Terry Rempel, founding member of BADIL - a resource centre for Palestinian residency and refugee rights - explains why defining who's a refugee is so political, and attempts to answer how many Palestinian refugees there are. The full article is printed in the current issue of Forced Migration Review.

Despite international recognition of the gravity of the problem, there remains a considerable lack of popular knowledge and/or misinformation about the world's largest refugee population. A recent study of TV news coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the UK discovered that most British viewers were unaware that Palestinians were uprooted from their homes and land when Israel was established in 1948.

Many of those familiar with the Palestinian case tend, as a paper by the Refugee Studies Centre for the UK Department of International Development (DFID) notes, "to see them as a case apart from other refugees in the region and, indeed, the global context generally."

This can be ascribed, in part, to the contentious debate that envelops this refugee question, particularly the right of return. It is also due to the unique aspects of Palestinian displacement:

• The UN. General Assembly Resolution 181 of 1947 recommending the partition of Mandate Palestine into two states contributed to the initial forced displacement of Palestinians.
• The universally-accepted definition of a "refugee" does not apply to the majority of Palestinian refugees.
• The U.N. established separate international agencies - UNCCP and UNRWA - to provide protection and assistance and to seek durable solutions for this refugee population based on principles elaborated in relevant U.N. resolutions.
• Most Palestinians today are both refugees and stateless persons.
• While voluntary repatriation remains in principle and in practice the primary durable solution for refugees worldwide, Israel - as the state of origin for the majority of the refugees - and key members of the international community, including the U.S. and the European Union, continue to view host country integration and resettlement as the primary durable solutions for Palestinian refugees.

Palestinians and Israelis both make claims about the uniqueness of Palestinian refugees.

Many Israelis, for example, claim that the separate regime established for Palestinian refugees (combined with the reluctance of Arab host states to resettle the refugees who cannot exercise their right of return) prevents a solution to the long-standing refugee problem.

Palestinians argue that while the U.N. continues to affirm, in principle, the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes of origin, member states have failed to muster the political and material resources that have made refugee return possible in other contexts.

Who is a refugee?

Israelis and Palestinians don't agree on the root causes of displacement, and they don't agree on who is a Palestinian refugee. During numerous negotiation sessions in the 1990s the parties failed to achieve consensus on a refugee definition.

While Israel argued for a narrow definition restricted to first generation refugees - those actually displaced in 1948 and in 1967 - Palestinians advocated an inclusive or expanded definition that included children and spouses of refugees, and others in refugee-like conditions, including those deported from the OPT by Israel, persons who were abroad at the time of hostilities and unable to return, individuals whose residency rights Israel revoked and those who were not displaced but had lost access to their means of livelihood.

This disagreement is exacerbated by the fact that there is no comprehensive definition of a Palestinian refugee. The most commonly cited definition is that used by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the U.N. agency set up in 1949 - two years prior to the formation of the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR - to provide relief and assistance to the refugees in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

Unlike the 1951 Refugee Convention, however, the UNRWA definition merely establishes criteria for assistance - it does not define refugee status. A U.N. initiative in the 1980s to issue identity cards to all refugees, irrespective of whether or not they were recipients of international aid, failed due to the lack of cooperation among host states.

In the early 1950s, the U.N. Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP), which was established by a general assembly to facilitate a solution to all aspects of the 1948 conflict, prepared a working definition of a Palestine refugee to identify those persons in need of international protection.

The definition would have covered all persons displaced in Palestine during the 1948 war irrespective of ethnic, national or religious origins. In light of the intractable differences between Israel, the Arab states and the Palestinians, however, the Commission's protection mandate was greatly reduced and the definition was never adopted.

The U.N. failed to provide the UNCCP with the machinery or resources to carry out its mandate in the context of a protracted conflict. The Commission reached the conclusion that it was unable to fulfill its mandate due to the lack of international political will. Today it has no budget and no staff.

How many refugees are there?

Not surprisingly, Israelis and Palestinians fail to agree on the number of Palestinian refugees. This is further complicated by lack of a universally-accepted refugee definition, a comprehensive registration system and frequent migration.

But it also relates to security and political concerns in host countries like Jordan and Lebanon, fears about repatriation in the country of origin and international concerns about capacity to deliver services and the impact on humanitarian aid budgets and to asylum claims.

This explains the vast discrepancy in estimates of the Palestinian refugee population.

Israeli and Palestinian estimates of the total numbers of Palestinians displaced in 1948 range from a low of several hundred thousand upwards to nearly a million.

The total numbers of Palestinians displaced for the first time from the 1967 OPT range from just over 100,000 to nearly 300,000.

Demographic studies that compare the size of the pre-war Palestinian population to the number of Palestinians that remained after the end of both wars tend to confirm estimates in the higher range. Some estimate that around 20,000 Palestinians were displaced per annum after 1967.

Academic studies and popular media often cite UNRWA registration figures as the total size of the Palestinian refugee population. Latest UNRWA figures cite a total Palestinian refugee population of 4.25 million (Jordan 1.78m; Gaza 0.96m; West Bank 0.68m; Syria 0.42m and Lebanon 0.4m).

While UNRWA registration data provides a basic starting point, agency data excludes: 1948 refugees who did not register or meet UNRWA's eligibility requirements; 1967 refugees; those displaced after 1967 and IDPs. UNRWA registration files for IDPs inside Israel became inactive in 1952 and it is yet unclear if UNRWA will be asked to assume responsibility for new IDPs in the OPT.

Additional sources of information include UNHCR statistics for Palestinian refugees outside the five UNRWA areas of operation and in need of international protection, government statistical surveys, independent demographic studies (carried out by organizations such as FAFO Institute for Applied Social Science) and civil society estimates (such as those by Civitas).

Assuming a broad definition descriptive of the scope of displacement and the number of potential claimants - i.e. not necessarily all persons in need of day-to-day protection and including 1948, 1967 and post-1967 refugees - it is estimated that up to three-quarters of the Palestinian people have been displaced since 1948.

The Bethlehem-based BADIL Resource Centre for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights estimates the total number of displaced Palestinians to be over seven million.

A longer version of this article is online in Forced Migration Review.

Any views expressed in this article are those of the author and not of Reuters.