The 'Right of Return' Debate Revisited by Max Abrahms

Middle East Intelligence Bulletin August-September 2003
Vol. 5 No. 8-9 Table of Contents
Jointly published by the United States Committee for a Free Lebanon and the
Middle East Forum

[Max Abrahms is a Soref research fellow at the Washington Institute for Near
East Policy, where he specializes in the Arab-Israeli conflict.]

Not since Israeli historian Benny Morris' controversial 1989 book, The Birth
of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, has a single study impacted the public
discourse over the "right of return" like the Palestinian Center for Policy
and Survey Research's (PSR) July 2003 poll.[1] According to Dr. Khalil
Shikaki, the well-known director of this Ramallah-based institute, the
survey reveals that while most Palestinian refugees demand the "right of
return" to land captured by Israel in 1948, the overwhelming majority do not
wish to actually exercise this right by relocating to Israel.[2]

Scattered throughout the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon,
the survivors and descendents of the roughly 700,000 Palestinians who fled
their homes during Israel's War of Independence are believed to number up to
4.5 million. Previous polls have shown that the vast majority of them are
deeply committed to the "right of return."[3] Since a mass influx of
Palestinians would threaten the Jewish character of the state, the Israeli
government and public have consistently opposed making this concession.

Shikaki is quick to claim, however, that because his poll shows that
Palestinians do not in fact want to move to Israel, granting the "right of
return" would in no "way, shape, or form affect the demographic balance in
Israel"[4] and "talk about the destruction of Israel through the right of
return is nonsense."[5]

Influential media and policy venues have not only given his claims copious
hearings, but have accepted them as fact. The Wall Street Journal first ran
an opinion piece by Shikaki and then applied his interpretation of the
polling data to its own editorial analysis the following day: "The silent
majority of Palestinians seem ready for compromise, as demonstrated recently
by a poll showing that most refugees are not interested in exercising a
right of return to Israel."[6] Former US Assistant Secretary of State
Richard Murphy, writing with David Mack in the International Herald Tribune,
declared that Shikaki's "encouraging" findings "offer a chance" for
resolving this hitherto insoluble problem.[7] M.J. Rosenberg of the Israel
Policy Forum maintained that Shikaki's findings prove that the Palestinians
"recognize both the reality of Israel and the fact that the partition of
Palestine is final and permanent."[8]

However, a closer examination of Shikaki's poll reveals that his optimistic
assessment of Palestinian public opinion is misplaced.

The Survey

Shikaki's data is based on a survey of 4,506 Palestinian refugees living in
the Gaza Strip, West Bank, Jordan, and Lebanon.[9] The respondents were
presented with a hypothetical situation: The Palestinian leadership had
accepted a compromise with Israel allowing for "the return of a small number
of refugees to Israel in accordance with a timetable that extends for
several years."[10] The respondents were then asked which of the five
choices in the table below would constitute the most "acceptable" option.
Preferred Choice for Exercising the "Right of Return"
(percentage of respondents, by location)

The following represents the answers of the refugees in the three areas:

Refugees' First Choice (%)
WBGS= West Bank/Gaza Strip, Total = (% of total population in the three
areas of WB/GS, Jordan, Lebanon)
1. Return to Israel and become (or not become) an Israeli citizen
WB/GS 12% Jordan 5% Lebanon 23% Total 10%
2. Stay in the Palestinian state that will be established in the West Bank
and Gaza Strip and receive a fair compensation for the property taken over
by Israel and for other losses and suffering
WB/GS 38 Jordan 27 Lebanon 19 Total 31
3. Receive Palestinian citizenship and return to designated areas inside
Israel that would be swapped later on with Palestinian areas as part of a
territorial exchange and receive any deserved compensation
WB/GS 37Jordan10 Lebanon 21 Total 23
4. Receive fair compensation for the property, losses, and suffering and
stay in host country receiving its citizenship or Palestinian citizenship
WB/GS 0 Jordan 33 Lebanon 11 Total 17
5. Receive fair compensation for the property, losses, and suffering and
immigrate to a European country or the US, Australia, or Canada and obtain
citizenship of that country or Palestinian citizenship
WB/GS 1 Jordan 2 Lebanon 9 Total 2
6. Refuse all options
WB/GS 9 Jordan16 Lebanon 17 Total 13
7. No opinion
WB/GS 2 Jordan 8 Lebanon 0 Total 5
Source: Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research
http://www.pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2003/refugeesjune03.html

At first glance, this data set seems to suggest that Palestinians are not -
contrary to common opinion and past polling data - committed to relocating
to Israel. Only 10% of the respondents said that they wanted to move to
within Israel's pre-1967 borders. In contrast, 71% chose to remain in their
host country or reside in a future Palestinian state comprising Gaza, the
West Bank, and other areas "swapped later on with Palestinian areas as part
of a territorial exchange."[11]

The problem is that the poll makes relocating to Israel an unappealing
option for most Palestinians since it stipulates a priori that "only a small
number" of refugees will be allowed to "return," and that the fortunate few
may have to wait "several years." Clearly, the framing of the question
discourages respondents from choosing Option 1, relocating to Israel.

