On the Impossibility of Going Backwards

I remember the first time I saw the image to my left. It was almost exactly eight years ago on my first of two learning tours to the West Bank and Israel. On both tours, we visited the Aida refugee camp in between Bethlehem, Beit Jala, and Jerusalem. On both occasions we paused at the gate and pondered this haunting image of a giant key. The symbolism was explained to us. Many families in this camp still have the keys to the homes from which they fled or were forcibly displaced during one of the wars that attended the founding of the nation of Israel. The key is a symbol of the memory of this trauma and of the hope that they will one day return.

I remember thinking two things both times I visited this camp. First, I was struck by the emotional power and pathos of the symbol of this key. How can one’s heart not break at the thought of these families retaining this physical connection to the lives they once lived? How can one fail to imagine oneself in this situation, living in a cramped refugee camp while retaining the memory of what once was? How can one not be outraged by the injustice of it all, of the bleak, brutal truth that one person’s (or nation’s) gain so often entails another’s loss?

The second thing I thought was, “This will never happen.” These people will never return to their homes. It is impossible to imagine that these keys that held such powerful symbolic value would fit any lock currently in existence. On a purely pragmatic level, their homes may not even exist any longer. And if they did, an Israeli family would almost certainly occupy it and would not be eager to just walk away. And even if they did, in some isolated and remarkable incident here or there, the Palestinian family that reinhabited that home would have to live and move among an overwhelmingly Israeli population. Which would, to put it mildly, be complicated (this was true in 2016; how much more so in 2024!). After three quarters of a century or more of nation-building, the communities that they fled would be unrecognizable. There is no going back to what once was.

In this week’s New York Times, Lydia Polgreen reflects on decolonization, on the moral impulses that fuel it, on what it is and what it isn’t, on the demands it makes and whether these demands are realistic or even honest. At one point, in a discussion on the imperative to restore what once was as an act of justice, she offers this:

But history doesn’t work that way. People do bad things. Other people resist those bad things. Humans invent and discover; they create and destroy. There is no going backward to some mythic state. There is no restoration. The events that unfold over time shape the land and the people who live on it, and those people shape one another in manifold ways, some brutal and destructive, some generative and loving. But time and experience ensure that nothing can ever be the same as it was before the last thing that happened.

This strikes me as an honest assessment of both history and the human nature that drives it. It is the kind of honesty that we would do well to heed more often than we do. There is no going back to pre-1948 in the land we (optimistically) call “holy.” There is also no going back to ancient Israel, as Benjamin Netanyahu and some of his most enthusiastic supporters seem to imagine. Some new future will have to be forged out of the brutality and hatred of the last eighty years. If both sides continue to imagine some kind of zero-sum game where one wins and the other loses, where some mythic idea of a “pure land” with its “original inhabitants” exists in some untroubled state, this conflict will simply persist in perpetuity.

(Polgreen makes an interesting connection between the the hyper-progressive left and the ultranationalist right here. Both assume “ancestral fantasies… in which who is allowed to live in which places is a question of the connection of one’s blood to a particular patch of soil.”)

The same is true for every virtually longing to return to the past. My wife’s Japanese ancestors who scratched out a living on the unforgiving prairies when they were forcibly moved in from the Canadian coast during WW2 will never return to their fishing boats and lost property near Vancouver. My Ojibwe children will never return to lives dominated by hunting and fishing in the forests and lakes of northwestern Ontario. Indeed, indigenous people more broadly will never return to the lives they lived pre-European contact. This simply is not how human history and human nature work. Too much has happened. We are bound together (for good or for ill) in all kinds of ways that simply cannot be undone. The sooner we realize this and stop reducing oppressed groups to tokenized avatars for our virtue and/or atonement, the better.

The same is true for us personally. Each one of us has endured or will endure pain and mistreatment in our lives. Often this is in marriages or families or friendships or social groups or churches. In each case, we have a choice. We can demand (implicitly or explicitly) that things return to the way they were before the careless wounding, the deliberate transgression, the painful rupture. Or we can say, “Given the pain that has been inflicted and endured, how can we build a more hopeful and just future? What new chastened relationship can be forged out of the ashes of human wickedness and stupidity?”

None of the preceding means that we do not take injustice or harm seriously or that we do not try to redress it in some way. It does not mean we turn a blind eye to the pain of the world and just say, “Well, I guess might makes right.” God help us, no. But we must be honest. We must not allow the of protection of our virtue or our rightness or our idealized memory of the past to make impossible and unattainable demands on the present. From the geopolitical to the intensely personal, this simply guarantees unending warfare.

Back to the Lydia Polgreen quote above. Much as I appreciate the honesty it contains, As a Christian, I obviously part company with a statement like “There is no restoration.” Because I believe that there is and can be restoration, even here and now. Not fully, perhaps, but enough to make a difference. I believe in the God who can make all things — even, perhaps especially ugly things — new. And I believe in the God who can inspire his followers to allow this future promise to bleed into the ugly present in all kinds of radically hopeful ways.