Since the beginning of the Oslo process, the relative weight and
attention given to each of the core issues to be negotiated has
significantly evolved. Initially, the greatest conceptual and
political challenge centered on the question of Palestinian
statehood, with the refugee issue regarded, to a large extent, as a
non-issue at best or, at worst, as one that would solve itself
within the last stages of the negotiations. Yet a decade later, a
convergence of various political, economic and cultural forces has
reshaped the conflict environment and altered Israeli perceptions
and expectations, with Palestinian statehood generally accepted as
a given, and the refugee issue taking center stage.
While the issue is little discussed within the general public
domain in Israel, perhaps the best way to describe the Israeli
perspective, from a leadership standpoint, is that there seems to
be a sense of being overwhelmed. This sense emerges from two
factors: One is the realization that a failure to address the issue
could ultimately prevent a final peace settlement, thus closing the
window of opportunity on what is still held to be Israel's leading
strategic objective - a negotiated comprehensive Permanent Status
Agreement (PSA); the other is the inability to clearly define
Israel's interests concerning most of the detailed elements
involved.
An Israeli Systemic View of the Refugee Issue
The inability to clearly define Israeli interests stems from three
factors which set the refugee issue apart from other core issues:
complexity of elements, multiplicity of actors and high uncertainty
concerning consequential outcomes and irreversibility.
A. Complexity of Elements
The various elements to be negotiated can generally be divided into
four interrelated dimensions:
1. The sociopolitical dimension: The Palestinian refugee
issue touches on a number of sociopolitical elements that embody
deep-rooted Israeli fears, both past- and future-oriented. While
the basic framework for the peace process is predicated on
concluding the historical conflict between Jews and Palestinians,
the refugee issue is the only core issue that relates directly to
the events of 1948, rather than to those of 1967. The outbreak of
the 1948 war and its consequences are central events in the
identities of both nations - the establishment of the state of
Israel for the victorious Jews and the Nakba and the creation of
the refugee problem for the defeated Palestinians. Any Israeli
leadership negotiating an agreement on the refugee issue will
inevitably be faced with domestic political obstacles relating to
historical narratives and collective identity and constituting
myths, any re-examination of which will be presented by the
opposition as threatening to the future character of the Jewish
state. Hence, to a large extent, it is the explicit and implicit
declaratory aspects of any agreement on the refugee issue that
affect the Israeli perspective the most.
Within the negotiation framework, the challenges relating to the
explicit declaratory elements are as follows:
a. To what extent and in what manner can history and competing
narratives be accommodated within the text of the agreement?
This is a vital question, as any phrasing drafted within the
agreement can be expected to be meticulously analyzed and
interpreted by the public. If an agreement is perceived or spun in
the wrong way, it could cause significant damage to the peace
process, undermine its legitimacy and prove to be political suicide
to any leadership promoting it. The options for addressing this
issue range from omitting any historical references, i.e., leaving
the agreement as a strictly legal text, to recruiting the "wise
men" of the world - prominent international figures such as Nelson
Mandela, the Dalai Lama and Bill Clinton - to draft the opening
text of the agreement, referring to the history of the conflict and
emphasizing both sides' commitment towards its resolution.
b. How should the Palestinian demand for Israel to take
responsibility for the creation of the refugee problem be
addressed? This demand places the Israeli leadership
negotiating the agreement in a difficult predicament vis-à-vis
the Israeli public, as this element touches on two traditional
collective standpoints: (i) the rationale that as it was the
Palestinians who started the war, Israel cannot be expected to take
responsibility for its consequences; and (ii) a lack of conceptual
and emotional distinction made between the events of the war itself
and the creation of the state of Israel, i.e., the idea of taking
some responsibility for the creation of the problem is immediately
associated not with the events of the war, but with the very
presence of a Jewish community in this area, a presence that has
yet to be accepted by the Arabs. This view may be summed up as: "We
cannot apologize for existing."
