As I've written a few times now, while I have many things I want to write about, I've found it hard for the past little while to maintain the mental focus for sustained, thoughtful writing, that doesn't just become an emotional rant. I've also been really appreciating the supportive and caring emails that I've received from many of you. In addition to notes of support and encouragement, some of my university colleagues have written some thoughtful and stimulating intellectual takes on the kinds of things I've been writing, and I've definitely benefited from those in previous posts. With his permission, for today's post, I am reproducing a discussion with my friend Greg (he is a philosopher, as you will quickly surmise) that is helping me to remember and clarify what has become a core issue for me in all of this, which is the way in which history is produced. Below you'll see his note, followed by my response, and then a final response from him.
This question of history-writing (historiography) has been central to my work in the study of religion and particularly ancient religious history, and very shortly after October 7 it really came into focus for me as a crucial issue to think through, articulate, and disseminate in terms of current world events, as I started doing in my blog. History is central because the identities we adopt today are based on ideas about where we came from; who we are is largely determined by our sense of culture/genetics/religion/history, either consciously or unconsciously. And more often than not, in today's world identities are adopted consciously as a way of being part of an "us" and not a "them." This sense of history, our communal or familial narratives, are political statements that empower us as individuals and give us meaning and purpose. But history is always selective; as I've written in a previous post, the stories we tell about where we came from are always tailored to our audiences and to the present moment, and framed within our own sense of who we are/ought to be. So they become self-reinforcing as both history and identity. In other words "history" is a story we tell to explain events and facts. History is an argument we are making, not an objective set of truths.
And I think this can help us partially understand the massive campus protests (what's going on in the UK is actually almost unbelievable). As my dad and I have been discussing a lot, the tradition of activism that began in protest of the Vietnam war and the draft and morphed into a civil rights movement has become an entrenched "student" identity. Students were fighting for change on behalf of the underdogs at home and abroad and really effected that change. The difference today is that those who are in positions of authority in the universities were once the same student revolutionaries from yesteryear, and this politics of the underdog has solidified with postcolonial theories that a-historically flatten all current events into questions of oppressed vs oppressor, with no nuance -- and no need for it. [Note: I have nothing against post-colonial theories; I use them all the time in my own work and they can be incredibly helpful. But for many, theoretical perspectives have become totalizing calls to action, which they were never intended to be. Theories are tools, not facts; frameworks for understanding, not material to be understood as reality. I fear that many colleagues around the world have always failed to make those distinctions, and we are seeing the results in real time today.] Journalists are the same. Who needs history when you have Wikipedia? And so the loudest PR machines with the widest reach and the simplest message -- spreading ideas that also resonate with the identity that one wants to project, be that "student," "underdog," "leftist," "champion of the oppressed," etc. -- are the ones who are revising history to suit their political agendas (and by that I mean politics in the usual sense, but also the individual politics of identity).
Anyway, enough of my rambling. Here's my exchange with Greg:
Hi Shawna,
I found the Ezra Klein interview with Yossi Klein Halevi really interesting and informative. Klein says at the beginning that in that week he had already interviewed someone with the Palestinian narrative, so I was able to get to it. It’s an interview with Amjad Iraqi. I’m copying it and pasting it here.
A few things that seem to me to be important about comparing these two narratives. Let me know if you think so too:
1. It confirms for me that the root of the entire struggle is whether or not Israel should exist. Both Halevi and Iraqi agree on this fundamental point — that if Palestinians are successful in getting what they want, Israel as a Jewish state will cease to exist.
2. Both Halevi and Iraqi talk about what Iraqi calls ‘armed struggle’ against Israel on the part of Hamas, and also the Great March of Return, and the B.D.S. (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) movement. But Halevi states openly that the aim of all three is the end of the state of Israel. Iraqi talks about these three in more vague terms as three ways that Palestinians have tried to achieve their aim, but he doesn’t make it clear at that point that the ‘aim’ he is talking about (the ‘return’ of all Palestinians to the entire territory) would mean the end of the state of Israel. This allows him to portray the situation as a ‘we’ve tried everything, even peaceful means and Israel still won’t give us what is right’, which has the rhetorical effect of saying peaceful means just don’t work, and so justifying the ‘armed struggle’ option. But of course, ’trying everything’ when the aim is the elimination of Israel is not going to be acceptable to Israelis.
3. Halevi of course says that the end of Israel as a Jewish state would be a disaster, and it’s pretty easy to see why that’s a plausible claim. Iraqi claims, on the other hand, at the end of the interview, that it would lead to some kind of paradise of brotherhood where Jews and Palestinians could live together in peace. He’s very unclear on what that would look like, and it’s obviously very difficult to take this seriously, given the stated aims of Hamas.
4. Finally, Iraqi claims that the goal of Palestinian statehood has always been supported by the other Arab nations. But to me that claim is undercut by the fact that Egypt and Jordan didn’t give the Palestinians a state of their own when they were the occupying powers rather than Israel, between 1948 and 1967. (This is in addition to the refusal to grant citizenship to Palestinian refugees by Lebanon and Jordan).
