsibility for the creation of the refugee problem lies solely with the Arab states, which never accepted the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and declared war on the nascent Jewish state. The Arab states that attacked Israel in 1948 created the refugee problem by calling on the Palestinians to leave their homes during the war, and to return later with the victorious Arab armies. ³ Second, Israel has sought to prevent the mass return of the refugees, and has denied that the Palestinians possess any legal, or moral, right to return to their homes and reclaim their property. Finally, Israel has argued that the solution to the plight of the refugees lies in their absorption and rehabilitation in their current places of residence, namely the Arab host countries.

The Arab states, along with the Palestinian leadership, are also accused by Israel of perpetuating the refugee problem, and of manipulating the refugees’ plight for political advantage. Instead of offering the refugees the opportunity to assimilate into their host societies, the Arab states have confined them to camps, and to a life of misery. In this they have been abetted by the international community through the setting up in 1949 of the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) – the international agency responsible for providing services to the refugees – and its continuous and extensive financial underwriting of the work of the UNRWA. By contrast, Israel points to the experience of some 600,000 Jewish refugees who were expelled from their homes by Arab governments following the war in 1948, but who were successfully absorbed into Israeli society.

Central to the Israeli discourse and its positioning on the refugee issue has been the prevention of the right of return. This issue has elicited a wall-to-wall consensus across Israeli civil society and the political establishment. Israel has consistently denied that the Palestinian refugees possess a legal or moral right to return to their homes. It has refuted Palestinian claims that UN General Assembly Resolution (UNGAR) 194 of December 1948 affords them any such legal right (Benvenisti 2002; Lapidoth 2002). Any Palestinian return, if at all, would be granted on a limited, case-by-case basis, using humanitarian criteria that allow solely for family reunification. Shlomo Gazit best presents the political argument:

Israel denies the legality of the Palestinian claim. If it recognizes the right of return it would be admitting responsibility, and perhaps even culpability for creating the problem. But Israel categorically denies any responsibility for the War of 1948. On the contrary, the guilt and responsibility are all Arab-Palestinian, and it is completely irrelevant whether the Arab leaders encouraged the local population to leave their homes, or whether they departed to escape the fighting. Israel would deny any responsibility even if there were no practical demands for a “return” of refugees; even more so when recognition of such a right would deny Israel the right to control and veto the number of returnees.

(Gazit 1995: 7–8)

Any discussion of the “right of return” is regarded as unacceptable for the vast majority of Israelis, and is a subject not open for any negotiation. The idea of acknowledging any Palestinian right, even symbolically, is viewed as a step that would only entrench this issue as a source of future tension between Israel and the Palestinians rather than help to bring closure on their conflict.

The rejection of a Palestinian “right of return” is not, however, just tied to the denial of any past culpability or responsibility. The Israeli discourse has securitized the question of repatriation of the Palestinian refugees. In recent years, the demographic issue has been viewed as a significant challenge to the Jewish-democratic nature of Israel and has become a major driver behind arguments for the need for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. The advocacy for the Palestinian right of return to Israel is regarded within Israel as an ongoing challenge from the Palestinian leadership to the very foundation of the Jewish state, and therefore, in practice, as a rejection of the two-state solution. For Israel, accepting an unlimited number of Palestinian refugees is seen as nothing short of national suicide. Allowing a return of Palestinian refugees into Israel, however limited, is viewed as a threat to the demographic, social, and, above all, Jewish character of the state. Shlomo Ben Ami, Israel's foreign minister at the Camp David summit, gave a forthright expression of his country's framing of the right of return as posing an existential threat to Israel. In a speech shortly after the collapse of those talks, he stated bluntly: “We want peace but we are not lunatics.”

For Israel, any repatriation of Palestinian refugees, and thereby fulfillment of the right of return, would occur only in the context of a return to a future Palestinian state. In the past, even a return of the refugees to a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza was questioned, especially by those on the right wing of the Israeli political spectrum. This was reflected in the 1996 Israeli government guidelines, presented by Benjamin Netanyahu, in which it was stated that Israel would “oppose ‘the right of return’ of Arab populations to any part of the Land of Israel west of the Jordan River” (Government of Israel 1996). Even for analysts who accept that imposing such conditions on the Palestinian leadership is politically unsustainable, there is a deep concern that the mass and uncontrolled return of refugees to the West Bank or Gaza would not be economically or socially viable. And that it would result in future destabilization, thereby presenting Israel with a potential new geostrategic threat.

