REFUGEE DAY: A Third Time Homeless

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ferry Biedermann

JERUSALEM, Jun 17 2004 (IPS) - Standing amid the rubble of their homes demolished during the latest fighting last month, they said it was the third time they had been made homeless by the conflict.

The plight of refugees could hardly be better illustrated than by those bitter remarks of the group of Palestinians in Rafah, at the southern tip of the Gaza strip on the border with Egypt.

The first time they became refugees during the war of 1948 when Israel was founded. The second came for many in the 1970’s when Ariel Sharon tried to pacify Gaza with bulldozers. Now over the last couple of years Israel has been creating a buffer zone along the border with Egypt, destroying thousands of houses.

Rafah and the rest of the Gaza strip are at the best of times not the most cheerful places to live in. The strip, some 20 percent of which is still held by Israeli settlers, is at most places overcrowded, desolate and dirty.

Unlike anywhere else, registered refugees make up the large majority of the population, more than 900,000 in a total of some 1.3 million people living there. In the West Bank by contrast, some 660,000 refugees form about a third of the population.

These are just some of the amazing statistics among many in the Palestinian situation. Most of the refugee population traces its roots back all the way to 1948. A sizeable number of those who had escaped to the West Bank fled again, together with others, when Israel conquered that territory from Jordan in 1967.

What started with 700,000 to 800,000 refugees in the late 1940’s has now ballooned to a total registered Palestinian refugee population of more than four million. That is almost 40 per cent of the 10 to 11 million Palestinians worldwide.

Their fate is seen as crucial to any resolution of the conflict with Israel. The Palestinians claim a ‘right of return’ to their former homes in Israel for all refugees and their descendents. This is based, among other things, on resolution 193 in the UN General Assembly.

Israel fears it will be swamped by the Palestinians if it agrees to such a return. It argues mostly that the acceptance by the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the Palestinian Authority (PA) of the two-state solution means that such a return is impossible because one state is meant to be Palestinian and the other Jewish. Israel also denies responsibility for creating the refugee problem, and says it cannot be required to absorb them.

U.S. President George W. Bush said recently he thought a mass return of refugees was not ‘realistic’. In negotiations during the Oslo peace process both sides seemed to be nearing agreement on the issue, with most refugees either settling in the Palestinian state, in the countries where they are now, or in third countries. Since the outbreak of hostilities in September 2000, positions on both sides have again hardened.

Not all refugees live in camps, ‘only’ about a third do, and even the term camp may be misleading because they all are fixed housing units, not tents. Almost all camps now have access to utilities like water, electricity and sanitation. Even so, most resemble ramshackle shantytowns though some areas are well laid out and quite comfortable.

Among all refugees, the Palestinians are the only ones to have a long-term dedicated United Nations organisation that deals with them. The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) started work in 1950 and provides basic services such as healthcare, education, relief and social services to the refugees.

After the Oslo process of the 1990’s the Palestinian Authority took over some of those services from UNRWA in the West Bank and the Gaza strip but during the Intifadah, the Palestinian uprising of the last three-and-a-half years, the agency has had to step in again in many cases to support a hamstrung PA and an increasingly impoverished population.

The situation of the Palestinian refugees differs from place to place. In the Gaza strip and the West Bank the refugees and non-refugees share many of the same hardships. In some of the other countries in the Middle East where the refugees have found a haven, the local authorities have imposed limitations on them that severely curtail social and political activities.

In Lebanon, where the influx of so many Palestinians in the 1940’s and 1950’s was seen as upsetting the delicate sectarian power balance, these restrictions may be the most severe. Many Palestinians are banned from certain professions and from owning land.

It is believed therefore that in any peace deal a solution for the approximately 200,000 refugees who remain in camps in Lebanon will be given priority.

Syria by contrast has proved much more welcoming for its more than 400,000 Palestinian refugees, as has Jordan in some ways.

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan annexed the largest part of Palestine that had not been incorporated into Israel after 1948, the West Bank. Partly in order to gain legitimacy for that move, the Jordanians alone among all Arab countries offered a passport to Palestinian refugees.

The Jordanian king Abdullah I was murdered by a Palestinian in 1951. Abdullah’s grandson King Hussein waged a bloody battle against Palestinian fighters in the country in 1970.

Palestinians now are unofficially estimated to make up more than half the 5.5 million people of Jordan although the figure of registered refugees is just 1.7 million. Even though parliament in Jordan is toothless, Palestinians are severely underrepresented as a result of a skewed electoral system.

In 2000 when a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians still seemed possible, the Jordanian authorities became concerned about the likelihood of the continued presence of the refugees in their country. Even so, very few people in the region or in Jordan itself expect the Palestinians to leave, and many observers expect some kind of political accommodation to integrate them further into the country.

There are no officially registered Palestinian refugees in other countries, although substantial numbers of Palestinians live in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries.