As refugees forever

President George Bush's stance that the new realities on the ground in West Asia make a return to the situation as it existed before 1967 unrealistic means that Palestinians will remain barred forever from returning home.

WITH the George Bush administration preoccupied with Iraq and the upcoming presidential election in the United States, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has chosen to act decisively. In the third week of April, Sharon, after announcing Israel's so-called plans of "disengagement" from the Gaza Strip, visited Washington for the umpteenth time after he was elected Prime Minster. In the U.S. capital, to the surprise of the world community, President Bush endorsed Sharon's blueprint for sabotaging the prospects of Palestinian statehood. At a joint press conference, without batting an eyelid, Bush called Sharon "a man of peace" and said that Washington supported his unilateral moves in Gaza and the expansion of Israeli borders into the West Bank.

Bush, however, described the Israeli decision to withdraw from Gaza as "historic and courageous". Sharon also got an explicit assurance from Bush that the U.S. government was committed to new "defensible" Israeli borders. Bush went on to say that the U.S. did not recognise the right of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel but did recognise the right of the Jewish state to hold on to its illegal settlements in the West Bank. According to Bush, the "new realities on the ground" made a return to the pre-1967 borders unrealistic. Almost immediately after the Sharon-Bush meeting, the U.S. government sanctioned millions of dollars for the security of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

The Democratic presidential nominee, John Kerry, in his eagerness to cultivate the powerful pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., was quick to support the stand taken by his Republican opponent. Bush is dependant on the support of millions of "born again" evangelical Christians who believe that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ depends on Jews having possession of the mythical biblical land of Israel. Kerry is assiduously courting the group.

The Palestinians and the Arab world were outraged. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, otherwise a staunch ally of the U.S., suggested indirectly that the recent American actions had contributed to the "great turmoil" that was raging in West Asia and beyond. The Syrian government has also indicated that the devastating bomb blasts in Damascus in the last week of April was a result of the turmoil engulfing the region. The United Nations envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, was more direct. He told the French radio that there was a link between Israeli actions and the recent upsurge in violence in West Asia. He described Israeli policy towards Palestinians as "the big poison in the region". Palestinian Prime Minster Ahmad Qurei said that Bush was the first American President to have given the stamp of legitimacy to the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. Palestinian President Yasser Arafat emphasised that no power could take away the inherent right of Palestinians to return to their land.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan stated that any negotiated settlement between Israel and Palestine should be based on U.N. resolutions, not on unilateral moves. The European Union (E.U.) leadership too has been critical of the latest act of unilateralism by the Bush administration. However, as usual, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has supported the latest American stance.

A Palestinian diplomat wrote that Sharon was treating the U.S. and the U.K. as "banana republics," that allowed him to dictate the script. He reminded the world that Sharon was the man in West Asia with the most blood on his hands. Sharon was found "to be unfit for public office" by an Israeli inquiry committee after the massacres of Sabra and Shatila in 1982.

A few days after Sharon left Washington with a "blank cheque", the Hamas leader, Abdel Aziz Rantissi, was brutally assassinated by the Israeli security services. The feeling in the Arab world and beyond is that Washington had given Sharon the green signal for the killing, though the Bush administration has denied it. Significantly, only Washington failed to condemn the targeted killing, which came a month after the assassination of the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Both leaders were killed by missiles fired from Apache helicopters. Rantissi, like Yassin, was moving around openly, having refused to go underground. A trained medical doctor, Rantissi had said on many occasions that he was not afraid of dying. He said that if he had to die, he would prefer "martyrdom" at the hands of the occupiers. Israel had made an attempt on Rantissi's life last June. Ultimately he was killed while coming out of his family home in his car.

