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Abbas invites the wrath of Palestinian refugees

May 5, 2014 at 12:45 am

There is nothing like the anger of a Palestinian refugee told that his right to return is compromised. Mahmoud Abbas was reminded of this following his recent interview with Israel’s Channel Two TV. When asked if he wanted to live in Safad, the village in the Galilee where he spent his early childhood, he replied, “I want to see Safad, it is my right to view it, but not to live in it.”

He reassured his hosts that all he wanted was a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip; and that whatever remains of historic Palestine would be Israel forever. Finally, Mr Abbas warned that as long as he is President of the Palestinian Authority, he will not allow another Intifada to take place in the occupied territories.

 


Whatever the motive, these assertions were not only ill-judged they were also terribly timed, coinciding as they did with the 95th anniversary of the infamous Balfour Declaration. The reaction in the refugee camps and wider diaspora was utter dismay and indignation.

 

Abbas had, yet again, recklessly overplayed his hand. His public relations machine cranked into overdrive in an attempt to limit the damage to Abbas’s already deflated image. One year ago, Al Jazeera’s release of the Palestinian Papers exposed a shocking catalogue of compromises which the PLO/PA negotiators were prepared to make in discussions with the Israeli occupiers. Although the scandal has been overshadowed by the Arab uprisings it has not been forgotten.

Today, the official line from Ramallah is that Abbas’s remarks were meant for the Israelis only and they had nothing to do with the final status issues of which the refugee issue is pivotal and undeniable. Utter nonsense, of course, but Abbas’s political advisor, Nimr Hammad, still took to the airwaves promising that the refugee issue would be negotiated along with all the others such as settlements, Jerusalem, water and borders. He even denied that there was any explicit statement in the interview which compromised the refugee issue.

In London, the outspoken Palestinian editor-in-chief of Al Quds Al Arabi, Abdel Bari Atwan, wrote an acerbic piece on Saturday pleading with Abbas: “Please, don’t speak in our names.” If Abbas doesn’t want to return to Safad, he added, that was his business. “But he should not speak on behalf of all Palestinians.”

In Jordan, the remarks coincided with a conference on the right of return. Naturally, it threw a dark shadow over the proceedings. Ahmad Nofal, a professor at Yarmuk University, demanded that Abbas be put on trial for his “betrayal” of the Palestinian cause. He challenged the PLO/PA chief to visit a refugee camp anywhere and repeat his remarks.

This was not a run of the mill gaffe that politicians make occasionally. It is the latest in a series that surfaced in the 1993 Oslo Accords, reflecting a disturbing pattern devised to deny the exercise of the right of return. They were endorsed in the Abu Mazen-Yossi Beilin document (1995) and the Geneva accord (2003), and exposed by the Palestine Papers (2011).

The rationale of this approach is that there must be a distinction between recognition of the right of return in principle and its actual implementation. This was recorded in a document which the PLO’s Negotiations Support Unit (NSU) communicated to the Israelis on 26 March 2008: “The PLO will pursue the recognition of all refugees’ rights and their satisfaction with particular care, especially since these are individual rights. The Palestinian leadership is however ready to negotiate their implementation in order to accommodate to the two-state solution.”

By addressing the Palestinian refugee issue outside the framework of international law the PLO has given the impression that it is prepared to endanger the right of return for a state in the West Bank. Hence, the PLO has, to all intents and purposes, accepted the resettlement of the refugees in their places of refuge. In other words, no return to their “homes and property” as advocated by UN Resolution 3236 (1974).

However, instead of pressuring the refugees to relinquish their right to repatriation they should be coordinating with them on how to exercise it. That is if the PLO/PA really represents the people, as is claimed.

Sadly, the “historical leadership” is determined to conflate the individual right of return with the collective right to self-determination when neither right should be curtailed at the expense of the other. The right of the individual must be preserved, irrespective of whether the PLO gains international recognition for a state.

If there is any issue capable of uniting the Palestinian people it is the right of return. By disowning it Abbas has taken himself beyond the pale of the national consensus. Whatever calculations or manoeuvrings of the Israeli or Palestinian “representatives”, it will remain the bedrock of the Palestinian cause, until it is achieved. Fawaz Turki spoke for his generation and all others when he wrote:

“Yes. Yes. Yes, that is where I want to return; where I want to be; at the gates of Jerusalem, Haifa and Jaffa. And when I knock on the door, I shall be there listing every blade of grass, every grain of sand, every floor, every shadow of every olive tree that I left behind.’ [JPS, Vol. VI, No 3, Spring 1997, p.66]