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The Geneva
Agreement & The RefugeeMovement: Questions & Challenges
*Anwar
Hamam
No
one knows whether the Geneva accord deserves all the disputes
still raging over it, or whether it will remain ink on paper and
never have any influence on Palestinian political life. Could
the accord represent a crucial juncture in official Palestinian
perspectives and positions and form a starting point for a
future Palestinian political mobilisation? Is the existing
heated debate is healthy for Palestinian society? What is
certain is that we must conduct a serious revision and
discussion of the refugees’
issue and the various ways of addressing it proposed by the
authors of the document and the new initiatives advanced, as
well as the positions of the various political, cultural and
social forces active within refugee milieus, away from charges
of treason and intellectual intimidation.
The positions of the Geneva agreement’s
authors
The authors of the Geneva accord start their vision for
the settlement of the refugee issue with the premise of the
impossibility of return to regions occupied in 1948, on the
basis that this would be nothing short of the state of Israel’s
collective suicide. They are of the view that return is
unattainable and would, therefore, only complicate any political
settlement with the Israeli side. They thus seek a settlement
closer to their conception of political realism, calling for a
symbolic return of refugees to Israel and an actual one to the
future Palestinian state. Some even argue that Palestinians
ought to return to this prospective Palestinian state, if they
are to preserve their national identity. Others propose the idea
of ‘land exchange’
inspired by the Taba agreements, as a creative solution
to the refugee problem. Palestinians are here required to return
to the land from which Israel is due to withdraw, in exchange
for the future Palestinian state’s
surrender of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. The
Geneva Accord presents a single interpretation of resolution
194, which is to be implemented in all individual cases, which
is compensation, and not compensation as a concomitant of the
right to return.
The champions of the agreement insist that rejecting this
non-official proposal would be historically detrimental, since
they maintain, Israel is
moving further ahead in its de facto policy, by imposing new
political and geographical facts on the ground. They,
furthermore, argue that the significance of the proposal lies in
its ability to penetrate within Israeli society.
‘Regardless of details’,
it is said, the document is likely to force Israelis to
seek a political settlement with a willing Palestinian partner,
which refutes Sharon’s
argument in defence for his campaign of aggression against
Palestinians and his claim that the slogan of
‘let the army win’
will be victorious in the end. Some see the document as a
political embarrassment for Sharon, in preparation for his
electoral defeat by the so-called ‘forces
of peace’ in Israeli society.
The refugees mobilise
Activists in the field of refugee rights see this accord
as a violation of the inalienable right to return, a cause of
division and a blow to Palestinian national consensus, as
articulated in the national councils and the Central Assemble.
They insist that, even if the initiative is an embarrassment to
Sharon, it comes at too high a price. It involves the distortion
of international resolutions, particularly with regards to 242
and 194, lowers the threshold of Palestinian demands and raises
that of the Israeli side. Refugee rights activists are adamant
that the refugee issue represents the heart of the conflict and
that the responsibility for the resolution of the problem of the
scores of Palestinians forcibly removed from their homes and
lands, through the campaigns of killings, terrorism and
intimidation perpetrated by Zionist gangs, in the aim of
uprooting one people from the land to replace it with another,
rests with Israel itself. The right to return, they insist, is
to be implemented as expressed in Resolution 194 of the United
Nation’s General Assembly
and that all that forms of repatriation are to be combated,
along with the Israeli theory of population exchange (exchanging
Jews from Arab countries with Palestinian refugees), or land
exchange as solutions to the problem.
The refugees refer to international human rights
conventions and declaration in support of their claims, the
right to return being one of the fundamental rights the human
being is entitled to, just like the rights to education and to a
dignified life. They, furthermore, appeal to resolutions that
deemed Israel’s recognition
of this right as a precondition of the recognition of its
existence. It is a historical right, since it was in this land
that the Palestinian people founded its Arab Palestinian
national identity and culture.
Pioneers of this right insist that it ought to be
included with the right to compensation, on the basis of
resolution 194. Compensation thus may not be seen as a
substitute for return, but is dispensed for the years of
displacement from their homes and livings, for the suffering and
exile, for the revenue of the lands they were driven out of and
the mean of production they were forced to
leave behind. Compensation should also cover emotional
damage and includes ‘lost
opportunities’.
