[ Why is dreaming of return laudable for Jews but pathological for
Palestinians? Since World War II, the international bodies that
oversee refugees have developed a clear ethical principle: People who
want to return home should be allowed to do so.]
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TESHUVAH: A JEWISH CASE FOR PALESTINIAN REFUGEE RETURN  
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Peter Beinart
May 11, 2021
Jewish Currents
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_ Why is dreaming of return laudable for Jews but pathological for
Palestinians? Since World War II, the international bodies that
oversee refugees have developed a clear ethical principle: People who
want to return home should be allowed to do so. _

A Palestinian man holding a key during a demonstration against
Israel's annexation plans in Gaza, July 2nd, 2020., Photo: Yousef
Masoud/INA Photo Agency/Sipa USA // Jewish Currents

 

In April, when Joe Biden announced
[[link removed]] that
he would restore US funding for The United Nations Relief and Works
Agency (UNRWA), which provides education, health care, and other
services to Palestinian refugees, establishment American Jewish groups
reacted with dismay. A letter signed
[[link removed]] by
Hadassah, B’nai B’rith, and the Zionist Organization of America
(ZOA) blamed UNRWA’s schools for teaching Palestinian refugees
“lessons steeped in anti-Semitism and supportive of violence.”
AIPAC accused
[[link removed]] the
organization of “inciting hatred of Jews and the Jewish state.”

But AIPAC and the ZOA did not merely accuse UNRWA of miseducating
Palestinian refugees. Along with Israeli government officials, they
have questioned whether most of the Palestinians that UNRWA serves are
refugees at all. AIPAC has slammed
[[link removed]] UNRWA’s
“misguided definition of refugees.” ZOA called
[[link removed]] UNRWA’s
clientele “the descendants of Arab refugees.” Israel’s
Ambassador to the US and the UN, Gilad Erdan, declared
[[link removed]] that,
“this UN agency for so-called ‘refugees’ should not exist in its
current format.” 

The fundamental problem with UNRWA, according to this line of
argument, is that it treats the children and grandchildren of
Palestinians expelled at Israel’s founding as refugees themselves.
Establishment Jewish critics don’t blame UNRWA merely for helping
Palestinians pass down their legal status as refugees, but their
identity as refugees as well. In _The War of Return_, a central text
of the anti-UNRWA campaign, the Israeli writers Adi Schwartz and Einat
Wilf allege that without UNRWA, refugee children “would likely have
lost their identity and assimilated into surrounding society.”
Instead, with UNRWA’s help, Palestinians are “constantly looking
back to their mythologized previous lives” while younger generations
act as if they have “undergone these experiences themselves.” To
Schwartz and Wilf’s horror, many Palestinians seem to believe that
in every generation, a person is obligated to see themselves as if
they personally left Palestine.

As it happens, I read _The War of Return_ just before Tisha B’Av,
the day on which Jews mourn the destruction of the Temples in
Jerusalem and the exiles that followed. On Tisha B’Av itself, I
listened to medieval_ _kinnot, or dirges, that describe those
events—which occurred, respectively, two thousand and two thousand
five hundred years ago—in the first person and the present tense
[[link removed]]. 

In Jewish discourse, this refusal to forget the past—or accept its
verdict—evokes deep pride. The late philosopher Isaiah Berlin
once boasted
[[link removed]] that Jews
“have longer memories” than other peoples. And in the late 19th
century, Zionists harnessed this long collective memory to create a
movement for return to a territory most Jews had never seen. “After
being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it
throughout their Dispersion,” proclaims Israel’s Declaration of
Independence [[link removed]].
The State of Israel constitutes “the realization” of this
“age-old dream.” 

 

Why is dreaming of return laudable for Jews but pathological for
Palestinians?

Why is dreaming of return laudable for Jews but pathological for
Palestinians? Asking the question does not imply that the two dreams
are symmetrical. The Palestinian families that mourn Jaffa or Safed
lived there recently and remember intimate details about their lost
homes. They experienced dispossession from Israel-Palestine. The Jews
who for centuries afflicted themselves on Tisha B’Av, or created the
Zionist movement, only imagined it. “You never stopped dreaming,”
the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once told
[[link removed]] an
Israeli interviewer. “But your dream was farther away in time and
place . . . I have been an exile for only 50 years. My dream is vivid,
fresh.” Darwish noted another crucial difference between the Jewish
and Palestinian dispersions: “You created our exile, we didn’t
create your exile.” 

Still, despite these differences, many prominent
Palestinians—from Darwish
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Edward Said to law professor George Bisharat
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former Knesset member Talab al-Sana
[[link removed]]—have
alluded to the bitter irony of Jews telling another people to give up
on their homeland and assimilate in foreign lands. We, of all people,
should understand how insulting that demand is. Jewish leaders keep
insisting that, to achieve peace, Palestinians must forget the Nakba,
the catastrophe they endured in 1948. But it is more accurate to say
that peace will come when Jews remember. The better we remember why
Palestinians left, the better we will understand why they deserve the
chance to return. 

Samira Dajani holds a photo of her father, Fouad Moussa Dajani and his
sons, taken in the same place in the courtyard of their home in the
Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, May 9th, 2021. The
Dajanis are one of several Palestinian families facing imminent
eviction in Sheikh Jarrah. Photo: Maya Alleruzzo/AP Photo  //
 Jewish Currents
Even for many Jews passionately opposed to Israeli policies in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip, supporting Palestinian refugee return
remains taboo. But, morally, this distinction makes little sense. If
it is wrong to hold Palestinians as non-citizens under military law,
and wrong to impose a blockade that denies them the necessities of
life, it is surely also wrong to expel them and prevent them from
returning home. For decades, liberal Jews have parried this moral
argument with a pragmatic one: Palestinian refugees should return only
to the West Bank and Gaza, regardless of whether that is where they
are from, as part of a two-state solution that gives both Palestinians
and Jews a country of their own. But with every passing year, as
Israel further entrenches its control over all the land between the
Jordan River and the Mediterannean Sea, this supposedly realistic
alternative grows more detached from reality. There will be no viable,
sovereign, Palestinian state to which refugees can go. What remains of
the case against Palestinian refugee return is a series of historical
and legal arguments, peddled by Israeli and American Jewish leaders,
about why Palestinians deserved their expulsion and have no right to
remedy it now. These arguments are not only unconvincing but deeply
ironic, since they ask Palestinians to repudiate the very principles
of intergenerational memory and historical restitution that Jews hold
sacred. If Palestinians have no right to return to their homeland,
neither do we.

The consequences of these efforts to rationalize and bury the Nakba
are not theoretical. They are playing themselves out right now on the
streets of Sheikh Jarrah. The Israeli leaders who justify
[[link removed]] expelling
Palestinians today in order to make Jerusalem a Jewish city are merely
paraphrasing the Jewish organizations that have spent the last several
decades justifying the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 in order to
create a Jewish state. What Ta-Nehisi Coates
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observed about the United States, and Desmond Tutu
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observed about South Africa—that historical crimes that go
unaddressed generally reappear, in different guise—is true for
Israel-Palestine as well. Refugee return therefore constitutes more
than mere repentance for the past. It is a prerequisite for building a
future in which both Jews and Palestinians enjoy safety and freedom in
the land each people calls home.

THE ARGUMENT AGAINST REFUGEE RETURN begins with a series of myths
about what happened in 1948, which allow Israeli and American Jewish
leaders to claim that Palestinians effectively expelled themselves. 

The most enduring myth is that Palestinians fled because Arab and
Palestinian officials told them to. The Anti-Defamation League
(ADL) asserts
[[link removed]] that
many Palestinians left “at the urging of Arab leaders, and expected
to return after a quick and certain Arab victory over the new Jewish
state.” The Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi debunked this claim
as early as 1959. In a study
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Arab radio broadcasts and newspapers, and the communiques of the Arab
League and various Arab and Palestinian fighting forces, he revealed
that, far from urging Palestinians to leave, Palestinian and Arab
officials often pleaded with them to stay. Decades later, employing
primarily Israeli and British archives for his book, _The Birth of
the Refugee Problem Revisited_, the Israeli historian Benny Morris did
uncover evidence of Arab leaders urging women, children, and the
elderly to evacuate villages so Arab fighters could better defend
them. Still, he concluded that what Arab leaders did “to promote or
stifle the exodus was only of secondary importance.” It was Zionist
military operations that proved “the major precipitants to
flight.” Zionist leaders at the time offered a similar assessment.
Israel’s intelligence service noted in a June 1948 report
[[link removed]] that the “impact
of ‘Jewish military action’ . . . on the migration was
decisive.” It added that “orders and directives issued by Arab
institutions and gangs” accounted for the evacuation of only 5% of
villages.

The Jewish establishment’s narrative of Palestinian
self-dispossession also blames Arab governments for rejecting the
United Nations proposal to partition Mandatory Palestine. “Zionist
leaders accepted the partition plan despite its less-than-ideal
solution,” the ADL has argued
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“It was the Arab nations who refused . . . Had the Arabs accepted
the plan in 1947 there would today be an Arab state alongside the
Jewish State of Israel and the heartache and bloodshed that have
characterized the Arab-Israeli conflict would have been avoided.” 

This is misleading. Zionist leaders accepted the UN partition plan on
paper while undoing it on the ground. The UN proposal envisioned a
Jewish state encompassing 55% of Mandatory Palestine’s land even
though Jews composed only a third of its population. Within the new
state’s suggested borders, Palestinians thus constituted as much as
47% of the population. Most Zionist leaders considered this
unacceptable. Morris notes that David Ben-Gurion, soon to be
Israel’s first prime minister, “clearly wanted as few Arabs as
possible in the Jewish State.” As early as 1938, he had declared,
“I support compulsory transfer.” Ben-Gurion’s logic, concludes
Morris, was clear: “without some sort of massive displacement of
Arabs from the area of the Jewish state-to-be, there could be no
viable ‘Jewish’ state.” 

