NADIM KHOURY
Introduction
On October 11, 2008, Sara Roy delivered the Edward Said Memorial Lecture at the University of Adelaide. In her lecture, Roy spoke of her childhood growing up in a household of Holocaust survivors and her adulthood working in the occupied Palestinian territories. For Roy, there was a link between the traumas that haunted her household and those being inflicted on Palestinians. While she could weave both into her own life story, inserting them into the larger narrative of her Jewish community proved more arduous. “Why is it so difficult, even impossible to incorporate Palestinians and other Arab peoples into the Jewish understanding of history?”1 she asked her audience. Raising these questions in a speech honoring Edward Said was not a coincidence, since the latter pondered a similar link from the Palestinian perspective. “Unless the connection is made by which the Jewish tragedy is seen to have led directly to the Palestinian catastrophe,” he famously argued, “we cannot co-exist as two communities of detached and uncommunicatingly separate suffering.”2
Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg identify such arguments as “deliberations on memory.”3 Deliberations on memory are public discussions between members of divided societies aimed at transforming their respective national narratives. In this case, they involve Israelis and Palestinians (and, more generally, Jews and Arabs) and focus on two historical injustices: the Holocaust and the Nakba.4 The goal of these deliberations is to find resources in history and memory to promote an alternative future between both people. My goal in this chapter is not to examine the arguments deployed in these deliberations but to situate them in the context in which they occurred. The questions I will focus on are: When and under what conditions did public discussions on these two historical tragedies emerge? What political factors allowed them to surface? Finally, in what kind of ideological space did they take place?
Answering these questions, I will show, requires that we situate these deliberations within the Oslo peace process and the politics of memory it promoted. The argument I want to defend is paradoxical: the peace process simultaneously permitted and hindered joint discussions on the Holocaust and the Nakba. It enabled them by opening up a public space where Israelis and Palestinians could publicly deliberate over matters of national narratives. It hindered them by imposing an ideological framework on these deliberations that denies Israeli responsibility for the Nakba and safeguards the Zionist narrative of the Holocaust. I will explore both parts of the paradox in the pages below.
I begin the chapter by reviewing the constraints that, for half a century, have stifled Holocaust/Nakba deliberations. Then I move on to show how the peace process lifted some of these constraints by carving out a public sphere where Israelis and Palestinians could deliberate on their national narratives. In the third section, I argue that the opening of this public sphere was simultaneously a closing, because the deliberations it enabled were contingent on the ideological framework of the two-state solution. I characterize this framework as endorsing narrative partition—i.e., the revision of both national narratives in a way that reflects the territorial partition of Israel/Palestine along the 1967 border. Narrative partition, I maintain, excludes productive ways of connecting the Nakba and the Holocaust, because it evades the former and consolidates the Zionist narrative of the latter. I conclude the chapter by conceptualizing Holocaust/Nakba deliberations as a counterpublic of memory. This counterpublic challenges the foundation on which the abovementioned public sphere was created: it favors binational rather than national modes of commemoration, and it places both historical injustices at the center, rather than at the periphery, of peace.
I. Holocaust/Nakba: Constraining Conditions
Deliberations on memory do not operate in a vacuum. Remembering the past—and by extension discussing it with friends and foes—is a dynamic process. For decades, joint discussions on the Holocaust and Nakba constituted a taboo. In the 1990s and 2000s, however, this taboo was partially lifted, allowing some kind of deliberation on the two historical tragedies. In fact, public discussions on the Holocaust/Nakba became more frequent during the two decades that followed the Oslo peace agreement. This is evidenced by journalistic and academic articles by Azmi Bishara,5 Edward Said,6 Hamzah Sarayah and Salih Bashir,7 Ilan Pappé and Ilan Gur-Ze’ev,8 Dan Bar-On and Saliba Sarsar,9 and Yair Auron,10 among others. These public intellectuals were not making the same connection between the Holocaust and Nakba. Some saw the discussion as an effort toward Israeli-Palestine coexistence, while others conceptualized it as a basis for binationalism. For some, deliberation was akin to dialogical therapy, where parties mutually acknowledge each other’s historical traumas; for others it was a dialectical enterprise aimed at transforming colonial relations. These differences notwithstanding, the connections between the Holocaust and the Nakba were made within a similar historical context, and the timing, I want to show, was not a coincidence.
In their introduction to the edited volume Across the Wall: Narratives of Israeli-Palestinian History, Ilan Pappé and Jamil Hilal recognize the role that the Oslo peace process played in enabling discussions over history and memory. “The diplomatic efforts that gave us Oslo,” they write, “produced a rare…period of academic openness in Israel…that eventually fostered the dialogue between Palestinians and Israeli academics.”11 Pappé and Hilal are referring to their work as Israelis and Palestinians engaged in a critical and alternative history of Israel/Palestine. A crucial aspect of this alternative history, they argued, was a “bridging narrative” between the Holocaust and Nakba. Their claim about the conditions of the peace process as a “rare period” that enabled their work captures the argument I want to make. This is not a value judgment on the Oslo Accords but a statement about the sociological and political realities the Accords created. Prior to the peace process, deliberations on the Holocaust and Nakba were almost impossible. The general conditions of the peace process changed this by introducing a public sphere where deliberations on memory became possible.
