chargrille

chargrille, 1 month ago

"The 1995 Dayton Agreement, which ended years of warfare between Serbia, Croatia, & Bosnia, states: “All refugees & displaced persons have the right freely to return to their homes of origin” & “to have restored to them property of which they were deprived in the course of hostilities.” The American Jewish Committee—whose CEO, David Harris, has demanded that Palestinian refugees begin “anew” in “adopted lands”—not only endorsed the Dayton agreement but urged that it be enforced with US troops."

chargrille, 1 month ago

"In 2019, #AIPAC applauded Congress for imposing sanctions aimed at forcing the Syrian government to, among other things, permit “the safe, voluntary, & dignified return of Syrians displaced by the conflict.” That same year, the Union for Reform Judaism, in justifying its support for reparations for Black Americans, approvingly cited a UN resolution that defines reparations as including the right to 'return to one’s place of residence.' "

chargrille, 1 month ago

"Jewish leaders also endorse the rights of return & compensation for Jews expelled from Arab lands…As McGill University political scientist Rex Brynen has noted, during the Oslo peace process Israeli negotiators privately acknowledged that they were using the flight of Arab Jews as “a bargaining chip, intended to counterweigh Palestinian claims.” In so doing, Israeli leaders backhandedly conceded the legitimacy of the very rights they don’t want Palestinians to have."

chargrille, 1 month ago

"Jewish leaders often claim that only Palestinians who were themselves expelled deserve the designation, not their descendants. It’s a cynical argument: Later generations of Palestinians would not need refugee status had Israel allowed their expelled parents or grandparents to return…As UNRWA has noted, “Palestine refugees are not distinct from other protracted refugee situations such as those from Afghanistan or Somalia, where there are multiple generations of refugees.”

chargrille, 1 month ago

"Moreover, the same American Jewish leaders who decry multigenerational refugee status when it applies to Palestinians celebrate it when it applies to Jews.
…
In 2016, after Spain and Portugal offered citizenship to roughly 10,000 descendants of Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula more than 500 years ago, the AJC’s associate executive director declared, “We stand in awe at the commitment & efforts undertaken both by Portugal & Spain to come to terms with their past.”

#Nakba

chargrille, 1 month ago

"Veteran Republican foreign policy official Elliott Abrams has called compensating all Palestinian refugees a “fantasy.” Too much time has passed, too many Palestinian homes have been destroyed, there are too many refugees. It is not possible to remedy the past. The irony is that when it comes to compensation for historical crimes, Jewish organizations have shown just how possible it is to overcome these logistical hurdles."

#Nakba

chargrille, 1 month ago

"More than 50 years after the Holocaust, Jewish organizations negotiated an agreement in which Swiss banks paid more than $1 billion to reimburse Jews whose accounts they had expropriated during World War II. In 2018, the World Jewish Restitution Organization welcomed new US legislation to help Holocaust survivors & their descendants reclaim property in Poland…

If Jews robbed en masse in the 1940s deserve reparations, surely Palestinians do too."

#Nakba

chargrille, 1 month ago

"When Jewish organizations deem it morally necessary, they find ways to determine the value of lost property…Israeli govt…estimated the value of property lost by Jewish settlers withdrawn from the Gaza Strip in order to compensate them.

…calculations can be made for property lost in the #Nakba as well. UN Res. 194 declared that Palestinian refugees were entitled to compensation “for loss of, or damage to, property [& created] the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine to tally the losses."

chargrille, 1 month ago

"Using land registers, tax records, & other documents from the British mandate, the UNCCP between 1953 & 1964 assembled what Randolph-Macon…historian Michael Fischbach has called “one of the most complete sets of records documenting the landholdings of any group of refugees in the 20th century.”…those records have been turned into a searchable database & cross-referenced with information from the Israeli Land Registry. The primary barrier to compensating Palestinian refugees is not technical"

chargrille, 1 month ago

"The same goes for allowing Palestinian refugees to return home. Lubnah Shomali of the Badil Resource Center, which promotes Palestinian refugee rights, has noted that, “If any state is an expert in receiving masses & masses of people & settling them in a very small territory, it’s Israel.”

In its first four years of existence, Israel—which in 1948 contained just over 800,000 citizens—absorbed close to 700,000 immigrants."

chargrille, 1 month ago

"At the height of the Soviet exodus in the early 1990s, when the Jewish state totaled roughly five million citizens, alongside several million Palestinian noncitizens in the West Bank & Gaza, it took in another 500,000 immigrants over four years…"

chargrille, 1 month ago

"Palestinian scholars have begun imagining what might be required to absorb Palestinian refugees who want to return.

One option would be to build where former Palestinian villages once stood since, according to Shomali, roughly 70% of those depopulated and destroyed in 1948 remain vacant.

In many cases, the rural land on which they sat now constitutes nature preserves or military zones."

