The Nakba / The Catastrophe
Every year Palestinians commemorate the Nakba ("the catastrophe"): the expulsion and dispossession of hundreds of thousands Palestinians from their homes.
According to British Mandate Authority population figures in 1947, there were about 1.3 million Arabs in all of Palestine. Between 700,000 and 900,000 of the Arabs lived in the region eventually bounded by the 1949 Armistice line, the so-called Green Line. By the time the fighting stopped, there were only about 170,000 Arabs left in the new State of Israel. By the summer of 1949, about 750,000 Palestinian Arabs were living in squalid refugee camps, set up virtually overnight in territories adjacent to Israel's borders. About 300,000 lived in the Gaza Strip, which was occupied by the Egyptian army. Another 450,000 became unwelcome residents of the West Bank of the Jordan, occupied by the Arab Legion of Transjordan.
For Palestinians, the refugee question embodies their cause. More than any other, the refugee question carries the weight of their dispossession and collective anger against Israel; their frustration with the inability of their leaders to resolve their national crisis; and their sense of abandonment by the world, depite the reality that millions of Palestinian refugees daily receive services from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. The refugee question connects their statelessness and their ambivalent relationships with the Arab states that - with the notable exception of Jordan - have denied citizenship and equal rights to Palestinian refugees.
The refugee issue for Israel is about the expulsion of as many as 850,000 Jewish refugees from the Middle East and the absorption of 600,000 of them into Israel in the fragile first years of its existence. In varying degrees, and in varying circumstances, between the years of Israel's founding and the 1967 Six-Day War the Jews of Iran and the Arab world were compelled by circumstance. For Israelis, these factors, combined with six decades of unremitting war and terrorism, and the implications of demography, make Palestinian demands concerning refugees sound not like calls for justice, but calls for suicide.
Jewish refugees have been successfully absorbed in Israel and elsewhere and, perhaps, as a result, their claims and misfortune have been largely ignored. The Arab world having denied them more than mere sufferance of their presence, most Palestinian refugees-including many who lack even legal identification-still linger in refugee camps that have in fact become small cities. Enraged and helpless, they have watched the national movement and institutions that were to have ended their statelessness, and resolved their claims, stagger, stall and stand now in real danger of collapse or disintegration.
The refugee question the central and, perhaps, the most difficult of the final status issues. For Palestinians, the refugee question, more than any other, embodies their cause. It carries the weight of their dispossession and collective anger against Israel; their frustration with the inability of their leaders to resolve their national crisis; and their sense of abandonment by the world,
Even as the claims have lingered and the grievances of the refugees have hardened, time has not stood still. The reality is that an exchange of populations has taken place; that the Jews of Iran and the Arab countries are not going back to those lands; and that the Palestinian refugees will not be returning to homes in the State of Israel. Too large an edifice of illusion about the "right of return" has been built up to be dispensed with overnight. For a majority of Palestinians, "refugee-hood" has become an indelible component of their identity, and that an imaginary world with a"right of return" has become more precious than actual citizenship in Palestine. This reality-gap is a problem.
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