Chicago Tribune | Lost homeland
My grandfather fled Jerusalem in 1948 just before war broke out. As a father of three young children, he was concerned primarily about the safety of his family. There had been unrest and clashes for a long time, but it was the news from Deir Yassin--where the Jewish Irgun and Stern groups killed between 100 and 200 Palestinian villagers--that finally persuaded him to leave. He and my grandmother took little with them. Like most Palestinians who fled or were forced to flee then, they didn't think their absence would be anything but temporary. Clinging to that belief, my grandmother lived in London for 40 years without ever learning English beyond the rudimentary. As it turned out, she would never return.

Their house still stands in West Jerusalem and is now inhabited by a Jewish family. My grandfather still has the deeds. No one ever bought or offered to buy the house from him. He has received no compensation and has no legal recourse.

To understand the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian longing for a state, it is necessary to understand two basic Palestinian narratives. One is of exile and dispossession, my grandfather's story; the other is the story we see on our TV screens every day: occupation. Both narratives arose as a result of the creation of Israel.

Palestinians call the creation of Israel in 1948 al Nakbeh, the catastrophe. Out of a total population of about 1.25 million, almost 60 percent of all Palestinians were displaced by the subsequent war. None was ever allowed to return. Repeated calls by the international community and UN resolutions asserting the right of return of the refugees went unheeded by Israel. Their houses and their land were taken over by the new state. No compensation has ever been paid. It was a historic injustice.

My grandfather was one of the "lucky" ones. He eventually found a job in London and secured British citizenship. Homeless and stateless, most of the Palestinian refugees ended up in camps hastily erected by their host countries and the UN. Most of these refugees and their descendants remain in those camps to this day. Many still have no passports and have never left the countries where they reside. Almost all still dream of their homes in Palestine, or, in more and more cases now, of their fathers' and grandfathers' homes.

It is impossible to overstate the sense of injustice Palestinians feel over the displacement of almost their entire people. The blatant Israeli disregard for Palestinian suffering and dispossession as well as international law and moral imperative only heightened the resentment. The apparent unwillingness by the then-Great Powers, Britain and France, and today the United States to force on Israel the standards they themselves lay down, was a source of intense disillusionment.

A Palestinian narrative of exile was born; this narrative deepened the Palestinian identity and fueled Palestinian aspirations for statehood.

The 1967 war, resulting in the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, created a second Palestinian narrative, a narrative of occupation.

The Israeli occupation elicited international condemnation, by now customary. The international community affirmed the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and passed the legally binding UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, calling on Israel to withdraw immediately from occupied territories.

Israel ignored all of this and never attempted to incorporate the local population into its state. Instead, Israel imposed a harsh military rule.

Successive governments undertook comprehensive settlement building in the occupied territories, amounting to a de facto creeping annexation. In East Jerusalem, which Israel unilaterally annexed--an annexation not recognized by a single country--countless Palestinian homes were demolished and entire Arab neighborhoods were taken over to make way for Jewish housing.

Again the international community protested. The Israeli settlements are illegal under international law, which forbids the transfer in part or in whole of an occupying power's civilian population to occupied territory. Again to no avail.

Meanwhile, life under occupation was unbearable. In addition to the larger issues of house demolitions and settlement building were the day-to-day humiliations of being ruled by a foreign military. The Palestinians of the occupied territories were stateless and could not travel abroad. Roadblocks, travel restrictions, arbitrary arrests and curfews increased Palestinian resentment, while Arab and international impotence crystallized the need for Palestinians to control their destinies.

In 1987, the Palestinians took matters into their own hands and rose in a popular uprising, the intifada, to end the Israeli occupation and claim what they had been denied: their right to self-determination. Israel initially tried to suppress the uprising by force. Yitzhak Rabin, then defense minister, instructed his soldiers to "break their bones." He eventually came to the conclusion, as he later revealed, "that you can't win a war against women and children." The intifada forced on Israel the realization that the occupation could not continue indefinitely, and Israel entered into negotiations with the PLO, negotiations that ultimately led to the Oslo peace process.

Despite the promise the peace process held out to Palestinians of finally achieving statehood, neither the narrative of occupation nor the narrative of exile and dispossession has been resolved. East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, despite some transfer of authority during the years of the peace process, remain under occupation. Palestinians of the diaspora still cannot return to claim their property and land, nor do they have access to compensation.

Nevertheless, the intifada, and the peace process that resulted from it, was a defining moment for Palestinian understanding of a final settlement. By accepting that any Palestinian state would be limited to East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza despite the historic link to the whole land, Palestinians had made the ultimate compromise. The West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza are only 22 percent of historic Palestine. Israel would be left with 78 percent of a land Palestinians had lived on for centuries. Such a huge territorial concession was hard to swallow, but, in the overriding interest of securing self-determination, most Palestinians did.

This, in turn, has important consequences for the refugee problem. My grandfather knows that he will never be allowed to return to claim his house in West Jerusalem. He doesn't like it, and he doesn't think it's right. But it has become clear to most diaspora Palestinians that the practical implementation of the right of return will simply never happen.

But the narrative of dispossession is too critical to Palestinian identity for the right of return to be signed away. Even if the actual return is not implemented, Israel must accept responsibility for its role in creating the refugee problem, and the international community must be mobilized to provide an acceptable alternative for Palestinian refugees.
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