Rashid Khalidi: The challenges of writing Palestinian history
[Rashid Khalidi holds the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies at Columbia University, where he directs the Middle East Institute. This essay is adapted from his new book, ``The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood" (Beacon Press). ]
AS I WRITE, with rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah unable to agree on the fundamental basis for a new coalition government, and with the devastating effects of the Israeli and international boycott provoked by Hamas's victory in last January's elections, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza Strip appears to be tottering. Whether it survives or not, the prospect of the independent state that the Palestinians have never had, and that many expected to emerge from this Authority, seems as distant as ever.
The United Nations resolution of 1947 that led to the establishment of Israel called for such a state. In the years before that, Palestinians similarly failed to win independence from the British, who held a League of Nations mandate over Palestine, in part because of internal rivalries, but also because of the constellation of forces arrayed against them.
Why did the Palestinians fail to establish an independent state before 1948, and what was the impact of that failure in the years that followed, down to the present? These questions are important, first, because Palestinian history must be properly understood if we are to comprehend the present, and because this history has significance in its own right.
In the West this is a hidden history, one that is obscured by the riveting and tragic narrative of modern Jewish history. In a sense, the history of the Palestinians has disappeared under the powerful impact of the painful and amply recounted story of the catastrophic fate of the Jews of Europe in the 20th century. However, achieving any serious understanding of the Middle East conflict requires comprehension of Palestinian history in its own terms, which includes but cannot be subsumed by Jewish and Israeli history.
This effort is important for another reason: namely, to ascribe agency to the Palestinians, to avoid seeing them either as no more than helpless victims of forces greater then themselves, or alternatively as driven solely by self-destructive tendencies and uncontrollable dissension.
The Palestinians were facing an uphill struggle from the beginning of the British Mandate over Palestine in 1920 and still face one today. Palestinian society and politics were and are divided and faction-ridden, in ways that gave hostile forces many cleavages to exploit. But the Palestinians had many assets, were far from helpless, and often faced a range of choices, whether in the 1920s or the 1990s, some of which were better, or at least less bad, than others.
Writing this history from such a perspective makes it possible to put the Palestinians at the center of a critical phase of their own story, and also to understand some of their present dilemmas. Doing so, however, is an uphill struggle in itself, and the unique challenges it presents reflect some of the larger challenges that have faced, and still face, the Palestinian quest for statehood.
ALTHOUGH A FRESH LOOK at Palestinian history is needed, it cannot be ``revisionist" history in the standard sense, along the lines of what has emerged from Israel in recent years. Revisionist history requires as a foil an established, authoritative master narrative that is fundamentally flawed in some way. Thus, the ``revisionist" works written by a number of Israeli historians-such as Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev, and Benny Morris-argue against the country's nationalist mythology, which has become the backbone of the received version of the history of the conflict as it is perceived in the West.
One of the most important of these myths about the infant state of Israel has the number of Arab armies that invaded Israel after its establishment ranging from five to seven. However, there were only seven independent Arab states in 1948, two of which, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, did not even have regular armies. Lebanon's army never crossed the international frontier, Transjordan's and Iraq's never entered the territory the UN allotted to the Jewish state, while Syria's made only minor incursions. The only serious incursion into the territory of the Jewish state was that of the Egyptian army. This story of an invasion by multiple, massive Arab armies is not just an important element of the Israeli myth of origin, it is a nearly universal myth.
By contrast, there is no established, authoritative Palestinian master narrative, although there is a popular Palestinian nationalist narrative that includes its share of myth. Some of the myths worth debunking in the Palestinian version of events include mistaken and simplistic ideas relating to the Zionist movement and Israel and their connections with the Western powers; the relation of Zionism to the course of modern Jewish history; notably a failure to understand the central place of the Holocaust in this history; and the reductionist view of Zionism as no more than a colonialist enterprise-it was both this and a national movement. Deconstructing such misconceived notions on both sides will be crucially important to an eventual reconciliation of the two peoples....
Read entire article at Boston Globe
AS I WRITE, with rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah unable to agree on the fundamental basis for a new coalition government, and with the devastating effects of the Israeli and international boycott provoked by Hamas's victory in last January's elections, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza Strip appears to be tottering. Whether it survives or not, the prospect of the independent state that the Palestinians have never had, and that many expected to emerge from this Authority, seems as distant as ever.
The United Nations resolution of 1947 that led to the establishment of Israel called for such a state. In the years before that, Palestinians similarly failed to win independence from the British, who held a League of Nations mandate over Palestine, in part because of internal rivalries, but also because of the constellation of forces arrayed against them.
Why did the Palestinians fail to establish an independent state before 1948, and what was the impact of that failure in the years that followed, down to the present? These questions are important, first, because Palestinian history must be properly understood if we are to comprehend the present, and because this history has significance in its own right.
In the West this is a hidden history, one that is obscured by the riveting and tragic narrative of modern Jewish history. In a sense, the history of the Palestinians has disappeared under the powerful impact of the painful and amply recounted story of the catastrophic fate of the Jews of Europe in the 20th century. However, achieving any serious understanding of the Middle East conflict requires comprehension of Palestinian history in its own terms, which includes but cannot be subsumed by Jewish and Israeli history.
This effort is important for another reason: namely, to ascribe agency to the Palestinians, to avoid seeing them either as no more than helpless victims of forces greater then themselves, or alternatively as driven solely by self-destructive tendencies and uncontrollable dissension.
The Palestinians were facing an uphill struggle from the beginning of the British Mandate over Palestine in 1920 and still face one today. Palestinian society and politics were and are divided and faction-ridden, in ways that gave hostile forces many cleavages to exploit. But the Palestinians had many assets, were far from helpless, and often faced a range of choices, whether in the 1920s or the 1990s, some of which were better, or at least less bad, than others.
Writing this history from such a perspective makes it possible to put the Palestinians at the center of a critical phase of their own story, and also to understand some of their present dilemmas. Doing so, however, is an uphill struggle in itself, and the unique challenges it presents reflect some of the larger challenges that have faced, and still face, the Palestinian quest for statehood.
ALTHOUGH A FRESH LOOK at Palestinian history is needed, it cannot be ``revisionist" history in the standard sense, along the lines of what has emerged from Israel in recent years. Revisionist history requires as a foil an established, authoritative master narrative that is fundamentally flawed in some way. Thus, the ``revisionist" works written by a number of Israeli historians-such as Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev, and Benny Morris-argue against the country's nationalist mythology, which has become the backbone of the received version of the history of the conflict as it is perceived in the West.
One of the most important of these myths about the infant state of Israel has the number of Arab armies that invaded Israel after its establishment ranging from five to seven. However, there were only seven independent Arab states in 1948, two of which, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, did not even have regular armies. Lebanon's army never crossed the international frontier, Transjordan's and Iraq's never entered the territory the UN allotted to the Jewish state, while Syria's made only minor incursions. The only serious incursion into the territory of the Jewish state was that of the Egyptian army. This story of an invasion by multiple, massive Arab armies is not just an important element of the Israeli myth of origin, it is a nearly universal myth.
By contrast, there is no established, authoritative Palestinian master narrative, although there is a popular Palestinian nationalist narrative that includes its share of myth. Some of the myths worth debunking in the Palestinian version of events include mistaken and simplistic ideas relating to the Zionist movement and Israel and their connections with the Western powers; the relation of Zionism to the course of modern Jewish history; notably a failure to understand the central place of the Holocaust in this history; and the reductionist view of Zionism as no more than a colonialist enterprise-it was both this and a national movement. Deconstructing such misconceived notions on both sides will be crucially important to an eventual reconciliation of the two peoples....