|
|
|
Lost homeland
Narratives of exile and of occupation
By Omar Karmi
Omar Karmi is a
Chicago-based journalist
and the former Op-Ed editor
of the Jordan Times
Published May 5, 2002
My grandfather fled
Jerusalem in 1948 just
before war broke out. As a
father of three young
children, he was concerned
primarily about the safety of
his family. There had been
unrest and clashes for a long
time, but it was the news
from Deir Yassin--where the
Jewish Irgun and Stern
groups killed between 100
and 200 Palestinian
villagers--that finally persuaded him to leave.
He and my grandmother took little with them.
Like most Palestinians who fled or were
forced to flee then, they didn't think their
absence would be anything but temporary.
Clinging to that belief, my grandmother lived
in London for 40 years without ever learning
English beyond the rudimentary. As it turned
out, she would never return.
Their house still stands in West Jerusalem
and is now inhabited by a Jewish family. My
grandfather still has the deeds. No one ever
bought or offered to buy the house from him.
He has received no compensation and has no
legal recourse.
To understand the Palestinian-Israeli conflict
and the Palestinian longing for a state, it is
necessary to understand two basic Palestinian
narratives. One is of exile and dispossession,
my grandfather's story; the other is the story
we see on our TV screens every day:
occupation. Both narratives arose as a result
of the creation of Israel.
These narratives are rooted in the
fundamental attachment Palestinians have to
the land historically known as
Palestine--modern-day Israel, the West Bank
and the Gaza Strip. The land has been
predominantly Arab since the 7th Century,
and Palestinians base their claim to the land
on 13 centuries of continuous habitation.
They are Palestinian because they come from
Palestine.
Palestinians call the creation of Israel in 1948
al Nakbeh, the catastrophe. Out of a total
population of about 1.25 million, almost 60
percent of all Palestinians were displaced by
the subsequent war. None was ever allowed
to return. Repeated calls by the international
community and UN resolutions asserting the
right of return of the refugees went unheeded
by Israel. Their houses and their land were
taken over by the new state. No
compensation has ever been paid. It was a
historic injustice.
My grandfather was one of the "lucky" ones.
He eventually found a job in London and
secured British citizenship. Homeless and
stateless, most of the Palestinian refugees
ended up in camps hastily erected by their
host countries and the UN. Most of these
refugees and their descendants remain in
those camps to this day. Many still have no
passports and have never left the countries
where they reside. Almost all still dream of
their homes in Palestine, or, in more and
more cases now, of their fathers' and
grandfathers' homes.
It is impossible to overstate the sense of
injustice Palestinians feel over the
displacement of almost their entire people.
The blatant Israeli disregard for Palestinian
suffering and dispossession as well as
international law and moral imperative only
heightened the resentment. The apparent
unwillingness by the then-Great Powers,
Britain and France, and today the United
States to force on Israel the standards they
themselves lay down, was a source of intense
disillusionment.
A Palestinian narrative of exile was born; this
narrative deepened the Palestinian identity
and fueled Palestinian aspirations for
statehood.
The 1967 war, resulting in the Israeli
occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank
and Gaza, created a second Palestinian
narrative, a narrative of occupation.
The Israeli occupation elicited international
condemnation, by now customary. The
international community affirmed the
inalienable right of the Palestinian people to
self-determination and passed the legally
binding UN Security Council Resolutions 242
and 338, calling on Israel to withdraw
immediately from occupied territories.
Israel ignored all of this and never attempted
to incorporate the local population into its
state. Instead, Israel imposed a harsh military
rule.
Successive governments undertook
comprehensive settlement building in the
occupied territories, amounting to a de facto
creeping annexation. In East Jerusalem,
which Israel unilaterally annexed--an
annexation not recognized by a single
country--countless Palestinian homes were
demolished and entire Arab neighborhoods
were taken over to make way for Jewish
housing.
Again the international community protested.
The Israeli settlements are illegal under
international law, which forbids the transfer
in part or in whole of an occupying power's
civilian population to occupied territory.
Again to no avail.
Meanwhile, life under occupation was
unbearable. In addition to the larger issues of
house demolitions and settlement building
were the day-to-day humiliations of being
ruled by a foreign military. The Palestinians
of the occupied territories were stateless and
could not travel abroad. Roadblocks, travel
restrictions, arbitrary arrests and curfews
increased Palestinian resentment, while Arab
and international impotence crystallized the
need for Palestinians to control their
destinies.
In 1987, the Palestinians took matters into
their own hands and rose in a popular
uprising, the intifada, to end the Israeli
occupation and claim what they had been
denied: their right to self-determination. Israel
initially tried to suppress the uprising by force.
Yitzhak Rabin, then defense minister,
instructed his soldiers to "break their bones."
He eventually came to the conclusion, as he
later revealed, "that you can't win a war
against women and children." The intifada
forced on Israel the realization that the
occupation could not continue indefinitely,
and Israel entered into negotiations with the
PLO, negotiations that ultimately led to the
Oslo peace process.
Despite the promise the peace process held
out to Palestinians of finally achieving
statehood, neither the narrative of occupation
nor the narrative of exile and dispossession
has been resolved. East Jerusalem, the West
Bank and Gaza, despite some transfer of
authority during the years of the peace
process, remain under occupation.
Palestinians of the diaspora still cannot return
to claim their property and land, nor do they
have access to compensation.
Nevertheless, the intifada, and the peace
process that resulted from it, was a defining
moment for Palestinian understanding of a
final settlement. By accepting that any
Palestinian state would be limited to East
Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza despite
the historic link to the whole land,
Palestinians had made the ultimate
compromise. The West Bank, including East
Jerusalem, and Gaza are only 22 percent of
historic Palestine. Israel would be left with 78
percent of a land Palestinians had lived on for
centuries. Such a huge territorial concession
was hard to swallow, but, in the overriding
interest of securing self-determination, most
Palestinians did.
This, in turn, has important consequences for
the refugee problem. My grandfather knows
that he will never be allowed to return to
claim his house in West Jerusalem. He
doesn't like it, and he doesn't think it's right.
But it has become clear to most diaspora
Palestinians that the practical implementation
of the right of return will simply never
happen.
But the narrative of dispossession is too
critical to Palestinian identity for the right of
return to be signed away. Even if the actual
return is not implemented, Israel must accept
responsibility for its role in creating the
refugee problem, and the international
community must be mobilized to provide an
acceptable alternative for Palestinian
refugees.
And finally, the occupation must end.
Palestinians have been paying the price for
European crimes against the Jewish people
for too long. A sovereign Palestinian state, in
all the occupied territories of the West Bank
and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital,
is their moral, legal and historical right.
Copyright © 2002, Chicago Tribune
4 responses total.
so, jordan isn;t interested in regaining hte west bank? or egypt the gaza strip? maybe i;m wrong here, but wasn't the 1967 war started by a combine of arab countries acting as one adn all got the shit kicked out' of them by 'lil ol israel - in self-defense? why don't the palestinians all go and pillage england and france for their 1946 or '47 or '48 (whatever year) map making tricks? or beter yet, get england and france to carve a differnet map somewhere else? why have teh palestinians - muslinms - been *rejected* by eery other arab country since 194x as residents or immigrants? islamic brotherly love? yeh, must be.
*punch*
*judy*
*garland*
Response not possible - You must register and login before posting.
|
|
|
- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss