In Dissent a few weeks back Michael Walzer wrote that no Palestinian leader will give up the right of return of refugees, which means that Palestinians have not accepted Israel’s right to exist with a Jewish majority. Now Jerome Slater has responded saying that there is actually a rich history of Palestinian leaders/negotiators being willing to give up the right of return of refugees (beyond a token return, say of 30,000 refugees) thereby acknowledging what even some of these Palestinians have called Israel’s “demographic” needs, i.e., to maintain a strong Jewish majority inside Israel.
I know that Slater is a realist. And privately, even Palestinians will say, How many of the refugees are going to return to the land of Israel? So they also are being realistic… And yet I find these discussions unseemly, for a number of reasons having to do with the imbalanced power-politics and spiritual/historical-politics, of the issue. It’s complicated, so I’m going to chip away at this one:
–Politically I can’t see why anyone is dressing up the two-state solution as a reality. It’s not. It’s a failure. The positions Slater cites are largely 8 and 10 years old, or in the Palestinian Papers case, 2008– the product of a group of negotiators who I doubt are representative of Palestinian public opinion. They took these positions before the Israeli assault on Gaza in Dec. 08 catalyzed the international solidarity movement, which has embraced the right of return as a human rights principle, and years before the Arab spring changed many people’s expectations for democracy in the Middle East.
–Some spiritual politics. This post is about privileged American Jews, including me, weighing in on Palestinian rights. And here is liberal professor Eric Alterman, celebrating Sari Nusseibeh’s declaration that he would give up the right of return, and calling it a brave statement. But I need to point out: if you talk to any Palestinian in the Diaspora, they will tell you that they believe in the right of return. They might be romantic, but that’s what they actually say.
Palestinians in the West Bank too. At a time when the vision of human rights is shifting inside the Arab world, and we are dreaming of a fulfillment of liberal democracy in Egypt, why should any liberal in the West be selling out a basic human right– the right to return to your home from which you were thrown out? As James Murdoch says in the Guardian today, they were thrown out of their fucking homes. Isn’t this a fact/right that Jewish liberals ought to acknowledge and embrace?
–Historical/spiritual dimension. The United States acted to recognize Israel in 1948 in some large measure because Harry Truman was moved by the plight of European Jewish refugees in displaced persons camps, 3 years after the war. And in that year, 1948, 700,000 Palestinian refugees were created, and in the decades that followed several U.S. Presidents urged Israel to allow them to return to their homes, which was their right under international law. Israel flouted US concerns. None of these Palestinian refugees were allowed to return to their homes. Their plight was never the basis of international action…. And their rights are still being debated and negotiated away by American political theorist Michael Walzer 63 years later. Isn’t that kind of dispiriting/unseemly?
–The power-politics dimension is inescapable. For those 60-odd years, Jews have had a law of return under which any Jew anywhere has a right to become a citizen of a land from which 100s of thousands of Palestinians were expelled and to which they were not allowed to return. Jerry Slater, Eric Alterman, Michael Walzer and I have all chosen not to exercise our right of “return,” preferring to live in the liberal democracy in which we were born. So: hundreds of thousands of Palestinians want to go home, were born there but can’t set foot in the place, can’t even visit their own homes. And millions of other Jews who have no living connection to this land–only a connection they find in religious texts– get to move to those homes whenever they like, on a racial/ethnic basis. Isn’t that kind of appalling?
I have to repeat: Who would want to be a party to such talk? Michael Walzer is a justice theorist. He has come up with respected theories of law and justice. I have to ask: Is there any justice in demanding that millions of people who say they want the right to return to their (or their parents’) homes have no right to do so but must accept their dispossession as an accomplished fact and moral virtue? What would that theory of justice say about the Jews who lost family members and property in the Holocaust, and who have been compensated, and more than that, APOLOGIZED TO?
I find this the most stupendous monstrosity of the refugees issue. We Jews were apologized to. We Jews have countless holocaust museums across the United States and the world. Beginning 20 years or so after the fact, the world did its utmost to apologize to the Jews and say Never-again. No, the atrocities of the Nakba don’t approach the horrors of the Holocaust. (Though for those who were massacred, what’s the difference if they were one of 100 or one of 100,000?) But right now the world has done almost nothing to acknowledge the Nakba, and Jewish leaders have done nothing collectively to acknowledge it, even 60 years later.
This dullness won’t last. Walzer and Alterman are trying to run ahead of that awareness. They want to cut a deal to save the Jewish state before people wake up to the tragedy that marked its establishment– a tragedy that Jerry Slater has done as much as anyone to document in the West.
I say, Liberals are better than that. American liberals—we should do as Nixon, Eisenhower, Johnson and Truman said, and stand up for the right of return. The recent Zogby poll says that liberal Americans [Obama supporters] support the right of return by 61 to 13 percent. On the basis of similar consensuses, liberals have argued for abortion rights, women’s rights and gay rights– and changed America! Why throw in the towel on the right of return?
It may be that the injustices of the Nakba are so old that the right of return isn’t fully actionable. It may well be that the refugees are so well situated that few would want to return. It may well be that the Palestinians living in Palestine and even the border states are less attached to the right of return than the Palestinians in the Diaspora. And god knows, Diaspora longings are a bad basis for policy-making.
But I don’t see how a liberal American Jew can be taking the conservative position on these matters, I don’t see where a liberal American Jew gets off talking about “demographics.” And please, save me those arguments, at least until our community has acknowledged the Nakba, and apologized for our part in it…
