After So Long, the Same Old Arguments Johann Hari

Opinion, July 2003, www.aljazeerah.info

After So Long, the Same Old Arguments

Johann Hari

The Independent & Arab News

LONDON, 31 July 2003 — The people of Israel and Palestine are, it seems, trapped forever in a demonic Groundhog Day where they endlessly rerun 1948. As I have traveled around Israel/Palestine over the past few weeks, it has been startling to hear just how old the arguments between the two sides are. At heart, everything still boils down not to 1967 — when the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank began — but to the events of 1948 itself; almost all the arguments I have been engaged in could have happened in the winter of that year.

More than a fight between armies, the Middle East conflict is a clash between two national stories. Each side sees every event through the prism of its own mythology about 1948, and ignores the other side’s story completely. The first of these stories — the more well known in the West — is the official Israeli narrative. It goes something like this: The Holocaust was the last, terrible demonstration that without a state of their own, Jews would be forever pogromed and slaughtered. Therefore the Jewish people, after millennia of persecution, finally and bravely decided to return to the homeland that the Roman Empire stole from them 2,000 years before. They revived a dead language and made the desert bloom; they created a thriving democracy with Jews from all over the world. Only the hostility of anti-Semites in Europe and of genocidal Arabs — who tried repeatedly to destroy Israel for their own mad reasons — explain why Israel is not widely admired today. In the most extreme versions of this narrative, the land was empty when the Jews returned to it, except for a few wandering nomads. Those who claim to be displaced Palestinians are malicious liars who want to snatch Israel’s land and wealth.

And then there is the Palestinian story, less well-known in the West (and entirely unheard in America), but almost the sole version of the conflict told in the Arab world. It goes something like this: The God-fearing Arab peasants of Palestine lived peacefully alongside a Jewish minority for thousands of years, especially during the 400 years of the Ottoman Empire.

But then Zionism appeared on the scene, and declared that the Biblical Land of Israel belonged to the Jews. Arabs would have to accept that they were second-class citizens in a Jewish state, or leave. Even left-wing Zionists covertly supported the idea of “transfer” of the native Arabs to other lands — now known as ethnic cleansing. The British, who took over from the Ottomans in 1917, backed the Zionists, and pledged the land of Palestine — which was not theirs to give — as a Jewish national home.

The Palestinians began to fight against this, with the conflict culminating in the Naqba (catastrophe), when over 700,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes and driven into exile while the state of Israel was declared, partly on their abandoned land. In the most extreme versions of this narrative, 1948 was part of a global Zionist plot for world domination, as outlined in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

It is time to admit — and this is not woolly third way-ism — that both national myths contain truths and ridiculous lies. At the moment, the two sides stare at each other in blank, hateful mutual incomprehension. Of course, if you don’t know about the Naqba, Palestinian anger at Israel looks simply like a disembodied, crazy loathing. And if you don’t know about the terrible history of anti-Semitism, the creation of the state of Israel looks like unjustifiable wickedness.

There is another way. A few days ago, I visited Neve Shalom, an Israeli village where Palestinians and Israelis live side by side in peace. Their children are taught both national stories, and encouraged to see the flaws in each. Some Israeli residents of the village are involved in an organization called Zokrot (Remember), which promotes understanding of the tragedy that befell the Palestinians in 1948 by holding discussions and erecting signs on the sites of Arab villages destroyed then. Several Palestinians, such as Edward Said, have in parallel challenged the prevalence of anti-Semitic ideas in Palestine, and have even taken young Palestinians to Auschwitz.

Yes, we need a political process that ends the murderous occupation of Gaza and the West Bank; we need a full Palestinian state there, and full equality for Arabs within Israel proper. But proper reconciliation — as opposed to a top-down political solution — will only come through a massive re-education program on both sides. Israel is now secure enough to admit publicly — and to teach its children — that the ethics of 1948 were horribly complex. The reality is that the victims of one of the worst atrocities in human history — many still half-emaciated from the concentration camps — were desperate to feel safe. So they did a terrible thing: They committed another (though not equivalent — Nazi analogies are offensive and false) atrocity against the Palestinians.

The solution is not, as the fanatics of Islamic Jihad and Hamas imagine, to reverse that decision now: The way to correct an act of ethnic cleansing 55 years ago cannot be to commit another act of ethnic cleansing today. Rather, it is to share the land, to compensate the victims of 1948, and to begin to learn about the other side’s story at last. I doubt that this last recommendation will happen soon. This is a shame, because 1949 could be a great year for Israel/Palestine.

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).