Israel's "internal refugees" - Arab citizens who were displaced from their native villages and towns in 1948, and took refuge to areas behind the Green Line have recently told the Palestinian National Authority not to negotiate with Israel in their name, according to a report by Haaretz.
“They don't want the PA to assume responsibility for their demands to return to their native homes,” said the paper, citing Attorney Wakim Wakim, secretary of the National Council for the Defense of the Rights of Displaced Persons in Israel as saying he and his colleagues are afraid Palestinian Yasser Arafat will make far-reaching concessions on the right of return issue.
For this reason, they don't want the PA to incorporate their cases into the peace talks, said the report, adding that the alternative is that the internal refugees themselves to wage their own legal, public and political struggle within the framework of the state of Israel.
Wakim told the paper that the displaced persons believe they have a better chance of realizing an internal right of return to their abandoned villages than do 1948 refugees living outside Israel.
"The government of Israel should understand if it manages to impose some sort of quasi-agreement which defuses the question of the right of return, it will still have to confront our own demands that our rights as citizens be redeemed."
After the 1993 Oslo accords, the internal refugees decided to divorce their case from the PLO's political campaign for recognition of the Palestinian refugees right of return. The Oslo agreement held that discussion of the right of return should be deferred to final status negotiations. But, the whole issue remained an obstacle hard to overcome.
According to the peace plan proposed by US president Bill Clinton, Israel would morally and humanely recognize the right of return, and take part in the international efforts to compensate the refugees and better their lives in the host countries where they will be resettled.
The other three alternatives suggested for the issue is that a certain percentage of the 3.7 million refugees reside in the Palestinian state and in Israeli lands included in a swabbing deal. Others can be hosted by “third countries,” not named in the plan. However, there have been reports that countries like Canada might absorb a number of Diaspora Palestinians
Haaretz said that PLO officials have asked ‘internal refugees’ to suspend public activity on their case. But the delegates rejected the PLO request and created the National Council to champion their rights as displaced persons. The National Council is an umbrella organization uniting thirty local committees of refugees from abandoned villages within Israel.
The Council is legally registered as a non-profit association, said the daily. Its members organize activities to strengthen the displaced persons' sense of identification with their native abandoned villages. These include picnic outings to village grounds on the anniversary of the 1948 "Nakba," or catastrophe, renovation of mosques, churches and cemeteries, and compiling documentary material on their villages.
After the National Council's last congress at Nazareth in March 2000, the organization called on the PA not to represent refugee citizens of Israel in the final status talks. Several weeks ago, as reports grew of an agreement forming on the refugee issue under which the PA would concede certain right of return demands in return for sovereign powers on the Aqsa compound, the Council issued a statement to Israel and the PA, reiterating its own demands on the refugee issue, according to the paper.
These displaced Israeli citizens number 150,000-200,000 are a mere fraction of the world's Palestinian refugees. But with regard to the Israeli Arab population of about 1.8 million, they are a significant sector. In some Galilee communities they are a majority, said the report.
About half of Nazareth's Arab residents are internal refugees and their descendants and more than half of Umm al Fahm's residents belong to this group. In many towns and villages, the displaced persons live in separate neighborhoods, segregated according to their original native villages.
In Arrabe for instance, natives of Mia'ara, an abandoned Western Galilee village, set up their own neighborhood after 1948. Similarly, refugees from the Zipporiah village (on whose ruins today's Zippori community was built) created their own neighborhood in nearby Nazareth.
Quoting the Hebrew University's Hillel Cohen, the author of a study on displaced persons in Israel, the report indicates that refugees from 64 out of 162 villages abandoned in the north in 1948 remained in Israel.
Members of the National Council say that if the state of Israel seeks to resolve the refugee issue within the final status framework, it should start by addressing the demands of displaced persons who are its own citizens.
"We view our own problem as being part and parcel of Israel's experience," Wakim said. "We don't want a situation to arise in which we end up being forgotten, and not included in an arrangement on the refugee problem. On the other hand, if such an arrangement is one in which the Palestinian leadership makes concessions about our basic rights, we wouldn't want any linkage between the diplomatic negotiations and our struggle as Israeli citizens.
"As far as we're concerned," he said, "if the state of Israel really seeks a solution based on historic compromise, such a solution has to be a painful one [for it]. A side which caused trauma in the past to hundreds of thousands of people, turning them into refugees, needs to understand how to pay a price."
In dealings with Israel Arab public, one problem the National Council faced was Wakim's own reputation as a political radical. Many internal refugees would rather not be represented by a man or organization of radical image, whose declared goals are uncompromising - demanding a complete return to all abandoned lands and houses.
However, not all Palestinian sources refer to internal refugees as proper refugees. In fact the official PNA site: www.pna.net talks about four waves of immigration where terrified Palestinians were forced to leave their land to the West Bank or other countries such as Jordan and Lebanon.
Besides, not all Palestinians are happy with the prospects held by the current peace efforts. TV and press reports have featured refugees who said they will never cede their right to return whatever the offer was, a demand that would be suicidal to meet in Israel’s view – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
