Ali Abunimah, writing from South Africa, publishes a piece in The Hill criticizing the Zbig Brzezinski-Stephen Solarz plan for a two-state-solution:
Even more devastating to Palestinian rights, Brzezinski and Solarz float "a
solution to the refugee problem involving compensation and resettlement in
the Palestinian state but not in Israel." This they call "a bitter pill" but argue that "Israel cannot be expected to commit political suicide for the sake of peace."
Palestinian refugees have an internationally recognized legal right to
return to their homes and lands, but Israel has always denied this on the
sole grounds that Palestinians are not Jews. Thus Gaza, where 80 percent of the population are refugees, is essentially a holding pen for humans of the "wrong" ethno-religious group. Would Brzezinski and Solarz be so sanguine about accommodating Israel’s discriminatory character if its grounds for refusing the return of refugees was that they had the "wrong" skin color?
I write from downtown Pretoria, once the all-white capital of the South
African apartheid state, which also argued that ending white rule would be
"political suicide." The notion that people of different groups cannot or
should not mix is belied by the vibrant multiracial reality in the streets
of Pretoria outside my window today.
And precedents for the actual return of refugees abound. Under the
US-brokered 1995 Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnia war, almost half a million refugees and internally displaced persons returned home with
international assistance, to areas that had become dominated
demographically and politically by members of another ethno-national
community — an enormous achievement in a country with a total population
of 3.5 million and deep traumas as a result of recent war.
Other than Israel’s discriminatory aversion to non-Jews it is difficult to see why Palestinian refugees could not also return to their lands inside Israel, the vast majority of which remain uninhabited.
