Review of War Of Return

If you do not wish to read further then the TL;DR is:

Summary: This book argues the root cause of the conflict in Palestine is not that Palestinians were dispossessed, but that they wish to no longer be dispossessed and go back home.

My conclusion: I read it so you don't have to be subjected to the ugly idea professed here that for there to be peace, Palestinian voices need to be smothered. I suggest reading something else by someone like Rashid Khalidi, or Illan Pape instead.

Or here are two upcoming books that I have far more hope for:

If I Must Die, by Palestinian Poet Refaat AlAreer

Genocide Bad by Jewish Author and Activist Sim Kern

To expand slightly I find this book to be of almost no value, read on if you wish to know what those bits of value may be.

Note: whenever I refer to Zionism in this review, I refer to modern political Zionism as established by Theodor Herzl in the 1890s, and Zionists as people who agree with that vision.

Whenever I refer to Palestine I refer to the region known as Mandatory Palestine which was very arbitrarily carved up by European powers at the end of World War I in the Sykes–Picot Agreement.

Introduction

Just like any other entity or concept, there are as many versions of Israel as there are people who have opinions on it. There are three versions that are especially relevant here at the end of 2024. One is the fire and brimstone expansionistic version of Israel that can be found in the infamous verses of Amalek in the Torah, another is the aggressively nationalist vision of Ze'ev Jabotinsky. Both of these are sources of the numerous calls for the annexation of more and more land that come from, not only the highest levels of the current Israeli government, but also its media and intellectuals. For example:

It is the chant calling for the restoration of Greater Israel. The faint signal is a promise that is part of the very fabric of Western, nay human civilization. This promise is inscribed indelibly on the minds and unconscious of humankind; it is the specter of Greater Israel from the “River to the River,” that is from the river Euphrates to the river Nile and all of the land in between. It is not a divine promise in the strict sense but a covenantal commitment, a legal claim and title to all of the lands between the two rivers, and it is a ‘deed’ that has been witnessed and ‘sealed’ by all of humankind. The granting of this title, immortally and in perpetuity to Abraham and his progeny though Isaac and Jacob is permanent and irrevocable.¹

The third is a version of Israel that just wishes to be left alone to prosper and has been forced to extreme self defense by the unrelenting and unreasonable violence and hostility of surrounding regions. This last version of Israel is the only one that appears in The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream has obstructed the Path to Peace. a work of political science non fiction by two Israeli thinkers. It is one of its many flaws. It is however a well sourced book and, as I am no scholar or academic of the conflict, I will defer to the glimpses into history that the authors choose to include. I do retain the right to point out how slanted these glimpses are.

The only reason I read this was as a challenge from someone on TikTok who, very reasonably pointed out that I was only reading Pro-Palestinian scholarship. This book was recommended by them as the one I should read if I wanted a good alternate Pro-Israeli view. I went into it with an open mind, but also low expectations as, as far as I'm concerned, the absolute best defense for Israel that Zionists can muster was offered in The Hague in January 2024 in response to a South African accusation of genocide. A failure that resulted in judgements in the International Court of Justice that went against Israel to the tune of at least 15 to 2.²

My expectations were met. The structure of the book is a chronological review of the history of the Palestinian refugees to highlight what the authors believe the root of the problem to be along-with their solution to it. The arguments are repetitive, reinforced as they are from the Foreword all the way to the Conclusion as the book goes through the history of the dispossession of Palestinians from 1948 all the way to about 2020, which is when this book was published. I regret to say that my review will be similarly repetitive

Foreword and Chapter One (1948).

The problems start right from the foreword where the authors pretend the Palestinian desire to return home is not just, completely fail to mention Zionist injustices, and state as accepted fact the controversial claim that Palestinians were responsible for the failures of the 2000 and 2008 peace process.

Chapter one relates the 1948 war, which I will refer to as the Nakba, that was a major inflection point in the conflict and repeats the idea that the Palestinian desire to return home is unreasonable. As a part of the argument it conflates the amount of Palestinian land with the amount of Arab land to show how small a portion Israel is claiming. This is obvious dishonesty and a foreshadowing of how much of this book is built on Zionist talking points that do not withstand scrutiny.

