Palestinian Refugees

Re "It's Goodbye to Arafat, Farewell," Commentary, June 5: I find it grossly disingenuous for Edward Luttwak to claim that the intifada was Yasser Arafat's answer to the offer of more than 95% of the West Bank and 100% of Gaza that Ehud Barak made last summer in the Camp David summit. It is amazing how Luttwak fails to mention the most critical elements of Barak's "take it or leave it" offer that prompted Arafat to turn it down. In addition to the 90% or so of Palestinian land, Arafat was presented with impossible demands: to hand sovereignty over the Al-Aqsa Mosque to Israel, to accept a state that lacks territorial contiguity, to call a number of isolated pockets in East Jerusalem the capital of that state and to give up the Palestinian refugees' right of return to the land from which they were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and 1967.

"Settlers Demand Reprisal After Brutal Slaying of Boys" (May 10), about the beating deaths of two Israeli teens in the West Bank, reported that Yasser Arafat "did not condemn the killings when asked about them." Certainly Arafat could have taken what seems like a politically safe opportunity to denounce the killing of civilians, especially children. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, he didn't. As Americans, we do not have the luxury of such irresponsible reticence and inaction. Under U.S. law, it is a federal crime to murder a U.S. national.

Israeli and Palestinian teams failed to make a breakthrough in peace talks Friday, but they said negotiations looked "promising" as the sides undertook one of the most difficult issues--the fate of millions of Palestinian refugees. Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath reported "fruitful and very serious" talks, saying the sides were close on the issues of security and borders of a future Palestinian state. "This is real negotiations, not posturing," he said.

Some years ago, I met a 5-year-old boy in the Palestinian refugee camp of Dahaisha. I asked him if he had been born in the camp and he said "yes," but immediately added: "But I'm from Zakira." I was surprised: Zakira is a village that was conquered by Israel in its War of Independence in 1948 and no longer exists. But the boy insisted, "We had a huge house there, a castle and a grove of orange trees, each orange this big."

President Clinton's formula for Israeli-Palestinian peace is predicated on an unworkable and disastrous concept: that the world's largest group of refugees should renounce their basic human rights.

Despite the news from Washington, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process that began with such hope and promise seven years ago is now deceased. While the reasons for its demise are complex, the main cause of death is a tragically short-sighted Palestinian policy. Once again, by demanding everything, the Palestinians have doomed themselves to getting nothing. Surely, the earlier years of the process were fraught with conflict, delays and setbacks.

Yasser Arafat's refusal to abandon the "right of return" of several million Palestinian refugees to Israel proper belies his tentative acceptance of President Clinton's final Middle East peace proposal. The Oslo peace process was based on the assumption that, at the moment of truth, Arafat would sacrifice the dream of displacing the Jewish state with Greater Palestine in exchange for a more modest Palestinian state alongside Israel.

The apparent assumption on the part of American and Israeli negotiators that there can be a trade-off between some form of limited Palestinian sovereignty over parts of East Jerusalem and the right of return for about 3.5 million Palestinian refugees is invalid. The right of return, contained in U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 1948 and explicitly supported by the U.S. government until the 1992 Ottawa meeting on refugees, cannot be so easily dropped.

Despite another day of violence and death, Israel and the Palestinians moved closer to renewed peace talks Sunday as both sides announced that they will dispatch senior-level negotiating teams to Washington. Israeli and Palestinian representatives will arrive in Washington on Tuesday, spokesmen said, for separate meetings with U.S. officials. Trilateral talks are not yet planned but seem likely.

In 1948, 800,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled out of fear from their homes in what is now Israel, and they never have been allowed to return. Today, these refugees and their descendants number more than 4 million. More than any other factor, the dispossession and suffering of the Palestinian refugees have fueled the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. And more than any other factor, their fate is the key to its resolution.