Of course, historical associations between the Holocaust and the Nakba precede the Oslo agreement and have appeared sporadically since the 1950s.12 These historical linkages, however, were typically private, not public, evasive rather than forthright, and many of them were forgotten and repressed. They later reemerged as part of a larger conversation about memory and reconciliation that was first put on the public agenda with the peace process. This does not mean that Holocaust/Nakba deliberations suddenly became easy but simply that they became possible. Once a subject that was beyond societal debate, it now became a topic of public discussion.13
To better appreciate how the peace process enabled Israeli and Palestinian deliberations on memory, it is worth reviewing some of the constraints that have hindered them thus far. A crucial factor inhibiting Holocaust/Nakba deliberations is the Israeli and Palestinian narratives that plot the two historical tragedies into two mutually exclusive stories. In the traditional Israeli narrative, the State of Israel is depicted as the response to a long history of anti-Semitism that culminated in the genocide of six million Jews. In this narrative, the urgency and priority of saving the Jewish people makes discussions about the Nakba insignificant at best, completely unjustified at worst. It is therefore not a surprise that, until the 1990s, Israeli responsibility for the forced migration of Palestinians constituted a taboo, a topic that was beyond societal debate.14 The Holocaust, on the other hand, was erected as a totem—an object of a “new religion,” with its set of rituals and commandments.15 In the creed of ethnonationalism, the association of totem and taboo is blasphemous. The Zionist narrative therefore could not make room for joint deliberations on both historical tragedies.
In the mainstream Palestinian narrative, the Nakba, like the Holocaust, is a foundational tragedy, a “catastrophe” that disrupted a continuous presence of a people on its land.16 According to this narrative, associating the Holocaust and Nakba is not necessarily inconsistent. The taboo is recognizing the Zionist narrative of the Holocaust, where the Holocaust is used to justify the displacement of Palestinians and continued occupation of their territory. Many in the Arab world have, unfortunately, conflated the two. As a result, they opposed Zionism with Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism. Some, like the PLO and some Arab intellectuals, however, have separated them, going as far as mobilizing the memory of the Holocaust to highlight the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinians.17 Whether the conflation is made or not, discussions about the Holocaust in the Arab world are still rare and generally seen as a form of sympathy with the enemy.18
Besides the Israeli and Palestinian national narratives, there are other factors that stifle Holocaust/Nakba deliberations. The present conditions of violence within and without historical Palestine, for example, hinder any kind of joint discussions about historical injustices or national identity. Moreover, the past itself imposes its own constraints,19 since the Holocaust and the Nakba were experienced as a clash in 1948. In fact, a third of the Zionist forces that ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages and towns were Holocaust survivors, and many of these survivors were given abandoned Palestinian property unjustly seized after the promulgation of absentee laws.20 This painful history constrains the degree to which both historical tragedies can be commemorated for purposes of reconciliation.
II. Enabling Conditions of Holocaust/Nakba Deliberations
Rather than delve into the many other factors that hinder Holocaust/Nakba deliberations, I wish to examine the factors that made them possible. Given the constraints identified above, I want to ask: How can we account for existing discussions on both historical traumas? What factors made it possible to engage publicly in such discussions? A major factor was the creation of a public sphere where Israelis and Palestinians could deliberate on their collective memory. A public sphere typically refers to a metaphorical space where citizens can discuss public issues—in this particular case, national narratives—with the guarantees of basic rights and freedoms of expression and association. In this space, agents are free from state power and social control to jointly deliberate over matters of public concern.21 One should be careful in transposing this liberal definition of a public sphere onto the settler colonial context of Israel/Palestine. The deliberations I am referring to operate in highly asymmetrical conditions. There is no equality between Israelis and Palestinians. While one people enjoys the benefits of political and civil rights, the other is under a military and civilian occupation. Moreover, this public sphere was mostly created from without, not from within. It is a byproduct of a dialogue industry generated by NGOs, international organizations, and foreign governments.22
The Oslo Accords opened this public sphere by placing the issue of national narratives on the political agenda of Israelis and Palestinians.23 This was set into motion in 1993 with the exchange of letters between representatives of the PLO and Israel. In this exchange, the PLO recognized “the right of Israel to exist in peace and security” and nullified “those articles of the Palestinian Covenant which deny Israel’s right to exist.” In return, the Israeli government recognized the PLO as “the representative of the Palestinian people.”24 This mutual recognition was asymmetrical. One party recognized the other’s right to exist as a state, while the other recognized an organization as representative of a people. Nonetheless, it created the grounds for public discussions on identity, because it established the idea of two partners with respective national histories.25 For decades, rejecting the other’s nationhood was the official policy; now representatives of both nations had to grapple with a new and thorny question: How do we narrate “our” and “their” history in light of a future peace?
