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By David Gardner, The Financial Times
Date: 20.05.2009
The tense meeting between Barack Obama, the US president, and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister, this week was a vivid reminder of the formidable obstacles in the way of Middle East peace. Even so, there are some Arab-Israeli minefields that can be traversed with a pragmatic compass: including the fate of the roughly 5m Palestinian refugees – used by rejectionists on both sides to argue that no reconciliation of this tragic history will ever be possible.
The Palestinian refugees – who fled or were driven out by the 1948 and 1967 wars – and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, insist on their right of return. According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) responsible for their welfare, the number of refugees is about 4.5m. Israel opposes their return, arguing that it would irreversibly change the demographic balance of the Jewish state. This is a real concern, so it would be as well to examine the reality.
First, the UNRWA numbers, though juridically correct, are not, in reality, accurate. In Lebanon, for example, the UN had just 374,000 refugees on its books in 2002, spread out in 12 camps. Fearful of its delicate confessional balance, Lebanon denies Palestinians not only citizenship, but the right to own property or work in 71 specified professions. Many Palestinians, using UNRWA-acquired educations as their passport, have therefore left. The actual number remaining in Lebanon in 2002, UN officials say privately, was 192,000.
Second, how many among them would exercise their right to return? Khalil Shikaki, a reputable Palestinian pollster, in 2003 asked refugees in Jordan and Lebanon if, given the choice, they would return to Israel, or accept compensation.
In Jordan, which hosts the biggest concentration of about 2.8m refugees who, unlike in Lebanon, enjoy citizenship, 5 per cent opted for return; in Lebanon it was 23 per cent.
Taken together, these two factors give some idea of the real dimensions of the problem. Furthermore, UNRWA’s regional tally is almost certainly a good deal higher than the actual number of refugees in the Arab states neighbouring Israel. The reason for the discrepancy is that the UN agency is obliged to safeguard the legal rights of all the refugees, wherever they are, against compensation they might receive under a settlement. Which brings us to the third element in the reality of the problem: compensation.
According to Shlomo Ben-Ami, former Israeli foreign minister, the outline deal issued to the parties in December 2000 by Bill Clinton, then US president, gave the refugees the right of return to “historical Palestine”, but “no explicit right of return to the state of Israel”, which could limit the numbers it admitted. The rest of the refugees would be covered by a multi-billion dollar compensation and resettlement programme.
The Arab League peace offer agreed at Beirut in 2002, moreover, proposed “a just solution” to the right of return that foresees compensation for the majority of refugees.
Israeli officials complain the Clinton parameters and Beirut plan are too nebulous. Yet Israel negotiated just such a deal in 2000, with Syria. That package fell apart, but there was agreement on an internationally funded deal of up to $17bn (€12.3bn, £10.8bn), to compensate 450,000 Palestinian refugees in Syria.
The right of return conundrum, in other words, is pragmatically soluble so long as it is clearly understood that no Palestinian leader can possibly yield on the rights of the refugees, as opposed to negotiating how those rights are honoured.
The cost of overall compensation, benchmarked against the Syrian package, could exceed $100bn, most probably financed by the US, the European Union and the Gulf states. That would prove a lot cheaper than the alternative: a beleaguered Israel ringed by dozens of camps, desperate huddles of misery so cut off from any hope of a decent future they become the new universities of jihad. No Israeli wall will be proof against that. |
