Broaching the Palestine Question: My Response to Gideon Palte
In the first WUPR issue of this semester, 17.1, I wrote an anecdotal piece titled The Palestinian Right of Return: What Once Was. I did not intend to primarily base my writing on historical issues; there are countless scholarly articles and UN resolutions which detail the legal and judicial basis of the right of return. I simply wanted to cast a personal light on this issue. Its emotionally fraught nature makes it a touchy subject to many, and I fully appreciate Mr. Gideon Palte’s taking the time to express his opinion on the matter.
In this regard, Mr. Palte’s characterization of my article as “feelings expressed without reference to historical context or external factors [which] create a much distorted-picture” is harsh, but not entirely false. I wanted to use my personal experiences as the basis for my article; given the limited space of the print issue, I could only include the bare minimum of hard historical/legal arguments.
Mr. Palte seems to suggest that I am biased and otherwise unable to see the truth because of my personal experiences. Surely, I am not an entirely neutral party—I have close Palestinian friends who suffer under the yoke of Israeli occupation daily. At the same time, I know that Mr. Palte has legitimate reasons to be personally invested in the issue as well. I am disappointed that he decided to take a personal jab at me for my opinion without recognizing his own biases. Furthermore, my critic states that his intention in writing the article is to lay out “cold, hard facts”. I must say that his facts, legitimate as some of them may be, do not represent the true situation on the ground.
I want to address my statement about civilians having the right to return to homes from which they were evicted in wartime. As Mr. Palte pointed out for me, I did make an honest mistake, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has no such provision. What was actually referring to was Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which protects civilians during war time:
Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.
Such evacuations may not involve the displacement of protected persons outside the bounds of the occupied territory except when for material reasons it is impossible to avoid such displacement. Persons thus evacuated shall be transferred back to their homes as soon as hostilities in the area in question have ceased.
As Israel is no longer in a state of war with the Arab nations which participated in the hostilities, it is obligated to allow refugees back to their homes. Some responsibility here does indeed lie with the Arab countries, namely Egypt and Jordan, which have signed full peace treaties with Israel (not just ceasefires) without demanding in return an affirmation of the right of return from Israel.
As opponents of the right of return often cite, Mr. Palte asserts that Palestinians left for a variety of reasons, including that they were actively encouraged to leave their lands by warring Arab armies. Israeli politicians often state that their country bears no responsibility to receive Palestinian refugees because hostile actions taken in Israel’s name were not the primary reason for the exodus of civilians, of the Nakba.
What better authority to clear up this misconception than a 1948 report entitled “The emigration of the Palestinian Arabs” by SHAI, the military intelligence branch of the predecessor of the modern-day Israeli Defense Force, Haganah. The report states that “at least 55% of the total of the exodus was caused by our (Haganah) operations,” in addition to Irgun (Jewish paramilitary) and Lehi (considered a terrorist organization by the British government) operations, which “directly caused some 15%…of the emigration.” Among other minor factors, the report concludes that 73% of the exodus was due to direct Israeli action, with another 22% of emigration due to civilians’ fear of imminent attack by either the Israeli military or roving bands of Jewish guerillas. The report also estimates that direct calls for flight by Arab militaries could only be attributed to 5% of the studied cases.
Of course, no one really knew the full picture at the time. It was an extremely volatile situation and information was hard to come by. Even so, it would be foolhardy to simply discount such conclusive results by the Israeli military apparatus itself. I find it hard to believe that the Israeli government has managed to convince so many of its supposed blamelessness in the Nakba. I would also like to note that Mr. Palte conflates the supposed Israeli lack of responsibility for the Nakba with the common narrative of the single-minded aggression of Arab nations toward Israel. This debate is outside the scope of my present response; for now, I simply want to suggest that this perspective is a convenient, simplistic reading of events which were predictable results of the colonialist legacy.
Haganah’s above “cold, hard fact,” as it were, renders many of Mr. Palte’s critiques moot. For the sake of argument however, I will treat one specific example. My critic asks “why did [Palestinians] not stay and help shape the country?” Mr. Palte, some did stay. Palestinian Israeli citizens, who many Palestinians affectionately call “48’s,” comprise 20% of the Israeli population. However, they are constantly subject to state-sanctioned discrimination. Their public schools are noticeably underfunded compared to Israeli Jewish public schools. Bedouin Arab citizens of Israel who have lived seven generations in “unrecognized” villages are denied access to public utilities (water, sewage, electricity), reasonable access to education, or any of the expected responsibilities of a state to its citizens. Expansion of Palestinian-majority towns is limited by zoning laws, whereas the same laws give generous space to adjacent Jewish towns to grow.
Israeli politicians often point to the inclusion of Palestinian Arab and Druze Israelis in parliament as proof that Israel is a “fully democratic nation that gives full, equal rights to all of its citizens, irrespective of their race, religion, or ethnicity.” Their presence in Knesset is a token gesture by the dominant Israeli Jewish establishment, and even Minister of Defense Moshe Arens has criticized the government of denying Palestinian Israelis the “full privileges of citizenship.” Palestinian Israelis have never had much leverage or opportunity to “help shape the country.” Add that to the broader, more philosophical, and ultimately troubling question of how a state with non-Jews can possibly be simultaneously Jewish and democratic, President Ben-Gurion’s rhetoric welcoming Palestinians to stay on as full citizens of the Jewish homeland rings hollow.
