The journey of return is not something based only in politics, but cuts and runs through the very essence of Palestinian existence, writes Sharif S Elmusa* The refugee camp on the edge of Jericho where I grew up wasn't home. Home was in Palestine: "There, on that mountain peak" where "our houses stand from ancient times", in the words of a poem I memorised in grade school. There, "my eyes behold their playground/ but my feet cannot seek it." On the wall of the study room hung a frame with a line of verse embroidered by my sister in the colours of the Palestinian flag. The verse was not particularly profound; it expressed, however, the obstinate yearning of the refugees for Palestine: "Even though long days will divide us/ the bitter separation will conclude with union." Palestine was in Jaffa and Haifa, Acre and Safad, Lod and Ramallah. It was in Abasiyya, my parents' village next to Lod. I smelled the fragrance of its orange groves, and my feet sank in its Sand Alley, leading to the fields. I followed my uncle from village to village and from town market to colourful town market in search of his stolen, white Arabian horse. The journey back home -- real or imagined -- is the fulcrum of the psychological structure of the exile. Without the pivot of the journey the exile would experience total cognitive dislocation. The Jews across centuries intoned, without intending political ambitions, "next year in Jerusalem". The Greek-Egyptian poet C P Cavafy in "Ithaka" addresses an ancient Greek exile; he counsels him to meander, to loiter on the way to Ithaka, for it would not make him prosperous or famous. The value of Ithaka is that it gave him the journey. When in 1955 an American special ambassador, Eric Johnston, negotiated a plan to give the Palestinian refugees in the Jordan Valley region land and water from the Jordan River, to "resettle them", the refugees rejected the plan. They wanted land and water, but in Palestine. The stirrings of the journey were stronger than economic gain. Can you imagine Odysseus, whose exile wasn't even forced, being "resettled"? It does not matter whether the exile is rich or poor, a prince or a commoner. Odysseus hailed from the nobility. Edward Said, in spite of global recognition, thought of himself as an exile. His ashes eventually made the journey back, close to home. One of the best known advocates of the Palestinian "right of return", Suleiman Abu Sitta, is an engineer, a rich businessman and holder of several passports. He was attacked once on the pages of this newspaper for not feeling the plight of refugees in the camps. Whatever one thinks of Abu Sitta's eccentric spatial- demographic analysis, which assumes Palestinians would return exactly to their original localities, the critic failed to understand that the power of the journey is not dependent on wealth or possession of travel documents. An exile differs from an immigrant. The immigrant may long for the old country, but knows he must strike roots in the adopted land. The exile, on the other hand, fears that immersion in the new place would compromise his belonging to the homeland. Mahmoud Darwish: "In order to remember my country's pure air/ I must breathe in consumption/ In order to retain ownership over my distant sky/ I must not own even my very skin." A cursory inspection of Salma Jayyusi's Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature reveals that this attitude is widely held among Palestinian poets and writers. Odysseus journeyed back as an individual. The Palestinian refugees always imagined they would return as community. They would be like "flocks of returnees", as "the nightingale told" the great Lebanese singer Fairuz, when they both met "at a bend" in the road. This romantic image may be an archetype among exiles. The Irish, who long-sustained a myth of return, fathomed a comparable representation. The poet and political activist Maude Gonne in the early years of the twentieth century wrote, "The wild geese shall return/ and we'll welcome them home." The Universal Declaration of Human Rights upholds the right of the individual person to return to his country. It thus recognises an innate, not necessarily political, human need for reunification with origins. This does not contradict the idea of the return of the community as community. In the Palestinian case the group right of return is enshrined in, among documents, the 1948 UN General Assembly resolution 194. Vesting the right of return in the individual functions too as a safety valve, in case the heads of the flock stray or get exhausted in mid-flight, or are forced under duress to sign away the right. The circle thus is closed; if the right of individual to return is inviolable, the individuals can imagine and act on their right of return as a community. The right of return always seemed to the Palestinians sacred and untouchable. This changed with the Oslo Accords. One early morning in 1994 in a suburb of Jerusalem -- where I was staying while doing research -- before the entry of Yasser Arafat into Gaza, I woke up overcome by the thought that the establishment of a Palestine state in the West Bank and Gaza would abort the journey toward Palestine. The long thin map of Palestine bounded by the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, which Palestinians wear as a pendant, would be tattered, bereft of emotional and historical appeal: "We are martyrs of the map," said Darwish. My being on the outskirts of Jerusalem did not feel like returning. The colours of the Palestinian flag that my little son had been given by a friend from the school appeared to lose the connotations of those of the embroidered verse on the wall of the study room of my childhood. The "bitter separation" struck me as permanent, and I sank into melancholy. Since then, voices willing to tamper with the right of return have multiplied. Members of the "inside" elite have campaigned for jettisoning this right. They were later joined by Palestinian Authority officials who became "naturalised" insiders. The culmination of the shift was the Geneva document signed last December by, among others, the veteran politician Yasser Abed Rabbo. President Arafat dispatched one of his many "advisers" to the signing ceremony. Yet, in his latest 15 May speech commemorating the 1948 Palestinian nakba, or catastrophe, the president of all seasons declared that the right of return was sacred. Some view discarding the right of return as a "logical" move, an inevitable price of a state in the West Bank and Gaza. This might be valid if the Palestinian vision of return was based on the expulsion of the Jews; it is not. The Zionists returned to expel, whereas Palestinian political vision since 1965 has included the Jews as part of Palestine. Still others tried to effectively discredit the seriousness of the right of return in a roundabout way. They polled refugees to find out how many would like to return, only to discover that a small fraction were interested. That way the pollsters believed they could reassure Israel and the United States that the endorsement of the right of return would not mean Palestinians would be flocking back to their country. This is a misled enterprise. Public opinion is not immutable. The early Zionists found few takers among Jews for the idea of immigration to Palestine. That changed with constant Zionist agitation and successes in Palestine and the disasters of World War II. Is there a better, or even more scientific, way of knowing how many Palestinians would want to return than opening the portals of the country? At any rate, Israel has been oblivious to these radical concessions by Palestinian "realists". Sharon continues to extend the wall system, grab ever more land and vehemently reject the idea of Palestinian return. The Israeli wall was formidably reinforced when President George W Bush signed in mid-April onto Sharon's "facts on the ground", and opposed the Palestinian right of return to boot. In ancient Egyptian mythology, as rendered by Norman Mailer in Ancient Evenings, Maat, the feather of truth against which the hearts of men are judged after death, scolded the sun-god, Ra, for lending a hand to Seth who killed his own brother Osiris. "It is dangerous to protect a victor from the curses of those He defeated," she told him, for "the victor will prosper too easily and the world will tip." Without the journey, the world of the exile too would tip. Beyond the formidable wall, "there, on that mountain peak", I say, I have my own facts on the ground. * The writer is associate professor of political science at the American University in Cairo.
