Speaking of Home: An Intimate Exchange on Israel-Palestine

On Monday, October 21, 2024, ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action released a recording of a conversation between psychoanalysts Eyal Rozmarin (Israeli) and Karim Dajani (Palestinian), moderated by ROOM’s Editor in Chief, Hattie Myers. With an urgent focus on Israel-Palestine, these two psychoanalysts engaged in a powerful and tender conversation showing how unconscious process underlies political-cultural realities and individual misunderstandings. This is a curated transcript of the event which was recorded at the Psychology & the Other conference on July 14, 2024, hosted by Boston College and Northeastern University in London. It is available to view at analytic-room.com/speakingofhome.

 

Hattie Myers

I’m a psychoanalyst from New York and the editor in chief of ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action. We are grateful to Psychology & the Other for giving us this opportunity to be with you today. In this symposium, we want to think with you about how history suffuses us, between the river and the sea, between what we know and what lies outside of our conscious awareness. Our hope is that by looking at impact of the unconscious during political violence and over generations of trauma, we will find some common ground. The hardest lift, as Karim and Eyal have found, is finding empathic connection. We’ll begin with each of them sharing with us what Eyal calls their “milk stories”—where they each have come from. 

 

Karim Dajani

For centuries my ancestors lived in Palestine. During the War of 1948, when Israel became a state, my parents, Naida and Khanum, were expelled from Jaffa. Psychologically, they were stateless and dispossessed from their land and place of origin. They lived among a large group of diaspora Palestinian intellectuals in Beirut. On June 5, 1967, another fateful war erupted. Israel attacked Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. For the first five days of the war, Arab media broadcasted an imminent victory. My father believed the borders would open. He believed his return to Jaffa was imminent. His worries turned to his books. How could he take them all? My mother was pregnant with me and had three little children to care for. She put her foot down, telling him to focus on how to transport people and essential furniture. He despondently started giving his books away, donating and selling them.

On June 11, news began to filter that we lost everything. As my mother tells it, our house was full of people. My father was sitting with a large group of men on the balcony. They were listening to the radio when the real news broke that the Arabs lost and the rest of historic Palestine had been occupied. The men broke into sobs. They cried and wailed. Some of them fell to the ground and rocked back and forth in a fetal position. My mother retreated into a room by herself. Amidst her tears, she turned to her fetus [me] and instructed me to come out different. She wished for me to possess the capacity to understand this devastation, to not fall for lies. To find a path out of this morass—for us as a family and for us as a people. I was assigned an impossible task before I was born. 

The story we were told was that in the 1890s, a movement called Zionism was born that aimed to establish a Jewish state, an historic Palestine. The Jews needed a place to go due to intense persecution and discrimination. They had lived for millennia as a stateless people like we are living now. They gave the world many intellectuals and artistic gifts. We were taught that in a world of dispossession, the only real possessions that cannot be taken away are your mind, your intellect, and your spirit. 

The Jews came prepared with the intention to take our land. We were taught not to forget the injustice that occurred, to remain faithful witnesses, and to cultivate a spirit of smooth, steadfast resistance. For the first fifteen years of my life in Lebanon, my lived experience of Jews was of soldiers with superior military equipment who were intent on killing me. I did not know or interact with a Jewish civilian until I immigrated to the United States.

As my life became intertwined with many Jewish colleagues and friends, what has become clear to me is that I did not grow up knowing much about the people who came to take our land. I did not know much about their culture and their collective. The stories we were told were missing an elaboration of the other’s lived experience.

How do we interrupt the ruin and destruction in order to begin something new?

 

Eyal Rozmarin

I am not sure at this point what it means for me to be “Israeli” or who I am representing here. At the same time, I am Israeli as a matter of collective identification, and I do speak as an Israeli. I don’t really have a choice. Being Israeli is part of myself, as much as it is part of myself to be the child of my parents.

So an Israeli, here with a beloved friend who is Palestinian—which puts us in a wild kind of relation, because my assigned-at-birth collectivity has been harming my friend’s people since its inception, with increasing ferociousness, to the present atrocity in Gaza. 

