Israel has no cause […]to be angry at the Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath, who declared yesterday in Lebanon that the road map will bring the refugees from 1948 back from Beirut to Haifa. It is true that he was exaggerating and distorting the meaning of the road map, since it does not say that on the issue of the right of return, the same rule applies to Nablus as to Lod, but it is also true that it does not rule out such a destructive possibility.

Thanks are due to Shaath because he had the goodness to uncover what lies hidden deep in his heart. His statements were evidence of the weakness of those schools of thought, founded by Moshe Dayan and Ariel Sharon, which favor interim agreements [with the Palestinians], rather than striving for the permanent agreements which were favored by Yigal Alon, as well as Menahem Begin and Ehud Barak (a few days ago The New York Times published an article supporting the latter view). A senior American diplomat, Frederick Vreeland, who participated after the Six Day War in drawing up UN Resolution 242, wrote that at the time everybody believed that if the practical problems were solved, then the questions of Jerusalem and the refugees would resolve themselves. This was a mistake. Now it is fitting to discuss these problems first, before dealing with the issues such as demilitarization and borders.

This is not a trivial matter. The fact is that so far not one single Palestinian has been found who is willing to agree that the right of return would be realized by migration of Palestinians to their state in Hebron and Kalkilya alone. Only Professor Sari Nusseibeh understands this and he is the only just man in the Palestinian Sodom.

Therefore, apart from the joint manifesto published by Nusseibeh and Ami Ayalon, there is no single, agreed platform on this issue, not even in the intriguing document which the discussion group headed by Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abed Rabbo have been writing for the past three years.

When the road map was published, Tsipi Livni, Uzi Landau and Ephraim Halevi immediately spotted the mistake in it, namely that the right of return was not rejected, or at least scheduled for discussion at an early stage.

From this point of view Shaath has done Israel a favor, by confirming what Israelis suspected anyway, namely that the Palestinians do not intend to solve the problem of the refugees outside the borders the Jewish state. This, therefore is the time for a change of direction. The debate on the refugees and the question of Jerusalem should be discussed first and other issues should be solved after them.

Yasser Arafat caused the failure of the Camp David Conference and resumed the fighting and the bloodshed because he did not want to discuss the partition of Jerusalem. That is precisely the point to which the negotiations ought to return, to the end of Camp David, with Jerusalem and the refugees first. Therefore [in spite of the protests which it aroused in Israel] Shaath’s statement was all to the good.

This analysis ran in the August 17th issue of Maariv

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