Palestinian Authority proposed that only a handful of the nearly six million Palestinian refugees be allowed to return.
At the Bourj el Barajneh refugee camp in southern Beirut, a centre for the elderly serves as an oasis from the overcrowded, filthy conditions outside its metal doors.
On a recent Thursday morning, a group of men and women in their 60s and 70s gathered around a table to color and draw pictures, while others solved crossword puzzles. One woman sitting in the corner focused intently as she embroidered a traditional Palestinian dress. The Active Ageing House in the refugee camp is a place where they can pass time, socialize and share meals.
They are known as the “Children of the Nakba” — a generation of Palestinians that witnessed, and survived, the forced expulsion and violence in 1948 committed by Zionist paramilitaries on behalf of the nascent state of Israel.
They each have a story about how they or their parents managed to escape their homeland over 60 years ago — and their wounds are still raw.
Some six million Palestinian refugees are scattered around the world, including more than 400,000 in Lebanon. Here, they are deprived of basic rights, not permitted to buy or sell property, and are banned from more than 70 job categories. Mired in abject poverty, they are dependent on an increasingly incapable United Nations agency for aid.
A “symbolic number” of returnees
The Palestine Papers show that Palestinian Authority (PA) negotiators were prepared to make major concessions on the refugees’ right of return: on the numbers potentially allowed to return to their homes in what is now Israel; on whether refugees would be able to vote on any peace agreement; and on how many would be able to settle in a future Palestinian state.
In an email Ziyad Clot, a legal adviser to Palestinian negotiators on the refugee file, writes, “President
[Mahmoud] Abbas offered an extremely low proposal for the number of returnees to Israel a few weeks only after the start of the process.”
The papers also reveal that then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proposed that 1,000 Palestinian refugees be allowed to return annually to Israel over a period of five years — totaling just 5,000, a tiny fraction of those displaced after Israel’s creation.
On January 15, 2010, Erekat told U.S. diplomat David Hale that the Palestinians offered Israel the return of “a symbolic number” of refugees.
According to the documents, not only did Palestinian officials offer a low figure of returnees, the chief negotiator of the PLO, Saeb Erekat, said that refugees would not have voting rights on a possible peace deal with Israel.
Notes of a meeting on March 23, 2007, between Erekat and then-Belgian foreign minister Karel De Gucht, reveal that Erekat said, “I never said the Diaspora will vote. It’s not going to happen. The referendum will be for Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Can’t do it in Lebanon. Can’t do it in Jordan.”
While Erekat conceded the rights of Palestinian refugees to determine their own fate, during such meetings Israeli negotiators made clear their vision for the refugees.
Hamas blasts PA-Israel ‘cooperation’
The Palestinian Hamas movement has lashed out at the Palestinian Authority (PA) over the leaked classified documents revealing the PA’s alleged cooperation with Israel.
Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for the Islamic movement, said on Monday that the discovery of the documents unveils a scheme drawn up by the PA and Israel to destroy the Palestinian cause, Press TV reported.
His comments come on the heels of the release of over 16,000 controversial documents alleging that the PA made concessions to Israel during ‘secret talks’ between 2000 and 2010.
The documents, released by Al-Jazeera TV on Sunday, reveal that the PA secretly agreed to concede almost all of the occupied East al-Quds (Jerusalem) to Israel. The leak alleges that the unprecedented proposal is just one of a string of concessions offered by the PA.
The documents also maintain that Palestinian Authority’s chief negotiator Saeb Erekat proposed that al-Quds’ Old City be divided, but he immediately denied he had made the offer.
By staff and agencies