Ex-PA minister: Peace draft doesn't concede right of return

[Gimel]

Former Palestinian Minister for Prisoner Affairs
Hisham Abd al-Raziq was quoted in Monday's Al-Quds
newspaper as saying that the unofficial draft
peace agreement completed Sunday by Palestinian
and leftist Israeli negotiators does not include a
Palestinian concession on the right of return.

Such a concession, which the Palestinians have agreed to
exchange for Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple
Mount, comprises the core of the agreement, known as the
Geneva Accord.
More

[bluesoul]

1. Generousity

One can only admire that after all the land grabbing and everything the Palestinians are ready to concede to such terms..

[drdon326]

2. You didnt read it right.

"On a substantive level, Abd al-Raziq seems to be
committing to the same treatment of "refugees"
as the agreement specifies. However, his
explicit rejection of a Palestinian concession
of the right of return, despite the equally
explicit wording of the agreement demanding
such a concession, could be interpreted as a
contradiction of the peace draft."

hes NOT conceding the right of return.

Hopefully Israel wont be fooled by the bullshit.

[bluesoul]

3. Fooled

Neither were Palestinians fooled by the so called "generous offer" ..

[rini]

7. exactly

n/t

[Fight_n_back]

4. Actually

since you are an informed observer, you know that the number of Jews that were expelled from the West Bank is roughly equal to the number of Arabs expelled from Israle so it is a wash and could be negotiatied that way.

Why you seek to represent it another way only you can answer.

[Aidoneus]

5. could you back up that very dubious figure?

since you are an informed observer, you know that the number of Jews that were expelled from the West Bank is roughly equal to the number of Arabs expelled from Israle so it is a wash and could be negotiatied that way.

maybe specify a specific time frame for this expulsion you speak of.. Roman times maybe, Crusades period maybe but that's stretching it (only to return with Salahuddeen's victories), but never within the rest of the last thousand years. Aside from Jerusalem and a few small communities, there was never then nor now as much a Jewish population in the "West Bank" lands as the hundreds of thousands expelled from the hundreds of Palestinian villages overrun and emptied.

Please point out on this map where this very large (and secret, it appears) population to be expelled was:
http://www.passia.org/palestine_facts/MAPS/Distribution_of_population.htm

a land ownership breakdown from a year or two previous to that:
http://www.passia.org/palestine_facts/MAPS/Zionist_and_Palestinian_landownership.htm

map of land ownership areas at the time of the "Partition". Note that there's no massive area denoting the alleged large Jewish population in the West Bank areas:--
http://www.passia.org/palestine_facts/MAPS/Landownership.html

So where were these hundreds of thousands of the West Bank's secret Jewish population living? Maybe somebody should've alerted the Zionist leaders in the Yishuv & Tel Aviv of all of these people, they probably would've liked to know..

[Gimel]

8. Jews expelled from Arab lands

This may in fact be what Yang intended to say. The number of Jews expelled from Arab lands prior to 1947 is greater than the number of Arabs that left Israel to live in the West Bank towns, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon.

While several posters insist on recalling "History" (by which they mean Arab history to the exclusion of Jewish history) they seem to forget these facts. The largest ethnic identity in Israel today is that of Morocco (a land of Sephardic Jews). I posted a link to the current population statistics and ethnic breakdown this week.

*Some 41% of Jews are from Europe or America, 16% from Africa, and 13.2% from Asia. Moroccans, who number 500,000, are the single largest group with a common host country, followed by Iraqis, Romanians, and Poles.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=124&topic_id=19476

Edit: To supply link and add excerpt

[Aidoneus]

9. that wasn't what YANG said

.

[Aidoneus]

12. ?

can you at least try and back up this claim, YANG?

[Aidoneus]

17. ??

If you won't even try to back it up, then admit that you told a lie and retract it..

[bluesoul]

6. hmm

I do not represent it in any way, I only talk about the facts. I do not deny what you have said.

[Darranar]

10. Lol...

the entire number of Jews in Palestine in 1948 was 600,000. 700,000+ Arabs fled.

[tinnypriv]

11. I'm fairly sure it actually does concede it

But I'll reserve judgement until the full text is published.

After all, even The Roadkill sounded good in the PR blitz lead-in... :eyes:

[Name removed]

13. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Gimel]

15. Right of Return

Settlements are illegal, right of return is the law.
Then this should apply to the rights of the Jews as well.


