In June 2013 the popular television competition Arab Idol was won by a Palestinian named Mohammed Assaf, a handsome twenty-three-year-old with carefully gelled jet-black hair, a shy smile and a beautifully modulated voice who belted out old favourites to an audience of thousands who voted for him by text message. Assaf was born in Libya but raised in Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip, the densely populated coastal enclave sandwiched uncomfortably between Israel and Egypt and a permanent, festering – and often violent – reminder of the unresolved conflict between Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land.
Assaf’s grandparents were among the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who became refugees during the 1948 war, when the State of Israel gained its independence and Palestine experienced its Nakba (catastrophe). His winning performance – beating an Egyptian and a Syrian – was at the cutting edge of contemporary mass entertainment, courtesy of the Beirut-based MBC, which had adapted the concept pioneered by the British series Pop Idol. The show was streamed live to millions of viewers across the Arab world, including in Gaza and the West Bank town of Ramallah, which erupted in ecstasy when the result was announced. ‘Revolution is not just about the rifle,’ Assaf told an interviewer afterwards, his dinner jacket draped festively in the green, red and white colours of the Palestinian flag.1 ‘Raise the Keffiyeh’ – Assaf’s signature song – centres on the eponymous Palestinian headscarf, the instantly recognizable emblem of the country and its cause.2
Another of Assaf’s popular songs commemorated an event that had taken place over eighty years earlier. ‘From Acre Gaol’ (‘Min Sijn Akka’) is a ballad of patriotism and sacrifice3 recalling Mohammed Jamjoum, Fuad Hijazi and Ata al-Zir, who were tried and hanged by the British for their part in the violent unrest that shook Palestine in 1929. That episode was described by the Mandatory authorities as the ‘Wailing Wall riots’. Palestinians called it the ‘al-Buraq’ revolution – an Arabic reference to the winged steed which carried the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Jerusalem. In Zionist and Israeli memory (terminology for the same events is usually different for both sides), the violence is referred to as ‘the 1929 disturbances’ in which 133 Jews were killed by Arabs, mostly in cold blood. Jamjoum, Hijazi and al-Zir were convicted of killing Jews in Hebron and Safed. ‘From Acre Gaol’, written and sung in colloquial Arabic, tells their story.
In 2012 a writer in Gaza hailed the trio as ‘three of the most important martyrs in the history of the Palestinian struggle’ who ‘were publicly executed by the British mandate forces for protesting against Zionist infiltration into Palestine’ – a description which clearly stretched the conventional meaning of protest and skirted over significant details.4 Palestinian Authority TV characterized the hangings as a ‘beacon in the history of our people’, prompting a swift complaint about ‘glorifying terrorism’ from an Israeli monitoring organization called Palestinian Media Watch.5 Later that year stamps were issued by the Palestinian Authority to commemorate them – portrayed with obligatory rifles and keffiyehs – on the anniversary of their execution.6 It was one of many examples of the way in which history is an extension of the battleground on which Israelis and Palestinians still fight – and perhaps more equally than on any other front.
Assaf’s song is of course a classic illustration of the saying that ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’. But there are many others. Jews who were executed as terrorists by the British in the 1930s and 1940s – some of them on the same gallows in Acre Prison – are still officially commemorated by the State of Israel. In February 2017 the country’s president, Reuven Rivlin, used his Facebook page to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the killing of Avraham ‘Yair’ Stern, leader of the group known in Hebrew as Lehi (Lohamei Herut Yisrael, the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel) or the Stern Gang in English. Stern was shot dead by a British policeman who tracked him down to his hiding place in Tel Aviv in 1942. In the same vein, Israel’s National Library refers to the Irgun (Irgun Zvai Leumi, the National Military Organization), which first launched attacks on Arab civilians in 1938 and killed ninety-one people when it blew up Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in 1946, as a ‘Jewish resistance group’.7 The full name of Hamas, the Palestinian group that carried out numerous suicide bombings against civilian targets and fired primitive rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel, is the Islamic Resistance Movement (Harakat al-muqawama al-islamiyya). For those who are resisting their own people’s worst enemies, terminology is always loaded and the ends invariably justify the means they use.
