We’ve all heard the expression “don’t judge a book by its cover.” In the case of Einat Wilf and Adi Schwartz’s recent October Return (an update of their previous The War of Return), I would shift to “don’t judge a book by its title,” at least not its English title, which bears nothing of the Einsteinian economy and explosiveness that the original Hebrew conveys.

In Hebrew, ShivAH b’October is a play on words. Clearly “October is October,” so the issue is “ShivAH.” Written as in the graphic above, it does mean “return.” However, spelled differently — but with only a tiny change in pronunciation (“Shiv’AH) — it means “seven” and “Shiv’AH b’October” is how Israelis refer to “October Seventh,” the day of the Hamas massacre.

In other words, while brilliant, this “play” is anything but funny. With chilling conciseness, the authors point to the core issues of the conflict — which they’ve been screaming for years — the ignoring of which has made peace not only elusive, but illusory.

And what are those issues? The stupefying erasure of Jewish history in the face of millennia of evidence; Palestinian rejection of Jewish sovereignty in ANY part of our ancestral homeland; UNRWA’s perverse — and perversely singular — designation of ALL Palestinians as refugees, no matter where they are or how long they’ve been there; and, most pivotally, the “right of return” for all the aforementioned, even, as Wilf and Schwartz point out, fifth-generation Jordanian citizens with passports.

And what would be the result of five generations (some 5-6 million........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)