• The results of the recent poll probing the attitudes of Palestinian refugees as to their choice of permanent status led one of us to recall a visit, with a colleague from the Peace Now movement, to three refugee camps in Jordan in 1996. We did not say we were Israelis - our host told the inhabitants we were European journalists.

We talked to more than 50 people. Except for a few, all said that despite their attachment to their ancestral land, they did not, if given the choice, intend to go back to Israel; for Palestine of old had disappeared, taking with it their villages and houses. Most preferred compensation.

Nevertheless, everybody - absolutely everybody - said they demanded, and insisted, that they be given the option of repatriation, and would never, under any circumstances, accept to be " told " by Israel that they cannot return. The unanimous and adamant demand of recognizing this right came out so forcefully that it made one stop and think hard about the phenomenon. And it was then and there that one came to realize what the right of return (ROR) really meant for the Palestinians, and that without its recognition there will never ever be any resolution of the conflict.

Among the many motivations behind this insistence is an important point of principle; it involves the symbolic content the refugees attach to any compensation they might get as part of a Middle East settlement - they require it be viewed as their fundamental right, as dispossessed former inhabitants of the land, and not as charity granted to them by Israel, as a result of " generosity and good will. " This refusal is a sort of settling of accounts with the Zionist movement, which they hold responsible for the destruction of their society and heritage, all the while placing the blame entirely elsewhere, and the rewriting of history in a way as to marginalize the importance of the destroyed communities.

For most Israelis the issue of the ROR evokes apocalyptic images of the " destruction of Israel. " As shown by Shikaki's research, however, the recognition of the ROR is not about demographic warfare. It instead involves a conceptual struggle between competing narratives. The demand aims at penetrating the hegemonic status and the self-righteous and self-declared moral superiority of the Zionist movement over the moral and historical rights of the indigenous people of the country.

Israelis refuse to cede to this precisely because they are not ready to admit their share of historical responsibility for the Palestinian tragedy. When denying and negating the ROR Israelis are protecting an interpretation of events that has become entangled with their own sense of identity. For what is up for destruction is not the country, but its implausible idealized reconstruction of its past. The danger is not embodied in a flood of refugees, but in a series of revisions of cherished beliefs. The return that is feared is of a haunted history.

It is the discrepancy between the acceptance by the refugees of the reality of the situation in Israel, and the absence of any conceptual modification of mainstream opinion in that country, that enraged the mob which demonstrated against Shikaki.

The key to compromise is therefore a recognition of this situation by those who won, whose plans actually materialized. The required re-evaluation of the past does not imply its erasure or reversal. But the recognition of unpleasant facts facilitates the advent of a less tormented future.

For while many (probably most) Palestinians are ready to accept the reality of Israel, few (if any) can be forced to see justice in the fact, which is intricately entangled so as to be inseparable, from the processes that lead to their dispossession. They require Israel views its peace proposals not in terms of " generous offers " but as minimal reparation for those who paid the price of its emergence.

Yehudith Harel and Amr A. El-Zant

Y. Harel is an Israeli organizational psychologist and a founder of the recently formed Palestinian Israeli Joint Action for Peace. A. A. El-Zant is an Egyptian physicist who was a research fellow at the Israel Institute of Technology (1997-2000) and is currently at the California Institute of Technology.