The problem is too little history, not too much
Israelis and Palestinians are both guilty of simplifying the past
Martin Woollacott
Thursday April 11 2002
The Guardian
>From Ramallah on a clear day you can see the Mediterranean. It is a
place from which Palestinians can easily survey what they have lost -
the sea to which all Mediterranean peoples turn, the land shaped by
generations, the cities now occupied by others.
"Fold after fold of the cup-shaped hills rolled on to the sea," wrote
Raja Shehadeh, the Ramallah lawyer, author and human rights worker, in
a recent memoir. But the Shehadeh family, expelled from Jaffa in 1948,
"saw Ramallah and its hills not for what they were but as the
observation point from which to view what lay beyond, the Jaffa I had
never known".
Shehadeh's book might seem at first another proof that Palestinians
and Israelis carry too much history around with them. But, as the
Israelis persist in their reoccupation of Ramallah and other
Palestinian cities, and as the Palestinians rage at this fresh assault
on their land, it is possible to argue that the problem is that both
come with too little history, not too much. The fathers of the young
soldiers now in Ramallah did the same thing once before, in 1967, and
the fathers of the Palestinian fighters witnessed that earlier, less
ruthless operation. How many of the sons, or the fathers, remember or
reflect?
Amin Malouf, the Lebanese author, has spoken of how societies "set the
scene for war", determining that "Whatever happens, 'the others' will
have deserved it". It may be that both Israelis and Palestinians live
too much in the now of current hatreds, very aware of a simplified
version of the past but out of touch with the complex chains of loss,
dispossession, regression and error that books like Shehadeh's examine
so delicately. When the Israelis came to Ramallah in 1967, an
extraordinary scene ensued at the Shehadeh house as Raja's father,
Aziz, a leading lawyer, worked away to produce a document to hand to
two Israeli reserve officers. In the absence of a secretary, young
Raja falteringly tapped it out on his new typewriter. It was a
proposal for a Palestinian state, occupying all the territory of the
West Bank, with its capital in East Jerusalem.
The officers rushed off with it enthusiastically, promising to present
it to their government, but it was of course either ignored or
repudiated by everyone concerned, by Israelis, by Jordanians and by
the nascent Palestinian resistance movements. Except that Aziz was a
marked man among Palestinians from that point. He had dared to speak
of "the unspeakable - recognition of Israel", writes his son, in
effect to accept the loss of beloved Jaffa in order to save Ramallah,
less loved but still valued.
That was traitorous in 1967, yet, in time, the two-state solution
became common ground between most Israelis and Palestinians. Does it
remain so? Undoubtedly many Israelis have convinced themselves
recently, as one disillusioned peace activist puts it, that "the
commitment of the other side to two states may never have been
genuine... It would have made a hell of a difference if Palestinian
violence had been confined to the territories because that would have
been a clear signal that their ambitions were confined to those
lands. By killing in Tel Aviv they signal that they want that city
back, too."
Equally, there are Palestinians who now believe that the Israelis were
never ready to allow a real Palestinian state to emerge, and they have
plenty of evidence to support that view in the actions of the Sharon
government. But peace in the circumstances in which Israelis and
Palestinians find themselves is a work in progress over many years, a
drama that can only play out when enough people suspend disbelief. The
phrases "making history" and "making peace" have some foundation in
what people actually do, and it is in the nature of this making that
the inevitable volatility of popular feeling and opinion has to be
accepted and managed.
As the years went by, Raja and his father watched the West Bank
literally re-formed. "Bulldozers came and sliced and turned and
levelled and destroyed the ancient terracing, uprooting the trees and
flattening the tops of the hills and turning the slopes into wide
level stretches where soon ready-made homes with sloping red tiled
roofs were deposited." Raja suggested that the speed with which the
settlements were created was evidence that they could be as swiftly
dismantled. Father replied, gloomily: "Children will be born who will
know no other home."
Both were right: history was being made but it was not being made
definitively. Nobody will ever be able to put back the tops on those
sliced hills, but the settlers, most of them, will almost certainly
eventually go. If there are preconditions for peace, they are less to
do with whether "facts on the ground" can or cannot be reversed than
with an escape, informed by history, from history.
For Israelis, the need is to break free of the paradox with which they
have long wrestled, which is that they will not give from strength and
cannot give from weakness. "When we're strong," an Israeli professor
wryly observed " we won't give because we don't have to. And when we
are weak, we won't give because we can't." Giving from weakness is how
many Israelis would now see concessions to the Palestinians - an
invitation to the Palestinians, once the West Bank and Gaza are
returned, to proceed with further attacks on Israel proper.
For the Palestinians the temptation is that reversion to absolute
solutions that Israelis fear, those absolute solutions that Aziz
Shehadeh long ago saw as the enemy of the possible. Some Palestinians
never abandoned such ideas and others, under the pressure of events,
may have now embraced them again. The suicide attacks are an index of
desperation, of the desire for revenge, of the work of organ isers who
truly do not want a two-state solution, or a mixture of all
three. What they are emphatically not is a practical policy to secure
a Palestinian state in the territories, since they activate the
Israeli survival complex as nothing else so effectively could. The
madness of Israeli policy, meanwhile, is that it daily erodes the size
of what the polls still amazingly show is a Palestinian majority for
compromise.
Tom Segev has given us a wonderful account, built up from the diaries
and letters of Jews, Arabs, British and others, of the years that led
up to Israeli statehood, a heaping up of stories of loss and love, of
prices paid by both the victorious and the defeated. He shows how hard
choices are a product of hard times. It is a point Malouf also makes
when he writes of how he had the "good luck" to emerge from the
Lebanese civil war "with my hands clean and with a clear
conscience... But things could have turned out very differently if I'd
been 16 instead of 26... or if I'd lost someone I loved. Or if I'd
belonged to a different social class or a different community." A
deeper understanding of this kind of luck, good and bad, the luck of
individuals in history, hardly brings peace in itself, but it can have
some solvent effect on the hatreds that breed war.
Strangers in the House by Raja Shehadeh (Steerforth Press)
In the Name of Identity by Amin Malouf (Arcade Publishing)
One Palestine, Complete by Tom Segev (Little, Brown)
Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited
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