by Ilan Pappe
February 13, 2006Why is the history of modern Palestine such a matter of debate? Why is it still regarded as a complex, indeed obscure, chapter in contemporary history that cannot be easily deciphered? Any abecedarian student of its past who comes to it with clean hands would immediately recognize that in fact its story is very simple. For that matter it is not vastly different from other colonialist instances or tales of national liberation.
It of course has its distinctive features, but in the grand scheme of things it is the chronicle of a group of people who left their homelands because they were persecuted and went to a new land that they claimed as their own and did everything in their power to drive out the indigenous people who lived there. Like any historical narrative, this skeleton of a story can be, and has been, told in many different ways. However, the naked truth about how outsiders coveted someone else's country is not sui generis, and the means they used to obtain their newfound land have been successfully employed in other cases of colonization and dispossession throughout history.
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The Zionist narrative is as simple a story as the history of the conflict itself. The Jews redeemed their lost and ancient homeland after two thousand years of exile, and when they "returned" they found it derelict, arid, and practically uninhabited. There were others on the land, but they were basically nomads, the kind of people you could, as Theodor Herzl wrote in 1895, "spirit away" outside the Promised Land. Still, the empty land somehow remained populated, and not only this, but the elusive population rebelled and tried to harm the Jewish returnees. Like any other narrative, this one too can be laid out elegantly and scholarly or conveyed coarsely and simply. It can appear as a sound bite on American television when a suicide bombing is "contexualized," or it can dominate a book produced by one of the prestigious university publishing houses in the West. But however verbose or taciturn Israel's advocates may be, the historical narrative they insist on broadcasting is a false representation of the past and present realities in the land of Palestine.
In academia, the Israeli claim of complexity and the Zionist time line as a whole have been exposed as propaganda at best. Similarly, the pendulum has swung in favor of many principal chapters in the Palestinian narrative, regarded hitherto as an Oriental fable. The emergence of critical and post-Zionist scholarship in Israel helped this process along by providing internal deconstruction of the Zionist metanarrative and accepting many historical claims made by the Palestinians, especially with regard to the events of 1948. The group of "new Israeli historians" who have focused on 1948 have endorsed the basic Palestinian argument that the native people were forcefully dispossessed in what today would be called an ethnic- cleansing operation.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=9719
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