Israelis split over Abbas refugee comments

JERUSALEM: Israelis were on Sunday split over the weight of remarks by Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas in which he appeared to give up on the right of refugees to return to homes they lost or fled from in the 1948 war.
His remarks were immediately welcomed as “courageous” by Israeli President Shimon Peres, but sparked a backlash of protest in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip where thousands burned pictures of the Palestinian leader.
But Israeli officials and commentators were split over the issue on Sunday, with some hailing his remarks as “realistic” while others dismissing it as a political ploy aimed at influencing public opinion ahead of the upcoming Israeli elections.
In an interview with Israel’s Channel 2 television on Friday, Abbas said he had no intention of trying to regain his childhood home in the northern town of Safed, today located inside Israel.
“I want to see Safed,” he said in English. “It’s my right to see it but not to live there.”
Abbas’s remarks showed he had taken a “realistic and very courageous look” at the thorny issue of the Palestinian right of return, wrote Roni Shaked in the top-selling Yediot Aharonot.
“There has been increasing reconciliation within the Palestinian leadership, and particularly so after (veteran leader Yasser) Arafat’s death (in 2004), to the idea that the right of return cannot be implemented,” he said.
By saying he did not want to return to his childhood home in Safed, Abbas had “conceded in practice the right of refugees to return to their villages and homes,” he wrote.
But the Palestinian leader’s spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina quickly sought to modify his remarks, insisting that they did not represent a policy shift on the right of return, one of the thorniest issues of the conflict, which could only be resolved through negotiations with Israel.
Other Israeli figures dismissed Abbas’s remarks as a political ploy ahead of general elections which are to take place on January 22.
“Abu Mazen’s attitude is typical of the Palestinians before elections in Israel,” Education Minister Gideon Saar told Israel’s public radio Sunday, using Abbas’s nom-de-guerre.
More than four million Palestinian refugees are scattered across the region — those who fled or were expelled when Israel was created in 1948, and their descendants.
The Palestinians have always demanded that the Jewish state recognize their right of return to modern-day Israel in keeping with UN General Assembly Resolution 194.
Israel rejects the right of return, which would end its Jewish majority. It is, however, prepared for those refugees to live in the promised Palestinian state.