Return

I have long felt that Palestinians’ call for Right Of Return for all refugees was among the political claims which present a frustrating paradox: the fundamental moral claim that every loss should be made whole is indisputable, but actually persuing it was so hopelessly intractable that keeping it on the table only stood in the way of either justice or peace. But Peter Beinart’s essay Teshuvah: A Jewish Case for Palestinian Refugee Return has turned me around. The moral case is even stronger than I registered. The pragmatics are hard, but not as impossible as I feared.

In 1977, Palestinian American graduate student George Bisharat traveled to the West Jerusalem neighborhood of Talbiyeh and knocked on the door of the house his grandfather had built and been robbed of. The elderly woman who answered the door told him his family had never lived there. “The humiliation of having to plead to enter my family’s home ... burned inside me,” Bisharat later wrote. In 2000, by then a law professor, he returned with his family. As his wife and children looked on, a man originally from New York answered the door and told him the same thing: It was not his family’s home.

But after Bisharat chronicled his experiences, he received an invitation from a former soldier who had briefly lived in the house after the Haganah seized it in 1948. When they met, the man said, “I am sorry, I was blind. What we did was wrong,” and then added, “I owe your family three month’s rent.” In that moment, Bisharat wrote, he experienced “an untapped reservoir of Palestinian magnanimity and good will that could transform the relations between the two peoples, and make things possible that are not possible today.”

There is a Hebrew word for the behavior of that former Haganah soldier: Teshuvah, which is generally translated as “repentance.” Ironically enough, however, its literal definition is “return.” In Jewish tradition, return need not be physical; it can also be ethical and spiritual. Which means that the return of Palestinian refugees—far from necessitating Jewish exile—could be a kind of return for us as well, a return to traditions of memory and justice that the Nakba has evicted from organized Jewish life. “The occupier and myself—both of us suffer from exile,” Mahmoud Darwish once declared. “He is an exile in me and I am the victim of his exile.” The longer the Nakba continues, the deeper this Jewish moral exile becomes. By facing it squarely and beginning a process of repair, both Jews and Palestinians, in different ways, can start to come home.