The leverage held by Israeli decision-makers on such matters is
greatly dependent on how they perceive the public mood and its
capacity to endure: To a large extent, the leadership is
constrained by what it thinks it can sell to the public without
being toppled. There has been significant change in the manner in
which the events of 1948 are presented and explained and that
specific references to the Nakba are already included in history
lessons, thus preparing the ground for a much more open public
debate than many leaders would assume. While Israelis are unlikely
to accept full responsibility, polling figures suggest that they
are more likely to accept shared responsibility - with some 40%
willing to acknowledge some responsibility for the refugees'
predicament. Hence, addressing the issue through a discussion of
shared responsibility, not only with the Palestinians but also with
the Arab countries which fought in the war, may help to further
increase the political flexibility around the negotiating
table.
c. How should Palestinians' demands for acknowledgement of what
they consider to be the refugees' right of return to Israel be
addressed? This poses perhaps the most difficult challenge for
Israeli decision-makers. Because this demand, put forward within
the context of permanent status negotiations, is a politically
symbolic demand rather than an operational one, it is viewed very
suspiciously by the larger Israeli public. The demand for "the
right of return" is commonly interpreted as something that stands
in clear contradiction to the principle of a two-state solution:
How could Palestinians seek both their own state and the right to
live in the other state at the same time? Hence it is viewed as a
demand put forward so as to embed within the agreement a symbolic
element that would completely undermine the concept of peace,
hinting at ulterior motives on the part of the Palestinians.
From the individual perspective there is first a great need to
legitimize a distinction between the collective implications of the
1948 war and its individual manifestations, thereby disassociating
the collective/national claims over the land from the intuitive
recognition of an individual's right to return to his or her own
house, regardless of the circumstances of departure. In this
regard, it would seem that the ground is already partly prepared,
as the idea of compensation for property is widely acknowledged and
although Jewish claims for compensation for property left by Jewish
refugees from Arab states cannot be addressed through a bilateral
Israeli-Palestinian agreement, at the very least they help to open
and facilitate public discussion.
The second need is to address the issue through a discussion of
collective historical rights. Legitimizing the notion that both
peoples hold such historical rights to all the land,
notwithstanding the current practicality of dividing this land into
two sovereign entities - a national home for each people - could
not only provide a bridge between Israelis and Palestinians but
also go a long way towards reducing Jewish ideological opposition
to an agreement.
d. How can the Jewish right to self-determination and regional
acceptance of Israel as the Jewish homeland be ensured?
Underlying the negotiations on the refugee issue is a trade-off
whereby Israel provides symbolic gestures and financial
compensation and in return receives recognition and acknowledgement
of its future rights. Israel perceives that a negotiated deal will
mark the end of its long conflict with the Arab world in general
and with the Palestinians in particular. The Israeli leadership
will need to have clear declaratory elements to this effect
included in the agreement.
2. The geopolitical dimension: The element of "the right of
return" is in essence a symbolic political issue rather than an
operational one. Therefore, whether Israel agrees to accepting the
immigration of five, 5,000 or 50,000 Palestinians, this would not
carry any real geopolitical meaning or form any demographic threat
to the Jewish character of the state of Israel. However, there are
still many geopolitical elements that will be designed within the
PSA framework that could affect Israel's interests.
Many of the operational arrangements concerning the solution to the
refugee issue relate to the establishment of permanent residency
and citizenship, i.e., either give refugees the opportunity to stay
in their current places of residence and promise them equal status
as other citizens of the host country, or help them to emigrate to
the newly established state of Palestine and/or a third country.
For Israeli decision-makers negotiating the settlement, this raises
the question of whether Israel should hold a position concerning
the full integration of refugees in places such as Jordan or
Lebanon. So far, Israel's guiding rationale on this issue has been
a wish to maintain political stability, especially in Jordan.
However, two constraints undermine this rationale: the bilateral
nature of the agreement and the nature of the arrangements
themselves, which will be implemented through the individual
choices of so many people, with political and economic
ramifications which are hard to assess and, therefore, harder to
translate into policy preferences. This interdependency between
economic and political processes makes both defining Israeli
interests and their order of preferences all the more
difficult.
A related question is whether Israel should demand a say in the
numbers, and even the identities, of refugees from outside the
occupied territories wishing to move in. An intensive and
uncontrolled immigration into what would be Palestine raises
concerns about growing pressures on the borders that are likely to
translate into new forms of violence. It can be assumed that the
Palestinian leadership would also prefer controlled and balanced
processes of immigration, coordinated with the development of its
absorption capacities. Some form of international monitoring on
this issue would be welcome.
