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The essence of an illusion By Zvi Bar'el Tags: Samri El-Youssef  "The Illusion of Return" by Samir El-Youssef, Halban Publishers, 160 pages, 12.99 pounds sterling (translated into Hebrew by Niv Savriago as "Ashlaiyat hashiva," Yedioth Ahronoth Books) 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. Advertisement "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. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Hamas on the Holocaust Al-Aqsa TV claims Jews concocted the Holocaust. Grasping genocide How a non-Jew in Israel came to understand the Holocaust.

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