The National has a highly favorable review of a Palestinian road movie that includes a Bonnie and Clyde romance of illicit return by refugees to a village in Israel–
native village, which was destroyed in 1948. When the police inevitably
catch up to them, Soraya’s American passport spares her a jail
sentence, but Emad is beaten, handcuffed and taken away.The police take Soraya back to Ben-Gurion airport.
The movie was shown at Cannes. This review, published in Abu Dhabi, is penned by a writer who lives in New York and Beirut–and the news is that 1948 is replacing 1967 as the western back story in Israel/Palestine.
I think this is also what Ian Lustick is saying in his groundbreaking paper in Middle East Policy. The 1967 back story–hey, let's go back to the '67 borders by means of an exchange of territory between Israel and its grudging neighbors–is now giving way to the existential 1948 back story: of hatred/expulsion/legitimacy. Israel as a pariah state, with implacable neighbors. And this process is fed by the discoveries of the new historians (Lustick is surely one) and the growing love affair of western intelligentsia for the Nakba narrative.
Obviously I am on the Nakba narrative side of these things. But I am pulling for a two-state solution now, to get this business over with. I say that as an American, and an American who recognizes that without fairness, the solution will not be a permanent one. We need permanence and fairness as goals here, or the Middle East is going to remain the powder keg that it is in world affairs–and ignite other Iraqs.
The 1948/1967 question brings up that most thorny issue, the right of return. "Israel's nightmare," says Michael Fischbach, the leading American scholar on the question, who is due at the 92d Street Y this winter.
I have a few semi-practical comments on the right of return. First, if Eric Alterman is saying that the settlers who live on the West Bank ridgelines out of some biblical ligature ought to just stay there in the new Palestinian state–a proposal that Richard Witty has been making for years–then what is wrong with letting Palestinians come back to their ancestral villages in Israel? Why does only one side get to have its "return" to ancestral lands? If it's good for the goose, why not the gander?
The world has long respected this right. In his book The Peace Process and Palestinian Refugee Claims, Fischbach makes the point that in the Dayton accords on Bosnia (yes, not long afterward) there was no question about the right of return. "All refugees and displaced persons have the right freely to return to their homes of origin." Fischbach adds, "regardless of the impact that may have on the ethnic demography of each of their countries and regions…" This is a similar principle to the one that is found in U.N. 194 of 1948.
Fischbach makes a related point that I think it is vital to consider. Some time ago the Israelis discovered that during the great landgrab of 1948 they had confiscated the property not just of Arab villagers, but of some Jews living in Central Europe who had died in the Holocaust. He says the Israelis have set up commissions to make reparations to the victims' families.
"Clearly, Israeli governmental, semipublic, and private agencies are willing to part with millions of dollars' worth of financial assets and valuable real estate for the sake of justice and equity by restituing this property to the owners' heirs. This comes despite the passage of six decades since the end of the Second World War. However, political realities make it difficult to translate this willingness to the Palestinian-Israeli context: restitution in these instances was being made by Jews to other Jews, not Jews to Arabs…. suffice it to say that there is almost no support among Israeli Jews today for returning large quantities of property to their original Arab refugee owners after nearly six decades. Such an idea strikes at the heart of the Zionist vision of Israel as a state for the Jewish people…"
When I read Fischbach, I think, Gee, this Zionist vision is basically unfair to the Palestinians, and it reflects what the late Israel Shahak called "exclusivist, chauvinistic" understandings among Jews. And I say again: Why should we Americans, who have been tied up in this problem for decades with terrible effects, adopt views on the resolution of the problem that support such thinking? We who are about to elect a black man president?
Again, this is why the 1948 narrative is rising. Because as the peace process has gone on endlessly without real result, there is an international awareness of the basic injustice in Israel's land policies–and yes, because the Palestinians, having ground it out for so long, through apartheid conditions, seem to have some vision of the whole enterprise collapsing in the ways that Lustick describes: Jewish emigration to the U.S., the inmigration of Jewish life towards the Tel Aviv part of the country, away from the Arab periphery…
When Alterman suggets that we could find a solution by getting past ideology and religion, I say, Yes. Stop thinking in those ways. Let's stop thinking about the bible and the law of return that few wish to exercise anyway and start thinking about people's real relations to the land. I have to believe that a lot of Arabs would be very happy pursuing their traditional life styles in Israel. This is the implication of Salman Abu Sitta's studies, in which he looks at the real uses of the land and shows that repatriation would be possible:
“The return of the refugees
is possible with no appreciable dislocation of Jewish residents.”
Abu Sitta demonstrates that most Israeli Jews now live,
as they have for decades, in the central and coastal regions, which
he designates as Areas A and B. These areas, taken together, amount
to only 15 percent of the land.
“Thus, 78 percent of the Jewish population of Israel lives on only
15 percent of the land,” Abu Sitta said… 85
percent of the State of Israel, is, Abu Sitta notes, remarkably
similar to, but not exactly consistent with, the Palestinian areas
from which 805,000 refugees were forcibly expelled during the ethnic
cleansing of 1948.
Fascinating. My chief point here is that boundaries are less important than mutual respect; and that pluralistic Americans, who have learned somewhat how to live with one another, have real lessons to impart to the Israelis and Palestinians. We can think about these matters in creative ways. Yes, I know that these thoughts cause great anxiety among Zionists. But listen to your children: Jews are safe in western lands (or for god sakes listen to the Jerusalem Post say the same thing). Isn't it time to try to think of ways to make Jews feel safe in Israel and Palestine? The only way to achieve that is by respecting Palestinians' rights and desires.