Establishment Jewish organizations often link
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rejection of the UN partition plan to the war that Arab armies waged
against Israel. And it is true that, even before the Arab governments
officially declared war in May 1948, Arab and Palestinian militias
fought the embryonic Jewish state. In February and March of 1948,
these forces even came close to cutting off Jewish supply routes to
West Jerusalem and other areas of Jewish settlement. Arab forces also
committed atrocities. After members of the right-wing Zionist militia,
Etzel, threw grenades into a Palestinian crowd near an oil refinery in
Haifa in December 1947, the crowd turned on nearby Jewish workers,
killing 39 of them. In April of 1948, after Zionist forces killed more
than 100 unarmed Palestinians in the village of Deir Yassin,
Palestinian militiamen burned dozens of Jewish civilians to death in
buses on the road to Jerusalem. In May of that year, Arab fighters
vowing revenge for Deir Yassin killed 129 members of the kibbutz of
Kfar Etzion, even though they were flying white flags.  

 

What the establishment Jewish narrative omits is that the vast
majority of Palestinians forced from their homes committed no violence
at all. Their presence was intolerable not because they had personally
threatened Jews but because they threatened the demography of a Jewish
state.

But what the establishment Jewish narrative omits is that the vast
majority of Palestinians forced from their homes committed no violence
at all. In _Army of Shadows_, Hebrew University historian Hillel
Cohen notes that, “Most of the Palestinian Arabs who took up arms
were organized in units that defended their villages and homes, or
sometimes a group of villages.” They ventured beyond them “only in
extremely rare cases.” He adds that, frequently, “local Arab
representatives had approached their Jewish neighbors with requests to
conclude nonaggression pacts.” When such efforts failed, Palestinian
villages and towns often surrendered in the face of Zionist might. In
most cases, their residents were expelled anyway. Their presence was
intolerable not because they had personally threatened Jews but
because they threatened the demography of a Jewish state.

IN FOCUSING ON THE BEHAVIOR of Arab leaders, the Jewish establishment
tends to distract from what the Nakba meant for ordinary people.
Perhaps that is intentional, because the more one confronts the
Nakba’s human toll, the harder it becomes to rationalize what
happened then, and to oppose justice for Palestinian refugees now. In
roughly 18 months, Zionist forces evicted upwards of 700,000
individuals, more than half of Mandatory Palestine’s Arab
population. They emptied more than 400 Palestinian villages and
depopulated the Palestinian sections of many of Israel-Palestine’s
mixed cities and towns. In each of these places, Palestinians endured
horrors that haunted them for the rest of their lives.

In April 1948, the largest Zionist fighting force, the Haganah,
launched Operation Bi’ur Hametz (Passover Cleaning), which aimed to
seize the Palestinian neighborhoods of Haifa, whose population had
already been demoralized by the flight of local Palestinian elites. A
British intelligence officer accused Haganah troops of strafing the
harbor with “completely indiscriminate . . . machinegun fire, mortar
fire and sniping.” The assault on Arab neighborhoods  sparked what
one Palestinian observer termed a “mad rush to the port” in which
“man trampled on fellow man” in a desperate effort to board boats
leaving the city, some of which capsized. Many evacuees sought
sanctuary up the coast in Acre. Later that month, the Haganah launched
mortar attacks on that city, too. It also cut off Acre’s supply of
water and electricity, which likely contributed to a typhoid outbreak,
thus hastening the population’s flight. 

Members of the Haganah escorting Palestinians expelled from their
homes out of Haifa, May 12th, 1948. Photo: AFP  //  Jewish Currents
In October of that year, Israeli troops entered the largely Catholic
and Greek Orthodox village of Eilaboun in the Galilee. According to
the Palestinian filmmaker Hisham Zreiq, who used oral histories,
Israeli documents, and a UN observer report to reconstruct events, the
troops were met by priests holding a white flag. Soldiers from the
Golani Brigade responded by assembling villagers in the town square.
They forced the bulk of Eliaboun’s residents to evacuate the village
and head north, thus serving as human shields for Israeli forces who
trailed behind them, in case the road was mined. After forcing the
villagers to walk all day with little food or water, the soldiers
robbed them of their valuables and loaded them on trucks that
deposited them across the Lebanese border. According to an eyewitness,
the roughly dozen men held back in the town square were executed in
groups of three. 

