On the Palestinian Right of Return

A Jewish Meditation on History, Rights and Return

by Marc H. Ellis

I have been speaking and writing on the subjects of Jewish history, the Holocaust, and Israel and Palestine for over twenty years. I must confess that I have never addressed directly the Palestinian right of return. One can speculate on this lacuna and perhaps properly so. Is it fear of the issue that may in fact lie at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its resolution? Is it a desire, even when severely criticizing Israel and Israeli policy, to dodge the issue of Israel's right to exist or its continuation as a Jewish state? As a Jew who has publicly taken positions that are seen as extremely negative by the Jewish establishment, meaning by this not only leaders of Jewish organizations in the United States but also the university network of Jewish and Holocaust Studies programs that have mushroomed over the last decades, am I content to speak in the generalities of ethics and morality without facing the hard practical issues, the very issues that might make the difference? Though very critical of the Jewish renewal movement exemplified by Tikkun magazine in the United States and similarly critical of Peace Now in Israel for claiming a progressive agenda that often covers over the sins of settlement and expansion, by avoiding the Palestinian right of return, do I also participate in the progressive movement I have criticized?

That judgments ultimately belongs to the reader. The following is my attempt to approach the question of the Palestinian right of return . I begin by advancing my own views on a variety of issues surrounding the right of return and the context from which these views emanate. As with any issue of depth and moment, autobiography is crucial to factor in. My own biases, identities and struggles are important, at least to how I enter the question before us: as an American Jew born in the first decade after the Holocaust, it is impossible to pretend an objective analysis on the questions of Jewishness, Israel and the Palestinians.

To begin with, I place to the side questions of international law, United Nations resolutions and the modern understanding of human rights. I do this not because they are irrelevant or because they favor one side or the other; institutions and statements should obviously be used to assert the rights and dignity of the displaced and those who struggle for freedom. I also leave aside the power of the powerful to conquer and occupy and then to assert innocence and destiny in the exercise of that power. Clearly, the power of the powerful is a factor that cannot be denied through history and today as well. I take for granted that power to dislocate and destroy should be opposed. Finally, I bypass the argument, at least in its deepest sense, of the complexity of history and all that this implies. The complexity of history is a topic for discussion on this and many other issues, but it is most often used as an excuse or a justification for lack of criticism of unjust power. It may be that history is simply a progression of one atrocity after another, where victory is to be celebrated and defeat to be avenged until the end of time - I cannot rationally argue against this view of human history. But in the end I do not stand in this kind of history; I would be dishonest to invoke it.

By not dealing with these issues, I do not seek to demean their significance for Israelis and Palestinians. In many ways the invocation of law, power and the travails of history are constant and significant in the lives of both peoples. They are also part of the cycle of dislocation and atrocity that threatens to become the future for Israel and Palestine rather than a bloody past. In a cumulative way, these issues point to a deeper place of decision, at least for Jews. For the refusal to find certain claims as central to the argument can heighten their significance as signposts for reflection. Could it be that international law, the power of the powerful and the cycle of dislocation and atrocity warn Jews of our tradition of suffering and struggle, one that we inherit and are now squandering?

It is the tradition of suffering and struggle that I turn to, the place from which Israel emerges and Judaism finds its roots. I refer here to formative experiences of slavery and freedom, the difficult path of nation building and occupation, then the dispersion and diasporas, the suffering within Christendom, the embrace and disappointment with the Enlightenment, the Nazi era and the Holocaust. Within this history so many ideals and possibilities emerge: of choosiness and justice, of vocation and service, of society and the prophetic.

And yet it is here that some claim the problematic to lie. In Jewish history, especially in the Biblical period, is a self-righteousness and militarism. The peoples beyond and next to Israel are pawns in the salvation history of the tribes of Yahweh. Dispossession is mandated by the promise of the land and God legitimates, even leads, Israel into the land.

In Israel's wake is desolation and death. Is this history the forbearer of modern Israel? The lacuna between these ancient histories of violence and retribution and the peaceful, often suffering, journey of diasporas Jewry is time without power. When power is achieved the ancient reasserts itself and the real character of the Jews is displayed.

Is Ariel Sharon the real Jew, ancient in modern dress? Is the nation-state Israel, heir to Biblical Israel, again the real Israel in modern style? The danger of essentialism is everywhere, origins as destiny, freedom circumscribed by ancient beginnings. So too the danger of the modern, origins as the present with no precursors, goodness as goodness, violence as violence, as if nothing is historical and particular. In the former view, Jews are Jews with no difference between them except style and strategy; in the latter view Ariel Sharon and the voices found in the progressive Jewish journal, Tikkun, are disconnected and discontinuous.

Between essentialism and the modern lies a connection that is neither determinative nor disconnected. The connection is multifaceted and diverse, opening history and possibility through the mediation of text and tradition, within patterns of thought and life over the millennia, in light of conscience. Here decisions are made within a framework that is real and flexible, one that has origins and freedom, a vocation that evolves and is embodied within and beyond the individual.

Within this understanding is there such a thing as a real Jew as opposed to an inauthentic Jew? Can the nation-state Israel be claimed as the real heir to Jewish history or as inauthentic to that history?

