Livni rejects Palestinian right to return

[bemildred]

Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister, has used a speech at the United Nations to tell Palestinian refugees that they should not expect to be allowed to return to their homes in Israel.

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Livni said: "This is the real and only meaning of the two-state vision. It requires each people to accept that their rights are realised through the establishment of their own homeland, not in the homeland of others.

"If Palestinian leaders are unwilling to say this, the world should say it for them. Instead of giving false hope, it is time to end the exploitation of the refugee issue."

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Alvaro de Soto, UN Middle East peace envoy, said it would have been unthinkable three or four months ago, but "now there is the willingness to consider the possibility of a coalition government including Hamas".

Al Jazeera

[sabbat hunter]

1. right of return

a right of return to israel proper is pretty much a non starter. I do however support monetary compensation for those who left in 1947 from israel. give them current value for the homes lost. At the same time muslim countries compensate those jews that were thrown out after israel was formed.

Hamas, other palestinian organizations benefit IMHO from keeping the refugee status as is. It focuses the anger of the palestinian people on israel instead of on corruption and other foul practices by Fatah, hamas.

It is the same reason places like Iran, saudi arabia, etc focus so heavily on Israel. instead of being against a corrupt, backwards regimes, their anger is focused outward. I think the Iranian goverment wants to keep israel around so it can be used as a scapegoat so their rule isnt threatened.

[The Magistrate]

2. She Is Quite Right, Sir

There will be no incorporation of the descendants of those who fled in '48 into Israel, either as citizens or resident aliens. Insistence on it, even as a stance at the commencement of negotiations, is tantamount to declaring an intention to continue conflict. This does indeed need to be stated clearly, and driven home so there is no room for doubt about it. What occured then is irreversable, short of the complete military overthrow of the Israeli state. There certainly ought to be money compensation, to the heirs of lost properties, and this should be at honest current market rates. Indeed, that measure would be of great help in seeing that a settlement endured, by virtue of the economic boost it would bestow upon Arab Palestinian society: the best way to quiet people is to make them prosperous, so that they have something to lose. A person of truely impish disposition would convey the settled value in the form of State of Israel bonds, thus giving every person compensated a real stake in the endurance of that state as well, lest their paper prove out a sheaf of highly ornamented toilet tissue....

Once, the Sage wrote: "Having little to live on, the people know not to value life too much."

[muesa]

3. Author Bears Steady Witness to Partition’s Wounds, New York Times

Just days before the official birth of independent India and Pakistan in August 1947, Khushwant Singh, a lawyer then practicing in the High Court in Lahore, drove alone across what would soon become a bloody frontier and arrived here at his family’s summer cottage in the foothills of the Himalayas.

From here, along nearly 200 miles of eerily vacant road, he would drive on to Delhi and, on its outskirts, encounter a jeep full of armed Sikhs, who would boast of having slain a village full of Muslims. In the face of such ghastly swagger, Mr. Singh, also a Sikh, would realize that he would never return home to Lahore, for what he had just heard was a chilling echo of what he had heard on the other side of the soon-to-be border, except that there Sikhs and Hindus were the victims.

That solitary drive would also give shape to “Train to Pakistan,” Mr. Singh’s slim, seminal 1956 novel whose opening paragraphs contain one of its most unsettling lines: “The fact is, both sides killed.” An estimated one million people were killed during the partition, and more than 10 million fled their homes: Hindus and Sikhs pouring into India, Muslims heading in the other direction, to Pakistan. The novel tells the story of an uneventful border village that gets swept up in that violent storm.

Now, in a new edition of the novel, Roli Books in New Delhi has paired his story with 66 unflinching black-and-white photographs of the Partition era, some never before published, by the American photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White. This new incarnation of “Train to Pakistan,” which Roli hopes to find international distributors for at the Frankfurt Book Fair next month, has given the book what its author happily calls “a new lease on life.” It has also given Mr. Singh, who at 91 has borne witness to several rounds of carnage in his country, an occasion once again to warn against forgetfulness.

An equally tragic -- and directly analogous -- situation, and as the reviewer (Somini Sengupta) quotes Singh, “The wounds of partition have healed, ... The poison is still in our system.”

[breakaleg]

4. this bit struck me most...

"Livni said: "This is the real and only meaning of the two-state vision. It requires each people to accept that their rights are realised through the establishment of their own homeland, not in the homeland of others."

So Israelis are allowed to form a homeland in the existing homeland of others, but Palestinians aren't allowed to return to theirs? Typical Israeli arrogance.

[bemildred]

5. Logic has nothing to do with it.

It beggars description to think logic has anything to do with the situation, except, I suppose, in the sense that if you start with the proper premises, then you can conclude anything you like.

The two-state "solution" was always something of a fantasy, a political talking point, and as far as one can tell it is dead as a doornail today, in the sense that I see no way of actually carrying it out, such that it would actually lead to a resolution of the dispute. Had an agreement been reached at Taba, well maybe, I am skeptical, but there was a lot of good will still to be had at that point. Now, I don't think so. Not that that will stop politicians from trying.

The fellow above, that posted about the Indian partition, while I would dispute the comparison he seems to make of that partition with the I/P situation, has a good point in that "artificial" boundaries do not settle disputes, they perpetuate them.

Ms Livni has the problem that she has no means to compel anyone to accept anything, she has force at her disposal, but that will not do the job, as going on 60 years of history demonstrate.

[Violet_Crumble]

6. I agree with that...

Had an agreement been reached at Taba, well maybe, I am skeptical, but there was a lot of good will still to be had at that point.

I think there would have been problems even if Taba had turned into something official, but what did come out of it was groundbreaking and should be the starting point for future negotiations. Of course being an obvious starting point, it'll be totally ignored even if it gets to the point again that negotiations are on the cards....

[nicoll]

7. state of Palestine

Okay then a Palestinian state should be created so all palestinian refugees can return to it and not Israel, but the problem is it can not be two separate parts because it won't work. it has to be whole, which basically means unification of the two to form Palestine. The thing is it goes straight through the middle of Israel when you join the two together.

[Behind the Aegis]

8. "through the middle of Israel"

So is it "OK" to split Israel, already an established nation, into two, but not "OK" to create a new Palestinian state that has two parts?

[muesa]

9. The same logic that put Hashemite Clan

kings almost everywhere in the spoils of the Ottoman Empire after WW1.

[Igel]

10. The original partition plan had some nifty

places where one country or the other's territory narrowed to a point before continuing on. It provided crossings, with the width of a road or railroad track presumably being de facto nobody's territory. It squared the circle, so to speak, so that all states had, in some sense, unified territory.

I would note, however, that the US is in two separate parts, ignoring Hawaii. We transship significant amounts of goods through Canada. It requires trust on their part, that we won't "partially transship" weapons, suicide belts, and the like to fuel attacks in Canada; and on our part that they won't simply confiscate the goods.

Such a relationship would provide great benefits to both countries, even without forming a free-trade zone.

With such trust, you'd also see the Gaza airport open and a Gazan port built. But the trust that the Palestinians would actually build a society in Gaza, instead of just using it for interclan competition and intertribal strife (sensu stricto and latu) was misplaced, and that level of trust seems to be far in the future, if even possible.