These questions, and the difficulties of answering them, resonated differently for Palestinians and Israelis. Palestinians were setting up their public institutions and were writing their first official narrative under the scrutiny of Israel and the international community. The dilemmas of writing a new narrative were well captured by the following survey questions sent out by the Palestinian curriculum center to teachers across the West Bank and Gaza: “What Palestine do we teach? Is it the historic Palestine with its complete geography, or the Palestine that is likely to emerge on the basis of possible agreements with Israel?”26 Similar questions were asked on the Israeli side,27 although Israel already had institutions capable of promoting, maintaining, and reproducing national narratives, and they did not experience the same kind of international pressure in answering them.28
Questions about how to revise Israeli and Palestinian history were not limited to public officials. Members of Israeli and Palestinian civil society also took up the challenge. An illustrative example is the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME), headed by the Israeli psychologist Dan Bar-On and Palestinian Professor of Education Sami Adwan. PRIME became known for its jointly written textbooks that juxtaposed the Palestinian and the Israeli historical narratives on the same page. This “dual narrative” approach was designed to challenge the predominant zero-sum understanding of history and introduce Israeli and Palestinian students to one another’s national stories.29 PRIME modeled its dual narrative approach on dialogical storytelling seminars first developed by Dan Bar-On with children of Holocaust survivors and children of prominent Nazi leaders. The aim of these seminars was the therapeutic and trust-building effect of narrating one’s story in front of members of another subgroup.30 By bringing together Palestinian and Israeli history teachers, PRIME was also working within a long tradition of bilateral historical commissions inaugurated in Europe after World War I. These commissions brought together historians from both sides of the conflict to revise their respective school textbooks and promote the values of pacifism, antimilitarism, and antichauvinism.31 In fact, PRIME was supported and funded by the very same institutions that supported bilateral historical commissions in Europe, namely UNESCO and the George Eckert Institute.
There are other instances of such joint projects. For example, Palestinian and Israeli historians Adel Manna and Motti Golani published a joint history entitled Two Sides of the Coin: Independence and Nakba 1948.32 Manna and Golani’s work subscribed to same guiding principles as PRIME, namely that Israelis and Palestinians should recognize the legitimacy of the other’s narrative and that this mutual recognition is a necessary step toward a comprehensive peace. Rather than juxtapose both narratives like in the books of PRIME, however, they wrote one common narrative of 1948 that integrated elements of both national stories, leading to one multilayered narrative. Another example also worth mentioning is the work of Israeli and Palestinian academics in dialogue (PALISAD) mentioned earlier. PALISAD’s work subscribed to a more radical agenda. Their research heavily emphasized the Zionist colonial enterprise and the political and epistemological silencing of Palestinian narratives. Their critical tools were predominantly used to deconstruct existing hegemonic discourses, but they were also meant to paint an alternative political horizon that crystalized around the idea of a bridging narrative.
All of us shared the belief that what was needed was an alternative historical perspective on the conflict, one capable of bridging over the two national meta-narratives and their ethnocentric and segregationist orientations. These meta-narratives, rather than bridging the two sides together, spelled the defeat of all chances for reconciliation between our two peoples.33
For members of PALISAD, and especially for Ilan Pappé, the dialectical exchange between the Holocaust and the Nakba was a crucial part of this bridging narrative in both its both its deconstructive and constructive aspects.
These examples illustrate the kinds of deliberations on memory that occurred in the public sphere engendered by the peace process. These deliberations were public in three ways. First, they were undertaken by public officials, as evidenced in the changes made to history textbooks. Second, they occurred within Palestinian and Israeli civil societies, as in the case of PRIME and PALISAD. Finally, they were voiced in public—in newspapers, books, or television—and not reduced to private discussions.34 By making discussions on history and memory public, I want to argue, the peace process provided a space where deliberations on the Holocaust and the Nakba became possible.35 Absent this space, arguments linking the two historical tragedies would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make.
III. Deliberations on Memory and Narrative Partition
Earlier, I argued that the deliberations on memory that followed the Oslo agreement sought to answer a fundamental yet difficult question: How do we narrate our past in view of a future peace? The peace process, I now want to show, imposed its own ideological framework to answer this question. I call this framework narrative partition. Partition typically denotes a geographic solution. It refers to the division of two nations fighting over the same territory, in this case, two states—Israel and Palestine—separated along the lines of the 1967 border. Partition, however, is also a matter of history. “Insofar as Israelis and Palestinians are negotiating on the basis of a ‘land for peace’ formula,” argues Herbert Kelman, “they are accepting territorial limits to their national identities, which have, after all, been historically linked to the whole of the land.”36 This means that the 1967 border works as a simultaneously physical and symbolic border, one that delimits the territory and the history of Israelis and Palestinians.37
What does narrative partition mean in practice? What would the Israeli and Palestinian narratives look like after their division? For Israelis, it would leave the core of the Zionist narrative intact. It would justify the occupation of the Palestinian territories for security reasons but would be critical of its prolonged nature. According to this narrative, the continued military and settler rule over Palestinians will corrode two core tenets of the Jewish state: its democratic and Jewish natures. To preserve these core values and guard Israel from deterioration, Israeli leaders must accept a diplomatic agreement along the borders of 1967. Internally, this would save Israel’s Jewish and democratic nature and fulfill the promise of its founding fathers. Externally, partition would guarantee peace with its neighbors and a better standing in the family of nations. As for Palestinians, a partitioned narrative requires that they no longer claim all of historical Palestine, but only 22 percent of it. This means replacing the Nakba of 1948 with the Naksa of 1967 as foundational Palestinian event and depicting Israel as a neighboring nation-state rather than a settler colonial state. For both Israeli and Palestinian revised narratives, Rabin and Arafat’s handshake on the White House lawn constitutes a cofoundational moment that marks a new era of peace and prosperity for both people.
