For history, not narratives

Today, November 9th, is the anniversary of Kristallnacht. That's the night in 1938 of the Nazi-organized mass burning of synagogues, wrecking of hundreds of Jewish homes and businesses and the murder of 91 Jews across Germany.

It's got a particular resonance with me because both my parents were in Berlin that night. My father was in hiding. He managed to avoid getting rounded up as part of the mass deportation of Polish Jews that happened in the early hours of October 28th. It was a bureaucratic oversight. My grandfather and the only one of his three sons still in Germany weren't so lucky.

My father's warning phone call came just too late. The Gestapo had come knocking on the door of the family flat in the early hours of the morning and arrested them.  They were deported and dumped in the no-man's land on the Polish-German border.

The day after Kristallnacht, two surprising things happened.

My mother was working in the office of the Jewish-owned motor factors where she had a job as a book-keeper. Although she had an outstandingly brilliant academic record, there was no chance she was going to go to university. As a Jew, she was excluded. A bunch of SA (Nazi militia) walked into the store. My mother was in the back office.

Es sind hier Juden? (Are there are any Jews here?)

No, shot back the German gentile man behind the counter.

The SA turned and walked out.

Whenever I remember that story, I wonder what would have happened to my mother if the man had said yes....

Later, the gentile caretaker of my grandparents' synagogue came round to the family flat. The synagogue had been burnt out. But he had my grandfather's top hat, kept at the synagogue for his ceremonial role as a senior Jewish community honorary officer, which he had saved from the flames. He wanted to return it to its owner, who unfortunately was no longer there to receive it.

There's virtually no coverage of the anniversary in today's media.

But there has been a great deal of coverage over the last few days of the tenth anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin's murder.

What really interests me is the difference between the way bloggers and their readers are discussing that anniversary on Israeli and UK-based blog sites.

The Israeli blog sites are almost all centred on two themes. The first is remembering what they were doing, and how they felt that night and in the following days and weeks. And the second is on speculating what might have been had Rabin not been murdered. Most of the posts are nostalgic, and filled with longing for the remembered optimism of the dream of peace of those days.

But it's quite another story on UK-based Harry's Place. Gene's post follows the same themes as the Israeli bloggers. But the comments rapidly become a complex of battles between radically opposed commenters.

I once heard one of the HP team characterize their commenters as like those gangs of English football hooligans who make arrangements to meet in obscure car parks and motorway service stations so they can give each other a good kicking.

There are those who want to argue about whether whether Netanyahu or Rabin deserve the very different reputations they have. But the commenters rapidly turn it into a debate, or perhaps a dialogue of the deaf, about whether the Israeli or the Palestinian cause is entirely in the right or entirely in the wrong.

And that immediately morphs into a discussion about whether which of two narratives is to be adopted-- the Israeli or the Palestinian.

One commenter objects to this, set off by this example:

"The greatness of Rabin (which a small-minded Barak never matched and the crooked Bibi never aspired to) was to understand in his last years that the other side has narrative and a story of its own, to listen to it without giving up on his own narrative."

I am really struggling with the concept of competing narratives. It is not just a question of viewing the same facts from different perspectives, understanding where the "other" is coming from. I find even at pro-Zionist conferences now, everyone is paying at least lip service to the idea that we must not confront "the other" with any blatant, provable falsifications, but just say- we have 2 narratives here. This, even in the case of the shooting of Muhamed al Durah, which appears convincingly to have been shown at seconddraft.org to have been falsified, and despite the consequence of accepting the other narrative in the Durah incident as being the fulcrum of incendiary hostility to Israel throughout the world. Would we say to someone who is propogating the Protocols- oh it is just a different narrative? This would clearly be a postmodernism too far. Richard Evans passionately addresses the problem of abandoning objectively ascertainable history in his book, In Defence of History and he has experience of how this can end up with the "historical" narrative of David Irving. But how far do other commenters believe it appropriate to entertain the two narratives concept?

Well, I'm someone wholly opposed to entertaining this concept.

