From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DISPATCH
Let Palestinians Become Americans
How Clinton could solve the Mideast's refugee problem.
It'll be illuminating to see how President Clinton responds to Saturday's Associated Press report that Middle East peace hangs on the fate of the 3.5 million or so Palestinian Arabs registered with the United Nations as refugees.
Not one of the Arab countries has been eager, or even willing, to take them in. For decades Arab governments have permitted the refugees to be housed in camps overseen by the U.N., exploiting these camps as breeding grounds for a national struggle that didn't exist before the Zionist settlers began the Jewish return to Palestine.
Neither, however, do the Israelis want the refugees. This was made clear, yet again, by Israel's xenophobic Minister of Justice, Yossi Beilin, who told the AP that if the Palestinians insist on a right of return to Israel for more than a million refugees, there will be no peace agreement. Mr. Beilin further asserted that Israel will cease to exist as a Jewish state if unlimited numbers of Palestinian refugees are permitted to enter its territory. "For us," he told the wire service, "this is really a question of whether we will survive or not."
There's an obvious way to alleviate this problem. It would be to map out a plan for bringing the Palestinian Arab refugees to America. Such a plan would take the pressure off the antagonists in the Middle East, and it would give America a chance to benefit from an influx of educated, intelligent refugees at a time when the labor market is so tight that America desperately needs all the help it can get.
I put forth this idea nearly 20 years ago, in August 1983, as the Reagan expansion was just getting started. In a Wall Street Journal editorial page article entitled "Invite the Palestinians to America," I proposed that the U.S. provide the Palestinian Arabs 250,000 green cards a year for a decade. If Washington had taken up the idea, things would look different today. In the event, the suggestion was set down as chimerical at best, lunacy at worst.
The only government official who seemed to consider bringing in any Palestinian Arabs was Secretary of State George Shultz. He had apparently grown alarmed at what could happen as the Palestinian refugees trapped in Lebanon got caught in a vise between Israel's invasion and attacks from the Arabs, including the Lebanese and the Syrians. There was one report of a State Department study that explored bringing in 50,000 Palestinian Arab refugees from Lebanon on an emergency basis. It was a farsighted thought. This was in the period when Lebanese Phalangists committed the notorious massacres at Sabra and Chatilla and before the Syrians started shelling followers of Yasser Arafat.
At one point I asked Mr. Arafat directly about the proposal. The Journal's Karen Elliot House and I had gone to see him when he was staying at a state guest house in Amman. I asked him what he thought of the idea of America offering the Palestinian Arabs 250,000 green cards a year for a decade.
At first Mr. Arafat looked startled and huddled with his aides. Then he looked up and asked whether I was serious, remarking at one point that the Palestinians would have influence in the election of the U.S. president. I conceded that it wasn't a live policy initiative in Washington and explained I was asking about the principle. Mr. Arafat huddled with his aides again before replying: "Me, I want a visa to Jerusalem." When pressed, he asserted that I had a "lively imagination."
It was not the worst thing that was said about me--or about the idea. One Lebanese official at the time said he didn't care where the Palestinians went, so long as they didn't stay in Lebanon. The only Middle East official I talked with who had a different view was, ironically, Ariel Sharon, the right-of-center general from Israel's Likud Party. I asked about the idea while visiting him at his farm. He said that he didn't see why those Palestinian Arab refugees in land controlled by Israel couldn't stay. He wasn't blind to the obvious political problems and the challenge to Jewish nationalism. His point was that he has always wanted a large Israel and recognizes that it is an underpopulated country.
Which leaves the current Labor-led coalition in Israel heir to a nagging contradiction. It has no interest in bringing in Palestinian Arabs, despite the country's labor shortages. It is worried about Jews becoming a minority in their own country, yet it has failed to attract any large influx of American Jews, who shy away from, among other things, the socialism the Labor Party has nursed. The exception are the so-called ultra-Orthodox Jews, who make the government nervous because they are inclined to settle in the very West Bank the government wants to give away.
So what President Clinton does about the question of the Palestinian Arab refugees will make clear that for all the palaver at the peace talks so far, the parties are still formulating a zero sum game.
Mr. Lipsky is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Wednesdays.
