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| By Associated Press January 4, 2005 |
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Mahmoud Abbas, the leading candidate in next week's presidential election, on Monday promised Palestinian refugees they'll be able to return home one day -- his most explicit comment yet on an explosive issue that has derailed peace talks in the past.
He's still far too moderate for the violent Islamic Hamas, however, which demanded that he apologize for requesting a halt to rocket attacks against Israel.
Abbas was campaigning for a third straight day in Gaza, trying to counter his image as a gray bureaucrat who might not stand up to Israel by appealing to younger, more militant Palestinians with hard-line pronouncements.
Following warm embraces with militant leaders in refugee camps and his pledges that he would stand by the gunmen in their struggle to avoid capture by Israel, Abbas took an uncompromising stance on the refugee issue.
On Monday, addressing a rally in Gaza City, Abbas endorsed the claim that Palestinian refugees and their descendants from the two-year war that followed Israel's creation in 1948 have the right to return to their original homes.
"We will never forget the rights of the refugees, and we will never forget their suffering. They will eventually gain their rights, and the day will come when the refugees return home," Abbas told the cheering crowd.
Abbas himself is a refugee from Safed, an ancient city in northern Israel.
All together, the refugees and their descendants total about 4 million people. Almost unanimously, Israeli Jews reject the claim, warning that resettling so many Arabs would undermine the Jewish quality of their state, where about 5 million Jews and 1 million Arabs now live. Some say it is a dark plot to destroy the Jewish state.
Israel's government believes Palestinian refugees should be resettled in the Palestinian state that would be created through peace talks or in the places where they have lived for the past six decades.
Israel offers compensation for lost property, and a previous, more moderate government agreed to take in a limited number of refugees on the basis of reunification of families.
However, the actual "right of return" has become a watchword of the Palestinian faith, a promise made by Yasser Arafat to generations of refugees and their families, waiting in refugee camps on Israel's borders for the moment when their dream of return would come true -- though many of their villages have been replaced by Israeli towns and cities now, and some of their farmland has turned into shopping malls, suburbs and factories.
The deep dispute has torpedoed peace efforts, most recently in July 2000, when then-U.S. President Bill Clinton called a peace summit but was unable to broker a deal.
Israeli officials believe Abbas is a moderate who has publicly opposed Palestinian violence and might be more flexible than Arafat, and they're prepared to wait and see what happens after the Jan. 9 election for president, which Abbas is almost certain to win.
"The future Palestinian leaders will be judged according to their deeds and actions, not according to words said during an election campaign," said a senior official on condition of anonymity.
In an Associated Press interview last August, Abbas indicated flexibility. He said Palestinians might settle for a statement of responsibility from Israel for the refugee problem, followed by the return of a limited number of refugees. He said the numbers could be worked out in negotiations, a stand close to that of Israeli peace activists.
Yariv Oppenheimer, spokesman for Peace Now, a group that favors an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, said Israel should not judge Abbas after every statement he makes during the campaign.
However, Oppenheimer said, Israel could not accept millions of Palestinians, even in a peace deal. "The return of refugees is obviously a red line for the government of Israel," he said.
One of Abbas' few moderate comments during his Gaza swing drew fire from Hamas and other Gaza militants on Monday.
With Israeli tanks posed to sweep into northern Gaza on Sunday to put a stop to a wave of mortar and rocket attacks on Israel, Abbas called for an end to the barrage because it was giving Israel an excuse to invade.
In response, Hamas and several other groups released a joint statement demanding that Abbas apologize.
The groups called the statement "a stab in the back to the resistance ... because the resistance has proved that this is the only way to respond to the crimes of the occupation."
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