3. The economic dimension: An agreement on the Palestinian
refugee issue involves a complex array of economic elements with
significant long-term ramifications. Under the general title of
"compensation and rehabilitation," the arrangements over the
refugee issue are aimed at helping to transform the conflict
environment into a more economically prosperous and balanced
political economy. Such an objective requires the following
considerations to be taken into account:
a. Compensation to whom and for what? Like other aspects of the
issue, there has been very little Israeli public debate about the
question of compensation. The seemingly most straightforward part
is the need to compensate for property left behind by the refugees.
But the intricacy of the issue becomes apparent when one starts
operationalizing this process. First is the need to identify all
the properties for which compensation is required, a task on which
a lot of expert work has already been done. Second is the need to
value the properties, a task on which many contradictory expert
opinions have already been formed. Beyond both of these laborious
tasks is a still harder one: the question of ownership. There is
tension between the legal definition of land rights and the
political aim of the arrangements - in other words, to whom should
the money go? In many cases wealthy families held the deeds to the
land, while most Palestinians held no land deeds but lived on and
worked the land. Moreover, 60 years on, questions of inheritance
rights also pose difficult policy challenges. Which legal model of
inheritance rights should be adopted? While these may seem to be
legal issues, their real impact is social, cultural and political,
as each decision reflects alternative processes of power
distribution.
Israel would probably like to see a professional international body
established which could make these decisions so as to best promote
Palestinian economic development. Another option that has been
considered is the possibility of providing compensation for the
very status of refugeehood. From an Israeli perspective, this is
seen as part of the declaratory reconciliation package. One Israeli
concern is how the status of refugee would be determined. Would it
be restricted to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)
definition? Would Palestinians from refugee families living in
London be considered as well?
b. How much compensation? And who pays? Since the refugee issue
has begun to receive the attention of expert evaluators, a whole
spectrum of numbers has been thrown around. However, two
considerations are especially important. The first is for the
agreement to clearly state a final estimate, figure or mathematical
formula of Israel's contribution to the settlement. The second,
perhaps even more important from an Israeli perspective, is the
number of parties contributing the funds. This, again, is an
implicit declaratory element associated with the discussion on
responsibility.
c. Towards what end? Assuming an international fund will be
created, its resources would have to be divided between public and
private ends. What would be the public programs financed through
the fund? How would the money be distributed between the
Palestinian state and host countries such as Jordan? And who would
be in charge of carrying them out? While the Israeli leadership
could be expected to entrust many of the answers to international
experts such as the World Bank, the participation of other agencies
such as UNRWA would raise serious concerns.
4. The legal dimension: Palestinian attempts at raising
political international support on the issue have been largely
advanced through legal discourse. Hence, Israeli legal positions
have emerged to a great extent as part of an attempt to counter
Palestinian political strategy through the use of legal claims.
Nevertheless, within the framework of a signed settlement, Israel
might run the risk of opening the door to future claims. For
example, does a politically symbolic gesture of accepting shared
responsibility for the creation of the refugees' predicament hold
legal meaning? Does providing compensation for property necessitate
a waiver of future claims by all recipients? This requires the
Israeli leadership to be equipped with expert legal advice that
would, on the one hand, mitigate any real future threats and, on
the other, not overtake the political rationales and objectives
underlying the peace agreement.
B. Multiplicity of Actors
The second challenge to a clear definition of Israeli interests
emerges from the multiplicity of actors and agendas involved in the
refugee issue. Because it is not bilateral in nature, the refugee
issue presents much broader negotiation challenges.
The first is the question of representation. In continuation of the
Oslo process, negotiations on a PSA are carried out between Israel
and the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people,
both within and outside the occupied territories. However, various
trends within the Palestinian political system over the last decade
have significantly undermined this assumed monopoly, casting doubts
on the level of legitimacy and acceptability of any agreement among
the wider Palestinian society. This is especially relevant to
Israeli positions, since the only thing that Israel can minimally
aspire to receive in return for its symbolic and financial
concessions is the recognition of its right to exist as a sovereign
Jewish entity in the Middle East.
From an Israeli perspective, a weakened representational position
of the PLO does not mean that such an exercise is strategically
futile. It would, however, require other elements to enhance its
legitimacy. One such vital element would be the Arab states'
support, possibly reflected through some accommodation of the Arab
Peace Initiative.