It's funny, isn't it, that this use of "narratives" to discuss historical conflicts and related debates is never applied outside the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

We never hear about the Allied narrative versus the Nazi narrative, or about the Western narrative versus the Soviet narrative.

Or the Nazi narrative versus the Jewish narrative. Because in the case of the Kristallnacht story I related above, we'd be hearing the Nazi narrative that said that what happened that night was a totally spontaneous uprising of German wrath against the evildoing and murderous conspiracies of the Jews.

We don't talk about the British government narrative versus the IRA narrative or the Al Quaeda narrative.

We don't yet talk about the western narrative versus the Islamist narrative.

This "narrativization" process is pernicious, and its exclusive application to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict derives from Edward Said's sleight of hand, in his highly influential writings on orientalism and the conflict. He sought, with some considerable success, to substitute postmodernist literary critical concepts to replace historical and political analysis based on concepts like objectivity and even historical truth.

It reduces historical questions for which objective evidence exists to mere narratives which you choose between according to your political inclinations. Jack the Giant Killer versus the Big Friendly Giant. Alice in Wonderland versus Little Red Riding Hood.

Recasting historical debates as a choice between narratives creates a moral equivalence between meticulously documented historical research, which stands up to peer review, and mendacious falsifications and fabrications.

Behind it all lies a wish to get rid of very uncomfortable truths about the real causes and issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

And here's just one little example of what becomes fair play when you think it's all just a choice of "narratives" rather than objective history.

For, via the "Palestine" section of Global Voices Online  we have that site's "beloved Middle East Editor's personal blog's "Palestinian-narrative" oriented series of quotations from Israeli and Zionist leaders like Ben Gurion, Dayan and Ariel Sharon.

He offers these in support of his assertion that, just like the Iranian president with Israel, Israeli leaders sought to wipe the Palestinians off the map.

There's just one little problem. The quotations he cites are either faked or quoted so wildly out of context as to make them meaningless.

And in case you think there's no significance to what an obscure, if beloved, anti-zionist blogger from Bahrain says, you will find the same quotes cited on the site of Miftah, a very prestigious Palestinian site glorying in calling itself "The Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy", whose secretary is no less than the luminary Palestinian politician Hanan Ashrawi.

Not surprisingly, the site carries an article by Ashrawi in which she invokes the need to take on "the Palestinian narrative". In that particular case, she invokes the "narrative" in order to try to persuade the US government to stop putting pressure on Yasser Arafat to reign in Palestinian terrorists, and put pressure on Israel instead.

The United States and Israel need to talk to Arafat in order to address any serious issue. There is no reason for their boycott of him. It is childish and manipulative. If the United States is serious about peace, it has to deal with Palestinian realities, not realities manufactured in someone's mind.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian prime minister, cannot do anything on his own without the cooperation of Arafat, just as he needs the help of Fatah and the Palestinian Legislative Council. Everybody has been trying to help Abbas, but he also has to help himself and understand he gains his legitimacy from the people and not just from the Americans or the Israelis.

There is such a thing as killing with kindness, and this is what the United States is doing to Abbas. Washington needs to understand the sensitivities and the balances and the intricate relationships within Palestinian domestic politics.

The State Department seems to understand this dynamic of domestic politics, and I have tried to explain it to the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, who is beginning to understand that meddling in Palestinian politics could backfire. The Americans have to understand that when they attack Arafat, he gets more support; when they embrace Abbas, he gets less.

The problem is that within the White House and Pentagon, people don't have any connections with Palestinians. They still don't know the full Palestinian narrative and the Arab point of view that makes our politics tick. They tend to make simplistic decisions on the basis of the Israeli version, to which they are exposed daily.

I have been asked lately if all of this might deteriorate into civil war. There is an awareness among Palestinians that civil war would be fatal for everybody, but at the same time being aware of it does not mean being able to avert it. The only way to do that is to remove the pressures that are leading the Palestinians in that direction. The No. 1 source of pressure is the Israeli assassinations, followed by the siege, the destruction, the abductions and the prisoners.

