A Jewish case for Palestinian refugee return

SATURDAY 15 MAY WAS NAKBA DAY, which commemorates the 700,000 Palestinians who were expelled by Israel – or who fled in fear – during the country’s founding in 1948. The commemoration had special resonance this year, since it was Israel’s impending expulsion of six Palestinian families from the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah that was a trigger for the violent struggle engulfing Israel-Palestine. For many Palestinians, that imminent expulsion was evidence that the Nakba has still not come to an end.

Every year, commemorating the Nakba represents a kind of mental struggle to remember the past and sustain the hope that it can be overcome – by ensuring that Palestinian refugees and their descendants can return home. In my own community, by contrast, Jewish leaders in Israel and the diaspora demand that Palestinians forget the past and move on.

Israel’s parliament passed a law in 2011 that could deny government funds to any institution that commemorates the Nakba. Israeli teachers who mention it in their classes have been reprimanded by Israel’s Ministry of Education. Last year, two Israeli writers, Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf, published an influential book, The War of Return, which criticised the Palestinian desire for refugee return as emblematic of a “backward-facing mode” and an “inability to reconcile with the past”.

I read The War of Return last year 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, 2,000 and 2,500 years ago – in the first person and the present tense.

In Jewish discourse, this refusal to forget the past – or accept its verdict – evokes deep pride. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once boasted that Jews “have longer memories” than other peoples. 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. For 2,000 years, Jews have prayed to return to the land of Israel. Over the past 150 years, Jews have made that ancient yearning a reality. “After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion,” proclaims the Israel i Declaration of Independence. The State of Israel constitutes “the realization” of this “age-old dream”.

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