My own sense is that claims of real and inauthentic pegged to individual Jews or Israel fail to address the question of what it means to be Jewish or indeed what it means to be a Jewish state. It also tells us little about our obligations to ourselves, our people and to the world.

What then defines us as individual Jews and as a people in our time? Here contemporary history assumes importance. Values in the Jewish tradition have grown within a history and are tested in every generation. These values are found within certain patterns of thought and hope, yet their embodiment is contextual, arguing for independence status in certain places and times, in some eras under assault, in other contexts able to exist in an interdependence with other cultures and systems. Of course, in a community that exists in diverse settings and frameworks, the contextual reality is of great importance. And it can be that different communities in the same time period will pursue different paths. This is certainly true in our time: just a cursory exploration of Jewish life in America and Israel point to tremendous differences in relating to neighbor, culture, the military and the nation-state.

Still, the commonality remains, at least in bonds of sensibility and solidarity. In some ways, because of mass communication and travel, we are more aware of these bonds than ever before. In other ways, perhaps precisely because of mass communication and travel, the bonds are more strained. At least at the elite level, American Jews know of Israeli policies and Israelis know of American Jewish understandings in detail and immediately. Policies and responses can be coordinated by organizations, between on the one side, the Israeli government and American Israel Political Action Committee, and on the other side, between Peace Now and Tikkun. If commonality with regard to the state can be coordinated so can commonality in dissent. Solidarity on both sides of the divide are instantaneously possible which, on a different level, can also heighten the divide. There are some who believe that in our time two nations are forming within the Jewish community, one in Israel, the other in the United States. But I wonder if these nations, or better yet two divergent sensibilities, are forming within Israel and America precisely over the future of Jewish life.

Is it in this division that the kernel of the Palestinian question is found?

And is it here that the question of the Palestinian right of return is also to be located?

The divisions in Jewish life are complex. But here it is important to understand that the division is widening and is foundational in nature. What does it mean to be Jewish? What is the destiny of the Jewish people? What practice defines Judaism and Jewish life? Can Jews live within a community of Jews that define themselves in a pluralistic way and with others who are non-Jewish, themselves pluralistic in their outlook and identities? How does statehood, including the very conception of citizenship, affect one's sense of Jewishness and Jewish identity? The question of history is important here. Does the past, especially in Europe, of isolation and ghettoization, of pogroms and Holocaust, define the Jewish future? Or is this past really past, invoked now to warn against transgressions against any community, including but not limited to Jews?

Ideology and theology notwithstanding, Jews have chosen, even after the Holocaust, to live in secular, pluralist, democratic nation-states. This is clearly true with regard to the United States and Europe; it is also true, at least with regard to Jews, in Israel. Israel is founded on these principles and the peculiar intermingling of synagogue and state that flows from Jewish history is, in relative terms, akin to the relations of church and state in America. The restrictions on citizenship of the Palestinian minority also have their parallels with historic restrictions on African-Americans in the United States. Despite reversals, and with the realization that significant struggles lie ahead, the fight for equality of Jews and Palestinians will continue, even escalate in the years ahead.

As a modern, Western-oriented nation-state, Israel and Israelis will have no choice but to continue on the path toward expanding the practice of pluralism and democracy. The primary challenge, of course, will be the greater integration of Palestinians, those in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, into this citizenship. The proximity of the two peoples -geographically, culturally, historically, economically and linguistically -makes this expansion of citizenship inevitable, even if some Jews and Palestinians resist this integration, at least symbolically. I use the term symbolically for a specific reason: who, looking at the map of Israel and Palestine, with the intermingling of populations, settlements, roads, security, borders and economy can seriously consider a separation that is more than symbolic? The crossing of boundaries between Jews and Palestinians has steadily increased over the years and will increase in the future, this in spite of the stated policy of separation. Much, perhaps most, of this interaction has been imposed by occupation, dislocation and atrocity, the attempt above all to create an apartheid system in the name of Jewish history, but the unintended consequences are the future. This future of integration, under two flags or one, at first in victory and surrender, will one day see the creation of a new identity for Jews and Palestinians in Israel/Palestine that will carry aspects of each people's past and elements of joint experiences forged in blood, struggle and solidarity.

Today, in the midst of a new Intifada and the governance of Ariel Sharon, history seems to be moving in the opposite direction. Naturally, in this situation, the ideology of separation, always linked to a romanticized past, is played, on both sides, politically and dramatically. And who can protest these dreams of the past, especially among the suffering who, in their lifetime, have experienced and continue to experience exile today?

Who in conscience, especially Jews, can help but be thoroughly disgusted with the bellicose claims of a united Jerusalem, eternally, under Jewish power, with no sense of other connections to land and religion? The Palestinian right of return rests here, at least in my understanding.

The argument can be made on many levels - including and beyond the areas I have left aside - but the right of return, or better phrased the possibility of return, rests, ultimately, less on rights, history, or power than it does on the unintended consequences of victory and the long run of history that always, everywhere, and especially where it is denied ideologically and symbolically, moves toward integration. The division of the Jewish community in Israel and America, but more importantly the choice of Jews to live in secular, pluralistic, and democratic societies regardless of their theology, is part of this future movement.