Greg
Hi Greg,
Thanks very much -- I really appreciate your insight here. Yes, the root is exactly as you say -- the question of whether Israel should exist. Israelis and most diaspora Jews take it as a given that it does, and should, and that we must constantly be vigilant and fight for its continued existence. Most Palestinians, and Arab and Muslim states, see its existence as an aberration in an otherwise continuous Muslim domination of the land, and one that needs to be rectified by eradication. That's why "From the River to the Sea" as a battle cry for "resistance" to the "occupation" is so contentious. Because it absolutely means the annihilation of the state of Israel; the "occupation" isn't referring to Israel's occupation of Gaza (because it hasn't occupied Gaza since 2005) or of the West Bank (which is largely self-governing), but the 'occupation' of British Mandate Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state in it.
The idea that armed struggle is the only way against Israel, a common one among Palestinians and their supporters, only holds if we understand the first premise, as you've laid it out -- peaceful resolutions like a 2 state solution don't solve the problem of the 'occupation' because they leave intact a Jewish state on "Arab land." A Palestinian reclamation of the land or a 1-state solution would effectively wipe out the Jewish presence and the raison d'etre for the state as a place where Jews can find refuge from antisemitism around the world. And if the way that the Jordanian waqf looks after the Temple Mount is any indication of how such a one-state (with a Muslim majority, allied with the Muslim and Arab states all around) would treat Jewish holy sites, pilgrimage, etc. this is not a viable option for Jews in terms of religious observance and preservation of our cultural history.
On your last point, I think that Iraqi is correct that Palestinian statehood has always been supported by the other Arab nations BUT only if that statehood is total, i.e., in place of Israel. I think the surrounding nations have been very happy to keep that hope alive by not absorbing the Palestinian refugees themselves as citizens, but rather keeping them in that refugee status with the promise that one day they will return to their ancestral homes. In other words, Egypt and Jordan didn't grant the Palestinians their own states in Gaza or the West Bank because this would undercut the need for Israel to abdicate its position, and relieve pressure on the West to broker a deal in which Israel would have to give up some of its territory for a Palestinian state. By keeping the Palestinians in a "refugee" status, the surrounding Muslim nations (I'm including Turkey & Iran, so not calling them all "Arab") can maintain the illusion -- along with the UN, and especially the UNRWA -- that they deserve and will one day get their land back. And this is also ultimately why every time Israel has been ready to sign a 2-state deal, the Palestinian representatives have rejected it. (There's a good piece from a couple of weeks ago here by David Brooks in the NYT about this, and another one here by Salo Aizenberg in Fathom.)
That's why Iraqi needs to be so vague on his stated aims. They are clear if you pay attention, as you have, to the narrative; Israel is not, and cannot be, part of the ultimate solution to the problem of the refugees. They all pay lip-service to a peace process and to a 2-state solution, but ultimately (a) no one really cares about the plight of the Palestinian refugees; they are pawns in a larger and longer-term game; and (b) the end goal is to campaign -- as Hamas has done so successfully -- for the west to see that getting rid of the Jews in the region is the only way there will be peace in the Middle East.
These competing historical narratives, which directly affect of course the competing objectives of each side, are what I've been thinking about a lot but haven't yet been able to write about (but stay tuned). To me, one of the core issues (beyond people simply not understanding the historical context) is the contested nature of that history, and the alternate narratives among Palestinians and Israelis. Further to that are the competing narratives even among Israelis, and among diaspora Jews (I can't speak to the Palestinian or Arab sides but I will do more reading on this). We diaspora Jews learned a simple version of history growing up, one that left out for example other reasons why Arabs fled in 1948 (i.e. not just that the Arab states told them to leave temporarily until the Jews were eradicated); like the massacres at Deir Yassin and Tantura. The current government of Israel's policies are a stark reminder of this strain in Israeli thought, and this stain on Israel's history. It cannot be a simple black-and-white narrative on either side, and there is ugliness on our side that also needs to be better acknowledged. This deeper appreciation of the history can only help us better understand the present, and the variety of perspectives on that present that abound, even as they are flattened into a pretense of a cohesive Palestinian/Arab side and a cohesive Jewish/Israeli side. The flattening of narratives becomes outright distortion popularized both in the media, and in rallies. I intend to write about these as I develop the blog further. Because ultimately, what it seems I'm doing with my blog -- completely unintended when I started out -- is a kind of thinking-through of how history-writing works (which makes sense since this is what I also do for a living and is a common theme in my current research projects that focus on gender in the ancient world).
I read somewhere recently that producing public memory is a political act first, and an adherence to historical fact second; people write histories that are agenda-driven (and this is also how I teach about the writing of the various strands in the Hebrew Bible) and their audiences, also agenda-driven, interpret/emphasize some parts and 'forget' other parts, in order to fit their own identities and narratives (this is how I teach about the history of interpretation, for example of the Eden story). This is the strand of thinking that I want to pick up when I start writing again in earnest.
Shawna
Hi Shawna,
I’d just like to respond to one thing you read, about writing history, that:
"producing public memory is a political act first, and an adherence to historical fact second; people write histories that are agenda-driven (and this is also how I teach the writing of the various strands in the Hebrew Bible) and their audiences, also agenda-driven, interpret/emphasize some parts and 'forget' other parts, in order to fit their own identities and narratives."
