The Law of Return vs. The Right of Return

Last December, Hannah Mermelstein of Birthright Unplugged, sat down with me to talk about her work, and expound on the concept of "Birthright" over coffee and the incredibly unnerving sound of our refrigerator-fan freaking out, while the snow blanketed the town. What follows is an excerpt of our conversation.

aVFP - Give me a general overview of Birthright Unplugged.

Hannah - Birthright Unplugged is the name of the organization, we have two programs: Unplugged and Replugged. We started partially as a response to this idea of a Jewish birthright in the place where Palestinian people were kicked out of.

We have the two programs and consider them to be ‘movement building’ programs - that’s our goal for both of them. With Unplugged it’s a six day grip mostly through the West Bank meeting mostly with Palestinian people and most of the people who come are Jewish North Americans and they are... we basically put people in direct communication with Palestinian people, folks that they would otherwise not have connections with and would not have access to. We stay in refugee camps, we expose people to a lot of different issues and then we help to equip them to return to their own communities and work for justice back at home, usually in the U.S. and Canada.

That’s Unplugged.

Re-plugged is a two day trip for Palestinian children who live in the West Bank, they’[re refugees, they live in West Bank refugee camps. We take them to three places that they otherwise would not be able to go, and that they’re grandparent’s have been prevented from returning to, their parents can’t go. We take them because they’re under the age of 16 and don’t yet have I.D. cards-those ID cards are what Israel uses to control peoples’ movement, so under the age of 16 people have a little bit more freedom of movement. It’s sort of a loophole. So we’re able to work with these kids and get them through checkpoints and get them to Jerusalem, the sea, and the villages that their own grandparents are from that they have never been to. They document their experiences and create photo exhibits to share with their own communities and also we bring them back to the U.S. to share with communities here, to share their voices and their stories. It’s a two day trip so they actually stay with Palestinian families inside ’48 or inside Israel.

VFP - How big is your staff?

H - Just the two of us. We founded it - her name is Dunya - we met working with the IWPS. She and I are the directors, we lead the trip with Re-plugged and we get volunteers to help us. It’s a pretty high staff to kid ratio on that trip.

VFP - I imagine.

H - Its necessary. (laughs)

VFP - Have you had any negative reaction from birthright-type organizations or people who have been involved - I know you were involved with it as a young person.

H - Well, not with Birthright Israel itself, with other similar kinds of movements. Birthright Israel threatened to sue us before we even started, they sent us a cease and desist letter. We’re not even sure exactly how they found out about it because we were being pretty low-key about the name. We already knew we were going to use that name but we weren’t really publicising it much yet because we wanted to get one trip off the ground before getting sued.

But they sent us a cease and desist letter and we ended up getting some lawyers to help, to say that they would write back. You know write letters back and forth if they needed to, to help us, help defend us, and they did. So we went back and forth a couple of times with letters and the last time we heard from Birthright international they said “It’s not enough, we’re about to sue you.” And that was more than two years ago.

And more recently they’ve actually said in the media - we have some articles on our website that you can look up http://birthrightunplugged.org/press - but one of them, I think we have it up there, someone from Birthright International was quoted as saying that the reason they didn’t actually go through with the lawsuit was that they didn’t want to give us any more publicity.

VFP - Wow, that worked for you then...

H - At the very beginning when we thought “Okay, we might get sued” we thought, “Well, at least we’ll be getting the message out in someway. So, it can go either way, but ultimately we’re glad that we’re able to do these programs.

VFP - I think a lot of my readers are unfamiliar with the conflict in general, so in you’re own words could you explain the concept - as a Jewish American - of birthright: the right of Jewish people to return to Israel, and how that plays itself out in organizations like Birthright International.

H - This concept of birthright - it’s hard to dissect - to figure out, you know, who has a right to a place and why.

Often times Jewish groups or Jewish people wil say that they have a right to Palestine/Israel/Canaan you know, whatever it’s been called over the years, because there’s this biblical connection. In the Torah, Zion means something to Jewish people - so there is this religious connection.

The majority of Jewish people in the world are not particularly religious and the majority of Zionists are not particularly religious either.

Most of the way that Israel is justified is actually - we hear a lot about the land being promised to the Jews but most of the people who are very committed to Israel, it’s not for that reason, it’s more people’s fear and people really wanting to have a Jewish state. It’s a kind of political ideology rather than something religious.

The question, then, is having a Jewish state at the expense of whom or what?

Palestinian people are indigenous to the land and Palestinian people consist of Muslims and Christians, so these people are the descendants of folks who’ve been there for thousands of years. They’re Palestinian. They are people who actually have a right to the land as an indigenous population does.

I think that a lot of what is happening there occurs within the context of two laws: The RIGHT OF RETURN and the LAW OF RETURN.

The Right of Return in an international law that applies to all refugees in the world and it says that any refugee has the right to return to the place that they’re from and to get full compensation for any loss of damages. Two thirds of the Palestinian population are refugees. They were kicked out in 1948, not because Zionists are inherently mean people, but because they had a political ideology and wanted a Jewish state. In order to have that they needed a Jewish majority. In order to have a Jewish majority they needed to kick out the Palestinian people - the non-Jewish people. So two thirds - more than 7 million Palestinian people - are prevented from returning to their land in violation of the Right of Return.

Israel has created something called the LAW of RETURN that says that any Jewish person in the entire world can move to Israel, get full citizenship rights, learn Hebrew at the expense of the government, get housing subsidies, all of these things because they’re Jewish, even if they don’t have any connection to the place.

So Israel defines itself as a state of the Jewish people, not as a state of its citizens. A lot of people who are its citizens are actually not Jewish and they don’t have equal rights. A lot of people who are not its citizens - like myself - could have full rights there. If I wanted to, because I’m Jewish. So that is how these laws interact with each other, and that is the political process that’s going on.


You can read more about Birthright Unplugged by surfing to their website listed on the right.

-aVFP