On April 11, 1987, the Jewish-Italian writer Primo Levi committed suicide.1 He leaped off the third-floor landing of his home at 75 Corso de Umberto, Turin, Italy. Levi survived Auschwitz where he had been interned on February 26, 1943, and liberated two years later on January 27, 1945. He was obliged to remain in the Soviet zone until October 1945; only then could he return to Italy, to Turin. Levi’s was a concrete and natural return: to his country, his hometown, landscape, language, his own home and family. Levi was one of eighty-five hundred Italian Jews (out of forty-five thousand) who were shipped as cargo to death camps; seventy-nine hundred of them never returned.
For over thirty years, Levi argued for concrete return, making an active case for the diaspora, for the right of Jews to remain dispersed in their diaspora—a historical-philosophical statement that the natural place for Jews was their place of birth anywhere in the world and not some legendary homeland. This was a statement addressed to Zionists and anti-Semites alike. Levi’s concept of citizenship was nonethnic, nonreligious, quite the opposite of the essence of Israeli citizenship. Was he conscious of what his return to Italy implied? I have no way of knowing.
In his “self-murder,” as the German term Selbstmord would have it, Levi undid two returns: his concrete/literal return chosen in 1945 and another one that he did not weigh as a possibility: the mythological return to Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel. Did he want to tell us that no return was possible after Auschwitz? But in 1950, he, like Jews all over the world, had the legal right to immigrate to the two-year-old State of Israel, a foreseen, understandable move, five years after the German-European murder industry was dismantled, though its product, destruction, remained still and ever so concrete.
In July 1950, the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, passed the “Law of Return,” granting all Jews the right to “return” to a place they had never known, save for the Bible and other stories, perhaps. The law stipulated that “every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh…. An oleh ’s visa shall be granted to every Jew who has expressed his desire to settle in Israel.”2
After 1948, only three thousand Italian Jews exercised this right, to return to a place unknown to them. Several possible realities may account for this unusually small number (less than a tenth of the Italian Jewish community). The estrangement of Italian Jews from their place of birth by the German-European death industry was not as powerful and as widespread as it was in Poland, for example. There was not much time left for Nazi dictates to wreak total destruction upon that community, so deeply rooted in Italian soil. Furthermore, the newly born state in dire physical and economic conditions was obviously much less attractive than the optimistic, apparently stable, new Italian republic and, in particular, the fact that it was outside the Soviet zone, unlike Romania, for example, another fascist regime where a large part of the Jewish community was spared the fate of occupied Poland’s Jews but chose to emigrate en masse.
From the beginning, the movement of “return” to the alleged ancestral homeland has navigated several competing drives: the personal-religious, the religion-based but secular and nationalist drive, inspired by the romantic ethnic nationalism of Germany and central Europe, and, eventually, the drive to escape racist persecution and discrimination, harsh economic conditions, and dictatorships. At times, two or all of the above could serve as relevant justifications, but the fact remains that only with the rise and success of genocidal anti-Semitism did Zionism stop being an ideological home for a minority of the Jews and begin to appeal to the majority (that is, the majority of the then decimated Jewish community) by offering Israel as a place to live.
According to the Law of Return, upon choosing Israel, a Jew was defined as neither a “returnee” nor an immigrant, but rather as an oleh, or, in the plural, olim . This word stems from the Hebrew infinitive “to mount,” “to ascend,” “to rise.” It invokes the teaching of the Talmud that the land of Israel is higher than all other lands. That is why leaving it, on the other hand, is seen as a descent, yerida . In Zionist parlance, descent is a disparaging term, charged with spite and scorn, the opposite of ascent, aliya . Its original, scriptural use, however, did not carry any judgmental connotation. Ascent did not necessarily denote immigrating to and settling in the Land of Israel. A visit sufficed to be termed aliya. Only in Zionist jargon has aliya gained added value and become synonymous with immigration and settling in.
And the Law of Return continues: “Every Jew who has immigrated into this country before the coming into force of this Law, and every Jew who was born in this country, whether before or after the coming into force of this law, shall be deemed to be a person who has come to this country as an oleh under this Law.”3 It should be stressed that, grammatically, oleh does not designate a person who has completed an action, but rather one who is still in the process, a present-continuous, as it were. That is, the very birth of a Jew in the country makes him an oleh (and not simply a citizen, a resident) and entitles him, like a Jew who did in fact immigrate, to the spiritual, metatemporal, never ending status of permanent ascendancy. I was born in Jerusalem and thus shall to the last of my living days be an olah—forever ascending, not merely in the metatemporal but also in the metaspatial sense of the term.
