The furor over Helen Thomas’ remarks reminded me of this lecture Amira Hass gave in New York two years ago, in which she eloquently described the intersection of Israel’s Law of Return and the Palestinian right of return.
In the talk Hass tells an anecdote about a French activist who asked her if she ever thought of “returning” to Sarajevo, the place her Holocaust survivor mother left before moving to Israel. She said it bothered her because, as a Jew born in Israel, she had never known another country.
But the French woman’s confusion reflects a tension inside Jewish life: between the desire for Jewish concrete return after the Holocaust–returning to communities in Europe that no longer existed–and the abstract Zionist “return” to a place most Jews had never been, Palestine.
What was unfortunate about Helen Thomas’ comment is that, while many Israeli Jews are dual citizens, or otherwise have one foot in another country, many do not. It makes no sense to ask Amira Hass and Israelis like her to “go back” to a Europe that they do not know.
Palestinians have a very different experience of being refugees, and Hass says Palestinians sometimes transposed that experience onto the Jews. At first she couldn’t understand when Palestinians insisted "on giving me imagined roots into places and languages and landscapes that are totally foreign to me … that are not mine, that are fata morgana, that are a phantom.” All in Europe, of course.
However, she notes in her talk, in Palestinian society, this question of belonging has a different meaning. When you ask a Palestinian of refugee lineage, “where are you from?” they will tell you the name of the exact village or city in Mandate Palestine from which their parents or grandparents were forced in 1947 or ‘48.
So while many Jews wrestled with a dilemma between concrete and abstract return, for Palestinians, the right of return is wholly a concrete concept.
What Hass recognizes and I also believe is that Jewish “refugee-ness” is intimately bound up with the history (past and present) of Palestinian dispossession.
