Are the Israelis ready to apply the same principles to the Palestinian refugees that they demand for their own people?

"The complexity of applying a single standard of law and morality to both sides - the critical foundation on which any successful diplomacy must proceed in the Palestine-Israel and wider Arab-Israeli conflict - was raised in the second development that caught my eye this week: a draft bill in the Israeli parliament to compensate Jews who were forced out of or fled Arab countries after the establishment of Israel in 1948.

Among the arguments for the bill before the Immigration and Absorption Committee last Tuesday were references to a February 2008 US House of Representatives resolution saying that the United States should demand that Jewish refugees be acknowledged and treated in the same way as Palestinian refugees. The Israeli bill also demands compensation for Jewish communal properties, like synagogues and cemeteries.

The prevalent Israeli aim in this bill is not to resolve all refugeehood cases fairly, but to claim that a “population exchange” between Palestinians and Jewish Israelis occurred in 1948 and therefore the Palestinians have no more claims, and there is nothing to be resolved anymore.

The reality is more complex for two reasons: the circumstances under which Palestinians and Arab Jews left their homes and moved or were forced elsewhere are very different and cannot be lumped into a single dynamic of population exchanges. Nevertheless, the resolution of these and other claims by refugees or displaced persons must reflect application of a single standard of refugee law, whether pertaining to restitution, repatriation, compensation or other mechanisms of conflict resolution.

Are the Israelis ready to apply the same principles to the Palestinian refugees that they demand for their own people? Similarly, are the Israelis prepared to allow an impartial international investigation of their conduct in the Gaza war, alongside a similar investigation in Gaza?

Try as people may, we simply cannot escape the principle that adjudicating conflicts through the equal application of the law to both sides is the inescapable bottom line of any successful negotiation that sees both feuding parties directly involved in the process.

The UN secretary general and the Israeli parliament this week remind us how to evade this reality, when in fact we need to discover how to embrace it." Rami G. Khouri

http://www.jordantimes.com/index.php?news=23945

Peace making requires application of the law