Arab violence in 1948 is well described, sometimes in lurid detail. Everything similar from the Zionist side however is rationalized as Jewish fighting forces being less tolerant as a result of "numerous instances of Arab savagery". This is obviously slanted and there are far better works of history to refer to on this tragic period in time.

The authors quickly move on to the core of the book. Palestinian refugees. They state the accepted estimate to be of 720,000 but then almost immediately question how many of these were 'genuine'. Nevertheless it is accepted that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were dispossessed by Zionist violence though the authors don't put it in those terms.

A direct quote from the authors on the aftermath of the Nakba is:

The Israeli's growing intolerance for the local Arab population was understandable.

This is an illustrative sentence. It neatly demonstrates this book's constant apology for Zionist intolerance and violence during and after the Nakba while everything similar from the Arab side, even rhetoric, is portrayed as just unreasonable and violent Arabs being unreasonably and violently Arab. This sort of bigotry is present throughout the book.

From there the book goes into a discussion of how 'exceptional' the Nakba was or was not, which I find to be a petty waste of words. As a part of this the authors make reference to the horrors of the partition of South Asia and I will note that, as a Pakistani child of parents who felt forced to leave India, I find it insulting that my personal family trauma is used to portray the Nakba as somehow not a big deal.

It is right from this early chapter that the Zionist insistence on a Jewish majority is placed as a higher priority than the right of Palestinians to return to the homes they were dispossessed from. A constant and recurring theme.

The use of the word refugees in quotes when referring to Palestinians at many points in the book is a choice, that is simultaneously enraging and illuminating, as is the literary device of including an ever increasing 'number of refugees' ticker at the start of each chronological chapters. It seems to be an attempt to reinforce the illegitimacy of the Palestinian claim to be refugees. I find it to be both petty and pedantic.

In the end these chapters sanitize Zionist actions and set the stage for blaming Palestinians as much as possible for what happens next.

Chapter Two (1949)

Part Two focuses on 1949 and the book starts to make repeated mention of the 'Jewish state'. It could accurately be referred to as 'Lost Palestinian homes' instead and this really showcases how much of all of this is a struggle of framing.

This can be seen in the following paragraph which is a summary of the thesis of the book.

instead of being a legal or humanitarian issue, then and now, the refugee problem is first and foremost a political problem, reflecting the (Palestinian/Arab) desire to dominate the entire land.

This very neatly recasts a very natural desire to return home as a political plot against the Zionist objective to maintain an ethno-majority by any means necessary.

Whether my portrayal is more accurate than the authors is irrelevant. What is relevant however is my framing does not turn a wish to go home into something nefarious. Whatever the political ramifications may or may not be of refugees returning to their homes, the core fact remains that this should happen. That Zionist ideology cannot stomach this is a failure of Zionism, not anything else.

As a part of justifying the unjustifiable prevention of Palestinians returning to their home the authors call the Arab population 'a party to the war'. This is horrific. Those five words make it impossible for Palestinians to be considered civilians. It turns all of them, including babies, into soldiers. Rather than making any solid argument in favour of Israel this just provides the intellectual justification for the IDF murder of Palestinian children that has been going on for decades but has accelerated since October of 2023.

The authors also mention 'potential security implications' as a reason to prevent the return of Palestinians. 'Potential security implications' is of course not a valid reason to prevent people from returning to their homes and it is illuminating that the authors disagree.

The authors also portray an Israeli special committee deciding that Palestinians being resettled elsewhere as some sort of act of statesmanship when it's really just putting a rubber stamp on an ethnic cleansing.

Another illustrative quote is

Note that Israel’s objection was to the principle of the mass return of refugees as an ethnic group, not to the return of individual refugees out of special humanitarian considerations.

How is this any sort of successful apology of the bigotry and racism of the Israeli position? What do the authors think is wrong with the return of an ethnic group? Is there something wrong with this particular ethnic group that it should not be allowed back home? I can only come up with one answer to these questions and it is not flattering to the Zionist cause.

Another quote referring to the demand of Palestinians to go back home:

Israel was fully justified in refusing that demand, which would practically amount to committing suicide.