There is also, of course, pressure on Arafat and Abbas to destroy the infrastructure of terrorism - even though Israel, which has been an occupying power all these years, has not been able to stop the violence. To call on the Palestinian Authority to stop what Israel couldn't stop is to set the authority up for a fall.

There are great many variants of the way in which an appeal to "the Palestinian narrative" is used as a justification for political finagling. Not the least of these is the myth that there is such a thing as a single "Palestinian narrative" which has stood like an eternal and unchanging established tale by an eternally unchanging people from the start of a conflict which goes back into at least the early years of the twentieth century.

For the concept of "the Palestinian narrative" itself glosses over one of the most successful rebranding operations of the last hundred years. The former united opposition of the Arab nations against Israel was controlled by the Arab League, the original instigator of blanket boycott action against any nation, company or individual shown to have a conection with Israel. Once the opposition to Israel was perceived to come from the Palestinians rather than the Arabs, Israel, the former underdog compared to the numbers and wealth of the Arab nations, became the overwhelming power opposed to the oppressed and dispossessed of the refugee camps.

So we can easily reconstruct an Arab nationalist narrative (with its goal the elimination of Israel to enable a single Arab baathist state to be established across the territory of Egypt, Israel and Jordan).

And these days, we need to recognise there is a competing narrative for the Palestinians. That's the Islamist narrative of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and their backers in Iran, which actually opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state, along with democracy, and wants a caliphate with a single Islamic ummah across the Middle East and beyond.

I hope to post further on the way in which "the Palestinian narrative" concept is used to evoke and cover a range of historical obfuscations and distortions. There's no shortage of candidates for deconstruction.

Comments

[JohnM]

I agree that the term "narrative" is widely used to discuss the Palestinian issue but not that it doesn't get used elsewhere. I would have said it is intrinsically linked with any discussion of identity politics. "Herstory" for example.

The BBC seemed to go through a phase of using the term several years ago and then it stopped. Nevertheless as a method it is still used as a filter to ensure that stories that tend to reinforce the supported narrative get reported, whereas others get ignored.

[Joanne]

I do think that the concept of "narrative" is a useful one. History is a complicated mess of facts and perspectives. Even as events happen, they're experienced differently by the actors involved. Scholars, journalists, and policymakers should try rigorously to understand the motivations and views of all sides.

That said, I nevertheless agree with your contention, Judy, that the concept of "narrative" can be abused. It's helpful when it sensitizes us to our own preconceptions or wishful thinking, and challenges us to work harder to understand points of view adversarial to our own. But it can be unhelpful when:

- It becomes a device for political manipulation, used to accuse those who don't accept every detail of the Palestinian viewpoint. After all, if all narratives are equally valid, then why is the "Israel narrative" often denied equal validity? It's one thing to say that we do not truly understand the ways in which the Palestinians have experienced the history of Israel/Palestine for the last 57 years. It's another to repeat that contention, not just to achieve fuller understanding and sympathy, but to get unquestioning support for Palestinian political objectives.

- Instead of encouraging us to take a more honest look at the other side's experience, it creates the opposite effect. The notion of narratives (and of relativism) can generate lazy, partisan scholarship among historians and political scientists. Since there is no objectivity, why even bother keeping up the pretense?

[Ami Isseroff]

You never hear about a Nazi or a Carthaginian narrative (or an American Indian aka Native American one) because the victors won the war. Often many many years later you hear about the other narrative.

Yes there are fake quotes at Miftah. Yes there are blood libels about Zionists killing children to steal their organs.

And it is important to remind anti-ZIonists that Arabs were massacring Jews in Palestine before any Arabs were massacred by Zionists as, in Hebron for example. http://www.zionism-israel.com/Hebron_Massacre1929.htm

It is incorrect to present two narratives uncriticallly, especially to children as I point here - http://www.mideastweb.org/log/archives/00000398.htm.