Palestinian and Israeli narratives diverge over far more than the words that are commonly used for their respective national heroes, not least over the nature of the long and unresolved struggle between them over the same small territory on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. Both are reflected throughout this book. Each is authentic, even if dismissed by the other side as propaganda or lies. Neither can be ignored. The conflict between these two peoples can only be understood by paying attention to how they see themselves and their history as well as each other. Narrative, in its simplest definition, is ‘the story a nation tells itself about itself’.8
Israelis describe a quest for freedom and self-determination after centuries of anti-Semitic persecution, and the ‘ingathering of the exiles’ who ‘return’ from the Diaspora to Zion to build a sovereign and independent Jewish state in their ancient homeland, finally achieved in the wake of the extermination of 6 million Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War. That story of national liberation is succinctly captured in the Hebrew phrase ‘miShoah leTekuma’ – ‘from Holocaust to rebirth’. Self-respect and dignity are restored after centuries of powerlessness, suffering and humiliation. The presence of another people in that homeland (however that people and land are defined) is rarely noted beyond its violent opposition to Zionism. Land is ‘redeemed’ and the desert made to bloom. Israel’s dominant narrative emphasizes its own readiness to compromise and to make peace while the other side has repeatedly missed opportunities to do so. The ‘dove’ is forced to fight. Unrelenting and pervasive Palestinian, Arab and Muslim hostility is blamed far more than Israel’s own actions – whether in 1947 and 1948, or over decades of settlement in the territories it conquered in 1967 and the military occupation it has maintained in ‘Judaea and Samaria’ (the West Bank) and its unilateral annexation of East Jerusalem, now part of the country’s ‘united and eternal capital’. (Under international law Israel remains responsible for the Gaza Strip despite its 2005 withdrawal, as it does for the West Bank partially controlled by the Palestinian Authority.) It is common for Israelis to claim that they have no Palestinian ‘partner’ for peace and that their enemies are motivated by hatred and prejudice, not a quest for justice and an end to conflict. Terror continues.
Palestinians describe themselves as the country’s indigenous inhabitants who lived peacefully for centuries as a Muslim majority alongside Christian and Jewish minorities. Theirs is a story of resistance to foreign intruders, starting in Ottoman times but since 1917 under a perfidious British Empire that betrayed the cause of Arab independence and put its own interests first. Three decades of Mandatory rule, which promoted Jewish immigration and land purchases, were followed after the crimes of the Nazi era (for which they were in no way responsible) by an unjust UN partition plan that Palestinians rejected and fought. Then came war and ethnic cleansing in 1948 and, nineteen years later, the occupation of the rump of the country between the Mediterranean and the river Jordan. Israel’s independence was the Palestinians’ catastrophe. The right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes was recognized by the UN but never by Israel. ‘The essence of the encounter’, in the words of the Palestinian scholar Nadim Rouhana, ‘took place between a group of people living in their homeland and a group of people who arrived from other parts of the world guided by an ideology that claimed the same homeland as exclusively theirs.’9 Yet Palestinian leaders still agreed to accept a state on only 22 per cent of the territory – a historic compromise described as ‘unreasonably reasonable’.10 The Nakba continues as memory and ‘present history’. That is marked by ongoing occupation, land confiscation, expanding Jewish settlements, the threat of annexation, house demolitions and an ‘apartheid wall’ built to protect Israel’s security – a disaster without end.11 Sumoud (steadfastness), the preservation of national identity – and resistance – carry on in the service of a struggle for freedom, dignity and human rights.
These master-narratives are not so much competing as diametrically opposed – and utterly irreconcilable: justice and triumph for the Zionist cause meant injustice, defeat, exile and humiliation for Palestinians. They have developed and been reinforced over the decades by selectivity, repetition and unshakeable self-belief. Sir Alan Cunningham, Britain’s last high commissioner for Palestine, made the point well just weeks after the Mandate’s inglorious end. ‘One of the most remarkable phenomena in the handling of policy in Palestine was that neither Jew nor Arab in their approach to the problem … would ever refer to the other,’ he recalled. ‘And it would seem as if they ignored each other’s very existence.’12 Common ground has been hard to find since the beginning. Textbooks that attempt to reconcile or to integrate the rival narratives have to print them on alternate pages.13 An Israeli–Palestinian debate about an innovative project ambitiously entitled ‘Shared Histories’ quickly concluded that the two sides’ versions in fact had very little in common – and that was before they had even reached the twentieth century!14 Efforts by Palestinian and Israeli educators to compose a ‘bridging narrative’ acceptable to both had to be abandoned after the second intifada because ‘the mutual suspicion, hatred and poisoning of minds among both peoples in relation to the “other” [had] become so intense’.15
