In early October, I meandered the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland with easy-laughing Mahmoud. We were bleary-eyed from international travel, and from many hours of animated discussions at our conference. 

Scholars, lawyers and activists had converged to explore ways to implement the rights of Palestinians to return to and regain their homes, seized by Israel in 1948. This fate had befallen Villa Harun ar-Rashid, the Jerusalem home of my late grandfather, Hanna Ibrahim Bisharat. We had been inspired by accounts of successful campaigns for housing restitution for refugees and other dispossessed peoples in Bosnia, South Africa and Rwanda.

The sky was leaden, the wind off the slate lake bracing. But the fountain at the end of the lake lofted exuberant white plumes of water toward the heavens, and seemed to elevate with them our hopes and dreams for a more just and peaceful future. 

Little did we suspect that in other conference rooms across the same city, Israelis and Palestinians had been conducting covert, informal negotiations for two years toward what are now touted as the "Geneva Accord." The agreement, while envisioning a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, studiously avoids mention of the very rights Mahmoud and I, and many others, are fighting to protect. The negotiators, prominent private citizens, include former Israeli Justice Minister Yossi Beilin and former Palestinian Information and Culture Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo. 

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has vehemently attacked the unofficial pact, and the negotiators have been condemned as irresponsible meddlers. The accord has no chance of adoption in the immediate future. 

Its principal objective may have only been didactic: to teach Israelis there is an alternative to the militaristic policies of Sharon. 

The pointed silence regarding the Palestinian right of return, however, means that an important opportunity has been missed to apprise Israelis, and the world, of a critical reality. No real or lasting peace will be achieved in the area until Israel finally admits the long-denied truth, accepts moral responsibility and apologizes for its forcible exile of Palestinian refugees 55 years ago. 

Ads by Google: Advertisements not controlled by IslamiCity

In 1948, three quarters of a million Palestinians were driven from what became Israel, their homes, land and possessions taken over by the new Jewish state. Most were victims of direct military attacks, forcible expulsion orders or a deliberate campaign of terror and intimidation, fueled by actual massacres. A post-war internal report from the Haganah (a quasi-official Jewish militia) stated that of 391,000 Palestinians who had fled by June, 1948, some 73 percent had done so in response to Jewish military operations. 

Palestinian villagers were often attacked at night, from two or three sides, while a road to the closest Arab country was left open. Their flight was hastened by news of massacres committed by Zionist forces, the most infamous of which occurred on April 9, 1948 in Deir Yassin. Up to 254 mostly unarmed Palestinians were slaughtered. Some were paraded in Jerusalem on trucks before being executed. 

Describing the July 10, 1948 attack on Kweikat, near Haifa, a villager attested: "We were awakened by the loudest noise we had ever heard, shells exploding and artillery fire ... the whole village was in panic ... Most of the villagers began to flee with their pajamas on. The wife of Qasim Ahmad Said fled [mistakenly] carrying a pillow in her arms instead of her child." 

Exile involved more than material deprivation. Palestinians lost their homes, belongings, fields, orchards, workshops, possessions, professions -- but more than that they lost their human dignity. Any people that has suffered massive wrongs -- African-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Jews -- understand the special wound of victimization for who you are, not what you have done. 

Like slavery for African-Americans, internment for Japanese-Americans and the Nazi holocaust for Jews, the "Nakba" ("Catastrophe") was a seminal event in the consciousness of the Palestinian people. No act of the Palestinians justified their expulsion. Their only "crime" was that they were born Christians and Muslims in a place coveted by the Zionist movement for an exclusive Jewish state, and refused to slink off into history as a vanquished people.