A MUST READ “Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians left Israel during the war. This is stark historical fact. But within Israel, the telling of how and why this happened is contested. Nations have creation stories, a univocal, unifying narrative that holds the polis together. So much of how we understand what it means to be American, or Filipino, or Iranian, comes from the stories we tell ourselves about our history as a people. As Susan Sontag put it, “What is called”collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened.”These shared histories may be intersected, or dissected, by other shared histories: of a religious tradition, or an ethnic group, for example. But at its root, the shared history of a nation is sunk deep in a place, the lived experience of a particular piece of land. Such founding myths are essential to the coalescence of a national identity, especially in its early years. This is particularly true in a case like Israel, whose new citizens came from highly diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Only when a nation is well established, its survival assured, and its identity secure, can it afford different voices the space to present other narratives. For first-generation Israelis, their stories about the 1948 War centred around the experience of their “David versus Goliath” victory against Arab invaders, even though the numbers don’t bear that out. The displacement of Palestinian Arabs didn’t have a place in that story. If anything, what was remembered was that they ran away. Winning election after election, David Ben-Gurion and his Labour Zionist successors governed Israel uninterrupted for thirty years. All of them had lived through the war. Their socialist brand of Zionism formed the national ethos in those first decades of Israel’s existence. The Zionist narrative, at its zenith, was accepted as self-evident,” writes Israeli sociologist Michael Feige. “Although it was challenged by anti-Zionists, certain [religious] Jewish communities, and even within the Zionist camp itself … the national narrative was understood as ‘objective history,’ and was taken at face value as irrefutable truth by most Israeli Jews.” It’s instructive to look at how the narrative of 1948 was portrayed in Israeli high-school textbooks at the time. Elie Podeh has studied history and memory in the Israeli educational system, and he examines how textbooks function both as village storytellers and as “supreme historical court” in the shaping and instilling of a shared national identity. According to Podeh, textbooks written in those early decades presented a straightforward account of the war in which Israeli forces bore no responsibility for causing the refugee problem. Discussing the departure of the Palestinians, one book “euphemistically used the terms ‘left,’ ‘departed,’ ‘abandoned,’ ‘deserted’ and ‘fled’” — words which are loaded with the victors’ thinly veiled contempt for the defeated. “The Arabs began fleeing the country’s towns and villages several weeks before the official end of the British Mandate,” says a textbook from 1960. “The Arab population’s spirit was broken and the result was a mass, panic-stricken flight. This process was accelerated by vicious, hate-filled Arab propaganda that stuck terror into the hearts of its listeners and served to pour oil on troutroubled waters. The Arabs were deceived by their foolish leaders into believing that they would soon return home triumphantly, drive the Jews away and seize their property as the just fruits of war.” One 1948 textbook teaches that the Jews even “bid their neighbours to stay,” but “the Arabs preferred to leave.” Podeh points out that these books were largely written by European Jews whose frame of reference was shaped by the Holocaust. For them, Arab violence was refracted through the lens of anti-Jewish pogroms, and any other understandings became invisible.” Excerpt From: Roberts, Jo. “Contested Land, Contested Memory.” Dundurn. iBooks.
Posted on: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 11:14:38 +0000
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