Palestinian
Refugees And Exiles
Must Have A Say-So
By Rima Merriman
19 January, 2007
The
Electronic Intifada
Today,
Palestinian refugees outside the occupied territories and Palestinian
exiles feel completely excluded from the body politic and national debate
currently taking place in the occupied territories. They listen to the
feuding emanating from the territories in helpless dismay. They watch
those on the inside who are caught up in a carefully engineered web
of power struggles and passionate rifts that seem incomprehensible in
their intensity and misdirection.
This fragmentation in the
Palestinian political process has long been in the making. The Palestinian
National Authority, courtesy of the Oslo negotiations, is designed to
represent only Palestinians living in the occupied territories and to
function as no more than Israel's administrative arm.
The advent of Hamas on the
Palestinian political scene has forcefully brought to the fore the question
of adequate forms of representation for the Palestinian people. Far
from enhancing democracy and representation, the elections of the Palestinian
Legislative Council exclude Palestinians outside the territories. As
it turned out, these last elections were also deemed by the international
community as irrelevant.
The Palestinian Liberation
Organization (PLO), the sole legitimate voice of the Palestinian people
as recognized by the United Nations and the Arab League in 1974, is
now separated functionally and structurally from the Palestinian diaspora.
Its links with the outside were weakened and marginalized when the core
elite of the PLO moved to the West Bank and Gaza as a result of the
Oslo negotiations in 1994.
What all this means is that
the vast majority of Palestinians are disenfranchised. The number of
Palestinians worldwide as of the end of 2006 was estimated by the Palestinian
Central Bureau of Statistics to be 10.1 million. Of these, only 39.2
percent (or 3.95 million) live in the occupied territories.
A participant in one of the
public meetings conducted by CIVITAS, a research project on Palestinian
communities living in exile, expressed her feelings of being shut out
of the political process thus: "Before the peace treaties, Palestinian
political parties were more effective, and we had a voice: we worked
properly! We made our voice heard to the entire world. But the world
now only hears the voice of the Palestinian president, and his prime
minister. As a citizen, I no longer have a voice. His voice is enough.
But before the peace process my voice was heard. If this peace will
silence me then I don't want it!"
The national aspirations
of Palestinian refugees on the outside and inside are driven predominantly
by a single, uncluttered historical agenda: their right of return. Both
groups must contend with poverty and severe health and education challenges.
But whereas the refugees on the inside are in daily bloody confrontations
with their dispossessor, those on the outside have their own crosses
to bear based on where they happen to have been planted. Lack of legal
documents, passports, travel documents or identity papers, unfair electoral
systems, denial of the right to work, and lack of entitlements for ownership
and inheritance are but a few of the hardships they face.
In spite of being clearly
impotent to represent Palestinians outside the occupied territories
or those inside for that matter, the Palestinian National Authority
runs ineffective consulates around the world that simply raise false
expectations and frustrations among Palestinian exiles as well as those
allowed by Israel to reside in the occupied territories: "Any citizen
who has another nationality would resort to his Embassy when seeking
protection or help. Therefore I demand my Embassy offer me this as a
Palestinian. We don't want money from it, we just want it to defend
us, and we want to feel that we belong to this Embassy which can protect
us when we need protection. This is all what I ask from my Embassy,
which is my country" (CIVITAS Participant, Meeting, Cairo, Egypt).
Throughout the past decades,
international efforts to help the Palestinians have come in the form
of their conditioning Palestinians to accept "painful" compromises,
and to de-historicize the conflict by ignoring the rights of those outside
the occupied territories and treating them as humanitarian aid beneficiaries
at best. Even the United Nations Relief Works Agency, supposedly at
the forefront of pressing refugee rights, has been reduced by its funders
to a service provider and imposes restrictions on how Palestinians express
themselves in refugee camps: "As UNRWA teachers, we are forced
to sign a document which prohibits us from discussing politics, especially
the Palestinian refugee issue, with students, directly or indirectly.
Whoever refuses to sign is fired. It is illegal to hang anything in
schools that has a reference to the Intifada, or the [Palestinian] revolution,
or expressing your right as a refugee."
What's on the table currently
by way of a "peace plan" is an Israeli unilateral plan that
has US backing for a putative Palestinian state. This plan means the
Israeli annexation of a further 15 percent of the West Bank and the
vast majority of its water aquifers, a plan whose essential features
are already "facts on the ground". On the Palestinian side,
there is a proposal based on a referendum drafted by the leaders of
Palestinian prisoners of various factions in Israeli prisons. This plan
drops Palestinian territorial claims beyond the 1967 borders and promises
full Arab recognition of Israel. It is a proposal that has only partial
legitimacy, because it does not include consensus from Palestinians
living outside the occupied territories in the far-flung diaspora. Needless
to say, neither the Israeli side, nor the Palestinian side, even in
its partially-formed and troubled current consensus, accepts the plan
of the other.
But continuing to give precedence
to the concerns of West Bank and Gaza residents over those of non-resident
Palestinians means the planting of a time bomb in the heart of the peace
process. Their inclusion guarantees that the historical roots of the
conflict, something that Israel has spent its monstrous state apparatus
denying for decades, will be taken into consideration, as it is the
right of every Palestinian that they should be. Israel must understand
that Palestinians will never forget these roots. Here is what one CIVITAS
participant in a public meeting in Toronto, Canada has to say: "Young
Palestinians should go and visit their towns just like the Zionists
do through their Birth Right program; after all, there are a lot of
Palestinians in the world with foreign citizenship. So why not plan
visits to Yafa in an organized way and sponsor the youth to go back
to their homeland?"
Palestinians must start building
political infrastructures that go all the way to the top for Palestinians
now outside the West Bank and Gaza who have never relinquished their
right of return. These Palestinians must have active and constructive
involvement in the decision making process.
Rima Merriman is a Palestinian-American living in Ramallah in the occupied
West Bank.
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