Nevertheless, in recent decades there has been growing agreement about the facts of what happened in significant periods. Starting in the late 1980s, Israel’s self-styled ‘new historians’ drew on newly opened official archives to rewrite the history of the 1948 war in a way that was closer – though not identical – to traditional Palestinian accounts that had previously been dismissed by Israel as propaganda. In different ways Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, Tom Segev and Avi Shlaim slaughtered the sacred cows of an earlier national consensus when the heroic period of Israel’s ‘state-in-the-making’ was no longer a taboo and controversy was raging over the 1982 war in Lebanon and the first intifada five years later. Palestinian scholars, handicapped by a dearth of Arab documentary sources, a lack of access to Israeli archives, and by their own statelessness, began to examine their history more assertively, although with less dramatic results.16 In the 1990s Walid Khalidi’s encyclopaedic study, All That Remains, laid the foundation for recording the Palestine that was eradicated by Israel.17 Yezid Sayigh’s meticulously documented account of the Palestine national movement and its search for a state is still unsurpassed, two decades after publication.18 It is also hard to improve on the penetratingly honest insight of the Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi that Zionism was not just another European colonial enterprise but was simultaneously the national movement of the Jewish people and one that achieved its goals at the expense of his own people.19
No one now seriously disputes, for example, how many Palestinians died in the Deir Yassin massacre in April 1948, or how many Arab villages were depopulated or destroyed during or after that year’s war. Very few accept the old Israeli claim that a ‘miracle’ or orders from invading Arab armies triggered the Palestinian exodus. Oral testimony, once dismissed as unreliable, has greatly enriched understanding of the Nakba. So have autobiographical accounts of the period, motivated by the urge to bear witness to traumatic events and avoid the erasure of memory. In that spirit Palestinian genealogy, folklore and cultural studies have blossomed as data is collected on old houses and scattered communities and published online. Satellite TV channels have promoted and maintained interest. Palestine’s future may be profoundly uncertain. But its past is being studied and celebrated as never before.
Academic research has penetrated popular consciousness. Ari Shavit, a prominent Israeli journalist, made waves in 2014 – especially in the US – when he published an unvarnished account of a massacre and the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians from Lydda in 1948, based on interviews with Israeli veterans. He called it candidly (and controversially) ‘the price of Zionism’, but argued that there had been no alternative and gave no evidence of any contrition. ‘If Zionism was to be, Lydda could not be’, Shavit wrote. ‘If Lydda was to be, Zionism could not be.’20 In recent years Israeli leaders have periodically expressed public sympathy for Palestinian suffering, though, crucially, they have refused to admit responsibility for it. Historical revisionism, however honest, has strict limits in the real world.
Shifting perspectives have meant that closer attention is now paid to the irreducible Arab–Jewish core of the conflict. This is partly because of Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, the (apparent) end of inter-state wars (since 1973), discreet ‘normalization’ of relations with the conservative Arab Gulf states and, since 2011, the upheavals and bloody distractions of the ‘Arab Spring’. It has also happened because, by the crude but significant yardstick of body counts, the Israel–Palestine conflict has escalated, despite (or perhaps because of) efforts to ‘manage’ rather than resolve it. In the twenty years between 1967 and the start of the first intifada, 650 Palestinians were killed by Israel in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. From late 1987 to September 2000, the death toll was 1,491. From the second intifada to the end of 2006, the figure was 4,046 Palestinians and 1,019 Israelis.21 The Gaza Strip, now home to 2 million Palestinians, has seen four fully-fledged military campaigns since 2006. In the 2014 war, up to 2,300 Palestinians died. The conflict remains an issue of global and regional concern, a source of instability, misery, hatred and violence.
Understanding of the past always changes over time. For years after 1948 Israel’s version, the victor’s version, did dominate – though never entirely. In its aftermath the Palestinians were traumatized, leaderless, dispersed – and, indeed, often nameless too. They largely disappeared from public view in the West and in Israel, where if they were remembered at all it was as ‘Arab refugees’, ‘Israeli Arabs’, Jordanians or simply ‘terrorists’. Wider Arab solidarity with the Palestinian cause was accompanied by discrimination and intolerance. It was only after 1967 that the Palestinians began to ‘reappear’, although two years later Golda Meir, then Israel’s prime minister, still insisted, notoriously, that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people. By 1974, however, Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), was addressing the world in their name from the podium of the United Nations – one side’s terrorist, the other’s freedom fighter. In 1988 Arafat declared Palestinian independence, implicitly recognizing Israel. And just five years after that, in the Oslo accord, the PLO and Israel formally and explicitly recognized each other, though that pragmatic landmark said nothing about Palestinian rights or statehood and did not lead to a final peace settlement. Indeed, it did not mark any kind of genuine reconciliation, and it came in time to be seen by many on both sides as an abject failure. The subsequent collapse of negotiations and unprecedented violence deepened the chasm between them and their sense of mutual grievance and alienation.