As is evident, these two partitioned narratives privilege the signatories of the peace process—the Israeli Labor Party and the PLO—depicting them as its main protagonists. This is not a coincidence, since narrative partition corresponds to both parties’ political agendas. Yehouda Shenhav has shown how partition along the Green Line is a defining feature and something of a “political fetish” of the Israeli left.38 This sets it apart from the Israeli right. The latter subscribes to a religious reading of the occupied territories and portrays itself as its redeemer, the party that will restore the “heartland of the Jewish homeland” to its rightful owners. The left, on the other hand, stresses the secular nature of these territories and portrays itself as their custodians, the party that will use the territories “as bargaining chips in future peace negotiations.” 39 For the former, the meaning of the land is religious and nonfungible; for the latter, it is strategic and fungible. Of course, the Israeli Labor Party played a crucial role in the colonization of the occupied territories. The point I am making is that it did so in different ways and by deploying different narrative strategies than the right. Discursively speaking, only the left is predisposed to negotiate the meaning of the occupied territories. The difference between the religious and the secular notwithstanding, one should not ignore the political theology of the Israeli left that used its own messianic leitmotivs to justify the conquest of historical Palestine.40
Narrative partition also fits the political agenda of the Palestinian Authority, but for different reasons. Narrating a new national story along the Green Line is not a political fetish but a crucial step for the PA’s quest to secure statehood through international recognition. To prove itself worthy of statehood, the PA needs to display evidence that it is willing to accept a state within the 1967 borders. Evidence of a reduced Palestinian national imaginary can be found in many sites of Palestinian identity making, whether in political speeches, textbooks, or the Palestinian constitutional process.41 For example, when a Palestinian textbook describes Palestine as a country “that looks out over the coast of the Mediterranean Sea” but only refers to the cities of “Gaza, Dayr Balah, Khan Yunis, and Rafah” in the Gaza Strip,42 it is sending a signal that Palestinians have abandoned claims over the coastal cities of Haifa, Acre, and Jaffa in current day Israel. Similarly, when president Mahmoud Abbas reassures an Israeli journalist that should he return to his hometown of Safad (in current day Israel), he would do so as a tourist, not as a refugee, he is signaling to the Israeli public that the Palestinian authority has no political or symbolic claims beyond the Green Line. Of course, references to all of historical Palestine did not disappear among official representations.43 The ruling Fatah party, however, was walking a tightrope between two audiences: an international audience that expected a compromised narrative and a Palestinian audience not willing to compromise on their belonging to historical Palestine or abandon its refugees. Parties that did not abide by the Oslo Accords, such as Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, did not face this dilemma.
As an ideological framework, narrative partition also pervaded deliberations on memory within civil society. It can also be found, for example, in the conception, presentation, and content of the PRIME history textbooks mentioned above. In fact, the team of Palestinian teachers selected to write the Palestinian narrative purposely excluded Palestinians living outside the West Bank.44 Moreover, the title of the textbook—Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine45—and its juxtaposition of both narratives on one page conveys the idea of two nation-states seeking coexistence, each with its own narratives. Finally, the content also abides by the requirements of narrative partition, especially in the Palestinian section that “clearly reflects the state and nation-building agenda of the PNA [Palestinian National Authority], which is limited to the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip.”46 I mention the example of PRIME because it was one of the most ambitious attempts within civil society to revise history. The ideology of narrative partition that characterizes its work, however, saturates most of the people-to-people initiatives that surged during the peace process. Even when these initiatives asked their Israeli and Palestinian members to put history aside, they were indirectly consolidating the ideology of narrative partition, creating the illusion that they were bringing together citizens of two nation-states at war and imposing symmetry on a situation that is highly asymmetrical.
In sum, narrative partition was the dominant ideology that shaped deliberations on memory during the peace process. It corresponded to the political agendas of the parties that signed the Oslo Accords and it permeated people-to-people initiatives at the level of civil society. Narrative partition, moreover, was embedded within the two-state solution and endorsed by the foreign governments, international organizations, and NGOs that supported the peace process. This is evidenced, for example, in the many reports conducted to survey Israeli and Palestinian textbooks, where a key question used to evaluate the texts was whether both sides acknowledged each other’s legitimate existence along the 1967 partition line. Failures to do so were flagged and formed the basis of diplomatic tensions, the Palestinian Authority typically being accused of not fulfilling its side of the narrative compromise.47 As a dominant ideology, narrative partition discriminated between good and bad deliberations on memory. Deliberations that respected the Green Line as a territorial, epistemic, and narrative border received international support and attention;48 those that trespassed the border to stress the centrality of 1948 did not.
