24 April 2008 Haaritz.com
Samir El-Youssef's novel lay on the corner of my coffee table for a long
time. The first page of it was folded over and a pencil was stuck between
the binding and the title page - a sort of promise that one day I would
really write a review of it. Almost every day I held a somewhat childish
dialogue with the title of the book, "The Illusion of Return":
Is it "return" that you want? I will return yet in your
illusions. Because Palestinian literature, especially about the right of
return, is in fact Israeli literature - only in reverse.
The right of return is an Israeli "flag" as much as it is a
Palestinian symbol. As long as there is no Palestinian return, an Israeli
can feel confident in his strength, and well protected from the moral
arrows of those who passed on this right - which is properly anchored in
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 - to its
"owners." The right of return is the opposite of the Jewish
Israeli's right to self-definition. Give the Palestinian a return, and
you've lost the country with which you identify.
"The Illusion of Return," then, is not in need of proof. This
illusion is the reality with which every Palestinian lives - whether he is
a non-refugee inhabitant, a real refugee or "just" the
descendent of original refugees who are dying out after 60 years in the
diaspora. These are the categories in which citizens who have no state are
imprisoned, the citizens of the right of return. El-Youssef writes that
they should "be realistic and forget about the idea of the right to
return; the only return we should think of is one of more symbolic
value."
This is indeed an intelligent Palestinian sentence, one that can perform a
good service in an article by a peace-seeking politician, but apparently
El-Youssef does not yet understand what he is up against. In Israeli eyes,
even the symbolic value of return cannot exist, because the symbol is no
less threatening than the realization of the right. The symbol is the
memory, and memory is the material from which politics is made. Hence, not
only has the right of return been shelved: The illusion of this right must
evaporate as well. How can a shadow exist when that which casts the shadow
does not exist? And how can an illusion exist without the real source from
which it draws its life?
It is perhaps for this reason that I thought, like most Israelis, that
given sufficient time this book would somehow wash itself away from the
corner of my coffee table, and I would not have to deal with that illusion
of return. But like the right of return itself, the book, which had
already begun to collect a layer of dust, continued to remind me of its
existence. And who would dare to make the right of return disappear from
his coffee table even if it is wrapped in illusion?
Subtle pinprick
It would have been possible to make do with these learned comments had
Samir El-Youssef not written an extraordinary, delicate book, with the
subtlety of a pinprick in the flesh of a sensitive foot. El-Youssef is a
Palestinian refugee who was born in the Rashidiyeh refugee camp in
southern Lebanon 43 years ago and at the age of 25 moved to London to live
and write. "The Illusion of Return," which came out a year ago,
is the first book that he has written in English and it has now been
published in a fluent and perceptive Hebrew translation by Niv Savriago.
This is a story of four friends, one of them the narrator, which takes
place during the initial phase of the first Lebanon War, before the Israel
Defense Forces withdrew to the deadly areas of the security zone. During
that period the broad backing that the Palestinian Liberation Organization
had given to the Palestinians in Lebanon disappeared, Hezbollah began to
flourish and the violent manifestations of the Lebanese Civil War had not
yet died out.
In this period, the characters are still able to engage in deep
discussions about Marxism, to make speeches to poor workers about how
their employer who is kind to them is really exploiting them, and to flee
from real politics to debates over philosophical formulas aimed at proper
management of society. But like a sharp stake, "the right of
return" is always thrust into the friends' discourse.
This is a fascinating discourse, mainly because of the silences it
creates. For example, when one of the friends isn't interested at all in
talking about the subject. He is a Christian named George, whose family
has kept away from politics as though from fire.
"They believed that if they stayed out of politics altogether, none
of the rival political factions and groups, which dominated the area,
could consider them enemies. They were Christian Palestinians with
Lebanese citizenship who lived in an area dominated largely by Moslems,
both Lebanese and Palestinian." Ostensibly, then, it is because of
the dangers of complex religious politics that George is stricken dumb in
face of the right of return.