Let us be clear that they are referring to the death of a state which I have no objections to. It is the death of people that I am concerned with.

In other places they refer to the introduction of the idea of a right to return as an 'original sin' which is an ugly sentiment that turns virtue into vice and vice versa.

They engage in victim blaming when they state "Bernadotte overlooked the Palestinian Arabs own responsibility for their fate". With Bernadotte being an early advocate for the return of Palestinians to their home.

They approvingly state "ethnic separation of rival populations was a lawful, moral, and legitimate tool of peace-making." Which is calling ethnic cleansing lawful, moral, legitimate

The authors state that cementing the dispossession of Palestinians by preventing their return would "have provided a rational and peaceful solution to the problem of the Palestinian refugees" ignoring that cementing dispossession is anything but peaceful and rational only in a psychopathic sense.

There are legalistic argument about UN Resolution 194 which ignore the basic fact that preventing people from returning to their homes is unjust.

This Chapter has to do the heaviest lifting of attempting to justify the Zionist prevention of Palestinians from returning to their homes. It failed at this for me, but I was always hostile to the idea, it will not have failed for someone who was already inclined to the view.

Chapter Three (1950-59)

The entire chapter is about the failure of cementing the ethnic cleansing of large parts of Palestine in 1948 as the authors imagine they have successfully argued that the ethnic cleansing itself was justified. They have not.

It is a condemnation on the United Nations UNWRA agency as, in the mind of the authors, this agency should have conditioned Palestinians to accept being ethnically cleansed.

It is an attack on surrounding Arab nations that did not go along with the Zionist desire to make permanent the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

And then it is an attack on Palestinian refugees for wanting to go back home and not accepting being ethnically cleansed in service to the Zionist necessity of creating and enforcing an ethno-majority in Palestine.

An illustrative paragraph:

Their (Palestinian) sense of injustice was rooted in their belief that they had been deprived of something that was theirs and theirs alone.

Yes, I do consider my home to be mine and mine alone and I fail to see why Palestinians would be any different.

Here is a more abhorrent paragraph:

They subordinated their own living conditions to the wider struggle against the state of Israel. They saw the living conditions of hundreds of thousands, and later millions, of their people as less important than this political objective. Since this was so, it was only natural to refuse rehabilitation or a return to normalcy if this meant ending the war with Israel.

I have reworded it here.

They subordinated their own living conditions to the wider struggle to go home. They saw the living conditions of hundreds of thousands, and later millions, of their people as less important than this completely natural and understandable objective. Since this was so, it was only natural to refuse rehabilitation or a return to normalcy if this meant ending the hope to go home.

There is a struggle here to define Palestinian motivation. Specifically why Palestinians did not acquiesce to ethnic cleansing while other peoples around the same time did (a claim of the authors I do not find compelling). To do so without any feedback and conversation with actual Palestinians is patronizing. They do quote Palestinians here and there but not to seriously engage with them in honest discussion.

I, in this review, am of course doing the same thing, however I am just one person writing a review, not two people with a book contract. As well my guess at their motivation being "They want to go home", is built on an understanding of a natural human need, rather than the author's insistence that their motivation is actually to make war on Jews. Palestinians in this book, are not human beings that just want to return home, but instead portrayed as stubborn and hateful beings that just want to fight Israel forevermore.

There is a lot of historical detail provided on the Western power's approach to UNWRA. For me this is frustrating as the agency has nothing to do with the core conflict of the state of Israel wishing to cement the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as opposed to Palestinians wishing to go back to their homes. It seems to be of critical importance to the authors however as their conception of the core problem seems to be that Palestinians refuse to be quietly ethnically cleansed and UNWRA as an instrument amplifying their voices must be destroyed to smother them.

A very telling example of the kind of double standard that authors employ, and I have no idea whether this is done consciously is not, is the statement that Arab states, by supporting the Palestinian desire to return home, were arm-twisting the international community. Israeli stonewalling of Palestinians going back home is not even mentioned as a similar 'arm-twisting' but as just some sort of inviolable law of physics that the Palestinians are mulish for not accepting.

This Chapter attempts to rationalize why the Palestinians didn't just disappear into the footnotes of history as would have suited Zionism. It is as terrible as it sounds.

