Scott Leckie, executive director of the
Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), was speaking
at a news conference on Wednesday where he launched a report on Israeli
"seizure of land and housing in Palestine" since 1948.
"Although the US routinely supports the rights of refugees throughout the
world to recover their former lands, homes and properties, it refuses to
recognise that Palestinian refugees should also enjoy their legitimate
property rights," he said.
"The hypocrisy of the US stance ... is blatant and unjustifiable if terms
such as human rights and the rule of law are to have universal
application," said Leckie, an international human rights lawyer.
More than four million Palestinian refugees and their descendants live in
refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria,
having fled homes in what is now Israel during the Arab-Israeli wars of
1948-49 and 1967.
'Demographic suicide'
Palestinians want Israel to implement UN
resolution 194, which says that refugees have the right either to return
to their original homes or receive compensation.
|
Although the US
routinely supports the rights of refugees throughout the world to
recover their former lands, homes and properties, it refuses to
recognise that Palestinian refugees should also enjoy their legitimate
property rights."
Scott Leckie,
COHRE executive director |
Israel's government - with the support of US
President George Bush's administration - refuses to admit refugees,
fearing a large influx would mean demographic change for a state of 6.6
million citizens, of which 80% are Jewish.
Instead, Israel wants refugees resettled in a future Palestinian state and
says it would contribute to a fund to compensate them.
Leckie said the US stance was surprising because Washington was supporting
the return to their homes in Iraq of Jewish Iraqis who fled the country
under the rule of former president Saddam Hussein.
The COHRE report cast doubt on the viability of a Palestinian state, a
project the United States strongly supports, that might be created in any
final peace agreements between Israelis and Palestinians.
Settlements
The report showed, Leckie said, "that what
little remains of the Palestinian homeland is disappearing in front of our
eyes - it's as if Israel is deliberately erasing it from the map".
Settlements on the occupied territories and a proposal to create an
Israeli corridor from Tel Aviv on the Mediterranean to the Jordanian
border at the Dead Sea would make a viable Palestinian state "a practical
impossibility", it said.
COHRE has offices around the world focusing
on eviction issues and land and housing rights.
It receives financing from the governments of
many European countries and of Canada, as well as from the US-based Ford
Foundation.