Israel’s legislators reserved the “return” for a collective act: the People returning to its ancestral homeland. Did the lawmakers shy away from actually defining each Jewish individual a returnee, even one who had never seen the country before? That is, were they simply unable to go so far as to conjure up linguistic and legalistic metareal situations? I cannot say. Perhaps they merely wanted to put to use every ancient term in their arsenal that would attest to a concrete, not merely imagined, continuity between the Land and the People.
Faysal Hourani, a Palestinian writer born in 1939 in Masmiya, a Palestinian village on the road connecting Jerusalem to Gaza, is a returnee. In 1948, the inhabitants of Masmiya had to flee the fighting as well as targeted attacks by Jewish troops. They have not been allowed to return since. Hourani’s mother settled in Gaza as a refugee, while he, a nine-year-old boy, was sent to his dead father’s parents who had fled and lived in exile in Damascus. In 1996 Hourani returned—not to his home village, which had become an Israeli community, but to Gaza. The Israelis authorized his entry into the country for the very first time after an absence of forty-eight years. Hourani was issued an ID by the Palestinian Authority, but this too could only be granted with Israeli authorization. To this very day no document of Palestinian civil status—birth, death, change of address—is valid and recognized unless it is registered in the com-puterized database of the Israeli Ministry of the Interior. Palestinian, not Israeli, terminology designates Hourani and the other several thousands of high-ranking PLO activists whom Israel allowed to reenter the country as returnees. As Hourani was born in the country, his return was literal, and the Palestinian term bears no trace of manipulative symbolism. If there was anything surreal about Hourani’s return, it was the fact that he could not come back to his own home (razed long ago) or to the scenery of his childhood.
In Hourani’s newly issued ID—printed by a Palestinian printer, yet authorized down to its last detail by the State of Israel—“Israel” is named as the place of his birth. But Israel did not exist when Hourani was born. Moreover, in the ID of an Israeli citizen (Jew or Palestinian) born in the country before the establishment of the state, namely, before 1948, his local place of birth would be specified as Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel Aviv. Evidently, the Zionist bureaucracy cannot acknowledge that a Palestinian refugee who now resides in the 1967 Occupied Territories has roots in a concrete place within what is now Israel proper. Would not that be a tacit recognition of his right to return?
Therefore, Palestinians whom Israel allows to “return” are obliged to partake in the metatemporal transformation of the country into the Jewish state, years before it actually became the State of Israel. In their actual return to their homeland, Palestinians must pay an added value tax: acknowledge the eternal status of Israel, the state that in 1948 expelled some seven hundred thousand of them (and later, after 1967, hundreds of thousands more by different means), robbed them of their lands, robbed their remaining family members of their lands and livelihood, and has been trying to downplay their existence in it ever since. The state defines them as “the Arab minority, the Arab sector,” anything to avoid acknowledging their “Palestinian-hood.” Strangely enough, “Israel” as the place of his birth is the only item on Hourani’s ID that is not printed in both Hebrew and Arabic. It appears only in Hebrew. Could the Arabic script not bear this myth, this lie?
Zionist ideology does its best to concretize the alleged blood links supposedly shared by Jews all over the world and to tie them all to the soil of the Holy Land. But the very terminology used by the Israeli bureaucracy, in its law and in the wording of the Palestinian Authority–issued IDs, reveals the fabricated connection. What the Law of Return does not dare, namely, to combine return with subjects and personal pronouns, is done outright on a huge road sign at a junction around two miles east of the Palestinian town of Ramallah. This junction is controlled by an illegal unauthorized colonist outpost, an offshoot of nearby Beit El, no less illegal a colony. “We have returned home,” the sign cries out. “Here in Beit El, 3800 years ago, The Land of Israel was promised to the People of Israel by the Creator of the World. Based on this promise we sit today in Haifa, Tel Aviv, Shilo and Hebron.”
The proclamation is signed by the colony’s local council. At the bottom of this spiritual sign a very concrete reference is made to its commercial sponsors: two supermarkets at Beit El and the firm that prints and posts these billboards. A checkpoint at the entry to Ramallah blocks the road leading to both the colony and the town. Only Palestinian notables, diplomats, and journalists are allowed through. Residents of Ramallah as well as of nearby villages on whose land the Beit El colony was built are not allowed to drive through it. Their daily commute from work is an ordeal. Take, for example, that young employee at the Palestinian Ministry of Education. He lives in Beitin, the alleged ancient site of Beit El that housed altars for Canaanite divinities, five minutes away from Ramallah. Because of the blocked roads, however, the drive to Ramallah and back takes him thirty minutes each way. But this is an aside, to give a sense of today’s reality. It was in 1977 that the Jews “returned” to Beit El where Abraham built an altar 3,800 years ago. Or was it 3,802 years ago as the billboard placed there two years ago claims?