Chapter Four (1960-87)

This chapter starts with this gem.

Gashey (a Palestinian child) grew up surrounded by children and teenagers who, like him, were effectively sentenced to a life in the refugee camps by their parents and Palestinian leaders after the war, with no chance of normality or hope"

Rewording for accuracy:

Gashey (a Palestinian child) grew up surrounded by children and teenagers who, like him, were effectively sentenced to a life in the refugee camps by Israel with no chance of normality or hope.

This fact in no way justifies the terrorist Munich Olympics Massacre which Gashey later participated in, but the complete abdication of any Israeli responsibility for his terrible childhood is emblematic of the ideological blinders that this book suffers from. Only Gashey is responsible for his own actions, but I would imagine his parents wanted him to grow up in their home in Palestine and to blame them for his being born in a refugee camp is beyond the pale.

It is in this chapter that the book introduces another pious fiction that Zionists cling to, that Palestinians grow up hating Israel because they've had a hateful UNWRA education, not because of the injustices that Israel has foisted on them. I can only explain this as a conviction that Israel is never the villain, it is at worst a neutral actor on the world stage and so some outlandish explanation must be found for why Israel is criticized, disliked, and hated.

It is also here that the authors make plain their stance that the only valid reason for UNWRA to exist was to provide humanitarian assistance. As soon as they judged Palestinians to no longer need such aid, they state that the agency should have been dissolved, with the conviction that would lead to Palestinians disappearing as a people and being absorbed into... something the authors never really describe. I can only guess it is some sort of generic Arab identity.

As someone who grew up in Saudi Arabia, I can assure you no such generic Arab identity exists. As such the authors wish for Palestinians to integrate into it is deep nonsense. Their own documentation of the discrimination against Palestinians by the countries they were forced into by Israel proves this but the authors either fail to, or choose to, not connect these dots.

A quote:

The refugee camps were no longer the places where aid recipients received limited-time assistance, but the places where a new Palestinian identity was forged, and the places where the Palestinian demand for return could fester and grow.

To use the description 'Fester and grow' as if it was some sort of infection is an ugly sentiment.

Another:

It looked as if they had fulfilled the typical desires of every refugee in the world

The arrogance of this statement feels indicative of the author's attitudes. It feels ridiculous to me to have to state that these two people cannot decide what the 'typical desires of every refugee in the world' are. This sentence feels to me like one that could have only come out of a colonial mindset. This is, of course, not a compliment.

Here we also see an example of the authors attacking a political figure who does not agree with their Zionist assumptions. John Davis, appointed a commissioner-general of UNRWA is pilloried for adopting anti Zionist arguments. Just as they did this to Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte in Chapter Two. In both cases the authors do seem to faithfully recreate their arguments but completely fail to debunk them. An illustrative example of this for Davis is:

According to him, the very idea of a Jewish state was immoral because it required prioritizing the interests of one population group, the Jews, over those of another, the Arabs (although he failed to explain how prioritizing the interests of the Arabs over those of the Jews would not similarly be considered immoral)

The obvious answer to this, is that giving Jewish and Palestinian people equal rights does not prioritize either group. The flaw here is not with Davis, the flaw is with the Zionist conviction that the only way to prioritize Jewish interests is by engineering and maintaining a Jewish majority.

There are more ugly thoughts. Here is an example:

Had UNRWA not maintained the refugee camps, the Palestinians would have had to be rehabilitated as individuals or in nuclear families in their host societies, and their social cohesiveness would have been eroded;

First, this is a hypothetical that is far from certain, and my own lived experience as being considered a part of the 'Muhajir' (Urdu for 'refugee') community in Pakistan as my parents were born in India puts the lie to it. Secondly and more importantly thinking of eroding a people's social cohesiveness as a good thing is horrific to the nth degree. Just thinking of the erasure of a people as a positive is mind-rending but to state it out loud here in a book that purports to advocating for peace is an act that I can only describe as deeply sick.

On the other hand the authors point out in this chapter clearly anti-Semitic language that attacks 'the Jews' in UNWRA school textbooks and that is completely correct to criticize. However the authors veer from this to protesting anti-Zionist language in these same text books. Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism are of course, not the same thing.

