Abbas and the right of return

Ahead of Mahmoud Abbas’s speech to the United Nations today, 100 US Jewish leaders wrote to the Palestinian president urging him to announce publicly that he is giving up the “right to return” to his home. The letter was sent by the Israel Policy Forum to President Abbas and said that such a statement would show “publicly to the entire international community and emphasising the Palestinian people’s willingness to live in peace with Israel would be important steps to improve the environment affecting the peace process.”

Abbas is due to speak at the UN exactly a year after he sought recognition for a Palestinian state. Following talks with US President Barack Obama, Abbas has since agreed to put a more comprehensive recognition bid on hold. Talks between the Israelis and Palestinians have resumed following a five year hiatus and it is the pressure put on Abbas from Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry for the talks to be successful that has seen Abbas agree to delay the UN bid.

Abbas’s willingness to concede to the demands of others, as he has done with the UN bid, has caused many people to raise concerns over his approach to the “right of return”. In an interview with Israeli Channel 2 last year, he said that he did not believe it was his right to return to live in his hometown of Safed (now in northern Israel): “It’s my right to see it, but not to live there.” His comment sent shockwaves across Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora as many believed that the head of the Palestinian Authority and PLO was in effect renouncing refugees’ legal right of return as enshrined in UN resolution 194. This accepted that the Palestinians who had been forcibly removed from their homes during the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe) had the right to return to their homes; implementation of the right was a condition of Israel’s membership of the UN. Despite this, it has never been allowed to happen and remains a cfinal status” issue. Millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants remain in limbo, living in refugee camps in the Middle East and in various countries around the world.

That apparently throwaway remark last year has caused shivers down many a spine. If Abbas was willing to give up his right of return, what guarantee is there that he will still push for and secure the right of the millions of refugees? The Palestinian Authority, which has taken it upon itself to represent all Palestinians on the world stage and in negotiations with Israel, is being led by someone who can clearly not be trusted with one of the most fundamental basics of the Palestinian cause. Furthermore, it indicated that if Abbas was willing to concede on this issue, what else would he and the PA be willing to give up? After all, the Palestinians have little more than 22 per cent of historic Palestine, no access to water, no air space and no military; what more could they possibly be asked to give up in “negotiations”?

As Daniel Levy of the European Council on Foreign Relations and founder of J Street told a MEMO conference on the legacy of Oslo recently, Israelis began to realise after the infamous channel 2 interview, that if Abbas would give up this right, then he might eventually give up other rights if he was backed into a corner. He quoted a speech by Israeli finance minister, Yair Lapid, who said that Abbas had given up on the refugee issue and that “just like the refugee issue if we stick to our guns on all of Jerusalem, then they’ll give that up as well.” The letter sent to Abbas by the Israel Policy Forum has followed in Lapid’s footsteps in urging Abbas to give up the right of return will be, presumably the first of many such demands. Whether Abbas will be able to withstand the pressure remains to be seen. Past experience does not make anyone very optimistic.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.