Among other places to which Jews have “returned” since 1967 is one called Halamish, some fifteen miles west of Ramallah. Like the Beit El colony, it was built in 1977. Local folklore tells of a certain American journalist who interviewed people in the village of Nabi Saleh, across the road from Halamish. “Since when have you lived here?” he is said to have asked one old man. The old man held the young reporter’s hand and asked him to look around: “Do you see the wad (valley) below? From up here I used to watch Adam and Eve playing with each other.” Obviously, the question echoed Zionist argumentation that Palestinians were new to the country, unlike Jews who had already been here back then, 3,772 years ago.
Another returnee, a Palestinian Marxist whose first name is Daoud, did not have to go back as far as Adam and Eve to claim his roots. Of all Arab peoples, he once told me, Palestinians are the ones who tend the most often to give their children biblical, Hebrew names: Daoud, Mussa, Sara, Maryam, Isaac, etc. Names are passed from grandfather to grandson, grandmother to granddaughter, for generations on end. His materialist conclusion: many of the Palestinians are descendants of the early Hebrews. Initial attempts by the Palestinian Ministry of Culture to connect Palestinians to a Canaanite past and ancestors do not seem to have taken hold. It suffices for most people to point at a house that was theirs and is now occupied by an Orthodox Jewish kindergarten or a Peace Now activist’s family. Trees that grandparents had planted and cacti that marked their family’s land offfrom their neighbors’ are as good as written deeds of ownership. There is nothing fabricated or imagined in this continuity. In 1967, nineteen years after they had been expelled from their homes, old people could go back for the first time to see them. Having gone back, I was told by friends in Gaza, many returned to their refugee camps and died of a heart failure or, rather, of a broken heart. Only upon their return as visitors did they realize that a literal, permanent return was no longer possible.
I, too, had a grandfather, a great-grandfather actually, who died in the Holy Land, in Jerusalem—not of a broken heart though. His was a natural death of very old age. In fact, sometime in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, he chose to emigrate from Sarajevo, Bosnia, in order to die in the Holy Land. Back then, so the family legend goes, he was already in his nineties. In the territories united under the Ottoman Empire, there were no borders to break up his journey. He mistakenly assumed he would die upon his arrival. I doubt whether he termed his journey a “return.” My family’s lost genealogical tree reaches back to the 1492 expulsion from Spain, not to Adam and Eve, not even to Sara’s days; Sarajevo was the family’s perfect home for generations. My mother used to joke that my great-grandfather’s death, and the place where he was buried, the Mount of Olives cemetery, guaranteed our right to stay in the country in accordance with the original PLO charter of July 1968, which states that “those Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians.” In my mother’s and others’ interpretation, the Zionist invasion was historically connected with the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that promised the Jewish people a national home in the land of Palestine.
Like Primo, my mother was a Levi. Like him, she survived a concentration camp, Bergen Belsen. Like Primo Levi, at first she opted for her right to return home, to Yugoslavia. As a Jew, so the joke goes, she was a real Yugoslav: not Bosnian, not Serbian, and not Croatian. Her 1949 return to Israel was an escape. She fled from the terrible void she had found in her real homeland. I assume it was the same void that eventually made Primo Levi do what the Nazis failed to do: murder himself.
Some forty years later, my mother tried to undo this flight and return to Yugoslavia. It was still one Yugoslavia back then. My mother was already seventy years old. She had almost decided to rent a room in a Belgrade apartment when the landlady told her: “Through this window I could watch the Jews being rounded up and sent away.” My mother took her yet unpacked suitcase and fled again, back to Paris, her already chosen diaspora for some ten years. In so doing, she voted for the right of Jews to live in the diaspora of their choice, not necessarily the diaspora of their birth. My mother’s, then, was a temporary return to the diaspora and to the principle of people’s right to live wherever they choose. She did come back to Israel in the early 1990s. This time, too, it was not a mythological return defined by a state law, but a concrete return to a concrete home. Perhaps the fact that she had a daughter played a role in her decision.