If Arafat was as good a statesman as he is a soldier, he would never have led anyone down a garden path on that.

So you consider Oslos the "Garden Path"?

[DuctapeFatwa]

16. I have said before that Arafat screwed the Palestinian people royally

and played Israel for a fool by letting his infatuation with swimmin pools and movie stars take precedence over his responsibility to be straight about what would and wouldn't fly with the Palestinian people, since he was supposed to be representing them.

But the truth is that Arafat cared more about being the toast of Europe and everybody's favorite new revolutionary and hobnobbing with a succession of US politicians than he did about his job, and so he told people what would get him the next trip, the next perk, and the Nobel Peace Prize.

As any Palestinian will tell you, neither illegal settlements or the right of return or negotiable, and that includes those Palestinians who don't even KNOW it's the law.

All of the various "accords," Oslo, Camp David, whatever, are nothing but eyewash because they are all based on a false premise.

The question is not what Israel will give Palestine.

The land is not Israel's to give. It is the other way around. The question is what Palestine will give Israel.

And you can go ahead and let out that breath with which you are about to go on about the United Nations and 1948.

Another false premise is that whatever happened with the UN and 1948 is anything more than an agreement between some rich western guys who had bought a few Arab dollahos.

AS was mentioned in a thread about Kurdistan the other day, a nation is not defined by a piece of paper written on by people in Washington and New York.

And if Israel really puts all that much stock in a New York piece of paper because it is stamped UN, there are 69 more of them that they seem to feel less reverence for.

Now the management here doesn't like it when I say that the US screwed Israel from the get-go, but just as Arafat went to what was supposed to be a negotiating table with nothing in his mouth that had anything to do with reality, decisions made in the US do not now and did not in 1948 have anything to do with the reality of what has been going on on the ground in the Levant.

European invasions of ancient lands have never been popular with the invadees, and that is the name of the game here. I don't doubt that there are many Israelis with sincere religious beliefs, and there were Dutch with sincere religious beliefs in Indonesia, and in fact, the pope wrote to the Spaniards in Mexico and practically BLESSED the wholesale rape of Indian women, telling them they were creating "la santa raza," "the holy race."

That did not make the rapes more popular, and it did not make the people who were enslaved meek and obedient, and it did not comfort the mothers whose children were murdered.

Not in Indonesia, not in the Americas, not in Africa, not in South Asia, and not in the Middle East.

And yes, anyone in Israel who wishes to return to Europe or the US should have the right to do so, and frankly, if they did, it would make negotiating a homeland for Middle Eastern and African Israelis a hell of a lot simpler.

[bemildred]

18. Props dude.

Well said.
And they still don't get it.
And they still don't get that they don't get it.
So the war will continue.

[DuctapeFatwa]

14. The link is forbidden but here are some comments about the swiss accord

The so-called “Geneva Agreement” or “Swiss Accord” has triggered strong reactions from Palestinian public leaders who dismissed as “as unbinding to the Palestinian people.”

The agreement, formulated in Geneva last week by a group of Palestinian and Zionist figures, including former officials, effectively concedes the right of return for some five million Palestinian refugees in exchange for Palestinian statehood.

“This agreement represents the views of those who signed it, it doesn’t represent the views of the Palestinian people,” said Jamil Majdalawi, a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Majdalawi pointed out that the Right of Return represented the central aspect of the Palestinian cause, adding that sacrificing that right meant killing the entire Palestinian cause.

“The right of return is the heart of the Palestinian problem.”

He called the Geneva document a “corruption of the Oslo Accords as the Oslo Accords were a corruption of UN resolution 242.”

Abdullah al Hourani, head of the PLO refugee department, also castigated the agreement.

“I am talking about five million refugees. Nobody has the right to give up their right to return to their homes from which they were expelled at gunpoint.”

Hourani warned that the PLO would no longer be the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people if it chose to sacrifice the right of return.

“The right of return was the raison d’etre of the PLO, if it abandoned that right, it would lose that raison d’etre.”

It is not clear if the Palestinian leadership accepts the accords.

On Monday, former PA official Yasser Abed Rabbo told the al-Quds daily newspaper that Yasser Arafat had called him to congratulate him on signing the draft agreement.

However, there has been no official reaction to the accords from the Palestinian Authority.