Who is the mightiest of the mighty? ... Some say: he who is able to turn his
enemy into a friend. -Avot d'Rabbi Nathan version A chapter 23
One of the obstacles to the creation of a political future shared by Jews and
Arabs in Israel, as discussed in the last entry, is perhaps the fact that we
don't share an understanding of the past. And the fact that the story told by
the Other casts doubt on the truth of the story we tell about ourselves
consistently makes us so angry that we can't continue the conversation.
We know: We once lived in this land and ruled it as a sovereign kingdom, in
which Judaism was the state religion and worship centered in the Temple in the
capital city, Jerusalem. Refusing to acquiesce in foreign conquest, first by the
Babylonians and later by the Romans, we rebelled; those rebellions were put down
with violence, our sovereignty was lost, and most of the people were forced (by
the conquerors or by conditions resulting from the conquest) to leave. For two
millennia we lived as an often persecuted minority, remembering from generation
to generation our "good old days" and longing for a return to the land and
restoration of our sovereignty. Modernization did not improve our lot in Europe,
and from the beginning of the 20th century we began to try to return
and reclaim our land and re-establish our state. The Holocaust made clear our
vulnerability without a state. The world accepted our claim, and the United
Nations voted to allow us to establish a state in a portion of our historical
domain. The Arabs who had moved in in our absence rejected our claim and the UN
decision, and did whatever they could to thwart our efforts, up to and including
war. Thus, the only way we could in fact attain – and maintain – sovereignty was
through force of arms.
The Arabs know: While the Jews may (or may not, depending on your acceptance
of the Bible as history) have once had a sovereign state here, they left of
their own accord, while we continued to live here, a life style and a culture
rooted in the soil, generation after generation. The Jews who began to immigrate
at the turn of the 20th century did so in the context of European
colonialism, believing it was their right to take over the lands of the
non-European world for their own benefit. The Jews forced us off our land,
having bought the land from absentee landowners. They introduced a foreign
culture and made it clear that they wished to create a European-style state run
by them. They claimed that the Holocaust somehow gave them the right to claim
this land, but we were not responsible for their troubles in Europe and refused
to see why they should be compensated at our expense. The world, dominated by
Europeans, rejected our right of self determination in our ancestral land,
leaving us no option except violence.
This zero sum game is self-perpetuating, for if either side grants any credit
to the story of the other side, it gives up its status as helpless, persecuted
victim and maybe even the moral justification of its claim to full ownership of
the land. A variation on this game is for the Palestinians to insist that the
Jews are a religion, not a nationality, thus having no claim to a state; to
which the Jews respond that the Palestinians are not an authentic nationality
but a 20th century invention, created as a tool against the Jewish state.
There can be no conversation (that is not just simultaneous screaming) until
each side is prepared to step up and say, "I admit that to some extent, at
least, I am responsible, I perhaps could and should have behaved differently,
the situation is more complicated than the story I have kept telling." Of
course, why should I say that until I hear the other side say it? Well, maybe
that's the only way out. Or maybe that will just lead nowhere – which is, it
seems, where we are already.
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