Compromise is possible on Palestinian right of return
There is room to negotiate between Israeli resistance and Palestinian insistence on the right of return: the monetary compensation that polls show most Palestinian refugees already favor.
In his taped video message for the May 14 inauguration of the US Embassy in Jerusalem, President Donald Trump said, “The United States remains fully committed to facilitating a lasting peace agreement.” His declaration did not console members of the shrinking Israeli peace camp. Several days later, the Associated Press reported that the Trump administration plans to present its Israeli-Palestinian peace plan in June. The news did not generate much excitement among residents of the Palestinian refugee camps in the region.
The recent Palestinian protests along Gaza's border with Israel, dubbed the "Great Return March,” focused public attention once more on the seemingly intractable problem of the Palestinians uprooted by Israel’s founding in 1948. No plan purporting to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and definitely not one Trump has hailed as the “ultimate deal,” can ignore the volatile issue. Other core divisions between the sides, such as the status of Jerusalem and of Israeli settlements, future borders and security arrangements can perhaps be bridged. The Palestinian demand of the right of return, however, is a non-starter — a red rag even for most of Israel's leftist Zionist Camp. Recent scenes of tens of thousands of Palestinians storming the Gaza fence clutching Palestinian flags appear to have confirmed the political right’s flagship argument that giving up the territories Israel captured in the 1967 Six-Day War would not resolve the conflict.
The following text posted in English by Gaza resident Rana Shubair on the website We Are Not Numbers, appears to buttress this view.
Shubair recounts how she set out with her family on March 30, the date Palestinians call Land Day to commemorate Israel’s 1976 confiscation of Arab lands in the Galilee, for the border with “occupied Palestine.” She vowed, “Each day until May 15, the anniversary of the Nakba [“catastrophe” when more than 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homeland to create Israel] we will camp by the border to remind the world that we have a right to return home … Everyone there was united under one flag and one motto: We have a right to return to Palestinians’ historic homeland. This overwhelming feeling of unity long has been missing, especially in Gaza … None of us had anything more valuable to lose than what we already had: our home.”