Before being assassinated, Rantissi had offered the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) Hamas' cooperation in running Gaza after the withdrawal of the Israelis. It was the first time that Hamas had indicated that it was willing to join the P.A. in running the government. Participation in the administration would have meant the tacit recognition of the 1994 Oslo accord, which Hamas had rejected so far. Arafat said that he would welcome Hamas into the P.A. The development was not to the liking of Sharon and the Israeli right wing. They would have found it difficult to demonise a moderate Hamas willing to integrate into the Palestinian mainstream. A recent opinion poll showed that the Hamas had outstripped Arafat's Fatah group in terms of popularity among Palestinians, mainly because of its charity work and principled resistance to the occupation. Israeli and American officials are aware that with each targeted killing of Hamas activists, the popularity of the organisation will only increase. The outpouring of support witnessed during the three-day mourning period for the slain Hamas leader is an indication of the organisation's rising popularity.

Hamas has vowed revenge but there has been a comparative lull in the actions against Israeli targets. Only one "suicide mission" has been carried out since the killing of Sheikh Yassin in March. Israeli officials claim to have killed many of the senior- and middle-level operatives of Hamas, thus reducing the capabilities of the organisation. However, many Arab observers are of the view that Hamas activists are being restrained by the P.A. The P.A. does not want Sharon to use retaliatory attacks by Hamas as a pretext to escalate tensions. After eliminating Rantissi, Sharon had brazenly announced that Arafat too was on the hit list. Sharon said that he was no longer bound by the pledge he made to the U.S. about not harming Arafat. Sharon's statement forced even the Bush administration to issue a warning asking him to desist from carrying out his latest threat. Arafat, for his part, appeared nonchalant about the latest threat from Sharon, saying that "all of us are martyrs in waiting".

Meanwhile, Sharon's blueprint for Palestinians is getting clearer by the day. Israel has announced that it will keep Gaza's borders with Egypt, the airspace and coastal waters under its control. In the letter Sharon exchanged with Bush, the word "relocate" is used, instead of "withdrawal" of Israeli forces from Gaza. The letters exchanged by the two leaders have made it clear that "certain military installations" can stay in Gaza. The Israeli military is planning to widen the corridor along the Palestinian border with Egypt, gobbling up more territory in a place that is the most densely populated in the world. At least 1.3 million Palestinians live in an area that measures 11 kilometres by 40 kilometres. It constitutes only 1 per cent of Palestinian land. Seventy per cent of Gaza's population is formed by refugees who fled when their lands were forcibly occupied. Israel will continue to control Gaza's water, fuel and electricity supply.

Recently, Sharon told an Israeli journalist that his plan for unilateral disengagement from Gaza should be seen not as a reward but as a punishment for the Palestinians. He said that the problems that his move would create would postpone the move for the creation of a Palestinian state for many more years. The Sharon-Bush agreement also undermines the American-sponsored road map, which specifically called for the freezing of all Jewish settlement activity in the occupied territories. President Bush has not only approved of the ethnic-cleansing of Palestinians that has been going on since 1948, but has now given the go-ahead for further aggrandisement by Israel.

The Bush Declaration of April 15 in the presence of Ariel Sharon is now viewed as a historical and political milestone similar to the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917. Lord Balfour announced that the U.K. favoured the creation of the state of Israel in Palestine but emphasised "that nothing shall be done which will prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine". Since then it has been downhill for Palestinians. Before the creation of Israel, Palestinians owned 90 per cent of the land. The first Arab-Israeli war of 1948 left the Jews in control of 78 per cent of Palestine. Three quarters of a million Palestinians were displaced at that time. After the 1967 war, Israel occupied all the Palestinian land. Today Palestine nominally exists only in Gaza and a number of "bantustans". Two-thirds of Palestinians are either refugees or displaced people.

Now Palestinians will have to make even more sacrifices if Bush, Blair and Sharon have their way. President Bush declared on April 15 that "it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is expected that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities". The reality, according to the Palestinians and the Arabs, is that Israel has been rewarded by the Americans for its illegal occupation and seizure of land. The Palestinians or the international community were not consulted when White House gave the signal to Sharon to build the apartheid wall and keep the massive settlements in the West Bank. According to the Bush edict, Palestinians are now barred from ever returning to their homes. The American stance is also against the many U.N. resolutions that have supported the right of Palestinians to return and to be compensated for their sufferings.