Conversely, the respondents who opted to settle outside of pre-1967 Israeli
land were led to believe that they would receive unrealistically generous
amounts of financial compensation. Options 2 through 5 promise respondents
that by not choosing to relocate to Israel, they will receive either "fair
compensation" or "deserved compensation." These subjective terms allow the
respondents to believe that they will receive whatever they consider to be
just compensation for their suffering. However, of those who opted for
financial compensation over relocating to Israel, two-thirds of the
respondents believed they were entitled to anywhere between $100,000 and
half a million dollars. In the text of his press release, Shikaki does
acknowledge, "The estimates for a fair compensation were much higher than
the estimates of what would actually be paid."[12] Yet in publicizing his
findings in the American and Arab media, he avoids mentioning this fact.[13]
Nowhere does he allow that the admittedly misleading options may have
artificially inflated the number of respondents choosing compensation over
"returning" to Israel.

The poll also encouraged the respondents to forgo exercising their "right of
return" because, as one Palestinian analyst observed, "Shikaki's options . .
. deny compensation to those Palestinians choosing to return to Israel . .
."[14] The exception is Option 3, which a disproportionate percentage of the
respondents chose. Option 3 not only states that refugees could "return to
designated areas inside Israel that would be swapped later on with
Palestinian areas," but that they would "receive any deserved
compensation."[15] The question leaves unsaid that the swapped area would be
tiny - no more than three percent of the total land "returned" to the
Palestinians, and therefore an unlikely home for such a relatively large
percentage of the returnees. That over a third of the refugees (37%) polled
in the West Bank and Gaza chose this option suggests that they misunderstood
this fact.

More importantly, while Shikaki claims his poll demonstrates that "the
Israelis can comfortably recognize the right of return without taking much
risks,"[16] other data from his poll contradict this conclusion.

First, Shikaki's contention that most Palestinian refugees would abandon
"returning" to Israel is not easily reconciled with the fact that 95% of the
respondents agreed with the statement that the "right of return" is a
"sacred right that can never be given up."[17]

Second, when asked if there are circumstances in which "you would live with
Israeli Jews in peace, security, and reconciliation," only 20% of the
respondents from the West Bank and Gaza said "yes," while more than 79% said
"no."

Third, less than half of the respondents said that they would "live in peace
in the Jewish state and respect Israeli law" upon "exercising" the "right of
return."[18] Shikaki does emphasize the first point in his analysis in the
Arab media, but he has carefully avoided mentioning points two and three and
has even expunged them from the translated copy of the poll posted on his
organization's official website.[19]

Shikaki has defended his poll by attempting to justify its methodology since
this has been the greatest point of contention for his critics. To show that
the Palestinians do not actually plan on using the "sacred right of return,"
he has said that the options presented to the respondents over whether they
would ever forgo this demand are legitimate in his poll because they are
based on the final status negotiations with Israel in January 2001 at Taba,
Egypt.[20]

Yet it is remiss not to point out that the Palestinian leader in charge of
the Taba delegation - Yasser Arafat - rejected placing limits on
Palestinians relocating to Israel by saying that the "right of return" is a
"sacred right."[21] In the same way, Arafat's senior advisor, Nabil Shaath,
told reporters after Taba that the Palestinian negotiators could not
restrict the Palestinians from moving to Israel because the refugee issue is
a "sacred right."[22] Thus, while Shikaki may claim that the 95% of the
respondents who said that the "right of return" is a "sacred right" meant
only that it had to be recognized by Israel, in effect, in principle,
Palestinian negotiators use the term "sacred right" to indicate that the
Palestinians are committed to, in fact, exercising it. Since the negotiators
use the term "sacred right" synonymously with "uncompromising," there is no
reason to believe that the respondents interpreted the term in the polling
question any differently.

