By Shlomo Ben-Ami
The forthcoming UN conference marking the 60th anniversary of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees could not come at a better moment. The restitution of lands occupied in 1967 will obviously continue to be indispensable to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it is the legacy of the 1948 war that both parties to the conflict have now put at the center of the debate.
Oddly, it was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who, by requesting that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, reopened the 1948 file. That demand brought the quest for peace back to its fundamentals, where the question of the refugees is bound to play a central role.
Netanyahu’s intention was essentially to force the Palestinians into admitting that the right of return of refugees applies only to the Palestinian state, not Israel. But the true significance of his demand lies in that it is being pronounced at a time when Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayaad’s policies are posing a genuine challenge to the Palestinian national movement to choose between an ethos of vindication and one of state building.
Under Fayaad, the Palestinian Authority seems to be superseding the Palestinian national movement’s diaspora-based emphasis in favor of state-building within the territorial confines of the occupied territories. It is as if the voice of the diaspora were being silenced in Palestine. Conspicuously, the recently elected Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) executive committee — which in the past consisted exclusively of representatives of the Palestinian diaspora — now has only one member from the diaspora, a delegate from Lebanon.
This could mark a sea change in the evolution of Palestinian nationalism. In Zionism, the Jewish community in Palestine was the focus of decision-making, with the Jewish diaspora a strategic back-up. But the situation was reversed in the case of the Palestinians: the ethos of the diaspora, with the plight of the refugees at its center, has been the beating heart of the Palestinian cause and the focus of decision-making for the national movement.
As a result, the Palestinian community in the occupied territories was always subservient to the primacy of the Palestinian diaspora. When it sought to assume a leading role — during the first Intifada in 1987, for example, its effort was suppressed by the diaspora-based PLO.
Fayaadism, by contrast, seeks the “Zionization” of the Palestinian national movement. It imbues the Palestinian cause with a positive ethos of nation and state-building by superseding Palestinian nationalism’s diaspora-centered preoccupations — and thereby transcending the paralyzing obsession with a never-fulfilled vindication of rights and justice.
In the peace process as it has been conducted up to now, the Israelis always wanted to concentrate on the issues of 1967 — that is, land and security. The Palestinians, however, always wanted to return to the issues of 1948: refugees, dispersion and what Akram Hanya, a close confidant of late Palestinian president Yasser Arafat, defined as the need “to make the Israelis face the tribunal of history.”
It now looks as if the roles have been inversed. Precisely when Israel managed to domesticate the Palestinian national movement by forcing it to abandon its revolutionary path in favor of state-building and economic development — a reorientation undertaken by Zionism as well — the Israelis decided to draw the Palestinians back to the fundamentals of the conflict.
RSS