Palestinian Refugee Compensation and Israeli Counterclaims for Jewish Property in Arab Countries

2008 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael R. Fischbach
Keyword(s):  
Arab World ◽  
Arab Countries ◽  
Palestinian Refugees ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Right Of Return ◽  
Compensation Claims ◽  
Palestinian Refugee ◽  
International Fund ◽  
The Right

Unlike its demands for Holocaust reparations, Israel's compensation claims for properties that Jews left behind in the Arab world have aimed not to provide individual financial reparations, but rather to counter and offset Palestinian refugees' claims for restitution and the right of return. In U.S.-sponsored negotiations in 2000, Israel announced it would drop its counterclaim policy and agreed with the Palestinians that individual compensation would be paid out to all sides from an international fund. More recently, however, a new counterclaim strategy has emerged, based not on financial reparations, but rather on an argument that a fair population and property exchange occurred in 1948. By pursuing this strategy, Israel and international Jewish organizations risk exacerbating tensions between European Jews who have received Holocaust reparations, and Arab Jews angry that their claims are held hostage to diplomatic expediency.

Memories for the Return? Remembering the Nakba by the First Generation of Palestinian Refugees in Syria

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anaheed Al-Hardan
Keyword(s):  
First Generation ◽  
Palestinian Refugees ◽  
Oslo Accords ◽  
Right Of Return ◽  
Palestinian Refugee ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
The Right ◽  
Political Realities ◽  
The Way

The 1948 Nakba has, in light of the 1993 Oslo Accords and Palestinian refugee activists' mobilisation around the right of return, taken on a new-found centrality and importance in Palestinian refugee communities. Closely-related to this, members of the ‘Generation of Palestine’, the only individuals who can recollect Nakba memories, have come to be seen as the guardians of memories that are eventually to reclaim the homeland. These historical, social and political realities are deeply rooted in the ways in which the few remaining members of the generation of Palestine recollect 1948. Moreover, as members of communities that were destroyed in Palestine, and whose common and temporal and spatial frameworks were non-linearly constituted anew in Syria, one of the multiples meanings of the Nakba today can be found in the way the refugee communities perceive and define this generation.

scholarly journals GRASS-ROOTS COMMEMORATIONS: REMEMBERING THE LAND IN THE CAMPS OF LEBANON

2004 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laleh Khalili
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Refugee Camps ◽  
Palestinian Refugees ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Right Of Return ◽  
The Right

The Oslo negotiations——and the specter of a Palestinian renunciation of the right of return——greatly increased the insecurities of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The new uncertainties in turn triggered the emergence in the refugee camps of commemorative practices different from those previously sponsored by the Palestinian leadership. The new forms of commemoration, centered on the villages left behind in Palestine in 1948 and including popular ethnographies, memory museums, naming practices, and history-telling using new technologies, have become implicit vehicles of opposition and a means of asserting the refugees' membership in the Palestinian polity. Beyond reflecting nostalgia for a lost world, the practices have become the basis of the political identity of the younger generations and the motivation for their political mobilization.

Imagining a Solution: Final Status Arrangements and Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon

1997 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 42-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rex Brynen
Keyword(s):  
Legal Status ◽  
Palestinian Refugees ◽  
Right Of Return ◽  
The Social ◽  
West Bank And Gaza ◽  
Palestinian Refugee ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Right ◽  
Palestinian Population ◽  
Research And Policy

Possible final status arrangements for the Palestinian refugee issue are explored, with emphasis on their consequences for the Palestinians in Lebanon. It is suggested that the right of return will be limited largely to the West Bank and Gaza, where it will be shaped by local economic conditions. Available compensation funds may be inadequate. Greater research and policy planning are needed in these areas. Moreover, because Lebanon will continue to host a significant Palestinian population for many years to come, both Palestinian-Lebanese dialogue and improvement in the social, economic, and legal status of the Palestinians are imperative.

Is the right of return still desirable and sacred among Palestinian refugees?

