JULY 2000, page 20

Special Report

Newly Established Council for Palestinian Repatriation Launches World-Wide Petition Drive

By Sherri Muzher

“We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return!” wrote Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, in his diary on July 18, 1948, according to Michael Bar-Zohar’s book, Ben-Gurion: The Armed Prophet (1967).

These sentiments have echoed throughout subsequent Israeli administrations, and most recently that of Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who has stated definitively that the Palestinian refugees will not be allowed to return under any final peace agreement with President Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority.

To make known the unacceptability of such terms to more than five million Palestinians plus their supporters throughout the world, a Washington, DC-based organization, the Council for Palestinian Restitution and Repatriation (CPRR), has been established this year. The formal purpose of this non-profit, non-partisan organization is to assist Palestinians and their heirs to achieve their individual and inalienable human rights to their land, natural resources and property as guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (December 1948).

The Holocaust Analogy

Through its legal department, CPRR will provide Palestinian victims and refugees with legal advice and assistance in achieving their rights to repatriation, restitution and reparation for lost income attributable to displacement, expulsion and confiscation, and all associated rights. In short, what lawyers for the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust have succeeded in doing for their clients, CPRR is determined to do for Palestinians driven from their homes in 1948 and 1967. Prominent members of CPRR’s Legal Advisory Board include Susan Akram, Cherif Bassiouni, Francis Boyle, Abdeen Jabara, Anis F. Kasim, Albert Mokhiber, Allegra Pacheco, John Quigley, George Salem, Thomas Stauffer, and Adrien Wing.

Under their direction, CPRR plans to research, collect and document data relating to Palestinian claims, and also conduct through its information department intensive educational campaigns about the plight of Palestinian victims.

To support this work a CPRR advisory board is also being formed to include representation from all Palestinian social, political and religious backgrounds, including refugees from the camps, and representation from the international community.

Palestinians’ “most fundamental and just claims are painted as radical and out-dated.”

Advisory board members include Haidar Abdul Shafi, Ibrahim Abu Lughod, Salman Abu Sittah, Basel Aql, Naseer Aruri, Hanan Ashrawi, Noam Chomsky, Burhan Dajani, Abulhuda Farouki, Norman Finkelstein, Muhammad Hallaj, Shafiq al-Hout, Ali Jarbawi, Said Khoury, Clovis Maksoud, Fouad Moughrabi, Ilan Pappe, Abdel Muhsin Qattan, Hasib Sabbagh, Edward Said, and Raji Sourani, and the list continues to grow.

Board members already are monitoring closely the negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel to be sure that any agreement signed implements the repatriation of Palestinians. Should such a final agreement omit mention of the repatriation of the Palestinian refugees, or renounce such repatriation, the individual right of repatriation would not be invalidated. However, it should be clear to all that the implementation of repatriation would be rendered more problematic and far more difficult. Hence the immense pressure put by Israel on the Palestinians to sign an agreement in the current negotiations.

The rights of Palestinians are clearly entrenched in international law. Their rights to their land and property are inalienable individual rights decreed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as the right of return, which means the return of the refugees to their homes, lands, villages and towns of origin, including the homes and houses still standing. These two rights cannot be nullified or abrogated.

To demonstrate collectively that any final settlement must include the right of return for every Palestinian refugee, CPPR is circulating for individual signatures a petition to be presented to the Palestinian Authority, Israel, the United States, and every international government and relevant organization. The text of the petition reads: “I affirm that every Palestinian has a legitimate, individual right to return to his or her original home and to absolute restitution of his or her property.”

CPPR welcomes signatures from both Palestinians and non-Palestinians. The organization will place them on two separate petitions, each bearing the same text. To participate, Washington Report readers and their family members and friends may fax the signed petition to (775) 418-5980. Or they may use the Internet to go to <http://www.rightofreturn.org>. Print out the petition, and sign on-line. Readers who do not have access to a computer or fax may affix their signatures to the text of the petition above and mail to to: CPPR, P.O. Box 21521, Washington, DC 20009.

Palestinian Signatures Crucial

CPPR directors consider it particularly crucial that Palestinians sign these petitions, as they can be taken as a formal expression of the will of the Palestinian people. If hundreds of thousands of such signatures are assembled, there is a far smaller chance that any agreement precluding these rights would have legal standing. Although the drive is barely underway as this issue went to press, more than 100,000 signatures had been collected. CPPR is hoping for one million signatures by September.

As LAW, the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment, recently noted, “Palestinian demands [for the right of return], founded on international law (rather than ethno-religious exclusivity) have been relegated to the realm of the unattainable, the unrealistic and the impossible. Their voice has become so marginalized that their most fundamental and just claims are painted as radical and outdated.”

CPPR directors therefore are calling for an expression of Palestinian will to rise above the expected marginalization of their just and fundamental claims during the period of final status negotiations between Palestine and Israel. With the petition as a beginning, they hope to right the injustices that Palestinians have suffered for the past 52 years, and thwart David Ben-Gurion’s vow that they must never be allowed to return to their homeland.

Sherri Muzher is a free-lance writer on leave from a position with the state of Michigan.