Drawing the Line - Page 2

Motivated by the frightening realization that Yasir Arafat and the PNA are more committed to consolidating and protecting their own power and privilege in their phantasmal "state" than they are to achieving the rights enshrined for Palestinian refugees in UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (December 11, 1948), which resolved that "the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live in 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 and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the governments or authorities responsible," activists representing a wide variety of nations, age groups, social classes and religions (including a number of progressive Jews, Israeli as well as American), have taken up the standard of refugees' rights with a vigor and eloquence not seen since the most electrifying days of the intifada. While the campaign's clearly stated purpose it to attain the justice denied the refugees for 52 years, its subtext is a growing challenge to the established Palestinian leadership, the legitimacy of the Oslo Accords, and the diminution of the role of international law in settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the convening of the Madrid conference in 1991. This challenge from the margins of the worldwide Palestinian community, which has been progressively fragmented since the inception of the Oslo process, seems to have put a bit of steel into the spines of Palestinian negotiators, as Israeli veteran journalist Danny Rubinstein noted in today's Ha'aretz ("A Brewing Palestinian Consensus"). The PNA may finally be realizing that concessions cannot go on forever without the loss of its own legitimacy. The right of return is rapidly emerging as a "red line" that the Palestinian leadership can ignore only at its political peril.

The multifaceted Right of Return campaign has been facilitated by an unusual combination of factors. Last year's televised flight of refugees in Kosovo awoke millions throughout the world to the horrors of ethnic cleansing and forcible population transfers. Some commentators noted that the Palestinians' violent eviction at the hands of the Haganah in 1948 was a tragedy on a much larger scale than that of Kosovo. The images of terrified women and children fleeing their villages in a driving rain, bundles of clothes and family pictures albums clutched to their breasts, reawakened the memories, and occasionally the consciences, of those who had forgotten or even, in some cases, caused the nakbah. One Israeli journalist even dared to acknowledge publicly that the Palestinian exodus had been far more horrific than the Kosovars' experience. Unlike the Palestinians, though, the Kosovars finally got to go home, thus pointing up inconsistencies and hypocrisies in the implementation and interpretation of international law. Over the last three years, the Internet has facilitated communication, mobilization and organization of the Palestinian Diaspora across social classes, time zones and closed borders. Internet projects in Lebanon and the West Bank have enabled widely separated Palestinian refugees to link up and share their stories, concerns and dreams with each other as well as with the rest of the world. Powerful photographic exhibits and video diaries done by refugee children have reminded the world, in images more compelling than a thousand factual reports, of the unjust and profound suffering inflicted on four generations of Palestinian refugees.

The Internet has also provided an immediate means of outreach and recruitment for such organizations as the Council for Palestinian Restitution and Repatriation (CPRR), a non-profit, non-partisan organization established to assist Palestinians and their heirs to fully achieve their individual and inalienable human rights to their land, natural resources and property as guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. CPRR's beautifully designed web site (http://www.rightofreturn.org) offers an impressive array of factual information, news updates, suggestions for successful activism, and an electronic petition demanding the right of return. Tens of thousands of individuals and organizations throughout the world have signed the petition, and more are signing everyday.

Perhaps the most galvanizing of all the recent efforts to advance the refugees' right of return was an international conference held in Boston on April 8th, 2000. Organized by the Trans-Arab Research Institute (http://www.tari.org), a non-profit organization devoted to scrutinizing the causes of Middle East crises and conflicts and to exploring policies and solutions that promote stability and peace based on justice, the conference identified the refusal of the refugees' right to return as a primary catalyst for future conflicts and violence.

Over 600 people attended the Boston Right of Return conference, and an additional 300 had to be turned away because of limited space in the lecture hall. Activists, students and scholars from Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, France, England, the Netherlands, the US and Canada listened to a stellar group of speakers, chief among them Dr. Edward Said, Dr. Noam Chomsky of MIT, Alain Gresh of Le Monde Diplomatique, Salman Abu Sittah, Lamis Andoni, Robert Fisk, and a young Arab-American activist, Ali Abunimah, who has single-handedly taken on the US news media's biased reporting of the Middle East. The conference also featured panels of speakers representing organizations at the front lines of providing crucial services to refugee communities in Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan, and concluded with a brainstorming session on ways to translate knowledge into action led by a panel of young activists, one of the more inspiring events of the conference.

Next month in CafeArabica.com, Part II: Notes on the Conference

From As-Safir (Beirut)