By Marzouq El-Halabi | Translation from Arabic to Hebrew: Nadav Franckovich, from Hebrew to English: Dimi Reider
The Palestinian discourse must leave denial behind and engage seriously with the Jewish and Zionist questions. No more talk of the victorious and the defeated, victims and victimisers, but a new narrative shared by both sides of the conflict.
Future president of Israel Chaim Weizmann and Emir Faisal of Greater Syria, 1918
Much of the discourse around the Palestinian question is characterised by ignoring the Jewish question. This trend is noticeable in a number of central Palestinian positions, which exempt their holders from this burdensome complexity, and postpone having to deal with it. The strategy of ignoring the Jewish issue cultivates a discourse based on nationalist, Marxist and Islamist viewpoints, which deny the very existence of the Jewish people and the fact that the Jews living and arriving in Palestine over the past decades have created a national mechanism that is worthy of its name. Alongside these points of view, directly related or not, is a popular approach that casts the Jewish project in Palestine as a purely colonialist venture, which should be fought without too much talk – despite the historical processes of the past several decades and the self-determination of the Jews as a people, inside Palestine and beyond.
These outlooks combined have produced an ahistoric track to which the Palestinian narrative has stuck pretty much without exception; this, despite the fact that the two questions, the Palestinan and the Jewish one, are intertwined through shared history since at least the 1930s, and certainly since the partition plan and the declaration of Israel as a sovereign Jewish state in historic Palestine. The official narrative, which leans firmly on Palestinian rights, has focused on the victimized and rights-holding self. The Palestinian mainstream has long eschewed grappling with the Jewish question or engaging critically with the Arab and Palestinian collective identity.
This stands out particularly starkly in the Palestinian national charter, which suggested turning back history, sending the Jews in Palestine back to where they came from and ending the conflict! Palestinian thought with regards to the conflict was long afflicted with this and similar illusions of a speedy redemption lurking around the corner, just waiting for the clock to be turned back by several decades.
Leading forces in the Arab and Palestinian political arenas began, at a fairly early stage, mythologizing the Palestinian problem and shaping its narrative as a kind of Greek or Canaanite myth. The Palestinians thus distanced themselves from history in the making, even as the Jewish question took root in historic Palestine after erupting so forcefully on European soil. As far as the Palestinian narrative was concerned, it was as if the Holocaust never happened. The Palestinians avoided engaging with the Holocaust and its considerable influence on the Jewish experience, and when they did engage, it was almost always in the narrow context of bickering with official Zionism, usually tending to downplay the Holocaust’s significance, even reaching levels of understanding for and endorsement of the views of Holocaust deniers. Traces of this trend can still be seen in contemporary Palestinian thought.
I believe the Palestinians have avoided engaging with the Holocaust and its implications for fear it would detract from their right over the land and shake a central tenet of their narrative – that the Jews are not a people, that their arrival in Palestine was a purely colonialist development and that they, the Jews, are not the ultimate victim they believe themselves to be. Such strategies have been dominant in the Palestinian movement for too long, and cannot hold water for much longer. That doesn’t mean that we should yield to the tragic chain of events, to facts being forged on the ground or to changes in the Arab geopolitical space. But we shouldn’t hold history’s ironic whims as sacred. If we do, it might repeat itself, perhaps even more cruelly and catastrophically than before.
Rather, the conclusion here is that the Palestinians must appear at the gates of history and engage in serious discussion about the Jewish question as it has presented itself to us – which is to say, as a historical, political fact and a collection of objective facts. First and foremost among these facts is that of a people defining itself in a certain manner and claiming some sovereignty in historic Palestine, with everything that this entails. There’s no point in continuing to cope with this issue simply by brandishing the Palestinian right or Palestinian victimhood. What’s need is political intelligence and recognition of the possibilities that lie in political activity.
We could continue to stick with what are considered the foundations of our perceptions of the self or the Jewish other. We could go on and call Zionism and Israel a considerable variety of names. But what we must to do is move on, refresh the concepts of the Palestinian question so that they are capable of conversing with the inextricably intertwined Jewish question, and create new outlooks that will open horizons for reconciliation between the two nations. These demands also apply to potential partners from the Israeli side, with whom we have engaged in dialogue for some time, but in this article they are being addressed to the Palestinian side, which, 63 years after the Nakba, needs more than any other to reevaluate its strategy, its narrative and its fundamental premises, so as to achieve the goals to which it aspires.