In al-Dawayima, in the Hebron hills, where Israeli forces reportedly
killed between 80 and 100 men, women, and children—and, in one
instance, forced an elderly woman into a house and then blew it
up—an Israeli soldier told
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Israeli journalist that “cultured, polite commanders” behaved like
“base murderers.” After Israeli troops evicted as many as 70,000
Palestinians from Lydda and Ramle in July, an Israeli intelligence
officer analogized the event to a “pogrom” or the Roman “exile
of Israel.” Less openly discussed were the rapes by Zionist
soldiers. In _The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem
Revisited_, Morris recorded “several dozen cases”—but
later acknowledged [[link removed]] that since
such incidents generally went unreported, that figure was probably
“just the tip of the iceberg.” 

Even survivors who avoided permanent physical injury were never the
same. At the age of seven, Fawaz Turki fled Haifa with his family on
foot. Decades later he wrote about “the apocalyptic images that my
mind would dredge up, out of nowhere, of our refugee exodus . . .
where pregnant women gave birth on the wayside, screaming to heaven
with labour pain, and where children walked alone, with no hands to
hold.” Nazmiyya al-Kilani walked
[[link removed]] with a broken leg, one
child in her arms and another tied to her apron, to the Haifa port,
where she boarded a boat to Acre. In the chaos she lost contact with
her husband, father, brother, and sisters, all of whom were deported
from the country. For the next half-century, until her adult daughter
tracked down her siblings in Syria, she did not know if they were
alive or dead. According to Elias Srouji, forced to march from his
Galilean village to the Lebanese border, “The most heartrending
sight was the cats and dogs, barking and carrying on, trying to follow
their masters. I heard a man shout to his dog: ‘Go back! At least
you can stay!’” (Jews familiar with the way our sacred texts
imagine expulsion may hear a faint echo. The Talmud records
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Temple was destroyed, “even the animals and birds were
exiled.”)  

 

In June 1948, Ben-Gurion himself lamented the “mass plunder to which
all sectors of the country’s Jewish community were party.”

Eviction was generally followed by theft. In June 1948, Ben-Gurion
himself lamented
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“mass plunder to which all sectors of the country’s Jewish
community were party.” In Tiberias, according to an official from
the Jewish National Fund (JNF), Haganah troops “came in cars and
boats and loaded all sorts of goods [such as] refrigerators [and]
beds” while groups of Jewish civilians “walked about pillaging
from the Arab houses and shops.” In Deir Yassin, an officer from the
elite Haganah unit, the Palmach, observed that fighters from the
right-wing Zionist militia Lechi were “going about the village
robbing and stealing everything: Chickens, radio sets, sugar, money,
gold and more.” When the Haganah cleared the village of Sheikh Badr
in West Jerusalem, according to Morris, Jews from the nearby
neighborhood of Nachlaot “descended on Sheikh Badr and pillaged
it.” Haganah troops fired in the air to disperse the mob, and
British police later tried to protect vacated Palestinian houses. But
once both forces left, Nachlaot residents returned, “torching and
pillaging what remained.” 

Jewish authorities soon systematized the plunder. In July 1948, Israel
created a “Custodian for Deserted Property,” which it empowered to
distribute houses, lands, and other valuables that refugees had left
behind. Kibbutz officials, notes the historian Alon Confino,
“clamored for Arab land,” and the Israeli government leased much
of it to them in September, using the Jewish National Fund as a
middleman. Atop other former Palestinian villages, the JNF created
national parks
[[link removed]].
In urban areas, it distributed Palestinian houses to new Jewish
immigrants. Israel’s national library took possession of roughly
30,000 books
[[link removed]] stolen
from Palestinian homes. Many remain there today. 

In November 1948, Israel conducted a census. A month later, the
Knesset passed the Law for the Property of Absentees, which determined
that anyone not residing on their property during the census forfeited
their right to it. This meant not only that Palestinians outside
Israel’s borders were barred from reclaiming their houses and lands,
but that even Palestinians displaced inside Israel, who became Israeli
citizens, generally lost their property to the state. In a phrase
worthy of Orwell, the Israeli government dubbed them “present
absentees.” 

The scale of the land theft was astonishing. When the United Nations
passed its partition plan in November 1947, Jews owned roughly 7% of
the territory of Mandatory Palestine. By the early 1950s, almost 95%
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Israel’s land was owned by the Jewish state. 

Arab refugees flee fighting between Israel and Arab troops in the
Galilee, November 4th, 1948. Photo: Jim Pringle/AP Photo  //  Jewish
Currents
SINCE IT TOOK the expulsion of Palestinians to create a viable Jewish
state, many Jews fear—with good reason—that acknowledging and
rectifying that expulsion would challenge Jewish statehood itself.
This fear is often stated in numerical terms: If too many Palestinian
refugees return, Jews might no longer constitute a majority. But the
anxiety goes deeper. Why do so few Jewish institutions teach about the
Nakba? Because it is hard to look the Nakba in the eye and not wonder,
at least furtively, about the ethics of creating a Jewish state when
doing so required forcing vast numbers of Palestinians from their
homes. Why do so few Jewish institutions try to envision return?
Because doing so butts up against pillars of Jewish statehood: for
instance, the fact that the Israel Land Council
[[link removed]], which controls 93% of the
land inside Israel’s original boundaries, reserves almost half of
its seats for representatives of the Jewish National Fund, which
defines itself as “a trustee on behalf of the Jewish People
[[link removed]].”
Envisioning return requires uprooting deeply entrenched structures of
Jewish supremacy and Palestinian subordination. It requires
envisioning a different kind of country. 

