Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, is currently the leading candidate in the race to take over Yasser Arafat's position as head of the Palestinian Authority.
Israel rejects any solution to the refugee "problem" other than their re-settlement in Arab countries; see below.
Abu Mazen was chosen on Tuesday night as Fatah's official candidate for PA leader in the elections scheduled for Jan. 9. A faction of Fatah, representing the "younger echelons," has not yet fully accepted this choice. The younger Fatah group, allied with the "local leadership" - as opposed to those who returned from Tunisian "exile" in 1993-4 - may be planning to field Marwan Barghouti – who is currently in Israeli prison serving several life sentences for murder.
Speaking at the PA parliament Tuesday night, Abu Mazen did not sound much more conciliatory than Arafat. "We promise you [Arafat]," he said, "that our heart will not rest until we achieve the right of return for our people... I declare that a vow is a vow and a promise is a promise."
Though the international community has taken for granted that a new PA leadership will more readily make peace with Israel, Abu Mazen has consistently been unyielding on the "refugees" issue. During his four-month tenure as PA prime minister last year, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said that Israel would accept a Palestinian state with temporary borders, in exchange for the PA's foregoing of the "right of return." Abu Mazen flatly turned him down, making clear that this was merely "one of [Israel's] dreams."
Interestingly, the famous Abu Mazen-Yossi Beilin agreement of 1995, which was never adopted or accepted by either of the sides, provides for a financial solution to the issue. Article VII states that the "Palestinian side... recognizes that the prerequisites of the new era of peace and coexistence, as well as the realities that have been created on the ground since 1948, have rendered the implementation of this right [of return] impracticable." Israel is obligated, according to the document, only to "participate actively" in the financial compensation of the "refugees," and to "continue to enable family reunification and [to] absorb Palestinian refugees in special defined cases..."
The Israeli position has long been that the refugee issue is a non-starter, for several reasons. Joan Peters, a former White House consultant on the Middle East, has written (From Time Immemorial, p. 25), "For every refugee in the Arab world... there is a Jewish refugee who fled from the country of his birth... An exchange of populations has in actuality taken place and been consummated.... There has been a completed exchange of minorities between the Arabs and the Jews, and a more-than-even tradeoff of property for the Arabs. The Jews who fled Arab countries left assets behind in the Arab world greater than those the Arabs left in Israel."
Another point noted by Israel is that the majority of the Arab refugees in 1948 were not expelled, and 68% left without seeing an Israeli soldier. Peters quotes this finding by the Arab-sponsored Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut.
In addition, the numbers cited by Arab sources are greatly exaggerated. A study by Uriyah Shavit and Jalal Bana (Ha'aretz Magazine, July 6, 2001) shows that official UNRWA statistics indicating that there are currently 3.7 million Arabs who allegedly qualify for refugee status "tend to be exaggerated." The authors attribute this to the refugee population's tendency not to report deaths, so as to enable the uninterrupted collection of the food rations of the deceased. Furthermore, UNRWA uses what the authors call an "expansive" definition of refugees, including in their numbers children and grandchildren of original residents, as well as "Palestinians" who lived in the area in question for as little as two years (!).
Furthermore, UNRWA's figures are based on a figure of close to 750,000 refugees in 1948-9, while "only 343,000 of the Arab refugees in 1948 were fleeing from Jewish-settled territory in which they had presumably lived permanently," according to Peters. She adds that it could not be calculated "how many among the 343,000 were in fact illegal immigrants to Western Palestine."
Read Michael Freund's commentary on the above news item in Arutz-7's New Blog.
Israel rejects any solution to the refugee "problem" other than their re-settlement in Arab countries; see below.
Abu Mazen was chosen on Tuesday night as Fatah's official candidate for PA leader in the elections scheduled for Jan. 9. A faction of Fatah, representing the "younger echelons," has not yet fully accepted this choice. The younger Fatah group, allied with the "local leadership" - as opposed to those who returned from Tunisian "exile" in 1993-4 - may be planning to field Marwan Barghouti – who is currently in Israeli prison serving several life sentences for murder.
Speaking at the PA parliament Tuesday night, Abu Mazen did not sound much more conciliatory than Arafat. "We promise you [Arafat]," he said, "that our heart will not rest until we achieve the right of return for our people... I declare that a vow is a vow and a promise is a promise."
Though the international community has taken for granted that a new PA leadership will more readily make peace with Israel, Abu Mazen has consistently been unyielding on the "refugees" issue. During his four-month tenure as PA prime minister last year, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said that Israel would accept a Palestinian state with temporary borders, in exchange for the PA's foregoing of the "right of return." Abu Mazen flatly turned him down, making clear that this was merely "one of [Israel's] dreams."
Interestingly, the famous Abu Mazen-Yossi Beilin agreement of 1995, which was never adopted or accepted by either of the sides, provides for a financial solution to the issue. Article VII states that the "Palestinian side... recognizes that the prerequisites of the new era of peace and coexistence, as well as the realities that have been created on the ground since 1948, have rendered the implementation of this right [of return] impracticable." Israel is obligated, according to the document, only to "participate actively" in the financial compensation of the "refugees," and to "continue to enable family reunification and [to] absorb Palestinian refugees in special defined cases..."
The Israeli position has long been that the refugee issue is a non-starter, for several reasons. Joan Peters, a former White House consultant on the Middle East, has written (From Time Immemorial, p. 25), "For every refugee in the Arab world... there is a Jewish refugee who fled from the country of his birth... An exchange of populations has in actuality taken place and been consummated.... There has been a completed exchange of minorities between the Arabs and the Jews, and a more-than-even tradeoff of property for the Arabs. The Jews who fled Arab countries left assets behind in the Arab world greater than those the Arabs left in Israel."
Another point noted by Israel is that the majority of the Arab refugees in 1948 were not expelled, and 68% left without seeing an Israeli soldier. Peters quotes this finding by the Arab-sponsored Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut.
In addition, the numbers cited by Arab sources are greatly exaggerated. A study by Uriyah Shavit and Jalal Bana (Ha'aretz Magazine, July 6, 2001) shows that official UNRWA statistics indicating that there are currently 3.7 million Arabs who allegedly qualify for refugee status "tend to be exaggerated." The authors attribute this to the refugee population's tendency not to report deaths, so as to enable the uninterrupted collection of the food rations of the deceased. Furthermore, UNRWA uses what the authors call an "expansive" definition of refugees, including in their numbers children and grandchildren of original residents, as well as "Palestinians" who lived in the area in question for as little as two years (!).
Furthermore, UNRWA's figures are based on a figure of close to 750,000 refugees in 1948-9, while "only 343,000 of the Arab refugees in 1948 were fleeing from Jewish-settled territory in which they had presumably lived permanently," according to Peters. She adds that it could not be calculated "how many among the 343,000 were in fact illegal immigrants to Western Palestine."
Read Michael Freund's commentary on the above news item in Arutz-7's New Blog.