294
PARTISAN REVIEW
accepted, it has not dismantled even one of the fenced refugee camps in
the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and has not offered their inhabitants
any future or any hope. Nor did it relieve them-and Palestinian soci–
ety-of the role of the forced victim. Instead, the conditions for residents
of the camps have grown worse, the budgets allotted to them have been
shifted, independent initiatives for welfare programs have been rejected
by UNRWA authorities-all of which immortalizes the status of the
refugees. (The residents of the camps have even been forbidden
to
pop–
ulate the few neighborhoods that have been built for them, according
to
Palestinian activists at a symposium at the Yakar Institute in November
1999.)
Even the spontaneous offers of peace activists to improve the
conditions of life in the camps,
to
plaster, paint, remove the "splendor of
the garbage," encountered a firm refusal. On the contrary, one of the
first decisions of the Authority in
1994
turned the demand for "the right
of return" into the central·slogan and closed its eyes to the continuation
of the extremist Islamic incitement to
shahid-ism
among the residents of
the camps. The devotion to "the right of return," more than the territo–
rial dissension, is also what blew up the Camp David peace talks.
I believe that, along with territorial and security arrangements, all
negotiations will have
to
settle the problem of the Palestinian refugees
as a condition for accepting the complexity of reality, of mutual injury
and loss, and as a genuine expression of freedom, hope, and human dig–
nity. But first of all, there must be an opening in the physical and emo–
tional prison fence for millions of human beings. Giving up "the right
of return" and settling the refugees would constitute a basis for Pales–
tinian independence from the prison of victimhood and fanaticism.
Cooperation of the Arab and Muslim world in settling the refugees
would constitute recognition, in actual fact, of the establishment of the
State of Israel as a national home for the Jewish people. Recognition by
the State of Israel of its share of responsibility in uprooting the Pales–
tinians from their homes, and its participation in restoring them, will
extricate Israeli society from sediments of guilt, and the manifestations
of fear and violence stemming from them, and will realize her aspiration
for justice. The Christian world also needs to recognize its share in the
story and its responsibility for the solution, and the ways of love and
grace that do not need the spectacle of the martyr to evoke them.
CLEARLY, THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT has dimensions of
tragedy, but its settlement can only come from daring to face all its com–
ponents, and progress can be made only in stages. Now, two and a half
years after the outbreak of the war, Egypt is attempting to have the