I have argued
[[link removed]] previously
that Jews could not only survive, but thrive, in a country that
replaces Jewish privilege with equality under the law. A wealth of
comparative data suggests
[[link removed]] that political systems
that give everyone a voice in government generally prove more stable
and more peaceful for everyone. But, even in the best of
circumstances, such a transformation would be profoundly jarring to
many Jews. It would require redistributing land, economic resources,
and political power, and perhaps just as painfully, reconsidering
cherished myths about the Israeli and Zionist past. At this juncture
in history, it is impossible to know how so fundamental a transition
might occur, or if it ever will.

To ensure that this reckoning never comes, the Israeli government and
its American Jewish allies have offered a range of legal, historical,
and logistical arguments against refugee return. These all share one
thing in common: Were they applied to any group other than
Palestinians, American Jewish leaders would likely dismiss them as
immoral and absurd.

Consider the claim that Palestinian refugees have no right to return
under international law. On its face, this makes little sense. The
Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares
[[link removed]] that
“Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and
to return to his country.” United Nations General Assembly
Resolution 194
[[link removed]],
passed in 1948 and reaffirmed more than a hundred times since
[[link removed]], addresses
Palestinian refugees specifically. It asserts that those “wishing to
return to their homes and to live at peace with their neighbors should
be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”  

 

In the decades since World War II, the international bodies that
oversee refugees have developed a clear ethical principle: People who
want to return home should be allowed to do so.

Opponents of Palestinian return have rejoinders to these documents.
They argue
[[link removed]] that
General Assembly Resolutions aren’t legally binding. They claim
[[link removed]] that since Israel was only
created in May 1948, and Palestinian refugees were never its citizens,
they would not be returning to “their country.” But these are
legalisms devoid of moral content. In the decades since World War II,
the international bodies that oversee refugees have developed a clear
ethical principle: People who want to return home should be allowed to
do so. Although the pace of repatriation has slowed in recent years,
since 1990 almost nine times
[[link removed]] as many refugees have returned
to their home countries as have been resettled in new ones. And as a
2019 report [[link removed]] by the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) explains, resettlement is preferred
only when a refugee’s home country is so dangerous that it “cannot
provide them with appropriate protection and support.” 

When the refugees aren’t Palestinian, Jewish leaders don’t merely
accept this principle, they champion it. The 1995 Dayton Agreement,
which ended years of warfare between Serbia, Croatia, and
Bosnia, states
[[link removed]]:
“All refugees and displaced persons have the right freely to return
to their homes of origin” and “to have restored to them property
of which they were deprived in the course of hostilities.” The
American Jewish Committee—whose CEO, David Harris, has demanded
[[link removed]] that
Palestinian refugees begin “anew” in “adopted lands”—not
only endorsed the Dayton agreement but urged
[[link removed]] that
it be enforced with US troops. In 2019, AIPAC applauded
[[link removed]] Congress
for imposing sanctions
[[link removed]] aimed
at forcing the Syrian government to, among other things, permit “the
safe, voluntary, and dignified return of Syrians displaced by the
conflict.” That same year, the Union for Reform Judaism, in
justifying its support for reparations for Black Americans,
approvingly cited
[[link removed]] a UN
resolution
[[link removed]] that
defines reparations as including the right to “return to one’s
place of residence.” 

Jewish leaders also endorse the rights of return and compensation for
Jews expelled from Arab lands. In 2013, World Jewish Congress
President Ronald Lauder claimed
[[link removed]],
“The world has long recognized the Palestinian refugee problem, but
without recognizing the other side of the story—the 850,000 Jewish
refugees of Arab countries.” Arab Jews, he argued, deserve “equal
rights and treatment under international law.”

Given that international law strongly favors refugee return, the
logical implication of Lauder’s words is that Arab Jews should be
allowed to go back to their ancestral countries. But, of course,
Lauder and other Jewish leaders don’t want that; a Jewish exodus
from Israel would undermine the rationale for a Jewish state. What
they want is for the world to recognize Arab Jewish refugees’ rights
to repatriation and compensation so Israel can trade away those rights
in return for Palestinian refugees relinquishing theirs. As McGill
University political scientist Rex Brynen has noted, during the Oslo
peace process Israeli negotiators privately acknowledged that they
were using the flight of Arab Jews as “a bargaining chip, intended
to counterweigh Palestinian claims.” In so doing, Israeli leaders
backhandedly conceded the legitimacy of the very rights they don’t
want Palestinians to have. 