The chapter then goes on to decry UN resolutions that started to criticize Israel for being one sided as they only blamed Israel for Palestinians being refugees. Again this misses the point that there is no blame that can justify preventing Palestinians from returning home.

Another quote:

raised the definitive question, which remains unanswered to the present day—when the Palestinians speak of return, where precisely do they intend to return to, and how can this demand be reconciled with Israel’s own right to self-determination?

The answer to this is that Israel, being a state, has no right to self-determination, Jewish people have a right to self-determination. And even here the point must be made that self-determination does not require an ethno-majority. The core assumption that an ethno-majority is required is the flaw, not the Palestinian dismissal of this 'demographic concern'.

The most curious part of this chapter is the complete absence of Israeli aggression and violence. For example the violence of the Lebanese Civil War from 1975 to 1990 is referred to without even mentioning that Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. Whether this omission is deliberate or not I cannot say, but I can say that it renders the author's analysis of what escalated the violence (which bizarrely seems to be UNWRA education) to be fundamentally flawed.

This chapter shows the authors recoiling in horror from Palestinian consciousness as it changes with the times and resorts, at times, to violence in reacting to the continued injustice of their dispossession.

I share their horror at the attacks on non-combatants that some Palestinians engaged in. I do not share their mental erasure of the same by Israelis.

Chapter Five (1988 - 2020)

There is a very interesting paragraph here that is worth the effort to unpack:

The PLO’s growing weakness and need to adapt to geopolitical realities merely forced a change of tactics but did not lead to a genuine, deep-seated coming to terms with Jewish sovereignty. Arafat remained adamant in his denial of the equal rights of the Jewish people to self-determination, in even part of the land.

The conflation by the authors of Jewish self-determination with Jewish sovereignty is bizarre, it is not true that self-determination requires sovereignty. The conception of equality not being all people having the same rights, but, instead, different people's being sovereign on different bits of land is alien to me. And the prioritization of this political objective over the rights of Palestinians to return to their homes is an absolute non-starter, but for the authors seems to be an absolute given.

The justification provided by the authors for this is anti Arab bigotry and Islamophobia which I have no desire to repeat in this review. Suffice it to say that this bigotry is far closer to the core of the problem rather than the completely obvious desire for a dispossessed people to go back home.

Much of the rest of this section is just repeating again and again that the Palestinian desire to return home should be ignored and expressing horror at the fact that it is not.

There are still some new claims to be made however. For example:

Successive Israeli governments in the 1990s, together with the whole international community, were completely blind to the Palestinian refugee problem and its utter centrality for the Palestinian side

Firstly I suspect the followers of Ze’ev Jabotinsky in Israel have never had a problem understanding the Palestinian desire to return home as they probably recognize the need to crush it. Secondly there is no basis for the claim that the international community was blind to this.

Much of the rest of this chapter is devoted to supposed Palestinian 'sleights of hand' where, according to the authors, the Palestinians pretend to give up the right of return in diplomatic sounding language while doing nothing of the sort. This section is certainly not aimed at someone like me who prioritizes the need of a dispossessed people to return home over the desire of a state to enforce an ethno-majority. It seems to be aimed at those with influence in Western powers who the authors are convinced have been duped by Palestinians into believing Palestinians don't want to return home.

Then after this we have the appearance of the myth that "Palestinians never lose an opportunity to lose an opportunity", by stating the Palestinians were the ones responsible for the end of the Clinton peace process. Completely ignoring that it was the Israeli Prime Minister who broke off the talks at Taba.³

The final sentence of the section, clearly states what has been heavily alluded to throughout, the author's identification of a major obstacle to peace. UNWRA.

And the one obstacle that has been continuously overlooked, and underestimated, has been the Palestinian demand to return and the Western-funded organization—UNRWA—that fuels that demand.

The idea that UNWRA fuels the desire to return, rather than UNWRA being affected by the completely understandable desires of their Palestinian staff sets the stage for the absurd final section of the book, where the authors propose a solution.

