Prospective post-conflict arrangements for Palestinian refugees revolve around a pool of strategies and options. Prominent amongst those are various views of implementing repatriation, resettlement and some aspects of reparations, particularly property restitution and compensation. Previous rounds of negotiations and attempts at settling the Palestinian refugee problem have tackled one aspect or the other of the above. Yet, there has been an alarming steady lack of agreement between the parties over what constitutes reparations as a concept of redress and the various forms it takes such as apology for example. This comes in contrast to the modern comparative practice and literature on the politics of reparations stressing the centrality of apology as an integral form of reparations employed in the search for redressing a historical injustice such as displacement and dispossession. Drawing on international practice in Japan, South Korea and the US; as well as on the modern literature on reparations, this article seeks to illustrate how and why apology as a form of reparations is associated with monetary compensation and is an integral component of the search for redress to the Palestinian refugee problem. The study will also illustrate how negotiating the Palestinian refugee issue throughout the past decades has approached reparations- or failed to- from this perspective. It will argue that redressing the Palestinian refugee problem ought to include an official apology acknowledging the wrongful act of displacement and dispossession. © 2010 Taylor & Francis.

Apology Acknowledgement Palestinian refugees reparations

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