Welcome to European Tribune. It's gone a bit quiet around here these days, but it's still going.
Display:
We indeed seem closer on Sharon, tough we may differ on the quality or quantity of his changed position. The Wall (with its bare territorial and broader economic effects), the extrajudicial executions (called 'targeted assassination'), especially those that seemingly came as 'answer' to any progress on the Palestinian side, the deliberate targeting of civilians as collateral damage (f.e. the case of the second missile in Nuseirat), the attacks on Palestinian and international non-violent activists, the constant lies about the previous and the cover given to soldiers being cruel on their own until evidence was leaked, the large-scale destruction of homes and agricultural lands with phony security arguments are still war crimes and the mark of a cruel unilateralist.

As for borders, Palestinians were no party to said international agreements. I brought up border changes in the context of a fair peace and a solution to the refugee issue (more on it below). Given that those international agreements didn't cover the denial of the right of return, they are irrelevant to my argument. (As for 1948, I was not referring to the proposed partition, but the ethnic cleansing.)

On the refugee issue, we indeed appear to disagree completely. For you, the consensus of Israeli politicians is a constraint setting the framework of a possible agreement, for me it is a central problem that has to be solved for a true agreement. (This is connected to the Israeli side of what I said elsewhere, the problem of history - things like that in 1968 Israel was the attacker not attacked, and that the Yom Kippur war was not without justification given the occupied Syrian and Egyptian territories.)

The Palestinian refuge problem cannot be compared to the case of post-WWII Germany, where there were interstate agreements, a large home country to absorb refugees, and the backdrop of a genocidal war that made many Germans accept/believe that this is the price to pay as a guilty nation. Nor to Poland, which was shifted to the East, nor to other post-WWII ethnic cleansings that were more of a reciprocal nature.

Israel doesn't want the refugees (and descendants) to move back for fear of upsetting the ethnic balance - but just that is the problem of Jordan and Lebanon too, which would cease to exist if Palestinian refugees were granted citizenship, while Gaza became an overcrowded megaslum with no room to expand ('internal' 1948 refugees are somehow always forgotten).

If Israel wants to limit the number of those moving back, it has to give some compensation, and the best would be territorial - especially given the situation of Gaza. I note that a large inflow of Palestinian refugees was always a spin of the Barak camp: the Palestinian negotiators did contemplate Israel's point of view, and always said that the right of return is more symbolic than practical: they didn't expect the overwhelming majority of refugees to move into Israel anyway, and had compensation schemes in mind (and ones less bold than mine, BTW).

(Side note: I am not sure that that many German expellees think about collective, rather than individual rights to property - but I submit you being the professional, you must know them better.)

*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.

by DoDo on Thu Nov 24th, 2005 at 04:08:12 AM EST
[ Parent ]
1st paragraph: Yes Israel runs a brutal and criminal occupation. It is far from the only such government in the world, indeed there are several which are far worse human rights abusers. If we're to go beyond simple verbal condemnations than you need to explain why specifically Israel should be so targeted - as opposed to say China, Russia, North Korea, India...

My answer would be that it is because of the incredibly destabilizing effect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But that only makes sense if the objective is to seek a resolution. And that brings me to the second paragraph about the Israeli consensus against a Palestinian right of return. Insisting on such a right is the equivalent of saying that there will be no peace for the forseeable future since an overwhelming majority of Israelis sees it as tantamount to the destruction of their country.  You could counter by saying the same applies in reverse to the Palestinians. I don't think that is the case, but if it is then there is no real hope for settling the conflict and international efforts should be limited to just keeping it at as low a level as possible.  Forcing Israel to accept a right of return strikes as absolutely insane - seeking the destruction of a nuclear armed, conventionally powerful state, smack in the middle of an important and volatile region is not exactly a recipe for world stability.  I'll also note that its been almost forty years since the UN Security Council abandoned its insistence on a right of return - switching to a conveniently vague demand for a 'just solution' to the refugee problem.

In the case of Germany I agree with you on one point - the expulsions took place in the immediate aftermath of Germany's crimes during WWII. Germans only began seeing it in that light in the sixties. In the first ten-fifteen years of the Bundesrepublik the Germans themselves were presented as the primary victims of the war. The interstate agreement (i.e. the Potsdam declaration) was made by the victorious great powers, Germany wasn't involved, nor was Poland a party to the agreement shifting its borders, though the ethnic cleansing of Germans did have the support of virtually all Poles. West Germany's constantly repeated official policy (repeated both verbally and in German law) was that the 1937 borders remained valid, that expellees retained ownership over all property in the Vertreibungsgebiete, that the compensation they received in the Lastenausgleich did not change that one bit, that the Poles in the former German lands were illegal squatters. With respect to the Sudetenland the policy was that Munich was not valid but that the expulsion was illegal and that the Sudeten Germans had a right to exercize their Selbstbestimmungsrecht - i.e. to vote to join Germany. The expellee movement rejected the idea that the Poles or Czechs had any claims on private property, using the analogy that no matter how long a thief keeps posession of his stolen goods, and even if they pass on to his children, they remain the property of the rightful owner and his heirs.  It was only in 1991 that Germany accepted the Potsdam borders de jure (1970 was only de facto since the constitutional court ruled that West Germany couldn't give de jure recognition to the postwar borders)

And no, I don't think Israel should offer compensation to the refugees, and if it should, then think for a second just what the proportionate compensation should be for a relatively bloodless (Kosovo level) ethnic cleansing, vs what Israel would deserve from Germany, or indeed other nations complicit in one degree or another in the Holocaust. Or what the Armenians should get from the Turks, or pretty much every nation of the former (and in the case of the Caucasus - current) Russian colonial empire.

The hellish mess of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in large part the direct result of the attitudes and actions of European societies. Israel should withdraw to borders based on the 1967 status quo ante with one-for one compensation for any (minor) adjustments, but that's it. Paying for the monetary cost of making the agreement work should be the rest of the world's problem, and particularly that of Europe.

by MarekNYC on Thu Nov 24th, 2005 at 03:56:43 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Display:

Occasional Series