My grandmother Shoshana was born in 1910, in a little town outside Pinsk. They were eleven siblings, one brother, ten sisters. She immigrated to Palestine in 1933 by herself. It was a family decision. As she told the story, she was the prettiest of them all, and so most in danger for being kidnaped by the Cossacks. She forged a new life as an agricultural worker. She wed a young immigrant from Lithuania. In 1937 they had my mother. In 1941 he died from TB. In 1941 she also lost touch with her family. We assume they were all killed in one of those forest ditches that the SS made the Jews dig by themselves before shooting them in, town by town, as the German army swept into Russia. This is how they did it before the extermination of the Jews was industrialized. 

I think often about my grandmother’s annus horribilis. What was it like to become a single mother in British Palestine, to lose touch with your family, dreading that they all died. My grandfather’s brother reappeared after the war bearing an Auschwitz number. No one else survived.

My grandmother passed many years ago, but she lives inside me. How she built a life for herself, had three husbands, made a living making dresses and renting rooms in her apartment by the beach. I reminded her of her brother, I reminded her of her first husband. I was chosen to carry her dead into the world of the living. She taught me how to sew. I used to sew dresses for my mother. She left me her apartment by the sea. It is the only thing I own in Israel.

There was also my nannie. We called her Rachel the Tripoltani—because she was from Tripoli in Libya. She was a big, warm woman, with golden earrings and golden bracelets that chimed when she danced with the pots in the kitchen. She used to make us couscous and mafrum . . . Rachel also had on her arm an Auschwitz number. At some point, the Nazis started clearing up the Jews of North Africa as well.

I feel my task is to figure out how I can keep the visceral-identity roots that I have in the territory of Israel-Palestine, where my grandmother Shoshana found refuge and built the modest life she left to me, where Rachel also ended up. Neither had anywhere to go back to; neither would want to, even if they could. I have lodged in me their sense of precarity and necessity, their energies and hopes too. How to not betray them, how to keep the place they left me, while ending the immense harm and repairing the massive damage that their predicament, turned into a violent nationalism, keeps inflicting on my Palestinian compatriots? How to have an identity that is not steeped in injustice, how to change?

 

Hattie

Maybe we can begin by talking about what your experience is like being with each other, hearing these stories which I know you have heard before. 

 

Karim

There’s so much that needs to be said. It’s impossible for me not to feel sorrow, not to feel a protective impulse when I listen to Eyal. It’s impossible. And that’s one of the things that I think is really important to emphasize here. 

Our stories had very little in them structurally that allowed recognition of the other. We came together through a collision course of history, and now we’re bound together for eternity. We know nothing about each other’s lived experience and hearts. That has been a very illuminating part of this process. And for me, I’ll speak just for myself, we clearly developed an affectionate bond early on in our conversations, which has allowed us to do something that I don’t think has been done before, which is to analyze each other.

We’ve been involved in some kind of process of mutual analysis, and in that process we’ve learned that as much as we love each other, there are ways that we actually cannot hear each other. And we’re reaching out to each other for help, really, so that we can hear what the other is saying. Here is one example of that. When I first wrote the introduction you just heard, the part where my father was imagining that he would finally get to go home, Eyal’s immediate response was What are you going to do with the Jews who are living there? I responded that my father was going home to the house he was born in. 

But the thing is, what I heard Eyal say was Your father was going to Jaffa to kick out the Jews and kill them.

 

Eyal

I didn’t say that.

 

Karim

What Eyal actually said was What are you going to do with the Jews? That’s a very big difference. But I literally heard him say, You’re going to kill us, you murderers. Actually he was asking me a very legitimate question. He was thinking about Shoshana and his family.

Here is another example of that. Yesterday, Eyal had something to say to me that he had been holding on to for a while. But before we got to that, Eyal said to me, You know, we’re surrounded by people that want to kill us. Israel lives in a world where everybody wants to kill us.

And I had to stop him and say, But Eyal! Israel has peace treaties with the majority of the Arab nations! Israel enjoys a great deal of stability among sixty or seventy percent of its surrounding neighbors. And yet the story, or the thing that keeps repeating, is that everybody wants to kill you! 

These little distortions, when analyzed, open up a bit of a space to make some links, but that space is very precarious. It goes away immediately, and it has to be re-created. So we need to recognize that we are in a zone where we need to create a state of mind that is necessary if we are to be able to think together. Thinking is not possible when we’re living in the kind of world we’re living in now.

 

Eyal

I’d like to really emphasize Karim’s last point. It really happens that the two of us reach a place of understanding with each other and then we have to start again. And I think those little slips, those little mis-hearings happen because underneath—on both sides—there is the fantasy that both of us have: You do really want to kill us.

