Newsgroup: it.arti.cinema
Titolo: * Competing narratives and the right of return by Yehudith Harel and Amr A. El-Zant

Haaretz - Letters to the Editor - 28.7.2003
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/LiArt.jhtml?contrassID=2&subContrassID=7&sbSubContrassID=0
[see also: 
http://www.gush-shalom.org/archives/ror.html
 ]
The results of the recent poll probing the attitudes of Palestinian
refugees as to their choice of permanent status led one of us to
recall a visit, with a colleague from the Peace Now movement, to three
refugee camps in Jordan in 1996. We did not say we were Israelis - our
host told the inhabitants we were European journalists.
We talked to more than 50 people. Except for a few, all said that
despite their attachment to their ancestral land, they did not, if
given the choice, intend to go back to Israel; for Palestine of old
had disappeared, taking with it their villages and houses. Most
preferred compensation.
Nevertheless, everybody - absolutely everybody - said they demanded,
and insisted, that they be given the option of repatriation, and would
never, under any circumstances, accept to be "told" by Israel that
they cannot return. The unanimous and adamant demand of recognizing
this right came out so forcefully that it made one stop and think hard
about the phenomenon. And it was then and there that one came to
realize what the right of return (ROR) really meant for the
Palestinians, and that without its recognition there will never ever
be any resolution of the conflict.
Among the many motivations behind this insistence is an important
point of principle; it involves the symbolic content the refugees
attach to any compensation they might get as part of a Middle East
settlement - they require it be viewed as their fundamental right, as
dispossessed former inhabitants of the land, and not as charity
granted to them by Israel, as a result of "generosity and good will."
This refusal is a sort of settling of accounts with the Zionist
movement, which they hold responsible for the destruction of their
society and heritage, all the while placing the blame entirely
elsewhere, and the rewriting of history in a way as to marginalize the
importance of the destroyed communities.
For most Israelis the issue of the ROR evokes apocalyptic images of
the "destruction of Israel." As shown by Shikaki's research, however,
the recognition of the ROR is not about demographic warfare. It
instead involves a conceptual struggle between competing narratives.
The demand aims at penetrating the hegemonic status and the self-
righteous and self-declared moral superiority of the Zionist movement
over the moral and historical rights of the indigenous people of the
country.
Israelis refuse to cede to this precisely because they are not ready
to admit their share of historical responsibility for the Palestinian
tragedy. When denying and negating the ROR Israelis are protecting an
interpretation of events that has become entangled with their own
sense of identity. For what is up for destruction is not the country,
but its implausible idealized reconstruction of its past. The danger
is not embodied in a flood of refugees, but in a series of revisions
of cherished beliefs. The return that is feared is of a haunted
history.
It is the discrepancy between the acceptance by the refugees of the
reality of the situation in Israel, and the absence of any conceptual
modification of mainstream opinion in that country, that enraged the
mob which demonstrated against Shikaki.
The key to compromise is therefore a recognition of this situation by
those who won, whose plans actually materialized. The required re-
evaluation of the past does not imply its erasure or reversal. But the
recognition of unpleasant facts facilitates the advent of a less
tormented future.
For while many (probably most) Palestinians are ready to accept the
reality of Israel, few (if any) can be forced to see justice in the
fact, which is intricately entangled so as to be inseparable, from the
processes that lead to their dispossession. They require Israel views
its peace proposals not in terms of "generous offers" but as minimal
reparation for those who paid the price of its emergence.
Yehudith Harel and Amr A. El-Zant
Y. Harel is an Israeli organizational psychologist and a founder of
the recently formed Palestinian Israeli Joint Action for Peace. A. A.
El-Zant is an Egyptian physicist who was a research fellow at the
Israel Institute of Technology (1997-2000) and is currently at the
California Institute of Technology.

Brr... Pare il titolo di un libro della mitologia Lovecraftiana *__*