I24 News..
02 October '13..
In his address to this year’s United Nations General Assembly, Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas called for a solution to the Palestinian refugee problem in accordance with UNGA Resolution 194.
In the Palestinian narrative, Resolution 194 grants a legal right to the Palestinian refugees and their descendents to settle in Israel and to reclaim the real estate and land they lost in 1948. It is time to set the record straight.
For a start, General Assembly resolutions are mere recommendations. As opposed to Security Council Resolutions, they are not binding in international law. UNGA Resolution 194 is no exception: it is a non-binding recommendation. So even if this resolution recognized the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendents to return to Israel (which it doesn’t) such recognition would neither be binding nor enforceable.
Article 11 of Resolution 194 says inter alia that “the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and … compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return.”
The resolution doesn’t talk about “Palestinian refugees” but about “refugees” as it refers to both Arab and Jewish refugees that were displaced as a result of war in the former British Mandate. It mentions both return and compensation as possible solutions. But, mostly, it only refers to the refuges themselves and certainly not to their future descendents. This central point touches to the core of the refugee problem: the Palestinians claim that the refugee status and the “right of return” allegedly recognized by the UN applies not only to the 1948 refugees but also to their descendents. This claim is groundless in international law and has no precedent in 20th century history.
In the 20th century, refugees were unfortunately a common phenomenon in international relations. There was a 2 million population transfer between Greece and Turkey in 1923. In 1937, the Peel Commission proposed a population exchange between Jews and Arabs in the framework a territorial partition of British Palestine. After World War II, some 14 million Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe and became refugees. The partition of India in 1947 created a double refugee problem: over 7 million Hindu refugees and over 7 million Muslim refugees (with the breakup of Pakistan in 1971, some 10 million Bangladeshis became refugees as well). So did the partition of British Palestine, though with different proportions: some 600,000 Arab refugees from the newly established State of Israel, and some 900,000 Jewish refugees expelled from Arab and Muslim countries in the wake of the first three Arab-Israeli wars (1948, 1956, and 1967). All in all, there were about 60 million refugees in the world in 1948, and the Palestinian Arab refugees represented 1% of world’s refugee population.
These Palestinian refugees could have been integrated in Arab countries with which they shared a common ethnicity, culture, language and religion. Instead, they were kept in camps and discriminated against by Arab leaders who cynically used them as pawns against Israel. Rather than trying to solve the Palestinian refugee problem, Arab leaders did everything to maintain it. While the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was established to solve the global refugee problem, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) was created to maintain the Palestinian refugee problem.
Even though Palestinian refugees only represented 1% of the world refugee population in 1949, they were the only refugees for whom a special UN agency was established. The rest of the world’s refugees were (and still are) dealt with by UNHCR. This unjustified institutional duality has far reaching implications because of how UNHCR and UNRWA define refugees. While UNHCR defines refugees as forcibly displaced persons, UNRWA applies this definition to the refugees’ descendants too. Hence has the world’s global refugee population decreased from 60 million in 1948 to 15 million in 2012, while the Palestinian “refugee” population has increased from 600,000 in 1948 to 5 million today.
It is time to put an end to this absurd and unjustified double-standard. There is no reason why UNHCR’s definition and jurisdiction shouldn’t apply to Palestinian refugees. Incidentally, that would “reduce” the actual number of Palestinian refugees to about 50,000 (most of them are elderly by now). Alternatively, were the world to universalize the UNRWA algorithm, Poland would have to reintegrate the descendants of German refugees, and millions of Hindus and Muslims would have to re-cross the border between India and Pakistan.
The true meaning of UNGA Resolution 194 is that the actual Arab and Jewish refugees of 1948 should be compensated or allowed to reintegrate their lost homes. Israel should publicly offer to implement that resolution in order to expose the truth: the actual number of Palestinian refugees is 50,000, and the roughly equal number of Jewish refugees must be compensated at well.
Once the truth is told and internalized about the refugee issue, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might actually become solvable.
Original Title: Abbas muddying the waters in call for Palestinian right of return
Link: http://www.i24news.tv/en/opinion/131002-abbas-muddying-the-waters-on-palestinian-right-of-return
Dr. Emmanuel Navon heads the Political Science and Communication Department at the Jerusalem Orthodox College and teaches International Relations at Tel-Aviv University and at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center. He is a Senior Fellow at the Kohelet Policy Forum.
Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.
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