Common Narrative for Israel/Palestine Conflict?

I usually consider myself to be a secular Humanist. But events like the brutal October 7 Hamas attack on Israel make me feel very Jewish. Everyone wants peace. The question is on what terms and how to get there.

The Humanist Society of Santa Barbara (HSSB) hosted a refreshingly innovative talk in 2018 offering a way to re-frame the entire problem.

Jack Berriault created The Israel Palestine Project (TIPP) in 2003 to advance this idea: To create a single historical narrative that both sides could agree upon. Nancy Black was the Communications Director of TIPP who spoke to us.

Having such a shared historical narrative does not in itself solve the conflict. But it is hard to imagine any solution to a conflict where even the most basic facts are in dispute. Our own country is consumed by conflict today as a result of certain factions deliberately creating “fake news” and “alternative facts.”

“A Common Historical Narrative” is the aim of TIPP. The original texts were developed in dialogue between an Israeli and a Palestinian representative who prefer to remain anonymous.

They worked in dialog for a year. Their work was then passed to two prominent historians: Moshe Ma’oz (Professor Emeritus in Middle East History and Islam at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem) and Palestinian historian and author Philip Mattar (President of the Palestinian American Research Center in Washington, D.C.).

The Narrative had 35 chapters in 2018. Four of those chapters were available for viewing at that time.

Those finished chapters were:

1) Claims of Palestinians and Israelis to the Holy Land
2) Early Jewish immigration, the birth of Zionism, and impacts on the indigenous population
7) Never Again: The Holocaust and the origins of Modern Israel
9) The Deir Yassin Massacre – a triggering action of the Palestinian Al-Nakba, 1948

Some Chapter 1 points: 

At the beginning of the 20th century, most of the inhabitants of the “Holy Land,” the land we now know as Israel and Palestine, were Muslims, with a large minority of Christians and a smaller minority of Jews.

In the 1880s, Jews of the fledging Zionist movement made a claim to Palestine as their homeland and later, in conjunction with Great Britain through the Balfour Declaration (1917), asserted their ownership of the land as an act of reclaiming what was taken from them by the forces of history.

The Jewish immigrants bought land from Palestinians with large landholdings (mostly absentee owners) and from other resident Arab landowners. By 1948, seven percent of the land of Palestine had been purchased by Jewish-Zionist organizations.

Chapter 7 deals with the Holocaust. Most Americans are familiar with the Holocaust, at least in general terms. We know that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazi government of Germany in the 1940s solely because of being Jewish.

But this history is surprisingly disputed by Palestinians. Many claim it never even happened. Hence the need to document it in this shared Narrative.

In contrast, the 1948 massacre of Palestinians called Al-Nakba is central to Palestinian history, yet is largely unknown to others. Many Israelis, including some leaders of state, deny it happened. Again, this made it an essential part of the shared Narrative, listed in Chapter 9.

Black explained Berriault’s view of transformation versus change. Change is about incrementally altering circumstances that are rooted in the past. With change, in a sense, the past persists into the future as a burden and limits what is even possible.

Transformation is about creating what does not yet exist starting with a blank canvas and free from the constraints of the past. Creating a future free of the past starts with acknowledgment of the facts of that past: “This is what actually happened.”

I always wondered what happened to this project. I see that it indeed was published in 2020 as Israel and Palestine: A Common Historical Narrative and I just ordered a copy. Listening to each other is essential to peace with justice. This is a dispute about a finite piece of land. Who are the natives and who are the colonists? Perhaps if more of us could agree on a common narrative it would help?  

Note: This is adapted from an article I wrote in 2018 for the Humanist Society newsletter.