Restoring some balance to history

I hope readers gander at the shared links over to the right, but Bob's got a great post up that needs a billboard in Times Sqaure (where even the NYPD has flashing neon). There are a lot of bizarre notions going around about the nature of truth. It starts with the entirely reasonable observation that truth is socially constructed (to varying degrees we can argue about, noting that this arguing is an act of socially constructing something), but somehow ends up with the notion that anything Jews have ever said about Israel is necessarily a lie.

History is in the footnotes

At least, that's often the way it feels with the Isreali/Palestinian conflict. The JTA blog posts a footnote, explaining their conventions for describing someone from eastern Jerusalem as either Arab or Palestinians when most residents of eastern Jerusalem are accurate described either way.

Now, here’s where things get tricky. Eastern Jerusalem is code for the part of Jerusalem that was controlled by Jordan until the 1967 Six-Day War — i.e. Arab. But now Jerusalem is a united city, since Israel annexed East Jerusalem in the war’s aftermath (though almost no one in the international community officially recognizes that action). When East Jerusalem became part of Israeli Jerusalem (and we began calling it “eastern Jerusalem” — note the lowercase), the Arabs who lived there were offered Israeli citizenship. Some accepted it, but most did not. Virtually all, however, were granted Israeli ID cards.

Make sense? Well, unfortunately, a great deal of the way we talk about the conflict only kinda makes sense. It's convention to avoid footnotes.

Yitz Jordan cuts through the footnotes:

Mr. Dwayat benefitted no one, actions like his benefit no one, and no person or group of people has ever truly emerged “victorious” from a terrorist incident such as this. The only people who will see any positive effect from the carnage in Jerusalem are the propagandists who will use the spilled blood to fuel their mind-control engines, pumping this up in various media outlets as either a “victory” or a “strike at the enemy”.

Unfortunately, no matter how true, this observation doesn't advise anyone (who will listen) going forward.

Stephen Scheinberg on Nakba Day

At Meretz USA:

Those of you who have heard my editorials know that I have often expressed my sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people and have criticized Israel for not being as vigorous in the pursuit of peace as she is in settlement construction. However, my sympathy does not extend to the commemoration of the Palestinian Nakba [catastrophe] Day which has become an annual, mass cry of anguish blaming only Israel and her allies for the Palestinian catastrophe. The occasion of Israel’s 60th anniversary was used by many writers and groups, while certainly not all, to assess her progress and reflect on where Israel is heading; important questions were raised such as whether Israel would endure as both a Jewish and democratic state.

I have seen no evidence that the Palestinians have undertaken a similarly, perhaps painful, self-assessment on Nakba day.

Historiographies

If people are going to quote Benny Morris, they'd at least better get it right. (Once again, via Jeff Weintraub, who himself offers a tip of the hat to Tom Carew.)

In defiance of the will of the international community, as embodied in the UN General Assembly Resolution of November 29th, 1947 (No. 181), they launched hostilities against the Jewish community in Palestine in the hope of aborting the emergence of the Jewish state and perhaps destroying that community. But they lost; and one of the results was the displacement of 700,000 of them from their homes.

Not being an historian myself, I'm reluctant to criticize Morris on specific grounds, though I do have questions about what he says. But I have no problem criticizing those who would quote him in dishonest ways. While he did play a major role in revising the common historiography of the creation of the state of Israel, too many people take his work for far more than it is. I have seen people site him, exaggerating that "there were no Arab radio broadcasts urging the Arabs to flee en masse" by not acknowledging that:

on the local level, in dozens of localities around Palestine, Arab leaders advised or ordered the evacuation of women and children or whole communities, as occurred in Haifa in late April, 1948. And Haifa's Jewish mayor, Shabtai Levy, did, on April 22nd, plead with them to stay, to no avail.

The point here is not to deny the suffering of the Palestinians, but to avoid demonizing Israelis (or, actually, "Zionists"). People who misquote Morris often argue that all Palestinians' actions are forgiven in the context of the "Zionist" original sin of establishing Israel. Such an argument, though, assumes the "Zionists" were responsible for everything that happened, but they were not the only people capable of acting. Not only were the Palestinians capable of action (and not just animalistic, reflexive reaction), but the "Zionists" did not have absolute control over how history happened.