Democratic Palestine : 1 (ص 15)

غرض

عنوان

Democratic Palestine : 1 (ص 15)

المحتوى

Occupied Palestine
Resettlement
Resettlement, the central idea in Ben Porat’s new plan for the camps of the West Bank and Gaza,
is not new. Since 1948, when the majority of the Palestinian people were uprooted and dispersed in
refugee camps, many attempts have been made to resettle them. The ultimate aim of all these plans has
been to eliminate the will of our people to be steadfast and to struggle to return to their home. The
plans have intended to push or entice the Palestinians to give up the struggle against occupation and
dispossession in favor of finding new sites to settle down in order to attain a minimal standard of living.
Furthermore, these plans are all part, directly or indirectly, of the Zionist and imperialist efforts to
resolve the Middle East conflict without addressing the Palestinians’ national rights to self-
determination, return and an independent state. Rather, they deal with the Palestinians as a group of
refugees whose economic and social, but not political, needs must be satisfied in order to achieve
stability in the area.
Ct
Ben Porat’s Project
eee
In November, Mordechai Ben Porat, Israeli Minister without
Portfolio, told a press conference that ‘Israel’ wants to liquidate the
Palestinian refugee camps in the 1967 occupied territories. He did
not elaborate on how this is going to be done, but termed the plan
“humanitarian” and “voluntary”. Yet clearly, this project is
politically motivated. It aims to negate the Palestinian people’s
status as refugees and thereby also their rights to their homes in the
part of Palestine occupied in 1948, from whence the refugees of the
West Bank and Gaza Strip originate.
The project’s requirements
To implement this project, the
following steps are being taken or
planned by the Israeli authorities:
1. Pressuring the refugees in the
camps. This is done by continuous
destruction of houses under security
pretexts; roads are widened to make it
easier to control the camps; surround-
ing land is confiscated to prevent
expansion. Renting or selling houses in
the camps is forbidden without the
military authorities’ permission. More
directly terrorist methods are also
used: military siege, curfews, travel
restrictions, and _ facilitating the
In the beginning of 1983, the Israeli 1. Camps to be improved without | Zionist settler gangs’ attacks on the
government appointed Ben Porat to | moving residents. camps.
draw up a plan dealing with the
problem of the Palestinian refugees in
the camps. This was called “Project to
improve the conditions of the Palestinian
refugees.” For this purpose, a com-
mittee was formed including Ben
Porat, Yitzhak Shamir, Moshe Arens,
Moshe Nissim, Yuval Neeman and
David Levy. Porat and other Israeli
officials made _ special visits to
Palestinian camps such as Anata,
Akabat Jabr and Duheisheh, to
convince the people to leave their
camps. They were promised financial
compensation, or homes to be built in
other areas, if they are willing to hand
over their UNRWA ration cards and
ownership papers to land inside the
“green line” to the Israeli authorities.
The refugees refused this offer due to
their understanding of the political
motives behind it. To back their claim,
they cited the “voluntary” resettlement
of refugees in the Gaza Strip, initiated
by the Zionist state in 1975.
In June 1983, Porat made his
committee's proposals to resettle
170,000 more refugees in Gaza, and
80,000 in the West Bank. The
committee proposed dividing the
camps into three categories:
2. Camps to be demolished and re-
sidents moved to nearby, unpopu-
lated areas.
3. Camps to be demolished and re-
sidents moved to totally new areas.
This is similar to what has happened in
the Gaza Strip.
2. Coordination with UNRWA in
order to decrease its services to the
refugees until its jurisdiction over the
camps’ is ended. This serves a. dual
purpose: While eliminating
international responsibility for the
refugees, it also increases the hard-
After the Zionists tried to destroy the camps in Lebanon in 1982, they are now
continuing this war in the.occupied territories.
Svtht ye
Our thanks to “Al Fajr” for all the illustrations in this section.

هو جزء من

Democratic Palestine : 1

تاريخ

يناير ١٩٨٤

المنشئ

الجبهة الشعبية لتحرير فلسطين

مجموعات العناصر

Generated Pages Set

Democratic Palestine

PLO Research Center: Facts and Figures