IV. Public and Counterpublic of Memory
If the peace process created a public sphere that made it possible to engage in Holocaust/Nakba deliberations, it promoted an ideological framework (narrative partition) that hindered such deliberations. This is the second part of the paradox, which I now want to examine. Narrative partition hinders Holocaust/Nakba for three main reasons. First, Holocaust/Nakba deliberations insist on the recognition of the Nakba as a starting point for joint discussions on memory. Narrative partition, on the other hand, imposes a reading of the conflict that marks 1967 as its beginning, thus evading the issue of the Nakba altogether. Second, Holocaust/Nakba deliberations unsettle the Zionist narrative of the Holocaust, reading the latter outside of mainstream Zionism, even situating the ethnic cleansing of Palestine within the larger historical trajectory that led to the Holocaust. Narrative partition, on the contrary, only requires a revision of the Zionist narrative after 1967, leaving its core untouched and perpetuating the very logic that pits the Holocaust against the Nakba. Finally, and at a deeper level, deliberating on both historical tragedies encourages the dialectical transformation of national memories.49 Narrative partition, however, only prescribes their separation.50
Since they do not square with the ideological framework of narrative partition, Holocaust/Nakba deliberations, I want to conclude, are best understood as forming a counterpublic of memory, one that is marginalized from, and constituted in opposition to, the public sphere of the peace process. I borrow the notion of counterpublic from Nancy Fraser, who uses it to refer to public spaces that emerge “in response to exclusions from dominant publics.”51 Fraser forged the concept to criticize Habermas’s historical account of the public sphere in eighteenth-century Europe, which, he argued, was inclusive and (in principle) disregarded status. For Fraser, this public sphere was characterized by its male bourgeois hegemony and its exclusion of workers, women, and minorities. In response, these groups constituted their own counterpublics and modes of deliberation. The counterpublic of memory that I am referring to is not marginal in the sense of class, gender, or ethnicity. It is ideologically marginal, because it challenges the foundations of the public sphere created after Oslo. It does so in two ways: first, it rejects its underlying ethnonationalism, and second, it stresses the centrality of both historical injustices. I will elaborate on both points below.
(i) Rejecting ethnonationalism
The rejection of ethnonationalism is a common theme amongst activists and intellectuals that call for Holocaust/Nakba deliberations.52 At a basic level, this is a criticism of both mainstream narratives: the Zionist narrative of the Holocaust and its denial of the Nakba, on one hand, and the conflation of anti-Zionism and Holocaust denial, on the other. At a deeper level, it is a rejection of the binary ontology of ethnonationalism. Holocaust/Nakba deliberations challenge this ontology by recalibrating both narratives along binational and postnational lines so that Israelis can integrate the tragedy of the Nakba into their narrative and Palestinians can do the same with the Holocaust (even if they bear no responsibility for the Jewish genocide).
This critique also applies to partition, which is an upshot of ethnonationalism. Partition, we saw earlier, restrains nationalism; however, it still abides by its logic. As a framework, it depicts conflicts over memory as zero-sum struggles over scarce resources in which what it historically “ours” cannot be historically “theirs.” This analysis follows from the way nationalism has historicized territory and territorialized history, ascribing one national history to one national territory.53 Partition resolves conflicts by dividing the geography and narratives of contending parties. Edward Said criticized the Oslo agreements for specifically that. “It has been the failing of Oslo to plan in terms of separation,” he argued, “a clinical partition of peoples into individual, but unequal entities.”54 The clinical partition applies to the division of both geography and history along nationalist lines. Against this partition, Said proposed that we link the memory of the Holocaust and the Nakba:
The only way of rising beyond the endless back-and-forth violence and dehumanization is to admit the universality and integrity of the other’s experience and to be begin to plan a common life together. I cannot see any way at all (a) of not imagining the Jews of Israel as in decisive measure really the permanent result of the Holocaust, and (b) not also requiring from them acknowledgment of what they did to the Palestinians during and after 1948.55
According to Said, deliberations on the Holocaust and Nakba challenge ethnonationalism by highlighting the universality of both historical tragedies and by disclosing alternative political solutions, most prominently a binational state for Israelis and Palestinians.
(ii) The centrality of historical injustices
The second way in which deliberations on the Holocaust and Nakba challenge the Oslo peace process is by placing historical injustice at the center of peace, shifting the focus from 1967 back to 1948. In this context, discussions about the Nakba are central, but they appear within a new discursive universe, namely that of transitional justice and political reconciliation.56 Ilan Pappé, for example, advocated measures of transitional justice such as truth commissions and compensation alongside the right of return.57 Edward Said also used the language of “acknowledgment,” “reconciliation,” and “reparation” that drew heavily on past attempts to deal with historical injustices.58 Finally, Bashir Bashir has written extensively on reconciliation and its application to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.59 In the discursive universe of transitional justice, linking the Nakba and the Holocaust makes sense, since the Holocaust provided the vocabulary in which advocates of transitional justice articulated their claims. “The West’s handling of Nazi crimes was the womb from which the concept of transitional justice was born,” writes Pierre Hazan. “It provided transitional justice’s legitimacy, constructed its moral and legal arguments, and outlined what would become, decades later, the institutions, values, and practices of transitional justice.”60 Associating the Nakba with the Holocaust is therefore a strategy to apply these values and practices to address the plight of Palestinian refugees.
