Palestinian Right of Return - Bearing On The Peace Process

Bearing On The Peace Process

The argument over the existence of such a right has perpetuated the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, and the failure of the peace process is due, in large part, to the inability of the two parties to achieve a solution with justice for both sides.

The majority of Palestinians consider that their homeland was lost during the establishment of Israel in 1948, and see the right of return as crucial to a peace agreement with Israel, even if the vast majority of surviving refugees and their descendants do not exercise that right. The Palestinians consider the vast majority of refugees as victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and cite massacres such as Deir Yassin. All Palestinian political and militant groups, both Islamist and socialist, strongly support a right of return. The Palestinian National Authority views the right of return as a non-negotiable right.

Almost all Israeli Jews oppose a literal right of return for Palestinian refugees on the grounds that allowing such an influx of Palestinians would render Jews a minority in Israel, thus transforming Israel into an Arab-Muslim state. In addition to the right-wing and center, a majority of the Israeli left, including the far-left, opposes the right of return on these grounds. The Israeli left is generally open to compromise on the issue, and supports resolving it by means such as financial compensation, family reunification initiatives, and the admittance of a highly limited number of refugees to Israel, but is opposed to a full right of return. The vast majority of Israelis believe that all or almost all of the refugees should be resettled in a Palestinian state, their countries of residence, or third-party countries. The Israeli political leadership has consistently opposed the right of return, but it has made offers of compensation, assistance in resettlement, and return for an extremely limited number of refugees based on family reunification or humanitarian considerations during peace talks.

Israel's first offer of any limited right of return came at the 1949 Lausanne Conference, when it offered to allow 100,000 refugees to return, though not necessarily to their homes, including 25,000 who had returned surreptitiously and 10,000 family-reunion cases. The proposal was conditioned on a peace treaty that would allow Israel to retain territory it had captured which had been allocated to a proposed Palestinian state, and the Arab states absorbing the remaining 550,000-650,000 refugees. The Arabs rejected the proposal on both moral and political grounds, and Israel quickly withdrew its limited offer. At the 2000 Camp David summit 52 years later, Israel offered to set up an international fund for the compensation for the property which had lost by 1948 Palestinian refugees, to which Israel would contribute. Israel offered to allow 100,000 refugees to return on the basis of humanitarian considerations or family reunification. All other refugees would be resettled in their present places of residents, the Palestinian state, or in third-party countries, with Israel contributing $30 billion to fund their resettlement. During this time, most of the original refugees had died without any compensation. Israel demanded that in exchange, Arafat forever abandon the right of return, and Arafat's refusal has been cited as one of the leading causes of the summit's failure.

The Palestinian right of return had been one of the issues whose solution had been deferred until the "final status agreement" in the Oslo Accords of 1993. Not only was there no final status agreement, but the Oslo process itself broke down, and its failure was a major cause of the Second Intifada and the continuing violence.

In 2003, during the Road map for peace, Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom stated that the establishment of a Palestinian state was conditional upon waiving the right of return. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said that the Palestinian Authority must also drop its demand for the right of return, calling it "a recipe for Israel's destruction".

In 2008 the Palestinian Authority issued a statement "calling on all Palestinians living abroad to converge on Israel by land, sea and air" to mark Israel's 60 anniversary.