Writer's Block: How Historical Narratives Frustrate Israeli-Palestinian Peace

Conflict: this was the word that came to mind when I thought of the Jewish state. As a frequent consumer of both American and Pakistani media, I have read my fair share about tensions and negotiations with the Palestinians, but I am far from an expert.
This past March, I was preparing to travel with a group of about 50 other students to the land of Israel. A few weeks before my trip, however, I felt I still didn’t understand why peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority had been so elusive. I consulted a series of videos by The Atlantic titled, “Is Peace Possible?” The answer, to my surprise, was an emphatic “yes.” Of course, the project didn’t examine every single nuance to the decades-long conflict, but it clearly demonstrated that terms that would largely satisfy the needs of both sides were far from unreachable. Borders, security, refugees—none of these issues seemed impossible to resolve. My question, then, became this: why had they been impossible to resolve?
I soon discovered that I had been looking at the conflict completely incorrectly.
When I first landed in Tel Aviv, two other students and I were asked to undergo extra questioning before officially entering the country. I sat across the table from an immigrations officer, not unlike I had done in several other airports across the world. She asked me a few questions about my ethnic background and religion, before asking me this:
“Why are you coming to Israel?”
“Mainly tourism, I guess,” I said nonchalantly. “Oh, and I’m also really curious about Israeli and Jewish culture,” I added.
The first portion of my response didn’t elicit much of a reaction, but when I expressed an interest in the nation’s culture and history, a look of puzzlement and skepticism crept onto her face. It was quickly replaced by her normal, stoic stare, but I received the message. It didn’t make sense to her that I, a Muslim man of Pakistani origin, would travel all the way to Israel—a land holy to adherents of my faith—largely out of interest in the Jewish state and people. She wasn’t angry or upset, but simply confused. I didn’t fit the narrative.
In many ways, my brief experience in Ben Gurion International Airport was emblematic of a dimension of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is commonly glanced over by outside observers. A collective narrative, based on historical events and the emotions associated with them, often colors the way in which Israelis see themselves and their Palestinian neighbors, as well as the way in which they see the ongoing peace process. Meanwhile, Palestinians have their own narratives, which frequently contradict the Israeli perspective. These historical and emotional narratives do not show up explicitly when one examines the more practical, policy-oriented aspects of the conflict—how to address Palestinian refugees, how to assure Israeli security, et cetera—which is why, on paper, a deal might seem tenable. But as Daniel Shapiro, associate director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, told the HPR, “One could look at this problem very narrowly as a complication over the distribution of land, but that would completely belittle the nature of the conflict. … One needs to understand each side’s traumas, each side’s pride.”
An Ancient Story
One of the many people we heard from during our travels was Miri Maoz-Ovadia, a spokesperson for the Binyamin Regional Council, which represents 42 Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Illegal under international law and a complication to the peace process, these settlements are often seen as an encroachment on Palestinian land. However, that’s not how Miri sees them. “We see this as our homeland,” she told us. “We just want to live peacefully here.”
Miri was alluding to the presence of the Jewish people in the region for the past 3,500 years. More specifically, she may have been referencing the period from 1250 to 587 BCE, during which the ancient Israelites ruled over the area. Although there is no shortage of land of similar quality in Israeli territory, the symbolic act of continuing a historical narrative, for people like Miri, carries immeasurable importance, even though it creates challenges for negotiations. To her, her family’s settlement in the West Bank is completely reasonable—she is simply executing a historical right.
Gary Rendsburg, a professor of Jewish history at Rutgers University, spoke with the HPR about the historical importance of this idea of a Jewish homeland. “Even when you have various diaspora communities flourishing economically and culturally at different points in time, the yearning for a return is always there,” he explained. “It’s built into the liturgy. It’s built into the prayers—prayers asking God to return [the Jews] to Zion.”

