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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Thursday, March 28, 2024

The inalienable right of return

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This op-ed was written by members of the Tufts community with Palestinian ancestry.

 

Exile is one with utter dependence - in material things, in politics and culture, in ethics and intellect, and they must be dependent who are an alien minority, who have no Homeland and are separated from their origins, from the soil and labor, from economic creativity. So we must become the captains of our fortunes, we must become independent - not only in politics and economy but in spirit, feeling and will?...'There is no example in history of a people saying we agree to renounce our country, let another people come and settle here and outnumber us.'"

- David Ben-Gurion, Founding Prime Minister of Israel, 1944.

"We, the Palestinian Arab people, who believe in its Arabism and in its right to regain its homeland, to realize its freedom and dignity, and who have determined to amass its forces and mobilize its efforts and capabilities in order to continue its struggle."

- Palestinian National Charter, 1964.

The man and his family lived in the north of the country. In the morning he would head out of the house, into the warm sun, to work his land, knowing that it would reward him with a livelihood to bring back. At home, his wife cared for their six children. In his old age, he would pass this land down to his eldest son who bore his grandfather's name, and new branches would sprout from the family's olive tree. So it had been for generations in this land of milk and honey.

This man's generation, however, would live to see this ancient cycle broken, ruptured and torn.

Men came from Europe, different from those whom this man and his neighbors had previously encountered. They did not come to trade or pass through. They said they had a right to settle and rule this land, to exploit its soil already near-saturated with the sweat and blood of fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers.

Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, war erupted. The man's eldest son joined and died in revolt against those trying to take his country. Armed Europeans entered their village and forced them to leave. The man now had no land to pass on and no son to inherit it. Now refugees in a foreign land, ostracized and confined away by its inhabitants and violently blocked from reentering their country, they became part of a diaspora.

"But we do have a home," the man would repeat to his children, reassuring himself as much as them, "and one day we will return." Memories turned to stories, stories turned to dreams, as generations languished, but never forgot.

Who is this man and who are his people? The Jews, spread across the world, suffering persecution in Europe after their exile from Palestine 2000 years ago? Or the Palestinians, now suffering in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Gaza and the West Bank?

Cruel fate has seen the persecuted become the persecutors