Twice I have been asked whether I have ever thought of “returning” to Sarajevo, meaning returning to live there. I instantly saw beyond the words, and the shock at being asked such a question prevented me from commenting on its absurd terminology. How could I return to a place where I had never lived and visited only twice as a tourist? One person who asked me this question was a Palestinian prisoner with whom I used to converse on a clandestine cellular phone smuggled into jail. Palestinian political prisoners in Israel, unlike criminal prisoners and Jewish-nationalist prisoners, are not allowed to use pay phones to speak to their families, even when their constitutional right to have family visits is not being respected (as is the case now with all Gazan prisoners). The question would not have upset me so much had that same person not remarked just a few conversations earlier how a certain article of mine taught him new things: that not only Germany but other European societies had played their part in Judeocide and that the survivors, upon their return home, were often not welcomed by those societies. I thought I had finally met a Palestinian who grasped the refugeeness of Jews, including Israeli citizens. But his question made me realize how deeply ingrained the Palestinian conception is that we, Israel-born Jews, do not really belong here.
Palestinians often ask me: “Where are you from?” I know very well what they mean, but I reply: “I am from Jerusalem, I was born there.” “But no, no,” they insist, “where did you really come from?” They insist on giving me imagined roots in places, languages, and landscapes that are totally strange to me. One woman, a returnee, but from a refugee family originally, admitted that before she had met me she told people: “If Amira is such a leftist and progressive and against the Occupation, she should go back to where she came from.”
While I was upset and hurt by the prisoner’s question, I was actually enraged when a French woman asked me a similar question. She was on one of those solidarity tours at the beginning of the current Palestinian uprising. Having read my articles and my book, she was all admiration and compliments. But then she asked me whether I thought of “returning” to Sarajevo. “Where?” I asked in disbelief. Then, as I realized there was nothing wrong with my ears, I shouted: “Return to a continent that threw us out of the globe, out of the world of the living?” I smelled an anti-Semite who was saying in fact: “You have no right to be where you are.” She was a European, a Christian, ignoring the perfectly familiar history that placed me exactly where I am, her history. True, I am not an olah in the sense that the Law of Return imposes upon me. I am not uplifted by any sensation of permanent ascendance because of my being a Jewish-Israeli citizen. I wish my parents had emigrated elsewhere. But they did not, and Israel became my diaspora. I tried another diaspora for two years, but hurried back to the sunlight, vegetation, scents, language, and all the other things that make a home a home.
My father, too, fled the void he encountered in his Romanian hometown upon his return from four years in a Transnistria ghetto. Like my mother, he had never been a Zionist, and yet he found himself in Israel at the end of 1948, an oleh who, like my mother, gradually became more and more familiar with the Palestinians’ plight and void. Sometime at the beginning of the First Intifada, perhaps in 1988, or 1989, he shared with me a dream he had had the previous night. His description was so vivid that I sometimes feel I actually dreamed it with him. In that dream we, my father and I, were standing on a hill facing east. Many thousands of people were walking toward us, going down the hills, up the mountains, and through the valleys. Holding my hand and overwhelmed with happiness, my father exclaimed: “Look, Amirale, look, they are coming back, they are coming back!” The return he dreamed was, of course, the return of the Palestinians. The dream told me, more than all of our past and future conversations, how tormented my father was with the implications of his mythological return to the Holy Land, or rather, the implications of his concrete flight from what used to be his home: namely, the dispossession of an entire people from its homeland. So he dreamed the solution: undoing history.
For years, many Palestinians believed it was possible to undo history and return home. On the declarative level, all Palestinian organizations still demand that the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their homes be included in any future peace settlement.
I suspect that, for many, admitting their fear that an actual return was impossible—at least in our lifetime—would be considered politically incorrect and a total breach of all commonly accepted rules. Back in 1994, my friends at Jabaliya refugee camp in the Gaza strip started expanding their former shack and replacing it with a massive three-story building made of concrete blocks, spacious enough for their entire family. “How come you only started building it now?” I asked their father. He surprised me by replying that now, with the Oslo Accords, he knew for certain that they would never return home.
Other villagers who cannot go back home were expelled in 1967—not 1948—from three villages west of Jerusalem. ‘Imwas, Yalo, and Beit Nouba were located in an area that the Jewish army failed to conquer in 1948. Soldiers who occupied the villages at the end of the war ordered all inhabitants to leave for Ramallah. Then they demolished the solid stone houses with explosives or used bulldozers to raze them. Some people were said to have been killed inside their homes, others on the road, while fleeing. In 1973 the Jewish National Fund in Canada collected money to turn two of these destroyed villages, ‘Imwas and Yalo, into a “national” park, called Canada Park. It is a highly popular recreation site among Israelis who return every now and then to relish its lush expanses and beautiful views. Some of the villagers were thus twice expelled: they had moved to those three villages in 1948 after having fled or been driven out of their original villages.
