Fate of refugees bedevils quest for Mideast peace

By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Munir Jaber was seven years old when Jewish fighters assaulted the thinly defended village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem before dawn on April 9, 1948 and killed scores of men, women and children.

Now a dapper man of 66, met by chance in Shuafat refugee camp in Jerusalem, he fingers blue worry beads as he recalls an episode that terrified Palestinians at the time and created an enduring symbol of their exodus from their homeland.

"Thirty seven of my family were killed," Jaber said, telling how his brother's throat was slit and his cousin was shot.

Ali Mohammed, 69, said his family had fled the village of Beit Thul, west of Jerusalem, in panic soon afterwards.

"There was no attack on our village, but we saw soldiers blowing up houses in the nearby village of Saris. We were afraid after what happened in Deir Yassin," he remembered.

Deir Yassin fell five weeks before British Mandate rule ended and Israel was created. Some 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled into nearby Syria, Jordan or Lebanon in 1947-49 fighting, leaving 165,000 who became Arab Israeli citizens.

The 1948 refugees and their descendants make up the bulk of the 4.3 million refugees cared for by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, many in slum-like camps in Arab countries and in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. All claim a right to return.

No issue, with the possible exception of Jerusalem, is as emotive and troubling for Palestinians and Israelis as the fate of these people at the core of the Middle East conflict.

This week an Arab League summit in Riyadh is expected to renew an offer of full peace and normal relations with Israel if it withdraws from all the land it occupied in the 1967 Middle East war, accepts the creation of a Palestinian state and reaches an "agreed, just solution" for the refugees.

Israeli leaders have said the plan has positive aspects, but others, such as the proposal on refugees, are "problematic."

"RIGHT OF RETURN"

The Arab plan endorses a 1948 U.N. resolution which calls for refugees to be allowed to return or be compensated.

Neither Resolution 194 nor the Arab peace proposal contains the phrase "right of return," although this remains a longstanding Palestinian demand -- and anathema to Israel.

Mere talk of refugees sets off alarm bells for Israelis.

They fear that any mass return would threaten the Jewish character of the state carved out in 1948 on land partly assigned by a U.N. partition plan and partly gained in a war with Palestinians and Arab states which rejected that plan.