The question of any past culpability or responsibility for the refugee problem has also influenced Israel's approach toward the question of compensation for the Palestinian refugees. Israel has rejected the Palestinian position that it bears the sole responsibility for the payment of financial compensation to the refugees both for their material loss and for their personal suffering. Israel has refused to talk in terms of personal compensation paid out to the refugees. Instead Israel has preferred to speak in terms of a rehabilitation fund, to which it too would be prepared to contribute, so as to assist in the resettlement of the refugees in their current places of residence. In that respect, Israel has traditionally argued that any form of reparation should be distributed on a collective basis, rather than through individual or family claims. Moreover, whenever the issue of compensation for Palestinian refugees has been raised, Israel has sought to broaden the discussion to include reparations to Jews expelled from Arab countries after 1948 for their loss, arguing that these two phenomena are connected, and thus they need to be treated in a similar fashion (Fischbach 2008: 6–24).

The refugee question and the peace process

These principles influenced the strategy and the approach Israel adopted throughout the peace process from 1991 to 2000. With the start of the Madrid peace conference and the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, Israel could no longer deflect discussion of the refugee problem and keep it off the political agenda. And with the onset of final status talks at Camp David in the summer of 2000, it was forced to address the issue directly, and modify many of its long-standing positions.

The Refugee Working Group

The Madrid peace conference of November 1991 led not only to the start of bilateral negotiations between Israel and Jordan, Israel and Syria, and Israel and the Palestinians but to the establishment of a set of multilateral talks aimed at dealing with problems of a regional nature, such as water, the environment, regional economic development, arms control and regional security, and refugees (Peters 1996). The decision to include a working group on refugees was made at the behest of the Palestinians, over the reservations of Israel. The Palestinians saw the establishment of the Refugee Working Group (RWG) as an opportunity to address the substantive concerns and the political rights of the refugees, and to send a signal to the refugee community that they had not been excluded from the peace process.

Israel's strategy towards the RWG was consistent with its approach to the refugee question during the previous forty years. It was prepared to discuss any initiatives that might lead to international efforts aimed at improving the welfare and living conditions of the Palestinian refugees, but it would resist the introduction of any political issues into the deliberations of the RWG. This position hardened after the signing of the Oslo Accords, with Israel insisting that all political issues should be excluded from the RWG since they would be addressed as part of the proposed final status negotiations.

Given the divergent starting points of Israel and the Palestinians, the functioning of the working group was fraught with difficulties from the outset. The first two meetings of the RWG were dominated by procedural problems centering on the composition of the Palestinian team, with Israel boycotting the first plenary meeting in Ottawa in May 1992 in protest at the inclusion of Palestinians from outside the West Bank and Gaza within the Palestinian delegation. At the first meeting, the RWG drew up its agenda. It identified six themes and allocated countries (or “shepherds,” to use the official terminology of the multilateral talks) to be responsible for work in those areas: databases (Norway); human resources, job creation and training (USA); public health (Italy); child welfare (Sweden); economic and social infrastructure (EU); and family reunification (France).

Israel regarded the inclusion of family reunification among these six themes with deep suspicion, seeing it as a potential back door for a discussion of the right of return. Consequently, it was determined to limit the scope of discussion on this issue, and many of the deliberations in this sub-group revolved around developing criteria for defining the terms of family reunification. In April 1993, Israel agreed that it would increase the annual quota of applications for the reunification of families displaced from the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 to 2000 per year, a fourfold increase on the previous figure. It also agreed to reduce the time taken to process those applications from an average of one year to a maximum of three months. But in practice neither of these concessions was ever implemented.

The multilateral talks were short-lived and ceased to take place after the election of Benjamin Netanyahu as Israeli Prime Minister in May 1996...