The Return for All: Unravelling the Zionist Knot
The Only Solution to the Double Uprooting
"I will continue to struggle for the homeland because it is my right, my past and my only future, because I have a tree, a cloud, a shadow, a sun that burns, clouds that rain fertility and roots that refuse to be uprooted."
"Palestine was not a case of a people without a homeland, but of a people with a homeland that was stolen from them."
-Ghassan Kanafani
"Handala was born ten years old, and he will always be ten years old. At that age I left my homeland, and when he returns, Handala will still be ten, and then he will start growing up. The laws of nature do not apply to him... Things will become normal again when the homeland returns."
"Beware of remaining refugees, for those without a homeland have no dignity, even if they acquire every nationality in the world."
Oh my homeland, all birds have nests, except for those that master freedom, for they die outside their homelands... I am against compromise but for peace... and I am for the liberation of Palestine, and Palestine, in my view, is not just the West Bank or Gaza. To me, Palestine stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Gulf. [, the whole Arab world]
-Naji al-Ali
Within the stark architecture of the double uprooting—that of Jewish communities and of the indigenous Arabs of Palestine—a singular, profound demand emerges: not as a nostalgic dream, but as the most concrete and logical horizon of decolonial justice, the principle of return for all. This is not merely a political proposal but the inherent, symmetrical answer to a foundational injustice. If the crime was the forced displacement of peoples to serve a colonial project under a sinister imperialist plan, then the only remedy that aligns with the scale of that crime is the guarantee of the right of return for all affected. Ultimately, this necessitates an end to the imperial interventions and ideologies that made the crime possible.
For Palestinians, the right of return is a non-negotiable pillar of their political and historical consciousness—a right codified in international law. Of course, this does not refer to UN General Assembly so-called resolutions, an imperialist instrument that codified the partition of Palestine; those can go to hell. It is the collective demand of a people scattered across refugee camps and diasporas to reclaim not just the land, but the stolen future of their grandparents. It represents the dismantling of the demographic weapon central to the zionist project: the fear of being “swamped” by the native population. However, this right of return, solely for Palestinians, is often framed within the discourse as an existential threat—a demographic "end" to the “Jewish state.” This framing exposes the core tension: the apartheid state’s identity is premised on the permanent exclusion of those it displaced.
This is why the concept must be a return for all. The return of Palestinian refugees must be conceptually and practically twinned with the right of return for all other populations uprooted by the zionist settler-colonial project. It is critical to remember that this project was facilitated by a Western imperial order whose Judeophobia was not merely an obstacle but sometimes a perverse catalyst; the 1933 Haavara Agreement, for instance, saw zionist officials negotiate with nazis to transfer Jews and their assets to Palestine, explicitly leveraging the nazi regime's goal of making Germany Judenrein (clean of Jews) for settler-colonial aims.
This includes, firstly, European Jews whose ancestors were manipulated and mobilized as settlers. A decolonial framework recognizes their right to return to their European motherlands, from which they were spiritually and physically severed by centuries of monstrous Judeophobia and the zionist project’s cynical exploitation of that trauma for political, racist, and genocidal ends.
Secondly, it includes Mizrahi Jews. Often absent from the simplified European zionist narrative, Mizrahi Jews (from Arab communities and Iran) were not simply caught in a backlash but were deliberately targeted and uprooted by a deliberate zionist colonial strategy. Their centuries-old communities were shattered by a calculated campaign of manipulation and terror—including bombings of Jewish sites by zionist agents designed to foment fear and panic—all to force their migration to Palestine to serve as a demographic tool (e.g., the bombings in Iraq are often attributed to the zionist underground led by Yosef Beit-Halahmi).
This same instrumental logic extended to other Jewish communities, such as Ethiopian Jews, who were also recruited to serve the demographic aims of the settler-colonial project. They were brought to the Israeli occupation state not as welcomed brethren but as a second-class population, used to populate emptied Palestinian towns and villages and to garrison frontier areas. Their trauma was instrumentalized; as the Iraqi Jewish writer Sasson Somekh recounted, the zionist narrative demanded they forget their past: “We were taught to be ashamed of our ‘diaspora’ heritage, of the Arabic we spoke, of the music we loved. We were to become new Jews, Israeli Jews, and that required a violent break from who we had been.” (*)
A true decolonial vision, therefore, must advocate for the right of return of all uprooted populations. This means two distinct rights, based on two distinct experiences of displacement:
The Right of Indigeneity: For the Natives of Palestine, the right of all refugees and their descendants to return to their original homes and lands, with full restitution and compensation for the Nakba.
The Right of Rectification for the Displaced: For Jewish communities mobilized as settlers, the right to return to their countries of origin. This right is a direct remedy for their instrumentalization by the zionist project and includes:
For European Jews, the right to return to their European motherlands, with full guarantees of citizenship, restitution for properties, and the dismantling of the Judeophobic structures that made zionism seem like a necessary refuge.
For Mizrahi, Ethiopian, and other non-European Jews, the right to return to their countries of origin—including Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, and Iran—with full guarantees of safety, restitution, citizenship, and the repair of the communal ties severed by zionist intervention.
This framework of twin rights fundamentally reframes the struggle. It moves beyond the suffocating binary of a two-state solution and challenges the very logic of ethno-nationalist settler colonialism. The demand for return for all declares that no one should have to live as a refugee or a settler on stolen land, and that no state has the right to hold a population hostage to its own demographic engineering.
"The struggle for the liberation of Palestine, for a democratic secular state free from all forms of racial and religious discrimination is a vital part of the international struggle for justice and equality." -Ghassan Kanafani
Inevitably, the objection arises: "But would Jews want to return to Berlin, Warsaw, or Baghdad?" The power of the question is not in its literal answer but in its function. It forces a recognition of the entirety of the Nakba and establishes a principle of absolute equality. It makes the right of return universal and indivisible, a single standard applied justly to all. By demanding the right for all, it dismantles the hierarchy of victimhood and creates the conditions for a truly shared future within a liberated, democratic Palestine, reintegrated into the Arab world as a homeland for all its people—a land from the river to the sea where belonging is based on dignity and common cause, not ethnic supremacy or exclusion. The return for all is thus the ultimate rejection of the imperial divide-and-rule strategy; it is the demand for a full and complete unravelling of the imperialist/colonial knot, offering everyone uprooted by this project—whether from Deir Yassin or from Warsaw—a chance to finally come home.