Maher, another one of the foursome, has a different problem: He and the
narrator are aware that their status in the city - after they moved there
from the refugee camp - has changed dramatically. They already belong to
the middle class, taking part in Lebanese prosperity. And here is the
dilemma: "We must have regarded such a prosperity as somehow a
betrayal of our origins and we probably felt guilty about it." The
guilt plunges Maher deep into Marxist writings, so that he will not forget
his previous "class," but it can no longer force the friends to
hold the perceptions they once held in the camp.
At one of their meetings in which three members of an organization called
The Campaign for the Right to Return also participate, the narrator
lectures to them about an idea he has been nurturing: that they should
look at the notion of return "as a symbolic value," which is to
say that there is neither any need to realize it nor any possibility of
realizing it. Predictably, he elicits clich?ed responses from the members
of the organization. One of them says "only a traitor would dare to
say what you are saying!" Another adds: "You have no right to
speak on behalf of our people," and the third remains silent. The
narrator is in fact eager to hear the accent of the third, because he
associates accents with belonging to a place, and hopes that at least the
third member of the organization will speak in an accent like his. The two
students "spoke with the accent of those who had remained in the
camp. In my mind that was the accent of people who were cut off from the
world to the extent that they were incapable of being in the least
realistic."
And what is the realistic thing that the narrator proposes to these
refugees, to his friends the "bourgeois refugees," as well as to
those who have remained in the refugee camps? At least a cafe, but not
just any cafe - rather, "a place where people can meet and talk
philosophy. 'Are you serious?' 'Yes,' said I. 'There should be place where
people can meet and talk solely in abstract terms.' 'In abstract terms?'
he repeated my words, looking at me as he were seeing me for the first
time in his life. I ignored his look and went on explaining that in that
proposed cafe of mine there should be a rule that no conversation should
be based on personal or collective prejudice, nor should it refer to
historical facts."
This of course is the natural place where they would also be able to
discuss the right of return. Not as history or as politics, but rather as
something abstract and completely unthreatening. Perhaps this is the
definition to which Israelis could also agree.
In this way El-Youssef suggests two dimensions for dealing with the right
of return. First of all, this is a right of refugees who are living
outside the homeland. However, it is best to distinguish between the
refugees who speak with a "refugee-camp accent" - that is, those
who are stuck with a historical product that clings to facts totally
devoid of power - and the "prosperous" refugees, who are
prepared to discuss the right of return as an abstract issue only. In
fact, this is the only way it should be spoken of if they are interested
in maintaining their status as "progressive refugees." Indeed,
among themselves, the narrator and his close friends know that it is an
illusion.
Nevertheless, El-Youssef feels that it is also incumbent upon him to
answer the argument of one of The Campaign for the Right to Return group,
who argues that if the Jews are clinging to their right of return after
2,000 years, why can't the Palestinians cling to it after only 50 years?
To answer this, El-Youssef enlists another character - the Jew Bruno, who
survived the Holocaust and moved to the United States, where the fourth
friend, Ali, who had formerly been a collaborator of the Israel Defense
Forces in Lebanon, is living. Bruno, who has serious guilt feelings
because instead of immigrating to Israel he immigrated to the United
States, supplies the conclusive answer. "'Didn't he believe in his
right to return to the promise land?' I asked seriously ... 'What? Poor
Bruno,' Ali exclaimed, 'he didn't believe in the right to return anywhere'
... He believed that people moved on; even when they went back to the
place of their birth and early life they were only moving on." In
this way the circle of the right of return is closed.
But in El-Youssef's clever story, this right is broken down into the small
parts from which the Palestinian population in the diaspora of Lebanon is
built. It is inherent in the tacit violence of the Christian refugee's
home; in the practical naivete of the disciples of Marx, whose belief
itself sparks harsh violence; and it maintains the status of women in the
Arab home and fabric of social life under the regime of an occupation, in
which you never know who the real enemy is - the alien, Israeli occupier
or his ideological opponents, who murder their rivals in the dark of
night.
Tomorrow, or 10 years from now, when the right of return is once again on
the operating table of the eternal negotiations between Israel and the
Palestinians, it is fitting that El-Youssef's book be placed on the top of
the pile of documents that will serve the experts. There is nothing like
it for defining the essence of the illusion, the Israeli illusion as well
as the Palestinian.
