There is another international road map in which a right of return is embodied. It is the UN deal for Kosovo in which terms have been agreed for the Serb minority to return home. The fact that the Serbs have currently rejected the terms made by the UN is immaterial. The right of return was implicit in any fair settlement.
The right of return also remains an article of faith for the Palestinians. Those driven from their homes in what has become the Israeli state have been joined by Palestinians expelled from the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza. Any agreement, such as the unofficial Geneva Accord, which ignores the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and their right to return cannot conceivably work.
At a practical level, it is unlikely that many of the original unfortunates would now wish to return. It has been half a century and so many of them have created new lives for themselves elsewhere - here in Saudi Arabia, elsewhere in the Arab world or further afield, in Canada, the US and Australia. The right of return is for them - in many cases their descendants - symbolic. For those living in camps in Beirut and elsewhere, or who have more recently been evicted from Gaza and the West Bank, it is a very different issue. The recent exiles want their homes back. The property that they have lost in the Occupied Territories is an integral part of Palestine and a building block for their hopes of an independent and prosperous future. The earlier exiles, on the other hand, might be prepared to settle for compensation for the homes and businesses and farms that were stolen from them and stay wherever it is they are. Most of the recent ones, however, will want to swap the camps for a new life in a new Palestine. For them, the right of return is a must. It is not negotiable.
If the UN can endorse the right, and seek to facilitate the return, of Kosovo’s Serb minority to their homes, then no less a provision must be made and endorsed for the Palestinians. Nor should we forget that while Kosovo’s Serbs, for so long dominated and oppressed by Kosovo’s Albanian minority, Palestinians never sought to crush and humiliate their Jewish neighbors. It was the other way round. Even before 1949, Zionists were working to a program of intimidation and blackmail to force Palestinians to desert their farms and homesteads.
For too long the international community has been content to follow one standard when dealing with Palestine and another for the rest of the world. Washington has backed the Kosovo plan, though understandably it is not playing a high- profile role in it. Yet because the Israelis are not prepared to grant the right of return to the Palestinians, Washington refuses to countenance it.
This is both hypocritical and unacceptable. What is good enough for Kosovo must also be good enough for Palestine and Israel. Trading the right of return for shared access to Jerusalem, as the negotiators of the Geneva Accord have done, is a mistake. At the heart of the Palestinian tragedy rests a denial of history. From the beginning, Israelis ousted Arabs from the territory they controlled. They are doing it still in the Occupied Territories. There are hawkish Zionist politicians who would like even the surviving Israeli Arabs to be thrown out as well. Until this crime is recognized and undone, peace remains only the remotest of possibilities.
