In one final push before Donald Trump leaves office, some Republican Members of Congress are attempting to push the Trump administration to declassify a State Department report that distinguishes between Palestinian refugees born in Palestine before Israel’s establishment in 1948 and their descendants.
On December 11, Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) and 21 of his fellow Republican colleagues in the House sent President Donald Trump a letter urging him to declassify the report mandated by Congress in 2012 as a way to “address the so-called ‘Palestinian refugee’ population.”
The scare quotes and use of the deprecatory term “so-called” are an indication that this letter is not just an attempt by Congress to assert its powers to get the Executive Branch to provide it with information.
Instead, it is part of a concerted effort to prompt the Trump administration to prejudge in Israel’s favor yet another permanent status issue ostensibly intended for resolution in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
Erasing Palestinian refugees
The political nature of the demand is spelled out clearly by these Members of Congress.
“The issue of the so-called Palestinian ‘right of return’ of 5.3 million refugees to Israel as part of any ‘peace deal’ is an unrealistic demand, and we do not believe it accurately reflects the number of actual Palestinian refugees…it is time to end the fiction of the ‘right of return’ and bring the conflict one step closer [to] conclusion,” they argued.
A last-minute decision by the Trump administration to declassify the report before Joe Biden is inaugurated next month would certainly be in keeping with other steps the Trump administration has taken to predetermine permanent status issues in Israel’s favor.
Trump’s declaration of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital upended 70 years of bipartisan policy of refusing to acknowledge any party’s claims to sovereignty over the city. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s proclamation that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are not illegal superseded a Carter administration legal memo affirming that Israeli colonization of Palestinian land is contrary to international law. And the Trump administration’s “deal of the century” settled borders in Israel’s favor by giving it a green light to illegally annex as much as 30 percent of the West Bank outside the framework of negotiations.
The Trump administration has already taken a major step toward trying to erase Palestinian refugees. In August 2018, the State Department cut US funding to UNRWA, deeming the UN agency responsible for providing social services to Palestinian refugees an “irredeemably flawed operation.” By starving UNRWA, the Trump administration hoped to magically make Palestinian refugees disappear.
By declassifying the State Department report on Palestinian refugees, Republican Members of Congress hope to publicly redefine in US policy who is and is not a Palestinian refugee for this same purpose.
A long-term effort
To understand the salience of this report and its findings, it is necessary to digress historically to the Obama era. In 2012, the former anti-Palestinian Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL) introduced an amendment to an appropriations bill mandating an Executive Branch report distinguishing between Palestinian refugees “personally displaced” in 1948 and those who were not. It also required the State Department to distinguish between Palestinian refugees living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and those living outside historic Palestine.
The intended impact of the amendment on US policy was obvious: to count as Palestinian refugees only direct survivors of the Nakba residing outside of Palestine.
To its credit, the Obama administration pushed back against this amendment. “The status of Palestinian refugees is one of the most sensitive final status issues confronting Israel and the Palestinians; it strikes a deep, emotional chord among Palestinians,” the State Department wrote.
“United States policy has been consistent for decades, in both Republican and Democratic administrations–final status issues can and must only be resolved between Israelis and Palestinians in direct negotiations. The Department of State cannot support legislation which would force the United States to make a public judgment on the number and status of Palestinian refugees.”
The resulting compromise placed the reporting directive in the accompanying Senate report on the bill instead of in the text of the legislation itself, arguably lessening its constitutional gravitas. The compromise also stripped out the directive to distinguish between refugees inside and outside of Palestine.
The Obama administration dragged its feet on reporting this information to Congress, but eventually relented in 2015. However, it classified the report, “despite no apparent national security threat or known historical precedent for classifying such a report,” according to the 22 Republicans who signed the recent letter to Trump.
Classifying the report prevented its wide dissemination. However, sources who have seen the report indicate that the State Department counted approximately 20,000 Palestinian refugees who fit the criteria of the congressional reporting requirement, a far cry from the 5.7 million Palestinian refugees registered with UNRWA today.
Constraining Biden
Shortly before the Trump administration cut all funding to UNRWA, Lamborn introduced a bill that would have had almost the same effect. His deceptively entitled UNRWA Reform and Refugee Support Act would ensure “that US taxpayer dollars dedicated to refugees should only contribute to UNRWA to the extent that it resettles the original refugees from 1948, not the great-grandchildren who may have not even grown up in the Middle East but comfortably in other nations.”
The Trump administration is facing pressure to do so from those outside Congress as well. As a recent op-ed in the right-wing New York Post by Jonathan Schanzer and Richard Goldberg of the anti-Palestinian Foundation for the Defense of Democracies called the Trump administration’s decision not to release an updated and unclassified version of the report “puzzling”. Schanzer and Goldberg argued that this “policy change would thus upend the mythology of a Palestinian ‘right of return’”.
The Israel Allies Foundation, a lobbying organization promoting Israel’s policies in legislatures across the globe, is also highlighting the effort, along with Americans for a Safe Israel, an organization supporting a one-state, apartheid resolution.
If the Trump administration’s declassifies the report, it will not change the status of Palestinian refugees in international law, just as its positions on Jerusalem, settlements, and annexation do not alter the illegality of Israeli practices in Occupied Palestinian Territory.
However, by urging the Trump administration to declassify the report now, Lamborn is attempting to constrain the incoming Biden administration with another fait accompli. Either the Biden administration will have to acquiesce in the report findings and take them into consideration when it determines the levels at which it will refund UNRWA, or, it will be put in the awkward and unlikely position of renouncing the findings of the Obama administration report.
Either way, the GOP would achieve another victory in predetermining for the purposes of US policy a permanent status issue in Israel’s favor and further positioning itself as the guarantor of Israel’s interests.
