Transcript
KHALIL SHIKAKI: Thank you very much for having me here. The issue of the future of the refugees is one of the issues that everybody thought we knew what the answers were, but very few of us wanted to go deep inside and really try to find out how the refugees would feel about all these details with regard to their own futures. We assume that we know what is best for them and what they want. So we tended to avoid asking them questions because we thought these would be sensitive questions that we shouldn't ask. And even we at the center, when we decided to do these surveys made it a condition that everybody involved in this issue will be a refugee. To the fieldworker, who would interview the refugees, we insisted that they too be refugees. We had to train a lot of people to be sensitive to the issues, and we did tons of testing attempts in order to be able to make our questions as sensitive as possible so that we could get useful and reliable data that would help us to understand what the refugees want.
We essentially wanted to do two things: one, try to understand what options are open to us—Palestinians, Israelis, and everybody involved, with the issues of negotiations; and secondly, we wanted to provide ourselves—in this case the Palestinians, particularly those working on planning for the Palestinian state, the future of the Palestinian state—we wanted to provide ourselves with enough data and information that would help us become better prepared for the process of absorbing refugees in the Palestinian state. We wanted to know the numbers and we wanted to know the profile of those who would want to come to the Palestinian state. We have done graphics on their socioeconomic conditions, their desires, wishes, needs, et cetera, because we were fearful that even as we developed a good strategy for negotiations, a strategy that would meet the basic needs of the refugees, we were concerned that once we've done that we would make a mess out of implementing whatever we agree on with the Israelis and that the process of absorption, absorbing hundreds of thousands of refugees, would represent another catastrophe in the history of the refugees.
Motivated by these two basic objectives, we have been preparing for this for three years. We started before Camp David, and we in fact wanted to finish everything before Camp David. We were not able to do that because we discovered that this would require a much greater effort than we anticipated, so we kept working at it, hoping to do it after Camp David. And then we had the Intifida and the overall environment was not conducive to rational thinking, and for at least a year after the Intifada it was not physically possible for us to carry out surveys in the West Bank and Gaza. Even the regular surveys that I usually do every quarter I was not able to do during the first year of the Intifada. Between September 2000 and July 2001, I was not able to do a single survey in the West Bank and Gaza. It wasn't until the end of 2001 that we were able to put together the team—again, all refugees—to begin to do the surveys.
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