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Perhaps the most difficult single issue confronting the parties to the Arab-Israel conflict is that of the Palestine refugees, who are insisting on their right to return to their former homes in what is now Israel. It has resisted solution since its creation in 1948 and shows no signs of abatement. It has already reared its head in the discussions held prior to the June 4 summit at Aqaba.

The penultimate paragraph of the Road Map that President Bush hopes to implement reads in part as follows:

"Parties (at the Second International Conference) reach final and comprehensive permanent status agreement that ends the Israel-Palestinian conflict in 2005, through a settlement negotiated between the parties based on U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242, 338, and 1397, that ends the occupation that began in 1967, and includes an agreed, just, fair and realistic solution to the refugee issue...."

Who can quarrel with that set of criteria? Of course the settlement will have to be agreed upon, otherwise it will be no settlement. That it should be just and fair seems only right, and of course it must be realistic or it will not work. The parties, however, are likely to put very different interpretations on the meaning of those terms. To the Palestinians, "just and fair" means the solution must recognize the right of the 1948 refugees to return to their homes. To the Israelis, "realistic" must mean that there can be no sizeable return of refugees. Resolving these differences will require compromises neither side has so far shown a readiness to make. The property and legal issues of Jerusalem and the borders can be settled by drawing lines on maps and reaching agreements on shared sovereignty. The refugee issue is a human conundrum that transcends property.

The November 29, 1947 UN General Assembly partition resolution called for creation of an Arab and a Jewish state in economic union in Palestine. Jerusalem was to be a corpus separatum under international control. The population of Palestine at the time consisted of 1,200,000

Arabs and 650,000 Jews. Forty-five percent of the area was allotted to the Arab state while the Jewish state was to receive fifty-five percent, about half of which was the largely desert Negev. Forty-two percent of the population of the area allotted to the Jewish state was Arab. When the fighting was over in 1948, the Jewish state controlled 77% of the area and Jordan and Egypt the remaining 23%. There was no independent Palestinian state. Instead, there were 725,000 to 750,000 Arab refugees from the areas controlled by Israel who were not allowed to return to their homes in spite of UN resolutions calling either for their repatriation or for compensation to be paid to them. [1] Some 150,000 Arabs remained under Israeli control, largely in the Jerusalem and Galilee regions.

Israel's official position has long been that it bears no responsibility for the refugee problem, that the refugees left of their own accord, encouraged to do so by their leaders, including the Mufti of Jerusalem, who urged them to leave so the invading Arab armies would be freer to deal with the Jews. The Mufti's alleged broadcast of these remarks has never been documented and Israeli historians have uncovered official documents that record deliberate, forcible expulsions of Arabs who had opted to remain in the area controlled by Israel but were not allowed to do so. One of the earliest historical accounts of this process of ethnic cleansing was an article by Benny Morris in the Winter 1986 issue of the Middle East Journal that documented the expulsion of some 50,000 - 70,000 Arabs from the towns of Lydda and Ramleh in the coastal plain by the Israeli armed forces. How many of the total 750,000 were expelled and how many left "voluntarily" has never been determined, but from my own interviews with refugees in Jerusalem fifty years ago I concluded that the majority left because of fear, like refugees from any military conflict, not because they were forced out at bayonet point.

The Israelis assumed, or hoped, that if they did nothing the refugees would go away in time -- they would be assimilated and absorbed by the other Arabs and Israel would be left in peace to enjoy the fruits of its conquests. This outcome was foreseen in Herzl's famous remark about the local inhabitants scampering over the hills when the Jews arrived with their firman or title to the land from the Sultan in Constantinople, but it did not work out that way. The Ottoman Empire collapsed and was divided up into separate entities recognizing no supreme authority short of God, and the United Nations was not in a position to impose a solution. Had the 1947 Partition Plan been implemented in full, the refugee problem would have been less serious, but others would have taken its place. As it is, the refugees have refused to accept resettlement and keep insisting that their right to return back to their villages (most of which have been occupied or destroyed by the Israelis) is not negotiable.

In their own postponement of the evil day, the American peace processors have operated for almost thirty years on the theory that once a "dynamic of peace" was established and progress was made on substantial lesser problems, the refugee and Jerusalem problems would be soluble. At that point, the parties would have so much at stake they would have to accept a compromise that had hitherto been unacceptable. They were supposed to have arrived at such a point at Camp David in 2000 but the dynamic was not strong enough to overcome the clumsiness of the negotiators and the seriousness of the issues.

Now we are approaching such a moment of truth again. The refugee question is not due to be tackled immediately, but it is already out in front as an existential issue. While the Palestinians demand that their right to return to their homes in Israel be recognized, Israel wants none of that because it would mean that the Jewish state would soon lose its identity as such, not to mention the security, social and economic burdens that would arise immediately.

Even if no refugees return, Israel faces a daunting demographic challenge. Today the original 150,000 Israeli Arabs have grown to about 1,000,000. There are another 2.5 - 2.7 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, roughly half of whom are registered as refugees.

There are about 5,000,000 Israeli Jews. By 2020, at current growth rates, there will be about 7 million Arabs and 6.3 million Jews in the area between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. If at that point Israel still controls all the territory it controls today, the Jews will be a minority in their own state.