In fact, when pressed like he was during a question and answer session at
the Brookings Institution, Shikaki admitted that his poll does not
demonstrate that if the overwhelming majority of Palestinians (95 percent)
were granted the "sacred right of return" they would not use it. Shikaki
confessed, "There was no direct question that dealt with thatŠ.I can't say
it with certainty because I did not have a direct question there."[23]

Such admissions have been of little consolation to Shikaki's fiercest
critics - the refugees themselves - who have been apoplectic over the
pollster's claims purporting to show that Palestinians have abandoned their
designs on Israel. In fact, when he first announced his findings to the Arab
press in mid-July, an estimated 200 Palestinian rioters attacked him and his
staff in their Ramallah office. "We don't believe that [the poll] reflects
the reality and the position of the refugees," they stated.[24] Shikaki
dismissed the rioters as unrepresentative of the Palestinian population, but
it bears noting that they were not members of extremist Palestinian
terrorist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The rioters distributed
leaflets with the letterhead of the mainstream Palestine Liberation
Organization, stating, "We are here to announce that our right of return is
a sacred right,"[25] evidently using the term "sacred right" in the same
manner as the negotiators, to denote the Palestinian commitment to moving to
Israel. Shikaki's claims have also ignited an intellectual skirmish by
Palestinian intellectuals who have blanketed the Arab world's most
prestigious papers by arguing that the "right of return" is not just
important to their people in principle - they fully demand on one-day using
it.[26]

In sum, Shikaki's polling is methodologically problematic not only because
it is "rigged in such a way as to produce a result where most Palestinians
choose not to return,"[27] as one Palestinian bluntly put it, but because
Shikaki never shows that the 95% of the Palestinian public committed to the
"right of return" do not plan on exercising it in the future.

To his credit, the poll does highlight an unforeseen discrepancy, leading to
a potentially useful conclusion. If Shikaki's results are accepted at face
value, less than half of the respondents from the West Bank, Gaza Strip,
Jordan, and Lebanon said that "they themselves" would willingly consent to
accepting compensation over relocating to Israel in comparison to the 72%
who said they would if the Palestinian leadership first approved of the
compromise.[28] This divergence suggests that the Palestinian public might
moderate its positions toward Israel if its leaders showed a willingness to
compromise on the "right of return." Unfortunately, Shikaki ducks this
inference by instead asserting that the burden is on Israel to make more
concessions.
Based on Shikaki's past statements, his reluctance to call Palestinian
negotiators to account derives from his own proximity to them. "We consulted
very heavily with Palestinian negotiators as we planned the instrument, that
is, the questionnaire," he acknowledged in a recent lecture at the Brookings
Institution. "We worked with them, we asked them what questions they wanted
asked, and we proposed questions to them, and the eventual final product was
one that essentially tried to include as much as possible the questions that
negotiators were interested in answers to."[29] In light of such close
involvement by PA officials in the formulation of the survey, the pollster's
interpretation of the data requires scrutiny.

