One State by Ghada Karmi

Author:Ghada Karmi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

The two-state solution and the right of return

The refugee issue is possibly the most cogent argument against a two-state solution. The 5 million refugees and their descendants, living in camps, most but not all run by the UN, since 1948 formed the core of the Palestinian problem. They cherished the memory of the lost homeland and reared their descendants on a detailed knowledge of their towns and villages of origin in the old Palestine. On a visit to Bourj al-Barajneh refugee camp in Beirut in 1998, I was astonished to hear small children, aged 4 and 5, reciting the names of places they called their hometowns in what is now Israel. The children all said they were ‘going back’ there when they grew up. Listening to them, I was both saddened and awed at the tenacity with which the Palestinians held on to the idea of return, despite decades of exile in the worst of conditions and the apparent hopelessness of their cause.21 I wondered why they were allowed to indulge their dreams in this way, if it were the case that the international community had no intention of implementing the refugees’ right to return.

It is no accident that these camps provided the fighters of the PLO formerly and those of Gaza’s Hamas activists latterly. The refugees, representing the bulk of Palestine’s displaced population in 1948, also delivered a majority of the workforce that helped to build up the Gulf States from the 1950s onwards, and many went on to become successful entrepreneurs, journalists and other professionals. The prominent former editor of the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi, and media commentator frequently cited in these pages, Abdel Bari Atwan, for example, started life in a Gaza refugee camp.

The right of return on which all these displaced people’s hopes were pinned was a cause célèbre for Palestinians. Had there been no refugees and the Palestinian problem merely one of Israeli occupation, the conflict would have been easier to solve. But the 1948 dispossession was a fundamental part of Palestinian history, the legal backbone of the Palestine cause, and the crucial basis on which the Jewish state was built. Few people in the West appreciated the importance of the right of return for Palestinians, which should have been enforced from the beginning, and it became customary for Western policymakers to view the Palestinian refugees as commodities that could be moved about when required, and not as human beings with needs and desires. The fact that this issue was of core importance to Palestinians was constantly ignored. But if there were to be a settlement, the refugee issue would reassert itself forcefully for all Palestinians, and a deal that did not address this would not be considered just, legal, or an end to the conflict.

The two-state solution stood no chance of solving this problem on any count. And strictly speaking, as some have argued, the creation of two states in itself logically ruled out a refugee return to the area within the Israeli state.22 The

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