IMRA interviewed, MK Azmi Bashara (Hadash), in English, on December 26. the entire interview follows:IMRA: In an article in an Arab paper today you mentioned the Palestinian refugees you met in Damascus who hand down from generation to generation the keys to homes which they left in Palestine. Are these homes inside the Green Line?
Bashara: Yes. Most of the refugees in Syria and Lebanon - all of them actually - are refugees from 1948. The refugees of 1967 went to Jordan mostly.IMRA: How do you see this issue being resolved? It is a very dramatic image - people with keys to very specific places.
Bashara: Yes. the nostalgia is not abstract. It is to certain place. It seems to be a question of identity. That's how people maintain their identity. Second, it is an insistence on what they think is a just position. The right. The internationally acknowledged right. The UN had several resolutions on the right to return well before there were any resolutions concerning the Palestinians as a nation or concerning any solution of the Palestinian issue. The refugees issue was always recognized by the UN and they never gave up this right and it's a question which should be addressed in the permanent status talks. Of course, Israel rejects any possibility for a solution.IMRA: What do you see?
Bashara: Well, of course the Palestinians will not give it up now - even before any negotiations have started. That's for sure. The people who are refugees of 1948 in Lebanon and Syria are not at all heard in these negotiations. Nobody is talking to them.IMRA: Yasser Arafat may have his own interests which may be realized without solving this problem.
Bashara: Of course. This is a possibility. At least that's what they see and they claim. They claim that they are the ones who gave the most severe sacrifice during the 50's, 60's and 70's. They were the PLO. They were the national liberation movement. There are graveyards there which I visited which are full of thousands and thousands of martyrs - they call them. They are the people who fought. Actually the whole time. Until the intafada they were the fighters and they are now totally excluded from the negotiations.IMRA: Do they have leadership?
Bashara: Of course, the PLO is their leadership. But the PLO left them and went to negotiations without them. They have a sense of being betrayed.IMRA: Do you have a sense, knowing that community, that they have the wherewithal to have a "PLO #2" so to speak if they are not satisfied.
Bashara: Of course, there was some attempt and it did not succeed. There are a lot of questions . I participated in several discussions with their leadership there and with the community itself in several lectures at refugee camps. I participated and I have my ideas concerning what they should do.IMRA: Some Palestinians interviewed give the impression that they are as interested in acknowledgment of their right of return as they are in returning. Do you get a sense that they want to actually return to a specific house on a specific street?Their old ways of organization are passe now and they will have to look for new kinds of organizations that should be active - both in the Diaspora and the West Bank and Gaza.
Bashara: For a certain generation yes. A generation which is now gradually passing away. They left their homes and they want to go back. And they see Jews from Russia, 800,0000 of them coming, who were never in this country, part of them at least not Jewish, and they do not have the right to come? Why not?IMRA: And for them?This generation believed in their specific right to return to the houses they lived in. They are gradually passing away and handing the keys to the next generation who does not know the house.
Bashara: I don't know. They want it as an identity. They want to back to visit at least. They want their right at least to be acknowledged. I don't know. People should talk to them. No one is talking to them. I do not intend to play the game of representation. I think that their voice should be heard and then I can comment on it or try to interpret it. But first it has to be heard and its not heard.IMRA: So its not your place to go one way or the other on it.
Bashara: I will be raising the voice here in the future. Giving them some place in the political space in this country.IMRA: Do you see yourself also in the role of trying to guide them towards realistic expectations so they ask for the achievable.
Bashara: I do not go around promising them that they will come back like some people did. I think that, especially the ones in Lebanon, who are treated poorly - without the right to work or travel - like outcasts, must have a solution. There are others whose rights should be recognized and a kind of compensation should be worked out with them and not with anybody else.IMRA: Do you find a friction between you who stayed and those who left. In the Bedouin community in the south there was friction at one point with those who stayed claiming that the refugees didn't have the guts to stay and hold the land and are not as good.
Bashara: Of course this is a myth. Of course I don't have that feeling. Nobody stayed on the ground because he had guts. It's just because they forgot them. That's all. Mostly the people who fought are the people outside. Those who stayed stayed as underdogs and not as people who fought. Mostly villages that did not fight stayed. Not those who fought - those who had guts. Its a myth that people say 'we stayed, we resisted'. It is nonsence. All of it.When an army officer tolerated a certain village it stayed. Nobody stayed because he fought to stay. This is nonsense. Those who fought to stay were expelled. People who stayed here did not fight. They were tolerated. Of course this is nonsense.