/ 1 November 2024

Israel: There are two ‘truths’ to every story

Israel Palestinian Conflict Annexation Settlers Health Virus
(Photo by MENAHEM KAHANA / AFP)

It is hardly surprising that Drew Forrest (Israel’s ‘settler logic of elimination’, Mail & Guardian, 24 October 2024) chooses Ilan Pappe and Shlomo Sand to delegitimise — or at least attempt to delegitimise — the Jewish state. One polemicist recognises others. Forrest also signals his intentions by excavating the work of Ze’ev Herzog, a revisionist Israeli archaeologist who has challenged the historicity of the Bible. Nothing new in this. In fact Herzog’s arguments and the reaction to his work in Israel tell us more about the open nature of scholarly inquiry in that country than about ancient Israel. 

Forrest should know that there are two sides to any conflict and then there is the truth. Bolstering one’s prejudices with tendentious accounts is an abuse of history. 

Pappe knows all about that. He is a sociologist, disgraced by even left-wing (and revisionist) scholars of Israel. Known for his cherry-picking and self-admitted postmodernism, Pappe should be read with circumspection. Consider his own warning in A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, which Pappe published in 2004: My [pro-Palestinian] bias is apparent despite the desire of my peers that I stick to facts and the ‘truth’ when reconstructing past realities. I view any such construction as vain and presumptuous … In short, mine is a subjective approach.”

This is refreshingly honest, even for a sociologist and a communist. Pappe has no wish to write serious history. Nor is he able to empathise with historical options in real time and in particular circumstances. Instead the past is fashioned in service of the present. This always results in poor history. Did Herbert Butterfield, the Cambridge historian and philosopher, not warn us against the pitfalls of “presentism” more than 90 years ago? “When we organise our general history with a reference to the present,” he wrote, “we are producing what is really a giant optical illusion.” 

Forrest seems not to know that Pappe massages the past to fulfil his wishes. Why should he question Pappe’s “truth” — a “truth” that has been savaged by the likes of the eminent Israeli historian Benny Morris who by no measure is a right winger? Who cares that Pappe had it wrong when he claimed that one third of the overall casualties in the Palestinian intifada of 1987-91 were women? In fact, B’Tselem (an Israeli human rights group fondly relied upon by Israel’s enemies) revealed that 1100 Palestinians died at the hands of Israeli army and security personnel during that uprising, and of these, 56 were women? Is it a crime to claim that the UN partition vote in 1947 broke even when in reality 33 voted for, 13 against, and 10 abstained?

These errors might appear to be immaterial, but they should at least serve as a warning to readers, even if they have an axe to grind. Pappe was mistaken to claim that there were one million Palestinians living outside Palestine by the end of the 1948 war. There were no more than 300 000. And to suggest that the activities of the fedayeen in the early 1950s were attempts to recover lost property is to dismiss what were in reality terror activities. In his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006) Pappe went so far as to misread the “Shimshon” project and to accuse Israelis of planning to gas the Palestinians. Morris has argued that this conclusion was wilfully arrived at by the incorrect translation of a Hebrew entry in Ben Gurion’s diary and the omission of words that did not suit Pappe’s case. 

Forrest unfortunately uses texts that support his views. He does this also with the work of Shlomo Sand. Although the Tel Aviv University historian is more serious than Pappe, little in The Invention of the Jewish People (2010) is original. No serious scholar assumes today that all Jews are descended from the ancient Hebrews or that the conversion of the Khazars in the 10th century has been excised by Zionists writing in the service of a pure Israeli lineage? Sand is correct to dwell on the construction of an Israeli national identity, but this is common to all nation-states, not least to the Palestinians whose construction of peoplehood in many ways mirrors that of the Zionists. If Forrest had read Sand closely, he would have appreciated that much of his work implicitly undercuts Herzog’s archaeological conclusions. In any event, Sand ought to acknowledge that a shared and multi-layered Jewish identity evolved over time — an identity moulded by common experiences. 

The lengths to which Forrest goes to show that the Jewish demographic presence in “Palestine” was much lower than people imagine demonstrates his wish to undermine the “Zionist project” rather than to understand it. It is surely no surprise that only a tiny minority of Jews remained in Judea after two failed uprisings against their Roman conquerors who renamed the territory “Palestina” (derived from the age-old enemy of the Judeans, the Philistines) and the Muslim conquest and “occupation” of the Land of Israel in the seventh century.  

Forrest ignores or seems not to care about the Zionist mindset — a mindset informed by failed Jewish emancipation in the 19th century and built upon the decimation of Jews during the Crusades of the 11th century, the carnage that followed the European “Black Death” in the 14th, the expulsion of Jews from Spain in the 15th, the Khmelnitsky massacres of Jews in southern Europe in the 17th, the murder of more than 100 000 Jews in the Russian Civil War of 1918-20, the extermination of almost six million Jews in Holocaust, and the effectively forced emigration (ethnic cleansing) of about 900 000 Jews from Arab lands.  

Rightly or wrongly the national liberation of the Jewish people was considered a solution to the “Jewish Question”. Turning to the “Land of Israel” (where there had always been a Jewish presence) was predictable. It has always occupied a central place in Jewish memory. Burgeoning secularisation in the 19th century opened the way. Jews would no longer await the Messiah to turn dreams into reality. 

If Forrest widened his reading, he would not label the Zionists as “settler-colonialists”. Jews ruled the Judean kingdoms and prayed in the Jerusalem Temple for a thousand years, despite some archaeological finds that challenged aspects of the biblical record.The reality is that Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel.  

When Zionism as a political movement emerged, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire. Thereafter it was mandated to Britain. In 1921, 80% of the “Palestine” region of the former Turkish Empire was lopped off to the Arabs. 

Of course we know that Palestine was not a “land without people for a people without a land” — as Zionist propaganda would have it. But we also know that Jewish liturgy and prayer focused for millennia on Jerusalem and on the return of Jews to their historic homeland. It should also be noted that land was purchased by Jews (mainly through the Jewish National Fund) from Arab landowners. 

For the most part, Zionists wished to reach a modus vivendi with the Arabs. There were, moreover, many indications that this was possible. To date, however, the Palestinians have shown little interest. War has been the preferred option. Palestinians have refused to accept what most scholarly observers have described as reasonable offers in a conflict that will require Solomonic wisdom to resolve. Attempts at a two-state solution began with the Peel Commission Report of 1937, going on to the UN partition plan of 1947, and thereafter to serious efforts at Camp David (2000) and Taba (2001). 

Milton Shain is emeritus professor of historical studies at the University of Cape Town.