FORGET ABOUT ANY RIGHT OF RETURN Rosie Dimanno Toronto Star, May 28, 2003
In the last year, 140,000 babies were born in Israel. Mazel tov. Over the same period, 31,000 people emigrated to the country--rather an astounding fact, given the terrorist reality of living in the besieged Jewish state, the suicide bombers, the invasive security precautions, the internecine politics, the endless international nagging. The Promised Land is a minefield.
Nearly three years into the second intifadah--which is not actually an intifadah at all but a full-blown guerrilla offensive, orchestrated and ruthlessly executed by radical militants, if too often on the backs of brainwashed Palestinian youths--Israel is an unsettling place to settle, and we're not referring to the contentious settlements in the Occupied Territories.
At the moment, this geographical sliver of a country, this thumbnail of democracy in the Middle East, has a population of 6.7 million--an eightfold increase since the state's creation in 1948--of which about 5.4 million are Jewish. Jewishness is the very essence of Israel, the powerful force behind historical survival, millenniums of persecution withstood, and 20th century statehood.
But for all its fortitude, this self-contained Israeli biosphere is still demographically fragile. Which is why Palestinian "right of return" can never be accepted by any Israeli government, even the most leftist-skewed, as a prerequisite to peace and a component of a Middle East solution. To expect otherwise, to demand it--as new Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, himself a displaced refugee from Safed, continues to do--is so unrealistic, so foolishly dreamy, that one must question the sincerity of those who insist upon its inclusion in any peace discussions.
The demand, or plea, is symbolic to Palestinians now three generations removed from the homes they either abandoned or were forced to evacuate in 1948. And any yearning for a return by Palestinians to areas now contained within Israel proper--pre-1967 Israel--can only be assuaged by symbolic gestures at best: A small inverted diaspora of Palestinian refugees and fair financial compensation for those who can prove they left against their will. (Just imagine the bureaucratic nightmare that would entail.)
Oil-rich Arab countries should contribute towards financial and social rehabilitation of displaced Palestinians, given that their collective wars against Israel, their refusal to grant Palestinians citizenship (Jordan excepted) and their aggressive discouraging of Palestinian assimilation into the wider Arab world have all beggared that community, far more so than defensive or punitive Israeli policies.
A (latterly) hysterically anti-Israel United Nations may enshrine in its refugee charter the right of return for all peoples displaced by war. But if there's no statute of limitations on such return and no acknowledgment of Israel's inherent and exceptional truths--a sovereign nation carved out of an existing Ottoman territory (no modern Palestinian state ever existed)--then Israel could stake claim to all of the Occupied Territories by dint of biblical imperative. And do we really want to go there? But this is what comes of strident imperatives, however benevolent in intent.
The simple mathematical fact is this: Israel can't absorb 1.8 million Palestinians. Not economically, not socially, not politically.
The return of Palestinian refugees and their descendents would utterly swamp Israel and ultimately erase its Jewish character. If a sovereign Palestine--as envisioned by the Washington-promoted "road map" for peace, side-by-side with Israel--wants to welcome back every refugee, or every refugee-descendent-in-perpetuity--that's for the Palestine Authority to decide. But the PA can't possibly hope to impose this demand on Israel.
It's a non-starter.
The problem is too many Arabs, and Muslims, persist in viewing Jews in Israel as foreign implants and Israel itself as an outlaw occupier in its entirety. These factions most assuredly control the elements that want no part of rapprochement or conflict resolution, including those such as Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat who occasionally posture as peacemakers and political negotiators. That's why they so fear the emergence of Abbas as a political force--because he threatens their power base with all this talk of conciliation, concessions, reciprocity and an end to terrorism.
In truth, Palestinians are being asked to concede very little.
The road map that this week was accepted by Israel, however grudgingly, goes far beyond the thorny commitments proposed in the Oslo Accords: A Palestinian state with provisional boundaries by next year, sovereignty by 2005. In exchange, Palestinians must acknowledge Israel's right to exist--in security--and leave off their ruinous, violent tactics.
The package is distasteful to many Israelis, not just military hawks like Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. They fear, with good reason, that Palestinian terrorism will continue, except that bombers would be able to flee safely across a hard border that no Israeli forces will ever be able to cross. Sharon may be playing a game of political lunge-and-feint by finally admitting that Israel cannot continue holding 3.5 million people under occupation, not under the modern rules of occupation and warfare, not with a hostile media. The cost of occupation alone, of military vigilance, is crippling the country, while draconian pass-laws and curfews have impoverished Palestinians.
This approach isn't going anywhere and it hasn't made Israel one iota safer because suicide bombers are cheap at the price. A death for a bit of delusion.
Sharon has taken a remarkable step. He's accepted Palestinian statehood, with precious few of the details worked out. Abbas must do the same, not just by accepting the road map--which he did at the outset--but with transparent and quantifiable action, by asserting his authority, by unleashing de facto interior minister Mohammed Dahlan against the radicals, zealots and terrorists.