And it’s not just a fantasy. That’s what makes it complicated. I come from a country that is built on something between ignoring and eradicating the fact that there is another people living in that country. Karim’s parents are dying to go back home but if the borders open that means there will be no Israel. So then I ask, Well, what about us?”

And Karim says, I don’t know, but you have to leave your house. And then I say, So then what? Shall we go to camps?

And he says, Maybe camps. 

And then I say, Okay,  camps again!! Two generations later. 

So there is all this back-and-forth between us, even as we love each other and we are constantly trying.

There is a zero-sum game in the unconscious. Every time we speak, we bond, bond, bond, and we don’t see each other for two weeks, and when we talk, those little slips are there again. And underneath it all is the fantasy of annihilation. What we’ve been trying to think about throughout these months, separately and together, is how do you change that? What hope do we have?

And we both have friends, even scholar friends who say, this is not the time to do this, when collectives are under genocidal attack, whether in reality like the Palestinians in Gaza or for the Jews in Israel who feel, correctly or not, that they are in danger of extinction. At times like this, collectives coalesce and it’s very hard to reach across to one another. I have come to believe less and less in the notion of mutual recognition across collective borders. I am thinking that our job is to rearrange the collectivity. We must come together and fight for this. Karim and I—we are the new collective. We do not belong in different groups.

 

Karim

Just yesterday Eyal said to me, It’s important for you to take responsibility for the Palestinian collective, to take responsibility for the decisions Palestinians have made that have contributed to the situation that we’re in.  Eyal said, You know that the Palestinians have had decidedly failed leadership, and he said that I should take a stand publicly. He said I should work with my collective publicly and privately to address this issue. And two things happen when he says that. One is that I flare up with rage, and the other one is that I can’t agree with him more. I flare up with rage because Palestinians who lead, for the most part, have been assassinated or are in jails, being tortured. I have a recurring nightmare that that is my fate.

So to Eyal I say, We Palestinians need two things. First, we need you to stop killing us. Like, now! And second, we need you to actually give us something so that we can take responsibility. Give us back the people that we need. Stop killing the people that we need. Prove to me in some way that we have a partner in peace.

See, this idea, that we don’t have a partner in peace, is one that plagues the Palestinians because in our view Israel has not been for partner for peace at all. We need actions. We need goodwill actions. We need actions that that give us the necessary fodder to turn to our communities and ask them to give up things that are extraordinary: Give up the impulse to kill when you’ve been killed; give up your right to your homes when they’ve been taken away; accommodate a new reality that is here to stay; accommodate it in a way where you actually interpenetrate it and live with it, create with it, live, work, dance, and die with it. 

So I cannot agree more. But I’m not in a position right now to turn to my collective and ask them to give up anything. We need to work on it and we will—but we can’t without help.

 

Eyal

This was the hardest thing for me, to say what I said to Karim yesterday. 

I have been traveling for a month with all kinds of ailments and pains, but after I said it to him, all my pains went away. I was really containing something that I felt I had to contain because I don’t feel I can come with any requests or demands on behalf of my people when we’re doing what we’re doing . I don’t think it’s fair or right to turn to Karim and say, Well, you have to do something too. 

At the same time, I know that my friends who live in Israel who protest week after week for months now, for cease-fire, for the demise of the Israeli government say, Why don’t we see any dissent on the Palestinian side? I have answered many, many times why: Because you can’t expect someone being demolished to dissent. You can’t ask them to have a full-on, mature political debate when they live in either a concentration camp or in a destruction zone. It’s not fair. You can’t do that. So I’ve been shutting up for a long time. Because I feel I must. I have no right. But also, if we want to be on the level where we recognize each other and we build something together, I cannot do it from a position of one hundred percent responsibility, which is one hundred percent agency, which basically erases Karim as nothing but a victim. That’s the place where I find myself as an Israeli. I don’t necessarily want Israel to continue as it is. I believe in a binational state at some point—I just don’t think it’s realistic right now. So I think what we are trying to do is to work with what we have, with the collective unconsciouses that we have, and to see what’s possible.

What’s necessary in a place like this is to recognize that there is, on the other side, lets say, people who want to reinforce that we are here, we are your partners. And on both sides the feeling is we have no partners—they are attacking us and killing us—which is all true. 

So how do you create a feeling out of this demise to show that there are people on the other side who want to work with you? There has to be some responsibility-taking—some form. That was what we got to yesterday. 

