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Author: FIGBERT <figbert@figbert.com>
Date: Fri, 1 Nov 2024 17:26:17 -0700
Add Illusion of Return review
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+title = "The Novel of Palestinian Disillusionment"
+date = 2024-11-01T17:25:51-07:00
+[extra]
+book = "The Illusion of Return"
+author = "Samir El-Youssef"
+finished = 2024-10-23
+rating = "★★★☆☆"
++++
+
+**Author's Note:** I write everything in a conversational tone, so I
+doubt anybody reading this will notice much difference, but this review
+was originally a presentation. It is one of two I will give in Russell
+Berman's wonderful [Zionism and the Novel]. It was first written in [iA
+Presenter]. The title I have given the review here on the website was
+taken from our syllabus.
+
+## Let's begin
+~~Alright close your laptops and let's do this for real.~~ To get you up
+to speed, let me tell you succinctly everything you need to know about
+the book.
+
+Let us start with the fact that it's semi-autobiographical. Though it is
+a novel, and elements are fictionalized, the life of our protagonist
+broadly echoes the trajectory of our author.
+
+Which is a great intro to our
+
+## Brief List of Characters
+
+Beginning with our Author-Protagonist. He's Palestinian, born in
+Lebanon, and lives in London. He has no name! We do know a lot about him
+though.
+
+Ali has the same origin story, lives in the US, and is drug buddies with
+the protagonist. Ali is the closest of the bunch to the protagonist,
+because the other two basically thought that the protagonist wasn't
+mentally up to snuff.
+
+Maher has the same origin story as well. He is also a Communist.
+
+George is a Lebanese Christian, still in Lebanon as far as we know, and
+a big fan of abstract philosophy (specifically Heidegger). He is the only non-Palestinian of the bunch.
+
+## That's the Gang Of Four
+In the prologue, we witness the protagonist approaching the fifteenth
+anniversary of his departure from Lebanon. He gets a call from Ali, who
+has a layover in London on his way from the US back to Lebanon, and he
+wants to say hello. This throws the protagonist into a whirlpool of
+emotions, as he had pretty much severed contact with his past up until
+this point.
+
+The real meat of the novel is narrated to us in a series of flashbacks
+to the last night the gang of four spent together, revealing
+progressively more and more about their overlapping lives and
+relationships.
+
+Finally, in the prologue, we get to witness the discussion between the
+protagonist and Ali in the Heathrow Airport and a little bit of the
+latter's perspective on things.
+
+And, before we address the fun socio-political commentary of the novel,
+we can take a small more-mundane dive into one of the big questions of
+the course:
+
+## Is The Personal Political?
+El-Youssef answers clearly that, whether we like it or not: yes.
+
+The stories in this book are deeply tragic.
+
+Our protagonist had a sister named Amina. Amina was physically abused by
+her other brother Kamal, and ends up killing herself. The protagonist is
+haunted by her memory, and his family refuses to even say her name.
+
+Obviously, this is deeply tragic. It also exists in a political context!
+Amina shoots herself after Kamal sees her kissing a man and threatens to
+kill her himself for dishonoring the family. The freedom of women in
+society—regretfully, a political issue. The man Amina was kissing was a
+fellow member of a Palestinian resistance movement. Her family found her
+membership in that deeply troublesome, primarily because of their
+uniform of military fatigues. After her suicide, the movement covers up
+the cause of her death and honors her for dying in the fight against
+"the Zionist enemy." All deeply political!
+
+Ali's had a brother Sameh. Sameh was gay, and because of this a faction
+of Palestinian militants forced him into working for them as some form
+of punishment/conversion therapy (obviously political). Sameh is
+eventually caught smuggling arms into Israel and shot. The IDF traced
+his dead body and the van he was driving back to Ali in Lebanon, and
+force Ali to become an informant. Super political! And of course, very
+personally tragic! Ali and his brother are made pawns and stripped of
+their agency. When his brother is eventually killed, Ali experiences a
+mix of emotions—he is devastated, but also grateful because of the shame
+that Sameh's sexuality brought upon him. Super horrible!
+
+You'll also note that unlike the other three, Maher's intro didn't have
+a note about what he's currently up to. That's because, on the night at
+the cafe that we witness, Maher is kidnapped and murdered. He is
+kidnapped and murdered in part for political reasons—he's a
+communist—but also for the personal implications that political fact has
+created—his assailant is the bereaved son of a man who's factory was
+destroyed at the hands of a communist revolutionary Maher helped
+radicalize.
+
+George hides his personal struggles, for political reasons. His family
+lives together, but he reveals to the protagonist on their walk home
+from the cafe that his parents have been divorced since he was a child.
+He has struggled with love for his whole life, having grown up in an
+ice-cold household. But he can never reveal any of this, or stir up any
+great troubles or emotions, because of his precarious position in the
+community: a Christian amongst Muslims, a Lebanese amongst Palestinians,
+a third party caught in a Judeo-Islamic war. Not seeking to anger any
+dangerous people with guns, he lives a life disconnected from his
+personal struggles.
