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

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 workable resolution from the end and effect instead of blatantly investigating the root causes.

The most praiseworthy chapter of Exile and Return is Amal Jamal's chapter on the internally displaced Palestinians (IDPs). It breaks unequivocally with the deplorable and frequent tendency of many shallow views of the refugee question as a security issue as well as with the unjustified fear of the other to camouflage an underlying racism. The chapter includes a remarkable deconstruction of the myth of security and demographic threats bringing to the attention the centrality of the ideological character of the state of Israel to comprehending the nature of the question of refugees. Although the return of the IDPs would not have had even the scantiest trivial security or demographic threats to Israel, their return has been blocked since the establishment of the state despite high court rulings in certain cases. The IDPs case is highly intriguing that it considerably undermines the ostensibly convincing Israeli discourse on the refugee question.

Other contributors to this book are: Laleh Khalili, Elie Podeh, Sari Hanafi, Elazar Barkan, Ann M. Lesch, Ze'ev Khanin, Michael R. Fischbach, Yehouda Shenhav, Salim Tamari, Nadim H. Rouhana, Ilan Pappe, and Gershon Shafir.