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54th Anniversary of
the Palestinian Nakba (15 May 2002)
The RIGHT OF RETURN and REAL PROPERTY RESTITUTION
(E/38/2002)
BADIL Resource Center
10 May 2002
For Immediate Release
As Palestinians in the
1967 occupied Palestinian territories, over 50 percent of whom are
refugees, begin to assess the massive physical damage and destruction
(estimated at over US $300 million) left in the wake of Israel's most
recent military campaign to crush indigenous resistance to the ongoing
illegal military occupation and the denial of the right to
self-determination, they are also preparing to commemorate 54 years of
displacement and dispossession - al-Nakba. Israel continues to deny
Palestinian refugees, including internally displaced Palestinians, the
right to return to their places of origin and recover their property
inside Israel. A total of three-quarters of the indigenous
Palestinian population are displaced either outside or inside their
homeland.
Since 1948 Israel has expropriated more than 17 million dunums (17,000 sq.
km) of land owned by Palestinian refugees and nearly 1 million dunums
owned by Palestinians inside Israel, including internally displaced
Palestinians. Since 1967, moreover, Israel has further expropriated and/or
controls some 4.7 million dunums in the 1967 occupied West Bank, eastern
Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. In 1948 Palestinians owned more than 90
percent of the land in historic Mandate Palestine. Today, the indigenous
Palestinian Arab population owns and controls just over 10 percent of the
land within the borders of their historic homeland (i.e., inside Israel
and the 1967 occupied territories). At the same time, Israel has either
expropriated or destroyed over 150,000 homes belonging to refugees
displaced/expelled in 1948.
Return and
Reconstruction
The primary reason why Israel refuses to allow the refugees to come home
is that they are not Jewish. Israel has also argued, however, that because
refugee homes have been destroyed or expropriated to house Jewish Israelis
(referred to as secondary occupation) return is not possible. In the early
1950s, for example, Israeli officials informed the UN Conciliation
Commission for Palestine (UNCCP), mandated to facilitate a durable
solution for the refugees based on General Assembly Resolution 194 (i.e.,
voluntary return, restitution, compensation), that "the individual
return of Arab refugees to their former places of residence is an
impossible thing. Their houses have gone, their jobs have gone."
This argument has since become something of a mantra repeated not only by
Israeli officials but also by international diplomats, analysts and
academicians. Writing in the May issue of Foreign Affairs ("The Last
Negotiation: How to End the Middle East Peace Process"), for example,
Hussein Agha, a Senior Associate Member of St. Antony's College, Oxford
University, and Robert Malley, Director of the Middle East Program at the
International Crisis Group and former special assistant to President
Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs, state: "Many of the refugees
presumably want to go back to their original homes. But these homes, and
indeed, in many cases, the entire villages where they were located, either
no longer exist or are now inhabited by Jews." The conclusion drawn
is that while limited numbers of refugees may be able to return,
"consistent with the exercise of Israel's sovereign powers over entry
and resettlement locations", financial and other incentives will be
needed to "persuade" the majority of the refugees (i.e., impose
arbitrary restrictions on the basic human right to return) to
"choose" some form of resettlement either in a Palestinian state
in the West Bank and Gaza Strip or in a third country.
The land owned by the refugees has remained largely vacant; Jewish
settlement is concentrated in a number of urban centers, while some
160,000 rural Jewish Israelis live on more than 17,000 sq. km of refugee
land. In light of this fact, the argument that the destruction (or even
secondary occupation) of a Palestinian refugee's home, and even village,
permanently negates the right of return is at best misinformed, if not
duplicitous. No one has raised the argument, for example, that Israel's
destruction of hundreds of Palestinian homes in the 1967 occupied
Palestinian territories since the beginning of the al-Aqsa intifada
negates the right of the homeowner to continue living in his/her city,
town or refugee camp. Nor have such arguments garnered serious
consideration in other refugee cases. In Kosovo 50 percent of the housing
stock was destroyed, 65 percent in Bosnia, and 80 percent in East Timor.
In each of these cases the international community supported the right of
refugees and displaced persons to return to their places of origin. The
logical solution to the problem of damaged or destroyed housing is
rehabilitation and reconstruction. Five years after the Dayton peace
agreement was signed in Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example, the international
community had assisted with the repair and reconstruction of nearly 30,000
housing units. The experience of UNRWA in rebuilding destroyed refugee
shelters in places of exile over the past five decades provides one
immediate example of a model directly applicable to housing reconstruction
for returnees in the Palestinian case.
The mass destruction of Palestinian refugee homes and villages in 1948 is
not a credible reason to deny Palestinian refugees the right to return to
their places of origin inside Israel, nor can it be argued that the
passage of 54 years renders claims for real property restitution
irrelevant. To do so would not only violate basic principles of
international law but would also essentially punish Palestinian refugees
for Israel's rejection of the right of return and real property
restitution. Israel's sole argument for denying Palestinian refugees their
rights (and thereby obstructing a durable solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict) is that the refugees are not Jewish. As
numerous UN human rights treaty bodies have noted, this argument is not
consistent with international human rights law including the universal
norm of non-discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, nationality, and
religion.
On the occasion of the 54th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba,
BADIL Resource Center calls upon the international solidarity movement to:
-
Educate and inform
about the history and the scope of Palestinian displacement and
dispossession;
-
Educate and inform
about Palestinian refugees' right of return, real property restitution
and compensation in accordance with international law and UN
Resolution 194.
Resources are available
on the websites of BADIL and the Palestine Right to Return Coalition (http://al-awda.org) |