+
+In this book, and in real life, the personal world has profound
+political implications and vice versa.
+
+And now for the fun part.
+
+## Palestinianism
+I made up this word, and its going to live on the screen while we talk
+about what El-Youssef wants us to learn and believe. Because this book
+is a commentary on the Palestinian right of return. There's significant
+and explicit commentary on it within the book—the protagonist wrote
+(sort of) a thesis on the subject—including this lovely nod to the
+audience:
+
+> "'It's a one-way journey!' he told me," said Ali, "'As for those who
+> claim to return to a place where they never were,' said Bruno, 'they
+> are simply confusing the symbolic and metaphorical with the possible
+> and actual.'.... [T]here is no such thing as the right of return... I
+> shall write [this] as an essay or a story, which I could call *The
+> Illusion of Return*.
+
+Now, last year, in a wonderful course that I do not really recommend
+anybody take because it's quite boring and not that wonderful called
+[HISTORY81B: Making the Modern Middle East][HISTORY81B], I read a book
+called [*The War of Return*]. Unlike the course, this I highly
+recommend. It was written by two prominent Israeli leftists and contains
+an in-depth history that is largely unknown, and records some important
+oddities related to the right of return and the issue of Palestinian
+refugees.
+
+History in 1948 must be judged within its context, and not against
+modernity. Much was different back then, and population exchange and
+territorial partition were viewed as legitimate ways of solving ethnic
+conflicts in ways that they are perhaps not any longer. We can see this
+happening all over the world and at a much larger scale than in the
+Levant, such as in Greece and Turkey or India and Pakistan. So the
+illegitimacy—or even unique nature—of the circumstances surrounding
+Israel's founding and the birth of the Palestinian refugee issue is
+suspect from that perspective.
+
+And beyond that, Palestinian refugees have been treated radically
+differently from any other class of people. They are in fact not
+governed by the UN committee that deals with refugees, but by their own
+UNRWA—which you have likely heard about in the news recently. (As an
+aside, it's not incorrect to say "their own" in that sentence, as the
+vast majority of UNRWA employees since its inception have been
+Palestinians). They are hereditary where no other refugee group is,
+creating 5 million refugees from an initial displacement of around 700K.
+Their status is not surrendered when they gain citizenship to their new
+host countries, leading to Jordan's population being majority (~70%)
+Palestinian refugees. The entire population of the West Bank and Gaza
+have been considered refugees since 1948, despite living in territories
+allocated for their own future state. The "refugee camps" that most of
+them live in—and into which three of our four main characters were
+born—look far from the camps of the standard Western imagination, but
+are in fact fully built-out neighborhoods attached to or themselves
+forming major cities (see: Beirut and Jenin, respectively).
+
+Furthermore, attempts to resolve the refugee issue by traditional
+means—resettlement, economic empowerment, and rehabilitation, as seen
+elsewhere (including some of the UN's most successful projects, such as
+the reconstruction of Korea)—have been intentionally shuttered. Please
+see these two quotes:
+
+> The refugee issue, claim Schwartz and Wilf, is cynically manufactured
+> and perpetuated by Arab leaders.
+
+> And let's face it... the Arab countries are not the most hospitable
+> places, especially for Palestinians.
+
+This first quote is actually from [a book report][*The War of Return*] I
+wrote on *The War of Return*, and the latter from El-Youssef in *The
+Illusion of Return*.
+
+The issue of Palestine can be resolved. States can be formed, and given
+borders. But the right of return—this is crazy important, and something
+I realized in reading *The War of Return*—does not refer to the ability
+of Palestinians to immigrate to the future territory of a Palestinian
+state (presumably in the contemporary West Bank and Gaza) but rather to
+the whole territory that once comprised the British Mandate, including
+the modern State of Israel!
+
+This is the issue of Palestinians, not Palestine. And the broader Arab
+world does not want to resolve it. Because resolving it means closure.
+It means continuing forward in time. It means that Jews will have
+sovereignty over a slice of the Middle East.
+
+Our protagonist begins many things throughout the book, but never
+finishes them. He also struggles with time and presence, doubting
+whether the past really happened at all. His parents left Palestine for
+Lebanon, and he left Lebanon for London—but try as he might he cannot
+truly move on. The world around him forces this anti-closure upon him, a
+relic of his past—Palestinian-Lebanese Ali—literally showing up on his
+doorstep as he arrives at his anniversary of emigration.
+
+But he is wise enough to know that you cannot undo the past.
+
+Which! Brings us to:
+
+## The Jewish Question
+Though not the one you're familiar with. El-Youssef doesn't believe in
+return. The Jewish question I pose to you all now is thus: how can we
+reconcile this position with the reality of Israel—a return that worked?
+What, if anything, makes the case of the Jews different?
+
+[Zionism and the Novel]: https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/search?q=COMPLIT37Q
+[iA Presenter]: https://ia.net/presenter
+[HISTORY81B]: https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/search?q=HISTORY81B
+[*The War of Return*]: @/reading/war-of-return/index.md
