I was born and raised in Haifa seven years after Israel was established. I joined the 150,000 or so of us who survived the ethnic cleansing in 1948 to become second-class citizens in Israel. As for the 750,000 refugees and the internally displaced, they became, in the Orwellian Israeli legal fiction, "Present Absentees," which enabled the Israeli state to confiscate their lands and possessions.
We endured military rule from 1948 through 1966 and needed permits simply to move around. I shudder to think what my parents' generation must have felt when they stood in front of an Israeli officer -- most likely a new settler from Europe -- to plead for a travel permit in their own land.
I also remember quite vividly that there were large parts of what had just been our country that we could not access -- no signs were necessary -- such as kibbutzim. Although physically we had not left Palestine, we were exiled in our own homeland.
In 1965 my family crossed the Mandelbaum Gate into the West Bank, then under Jordan's rule. We had hardly settled when the Israeli military occupied the West Bank and Gaza along with other Arab territories. Once again we became occupied natives and confronted Israeli tanks, checkpoints and a military regime.
Upon graduating from high school in Jerusalem I left to study in Beirut and then in the United States. I returned to Lebanon in the late 1970s where my parents had relocated. But fate is wily: in 1982, a few years after we settled in Beirut, Israel invaded Lebanon. Friends with a sense of humor urged us not to move to their countries.
In the 'good old days' before the civil war of 1975, Beirut, the beautiful Mediterranean city with its seductive coastal contours and cedar mountains, throbbed with political life. Beirut's coffee houses, market places, mixed neighborhoods, streets and alleyways, hotels and brothels, universities and refugee camps were interlocked in impossible paradoxes that only Beirut could embrace.
Politics seeped into everyday conversation as nationalists, Marxists and others debated and argued on university campuses and joined protests in the streets. The mood was secular amid the winds of decolonization and self-determination which had swept the region and the Third World. The presence of freedom fighters or Fedayeen signaled that the Palestinian refugees refused to disappear as the Zionist movement had hoped. Indeed, the right of return was central to the Palestine Liberation Organization's recruitment efforts.
By the late seventies, the fires of the civil war ignited in 1975 were still smoldering and portending a darker storm. And the storm did arrive in 1982 carrying a deadly Israeli arsenal. I was the mother of a six-month-old baby. The images and smells of human carnage are deeply etched in my memory. I must admit I was not very brave back then. I felt helpless: how could I protect my child while being blasted from land, air and sea?
I left Lebanon in 1984 and only returned to the region a decade later to conduct research in the refugee camps in Jordan. For Palestinian refugees, the 1993 Oslo Accord was a shattering development that caused a dramatic shift and divide in national politics. Many intellectuals, scholars and activists, who had joined the Oslo jubilations at the time, accusing those who opposed it as romantic and idealistic, have since reversed their position. Today there is copious literature on the ruinous effects of the so-called "peace process."
Since then, there has been little peace and less justice. For Palestinian refugees and exiles, the political and armed conflicts in the region caused further displacement, for example from Jordan in 1970/71, from Lebanon during the civil war and the Israeli invasion, from Libya in the 1990s, and from Gulf countries and Iraq as a consequence of the two US invasions. In most of the Arab countries, Palestinian refugees remain vulnerable to discrimination and many have a precarious legal status. Yet the predicament of the Palestinian refugees is an Israeli responsibility. While refugees struggle for rights in various host states, the blame should not be transferred to them.
Poignantly, most of the refugees live within 100 km of their homes of origin: tantalizingly proximate, but politically inaccessible. And the number of refugees and exiles has grown. At the end of 2011 the total Palestinian population was estimated at 11.2 million, almost 70 percent of which is displaced, both within and outside historical Palestine.
Under the law, we have a right of return, and this requires us to consider the nature of the future polity in what was Palestine until 1948 and is now Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Regardless of its shape and form, the future polity must be a model of inclusion and diversity that incorporates Muslims, Christians, Jews, Druze, atheists and people of diverse backgrounds. Palestinian rights do not and should not generate another calamity and a counter-process of Jewish displacement.
A growing number of studies show that a Palestinian right of return is not only just but viable, even though at this historical juncture it seems far-fetched. Only the recognition and fulfillment of this right -- all the more important as the 64th anniversary of the Nakba approaches -- will lead to justice and secure a lasting peace.
Randa Farah is a policy advisor of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, and an Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario who has written widely on Palestinian, Sahrawi, and other refugee communities.
The author's family is from Haifa, where the Palestinians left by boats despite the city's Jews asking them to stay and with even the British not understanding why they left.
Her family was not "ethnically cleansed," but chose to emigrate 7 years later. She does not even have the right for the claim of return.
In a rare moment of almost integrity the author recognizes the wrongdoing of all Arab states towards the Palestinians, but she still thinks that a fifth generation Lebanese who is harshly discriminated because his great grandfather came from Mandatory Palestine is to blame Israel, not the Lebanese.
The peace process failed? maybe, but not a word about the Palestinian terrorist policy and unwillingness to compromise. And so on.
The author's lack of integrity leaves the Jewish reader with too many doubts about her chances of survival in this factious one state after she will give away her national rights on the altar of recently invented Palestinian fantasy of Islamic domination.
I encourage some commentators to research the many discriminatory laws and the apartheid situations endured by Palestinians living in occupied territories. I also advocate for an end to expanding efforts to silence Palestinians, Jews, and others who are critical of the state of Israel. This article, and the discussion it generates, is a step in the right direction.
You do not like it done to you, so why do you do it to others?