This connection between modern-day Jews and the ancient Israelites is also reinforced institutionally. Yoav Schaefer ’15, a Harvard College student and former Israeli Defense Forces operative, told the HPR about an experience he had with his former reconnaissance unit. “After finishing our training, we had a long march to Masada.” Masada is an ancient Jewish fortress located atop a mountain in the Israeli desert. Over 2,000 years ago, when Roman troops laid siege to the stronghold, its Jewish inhabitants committed mass suicide in order to avoid capture. The site now serves as a source of pride for the Jewish people and a symbol of Jewish bravery. “You reach to the top of Masada, incredibly exhausted,” Schaefer continued, “and then what you scream is, ‘Masada will never fall again!’” Current IDF troops are taught to see themselves as the heirs to a historical tradition dating back thousands of years.
The Palestinian narrative tells a different story with regard to the expansion of settlements. They see it simply as further Israeli encroachment upon their land. To many Palestinians, it is a violation of the very spirit of the Oslo Accords, a series of agreements signed by Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, specifying that facts on the ground shouldn’t be changed unilaterally without prior talks. To others, it constitutes theft. In a 2010 poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, over 80 percent of Palestinians said they would oppose peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority if settlement construction continued. Perhaps Mohamed Oweidah, a resident of East Jerusalem and director of the Palestinian side of the Jersualem-based NGO Combatants for Peace, voiced the sentiment most clearly when a member in our travel group asked him about settlements in his home city. “If I’m being honest with you,” he said, “sometimes I feel like I have no rights … no freedom.”
The contradiction here is clear. Many Jews—especially those living in settlements, in my brief experience—see themselves as having a historic right or even duty to settle in the land of their ancestors. Palestinians, however, see the settlements as neglecting their own rights, more recently outlined by the United Nations and the Oslo Accords. Neither side’s claim is without justification, but the two narratives are irreconcilable.
A Tragic Past
Looking at the more recent past, the Holocaust is perhaps the single most salient event in the Jewish collective memory and has understandably taken a massive psychological toll on the Jewish people. Although the Zionist movement dates back decades before the Holocaust, in which an estimated six million Jews were murdered by Hitler’s Nazi regime, many Israelis and historians see the foundation of the state of Israel as a response to the devastation. The Jewish people needed a state of their own where they could live protected from the anti-Semitism that had plagued their European existence.
Unsurprisingly, the Holocaust is no stranger to political dialogue in Israel. As we exited the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, our guide left us with a few telling words. “Barack Obama,” she quoted, “once said here that it was not because of the Holocaust that Israel exists. Rather, he said, ‘It is because of Israel that the Holocaust will never happen again.’ Let’s hope and pray,” she continued, “that he remembers those words.” She was referencing President Obama’s increasingly strained relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, suggesting that American support for and cooperation with Israel was of existential importance for the Jewish state.
Before that point, I had never heard the Holocaust referenced in anything but a historical context. In Israel, though, the memory of the Holocaust motivates a preoccupation with security and defense readily apparent to any casual observer of Israeli politics. As Yoav told me, “Objectively, Israel has the most powerful military in the region. It’s not even close. But after something like the Holocaust, which actually happened very recently … people are still scared.” He also highlighted the role of contemporary factors—an unstable Middle East and a series of hostile neighbors—in shaping this subjective sense of fear and vulnerability, despite the country’s objective military strength.
Derived in part from the Holocaust, but also largely from immediate strategic considerations, Israel’s obsession with defense causes the country to place high priority on considerations of its own military security during negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. Israel, very conscious of the fact that it is the lone Jewish state in an often-hostile Arab region, holds protecting its people from a repetition of the European experience as one of its primary goals. Fears about the safety of the Jewish people have only been renewed by Iranian leaders’ repeated calls to destroy the state of Israel.
Many Palestinians, meanwhile, have a different narrative surrounding the Holocaust. Israeli military campaigns in Palestinian territories, as well as the occupation itself, have often been likened to the Nazi campaign against the Jews. This comparison, of course, is largely inappropriate, as most recent Israeli incursions into the West Bank and Gaza have been motivated by security concerns as opposed to an ideology of ethnic cleansing. Nevertheless, the identification of Israel as a new Third Reich demonstrates how both sides have established irreconcilable narratives surrounding the conflict. Both Israelis and Palestinians see themselves in a position of historical victimhood.
Additionally, memories of the Holocaust and the emotions they elicit illustrate a pattern of mistrust between Israelis and Palestinians. Israelis, passionately concerned with their own security, are often skeptical of the intentions of their Palestinian neighbors, especially after renewed rocket launches by Hamas this past summer. Palestinians, having been occupied and occasionally attacked by Israel for decades, also see themselves as having few reasons to trust the Jewish people. Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk cited this mistrust as the primary obstacle in peace negotiations. “It’s the distrust between the leaders and between the people that holds us up and makes it difficult,” he told the New York Times last year.
Recent Memory
The Second Intifada of the early 2000s only exacerbated this deep-seated mistrust. The Intifada refers to a period of heightened Israeli-Palestinian violence roughly spanning 2000-2005 and peaking in 2002. Over 1,000 Israelis were killed, primarily in terrorist attacks on Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. About 5,000 Palestinians lost their lives in retaliatory Israeli military operations in the occupied territories.
Schaefer discussed with me how the Second Intifada affected his life and the Israeli mindset. “As I child … I remember having great relationships with Palestinian children. I remember going on buses to the West Bank to go shopping. There was a lot of hope—a lot of optimism—across Israeli society.”

Much of that, however, came crashing down with the Intifada. “It was terrible. The Second Intifada had an incredibly traumatic effect on the Israeli psyche. The streets were running with blood, and I don’t think the Israeli public has ever been able to recover.” Schaefer, who once worked on the staff of a representative to Israel’s Knesset, mentioned in particular that the large-scale attack on Israeli soil served to undermine the Israeli left. An emphasis on security and a fear of Palestinian intentions have conversely bolstered the more rightist elements of the country’s polity. This was on display in the final days leading up to this year’s March 17 elections, when the incumbent, right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, warned that “Arabs [were] voting in droves” in an effort to draw conservatives to ballot boxes. Netanyahu’s Likud Party subsequently won a plurality of seats, illustrating how scare tactics like this, largely because of traumatic experiences with Palestinians such as the Second Intifada, can still be effective political tools.
Unfortunately, the region may not be far away from another escalation on conflict. In a visit to Ramallah, the de facto capital of the West Bank, we heard from Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, an organization that investigates public opinion among Palestinians. He said that young Palestinians were increasingly in favor of the use of violence as a means to political ends. In focus groups, he found that the rationale behind this trend didn’t stem from anger or hatred toward Israelis. Rather, young Palestinians were beginning to feel that violence was that only way they could make Israel acknowledge their demands.
From the Jewish perspective, Palestinian violence will only turn the public off to cooperation with their Arab neighbors. But from the Palestinian point of view, violence is the only reliable method to force what they see as an apathetic Israel to make concessions.
Whether rooted in ancient history or the recent past, Israeli and Palestinian narratives surrounding the conflict are often at odds and can lead to mutual mistrust and misunderstanding. This is not to undermine the importance of the more concrete, policy-oriented aspects of the peace process. It is simply to say that a resolution will be elusive unless history and emotion can be reconciled with strategy and practicality.
Image source: Wikimedia // Wayne McLean // W. Hagens