2020 ◽  
pp. 136914812093378
Author(s):  
Sobhi Albadawi
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Research ◽  
West Bank ◽  
The Political ◽  
Refugee Camps ◽  
The West ◽  
Palestinian Refugees ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Political Position ◽  
Right Of Return ◽  
The Right

The right of return has been a fundamental claim by Palestinian people since 1948. The ‘right’ refers to the political position or principle that all generations of Palestinian refugees have the right to return to the property they or their forebears left behind during the 1948 Palestinian exodus, and following the 1967 Six-Day War. This study examines and updates Palestinian refugees’ views of the right of return claim, adopting a quantitative research design surveying 1200 participants from five refugee camps located in Hebron and Bethlehem in the West Bank. The study finds that even after 72 years of displacement, the right of return remains an active but changing political construct among surveyed Palestinians living in the West Bank. As such, future negotiations must consider the generational narratives and ensure that the right of return claim, resettlement, and compensation particularly are not treated as mutually exclusive in the delivery of a just solution to the displacement of Palestinian refugees.

Unfulfilled Promise: Palestinian Family Reunification and the Right of Return

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 24-39
Author(s):  
Nabila El-Ahmed ◽  
Nadia Abu-Zahra
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Family Reunification ◽  
The State ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Successor State ◽  
Palestinian Refugees ◽  
Right Of Return ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Right

This article argues that Israel substituted the Palestinian refugees' internationally recognized right of return with a family reunification program during its maneuvering over admission at the United Nations following the creation of the state in May 1948. Israel was granted UN membership in 1949 on the understanding that it would have to comply with legal international requirements to ensure the return of a substantial number of the 750,000 Palestinians dispossessed in the process of establishing the Zionist state, as well as citizenship there as a successor state. However, once the coveted UN membership had been obtained, and armistice agreements signed with neighboring countries, Israel parlayed this commitment into the much vaguer family reunification program, which it proceeded to apply with Kafkaesque absurdity over the next fifty years. As a result, Palestinians made refugees first in 1948, and later in 1967, continue to be deprived of their legally recognized right to return to their homes and their homeland, and the family reunification program remains the unfulfilled promise of the early years of Israeli statehood.

Chronology

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Paul Karolyi
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Palestinian Refugees ◽  
Palestinian Territories ◽  
Pull Out ◽  
Right Of Return ◽  
The Right ◽  
The U.S

This is part 138 of a chronology begun by the Journal of Palestine Studies in Spring 1984, and covers events from 16 May to 15 August 2018 on the ground in the occupied Palestinian territories and in the diplomatic sphere, regionally and internationally. This quarter saw the start of the ongoing months-long Great March of Return, a protest demanding the right of return for Palestinian refugees to their homes in Israel. These peaceful, large-scale protests along Gaza's border were met with stunning violence from Israeli forces. The bloodiest day, which fell on the day of the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the U.S. embassy's move to Jerusalem, and the day before the seventieth anniversary of the Nakba, saw fifty-eight Palestinians dead at the hands of Israeli troops. The U.S. and Israel successfully blocked a formal investigation into these killings, in spite of multiple requests from U.N. members. As well, U.S. president Trump announced his decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, after which tension and military attacks and counterattacks between Israel and Iranian forces in Syria mounted.

Palestinians to Citizens

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 204-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asem Khalil
Keyword(s):  
State Solution ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Willingness To Accept ◽  
Host Countries ◽  
Refugee Status ◽  
British Mandate ◽  
Right Of Return ◽  
Palestinian Refugee ◽  
Refugee Problem ◽  
The Right

In this paper, I first argue that, since the British mandate, citizenship regulations in Palestine contributed to dispossession of the rights of Palestinians, thus laying the seeds of the Palestinian refugee problem and its eventual consolidation. I then argue that citizenship regulations in host countries were exclusionary towards refugees in general, and Palestinians in particular, making it impossible for Palestinians to integrate in host societies. The so-called “Arab Spring” did not bring about any change in that sense. Finally, I argue that the narrative of statehood, although often separated from that of the “right of return”, constitutes but one narrative, and one from a completely different angle than the narrative of a “right of return”, where the ‘just solution’ creates the possibility of establishing a homeland for Palestinians where they, and in particular the stateless refugees, can be converted into full citizens. What was part of the problem for refugees is presented as part of the solution. This discussion is very important in today’s Palestine, which was just recently accepted by the un General Assembly as a non-member observer state. The importance of that move is the official Palestinian insistence on the need for a state on the 1967 borders, and the willingness to accept the formula of a two-state solution. Discussion related to citizenship and refugee status, and the right of return, are all back at the center of political and legal discussions.

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