#RightOfReturn

chargrille, 1 month ago

"The Palestinian geographer Salman Abu Sitta imagines a Palestinian Lands Authority, which could dole out plots in former villages to the families of those who lived there. He envisions many returnees “resuming their traditional occupation in agriculture, with more investment & advanced technology.” He’s even convened contests in which Palestinian architecture students build models of restored villages"

[Ruins of Palestinian homes in Lifta, on the western edge of Jerusalem, abandoned in 1948]

chargrille, 1 month ago

"Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi [thinks] it unlikely that many refugees—most of whom now live in or near cities—would return to farming. Most would probably prefer to live in urban areas. For [those] Palestinians…Badil has partnered with Zochrot, an Israeli organization that raises awareness about the Nakba, [to echo strategies for] Soviet immigrants in the 1990s [where Israel's govt] gave newcomers money for rent while also offering developers subsidies to rapidly build affordable homes."

chargrille, 1 month ago

"When Jews imagine …refugee return, most probably don’t imagine a modified version of Israel’s absorption of Soviet Jews. More likely, they imagine Palestinians expelling Jews from their homes. Given Jewish history, & the trauma that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has inflicted on both sides, these fears are understandable. But there is little evidence that they reflect reality. For starters, not many Israeli Jews live in former Palestinian homes since, tragically, only a few thousand remain."

chargrille, 1 month ago

"More importantly, the Palestinian intellectuals & activists who envision return generally insist that significant forced expulsion of Jews is neither necessary nor desirable. Abu Sitta[:] “it is possible to implement the return of the refugees without major displacement to the occupants of their houses.” Yusuf Jabarin, a Palestinian professor of geography[:] “I have no interest in building my life on the basis of attacks on Jews & making them fear they have no place here.”
#RightofReturn #Nakba

chargrille, 1 month ago

"Asked about Jews living in formerly Palestinian homes, Edward Said in 2000 declared that “some humane & moderate solution should be found where the claims of the present & the claims of the past are addressed . . . I’m totally against eviction.”

Badil & Zochrot propose that "If a Jewish family owns a home once owned by a Palestinian, first the original Palestinian owner (or their heirs) & then the current Jewish owner would be offered the cash value…in return for relinquishing their claim…

chargrille, 1 month ago

"If neither accepted…Zochrot activists [propose ownershp] would revert to the original Palestinian owners, [who] would receive compensation until the Jewish occupants moved or died [then] regain possession.

In cases where Jewish institutions sit where Palestinian homes once stood—for instance, Tel Aviv University…was built on the site of the destroyed village of al-Shaykh Muwannis—Zochrot has proposed that the Jewish inhabitants pay the former owners for the use"

chargrille, 1 month ago

"Efforts to face & redress historic wrongs are rarely simple, rapid, uncontested, or complete. 17 years after the end of apartheid, the South African government in March unveiled a special court to fast-track the redistribution of land stolen from Black South Africans; some white farmers worry it could threaten their livelihood.

But as fraught and imperfect as efforts at historical justice can be, it is worth considering what happens when they do not occur…"

#Nakba #Peace

chargrille, 1 month ago

"The crimes of the past, when left unaddressed, do not remain in the past. That’s true for the #Nakba…

Israel did not stop expelling Palestinians…It displaced close to 400,000 more…when it conquered the #WestBank & the #Gaza Strip in 1967—roughly a quarter of whom [were there] b/c their families had fled there, as refugees, in 1948.

Between 1967-1994, Israel [expelled] another 250,000…through a policy that revoked the residencies [of people] who left the territories for an extended period."

chargrille, 1 month ago

"Since 2006…almost 10,000 Palestinians in the #WestBank & #EastJerusalem have watched the Israeli govt demolish their homes"

"28 Palestinian families forced from Jaffa & Haifa in 1948 relocated to the East Jerusalem neighborhood of #SheikhJarrah [inthe 1950s]. After a decades-long campaign by Jewish settlers, the Jerusalem District Court ruled earlier this month [May 2021] that 6…should be evicted. By refusing to acknowledge the #Nakba, the Israeli govt prepared the ground for its perpetuation"

chargrille, 1 month ago

"In our bones, Jews know…when you tell a people to forget its past you are not proposing #peace. You are proposing extinction."

“We are what we remember,” wrote the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks…

For a stateless people, collective memory is key to national survival. That’s why for centuries diaspora Jews asked to be buried with soil from the land of Israel [&] why Palestinians gather soil from the villages…For Jews to tell Palestinians that peace requires them to forget the #Nakba is grotesque."

chargrille, 1 month ago

"Conversely, honestly facing the past—a process Desmond Tutu has likened to “opening wounds” & “cleansing them so that they do not fester”—can provide the basis for genuine reconciliation.

In 1977, Palestinian American…student George Bisharat traveled to…Talbiyeh & knocked on the door of the house his grandfather had built & been robbed of. The elderly woman who answered…told him his family had never lived there. “The humiliation of having to plead to enter my family’s home…burned inside me"

chargrille, 1 month ago

"In 2000, by then a law professor, he returned with his family. As his wife & children looked on, a man originally from New York answered the door & told him the same thing: It was not his family’s home.

But after Bisharat chronicled his experiences, he received an invitation from a former soldier who had briefly lived in the house after the Haganah seized it in 1948.

When they met, the man said, “I am sorry, I was blind. What we did was wrong,” &…added, “I owe your family three months’ rent.”

chargrille, 1 month ago

"In that moment, Bisharat wrote, he experienced “an untapped reservoir of Palestinian magnanimity & good will that could transform the relations between the two peoples, & make things possible that are not possible today”

There is a Hebrew word for the behavior of that former Haganah soldier: #Teshuvah, which is generally translated as “repentance.” Ironically… however, its literal definition is “return.”

In Jewish tradition, return need not be physical; it can also be ethical & spiritual."