The idea of transitional justice grew exponentially in the 1990s with the end of apartheid in South Africa. Not surprisingly, references to South Africa have figured prominently among advocates of Holocaust/Nakba deliberations. These advocates liken the colonial situation of Israel/Palestine to the South Africa apartheid regime, and they hold its process of political reconciliation as an alternative to the Oslo Accords. While the Oslo process glossed over historical injustices, the South Africa case represented an attempt to deal with them.61 Some even believe that political reconciliation has the potential to reverse power asymmetries—placing the victims, rather than the victor, at the heart of peace.62 With hindsight, however, it is not clear that transitional justice in South Africa (or anywhere else) delivered on such a promise. Whether it can do so in the context of Israel/Palestine is a subject for another essay.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I located the deliberations on the Holocaust and Nakba within the politics of memory that followed the Oslo agreements. On one hand, I argued that the peace process enabled Holocaust/Nakba deliberations because it created a public sphere where Israelis and Palestinians could address their respective narratives. On the other hand, the peace process imposed a strict framework for Israeli-Palestinian deliberations on memory. These deliberations were expected to lead to two “partitioned narratives,” mirroring the territorial separation along the Green Line. Holocaust/Nakba deliberations, I then showed, do not square with the demands of narrative partition but challenge them; as such they constitute a counterpublic of memory, one that calls for alternative forms of commemoration and a radically different understanding of peace.
Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the University of Tromsø, Brown University, and Bjørknes University College. I would like to thank the organizers of these workshops and their participants for their comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Hilde Restad, Alexis Wick, and Nicola Perugini for their careful reading of the paper. Last but not least, I would like to acknowledge Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg for their invaluable help and guidance. I was able to write this essay with the support of the Globalizing Minority Rights (GMR) project, funded by the Norwegian Research Council (NFR 259017).
1. Sara Roy, “The Impossible Union of Arab and Jew: Reflections on Dissent, Remembrance, and Redemption” (Edward Said Memorial Lecture, University of Adelaide, October 11, 2008), 11.
2. Edward Said, “Bases for Coexistence,” Al-Ahram Weekly, November 1, 2007.
3. Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg, “Deliberating the Holocaust and the Nakba: Disruptive Empathy and Binationalism in Israel/Palestine,” Journal of Genocide Research 16, no. 1 (2014): 79. What Bashir and Goldberg refer to as “deliberations on memory” is similar to what others have called “negotiation of national identity” (Herbert C. Kelman), “negotiation of narratives” (Jeffrey Michels), “communicative history” (John Torpey), and “historical dialogue.” See Herbert C. Kelman, “Negotiating National Identity and Self-Determination in Ethnic Conflicts: The Choice between Pluralism and Ethnic Cleansing,” Negotiation Journal 13, no. 4 (October 1997): 327–340; Jeffrey Michels, “National Vision and the Negotiation of Narratives: The Oslo Agreement,” Journal of Palestine Studies 24, no. 1 (Autumn 1994): 28–38; and John Torpey, “‘Making Whole What Has Been Smashed’: The Case for Reparations,” Journal of Modern History 73, no. 2 (June 2001): 333–358. In this chapter, I will use Bashir and Goldberg’s terminology, because the notion of deliberation comes with a set of related concepts that are central to my argument, namely public sphere, conditions of deliberations, and counterpublic. In liberal political theory, the concept of deliberation typically refers to the exchange of rational and reasonable arguments. In Bashir and Goldberg’s article, however, Holocaust/Nakba deliberations are more capacious and include other modes of speech, such as testimony, storytelling, and narrative. In their account, for example, literary texts that dramatize an encounter between the Holocaust and the Nakba count as a deliberation on memory, because they are making claims about historical events and offer tools to reimagine the past and the future.
4. I will use the expression “deliberation on memory” to refer to public discussion on national narratives, collective memory, and history, regardless of content. When referring to deliberations that focus on the Holocaust and the Nakba, I will use the expression “Holocaust/Nakba deliberations.”
5. Azmi Bishara, “The Arabs and the Holocaust: An Analysis of the Problematical Nexus” [in Hebrew], Zmanim 13, no. 53 (1995): 54–71; Azmi Bishara, “Ways of Denial,” Al-Ahram Weekly Online, January 27, 2006.
6. Edward Said, “Israel-Palestine: The Third Way,” Le Monde Diplomatique, English edition, September, 1998; Said, “Bases for Coexistence.”
7. Hamzah Saraya and Salih Bashir, “Knowing the Holocaust or the Breaking of the Jewish Monopoly Over It?” [in Arabic], Al Hayat, December 18, 1997.
8. Ilan Gur-Ze’ev and Ilan Pappé, “Beyond the Destruction of the Other’s Collective Memory: Blueprints for a Palestinian/Israeli Dialogue,” Theory, Culture & Society 20, no. 1 (February 2003): 93–108.
9. Dan Bar-On and Saliba Sarsar, “Bridging the Unbridgeable: The Holocaust and Al-Nakba,” Palestine-Israel Journal 11, no. 1 (2004): 63–70.
10. Yair Auron, “Letter to a Palestinian Reader: Holocaust, Resurrection and Nakba” Haaretz, May 8, 2014.
11. Jamil Hilal and Ilan Pappé, “PALISAD: Palestinian and Israeli Academics in Dialogue,” in Across the Wall: Narratives of Israeli-Palestinian History, ed. Ilan Pappé and Jamil Hilal (London: Tauris, 2010), 8.
12. Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg, eds., The Holocaust and the Nakba: Memory, National Identity and Jewish-Arab Partnership [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2015).
13. Following a distinction made by Jeffrey K. Olick and Daniel Levy, one could say that these discussions moved from being a societal taboo to a cultural constraint. See Olick and Levy, “Collective Memory and Cultural Constraint: Holocaust Myth and Rationality in German Politics,” American Sociological Review 62, no. 6 (December 1997): 921–936.
14. Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch, “From Taboo to the Negotiable: The Israeli New Historians and the Changing Representation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem,” Perspective on Politics 5, no. 2 (June 2007): 241–258.
15. Adi Ophir, “On Sanctifying the Holocaust: An Anti-Theological Treatise,” Tikkun 2, no. 1 (1987): 61–67.
16. Lila Abu-Lughod and Ahmad H. Sa’di, “The Claims of Memory,” in Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, ed. Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 1–26.
17. Joseph Massad, “Palestinians and Jewish History: Recognition or Submission?” Journal of Palestine Studies 30, no. 1 (Autumn 2000): 52–67; Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (New York: Metropolitan, 2010).
18. Two important caveats must be made here. First, the symmetrical presentation of both narratives does not mean that the conflict between them is symmetrical. Quite the contrary, since 1948, Israel has imposed its narrative by silencing Palestinian history through a variety of means (outlawing their commemorative practices, destroying and renaming their towns and villages, etc.). Second, the meaning of the Holocaust and the Nakba has evolved over time, just as it has varied across segments of Israeli and Palestinian societies. The crystallization of both events along two master narratives should therefore not be taken for granted. On the issue of the Holocaust, see Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); and Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, trans. Chaya Galai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For representations of the Nakba, see Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds., Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); and Anaheed al-Hardan, “Al-Nakbah in Arab Thought: The Transformation of a Concept,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35, no. 3 (December 2015): 622–638.
19. Michael Schudson, “The Present in the Past Versus the Past in the Present,” Communications 11, no. 2 (1989): 105–113.
20. Segev, The Seventh Million; Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust.
21. Jürgen Habermas, Sara Lennox, and Frank Lennox, “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964),” New German Critique 3 (Autumn 1974): 49–55.
22. Salim Tamari, “Kissing Cousins: A Note on a Romantic Encounter,” Palestine-Israel Journal 12–13, no. 4 (2005): 16–18. There is a critical literature on the “NGOization” of Palestinian politics that followed the Oslo accords, and many of its insights can be applied to such joint projects. See Jamal Amaney, Barriers to Democracy: The Other Side of Social Capital in Palestine and the Arab World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); and Tariq Dana, “The Structural Transformation of Palestinian Civil Society: Key Paradigm Shifts,” Middle East Critique 24, no. 2 (2015): 191–210.
23. For earlier attempts at an Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, see Saul Friedländer and Mahmoud Hussein, Arabs and Israelis: A Dialogue (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1975); and Jonathan Kuttab and Edy Kaufman, “An Exchange on Dialogue,” Journal of Palestine Studies 17, no. 2 (Winter 1988): 84–108.
25. Michels, “National Vision.”
26. Fouad Moughrabi, “The Politics of Palestinian Textbooks,” Journal of Palestine Studies 31, no. 1 (Autumn 2001): 7.
27. Elie Podeh, “History and Memory in the Israeli Educational System: The Portrayal of the Arab-Israeli Conflict in History Textbooks (1948–2000),” History and Memory 12, no. 1 (2000): 65–100.
28. Nadim Khoury, “National Narratives and the Oslo Peace Process: How Peacebuilding Paradigms Address Conflicts over History,” Nations and Nationalism 22, no. 3 (July 2016): 465–483.
29. Sami Adwan and Dan Bar-On, “Shared History Project: A PRIME Example of Peace-Building Under Fire,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 17, no. 3 (Spring 2004): 513–521.
30. Achim Rohde, “Learning Each Other’s Historical Narrative: A Road Map to Peace in Israel/Palestine?” in History Education and Post-Conflict Reconciliation: Reconsidering Joint Textbook Projects, ed. Karina V. Korostelina and Simone Lässig (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013), 177–191.
31. Marina Cattaruzza and Sacha Zala, “Negotiated History? Bilateral Historical Commissions in Twentieth-Century Europe,” in Contemporary History on Trial: Europe since 1989 and the Role of the Expert Historian, ed. Harriet Jones, Kjell Östberg, and Nico Randerraad (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 123–143.
32. Motti Golani and Adel Manna, Two Sides of the Coin: Independence and Nakba 1948. Two Narratives of the 1948 War and Its Outcome, English-Hebrew ed. (Dordrecht: Republic of Letters, 2011).
33. Hilal and Pappé, “Palestinian and Israeli Academics in Dialogue,” 2.
34. Nadim N. Rouhana and Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, “Memory and the Return of History in a Settler-Colonial Context: The Case of the Palestinians in Israel,” in Israel and Its Palestinian Citizens, ed. Nadim N. Rouhana and Sahar S. Huneidi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 393–432.
35. I am arguing that the peace process is a major factor that enabled Holocaust/Nakba deliberations, not that it is the only factor. A comprehensive study of all the causes that enabled these deliberations is beyond the scope of this chapter.
36. Herbert Kelman, “National Identity and the Role of the ‘Other’ in Existential Conflicts: The Israeli-Palestinian Case” (paper delivered at the Conference on Transformation of Intercultural Conflicts, University of Amsterdam, October 7, 2005), 6.
37. For more on this issue, see Yehouda Shenhav, Beyond the Two State Solution: A Jewish Political Essay, trans. Dimi Reider (Cambridge: Polity, 2012); and Khoury, “National Narratives.”
