Petition is legitimate

Letters

Editor: Jack Chivo's long letter (Bulletin, Dec.21) attacks the Jewish petition in support of refugee rights and includes several distortions of the purposes of the petition. The petition is one-line long. It states: "We Israeli Jews and Jews from other countries support the rights of Palestinian refugees."

Support for the right of return was understood, as was support for the rights to work and have free speech in the countries where refugees are residing. The signers were about a third Israeli and included Israeli-American lawyer Allegra Pacheco; professors Yigal Arens, Daniel Boyarin, Mark Solomon and Norman Finkelstein; Israeli professor and columnist Tanya Reinhart; Israeli anti-apartheid activist Jeff Halper; rabbis Lewis Bogage and Jeremy Milgrom; five rabbis from the Neturei Karta movement; and Alternate Peace Prize winner Uri Avnery. Most signatories are professionals: professors, lawyers, journalists and teachers. To date, 500 Jews have signed the petition.

The 500 are not members of an organization and their reasons for signing vary. For some, it is the legal argument. The countries of the United Nations have declared overwhelmingly year after year that the refugees have the right to choose whether to go back and/or be compensated. For others, it is the knowledge of the terrible conditions of the stateless Palestinians living in refugee camps for five decades. Still others believe that a state with a "Jewish character" can only be a Jewish supremacist state and a change in demographic balance would help to make Israel a full democracy.

Chivo says we "demand an immediate return of all Arab refugees." Nowhere do we use the word "immediate." Obviously, the return of a large mass of people would be a logistical challenge and would have to be negotiated with the Israeli government. Chivo says we call for the return of "three to six million Arabs." We insist on no particular number, but we do insist on justice for the refugees and part of that justice is going to have to include the return of a substantial number of people to the borders of pre-1967 Israel. Chivo states that we call for a "dismantling of the state of Israel in its present structure." The petition doesn't address that issue at all.

All international laws and treaties call for the right of refugees to choose to go back if they want to. Free choice is a key to peace and it is not the same as insistence on the return of all (or even a majority) of the refugees. We are certain that a large group of refugees would not choose to return when given the rights and freedoms and settlement in other countries with appropriate compensation for their suffering.

Let me speak for myself. Sure, the return of refugees would be a big problem for Israel, but David Ben-Gurion's government created the problem and Israelis have to make good on it. Ben-Gurion forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes during the fighting. (Let's not repeat the fairy tale that, because of some radio broadcast, 700,000 people ran away from everything they owned.) He refused to take them back after the war. Ben-Gurion thought he was being terribly clever in clearing the land of Palestinians. Instead, he created an immense festering problem that has haunted the region for decades and is a major source of the violence both in Israel/Palestine and in neighboring countries.

There is frequent hysterical talk about the right to return as being tantamount to "national suicide." Let me ask a question. The Yishuv in 1947 accepted the partition resolution, right? It was going to build an Israel with those 700,000 Palestinians as citizens, right? In asking the UN for partition, it didn't say their presence would be tantamount to "suicide." It was going to let them and their descendants vote in elections. So what existential principle would be violated by having an Israel today that would include those people and their descendants?

Chivo points out that Palestinian leader Sari Nusseibeh is willing to give up on refugee rights within Israel's borders. Perhaps Israel will get the Palestinian Authority to agree to this in a peace treaty but, if it does, it's only arranging a fool's peace, one that will rapidly become undone. Palestinians have an intense connection to their homeland and that has to be satisfied in some fundamentally just way or else the conflict will break out all over again.

Finally, Chivo states that the committee that I chair, the Middle East Crisis Committee, has as its goal the creation of a state of "Palestinian-Arab supremacy." Nothing could be further from the truth. Supremacy movements have been the bane of mankind. What we stand for is complete democracy with no ethnic group or religion being given any special privileges, not only in Israel and Palestine, but in all the countries of the Middle East.

Stanley Heller, Chair
Middle East Crisis Committee

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