 

Karim

I actually felt very appreciative that we got to this because you don’t need to treat me like a victim. You don’t need to treat me like an infant. True, we are on the lower end of the vertical. True, there’s a lot that is working against us. But we are not victims entirely. And I appreciated the agency and giving it to me to think about and respond to. I trusted you more. You know, before we went to dinner, I was talking to Karma, and man, we got totally paranoid about you.

 

Hattie

Karma is Karim’s sister.

 

Karim

Karma is my sister, was here yesterday, and we had dinner with her and she and Eyal totally fell in love with each other, which was very cute. But before we went out, Karma and I were having a total paranoid fantasy.

 

Eyal

Well, what was it?

 

Karim

It was a completely elaborated fantasy that you were beaten up by some Israeli agents that were telling you that you needed to abort what you’re doing with me and that you are a traitor and that you are doing the best you can not to harm me. Then you spoke what you spoke and the fantasy became clear.

 

Eyal

What do you mean, it became clear?

 

Karim

It became clear that it was a fantasy! And some contact, some exchange is needed for the concrete to disaggregate. I trusted you but I could see you were holding something from me. And to me that means danger. And you told me what you were holding. I could feel it. 

 

Hattie

Perhaps this is a good place to open this up for discussion. Your experience as an audience is very much what my experience has been when I have heard these two talk—we are coming into the middle of a conversation that has been going on before we got here and will continue to go on when we leave. It’s been such an honor for us, for all of us, to enter into this middle. I’d like, now, to open the space for all of you listening to share your thoughts, feelings, experiences, and questions. 

 

Audience Member

First, I just want to thank you both. You are bringing affect into this conversation in a way that is deeply meaningful. What happens to us individually as well as our collectives shapes what we’re able to hear. When we are unwilling to hear something more or something different from someone, it is because we expect them to speak in a particular way.

 

Q&A Speaker 1

I am from India and hearing you has been a profoundly moving experience. Thank you for your honesty and for the bravery that you’ve shown to be present with your affect, and bringing it out in all of us. I want to share a small anecdote. When my wife and I were traveling through Paris, we went to a restaurant to have dinner, and the owner said to the cook in Hindi, Our people have come; put a lot of spice. Later we came to know that he was from Pakistan and he said “apne log,” “your people.” What are your thoughts?

 

Karim

Pakistan, India, and Palestine were partitioned the same year, and it was a catastrophe on both because it is one people.

 

Q&A Speaker 2

I’m a psychoanalyst from San Francisco and I also want to thank you guys. I’ve been following your conversation and in my experience it’s our own subjective individual influences that very much impact our positions and our feelings, and explains why there are so many collapses and projections. There is an iterative experience that you’re describing of paranoia that can open up space and then become paranoid again. And that’s very much happening both in my practice, with friendships, and in my own personal life. It’s very moving to hear you bring your personal experiences to bear and to talk generationally about the traumas that your families and your collectives have suffered. It’s such an important reminder to all of us to locate ourselves in where we belong, where we come from, our identities, so to help us re-knit collectives and create something new. I think this is a very hopeful idea.

 

Eyal

I want to say something to that. One of the big problems of the Jewish collectivity in Palestine and the Palestinian in the diaspora is an intense attachment to our collective trauma and how we let the collective trauma bond us together. This is the glue, the inability to give up some of it and not let it define who you are and who’s against you. This is a hard thing to do but this is also something we both have to work on. The thing is, when I tell about my past, I don’t want to be attached to the trauma. But I have numbers from Auschwitz. I don’t know what to do with it. So this is the place I’m torn, and Karim is torn also with his story and everything they have lost. I don’t want to live with it but it’s in me. I think that’s part of the struggle: how to not let the trauma define you while it is defining you. 

 

Karim

Eyal and I have a collective friend that we both love very much, Orna Guralnik. And Orna’s thought a lot about ideology. If you read my work and just change the word culture to ideology, she and I are saying almost the exact same thing. Is it possible to create an ideology or a culture that is not rooted in ethnicity? It’s a real question. Can there be a genuine collective based upon a shared ideology? Does that run as deep as blood? I don’t know; it’s a question.

