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As stated earlier, the Israeli policy
concentrated its efforts, after the expulsion and dispossession of
the Palestinians and confiscating their land, on getting rid of the
refugees themselves.
Today, 88 percent of the refugees live in Palestine and environs: 46
percent in British Mandatory Palestine, 42 percent in Jordan, Syria,
and Lebanon, within a 100-mile radius of Israel. Only 12 percent
reside further afield, equally divided between Arab and foreign
countries. Their total number, according to 1998 figures, is 4.9
million, of which only 3.6 million are registered with the United
Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the official body set up to
care for the refugees . More than two-thirds of the Palestinian
people are refugees! There are no other people in the world where so
many have been forced into exile.
The proximity of the refugees to their homes and their unquenched
desire to return explains the feverish Israeli attempts to bring in
as many immigrants as possible from such diverse places as Ethiopia
and Russia, just to fill the depopulated Palestinian locations. On
the other hand, there are over three dozen schemes (over a hundred
if we consider minor variations) to resettle the refugees anywhere
in the world except their homes. They are all Israeli-inspired and
are based on one or more of the following premises: that the
Palestinians are not a distinct “people,” that they could and should
live anywhere, that they have no rights to qualify them for return,
that their return is not physically possible, and that their return
is not desirable because it would threaten the “Jewish character” of
Israel.
The latest edition of these schemes is a proposal made by Donna Arzt
. Although dressed in humanitarian garb, it is essentially a
continuation of the ethnic-cleansing plan executed by Ben-Gurion,
Weitz and Ariel Sharon. The plan calls for the transfer of 1.5
million refugees to various parts of the world and the forced exile
of several million under a scheme of threats, coercion and bribery.
There are other schemes which call for the return of the refugees,
not to their homes, but to a new state of Palestine, whose
sovereignty and territory are still shrouded in mystery. They even
propose ‘land swaps’, such as exchanging Palestinian-populated areas
in Israel, or deserts in Israel used as dumps for chemical waste,
for valuable territory in the West Bank occupied by settlers to be
annexed to Israel.
Such ideas confuse the issue of sovereignty, which applies to a
territory in which the state can make laws to admit citizens to it,
and the issue of return to the homes from which the refugees were
expelled, which is an Inalienable Right. The two are entirely
unrelated. The refugee remains one until he returns to his original
home. This has been clearly spelled out in the Explanatory
Memorandum of Resolution 194. Changing the camp address of the
refugee does not make him a returnee or deprive him of his rights. A
refugee should return to his home, regardless of the sovereignty of
the regime where his home lies.
All such schemes have failed, and they will continue to fail.
Therefore, it becomes increasingly necessary to go back to basics
and find creative solutions. Such solutions can never be permanent
unless based on justice. First we must break the Israeli taboo that
the Right of Return is not possible. We start by examining and
refuting the Israeli standard arguments against the Right of Return.
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