The Book's Conclusion and Solution

The authors reframe the Palestinian desire to return home as "Palestinian vision of exclusive Arab land" and a desire to "negate Jewish self-determination". They equate the desire of Palestinians to return home as the "end of Israel". They repeat the lie of Palestinians never losing an opportunity to lose an opportunity which I have begun to believe to be as big a lie as the "land without a people for a people without a land" myth which, thankfully is not present here.

There is another claim without evidence made here:

Even today, after years of Palestinians walking away from repeated peace offers and years of brutal terrorism, if the Jewish citizens of Israel sensed that a two-state solution and real peace that ended the conflict once and for all were possible, a majority of them would be convinced to support it.

The use of the phrase 'would be convinced' for a 'majority' of Israelis, exposes the Israeli reluctance to make peace, which is otherwise absent from this book. That it is done so indirectly and with such brevity indicates that there is a lot that the authors are choosing to gloss over in this work. From this I conclude that the author's remedies for the solution are probably not viable as they are built without reference to the forces in Israeli society who want land more than they want peace. At the very least reading this book in isolation would not lead to any sort of a comprehensive view of the conflict, and should be balanced by reading someone like Rashid Khalidi or Illan Pape.

Another quote:

The international community needs to openly acknowledge that this is the underlying Palestinian assumption and then decide whether to acquiesce to it or counter it

The tragedy is that the internal community has 'acquiesced to this. It is only Western powers, and the US use of their UN Security Council veto, and propping up of subservient Arab dictators around Israel, that keeps countering it.

In the subsection titled in bold and capitals NO RIGHT OF RETURN the authors clearly state that their vision of peace is to set in stone the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. This is of course a reframing of their words, but the framing is the core point, and without their incredibly selective framing of Palestinian desires and rights, this whole book cannot exist.

The long, tortured arguments about how Palestinians legally have no right of return in this section have no relevance to me. I suspect they have been debunked by experts well versed in international law over and over, but I am interested in justice not laws, as laws are not always just. Justice demands that people be able to return to their homes.

Then there is an attack on UNWRA which I also find to be tedious and irrelevant to the core justice of the Palestinian argument. The authors seem to be affronted that Palestinians have been able to use UN bureaucracy and international law as vehicles to successfully make their case. It does not seem to occur to them that this indicates how completely Israel has failed to make it's own counter case that the need to maintain a Jewish ethno-majority overrides the right of refugees to go back home.

As an aside, the cover of the book being a broken key, the key being symbol of the Palestinian desire to return home, is just another example of the ugliness of this book.

I feel the need to point out here that Palestinian advocacy through the use of international courts and bodies like UNWRA are peaceful modes of resistance. Through this book the authors seem to be aiming to attack and suppress this and I cannot help but marvel at the short sightedness of this approach. I can only repeat the famous quote:

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. - John F. Kennedy

The subsection on How to dismantle UNWRA is, as should be clear, completely irrelevant to me, however the fact that it cites the successful ethnic cleansing of the Nepali people from Bhutan as a possible precedent for Palestinians is emblematic of how horrific this entire book is.

My Conclusion

The value in this book does not come from what it attempts to clumsily argue. The value comes from:

Understanding the myriad different ways that Zionists can reframe the completely natural and just desire for Palestinians to return home in order to either dismiss it or vilify it.
Realizing what its clunky attempts to deflect blame away from Zionism actually obscures.

To expand on the second point, the weakness of the book's attempts to deflect responsibility away from Israel and onto Palestinians and Palestinian allies, just makes clear how much the Israeli/Zionist insistence on the violent maintenance of an ethno-majority is actually at the core of the problem.

The greatest sin this book commits however is repeatedly portraying the West as a blind and naive force routinely getting duped by wily and hateful Palestinians. Because, far from being blind or naive, it is Western powers and their more than century long meddling in the Middle East that are the real cause of all of this. Jewish Zionists have just been duped into being front line troops in the West's quest to exploit the region's resources and trade routes and serve as a political wedge issue for their Christian fanatics. That, in the end, is the only version of Israel that matters to it's patron, America. An unsinkable aircraft carrier and vessel for Christian Evangelical Apocalypse fantasies.

But that's an analysis that is miles away from anything this book can provide. More than anything else it is an ugly book full of ugly thoughts.

There is no path to peace to be found here.