 

Q&A Speaker 3

Thank you. I repeat the gratitude that everybody else has mentioned. What is sticking for me is a deep sense of hopelessness and embeddedness. Both of you are speaking from a place of autonomy and agency. And yet the situation is so deeply embedded and co-opted by stakeholders (or apparent stakeholders) globally. You are embedded in a process that, from its very beginning, has used individuals and cultures and ethnicities. Israel and Palestine has become a hook upon which postcolonial fears and racial injustice hang. I see the two of you working so hard as individuals and as points within our communities, but also clobbered by projection, projective identification, much in the way narcissistic parents use their children as objects. How do you sit with it? Not just with what you have to hold as individuals but also what it seems the whole world is holding and talking about through you—through what’s happening on your ground. 

 

Karim

I have this belief, I think, that Israel-Palestine is the navel of the world. And I think that if we don’t get it right, we will break the world. I am just one speck of dust. You know what I mean? And maybe it’s because I’m Palestinian, but one of the things that I’m really into is freedom, freedom with a small f. So what I am doing here is engaging in an act of freedom in an overly deterministic, dark, most likely completely destroyed world. But on the way there, I shall raise my head. Have a thought, and make an exchange that is mildly meaningful or profoundly meaningful to me. That’s it, really.

 

Eyal

Yes. And to what you said—for those of us who are psychoanalysts and relational, there’s a lot of talk about the third. There is no third. The third is America, the UK, the EU. It’s what you said. They are not really “thirds” because they are invested. They have stakes. We are alone. We are exploited or used for geopolitics of it. Israel is exploited with arms and money and the Palestinians in different ways. We seem to be more safe, but we’re not, in the long run anyway. So to return to what Karim said, we are it. We cannot hope for help from the outside. There is no umbrella of world order that is going to come and help us. The world order is pitting us against each other and using us. And we need to turn around from these exploitations and projections as much as we can. We need to solve the problem. There is no third. There is only us.

 

Audience Member

I’m from Germany. I went to Israel to train scientists on their communication and leadership skills, and I was impressed with the strength of the women with families and children who were facing all kinds of difficulties. I value facing what is in front of me, and my impression was that there was more of that in Israel; I appreciate that also in the session here. Thank you for demonstrating this courage to face what is impossible to face. I believe, as you also just said, that we are in this together. It’s just very much concentrated and evident, in this geographical location.

 

Q&A Speaker 4

I am a student and I never met someone from the Middle East until I came to this international campus where there are people from all over the world. It hit me like a breaking point when I heard Eyal say, Where should the Israeli people go? And then Karim heard, Yeah, you want to kill all the Israeli people. You know, we can feel the pain from both sides. And that’s when it springs. My question, as a student leader, is how can we de-escalate the conversation when one person’s sentence can feel like an attack and you don’t want someone to feel uncomfortable in a conversation? 

 

Karim

I went to a school called St. John’s College, where we read the “great books” around a table. And I often thought, because I was coming from Beirut, Wow, we’re sitting here and talking about things that people are shooting each other over. I think an ethos of nonviolence can be helpful there, because you can see this moment as a moment of inner violence that is actually breaking things apart inside the individual and between individuals. And to try as much as possible to impart the value of dwelling in that space with  an ethos of dialog and an ethos of facing violence without flinching with an aim to transform it. Try to push the group of people to tolerate the discomfort for just a little longer. And when it fails, you shouldn’t feel bad. When it works, you should feel elated because it’s most likely going to fail. You know what I mean? It really is most likely going to fail. But it is an act of freedom to take a stance to say there is an ethos of nonviolence, there’s an ethos of dialog that I would like to cultivate with the group as much as possible And maybe one way to do that is to tolerate the discomfort a bit longer until something new comes. And if it doesn’t come, a new day will come.

 

Eyal

I would add something that is difficult when you haven’t been broken down like us for decades. There is an unconscious; we don’t ever hear exactly what’s being said. Everything we hear triggers something and it goes in our unconscious and then meaning is created. So you never hear right. Even us—we don’t hear each other well. So maybe if there’s a way to tell people, “Listen before you even start—you are going to talk and what is happening in this conversation is not just in your awareness. You will go to places you don’t even know and you will hear things that are not being said sometimes.” 

When you have this kind of triggered reaction, think, What is the trauma or what is happening to me? It’s very hard to do in a group, but sometimes when somebody gets very upset, you can slow things down and say, “What do you think just happened that you heard something that felt very offensive? Let’s think about it for a minute.” Sometimes it’s enough to change something—just the recognition that you’re not quite hearing what was said. That you are triggered. 