Scattered between Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and the other Arab states are over 4,000,000 refugees registered with UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees. There are another 4,000,000 Palestinians who are not registered as refugees, three-fourths of whom live on the West Bank and in Jordan. How many of the refugees would opt to return to their homes in what is now Israel if given the chance to do so (as opposed to accepting compensation for their losses and remaining elsewhere) is unknown, but it is undoubtedly very substantial. To their number would be added many Palestinians who are not registered with UNRWA but who would claim to be refugees nevertheless.

An August 2001 poll of refugee opinion in the West Bank and Gaza conducted by the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information at Tantur, near Bethlehem, showed that an overwhelming majority rejected the idea of resettlement and compensation as a substitute for return to their homes in what was Palestine. One hundred percent said "return" meant going back to the 1948 territories, not to the territory to be controlled by the Palestinian state as some of the peace processors are suggesting. Ninety-six point seven percent of those under 60 rejected the idea that the PLO had the right to concede on the right of return, and 97.4 % agreed that it was impossible to accept a peace agreement that did not provide for the right of return. The fact that their return would mean the end of the Jewish state was probably a source of quiet satisfaction to the respondents, but they did not address the question of how unrealistic such an outcome was. (A summary of the poll's findings is in the Winter 2002 issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies.) The validity of this poll has been questioned and the intervening two years of violence may have moderated expectations somewhat, but in the absence of countervailing evidence we should take the survey as a reliable indication of the orientation, if not the intensity, of what moderate negotiators are up against.

What is to be done? American efforts will probably focus on some compromise involving token return and generous compensation plus facilitated resettlement within and outside the region. This assumes that the refugees will accept such a compromise when the cards are finally put on the table. However dubious that proposition may be, it is difficult to see the Americans following any other course, even though the initial result is likely to be deadlock. In the meantime, it may be useful to review briefly the most serious effort made to date to put such a compromise into effect -- the Joseph Johnson Plan of forty years ago.

In response to representations from various Arab leaders, President Kennedy had written to them on May 11, 1961, committing the US to seeking an equitable solution of the refugee problem, and in a conversation with Kennedy on May 30, 1961, Prime Minister Ben Gurion of Israel had reluctantly agreed that it was worth a try. At Kennedy's initiative, Joseph E. Johnson, President of the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, was appointed special representative by the Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC) in 1961 to recommend steps to resolve the problem. (The PCC was a phantom body left over from the conflict in 1948 that had made tentative efforts in the past to settle or ameliorate the Arab-Israel problem, with notable lack of success. Its members were Turkey, France and the United States. It may still be on the books but has not functioned since 1964.)

Johnson accepted appointment in August 1961. He made his first trip to the area in August-September of that year, while the General Assembly endorsed a US-sponsored resolution endorsing the PCC's action. He made a second trip the following spring and made specific proposals in July 1962. A long memorandum describing his proposals was forwarded to Kennedy, with a tepid endorsement from Secretary of State Rusk, on August 7, 1962. In the face of anticipated Israeli rejection, fortified by the efforts of Israel's supporters in the U.S., Kennedy decided not to go forward with it.

The essence of the Johnson plan was a staged process of determining refugee desires regarding repatriation and resettlement, first through a public and general survey and then through individual and private interviews after the real alternatives had been explored. It would be made clear that participation was purely voluntary and answers would be treated as confidential. An unstated assumption in the written plan was that the refugees would feel freer to opt for resettlement if they could make their choice in private, without being subject to pressure from the hard liners. The questionnaire permitted them to list four choices as to where they would like to be resettled. There was no commitment that they would get their wishes, but nothing was ruled out.

Although it was not stated in the plan, it was understood that destinations such as the United States, Canada, Australia and Western Europe would be among the real possibilities and that there would be liberalization of US immigration laws and regulations to permit this to happen. There would be a small relocation allowance plus UN compensation, with interest, for lost properties for those who chose resettlement. That was not mentioned in the questionnaire, but the refugee would be asked if he or she wanted financial help with resettlement from the UN and if there was property for which there should be compensation. A four-page questionnaire was to be attached for details as to the property or other assets in question. Anyone who was granted repatriation would have to claim compensation from the Israel government, which was considered a substantial disincentive, since Israel had no law providing for such compensation. Once choices had been ascertained, negotiations with prospective host governments on implementation would begin. The receiving governments would determine who was to be admitted to their territories.

It was expected that Israel would resist the plan, but that it would come around to accepting 100,000 to 150,000 refugees if the Arab governments were cooperating on resettlement and it was assured of generous USG financial support. It would have the unquestioned right to refuse people it did not want. The proponents argued that Israel would gain enormously from the restoration to useful lives of the refugees, whose numbers were put at 1,100,000.

Johnson was very upbeat about his plan, and those of us in Beirut who met him were favorably impressed with his approach. There was something of a consensus among us that if given a choice between return to a cool reception in Israel on the one hand or subsidized resettlement in the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe on the other, the overwhelming majority of the refugees would opt for the latter. This assumption was never put to the test, and at this remove there is no way of knowing whether it was realistic then. Would it be realistic now, forty years later? Not judging by the Tantur poll.

[1] The basic UN text is General Assembly Resolution No. 194 of December 11, 1948, which states in part:

"Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be aid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the governments or authorities responsible."

There has been no agreed value placed on Palestinian properties abandoned in Israel, but a 1964 UN estimate by the PCC put it at over $1 billion. . Assuming $2 billion in 2003 dollars would give an average compensation of about $500 per head. Hardly a princely sum!