Analysing the development of the two identities, the Jewish and the Palestinian, shows us how a future discourse that opens new possibilities of historical reconciliation can be nurtured. This is all the more evident in light of both Israel’s continuing existential crisis, which is rooted in the lack of peace and the feeling of illegitimacy, despite its military superiority, and of the Palestinian crisis, which is constantly growing in light of the failure of the violent strategy, the lack of solutions and the persistence of the Occupation, despite all the efforts and sacrifice. We should hope that the Palestinian Authority initiates moves that can lead to historic reconciliation, and not merely to the settling of political differences.
Such a discourse can only succeed if it knows to combine the two questions, the Palestinian and the Jewish, into a shared narrative of the conflict. No longer a confrontational narrative of the victorious and the defeated, victims and victimisers, but a new narrative that contains everything that has been denied by the parties, whether consciously or out of an instinctive defence of the “exclusive truth” that each side claims to own. I’m sure both in Israel and abroad there are many Jews who will answer the challenge and lend us a hand in an attempt to meet that need, especially Jews belonging to school of thought that does not accept the Zionist narrative wholesale, and whose ideas on ways to resolve the conflict are not without creativity and vision.
A shared narrative that rises above today’s monotonous narrative can form the basis of a new phase in which confrontation will die down and reconciliation will gain force, and doors to solutions and arrangements will be opened. If both parties contribute to creating the necessary conditions and atmosphere, we will be able to reexamine, together, the essential questions of history and moral responsibility. Then, perhaps, we will be able to avoid the errors of the past, move forward to reconciliation and settle the key issues of self-determination, sovereignty and security for both peoples, and to agree on the various sub-questions stemming from the primary ones.
Will the Palestinians do what they avoided doing all these years, and recognise that the Jewish question will be resolved on Palestinian land, and that after all, history, which has worked against them, will not be able to repay them what it owes? For now it seems that a large share of the damage stems from remaining outside history.
Marzouq El-Halabi is a writer, columnist and political advisor. He writes a regular column for Al-Hayat newspaper, where this column was initially published in Arabic. It was also translated into Hebrew for Haokets by Nadav Franckovich. This article is published here with the author’s permission. Email the author here.
—————————
+972 magazine needs your support. Check this post to see why, and how can you help to keep this project going
For additional original analysis and breaking news, visit +972 Magazine's Facebook page or follow us on Twitter. Our newsletter features a comprehensive round-up of the week's events. Sign up here.
Frans Geraedts
I think that the argument the author develops is very important.
I would like to support it with two flanking thoughts.
Europe should be the third party in that newly constructed narrative. It plays a major role in these intertwined histories, it has much to offer to both Israël and Palestine, and it carries a deep still unresolved obligation.
A proces of moral inquiry could play a vital role in creating such a shared narrative, because it would make it necessary to think through the rights and interests of all involved.
If at all possible i would like to start up a direct conversation with the author. Any help +972 could offer in that regard would be highly appreciated.
Frans Geraedts
ex israeli
if the zionist ‘jewish’ narrative is unclear to many israelis & jews themselves, how can it be “better understood” by palestinians?
David
The author writes that the Palestinian objection to Israel “shake[s] a central tenet of their narrative – that the Jews are not a people, that their arrival in Palestine was a purely colonialist development.”
This is a crock. First we have to disentangle the two claims here: (1) that Palestinians believe that Jews are not a people — which I think is just a red herring thrown in here for effect; and (2) that Zionism is not a purely colonial development — which IS the case.
If we go about giving free passes to whatever form of colonialism we love best (South African, American, British, etc.) we can have fun every day of the week. But at the end of each of those days, the domination of another people and the dispossession of their land by European immigrants is still colonialism. Zionism would have been colonialism if it had not come to Palestine but instead taken part of Argentina or Uganda, some of the other scuttled plans.
It is what it is: a racist, obsolete 19th century practice.
Zvi
@David, and what of any number of countries which were settled by people who came from elsewhere (Argentina, North America, Australia, NZ, South Africa, Singapore, Tibet, etc.)? We are talking about Israel/Palestine here. Perhaps you are not interested in looking beyond the origins of the conflict, but anyone who is looking for some sort of resolution must come to terms with the fact that Israel exists and is not going anywhere.
David Cooper
The shared history predates the current conflict by many centuries. Many if not most Palestinian Muslims are the descendants of indigenous Jews and Samaritans who were coerced by Egyptian (Mameluke) and Turkish foreign rulers to convert to Islam (see http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/132800 ). Not only shared history but ties of kinship and shared ancestry should be explored.
max
The realization that what El-Halabi writes isn’t common sense is nothing short of depressing
sinjim
Mr. Halabi uses a lot of words but says very little.
.
