Attainable Justice

Abstract

Many difficult and complex issues must be resolved before there can be a just, comprehensive, and final settlement of the question of Palestine and of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The most basic among them is undoubtedly the problem of more than 700,000 Palestinians who became refugees during the fighting in 1947-9 -- more than half of the Arab population of Palestine at that time. It will probably also be the most intractable issue to resolve, more so even than the formidably difficult question of Jerusalem.The massive demographic transformation which followed the flight of the refugees was a crucial turning point in the struggle between the Zionist movement and the Palestinian people over Palestine. Before 1948, Jews owned seven per cent of the land of Palestine and formed 35 per cent of its population; afterwards, Israel controlled 76 per cent of the land, within which Arabs were a small minority. Since its inception just over a hundred years ago, this conflict has focussed primarily on matters of population and land. The flight of more than half of the Palestinian people in 1948, hailed as 'miraculous' by Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel,(f.1) thus had profound historical, social, and moral consequences which continue to resonate today.(f.2)The Palestinian refugee issue is central to the conflict between Arabs and Israelis. For some, including many Palestinians, it is the basic issue of the conflict, from which all else has flowed over the past half-century. For Palestinians, their dispossession by Israel in 1948 was the defining element not only in the modern history of their people, but also in the entire conflict between Israel and the Arab countries. Nevertheless, the Arab-Israeli negotiations thus far reflect unremitting Israeli pressure for fifty years to ignore, diminish, and ideally to bury the whole question of the Palestinians who were made refugees in 1948.(f.3)Notwithstanding this constant pressure, the refugee issue must be forthrightly addressed if there is to be a just and lasting peace for two eminently practical reasons. First, for over three million Palestinians, most of whom are refugees and descendants of refugees, who live outside Palestine and constitute more than half of the Palestinian people, it is a crucial issue which will largely determine their attitude towards a comprehensive peace and, therefore, whether such a peace will be lasting.(f.4) Secondly, its satisfactory resolution is vital to a number of host countries, notably Lebanon and Jordan, but also several states in the Gulf region.(f.5)Many proposals have been made over the past fifty years for solving the problem of Palestinian refugees. Some involved full or partial return of the refugees to their homes and compensation for their losses; others were based on resettlement of the refugees in other Arab countries; still others involved combinations of these and other proposed elements of a solution. One element missing from most of these proposals, however, is a recognition that the key to resolution of this issue lies in Israel finally accepting, after fifty years, the major share of the responsibility for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem.As with similarly emotionally fraught and complex issues, such as those involving Japan's actions in east Asia during the Second World War, or Switzerland and Nazi gold, the key requirement for a resolution is not so much compensation (important though that is) as acceptance of responsibility and some form of moral atonement. A gross injustice was done to the Palestinians, half of whom lost their homes and property and all of whom lost their homeland. It is difficult for Israelis to accept that this was in large measure Israel's doing; such an admission requires substantial revisions in their self-image as victims, both of the Holocaust and of Arab aggression, and in their national narrative in which a blameless Israel was attacked without provocation by the Arab states in May 1948. …