Notes

[1] Results of PSR Refugees' Polls in the West Bank/Gaza Strip, Jordan and
Lebanon,
http://www.pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2003/refugeesjune03.html PSR, 18 July
2003.
[2] Khalil Shikaki, "Right of Return," The Wall Street Journal, 30 July
2003; Khalil Shikaki, Palestinian Refugees: Preferences in a Final
Israeli-Palestinian Peace Agreement,
http://brookings.org/fp/saban/events/20030716.htm The Brookings Institution,
16 July 2003 (complete transcript in pdf format is available at this url).
[3] Results of PSR Refugees' Polls in the West Bank/Gaza Strip, Jordan and
Lebanon, http://www.pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2003/refugeesjune03.html
Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), 18 July 2003;
Palestinian-Israeli Attitudes towards Palestinian Refugees, Part One
http://www.jmcc.org/publicpoll/results/1999/no34.htm and Part Two
http://www.jmcc.org/publicpoll/results/1999/no34b.htm Public Opinion Poll
No. 34, Jerusalem Media and Communication Center (JCMM), December 1999; On
Palestinian and Israeli Attitudes towards the Future of the Peace Process,
http://www.jmcc.org/publicpoll/results/1999/no35.htm Public Opinion Poll
No.35, JMCC, December 1999; On Palestinian Attitudes towards Final Status
Negotiations and the Declaration of the State,
http://www.jmcc.org/publicpoll/results/2000/no37.htm Public Opinion Poll
No.37, JCMM, June 2000.
[4] Shikaki, Palestinian Refugees: Preferences in a Final
Israeli-Palestinian Peace Agreement,
http://brookings.org/fp/saban/events/20030716.htm 16 July 2003.
[5] Interview, "Morning Edition," National Public Radio, 21 July 2003.
[6] Shikaki, "Right of Return," Wall Street Journal, 30 July 2003;
"Mideast Peace Process," The Wall Street Journal, 31 July 2003.
[7] Richard W. Murphy and David Mack, "Proposal to Solve the Settler and
Refugee Problems," International Herald Tribune, 21 July 2003.
[8] Ali Abunimah, "Who Said the Palestinians Gave Up the Right of Return,"
The Electronic Intifada, 23 July 2003.
[9] The survey did not include the refugees residing in Syria because, as
Shikaki put it, "the information we would be gettingŠwould not be reliable."
See Shikaki, Palestinian Refugees: Preferences in a Final
Israeli-Palestinian Peace Agreement,
http://brookings.org/fp/saban/events/20030716.htm 16 July 2003.
[10] Results of PSR Refugees' Polls in the West Bank/Gaza Strip, Jordan
and Lebanon,
http://www.pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2003/refugeesjune03.html PSR, 18 July
2003.
[11] Results of PSR Refugees' Polls in the West Bank/Gaza Strip, Jordan
and Lebanon,
http://www.pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2003/refugeesjune03.html PSR, 18 July
2003.
[12] Results of PSR Refugees' Polls in the West Bank/Gaza Strip, Jordan
and Lebanon,
http://www.pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2003/refugeesjune03.html PSR, 18 July
2003.
[13] Shikaki, "Right of Return," Wall Street Journal, 30 July 2003;
Shikaki, "Misrepresenting the Palestinian Refugee Poll," The Daily Star, 16
August 2003; Shikaki,http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/653/op41.htm The Right
to Choose, Al-Ahram Weekly, No. 653, 28 August - 3 September 2003; Shikaki,
Palestinian Refugees: Preferences in a Final Israeli-Palestinian Peace
Agreement,
http://brookings.org/fp/saban/events/20030716.htm
The Brookings Institution, 16 July 2003; Interview, "Morning Edition,"
National Public Radio, 21 July 2003.
[14] Ali Abunimah, "Who Said Palestinians Gave Up the Right of Return?"
The Daily Star (Beirut), 23 July 2003.
[15] Results of PSR Refugees' Polls in the West Bank/Gaza Strip, Jordan
and Lebanon, http://www.pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2003/refugeesjune03.html PSR,
18 July 2003.
[16] Interview, CNN International, 18 July 2003.
[17] Results of PSR Refugees' Polls in the West Bank/Gaza Strip, Jordan
and Lebanon, http://www.pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2003/refugeesjune03.html PSR,
18 July 2003.
[18] PSR Arabic version at
http://www.pcpsr.org/arabic/survey/polls/2003/refugeesjune03.html (special
thanks to Dr. Aaron Lerner of Independent Media Review and Analysis for
calling my attention to the original Arabic version of the poll). Shikaki's
poll suggests that these numbers might even err on the low side since the
Palestinians' "estimates for a fair compensation were much higher than the
estimates of what would actually be paid." The assumption is that unrealized
economic expectations among "returning" Palestinians could further enflame
resentment toward Israelis and Israeli society more generally.
[19] Results of PSR Refugees' Polls in the West Bank/Gaza Strip, Jordan
and Lebanon, http://www.pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2003/refugeesjune03.html PSR,
18 July 2003.
[20] Khalil Shikaki, "Misrepresenting the Palestinian Refugee Poll," The
Daily Star (Beirut), 16 August 2003. Shikaki, The Right to Choose,
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/653/op41.htmAl-Ahram Weekly, No. 653, 28
August - 3 September 2003
[21] David Makovsky, "Taba Mythchief," The National Interest, Spring 2003,
pp. 119-129; Jacob Tovy, "No Compromise on Refugees," Middle East Quarterly,
Spring 2003, pp. 39-50.
[22] Nabil Shaath, Al-Quds, 26 January 2001.
[23] Shikaki, Palestinian Refugees: Preferences in a Final
Israeli-Palestinian Peace Agreement,
http://brookings.org/fp/saban/events/20030716 16 July 2003.
[24] "'Return' Survey Riles Palestinians," CBSNEWS.com, 14 July 2003.
[25] "'Return' Survey Riles Palestinians," CBSNEWS.com, 14 July 2003;
Poll: Few Palestinians Would Return to Israel,
http://www.wcbs880.com/mideast/mideast_story_195113029.html WCBS NEWSRADIO
880, 14 July 2003.
[26] Ali Abunimah, "Who Said the Palestinians Gave Up the Right of
Return," Daily Star, 23 July 2003. Issam Nashashibi, "Efforts to Negate
Right of Return Have Long, Ignoble History," The Electronic Intifada, 29
August 2003.
[27] Ali Abunimah, "Who Said the Palestinians Gave Up the Right of
Return," Daily Star, 23 July 2003.
[28] Results of PSR Refugees' Polls in the West Bank/Gaza Strip, Jordan
and Lebanon, http://www.pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2003/refugeesjune03.html PSR,
18 July 2003.
[29] Shikaki, Palestinian Refugees: Preferences in a Final
Israeli-Palestinian Peace Agreement,
http://brookings.org/fp/saban/events/20030716.htm16 July 2003.