What does it mean for the Jewish and Palestinian questions to be addressed together? What is the Palestinian question? What is the Jewish question? What would a new narrative look like? What are the mechanisms by which this new narrative would emerge? Mr. Halabi doesn’t bother with these issues, as he’s busy accusing the Palestinians of denying Jewish peoplehood.
Gary
“No longer a confrontational narrative of the victorious and the defeated, …” – That, I believe, is the key, certainly from the Jewish side of the equation. Speaking as an American Jew, I fear that there will be no true settlement of the conflict unless and until the Israelis accept that this is a negotiation between equals, that the Palestinians have to be seen not as an occupied people conquered in war, but as a people with an equal (at least) historical and moral claim to the land. Let us hope and pray that people of good will on both sides can find the the shared narrative to which you aspire. Both peoples’ survival may depend on it.
Ben Israel
Interesting piece, but a couple of comments.
(1) Yes, it is important to understand the Holocaust, but the Holocaust has nothing to do with defining Jewish rights in the country. Yes, there are people like Prof Ze’ev Sternhell who deny that the Jewish people have any hisotrical or religious rights in the country, but that the Holocaust DID give the Jews the right to take Palestine from the Arabs UP TO the Green Line but not beyond that. But this philosophy is so incoherent and unjustifiable that it can be ignored. The true importance of the Holocaust comes in how Israeli Jews view the nature of the Arab conflict against Israel (including the participation of non-Arabs and non-Muslims in that conflict) and the world’s response to this conflict.
(2) I don’t know how you get people to supposedly shift their minds in order to forget at least part of their their own history and identity and refill it with somebody else’s. It is true, countries of immigration like the US have succeeded to a significant extent in getting the immigrants to shed their old loyalties and to adopt on a new one which attaches them to their new country (although there is some question as to whether this is working as well as it used to in the era of “multiculturalism”), but the writer here wants us to suddenly adopt the views and identity of a hostile neighbor. It seems like wishful thinking to me.
max
Ben Israel, I read El-Halabi’s intention not as wanting to replace one part with another, but moving away from the dynamics of power negotiations (I’ll crush you because I’m stronger, – resp., see Aumann’s Blackmailer’s Paradox – and I don’t care because I’m right) to a more business-like dynamics where understanding your adversary’s position leads to a better and faster resolution.
David 2
“that Zionism is not a purely colonial development — which IS the case.”
Given that half of Israel’s immigrants were ethnically cleansed from surrounding Arab and Persian lands, you appear to be using a very broad definition of “colonialism”.
By that basis, the Kurdish attempts to establish a self governing homeland are a form of colonialism, directed at Turks, Persians and Syrians.
Similarly, Greece – whose birth saw the dispossession of a huge number of “Turks” – is a colonial enterprise.
Likewise, Bosnia is a colonial state, because it was carved out of Yugoslavia.
How do we determine whether a population exchange, involving significant movement of individuals within a region, ending in the formation of a new state, is “colonial” or not? Do we look to the ethnicity of those who live in the new state? Are we saying that Yemeni, Moroccan, Persian, Egyptian, Iraqi Jews, who arrived in Israel completely disposessed, were the equivalent of White plantation owners in Kenya?
Or is the crucial factor not their ethnicity, but who backed them? Does this mean that Israel, unsupported by many of the great world powers in 1948 (excepting, notably, the USSR!) was initially legitimate: but became illegitimate because it is now (fitfully, and unreliably) backed by the USA?
Here’s a better explanation. Ashkenazi Jews from a Marxist background are trying to impose a colonial/imperial analysis on a story which just doesn’t fit into their erroneous worldview. Naturally, they think the story of Israel is all about them.
In doing so, they ignore the ethnic cleansing of the entire Jewish population of the Middle East into Israel.
max
In America, one recognizes the colonial past by names of places. When Zionists arrived to Palestine they recognized their Jewish past by names of places.
And true enough, today one recognizes the Arab past by yet other, newer names.
From the historical and cultural aspects, few countries in the world have a stronger affinity to their land than Jews to Israel.
MDmdPhD
ZVI – In each of the countries you list (with the exception of South Africa – and WHAT an exception!) settlers did not seek an homogenous, ethnically pure state in their new territories.
The Israel “exists” debate is a red herring. It is not its existence that is in question it is its intentions. However apologists for Israel dress it up – and boy do they dress it up – it is an expansionist and colonialist project. What should Palestinians recognise? The 48/67/Oslo/Road Map borders?
Zvi
@MDmdPhD – there is no “debate” about Israel’s right to exist – or do you think otherwise? States do not have volition, people do. The call to engage with the ‘Jewish question’ was a plea to move beyond simplistic discourse based on purported “intentions” and to actually communicate with one another as a way of understanding – not necessarily agreeing.