I define the term “narrative” here as a version of reality – a story told about a chain of events that organizes selectively chosen facts while being influenced by ideology. The same chain of events can be organized into many narratives, especially if influenced by different ideologies.
The separate narratives we live in very much impact how we relate to history, to ourselves and to each other in this country. Both sides tend to approach the conflict as a zero-sum game where there can only be one winner. And the conflict continues to rage partially because many of us are so trapped within our narrow paradigms that we refuse to acknowledge how things may look from different perspectives.
Advocates on both sides often cite hard facts to support their positions.
And while these facts might be true, they are not the only facts. And how we select, connect, contextualize and understand them is very much determined by the narratives we live in.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should state that I am an Israeli living in the occupied/disputed/liberated (depending on your movie) territories. I subscribe to what modern scholars would call a primordialist understanding of Jewish national identity – knowing exactly which ancient Hebrew tribe and sub-tribe I descend from – and I self-identify as Semitic and fully native to the region. I admit to psychologically living in the narrative of Jewish history. The protagonist of my story is the collective children of Israel. The antagonists are actually not the Palestinians but rather anyone standing in the way of my people’s liberation. I honestly don’t feel myself motivated by Jewish suffering so much as by what Israel has aspired toward for thousands of years.
So while many Zionists often relate to the Jewish people as an object with a problem (anti-Semitism, assimilation, persecution, etc.), I relate to my people as a subject with desires. And I’m proud to live a life very much inspired by those desires and dedicated to their realization.
But while I relate to the Jewish narrative as unequivocally true, I am open to the idea that it is not the entire truth and that another people has experienced the past century within a radically different context. I recognize the Palestinian movie to not only be valid but also necessary for people in my movie to understand in order for us to achieve peace and advance our liberation.
The events of 1948, for example, are understood and experienced very differently in our respective narratives. For Israelis, that war is all about how many Arab armies we had to beat back to survive. Many of us tend to hear Palestinian grievances over the Nakba, or catastrophe, as the gripes of sore losers trying to manipulate the story in order to cast themselves as victims of Zionist aggression. But for Palestinians, the Nakba isn’t some propaganda tool but actually something very real and painful we Israelis need to acknowledge and come to terms with.
Israelis and Palestinians are actually both victims of our conflict (in very different ways). And we often both feel victimized by the same policies yet blame one another for our respective plights. The Oslo Accords, for instance, are viewed by many Palestinians as a Zionist plot against them, while many Jews see those accords as a PLO scheme to destroy the State of Israel. And the truth is that Oslo and its derivatives have been disastrous for both peoples, having only served to drive our populations further apart while impeding a genuine peace process that could actually bring each side to appreciate the narrative of the Other while simultaneously being able to remain true to its own.
Over the years I’ve become involved in peace work that focuses on facilitating dialogue sessions for Palestinians and Jews living east of the Green Line that help participants transcend their competing generic narratives and create the crucial space for each of our collections of facts to become part of a larger truth.
A meaningful dialogue requires that we respect each other’s story, as well as our self-definitions within those stories.
My Palestinian counterparts do not need to accept my narrative as the sole objective truth but they do need to understand this to be the movie I’m living in. We can debate, for example, whether Jews living in the West Bank (or any part of Israel) are natives or colonizers, but it must at least be understood that the overwhelming majority of Israelis so deeply take our own indigeneity here for granted that we have trouble understanding how anyone could think otherwise.
I’ve often seen Palestinian activists struggle with this point because the notion of Jews being native to the country – actually being a Semitic people with deep historic roots here – challenges a narrative that has until now only been able to experience us as alien settler-colonialists.
It is also regrettably difficult for most Israelis (on both sides of the line) to recognize the truth in the Palestinian movie and to understand that regardless of whether Jews are natives or colonizers – or whether Israel’s presence in the territories legally constitutes an occupation of foreign land, the Palestinians are experiencing a repressive occupation perpetrated by people they perceive to be European invaders to their country. And like many Palestinians who seem to feel threatened by the notion of Jewish peoplehood and Jewish indigeneity to this land, many Israelis feel threatened by the notion of a Palestinian people or the legitimacy of its grievances.
This also illustrates the way different meanings are ascribed to some of the same words in each movie. The average Israeli might be offended by a term like “occupation” because he hears it as implying Jews have no rights or connection to the cradle of Jewish civilization. But Palestinians are very much living under a military occupation and Israelis need to realize that in the Palestinian narrative this word has little to do with whether or not Jews can live in – or even possess sovereignty over – the West Bank.
There is so much blame and pain powering this conflict. And acknowledging the narrative of the Other often feels like betraying our own. But if we can learn to see the greater story comprising both of our smaller stories and define the core aspirations and grievances of each side, we can begin to chart a course that allows both peoples to be protagonists in a single story that successfully transcends the dualistic “Arab versus Jew” paradigm and enables us all to experience the fulfillment of our deepest yearnings.
