Commentary

To All Friends in the Right of Return Movement

From Salman Abu Sitta

Sari Nusseibeh has now accelerated his efforts to abolish the Right of Return from expressing opinions and giving interviews to conducting a campaign among Palestinians, persuading them to waive their Right of Return and forego their place of birth and heritage.

If Nusseibeh was tolerated previously as a misguided academic, his active campaign, by sending letters to all Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinians Territories, under the banner of the PLO official in Jerusalem, to undermine the Right of Return, cannot go unchallenged.

This campaign, orchestrated in open collaboration with Israeli intelligence services, in the so-called Ayalon-Nusseibeh document, is designed to perpetuate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and activate a new one. This is a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Its perpetrators shall be treated as such.

The Right of Return is an Inalienable Right which has a solid backing in international law and is affirmed by the world community for over 50 years. It cannot be delegated or bargained for, and it has no statute of limitations.

The only danger to the Right of Return is that if every individual of the five million refugees willingly and knowingly surrenders personally his right. This will never happen under any circumstances. The Palestinians have endured 54 years of wars, raids, suffering and hardships to maintain their right. They are not going to surrender it now.

The Palestinians have a tremendous awareness about their rights especially following the rise of the Right of Return movement after Oslo and especially after 1998. The Palestinian refugees will not let this campaign pass, just as they resisted successfully over 40 schemes for resettlement, transfer and ethnic cleansing in the last half a century.

No doubt all members of the Right of Return movement will make their voices heard and will defeat any attempt to undermine their Inalienable Rights, as they have done previously. They will make it known that anyone who attacks our rights does not represent us and does not belong to us.