A Palestinian woman living in Lebanon holds a placard that reads,
“We will meet soon Palestine, we will return,” during a rally to
mark the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, May 15th, 2018. Photo: Bilal
Hussein/AP Photo  //  Jewish Currents
The double standard that suffuses establishment Jewish arguments
against the Palestinian right of return expresses itself most
glaringly in the debate over who counts as a refugee. Jewish leaders
often claim that only Palestinians who were themselves expelled
deserve the designation, not their descendants. It’s a cynical
argument: Later generations of Palestinians would not need refugee
status had Israel allowed their expelled parents or grandparents to
return. It’s hypocritical too. Distinguishing between expelled
Palestinians and their descendants allows Jewish leaders to cloak
their opposition in the language of universal principle—“refugee
status should not be handed down”—while in reality, they don’t
adhere to this principle universally. Across the globe, refugee
designations are frequently handed down from one generation to the
next, yet Jewish organizations do not object. As UNRWA has noted
[[link removed]],
“Palestine refugees are not distinct from other protracted refugee
situations such as those from Afghanistan or Somalia, where there are
multiple generations of refugees.” 

Moreover, the same American Jewish leaders who decry multigenerational
refugee status when it applies to Palestinians celebrate it when it
applies to Jews. In 2018, AJC CEO David Harris expressed
[[link removed]] outrage
that UNRWA’s mandate “covers all descendants, without limit, of
those deemed refugees in 1948.” The following year, Harris—who was
born in the United States to a refugee father
[[link removed]] who
grew up in Vienna—announced
[[link removed]] that
he had taken Austrian citizenship “in honor and memory of my
father.” In 2016, after Spain and Portugal offered
[[link removed]] citizenship
to roughly 10,000 descendants of Jews expelled from the Iberian
Peninsula more than 500 years ago, the AJC’s Associate Executive
Director declared
[[link removed]],
“We stand in awe at the commitment and efforts undertaken both by
Portugal and Spain to come to terms with their past.”

NOT ONLY do Jewish leaders insist that Israel has no legal or
historical obligation to repatriate or compensate Palestinians; they
also claim that doing so is impossible. Israel, the ADL notes
[[link removed]],
believes that “‘return’ is not viable for such a small state.”
Veteran Republican foreign policy official Elliott Abrams has called
compensating all Palestinian refugees a “fantasy
[[link removed]].”
Too much time has passed, too many Palestinian homes have been
destroyed, there are too many refugees. It is not possible to remedy
the past. The irony is that when it comes to compensation for
historical crimes, Jewish organizations have shown just how possible
it is to overcome these logistical hurdles. And when it comes to
effectively resettling large numbers of people in a short time in a
small space, Israel leads the world. 

More than 50 years after the Holocaust, Jewish
organizations negotiated an agreement
[[link removed]] in
which Swiss banks paid more than $1 billion to reimburse Jews whose
accounts they had expropriated during World War II. In 2018, the World
Jewish Restitution Organization welcomed
[[link removed]] new
US legislation to help Holocaust survivors and their descendants
reclaim property in Poland. While the Holocaust, unlike the Nakba, saw
millions murdered, the Jewish groups in these cases were not seeking
compensation for murder. They were seeking compensation for theft. If
Jews robbed en masse in the 1940s deserve reparations, surely
Palestinians do too. 

 

If Jews robbed en masse in the 1940s deserve reparations, surely
Palestinians do too.

When Jewish organizations deem it morally necessary, they find ways
to determine
[[link removed]] the
value of lost property. So does the Israeli government,
which estimated
[[link removed]] the
value of property lost by Jewish settlers withdrawn from the Gaza
Strip in order to compensate them. Such calculations can be made for
property lost in the Nakba as well. UN Resolution 194
[[link removed]],
which declared that Palestinian refugees were entitled to compensation
“for loss of, or damage to, property,” created the United Nations
Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP) to tally the losses.
Using land registers, tax records, and other documents from the
British mandate, the UNCCP between 1953 and 1964 assembled what
Randolph-Macon College historian Michael Fischbach has called “one
of the most complete sets of records documenting the landholdings of
any group of refugees in the twentieth century.” In recent decades,
those records have been turned into a searchable database and
cross-referenced with information from the Israeli Land Registry. The
primary barrier to compensating Palestinian refugees is not technical
complexity. It’s political will. 

