Gershom Gorenberg: There are multiple accounts of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Making peace is not a matter of choosing one side's story over the other's
[Gershom Gorenberg is a senior correspondent for The Prospect. He is the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 and The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount. He blogs at South Jerusalem.]
... The debate between Israelis and Palestinians -- and more so, in the online screams and screeds of their supporters abroad -- is devoted in no small part to the question of who has the correct version of the past. The answers are inevitably selective. Either the occupation is irrelevant because of terror, or vice versa. Arabs could make peace with a single statement, or Jews could.
In fact, both accounts are incomplete, riddled with gaps and misunderstandings. Where they diverge the most is sometimes where both are correct. It is true, simultaneously, that early Zionists were repatriating themselves to their homeland and that they were foreigners coming to a land already populated overwhelmingly by Arabs. Or a smaller but significant example: At the Khartoum Conference of 1967, Arab leaders did resolve that they would accept "no peace with Israel, no recognition … no negotiations with it." Israelis saw this as a declaration of permanent war. Yet as Israeli historian Yoram Meital found in a revisionist study, the conference resolution also meant that the Arab states would seek to get back only the land they'd lost in the war that June, and not to erase Israel, and that they would pursue indirect diplomacy rather than war. In the Arab world, the conference was understood as a victory of moderates.
Both sides can also be wrong: The 2001 Mitchell Commission report rejected both Israeli and Palestinian claims about how the Second Intifada broke out the previous September. "We have no basis on which to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the PA [Palestinian Authority] to initiate a campaign of violence at the first opportunity; or to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the GOI [government of Israel] to respond with lethal force," said the panel. George Mitchell, head of the panel and now Barack Obama's envoy for Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, knows how much louder the myths are than his calm conclusions.
The best of scholarly study will continue to challenge both narratives. If given centuries, it will probably not soften the pain, will not dissolve the axis of sorrow to which Jews and Palestinians belong.
Jewish memory says that the world wants Jews dead. Palestinians can argue, correctly, that Jews brought this memory with them, and devote a great deal of educational resources to passing it on. Nonetheless, Arabs inside and outside of Palestine rejected partition in 1948 and tried to crush the nascent Jewish state. A week before the Arab armies invaded, Arab League Secretary General Abd al-Rahman Azzam described the goal as "We will sweep the Jews into the sea." This was bravado, but the failed invasion confirmed Jewish anxieties (especially when one Jew out of 100 in the new country died in the war).
For the traumatized, time stand stills, and every new incident confirms the danger. Writing about the second intifada, Israeli historian and dove-turned-hawk Benny Morris argued, "Each suicide bomber seemed to be a microcosm of what Palestine's Arabs had in mind for Israel as a whole." This is poor political analysis: Tactics can express fury and miscalculation as easily as strategic goals, and the bombers did not have a mandate from every Palestinian. But it is a succinct summary of how a very large portion of Israeli Jews responded to the second intifada.
Palestinian memory says that the Jews dispossessed them, shattered their existence as a community, and denied them freedom. The actual history of 1948 is more complex than that, in ways that refuse to be put in one paragraph. The fact that Palestinians were unable to create a state in the West Bank and Gaza -- the parts of Palestine that Israel did not conquer in 1948 -- has to do with the intrigues and territorial hunger of Arab states. But the story of the Nakba isn't academic for Palestinians. It is "the past still at work within the present," as Palestinian scholar Lena Jayusi wrote in the 2007 anthology, Nakba: Palestine, Memory and the Claims of Memory. "This tale," she says, is "spoken in the first person plural, the communal voice." The catastrophe is understood as a "dispossession still worked and planned for, still an active agenda" on Israel's part. Every Israeli action will prove this. Trauma does not allow for shades of gray, or for recognition of the other side's fear....
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... The debate between Israelis and Palestinians -- and more so, in the online screams and screeds of their supporters abroad -- is devoted in no small part to the question of who has the correct version of the past. The answers are inevitably selective. Either the occupation is irrelevant because of terror, or vice versa. Arabs could make peace with a single statement, or Jews could.
In fact, both accounts are incomplete, riddled with gaps and misunderstandings. Where they diverge the most is sometimes where both are correct. It is true, simultaneously, that early Zionists were repatriating themselves to their homeland and that they were foreigners coming to a land already populated overwhelmingly by Arabs. Or a smaller but significant example: At the Khartoum Conference of 1967, Arab leaders did resolve that they would accept "no peace with Israel, no recognition … no negotiations with it." Israelis saw this as a declaration of permanent war. Yet as Israeli historian Yoram Meital found in a revisionist study, the conference resolution also meant that the Arab states would seek to get back only the land they'd lost in the war that June, and not to erase Israel, and that they would pursue indirect diplomacy rather than war. In the Arab world, the conference was understood as a victory of moderates.
Both sides can also be wrong: The 2001 Mitchell Commission report rejected both Israeli and Palestinian claims about how the Second Intifada broke out the previous September. "We have no basis on which to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the PA [Palestinian Authority] to initiate a campaign of violence at the first opportunity; or to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the GOI [government of Israel] to respond with lethal force," said the panel. George Mitchell, head of the panel and now Barack Obama's envoy for Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, knows how much louder the myths are than his calm conclusions.
The best of scholarly study will continue to challenge both narratives. If given centuries, it will probably not soften the pain, will not dissolve the axis of sorrow to which Jews and Palestinians belong.
Jewish memory says that the world wants Jews dead. Palestinians can argue, correctly, that Jews brought this memory with them, and devote a great deal of educational resources to passing it on. Nonetheless, Arabs inside and outside of Palestine rejected partition in 1948 and tried to crush the nascent Jewish state. A week before the Arab armies invaded, Arab League Secretary General Abd al-Rahman Azzam described the goal as "We will sweep the Jews into the sea." This was bravado, but the failed invasion confirmed Jewish anxieties (especially when one Jew out of 100 in the new country died in the war).
For the traumatized, time stand stills, and every new incident confirms the danger. Writing about the second intifada, Israeli historian and dove-turned-hawk Benny Morris argued, "Each suicide bomber seemed to be a microcosm of what Palestine's Arabs had in mind for Israel as a whole." This is poor political analysis: Tactics can express fury and miscalculation as easily as strategic goals, and the bombers did not have a mandate from every Palestinian. But it is a succinct summary of how a very large portion of Israeli Jews responded to the second intifada.
Palestinian memory says that the Jews dispossessed them, shattered their existence as a community, and denied them freedom. The actual history of 1948 is more complex than that, in ways that refuse to be put in one paragraph. The fact that Palestinians were unable to create a state in the West Bank and Gaza -- the parts of Palestine that Israel did not conquer in 1948 -- has to do with the intrigues and territorial hunger of Arab states. But the story of the Nakba isn't academic for Palestinians. It is "the past still at work within the present," as Palestinian scholar Lena Jayusi wrote in the 2007 anthology, Nakba: Palestine, Memory and the Claims of Memory. "This tale," she says, is "spoken in the first person plural, the communal voice." The catastrophe is understood as a "dispossession still worked and planned for, still an active agenda" on Israel's part. Every Israeli action will prove this. Trauma does not allow for shades of gray, or for recognition of the other side's fear....