The second group of questions associated with the multiplicity of
actors relates to the host countries. While the principles that
would govern the various processes towards resolving the refugee
issue will be decided bilaterally, the bulk of the people affected
live outside the borders of both Israel and the occupied
territories. Any bilateral conclusion of this issue will have
significant political and economic consequences for Lebanon, Syria
and, perhaps most importantly from an Israeli point of view,
Jordan.
The third group of questions relates to non-governmental
organizations - those currently active as well as those to be
created to implement the arrangements reached. Israel would not be
inclined to repeat its bitter experiences with UNRWA, but many
questions remain as to the status Israel should seek within such
forums.
The last group of questions, seemingly outside the negotiation
framework, relates to the Arab citizens of Israel. This community
shares some of the grievances and needs of the wider refugee
community on issues such as property claims and questions of
identity. The consideration of this additional group opens a door
to another whole system of conflict resolution processes needed to
address the relations between Jews and Arabs within the state of
Israel.
C. High Uncertainty Concerning Consequential Outcomes and
Irreversibility
Unlike agreements on other issues, the end result of the
implementation of a refugee agreement is very hard to picture. Will
the bulk of the refugee population accept the settlement? Will the
economic resources funneled through financial compensation succeed
in closing some of the development gaps and prevent further
political grievances? How many people will actually choose to
relocate and to where? How would this affect the Jordanian and
Palestinian political systems? Such uncertainties, and the sense of
risk associated with them, are further exacerbated by the notion of
irreversibility, for the movement of people and resources and their
effect on the sociopolitical environment cannot be undone. Hence,
Israeli decision-makers perceive a high level of risk on this
issue.
Four integral principles seem to cut across all the dimensions
described above:
1. Stability. The wish to maintain stability is a common
rationale, cutting across all Israeli considerations concerning the
refugee issue, hence the Israeli emphasis on operational solutions
that will maintain regional political, socioeconomic and
demographic stability.
2. Targeted economic assistance (rehabilitation). One of the
driving rationales underpinning the resolution of the refugee issue
is the concept of "rehabilitation," i.e., the need to significantly
improve the welfare of refugee communities to a standard on a par
with the rest of the population wherever they choose to live, which
would also help create the post-conflict environment that all sides
aspire to.
3. End of claims. "End of claims" refers to the idea that
the implementation of the PSA, and the refugee chapter in
particular, would end all Palestinian claims against the state of
Israel. While part of the legal discourse surrounding the
negotiations, this rationale is still vague in strategic terms.
Whose claims does this idea refer to? Is it to be understood as a
collective/national waiver? This brings us back to the complexity
of actors involved.
4. End of conflict. The concept of "end of conflict" is an
embodiment of the Israeli cultural notion of peace and is perceived
as the ultimate goal of the agreement. A comprehensive peace
agreement signifies the end of this century-old conflict, whereby
the Palestinian and Arab societies agree to fully accept Israel as
a permanent neighbor in the Middle East. In terms of the timetable,
the principle of "end of conflict" cannot merely be attributed to a
signed piece of paper but is tied to the implementation of its
content and the actual manifestation of the post-conflict
environment, whereby tension would be lessened, gradually changing
the nature of the conflict.
Conclusion
The fact that both sides have reached the point where the refugee
issue remains, to a large extent, the last piece of the agreement
puzzle, shows just how far both sides have traveled towards a
comprehensive negotiated agreement. From an Israeli perspective,
more strategic work is needed at the political/policy-making level
so as to determine the resolution level required for the agreement
itself. The Israeli leadership should then articulate the leading
principles it needs to secure within the agreement. To this end,
more work is needed to enable the set of alternative operational
frameworks involved to be presented to the decision-makers. At the
same time, more research and strategy development work is needed to
assess existing attitudes and possible avenues for widening the
public discourse in Israel.
From an international perspective, the foremost contribution could
be to convince both sides to support the creation of a task force
of leading experts that could work alongside the negotiation
process and present operational designs. This would translate
strategic options into operational ones so as to help the
decision-making process.
This article draws on a Chatham House workshop with leading Israeli
and international experts devoted to the refugee question. A longer
version of this article was prepared as a briefing paper for
Chatham House.
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