The same goes for allowing Palestinian refugees to return home. Lubnah
Shomali of the Badil Resource Center, which promotes Palestinian
refugee rights, has noted
[[link removed]] that,
“If any state is an expert in receiving masses and masses of people
and settling them in a very small territory, it’s Israel.” In its
first four years of existence, Israel—which in 1948 contained just
over 800,000
[[link removed]] citizens—absorbed close
to 700,000
[[link removed]] immigrants.
At the height of the Soviet exodus in the early 1990s, when the Jewish
state totaled roughly 5 million
[[link removed]] citizens,
alongside several million Palestinian non-citizens in the West Bank
and Gaza, it took in another 500,000 immigrants
[[link removed]] over
four years. The number of returning Palestinian refugees could be
substantially higher than that, or not. It’s impossible to predict.
But this much is clear: If millions of diaspora Jews suddenly launched
a vast new aliyah to Israel, Jewish leaders would not say that Israel
lacked the capacity to absorb them. To the contrary, Israel would
exercise the capability it displayed in the late 1940s and early
1990s, when, as Technion urban planning professor Rachelle Alterman
has detailed
[[link removed]],
it quickly built large amounts of housing to accommodate new
immigrants.

Palestinian scholars have begun imagining what might be required to
absorb Palestinian refugees who want to return. One option would be to
build where former Palestinian villages once stood since, according
[[link removed]] to
Shomali, roughly 70% of those depopulated and destroyed in 1948 remain
vacant. In many cases, the rural land on which they sat
now constitutes
[[link removed]] nature
preserves or military zones. The Palestinian geographer Salman Abu
Sitta imagines a Palestinian Lands Authority, which could dole out
plots in former villages to the families of those who lived there.
He envisions
[[link removed]] many
returnees “resuming their traditional occupation in agriculture,
with more investment and advanced technology.” He’s even
convened contests
[[link removed]-(1)] in
which Palestinian architecture students build models of restored
villages.  

Ruins of Palestinian homes in Lifta, on the western edge of Jerusalem,
abandoned in 1948. Photo: Ariel Schalit/AP Photo  //  Jewish
Currents
The Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi, by contrast, told me he
thought it unlikely that many refugees—most of whom now live in or
near cities—would return to farming. Most would probably prefer to
live in urban areas. For Palestinians uninterested in reconstituting
destroyed rural villages, Badil has partnered with Zochrot, an Israeli
organization that raises awareness about the Nakba, to suggest
[[link removed]] two other options, both of
which bear some resemblance to Israel’s strategy
[[link removed]] for
settling Soviet immigrants in the 1990s. In that case, the government
gave newcomers money for rent while also offering developers subsidies
to rapidly build affordable homes. Now, Badil and Zochrot are
suggesting a “fast track” in which refugees would be granted
citizenship and a sum of money and then left to find housing on their
own, or a slower track that would require refugees to wait as the
government oversaw the construction of housing designated for them
near urban areas with available jobs. 

When Jews imagine Palestinian refugee return, most probably don’t
imagine a modified version of Israel’s absorption of Soviet Jews.
More likely, they imagine Palestinians expelling Jews from their
homes. Given Jewish history, and the trauma that the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict has inflicted on both sides, these fears
are understandable. But there is little evidence that they reflect
reality. For starters, not many Israeli Jews live in former
Palestinian homes since, tragically, only a few thousand
[[link removed]] remain. More importantly, the
Palestinian intellectuals and activists who envision return generally
insist that significant forced expulsion of Jews is neither necessary
nor desirable. Abu Sitta argues
[[link removed]],
“it is possible to implement the return of the refugees without
major displacement to the occupants of their houses.” Yusuf Jabarin
[[link removed]], a Palestinian professor of
geography who has developed plans
[[link removed]] for rebuilding
destroyed villages, emphasizes, “I have no interest in building my
life on the basis of attacks on Jews and making them fear they have no
place here.” Asked about Jews living in formerly Palestinian homes,
Edward Said in 2000 declared that “some humane and moderate solution
should be found where the claims of the present and the claims of the
past are addressed . . . I’m totally against eviction.”  

 

“I have no interest in building my life on the basis of attacks on
Jews and making them fear they have no place here.”

Badil and Zochrot have outlined
[[link removed]] what a “humane and moderate
solution” might look like. If a Jewish family owns a home once owned
by a Palestinian, first the original Palestinian owner (or their
heirs) and then the current Jewish owner would be offered the cash
value of the home in return for relinquishing their claim. If neither
accepted the payment, Zochrot activists Noa Levy and Eitan Bronstein
Aparicio have suggested a further compromise: Ownership of the
property would revert to the original Palestinian owners, but the
Jewish occupants would continue living there. The Palestinian owners
would receive compensation until the Jewish occupants moved or died,
at which point they would regain possession. In cases where Jewish
institutions sit where Palestinian homes once stood—for instance,
Tel Aviv University, which was built on the site of the destroyed
village of al-Shaykh Muwannis—Zochrot has proposed that the Jewish
inhabitants pay the former owners for the use of the land.