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The Right of Return was so universally accepted that it was not codified until 1215, in Chapter 42 of the Magna Carta: “It shall be lawful in the future for anyone…to leave our kingdom and to return, safe and secure by land and water….”
The right of return was enshrined in international law when the United Nations adopted The Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December 1948 (Resolution 217 A III). By eventually gaining UN membership Israel agreed to abide by the Declaration’s terms of which Article 13(2) states: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and return to his country.”
On 11 December 1948, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194 (III) of which paragraph 11 resolves “…refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible….
On 11 May 1949, the General Assembly passed Resolution 273 granting Israel admittance to the UN. As a pre-condition, Israel formally agreed at the UN to obey General Assembly Resolution 194 as well as Resolution 181, the Partition Plan. “Recalling [Resolutions 181 and 194] and taking note of the declarations and explanations made by [Israel]…in respect of the implementation of the said resolutions, the General Assembly… decides to admit Israel into membership in the United Nations.” Along with Arab states and Palestinian representatives, Israel also signed the Lausanne Protocol at the 1949 Lausanne Peace Conference to the same effect.
The next important document adopted by the UN dealing with human rights, including the right of return, was the Fourth Geneva Convention (12 August 1949) of which Article 49 states “Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.” Israel is a signatory to the Fourth Geneva Convention. (cont’d)
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Several UN resolutions have been passed affirming the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. One of the most important is General Assembly Resolution 3236 (22 November 1974) which acknowledges that all those made refugees since 1947 have an inalienable right to return. Paragraph 1 refers to the national inalienable rights of “the Palestinian people” & paragraph 2 provides that the General Assembly “[r]eaffirms also the inalienable rights of the Palestinians to return to their homes & property from which they have been displaced & uprooted, & calls for their return.”
Mandatory UN Security Council Resolution 605 (22 December 1987) reaffirmed that all Palestinian refugees, including those of the 1947-48 conflict, have an inalienable right to return to their homes. Resolution 605 refers to “the inalienable rights of all peoples recognized by the Charter of the United Nations & proclaimed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
The legality & sanctity of the Right of Return was well demonstrated by the vigorous diplomatic & military efforts on the part of Western powers to ensure the return of refugees in Bosnia, Kosovo & East Timor.
Mandatory UNSC Resolution 2334, Dec. 23/2016: Reaffirming the obligation of Israel, the occupying Power, to abide scrupulously by its legal obligations & responsibilities under the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, of 12 August 1949, & recalling the advisory opinion rendered on 9 July 2004 by the International Court of Justice, Condemning all measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character & status of the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, including, inter alia, the construction & expansion of settlements transfer of Israeli settlers, confiscation of land, demolition of homes & displacement of Palestinian civilians, in violation of international humanitarian law & relevant resolutions,…”
It is hard to believe that a mentally deranged man, coaxed by the crooked PM of Israel, his son in law, and his rich campaign donors like Adelson, can decide to recognize the capital of Israel, sign off the Golan Heights like it belonged to the US, and decide that the Palestinians will be classified as “refugees”, when the rest of the world, including the UN has refused to acknowledge none of the above. What right has the US to make these decisions, without international consensus?
Israel is a pariah nation and it should be treated like one, because it continues to behave like one.
Beyond words! How much longer will the U.S. let itself be suckered by the Zionists?
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/12/22/indonesia-could-get-billions-in-us-funding-to-join-israel-push
“US dangles billions for Indonesia normalising ties with Israel”
Financial agency’s chief said the US could double its $1bn portfolio if Indonesia establishes relations with Israel.
Al Jazeera, Dec. 22/20
Excerpt:
“Indonesia could unlock billions of dollars in additional U.S. financing if it joins President Donald Trump’s push for Muslim countries to establish relations with Israel, according to a U.S. official.”
“The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, a government agency that invests overseas, could more than double its current $1 billion portfolio if Indonesia develops ties with Israel, DFC Chief Executive Officer Adam Boehler said in an interview Monday at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.”
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BTW:
Israel’s first and second attempts to join the United Nations following the signing of the 1949 armistice agreements were unsuccessful because the General Assembly considered it to be in contravention of the UN Charter. This was due to the fact that in violation of the Partition Plan (General Assembly Resolution 181, 29 November 1947), Israel was occupying the international zone of West Jerusalem and more than half of the territory assigned to the proposed Palestinian state. Consequently, with another vote on its application for admittance about to take place, Israel’s negotiators at Lausanne were instructed to go along with the Arab block and sign a protocol proposed by the commission “which would constitute the basis of work.”
On May 12, 1949, what is known as the Lausanne Protocol (consisting of two separate, but identical documents) was signed by Arab and Israeli negotiators. It stated that the Palestine Conciliation Commission, “anxious to achieve as quickly as possible the objectives of General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 11, 1948, regarding refugees, the respect for their rights and the preservation of their property, as well as territorial and other questions, has proposed to the delegations of the Arab states and to the delegation of Israel that the working document attached hereto (map of partition) be taken as a basis for discussions with the Commission.”
“[a]s a price for obtaining full membership in the United Nations in 1949, Israel’s ambassador, Abba Eban, had given assurances that Israel would faithfully adhere to the UN Charter and to the resolutions of the relevant UN bodies.” (George and Douglas Ball, The Passionate Attachment, p. 33)
Abba Eban assured the members of the U.N. Ad Hoc Political Committee reviewing Israel’s request for admission that his government “[would pursue] no policies on any question which were inconsistent with…the resolutions of the Assembly and the Security Council.” (Quoted by Khouri, The Arab Israeli Dilemma, p. 105) Eban thus further committed Israel to abide by Resolutions 181 and 194.