In March 1976, this group addressed the following letter to Israel’s then Prime Minister (Rabin), Minister of Defense, and Chairman of the Knesset:
“Re: Request to Return to Our Villages”
Your excellencies,
As inhabitants of ‘Imwas, Yalo and Beit Nouba, we have the honor to appeal to Your Excellencies in the hope that you will examine our legitimate request. We ask only for our legitimate humanitarian right to return to the villages from which we were driven and expelled. Before the war in 1967 we lived peacefully in our villages on the West Bank, Israeli border, with no problems with our Israeli neighbors. We were in no way a threat to security or a destabilizing presence in the area. For no reason, from the very beginning of the war, we were driven out from our villages, on foot, with our children and elderly. The Israeli army ordered us to leave our houses, telling us we could return after the war. Since that day, we have been unable to go back to our homes, but we live in the hope that one day it will be possible. We have appealed to the West Bank military administration but have received no reply to date. We are therefore referring our request to Your Excellencies as supreme authorities of the State of Israel. Our houses were completely demolished and there is nothing left of our village. We were forced to leave our land and houses, and everything was destroyed including our furniture, our livestock, and all our possessions, but we still hope to be able to return…. We are prepared to rebuild our houses ourselves without applying for compensations from the State, and we are full of hope that we shall be able to live once again as we have in the past, as peaceful neighbors.
Yours respectfully,
The residents of ‘Imwas, Yalo and Beit Nouba
No one even took the trouble to reply. Thirty-one years later, on November 1, 2007, a relatively new Israeli group called Zochrot (Remembering) joined the villagers in their appeal to Ehud Barak, Israel’s minister of defense, asking why the residents could not return to their homes. Being an Israeli group, they did get a reply this time from a senior adviser to the minister who, on March 20, 2008, bothered to write them as follows: “The return of the village inhabitants is not allowed for security considerations.”
Not only can they not return either to their pre-1948 homes or to their post-1948 homes, but they are not even allowed to visit. Most of those 1967 refugees live in the Ramallah area; some of them in nearby villages. For the past seven years, Israel has been blocking the roads that lead to the three villages and their surrounding lands. The average Israeli is convinced that this area is Israel proper. There is no sign to indicate the opposite. The fate of these three villages epitomizes Israel’s overall policy of consistent, serial dispossession throughout the years, since the state’s inception. Much state violence has been exercised to make those acts of dispossession last, persist, and expand. The Law of Return is part and parcel of this violence, as it entitles every Jew on earth to more rights in this country than any Palestinian born in it possesses.
The mythological return of Jews has successfully made the literal return of Palestinians impossible. With the passing years, as many first-generation refugees age and die, the return home becomes increasingly transtemporal, metareal, as testified by Mahmoud Darwish’s two poems with which I will end:
WE TRAVEL LIKE ALL PEOPLE
We travel like everyone else, but we return to nothing. As if travel were
a path of clouds. We buried our loved ones in the shade of clouds and between roots of trees.
We said to our wives: Give birth for hundreds of years, so that we may end this journey within an hour of a country, within a meter of the impossible!
We travel in the chariots of the Psalms, sleep in the tents of the prophets, and are born again in the language of Gypsies.
We measure space with a hoopoe’s beak, and sing so that distance may forget us.
We cleanse the moonlight. Your road is long, so dream of seven women to bear
this long journey on your shoulders. Shake the trunks of palm trees for them.
You know the names, and which one will give birth to the Son of Galilee.
Ours is a country of words: Talk. Talk. Let me rest my road against a stone.
Ours is a country of words. Talk. Talk. Let me see an end to this journey.4
WHO AM I, WITHOUT EXILE?
… Nothing brings me back from this distance
to the oasis: neither war nor peace….
… Nothing carries me, or loads me with an idea:
neither nostalgia, nor promise.
What shall I do? What shall I do without exile
And a long night of gazing at the water?
We have both been freed from the gravity of the land of identity.
What shall we do?
What shall we do without exile
And long nights of gazing at the water?5
Perhaps, because it is transtemporal, the Palestinians’ return will materialize one day, and their exile will have become one of choice, not of coercion.
Ramallah–New York, April 2008
Notes
1. Whether or not Levi took his own life is subject to debate. For a discussion of the controversy surrounding the circumstances of Levi’s death, see Carole Angier’s Double Bond: Primo Levi: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).
2. State of Israel, “The Law of Return 5710 (1950),” Knesset, http://www.knesset.gov.il/laws/special/eng/return.htm.
3. Ibid.
4. Mahmud Darwish, “We Travel Like All People,” in Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, ed. and trans. Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 11.
5. Mahmud Darwish, excerpts from “Who Am I, Without Exile?” ibid., 113–14.