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 gave 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. For another artifact of my work in the class, check out my review of Waking Lions.
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, 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 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?