Today in the NYR Online, Sari Bashi asks where Palestinians in Gaza have a right to live after decades of displacement and expulsion. “I’m an Israeli-American Jew, married to a Palestinian refugee from Gaza,” she writes. “Our family histories suggest an answer to that question.” Bashi relates the experiences of her husband’s mother—currently a refugee in the south of Gaza who in 1948 had been driven from her village to Gaza, where in the 1970s her home was demolished by the Israeli military—to those of her father, a Baghdadi Jew who fled Iraq in 1953. “Many Israeli Jews carry intergenerational memories of the Holocaust in Europe…and of having to flee Arab countries after 1948,” Bashi notes. “Everyone has a right to a safe haven…. But no safe haven should come at the expense of violating Palestinians’ right to safety and other fundamental rights, including the right to return.”

Below, alongside Bashi’s essay, we have collected four articles from the Review’s archives about the toll of displacement.

Sari Bashi
Gaza: Two Rights of Return

Most Palestinians in Gaza are now displaced at least twice over. They have a right to choose where to return.

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
The Right to Belong

“What will statelessness look like if nationality and citizenship are increasingly decoupled from territory?”

David S. Reynolds
Our Ruinous Betrayal of Indians and Black Americans

“Thomas Jefferson initially thought that the ‘natural progress of things’ pointed to natives becoming ‘citizens of the US.’ But as conflict with the Indians escalated, he said that Americans faced a heartbreaking choice: ‘To pursue them to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach.’ He concluded that ‘we shall be obliged to drive them with the beasts of forest into the stony [i.e., Rocky] mountains.’”

Christopher Hitchens
Experimental Station

“Since 1945, Cyprus has been the scene of an anticolonial war, a near civil war, a military coup, a full-scale invasion, and the only battle in which two NATO armies fired directly on one another. One approximate way to summarize and preface the argument is to show how variously the Greeks and the Turks interpret the past.”

Robert I. Friedman
The Palestinian Refugees

“On April 25, 1948, the Irgun launched a major ground offensive against the northern neighborhood of Jaffa. ‘Owing to the heavy bombing of Jaffa [with mortars],’ the UNRWA fact sheet notes, the Kassas family fled to Ramle, where they stayed for fifteen days before moving to Salt, a small town in Jordan. They settled in a tent behind the water pump of Salem El Yacoub’s house. Rent was one Jordanian dinar a month.”

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