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Al-Ahram Weekly Online
7 - 13 March 2002
Issue No.576
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875
Current issue | Previous issue | Site map
The way home
For many, the Palestinians' right of return may be no more than a pie in the sky.
Salman Abu Sitta begs to differ, as Sherine Bahaa reports
"What we are seeing on the news today about Israeli attacks on Palestinian refugee
camps in Gaza is not something new. It is a natural extension of what the refugees
have been suffering for the past 50 years." The words were spoken by Salman Abu
Sitta, a Palestinian who is an expert on the right of return for his people, at a
seminar
this week.
The seminar was organised by the Centre for Arab Studies, which is affiliated to the
Arab League.
Abu Sitta has long been a fervent advocate of the right of return of Palestinian
refugees. He is a researcher who has devoted much of his life to collecting maps,
testimonies of eye-witnesses and other data in order to compile details about the
number, names and homes of the Palestinians expelled in 1948 -- before and shortly
after the creation of the state of Israel.
Abu Sitta has seen his life's mission as revealing to the world that Western
conceptions about how Israel was established are a fallacy. He has tried to tell the
world about the heavy price Palestinians had to pay.
His goal is nothing less than the return of all Palestinians to their own villages and
cities. To this end, Abu Sitta established the Palestinian Return Centre ("Awda") in
London. Awda is a global network charged with educating the international
community on how to fulfil their legal and moral obligations vis-a-vis Palestinian
refugees.
Abu Sitta has also written dozens of articles on the right of return as well as his
latest
book, Blueprint for Return, in which he refutes Israeli arguments used to rule out all
possibilities for the return of more than four million Palestinian refugees to their
land.
According to Abu Sitta, who is a former member of the Palestinian National Council,
Israel was able to establish itself on the ground just a year and a half after it came
into existence.
"It was not war like the one fought in Europe," he said. "It was not a coincidence or
an accident. It was a nakba (catastrophe) unprecedented in modern history."
"Israel has expelled nearly 85 per cent of the original inhabitants of the land. It
was a
deliberate separation enforced between people's history and geography," Abu Sitta
said.
The events of 1948 are still vivid in his memory, he said. He remembers the exodus
of refugees, who were obliged to leave their houses either because of massacres or
because of a total evacuation of villages and cities. Jewish immigrants, summoned
from different parts of the world, then took over these cities to replace the real
owners of the lands.
Images of helpless Palestinians fleeing Gaza on fishing boats still irk the human
conscience, but officials and diplomats tend to relegate the importance of human
issues for the sake of finding a broader settlement to the conflict.
In his famous article in the New York Times on 3 February, Palestinian President
Yasser Arafat asserted that the Palestinian right to return "must be implemented in a
way that takes into account" Israel's "demographic concerns."
This kind of statement can easily be used to confirm what many have long feared --
that human rights will be sacrificed because of Israel's racist laws and apartheid
system.
Most Palestinian refugees expelled in 1948 now fear that the right to return to their
homeland will be sacrificed in order to reach a peace deal between the Palestinian
Authority and Israel.
Palestinian officials, including Yasser Arafat, have explicitly said that the priority
in
terms of the right of return will be given to Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon --
more than 200,000 people.
According to recent reports in the Western press, the formula currently being
presented to Palestinians is that a very limited number of people, originally forced to
flee in 1948, will be permitted to return to Israel. Only a slightly bigger number
will be
allowed to return to the future Palestinian state.
Enter Abu Sitta. He has rejected this proposal and offered a counter-argument. The
return of the refugees is "both legal and possible," he said.
He began his argument by stressing the fact that the right of return is clearly spelled
out in UN Security Council resolution 194. "This resolution has been reaffirmed 135
times by UN General Assembly members, which is something very rare," he said.
Abu Sitta also rejected the "demographic concerns" aspect of Israel's argument.
Using large projections of maps and statistics, he showed that the sites of the 531
Palestinian towns and villages, depopulated by Israeli forces during the early days of
the expulsion were still empty and could still be identified.
According to Abu Sitta's figures, "More than 90 per cent of the village refugees could
return to empty sites." In this way, Abu Sitta said, no Israelis would be evicted to
allow for the return of the refugees.
Abu Sitta went even further. He ruled out any solution that ignored the plight of the
refugees. "No solution to the Middle East conflict would be accepted without a prior
solution to the issue of the refugees," he said.
"Our problem is not economic or political. It is fundamental. Even Israelis reiterate
this equation of no peace without a solution to the refugees saga, but of course our
solution is different from theirs," Abu Sitta said.
Abu Sitta differentiated between the right of return and the establishment of a state.
"The declaration of a Palestinian state is a political right. It is simply a state
extending
its sovereignty over a piece of land," he explained. "But the right of return is a
human
right. It is related to the return to one's own house and land, whatever the name of
the state might be."
"My father was living in Palestine under the British mandate, while my grandfather
lived in Palestine during the Ottoman period. We do not care what the name of the
state is. Be it Israel, be it Palestine, it is the return that matters most," he added.
Nowadays, there is a third generation of refugees who have never even been to
Palestine, but still dream that one day they see their ancestral lands. Abu Sitta
quoted Daniel Rubinstein, the Israeli writer, in his description of the strong bonds
between the Palestinians and their land. "All people live in their countries, but the
Palestinians have their country living in them."
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