However, you can't say that our side's version is absolutely true, and that there is no truth at all in Arab Palestinian claims:

- There really were Arabs here way back when. My grandparents remembered them, and they parents remembered them. Joan Peters is wrong.

- Some Zionists did some really bad things. That doesn't invalidate Zionism, but we have to admit that it is true.

- Nobody ever can capture the whole truth in an unbiased way. We learn all the time. The little history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that I wrote (http://www.mideastweb.org/briefhistory.htm) with the help and corrections of our readers tries to provide both balance and accuracy. However, people are constantly pointing out errors or omissions that favor one side or another incorrectly. Fanatics of either side insist it is biased in the other direction, so I guess we did something right there.

[Stephen]

Joan Peters never argued that there were no Arabs in Palestine, and neither has her main argument been proven wrong by anyone. Daniel Pipes, while acknowledging the many flaws in her work, says this:

"[T]he book presents a thesis that neither Professor Porath nor any other reviewer has so far succeeded in refuting. Miss Peters's central thesis is that a substantial immigration of Arabs to Palestine took place during the first half of the twentieth century. She supports this argument with an array of demographic statistics and contemporary accounts, the bulk of which have not been questioned by any reviewer, including Professor Porath." Link: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/5172

[ami]

It was my comment at HP which is quoted in the post above.(I have always commented as ami, not to be confused with ami isserof) I have read ami isserof's first link above, and it is a very valid and laudable statement of the dangers of incorporating myths into narratives. I then skimmed the material about Deir Yassin -no time right now to read it all, and stopped at the section headed Deir Yassin revisited, where isserof says new Deir Yssins are being created on both sides, including a 12 year old boy "killed apparently by Israelis". This is the example of Muhamed Al Durah I give in my quoted comment, and by labelling something which even in 2001 when he wrote that comment was only apparent, as a new Deir Yassin, Isserof is doing just that- contributing to a new mythical narrative.

[Alex Bensky]

Gee, there are narratives and narratives. There's my narrative that the Holocaust happened and yours that it didn't. Who's to say which is correct?

This line of thinking offers possibilities: there's my narrative that Lucy Lawless is madly in love with me and her narrative that she doesn't know who the hell I am. Again, who can say which is correct?

[Amalek]

"There's my narrative that the Holocaust happened and yours that it didn't. Who's to say which is correct?"

The truth lies somewhere between-- with the Revisionists, 99% of whom are not 'deniers' (daft Zionist slur) at all and who disagree widely among themselves.

Since the official Holocaust story no longer shields Israel from the world's criticism, and since most survivors of the Second World War are dying off, my hunch is that large elements of the 'mainstream' version of the Shoah will be modified pretty drastically in the next 20 years. Especially the parts that originated in the fertile imaginations of Red Army propagandists.

For instance, we still hear that 6m Jews died by Nazi enemy action. Yet the foremost 'respectable' chronicler of those times, Raul Hilberg, makes it 5.1m and is not vilified in consequence. The gulf between the orthodox and the heterodox is not as absolute as the Devorah Lipstadts of this world make out.

[Marlene]

University history department professors are becoming the authors and dispensors of this Palestinian naarative. With all the peoples around the world, it is becoming the Palestinian "peoples" naarative that is being shoved to the forefront. Analysis of the Middle East does not focus on the problems and histories and conflicts within tribes and states, such as Sunnis, Kurds, Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, but rather the "Palestinian-Israeli Conflict" is analyzed and inflated to cover the impact Arab laws, governments, monarchies and tribal conflicts have on Middle East events. This is echoed in the media, where a typical day in the Sudan or Congo and the daily slaughters by Muslims and Human rights violations oparticularly against women, is completely ignored, while Palestinian "news" is reported daily, often on the front page. Even a slaughter of a whole village by Muslims in Sudan does not make it to the pages of the New York Times.

I believe that "Palestinianism" is a movement, that like communism, and fascism, must be battled and exposed wherever it takes hold. Indeed, Palestinianism is a tool used to allow fascism and Islamism to spread unhindered.