Exile and Return: Predicaments of Palestinians and Jews

Exile and Return: Predicaments of Palestinians and Jews is a bold attempt to understand constructively and build upon the terrible irony of two peoples, each with a searing memory of displacement and exile, struggling for a return to a land each remembers, each claims, and from which each has sought to exclude the other.

The Israeli, Palestinian, and American contributors to this volume consider the catastrophic failure of the Oslo peace process, the years of bloody violence that ensued, and a renewed awareness of the centrality of the Palestinian refugee question and the issues of demography and justice it raises with respect to any peace settlement. They explore the political meaning of the past delivered into the present by Palestinians whose personal and collective lives were forever transformed by the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, and by Israeli Jews whose sense of their own security and identity has been inseparably bound to centuries of persecution, culminating in the Holocaust, and a vividly constructed image as a people whose suffering arose from its exile from the Land of Israel twenty centuries ago.

The contributors' work is honest and often as inspiring as it is provocative. This volume stands as a major contribution to the construction of a new intellectual infrastructure for decisive thinking about the refugee question, about the entire notion of the right of return (whether in Zionism or in Palestinian nationalism), and about the unavoidable obstacles and unappreciated opportunities that confront peacemakers. It offers formulas, categories, and approaches that can be used by both Palestinian and Israeli leaders to convince their peoples that the agreement being sought will destroy neither the state that Israeli Jews have built nor the deep yearnings for vindication and return that lie at the emotional core of the Palestinian struggle.

The authors are leading scholars able to take full advantage of the flood of new work on these issues that the opening of various key archives has made possible. Their contributions here signal a shift toward a kind of reconciliation that is informed by the past, present, and future.

Contributors: Elazar Barkan, Michael R. Fischbach, Sari Hanafi, Amal Jamal, Laleh Khalili, Ze'ev Khanin, Ann M. Lesch, Ian S. Lustick, Ilan Pappé, Elie Podeh, Nadim N. Rouhana, Gershon Shafir, Yehouda Shenhav, Salim Tamari.

Preface
Introduction

1. The Failure of Oslo and the Abiding Question of the Refugees
—Ian S. Lustick and Ann M. Lesch

PART I. COLLECTIVE MEMORIES AND ACTUAL CHOICES
2. Commemorating Contested Lands
—Laleh Khalili
3. The Right of Return versus the Law of Return: Contrasting Historical Narratives in Israeli and Palestinian School Textbooks
—Elie Podeh
4. Social Capital and Refugee Repatriation: A Study of Economic and Social Transnational Kinship Networks in Palestine/Israel
—Sari Hanafi

PART II. TRUTH AND POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES
5. Considerations Toward Accepting Historical Responsibility
—Elazar Barkan
6. Negotiating Truth: The Holocaust, Lehavdil, and al-Nakba
—Ian S. Lustick

PART III. PRACTICAL MEANINGS OF EXILE AND RETURN
7. The Palestinian IDPs in Israel and the Predicament of Return: Between Imagining the Impossible and Enabling the Imaginative
—Amal Jamal
8. No Refuge for Refugees: The Insecure Exile of Palestinians in Kuwait
—Ann M. Lesch
9. The Vision of Return: Reflections on the Mass Immigration to Israel from the Former Soviet Union
—Ze'ev Khanin

PART IV. PROPERTY ISSUES FOR ARAB AND JEWISH MIGRANTS AND REFUGEES
10. Palestinian and Mizrahi Jewish Property Claims in Discourse and Diplomacy
—Michael R. Fischbach
11. Arab Jews, Population Exchange, and the Palestinian Right of Return
—Yehouda Shenhav
12. Palestinian Refugee Property Claims: Compensation and Restitution
—Salim Tamari

PART V. THE REFUGEE ISSUE IN CONTEXT
13. Truth and Reconciliation: The Right of Return in the Context of Past Injustice
—Nadim H. Rouhana
14. The Visible and Invisible in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
—Ilan Pappé
15. Reflections on the Right of Return: Divisible or Indivisible?
—Gershon Shafir

Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index