Ann M. Lesch and Ian S. Lustick. Editors. Exile and Return Predicaments of Palestinians and Jews.

PositionBook review

Ann M. Lesch and Ian S. Lustick. Editors. Exile and Return Predicaments of Palestinians and Jews. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005, 368 pages. Hardcover $45.

Exile and Return engages an issue of extreme importance, enormous human value as well as political worth. The organization of the material in this book, however, leaves important issues out. The five sections, together with the introductory part disregard substantial issues in the quest for a workable solution for the refugee return. While there are abundant footnotes, which substantiate statements in the main body of the text and contain a mass of additional sources, and despite the impressive expertise invested in the preparation of the fourteen chapters, wishful thinking and imperceptive, but ingenuousness nonetheless, hopes dominate what should have been meticulous scholarship.

While some of the text's chapters avoid considering the pre-stated workable solution to resolve the Palestinian refugee problem, the preface and introductory chapter advance intellectual delving into mechanisms for a practical, rather than fundamental, resolution to the Palestinian refugee problem, thus throwing away the rigorous scholarship of social and political affairs in favor of what might be characterized as equation making. Such an approach easily slips into reification; it not only overlooks the continuing colonial structure and relations and the impact they have on the future of the refugee problem, but it also starts the quest for a...

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