As you know, I’ve been thinking a lot about political lying. I’m giving another version of my course on Plato and the Sophists starting in January. So I’ve also been thinking about how one presents things in a partial manner.
I think a contemporary position, influence by post-Heideggerian thought, is that perspectives are ineliminable. All we have are differing perspectives and differing narratives. Klein’s paired shows could be given as an example. One might think he gives equal air-time to the Palestinian perspective and to the Israeli perspective, in two complementary interviews, just to display how the two versions are so different. Listening to them both, all we get are two different stories about the same thing, because what they really indicate are two different versions of reality, belonging to two different groups. The assumption here is that there is no ‘objective’ point of view, and not even any overlap between narratives. Epistemologically, this position is crippling. It shuts us up in our own cognitive worlds and removes both the ability and even the motivation to try to understand other people’s perspectives. Understanding someone else is impossible, because even if I try, I’ll just end up portraying the other out of my own perspective and misunderstanding them anyway. And even if I were able to get inside someone else’s perspective, all I’d end up with is cognitive dissonance, because their perspective is just incompatible with mine.
I think that way of thinking about differing perspectives is false and harmful. And I think rather that the way you expressed it is more accurate (if I may expand on it). That given in front of us some totality of facts/happenings/actions etc. that we have the ability to pay attention to, we create perspectives by including some things and omitting others, emphasising some things and downplaying others. We are always in such a cognitive situation, and usually unconsciously. We have to think about the world in a partial manner, otherwise our minds would be like Borges’ map that is the same size as the entire kingdom (see “On Exactitude in Science”). So in itself this kind of selection that produces a narrative is just how our thinking works. But when what we’re thinking about elicits competing narratives in the way that this issue does, or whenever different perspectives are such that they disagree or clash, I think something more is going on. And that is, as you say, that there is an extra epistemological motivation for what one chooses and omits, emphasises and downplays. How each side feels about the issues involved, what goods one seeks and what evils one tries to avoid, how one can live with the bad things one has been responsible for — all of these affect, consciously or unconsciously, what one attends to and what one ignores, and so shape the story that we tell ourselves and other people.
I think that this way of thinking about different perspectives is true and beneficial, because it doesn’t shut us up in our own cognitive worlds. It doesn’t posit an ‘objective’ account that would be some kind of view from nowhere. Instead, it holds that, in principle, each perspective can be expanded to attend to the things that the other side considers important. (That is, this is possible if both sides are arguing in good faith. If the selection of details is done in bad faith, with the intention of slanting the narrative in one’s favour, that is sophistry/propaganda, and you can’t argue with it because the other person just isn’t listening.) Overlap of perspectives allows criticism of each other’s narratives, and in particular a comparison of perspectives or narratives in terms of more or less complete accounts. So, for example, it allows you to notice that Iraqi uses vague language to make the aim of the Palestinians palatable to those who, naïvely, don’t realise that what he’s talking about is the destruction of Israel. I think that’s probably what Klein had in mind with his paired shows — giving the viewer the ability to see which narrative is more selective and which is more open about things.
But if you are able to expand competing narratives to take the details of each into account, then you can get down to the real disagreement. The disagreement is articulated in terms of ‘facts’, but even if one had an absolutely complete list of ‘facts’ it still wouldn’t settle it, because it’s about how each side perceives the ‘facts’ to stand in relation to their desires and what lies at the root of their desires, which is their perception or judgement of what will lead towards or away from one’s own good. Underneath the ‘root’, which is the question of whether Israel should exist, is the question of desire. Jews desire a homeland, and they desire that current homeland to be in the same place as their ancestral homeland. Palestinians also desire a homeland, and desire that it should be in the whole of the territory that they also consider their ancestral homeland. As long as those desire remain in place, there is no solution, and no debate about the ‘facts’ will resolve anything. The more unscrupulous on either side will intentionally construct a narrative to make their desire seem reasonable, and either ignore the desire of the other side or try to make it seem unreasonable.
But you can also think about the source of these competing desires. Jews desire at least one place in the world where they can be safe from the hatred and persecution, because this has been directed at them for thousands of years. In purely factual terms, the object of this desire is the country of Israel, because it exists and because it’s the closest thing Jews have had to a safe place since perhaps the time of Solomon (?). Palestinians desire the whole territory, because they consider themselves to have been displaced. As long as the conviction that Israel is the Jews’ only safety, Israelis will be uncompromising. As long as the conviction of displacement remains, Palestinians will be uncompromising.
This has obviously not led to a solution. But it would allow the debate to take place about what is really going on. Is Israel the only safety of the Jews? If not, what is the alternative? If so, what is the minimum needed (in territory, in law) for Israel to continue to exist as a Jewish state? Were Palestinians displaced by the state of Israel? If so, is there any kind of compensation that would suffice to make up for that, while allowing Israel to remain? If not, how can one counter a narrative that is so deeply entrenched — with facts? with compassion? with arms? with money?
G