These "fires" included brutal PLO occupation and subjugation of Southern Lebanon and repeated cross-border attacks against innocent Israeli women and children by Palestinian terrorists.
And Syrian invasion and occupation.
And War of the Camps between Palestinians and Lebanese people intent on wresting control of their land from Palestinians occupation.
Objective historical study requires a far more complex and veridical approach to data. Far more.
"And War of the Camps between Palestinians and Lebanese people intent on wresting control of their land from Palestinians occupation."
It is not enough that you deny the right of the Palestinians to return to their homes. That when the Palestinians fight for their very survival you accuse them of conducting an occupation. Might I suggest that you go back and have a read of the debates at various Zionist congress.
The intention of the Zionist movement from the very beginning was to transport the Arab population of Palestine to other Arab lands.
http://chaimsimons.net/transfer.html
A Historical Survey of Proposals to
Transfer Arabs from Palestine
1895 - 1947
by
Rabbi Dr. Chaim Simons
Did you not think that the other Arab nations might object. The reason why Palestinians were living in refugee camps in Lebanon was because the were not allowed to return to their own homes. The blame for that falls mainly on Israel's Shoulders.
Besides, Palestinians born before 1948 do have Palestine as birthplace on their documents.
As internationally condemned illegal settlements grow, steal more land, kick more Palestinians out of their homes. The practices of what took place in 1948 continue to take place today. Right now. The on-going Nakba continues with the displacement. They continue with the occupation.
Candy, banana’s, toys, are not allowed by Israel into Gaza. Israel has been successful in giving birth to the largest open air child prison with over 50 percent of the population being under the age of 21.
This has been going on for a number of years even before the first intifada even took place when in the early 1980’s separate Jewish only roads were already being built.
I bring this up because as I was skimming through the comments below-I saw a comment about Pakistan and India being made.
Pakistan and India are separate and unique historical issues that I am heavily aware of as I am of Pakistani descent myself.
As I am a conflict resolver my answer to the comment is:
If those -Pakistani and Indian- populations want the right of return-they should seek international law. But to bring this up in regards to the Palestinian issue is disrespectful and highly inappropriate.
However-if anyone wishes to learn about Palestine…I recommend looking into the practices of Gandhi and his heavy disapproval of the colonization of the Palestinians.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/5/newsid_2654000/2654251.stm
"1967: Israel launches attack on Egypt
Israeli forces have launched a pre-emptive attack on Egypt and destroyed nearly 400 Egypt-based military aircraft. "
You are also inaccurate as far as the position of international law on the acquisition of territory through war. International law says that it is "inadmissible to acquire territory through war" It makes no distinction between a war of defence or offence.
http://www.mideastweb.org/242.htm
U.N. SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTION 242
NOVEMBER 22, 1967
"Emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every State in the area can live in security, "
That wording clearly indicates that the U.N. security council does not accept that Israel is allowed to acquire territory through war.
Whether or not Israel was justified in it's belief that it was about to be attacked is a matter up for debate.
About as viable as the right of return of displaced Pakistanis and their great-grandchildren to India. Or displaced Hundu and their great-grandchildren to Pakistan. Nil.
F & F.
Hey, who needs objectivity.
Also, I direct my second comment to all of those who have mentioned this idea that the "right of return" is a non-existent concept. In fact, this is a basic human right as declared by the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and one claimed and enjoyed by many new Israeli settlers, often moving into new settlements built on what is what was, after the original 1948 partition and even recently, Palestinian land. Anyone who denies this fact needs to deepen their research and reading on the conflict with an unbiased view, where any map from 1948, 1967 and any subsequent year shows that Israel has consistently followed a policy of continued destruction of Palestinian homes on Palestinian land, in order to expand the territory that on which it was originally established.
Israeli elders used to say the old will die and the young will forget. Well we have not forgotten. One does not relinquish one’s own being. Reconciling historic injustices is the only way to security for all
Our collective Palestinian heart is telling us there are no intractable conflicts, only intractable minds refusing the will of humanity. Peace can, must and will come the sooner the better because there is no need for any child to cry again for becoming homeless. But the key to peace is the returning home of the 7 million displaced Palestinians whether they are refugees, exiles, diasporas or internally displaced citizens of Israel.
Exactly. If you're faced with someone on the other end of the negotiating table who indulges in these kind of claims and bottom lines, you cannot trust them to act with an understanding of reality. They will not be practical but ideological to the end.
So Israel, who was attacked by 5 nations and whose citizens were killed and maimed by the thousands, must open her doors to a fifth column of "11 million" and basically return to the scenario she faced 64 years ago? No, wars and belligerent actions have consequences, and given that nothing's changed after all these years, Israel is under no obligation to offer what would surely be another try at a different outcome.
This is basically a pity piece marked by the subjective, emotionally-laden term "Nakba" and written to coincide with Israel's 64th. It's noteworthy in this case that the first two letters of "professor" are
"p-r." It's more than a little disturbing if her school sanctioned such work
The expulsion from the Gulf States in the 1990s was because the Palestinians sided with Saddam Hussein after he took over Kuwait.
No mention of the Arab Nations' aggression in 1948, 1967, and 1973?
Or:
THe economic boycott of Israell?
The Arab League's isolation of Sadat because he recognized Israel, and the Palestinians celebrating his assassination?
The decades of Palestinian terrorism?
The rejection of the Clinton Plan at Camp David?
The bus bombings?
The election of Hamas?
Another one of those pesky anniversaries is coming up: The Munich Olympic Massacre.
Time for the Palestinians to take responsibility for the situation they're in, don't you think?
F & F.