THE g l tSTION OF PALESTINE 49 people,” a formula without analogy in any other state or quasi state), and second by the Law o f Return, by whose provision any Jew born anywhere is entitled to claim immediate Israeli citizenship and residence (but no A rab can. even if his residence and that o f his family for numerous generations in Palestine can be proved). These two exclusionary categories systematically and juridically make it im possible, on any grounds w hatever, for the A rab Palestinian to return, be compensated for his property, or live in Israel as a citizen equal before the law with a Jewish Israeli. Another argument is that if so many basically hostile Palestinians were to be allowed to return, what would happen to Israel would be. in fact, political suicide. M oreover, Israel is a state for Jews, and they must always be allowed the infinitely open option o f a potential "retu rn " to Zion . Both these arguments have the force, indeed the conviction and intensity, of genuine passion. It is useless for a Palestinian A rab to deny them, just as it is useless to imagine that Israeli Jews would be likely ever to want to return to their places o f origin. Much of the despair and pessimism that one feels at the whole Palestinian-Zionist conflict is each side’s failure in a sense to reckon with the existential power and presence o f another people with its land, its unfortunate history o f suffering, its emotional and political investment in that land, and worse, to pretend that the O ther is a tem porary nuisance that, given time and effort (and punitive violence from time to tim e), will finally go away. The actuality is that Palestinian and Israeli Jews are now fully implicated in each others' lives and political destinies, perhaps not in any ultimate way— which is a subject not easily bracketed in rational discussion— but certainly now and in the foreseeable future. Y e t even so, one must be able to discriminate between an invading, dispossessing, and displacing political presence and the presence it invades, displaces, and dispossesses. The two are not equal, nor in the end is one ever going to prevail over and definitively dominate the other. For Zionism to perpetuate a political, juridical, and epistemologieal system whose immediate and constantly renewed and even long-term goal is to keep Palestine and the Palestinians