 

Q&A Speaker 5

I am a theologian in New York City with an academic background in peace studies. And first of all, just as others have said, thank you for being so real with this. The holding of space and silence between your comments gives room to the other, and to yourselves. You’ve pulled on a sacred thread of displacement, of migration, of forced displacement, of chaos, and of war. It reminds me of my own displacement from the civil war in El Salvador and being undocumented in the US. John Paul Lederach, who was one of my mentors in peace studies, has worked with conflicts worldwide. In his earlier work, he wrote about reconciliation, but in his later work, he wrote about the impossibility of it.

He came to use Tibetan singing bowls as a way to think about friction—the way that resonance and communication can lead to some natural frequencies. This requires containers that can hold that friction together in order for them to sing at that natural frequency. And so my question for you is this: What is that container that allows you to engage at those natural frequencies? On a very practical level. What is that container that holds both of you and how quickly does that fall apart for each of you?

 

Karim

The container is actually a meeting that occurs every two weeks, over Zoom. What builds during our separation has a place to go. And there’s enough maturity and affection—we are psychoanalysts, after all, so we talk to each other—we feel free to speak. That’s why when Eyal was not free to speak, he had symptoms and I thought that he was the enemy. I read it right away that something was wrong. Here’s the thing. I didn’t give him the benefit of the doubt, that he was struggling with something that, in essence, was about protecting me. I thought he was struggling with something that, in essence, was about killing me.

 

Eyal

Actually, in your fantasy, even though I was recruited by the Mossad, I was protecting you.

 

Karim

Yeah, yeah. That’s interesting. In my fantasy, you’re protecting me. The affectionate bond held, but I’m like, Oh, he’s become useless—they beat him up and they gave him instructions. And this whole thing is going to fall apart. And I felt really sorry for him because I knew it broke his heart. Like, that’s really what I thought. It is really interesting. And it dissolved as soon as he said what he needed to say to me. But yes—you are right—there has to be a structure where meetings occur. Just like a psychoanalysis, there has to be a frame. And there has to be a willingness to speak, and that’s really hard because it does take an affectionate bond and some trust and the other person’s dispositions and abilities. Which we were fortunate to have been able to develop.

 

Eyal

So that’s going to lead me really beautifully to my final comments. The more time that goes by, the more I think there are two forces. There is the death drive and the life drive: eros. And we’re working with eros. We’re trying to love each other, we’re trying to connect, to be together.

And I think we manage to do it. We fight the fantasies, the destruction, the paranoia—that’s the death drive. We’re trying to live to find life together. The other thing I want to mention is the work of Ignacio Martín-Baró,  which I’m sure you know. There’s a lot of love in the field for Fanon right now—and Fanon is incredible, but I don’t think he gets it completely right about decolonizing when it’s about us, because we’re not just colonizing. We are also refugees and we have nowhere to go. 

So I searched how to think about this and I found Ignacio Martín-Baró, who was an educational scholar and theologian. In the context of El Salvador, he was interested in understanding how the indigenous majority of the population could be liberated from the colonial Spanish white people, who were the minority but controlled everything. He believed there was an ideological spell that the elite managed to cast that tells the majority of people, This is the kind of people you are: You have no real energy and you’re not industrious and so on. And the people believed this ideology. 

So the way to get out of it was what he called “de-ideologizing.” To go to people and say, What you believe in is something that some force is trying to persuade you of, and it’s not true. Get your own consciousness. Get your own sense of collectivity, and then you will be something else. 

I think that this is our task as the new collective: to de-ideologize our people from spells and projections, and to create a new kind of collective identity that is not created by the old Zionist ideology of the elites, or by the traumatized Palestinian ideology. Whatever is empowered, is authentic, that is built on who we are, not them.

 

Hattie 

Karim, are there any concluding thoughts you would like to add? 

 

Karim

I do want to add something. One of my students read our correspondence in ROOM. She’s from Lebanon. She is taken by your ideas. She’s taken by my ideas. But she said, I absolutely hate Rozmarin’s claim that he’s indigenous. That was the thing that stuck to her. And I was about to write her back saying this is a very complicated issue. So let me, let me just say this here. And it might be more than I can say, but I’m going to say it anyway: 

The people in Israel-Palestine, and their descendants, are not going anywhere. Everybody is there to stay and everybody is there to return.