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By referring to the Palestinian refugee as a ma'apil, R. Binyamin defines them as returnees to their home while breaking the restrictions imposed on him by an illegitimate law, thus subverting the developing legal Israeli discourse. R. Binyamin’s demand for the return of the refugees was another manifestation of his ongoing criticism against separatist and settler-colonial Zionist policies since his migration to Palestine in 1907. In his presentation, Avi-ram Tzoreff argues that R. Binyamin’s critique of secular Zionism was crucial for the construction of a non-separate Jewish collective existence in Palestine during the Ottoman and British mandate period. Dwelling on R. Binyamin’s discussion on the return of the refugees, Tzoreff – using Palestinian jurist Raef Zreik’s words – suggests R. Binyamin’s thinking as a way to think about the necessity of ‘theorizing the settler’, at the moment when ‘the settler stays but colonization goes’, and to think about the possibility of coping with the challenge of the ‘surgery that can elicit the national flesh from the settler-colonial skeleton’.

Avi-ram Tzoreff received his Ph.D from the department of Jewish History at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev, Be'er Sheva, with a dissertation entitled Jewish-Arab Coexistence against the Secular Discourse. His dissertation focused on the crystallization of the concept of Jewish-Arab cooperation in Palestine, as well as on the critical approach towards Zionist settler-colonial and secular nationalism in the writings of the author and essayist Yehoshua Radler-Feldman, also known as R. Binyamin (1880-1957). He is currently a post-doctoral EUME fellow associated with the Institute of Jewish Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. His current project is entitled Provincializing European Jewry: R. Yosef Hayyim of Baghdad, Ottoman Modernity and the Critique of the Secular Discourse.