Ravi - I just wanted to say that I really appreciated Ahmed's interview. It was the first time I've really heard a Palestinian speak so passionately AND honestly about the challenges facing their people, and it was a breath of fresh air. The man is absolutely right: However horrible what the Israeli state is doing is -- and it IS horrific -- it's not going to get solved by a terrorist state whose explicit strategy is to maximize their own civilian casualties, NOR by an impotent but dangerously out-of-touch international activist movement that promises Palestinians a revanchist fantasy that would literally require ANOTHER crime against humanity (expelling Israelis from homes many have inhabited for generations now) to achieve.
Personally, what I wish we could see would be a compromise that granted some sort of "right of first refusal to return", with an accompanying "right of reparation". Basically, for all the homes that a given Palestinian family or its descendants can show original ca.~1949 ownership of, whenever it goes up on the market, they would have the right of first refusal to have it repurchased for them by the Palestinian gov't from Israel. The repurchase fund would itself be funded out of a loan program subsidized and capitalized by Israel.
Also, since in a lot of cases we'd expect the houses to never come up on the market (or stay off for decades on end), if the descendants don't want to wait that long, then they could sell their right (presumably to investors) and have immediate cash on hand to go rebuild their lives and society with. We'd probably set up some sort of further mechanism for transforming these sold-on claims into regular old liens that could be disposed of by the market (or by another subsidized-and-capitalized reparations fund).
The way I see it, this provides a way for Palestinians to either (A) consciously decide to _move_the_hell_on_ and give them the immediate capital to make the best of that decision, or (B) establish a hope for a future return without compounding the original Nakba's wrong with its reverse of expropriating and cleansing Israelis. If anything, (B) also provides a gradualist mechanism for a peaceful reintegration of the two societies.
Ravi - I just wanted to say that I really appreciated Ahmed's interview. It was the first time I've really heard a Palestinian speak so passionately AND honestly about the challenges facing their people, and it was a breath of fresh air. The man is absolutely right: However horrible what the Israeli state is doing is -- and it IS horrific -- it's not going to get solved by a terrorist state whose explicit strategy is to maximize their own civilian casualties, NOR by an impotent but dangerously out-of-touch international activist movement that promises Palestinians a revanchist fantasy that would literally require ANOTHER crime against humanity (expelling Israelis from homes many have inhabited for generations now) to achieve.
Personally, what I wish we could see would be a compromise that granted some sort of "right of first refusal to return", with an accompanying "right of reparation". Basically, for all the homes that a given Palestinian family or its descendants can show original ca.~1949 ownership of, whenever it goes up on the market, they would have the right of first refusal to have it repurchased for them by the Palestinian gov't from Israel. The repurchase fund would itself be funded out of a loan program subsidized and capitalized by Israel.
Also, since in a lot of cases we'd expect the houses to never come up on the market (or stay off for decades on end), if the descendants don't want to wait that long, then they could sell their right (presumably to investors) and have immediate cash on hand to go rebuild their lives and society with. We'd probably set up some sort of further mechanism for transforming these sold-on claims into regular old liens that could be disposed of by the market (or by another subsidized-and-capitalized reparations fund).
The way I see it, this provides a way for Palestinians to either (A) consciously decide to _move_the_hell_on_ and give them the immediate capital to make the best of that decision, or (B) establish a hope for a future return without compounding the original Nakba's wrong with its reverse of expropriating and cleansing Israelis. If anything, (B) also provides a gradualist mechanism for a peaceful reintegration of the two societies.
Anyways, that's just my $0.02. Cheers!