Victims of status revocation in the current peace process framework

Palestinians who had not been displaced during or directly after the 1967 war and who were actually counted in the 1967 census and managed to receive an Israeli-issued ID card. This displacement took place as a result of the status revocation policy that Israel has been implementing since its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967.41 This policy is known among the Palestinian population mainly as “Sahb Al-Hawiyyat,”42 which can be literally translated to “ID Card withdrawal” or to get it to make better sense in English, “ID Card revocation.”

The Oslo framework addressed this issue by stating:

39 _{R. Brynen, “The Past as Prelude? Negotiating the Palestinian Refugee Issue,” Chatham House}

Briefing Paper (2008): 3,

http://kms2.isn.ethz.ch/serviceengine/Files/RESSpecNet/57346/ipublicationdocument_singledocument/07A CF594-6581-41B3-850D-ECA270AD32D4/en/11721_0608palrefugees_brynen.pdf.

40

Ibid., 2; Darweesh, Political Solutions for the Palestinian Refugee Issue and Peace Negotiations’ Horizons, 15; Salim Tamari, Palestinian Refugees, Displaced Persons, and the Negotiating Strategy, Birzeit University Working Paper Series (Birzeit: Forced Migration and Refugee Unit- Birzeit University, 2011), 2, http://ialiis.birzeit.edu/fmru/etemplate.php?id=164; Masalha, The Politics of Denial: Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 230.

41 _{See Chapter 3 Sec. ‎3.2 and ‎3.3 above.}

42 _{This term has been the main one used since the occupation, although other terms are used}

among the Palestinian community. For example, newspaper articles usually refer to this policy as Sahb Al- Hawyiyyat. See, eg., “Al-Hammouri: Sahb 14466 Hawiyya Maqdisyya Munthu A’am 1967 (Al-Hammouri: The Revocation of 14466 Jerusalem ID Card Since 1967),” Al-Quds Newspaper, January 28, 2011,

http://www.alquds.com/news/article/view/id/321192; The use of this term has been also used in English. Notice for example the use of the term “revocation of ID cards” in some of Badil’s literature. See, Badil, Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights and Alternative Information Center, “‘Lost IDs’ on the Agenda Now,” Article 74, December 1994, http://www.badil.org/en/article74/item/643- %E2%80%9Clost-ids%E2%80%9D-on-the-agenda-now.

188 A joint committee will be established to solve the reissuance of identity cards to those residents who have lost their identity cards.43

Two significant observations must be highlighted here in terms of the text and content of this provision. First, this article is an implicit recognition of the right of those displaced by residency revocation in the West Bank and Gaza to be repatriated. By not deferring the issue to the final status negotiations and by using the wording “the reissuance of identity cards,” the text confirms that Israel does not have, in principle, an objection to their return. However, the text did not specifically, neither explicitly nor implicitly, recognize the wrongdoing of forcible revocation through residency revocation. Indeed, the verb used in this text is “lost” and it was the residents who lost their “identity cards,” not that their whole status was actively revoked by Israel, contrary to the victims’ basic human rights that were protected by several international legal instruments as explained in Chapter 4.44 Moreover, this article does not offer refugees displaced by this method any other remedies. One cannot find any mention of restitution of property, compensation or any other remedies that would be combined with human rights violations.

Secondly, despite the implicit recognition of the victims’ right to return, the interim agreement deferred this action to a “joint committee” that will be “established to solve” this problem. This meant that no immediate remedy was given to this group of victims. When the joint committee met and tried to solve the problem, its fate was similar to that of the “Continuing Committee” that was assigned to deal with the 1967 refugees’ problem. It spent several years negotiating, starting first by reaching a common understanding of what the article means. The initial Israeli point of view was that the goal of this article was “the printing of new identity cards to replace those that Palestinian residents of the Occupied Territories had physically lost.”45 When the Palestinian negotiators managed to convince their Israeli counterparts that the purpose was to

43

Israel and Palestine Liberation Organization, “Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip”, Appendix III, Article 28 (3).

44 _{Nuseibah, “Unfreezing the Right of Return.”} 45

HaMoked and B’Tselem, Families Torn Apart: Separation of Palestinian Families in the Occupied Territories, 96.

189 restore residency status, the negotiators turned to negotiate other questions until Israel froze the population registry in 2000 and stopped accepting to negotiate these questions.46

Finally, it is important to notice that this provision excluded the Jerusalem Palestinians’ residency revocation problem. This is because the Oslo framework included Jerusalem in the issues of final status negotiations47 and thus excluded the Palestinian population of Jerusalem from most of the provisions of the interim agreement, with the explicit exception of their right to participate in the Palestinian Authority’s elections.48 Having Jerusalem as one of the final status issues meant that Israel’s treatment of the annexed city and the implementation of Israel’s civil law were not altered. The Palestinian Authority had no jurisdiction on Jerusalem and its people.49

5.1.4 Conclusions on the tackling of displacement in the framework of the