Questions the authors of the document need to answer
There are a number of issues and problems relating to the
issue of refugees, which the authors of the document need to
consider. These may be briefly summed up as follows: The issue
of representation: On what do the authors of the accord base
their claim of representing Palestinian refugees, to give
themselves leave to relinquish what is essentially an individual
right, concerning illegitimately confiscated individual
property? Who would compensate the owners for their property,
dwellings, lands and means of production? Are those who reject
compensation to be forced to accept it? What is to be done about
those who insist on implementing their rights to return and
compensation and refuse to restrict their choices within a time
frame? Has a time frame for the filing of legal demands to
reclaim properties been set? To what extent
are the lands to be surrendered to the prospective
Palestinian state capable of accommodating the millions of
refugees should they choose to return to there? Has the accord
conducted a realistic scientific calculation capable of
implementation, with regards to the issues of capacity,
infrastructure (health and educational systems, electricity and
water supplies, a transport network), the likely prospects for
the generation of real development and the creation of work and
production opportunities? Or is this only
talk of the transfer and movement of numbers and nothing more,
without any vision for development, which means the creation of
yet more problems within Palestinian society, and ones that
would be extremely difficult to resolve? To recognize all
Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza is to turn them
into a fact, while many house insignificant numbers of settlers.
Will the same approach be implemented with regards to refugees,
or will they be considered as numbers that may be dismissed
through compensation, or repatriation? Is it true that the lands
to be exchanged by Israel will be in the desert, against lands
of enormous economic and social importance and ones that hold
significant water reserves? Will such desert land incite
Palestinian youth to move to it, which refers us to the close
connection between final stage settlements and development
projects?
-Who will compensate the owners of the 6% of land
proposed for confiscation and surrender to Israel, and has an
agreement been obtained from the owners of the 2% of land
proposed for letting?
-Have the authors discussed the need for Israel to
present a historic apology to the Palestinian people for the
1948 catastrophe and an acknowledgement of its responsibility
for their tragedy?
-The document has defined the Palestinian threshold,
since the Palestinian side was almost official, what would be
the case if the Palestinians had to negotiate with the right,
should it be re-elected?
-Will the refugees be informed of their rights and the
alternatives they have, or will the pioneers of the document
rely on the current state of despondency within the Palestinian
public?
-What if the Palestinian state does not emerge in a year,
two, or even a decade or two? What alternatives do the authors
propose?
Questions refugee activists must consider
While the authors of the Geneva accord, like those of
previous initiatives insist on settling the refugee issue on the
basis of an acceptance of the current situation, Palestinian
refugees have, through their institutions mobilised to combat
all the proposals they see as deviating from the national
consensus and undermining the rights of refugees. There are,
however, a number of issues and questions the refugee movement
must consider:
- Do the refugees have institutions capable of
protecting, safeguarding, defending and demanding the
implementing of the right to return, particularly ones of a
legal nature which are most capable of generating a
state of awareness within refugee milieus about refugees’
human legal and political rights? And are refugees
sufficiently aware of the role they need to play in defining
their future and outcome, or is work within refugee circles
elitist and isolated from the masses?
- Where are the realistic and practical studies conducted
on the central right to return, which highlight in detail the
mechanisms of return, or is return as a concept only a political
slogan?
- How do refugee associations deal with the idea of
advancing proposals for settlements and methods of struggle to
combat the articles of the Geneva accord as bases for a final
settlement? What would be their response if a similar accord was
to be signed officially by the two parties?
- How are the possibilities of struggle for the right to
return in the framework of the two- states and the one state to
be discussed in refugee milieus?
- Within the context of a realistic vision, what is the
likelihood of turning the clock backwards and recreating
traditional Palestinian society anew, should return be realized,
or is right one thing and implementation quite another?
And finally,
It seems that the Geneva accord instead of infiltrating
into Israeli society, as its authors had hoped, has generated
division and dissent inside the Palestinian side itself. It has
as a result become conventional to speak of an official
Palestinian position, a semi- official and a popular one. The
dispute seems to have been transferred from the Palestinian/
Israeli arenas to the Palestinian sphere itself. What is most
worrying about the document, it seems, is its violation of
international resolutions regarding the conflict, undermining
their interpretations and of the idea of establishing the
Palestinian state on all the land Israel illegally occupied in
1967. The document has left the Palestinian negotiator utterly
unarmed.
* Researcher in the sociology of refugees
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