Mr. Palte goes on to state that my belief in affirming the right of return for “four million [refugees]—all bent on inhabiting a country of almost eight million—is preposterous.” If Mr. Palte had taken the time to consider my argument, he would recognize that nowhere near four million Palestinian refugees would return at all, and fewer still to Israel proper. I also take issue with his choice of words here. The suggestion that Palestinians are “all bent (emphasis added) on inhabiting…” throws the writer’s neutrality into question, and fans the already well-fanned flames of Israeli political fear.
My critic writes that while Jewish refugees immigrating to Israel have “moved on, billions of dollars in international aid over the last 64 years have not helped the Palestinians do the same.” This suggestion is dubious on several levels, particularly with respect to the international aid claim. Regardless, the most important fact is that many Palestinians have “moved on,” in a sense. Most Jordanian citizens are of Palestinian descent and are well integrated into Jordanian society. Palestinian-Jordanians wield immense influence in Jordanian government. Yet many Palestinian-Jordanians say that however settled they may be, Jordan is not their true home. It is not their nation. They do not identify with Jordan over their ancestral homeland. Why are they so stubborn, you ask?
We need look no further than the history of the Jewish people. Jews, by choice and under wrongful force, dispersed from historical Palestine over thousands of years of history. Yet, with the victory of Zionism in the first half of the 20th century, colonizing powers were sufficiently convinced that the Jewish people truly saw their cultural and ethnic identity as one and the same with the right to the land of Israel as a Jewish homeland. After World War II, the British Empire duly agreed. The Jews did not passively “move on” when even their great-grandparents had never set foot in the Holy Land. Why then, do Palestinians, as a nation and as a people, not have claims to their ancestral homelands, whatever the political lines may be now? Why are their sentiments for return and yearning for a homeland any less legitimate than that of the Jewish people? Why has the Palestinian right of return been revoked after 64 years, when that of Jews from all corners of the world was respected after 5,000?
Mr. Palte also points to Israel’s brave efforts at reconciliation with the Palestinians as evidence of Israel’s willingness to negotiate a settlement and its Arab neighbors’ recalcitrance. He points out that “Israel has made extreme territorial sacrifices totaling four times its current land mass.” It seems that the writer is here referring to Israel’s war gains in Eretz Israel, historically known as “Greater Israel,” which encompasses vast swathes of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. Not only were these lands part of established nation-states at the time of conquest, they were certainly not allocated by the 1947 UN Partition Plan to a Jewish state. Mr. Palte’s narrative of a benevolent Israel willing to compromise in the face of stubborn Arabs breaks down.
Furthermore, the facts on the ground mean that this supposed pioneering effort by Israel is irrelevant. Continued occupation and martial law of two million resident-not-citizens, accelerated settlement building in the occupied West Bank, and institutionalized discrimination in Israel make it hard to believe that Israel is truly committed to a just resolution, or, for that matter, has ever been. An interesting anecdote: while I was in Jaffa, Israel, a Palestinian Israeli friend drew my attention to the fact that the Israeli 10 Agorot coin—about 2.5 cents—has a silhouette of Eretz Israel on the tails side. What other state is so brazen as to mark its national currency with the territory of other sovereign states?
In my article, I wrote of a Palestinian-Jordanian man, Nabil, who suggested that he would return to a future Palestinian state, even though “there will be problems, but between Palestinian and Palestinian—between brothers.” In response, Mr. Palte writes that the “exclusion of Jews in this vision contradicts Article 1 of the UDHR.” I believe my critic misinterpreted this statement. I had asked Nabil why he would leave his settled life in Jordan for an uncertain future in his ancestral home of Hebron, which would undoubtedly be in a future Palestinian nation-state. He referred to this ideal vision of Palestinian unity as opposed to his current situation, living amongst Jordanians and many other peoples. Within the new Palestine, carved out from the 1967 lines of the West Bank and Gaza, the existence of a united Palestinian population, a brotherhood, if you will, does not require unlawful expulsion of Jews. Nabil is not talking about destroying Israel or “pushing the Jews into the sea,” as it were. I will note that the foundation of a Palestinian state is contingent on the evacuation of illegal settlements in the West Bank. Only in this physical sense that it is an “exclusion of Jews” from Palestine. However, this is due to the basic provisions of international law regarding occupation (see the entirety of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention), rather than some kind of discriminatory process. Mr. Palte, how are Palestinian sovereignty and a sense of unity, of shared identity, against the principles of Human Rights?
I am very glad that my article has sparked controversy and campus debate. Given everything that I witnessed, everything that I heard, and everything that I felt this summer, I feel obligated to break the ice on this contentious topic. To me, particularly at a place like Wash U, the issue of the right of return and of the future of the Palestinian nation in general demands to be broached. This is how we make progress. This is how we get people talking. As far as I can tell, the opportunities to broach this touchy topic are limited, the popular discourse too sparse, and the willingness to subject oneself to criticism from those who disagree too rare. Wherever Mr. Palte and I stand on the right of return, I can see that we see eye-to-eye on the need to engage in student discourse. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to do so. I encourage anyone with a different perspective to engage in this important discourse.