Agreement on some aspects of the past does not mean that the overarching narratives or the arguments that flow from them have moved any closer together. On the contrary, when Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister since 2009, described demands to evacuate illegal West Bank settlements as supporting the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Jews, Palestinians accused him of cynically appropriating ‘their’ narrative,22 reinforcing the impression that both sides are clinging to their own sense of victimhood. Netanyahu and supporters complain that Israel is the object of anti-Semitic hatred. Official Palestinian spokesmen reject such criticism and insist they are fighting for their legitimate rights and self-determination and are protesting about breaches of international law. In 2017 the formal goal of the PLO remained the end of the occupation and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. The Islamist movement Hamas, by contrast, was prepared only for a long-term truce with Israel. Netanyahu was committed at best to what he called a ‘state-minus’ for the Palestinians. Ending the conflict still looked like a very tall order.
It has become a truism of many rounds of unsuccessful peace talks to say that history must be left to academics and cannot be dealt with on the negotiating table.23 ‘Fanciful intellectual acrobatics only added impediments to the virtually insurmountable political obstacles that already existed’, as the Israeli historian Asher Susser has written.24 Experts in conflict resolution counter that acknowledgement of the other’s point of view, which does not constitute acceptance of it, can help promote practical compromises and thus win popular support for peace on both sides.25
History and politics cannot, however, be easily separated when the conflict is so raw and oppressive, and when one party so outweighs the other, militarily, economically and in many other ways. Netanyahu is correct to say that Palestinians have not recognized the legitimacy, as opposed to the existence, of the Jewish state, as he and many other Israelis demand they do – and as leading Palestinians freely admit they cannot. In the words of the Palestinian intellectual Ahmad Samih Khalidi:
For us to adopt the Zionist narrative would mean that the homes that our forefathers built, the land that they tilled for centuries, and the sanctuaries they built and prayed at were not really ours at all, and that our defence of them was morally flawed and wrongful: we had no right to any of these to begin with.26
Nor, crucially, has Israel recognized, in any formal or legal sense, the right of the Palestinian people to the sovereign, viable and independent state it desires, and so much of the world now believes it deserves, in what remains of historic Palestine. In 1993 Israel recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians. But what it called a ‘generous’ offer at the Camp David summit in 2000 was rejected as inadequate by the other side. Whether that was really a ‘missed opportunity’ remains a contentious question. In any event, agreement on how these two peoples are to live peacefully, freely and equitably as neighbours, not enemies, has never been reached. The story so far should help explain why such an agreement is so elusive – and may provide pointers for the way ahead.
Neither party has a monopoly on truth or morality. Happily, though, neither is monolithic either. If the master-narratives still exert their paralysing hold it is nevertheless possible to hear voices and strategies that deviate from them. Portraying one side as colonialists, settlers and racists and the other as terrorists, fanatics and anti-Semites only reduces the already slight chances of reconciliation. Significant numbers on both sides are realistic enough to acknowledge the ineradicable existence of the other – that, like it or not (and many do not), they are there to stay. Joint polls show that while contact between Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank (other than soldiers or settlers) is limited, majorities of both find their interactions ‘pleasant’. Less optimistically, trust between them is extremely low and majorities of both agree that theirs is a zero-sum relationship in which ‘nothing can be done that is good for both sides’ and ‘whatever is good for one is bad for the other’.27 Fear, hatred, apathy and self-interest, as well as domestic, regional and international attitudes and constraints, are powerful forces too – combining to sustain what has looked for too long like an unsustainable reality. Events in East Jerusalem in July 2017 – the killings of Israeli policemen by Israeli Arab gunmen on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif; Israel’s security crackdown; mass Palestinian protests; the killing of Israeli settlers; high tensions and a subsequent Israeli climbdown – were a stark reminder of how very quickly and easily matters can escalate out of control.
Historians inevitably reflect the preoccupations of the present: 2017, with its resonant anniversaries, is a period of unprecedented gloom about the prospects for easing, let alone resolving the permanent crisis in the Holy Land. In recent years debates have raged about the death of the two-state solution, the desirability and likelihood of a single state emerging by agreement, or the continuation and likely deterioration of an unjust, volatile and dangerous status quo. There is no sign that this conflict is about to end, so understanding it matters more than ever. But that also means that both peoples should heed the wise words of the Palestinian-Israeli writer Odeh Bisharat: ‘If there is no shared narrative for the past, then at least let us write one for the future.’28