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The chapter first discusses the implications of the justice of Zionism for the Palestinian right of return. Though it argues that Israel must acknowledge its responsibility for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem, it also argues against a mass return of Palestinian refugees. The chapter supports a return of a small number of refugees who are originally from areas that are currently unoccupied as well as a transfer of these areas to the Palestinian state. Section 2 argues that the pre-1967 borders should constitute the basis for the borders of the Jewish state. It argues that there is no moral inconsistency in the position that, while accepting the demographic and territorial results of the 1948 war, still calls for undoing the demographic and territorial results of the 1967 war.

This chapter clarifies the nature, extent, and applicability of the right of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and ethnic minorities to their return to their countries. The right of return has a solid foundation based on a series of conventions and declarations. First and foremost is Article 13(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which states: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” Their return also concerns rights to redeem lost property, the differences between individual and collective rights, the competition between and among different types of rights, the conflict between prioritizing rights or needs, and the more general issue of refugee and IDP protection. Viewed in an inclusive manner, the moral support for repatriation is not limited to a formal state or nationality, but is rather wide-ranging.

This chapter analyzes the right of return in a political and demographic context. The rights of return—as far as national and ethnic minorities are concerned—have difficulty gaining universal political backing instead of merely rhetorical support since politics equates national interest with an unmitigated calculation of the relative power of different political actors. Thus, there is no right of return if a state power rejects the return of a relatively weak group of refugees. However, if those refugees have powerful state backers, a state may bend even if return is considered not to be in its interests. Generally, populations reject the return of another ethnic group because of their own demographic concerns with remaining a majority, because of a perceived threat, or because return conflicts with their own right of self-determination.

The main goal of many infiltrators was to rejoin their families. Nearly every village and community was able to implement a limited “right of return” for a few of its members, enlarging the country's Arab population by 15%. The return of more than 20,000 refugees testifies to institutional ambivalence and to the fact that the official Israeli policy of “fewer Arabs on less land” was not always implemented. Arab lands were transferred to state ownership in a variety of ways, which have been documented and analyzed in many studies. The transfer of land to the state or to Zionist agencies was accomplished with the help of Arab collaborators. These people acted, generally consciously, in contradiction of their society's norms and against what Arab nationalists perceived as the supreme interest of the Arabs in Israel—keeping their land. In Israel, mukhtars played an important role in the state's acquisition of land in those areas where land ownership had never been officially registered. Arab farmers struggled against the expropriation of their land as a fight against progress and development.

This chapter examines the emergence of the Right of Return Movement within a Palestinian national arena of contention in light of the Oslo Accords, and the translation of this movement's contentious politics into historic Palestine and Nakba memory mobilization practices in the local community.

Belligerents routinely appropriate their enemy’s publicly owned resources, materiel, and territory, as well as their privately owned resources. The question is whether a belligerent which has taken property in the public and/or private de facto possession of its enemy is under a duty to restitute it once the war is over. In this chapter, it is argued that a justified peace all things considered, does not always require the restitution of what was wrongfully taken; it is also argued that a justified peace sometimes does require the restitution of what was rightfully taken. The chapter defends those conclusions by considering three cases: the restitution of publicly and privately owned moveable property; the return of territory; and the return of displaced individuals to their homeland.

This chapter argues that the taking of land should be theorized differently from other issues of corrective justice, not only because land is not moveable, and so cannot easily be distributed and redistributed and restored to the original occupant, but because morally significant relationships between people and place are likely to develop over time, and these affect the appropriate corrective justice remedy. Through analyzing these relationships, different types of wrongs involved in the taking of land can be identified, some of which apply to individuals and some to groups. The argument is pursued through three different kinds of place-related wrongs: violating rights of residency, violating right of occupancy, and violating rights to territory. The different wrongs suggest different potential remedies and not all expulsions involve all three of them.

This chapter examines the dynamics of rebuilding in one of the most devastated neighborhoods in New Orleans, the Lower Ninth Ward, after Hurricane Katrina and how this area has become a laboratory for architectural experimentation. In particular, it looks at Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation, a private sector effort to rebuild homes and lives in the Lower Ninth Ward, and how it evolved as a powerful voice of neighborhood preservation and racial justice at a moment when it appeared that the Lower Ninth Ward would remain vacant due to the lack of investment and support from the city’s elite. It also considers the efforts of Make It Right supporters to defend black residents’ “right of return” and to encourage the use of green building technologies, and argues that this project and the individual homes it has constructed are charming manifestations of the new landscape of neoliberal urbanism where the right to affordable housing and flood protection is determined by market forces as well as individual access to technological/architectural remedies.

In this chapter, the author responds to the somewhat enthusiastic welcoming of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's “acceptance” of the two-state solution in June 2009 by prominent left-wing figures in Israel. According to Netanyahu, the Palestinians must recognize Israel as the Jewish national state with an undivided Jerusalem and he rejected a right of return for Palestinian refugees, insisting that settlement building in the West Bank will continue. The author focuses on the views of David Grossman and A. B. Yehoshua regarding Netanyahu's Bar-Ilan speech. He declares that he is adopting a Jewish Palestinian identity and expresses his desire for the creation of a Jewish Palestinian state that is democratic, binational, multicultural, and multigendered.

Israel was incapable of digesting the political and emotional price of peace on two fronts, Syria and Palestine. Barak opted for a Syria-first approach. Talks with the Palestinians gathered steam along with the fading of the promise of a Syrian peace. Barak’s negotiating positions on Palestine, compounded by his refusal to even discuss Jerusalem, were utterly unrealistic. Inevitably, talks with the Palestinian negotiators Abu Ala and Abu Mazen revealed at once the magnitude of the gap. Though claiming to be steadfast in their defense of the unmovable principles of their cause, yet “flexible” in their implementation, the Palestinians were unequivocal in their drive for the borders of 1967, the division of Jerusalem into two capitals, the refugees’ right of return, and security arrangements that were respectful of Palestinian dignity. They also rejected any kind of interim agreement; it was all or nothing.

Back home, first a dramatic inner Cabinet meeting and then the full government overruled the army’s opposition and endorsed the Clinton peace parameters. The Palestinians, however, declared a total war on each and every aspect of the plan. Nor was the American performance particularly edifying. They gave in to Arafat’s irritating pressure for “clarifications,” and let him meet the president ten days after the deadline for an answer. Calls from world leaders pleading with him to give Clinton a yes and Arab envoys from Saudi Arabia and Egypt offering him their respective leaders’ encouragement were all ignored. Arafat’s reservations amounted to a resounding no. The Americans’ peace hopes faded away, and they shifted their attention to a “reduction of violence” or to some kind of presidential declaration that would enshrine the achievements of the process.