38. Shenhav, Beyond The Two State Solution. See also Ian Lustick, “Making Sense of the Nakba: Ari Shavit, Baruch Marzel, and Zionist Claims to Territory,” Journal of Palestine Studies 44, no. 2 (Winter 2015): 7–27.
39. Ilan Pappé, “Historophobia or the Enslavement of History: The Role of the 1948 Ethnic Cleansing in the Contemporary Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process,” in Partisan Histories: The Past in Contemporary Global Politics, ed. Max Paul Friedman and Padraic Kenney (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 132.
40. On this issue, see Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “A National Colonial Theology: Religion, Orientalism and the Construction of the Secular in Zionist Discourse,” in Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte 30, ed. Moshe Zuckerman (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002), 304–318; Shenhav, Beyond the Two State Solution.
41. Laleh Khalili, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Emilio Dabed, “Constitutional Making and Identity Construction in Occupied Palestine,” Confluences Méditerranée 86 (2013): 115–130.
42. Nathan Brown, “Contesting National Identity in Palestinian Education,” in Israeli and Palestinian Narratives of Conflict, ed. Robert I. Rotberg (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 230.
43. In fact, the Palestinian Authority organized demonstrations across the West Bank and Gaza to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba. See Christine Pirinoli, “Jeux et enjeux de mémoire: genre et rhétorique mémorielle durant la commémoration du cinquantenaire de la Nakba,” in Territoires Palestiniens de Mémoire, ed. Nadine Picaudou (Beirut: Kharthala et IFPO, 2006), 87–114.
44. Rohde, “Learning Each Other’s Historical Narrative,” 181.
45. Sami Adwan, Dan Bar-On, and Eyal Naveh, eds., Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine (New York: New Press, 2012).
46. Rohde, “Learning Each Other’s Historical Narrative,” 183.
47. Moughrabi, “The Politics of Palestinian Textbooks”; Khoury, “National Narratives.”
48. This is not to say that associations such as PRIME did not encounter obstacles. In fact, their textbooks were outlawed during the second intifada and the general collapse of the peace process.
49. This position is defended in Said, “Bases for Coexistence”; Gur-Ze’ev and Pappé, “Beyond the Destruction”; Hilal and Pappé, “Palestinian and Israeli Academics in Dialogue”; and Bashir and Goldberg, “Deliberating the Holocaust and the Nakba.”
50. There are some that subscribe to both narrative partition and some kind of deliberation over the Holocaust and Nakba. See, for example, Bar-On and Sarsar, “Bridging the Unbridgeable.” Theirs, however, is another version of the mutual recognition argument. It calls upon Israelis and Palestinians to recognize each other’s historical tragedy without altering their narrative. Israelis, for example, simply have to acknowledge that the Palestinians have a different (and negative) experience of 1948 without taking responsibility for this experience. The PRIME textbooks seem to subscribe to this idea. This is why the Holocaust is only mentioned in the Israeli side of the narrative, while the Nakba is only discussed in the Palestinian side.
51. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, no. 25/26 (1990): p. 67.
52. Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). See also Said, “Bases for Coexistence”; Pappé and Gur-Ze’ev, “Beyond the Destruction”; Hilal and Pappé, “Palestinian and Israeli Academics in Dialogue”; and Bashir and Goldberg, “Deliberating the Holocaust and the Nakba.”
53. Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: Verso, 1980), 114.
54. Said, “Bases for Coexistence.”
55. Said, “Bases for Coexistence.”
56. For more on this issue, see Yoav Peled and Nadim N. Rouhana, “Transitional Justice and the Right of Return of the Palestinian Refugees,” Theoretical Inquiries in Law 5, no. 2 (2004): 317–332; Tom Hill, “1948 After Oslo: Truth and Reconciliation in Palestinian Discourse,” Mediterranean Politics 13, no. 2 (2008): 151–170; Brendan Browne, “Transitional Justice: The Case of Palestine,” in The International Handbook on Transitional Justice, ed. Cheryl Lawther, Luke Moffett, and Dov Jacobs (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2017); Ron Dudai “A Model for Dealing with the Past in the Israeli-Palestinian Context,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 1, no. 2 (July 2007): 249–267; and Mark Osiel “‘Transitional Justice’ in Israel/Palestine? Symbolism and Materialism in Reparations for Mass Violence,” Ethics and International Affairs, January 20, 2015.
57. Pappé, “Historophobia or the Enslavement of History,” 140.
58. Edward Said, Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said (New York: Vintage, 2001), 449–450.
59. Bashir Bashir, “The Strengths and Weaknesses of Integrative Solutions for the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Middle East Journal 70, no. 4 (Autumn 2016): 560–578.
60. Pierre Hazan, Judging War, Judging History: Behind Truth and Reconciliation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 1.
61. See, for example, Rashid Khalidi, “Truth, Justice and Reconciliation: Elements of a Solution to the Palestinian Refugee Issue,” in The Palestinian Exodus 1948–1998, ed. Ghada Karmi and Eugene Cotran (Reading, UK: Ithaca, 1999), 221–240; and Peled and Rouhana, “Transitional Justice and the Right of Return,” 317–332.
62. Nadim N. Rouhana, “Group Identity and Power Asymmetry in Reconciliation Processes: the Israeli-Palestinian Case,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 10, no. 1 (2004): 33–52.