Exile and Return

by Lesch, Ann Mosely; Lustick, Ian S.

• ISBN13: 9780812220520
• ISBN10: 0812220528
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-10-30
• Publisher: Univ of Pennsylvania Pr

Summary

Exile and Return: Predicaments of Palestinians and Jewsis 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 theNakba(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 Pappeacute;, Elie Podeh, Nadim N. Rouhana, Gershon Shafir, Yehouda Shenhav, Salim Tamari.

Author Biography

Ann M. Lesch is Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at American University in Cairo. Ian S. Lustick is Bess W. Heyman Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

The Failure of Oslo and the Abiding Question of the Refugees

Collective Memories and Actual Choices

Commemorating Contested Lands

The Right of Return versus the Law of Return: Contrasting Historical Narratives in Israeli and Palestinian School Textbooks

Social Capital and Refugee Repatriation: A Study of Economic and Social Transnational Kinship Networks in Palestine/Israel

Truth and Political Consequences

Considerations Toward Accepting Historical Responsibility

Negotiating Truth: The Holocaust, Lehavdil, and al-Nakba

Practical Meanings of Exile and Return

The Palestinian IDPs in Israel and the Predicament of Return: Between Imagining the Impossible and Enabling the Imaginative

No Refuge for Refugees: The Insecure Exile of Palestinians in Kuwait

The Vision of Return: Reflections on the Mass Immigration to Israel from the Former Soviet Union

Property Issues for Arab and Jewish Migrants and Refugees

Palestinian and Mizrahi Jewish Property Claims in Discourse and Diplomacy

Arab Jews, Population Exchange, and the Palestinian Right of Return

Palestinian Refugee Property Claims: Compensation and Restitution

The Refugee Issue in Context

Truth and Reconciliation: The Right of Return in the Context of Past Injustice

The Visible and Invisible in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Reflections on the Right of Return: Divisible or Indivisible?

Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.