Palestinians Divided on Dreams for a Homeland

BALATA, West Bank — It is not uncommon for a Palestinian refugee to invite a visitor into his modest home, where he produces an antique key or a raft of decaying papers, the last symbols of a lost land.

Suhaila Abu Hamden was no different. She fetched an old tin cigarette box from its careful storage place in the closet and took out a yellowed, tattered document bearing the lion-and-crown insignia of the British Mandate and the “Government of Palestine.”

Dated May 14, 1945, the document registered in faded ink her family’s four dunams of land, about an acre, near what is today the Israeli city of Ramat Gan.

Like thousands of Palestinians, Abu Hamden, 52, speaks of returning to a home her family fled when she was just an infant. Some of her 11 children, especially those in high school, also speak with fiery dedication of their desire to return.

But others in this family, and in many Palestinian families, have become pragmatic. Nephew Falah, who is 36, has a good job and a pregnant wife, focuses on a strong Palestinian state that he hopes will soon emerge. “I am ready for a normal life,” he said.

At the Camp David summit thousands of miles from here, the plight of more than 3 million Palestinians--refugees and their descendants--is one of the most vexing issues blocking an end to decades of Arab-Israeli strife.

Officially, Palestinian leaders insist that they will not relinquish the “right of return” for their people. Israeli leaders insist that they will never recognize such a right nor permit such a return.

However, there are signs of compromise--due, in part, to a shift in Palestinian thinking.

Fifty-two years ago, Palestinians fled or were forced from their villages and towns in the fighting that followed Israel’s declaration of independence. Under a 1948 United Nations resolution, the refugees are to be allowed to return home or be compensated for the loss of their property.

Israel says it cannot allow repatriation en masse, because to do so would destroy the Jewish state, undermining its demographics and posing a potential security threat. Further, Prime Minister Ehud Barak has said his country cannot and will not accept responsibility or blame for the refugees’ plight because many who fled did so on orders of the Arab leaders of the time.

However, Israel is offering to accept a limited number of refugees who have family in the Jewish state, and it wants to participate in a multibillion-dollar international fund that will pay to resettle Palestinians elsewhere and improve their mostly dire living conditions.

Despite the rhetoric of their leadership, there is widespread awareness among Palestinians that there will be no collective return home. The faded dream has been replaced increasingly in recent years by the desire for an independent and sovereign state on attainable land, such as the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“There is a realization that the state is the most important value in terms of national priorities, and that if one is going to sacrifice, it is the state that cannot be sacrificed,” said Khalil Shikaki, an expert surveyor of Palestinian public opinion who heads a think tank in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Shikaki said he first observed the trend about three years ago, when he included a question in one of his regular polls about a proposal contained in a secret plan drafted by Yossi Beilin, a peace proponent who is now the Israeli justice minister, and Abu Mazen, a senior advisor to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. The proposal called for compensation instead of return, and Shikaki found majority support for it.

Still, recognition of what they see as their entitlement to return home is of utmost psychological importance to many Palestinians, especially members of the older generation such as Abu Hamden, whose lives have passed in squalid camps. They feel that they were done an injustice, and they need vindication.

Abu Hamden’s nephew Falah respects that, but said he sees Camp David as a “historic opportunity for peace” that must be seized, even if that means compromise.

“Give us the West Bank, Gaza--it’s enough,” he told his aunt, the two seated on low chairs in her tidy living room.

“But we want the sea, the coast,” she answered. “We depend on you young people to fight for this. . . . The only way to get our land back is with a gun.”

Later, Falah, who drafts blueprints for an architectural firm in Ramallah, said he grew up listening to stories told by his mother and aunt about the land they were forced to abandon, a village called Jamasin: beautiful farmland straddling a river, with orange groves and a herd of cattle “big enough to feed all of Palestine.”

He has been back to what he believes is the spot, now a field and some buildings.

“My mother would tell me about our country, and I felt something. But when I went back to see it, I felt nothing,” he said. “I spent all my life here,” he said of the Balata refugee camp, where an open sewage drain runs outside his mother’s tiny four-room home. “My friends are here, the people I like are here. A lot of people want to go back, but, frankly, I’d just as soon not.”

Balata, on the outskirts of the West Bank city of Nablus, is the largest of 19 refugee camps in the West Bank and a traditional hotbed of armed resistance to Israeli rule. Nearly 20,000 people live there, cramped into a tangle of squat concrete dwellings.

Some homes are comfortable: The house of Abu Hamden, whose husband is a successful carpenter, has faux marble floor tiles and a second story. Other homes are like that of her sister-in-law Halimeh, Falah’s mother, with its windowless walls of flaking plaster and only a sink and hot plate as a kitchen.

Of about 3.5 million Palestinian refugees registered by the United Nations, nearly half already live in the West Bank or Gaza. The rest are located in camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, where they pose a complicated political and diplomatic problem. The de facto host countries repeatedly have asserted that they do not want to become permanent homes for the Palestinians.

In Lebanon and Jordan, the Palestinian refugees threaten to upset delicate domestic ethnic balances. Lebanon, especially, is desperate to be rid of Palestinian camps that have been a source of armed conflict.

By most accounts, the bulk of returns will be to the eventual Palestinian state, despite Arafat’s reluctance to absorb additional refugees at a precarious time. The potential is enormous for friction between those returning and those who have remained all along in the West Bank and Gaza, as they compete for scarce jobs, aid and position.

Shikaki’s rough estimate is that as many as half a million Palestinian refugees could resettle in a Palestinian state over the next decade.

Israeli news reports have suggested that Barak’s government may be willing to admit as many as 10,000 Palestinians annually as part of a family-reunification program. The Jewish state says it already has admitted more than 70,000 Palestinians in previous years.

“We will consider unifying families [of Palestinians] living in Israel,” Haim Ramon, one of Barak’s senior ministers, said Monday, “not as recognition of the right of return from a legal, political or moral point of view, but as a gesture of mercy.”

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* SUMMIT OPTIONS

Israeli and Palestinian delegations at Camp David are looking for fallback positions. A10