EFFORTS TO FACE AND REDRESS HISTORIC WRONGS are rarely simple, rapid,
uncontested, or complete. Seventeen years after the end of apartheid,
the South African government in March unveiled
[[link removed]] a
special court to fast-track the redistribution of land stolen from
Black South Africans; some white farmers worry
[[link removed]] it
could threaten their livelihood. In Canada, where the acknowledgement
of native lands has become standard practice at public events,
including hockey games
[[link removed]],
some conservative politicians are pushing back
[[link removed]].
So are some Indigenous leaders, who claim the practice has become
meaningless. Thousands of US schools
[[link removed]] now
use _The New York Times_’s 1619 curriculum, which aims to make
slavery and white supremacy central to the way American history is
taught. Meanwhile, some Republican legislators are trying to ban it
[[link removed]]. 

But as fraught and imperfect as efforts at historical justice can be,
it is worth considering what happens when they do not occur. There is
a reason that the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates ends his famous essay
[[link removed]] on
reparations for slavery with the subprime mortgage crisis that
bankrupted many Black Americans in the first decade of the 21st
century, and that the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama—best
known for memorializing lynchings—ends its main exhibit with the
current crisis of mass incarceration
[[link removed]].
The crimes of the past, when left unaddressed, do not remain in the
past. 

That’s true for the Nakba as well. Israel did not stop expelling
Palestinians when its war for independence ended. It displaced close
to 400,000
[[link removed]] more
Palestinians when it conquered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in
1967—roughly a quarter of whom only lived in the West Bank or Gaza
because their families had fled there, as refugees, in 1948. Between
1967 and 1994, Israel rid itself of another 250,000 Palestinians
through a policy
[[link removed]] that revoked
the residencies of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who left the
territories for an extended period of time. Since 2006, according to
Badil [[link removed]],
almost 10,000 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have
watched the Israeli government demolish their homes. In the 1950s, 28
Palestinian families forced from Jaffa and Haifa in 1948 relocated to
the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. After a decades-long
campaign by Jewish settlers, the Jerusalem District Court ruled
earlier this month that six of them should be evicted
[[link removed]].
By refusing to acknowledge the Nakba, the Israeli government prepared
the ground for its perpetuation. And by refusing to forget the Nakba,
Palestinians—and some dissident Israeli Jews—prepared the ground
for the resistance that is now convulsing Jerusalem, and
Israel-Palestine as a whole.  

 

In our bones, Jews know that when you tell a people to forget its past
you are not proposing peace. You are proposing extinction.

“We are what we remember,” wrote the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.
“As with an individual suffering from dementia, so with a culture as
a whole: the loss of memory is experienced as a loss of identity.”
For a stateless people, collective memory is key to national survival.
That’s why for centuries diaspora Jews asked to be buried with soil
from the land of Israel. And it’s why Palestinians gather soil
[[link removed]] from the
villages from which their parents or grandparents were expelled. For
Jews to tell Palestinians that peace requires them to forget the Nakba
is grotesque. In our bones, Jews know that when you tell a people to
forget its past you are not proposing peace. You are proposing
extinction.

Conversely, honestly facing the past—a process Desmond Tutu
has likened [[link removed]] to
“opening wounds” and “cleansing them so that they do not
fester”—can provide the basis for genuine reconciliation. In 1977,
Palestinian American graduate student George Bisharat traveled to the
West Jerusalem neighborhood of Talbiyeh and knocked on the door of the
house his grandfather had built and been robbed of. The elderly woman
who answered the door told him his family had never lived there.
“The humiliation of having to plead to enter my family’s home . .
. burned inside me,” Bisharat later wrote
[[link removed]].
In 2000, by then a law professor, he returned with his family. As his
wife and children looked on, a man originally from New York answered
the door and told him the same thing: It was not his family’s home.

But after Bisharat chronicled his experiences, he received an
invitation from a former soldier who had briefly lived in the house
after the Haganah seized it in 1948. When they met, the man said, “I
am sorry, I was blind. What we did was wrong,” and then added, “I
owe your family three month’s rent.” In that moment,
Bisharat wrote [[link removed]], he experienced
“an untapped reservoir of Palestinian magnanimity and good will that
could transform the relations between the two peoples, and make things
possible that are not possible today.”

There is a Hebrew word for the behavior of that former Haganah
soldier: Teshuvah, which is generally translated as “repentance.”
Ironically enough, however, its literal definition is “return.” In
Jewish tradition, return need not be physical; it can also be ethical
and spiritual. Which means that the return of Palestinian
refugees—far from necessitating Jewish exile—could be a kind of
return for us as well, a return to traditions of memory and justice
that the Nakba has evicted from organized Jewish life. “The occupier
and myself—both of us suffer from exile,” Mahmoud Darwish once
declared. “He is an exile in me and I am the victim of his exile.”
The longer the Nakba continues, the deeper this Jewish moral exile
becomes. By facing it squarely and beginning a process of repair, both
Jews and Palestinians, in different ways, can start to come home.

_Eliot Cohen, Sam Sussman, and Jonah Karsh assisted with the research
for this essay._

_[PETER BEINART is editor-at-large of Jewish Currents.]_

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