Even for many Jews passionately opposed to Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, supporting Palestinian refugee return remains taboo. But if it is wrong to hold Palestinians as non-citizens under military law in the West Bank, and wrong to impose a blockade on Gaza that denies them the necessities of life, it is surely also wrong to expel them and prevent them from returning home. For decades, liberal Jews have parried this moral argument with a pragmatic one: Palestinian refugees should return only to the West Bank and Gaza, regardless of whether that is where they are from, as part of a two-state solution that gives both Palestinians and Jews a country of their own. But with every passing year, as Israel further entrenches its control over all the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, this supposedly realistic alternative grows more detached from reality. There will be no viable, sovereign Palestinian state to which refugees can go. What remains of the case against Palestinian refugee return is a series of historical and legal arguments, peddled by Israeli and American Jewish leaders, about why Palestinians deserved their expulsion and have no right to remedy it now. These arguments are not only unconvincing but deeply ironic, since they ask Palestinians to repudiate the very principles of intergenerational memory and historical restitution that Jews hold sacred. If Palestinians have no right to return to their homeland, neither do we. The consequences of these efforts to rationalise and bury the Nakba are not theoretical. They are playing out on the streets of Sheikh Jarrah. The Israeli leaders who justify expelling Palestinians today in order to make Jerusalem a Jewish city are merely paraphrasing the Jewish organisations that have spent several decades justifying the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 in order to create a Jewish state. What the Black American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has observed about the US, and the Nobel peace prize-winning Archbishop Desmond Tutu has observed about South Africa – that historical crimes that go unaddressed generally reappear, in a different guise – is true for Israel-Palestine as well.