The Arsenal of Memory

 

By David K. Shipler 

First published by Moment Magazine  

                Nofabrication or suppression of history is needed in the Israeli-Palestinianconflict. Truths are enough to arm both sides. We are now witnessing additionsto the stockpile of weapons in an arsenal of memory that never gets depleted.

                Victimsdo not forget. Nor do their descendants. When the Palestinian movement Hamas invadedIsrael from Gaza to execute its monstrously planned slaughters and kidnappings,the date, October 7, was marked indelibly. Going forward, probably forgenerations, it will remind Israeli Jews of the grievance and rage that scar theirlong road. And for Palestinian Arabs, Israel’s coming onslaught on Gaza willreload the batteries of hatred--and what they call “resistance.”

                The twopeoples are imprisoned by history. When they argue for themselves and againstthe other, the past looms. The pogroms in eastern Europe. The Holocaust. The scatteredviolence by local Arabs against Jews who fled to Palestine. The Arab states’rejection of a Jewish state, and the 1948 war that Jews had to fight to secureIsrael’s existence. The Arab-led wars that followed. The Palestinian terroristattacks and suicide bombings into the heart of daily life.

                TheJews from Europe settling on Palestinians’ land. The Jewish forces’ expulsionof Palestinian Arabs from what became Israel during the 1948 war. The harsh Israelimilitary occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 war. Thehumiliating Israeli army checkpoints. The imprisonment of Palestinian teenagerswithout trial. The nighttime army raids into Palestinians’ homes, the shootingdeaths. The influx of Jewish settlements onto West Bank land, where Jewishvigilantes harass, assault, and terrorize Palestinian residents.

                And on.It is an arms race of memory. Not every one carries equal weight. The Holocaustcannot be balanced by the Israeli bombing of Gaza, which cannot be balanced bya suicide bomber at a café. Yet it’s important to understand that theIsraeli-Palestinian conflict is not only a clash of two nationalisms withoverlapping claims to territory. It is also a clash of histories, whose wounds resisthealing. It is a mismatch of historical narratives, none so acute as the twocompeting stories of the birth of modern Israel.

                This Iencountered soon after arriving in Israel for The New York Times in1979. Yitzhak Rabin, then in the opposition, had written his memoir. HisEnglish-language translator, Peretz Kidron, was outraged that a censorshipcommittee had deleted Rabin’s description of how he and Yigal Allon, on theorders of David Ben-Gurion, had forced Arabs from the towns of Lod and Ramle. Kidrongave me the manuscript, and I went to see Rabin to confirm its accuracy.

He said he couldn’t talk about it,because of the censorship ban. But when I asked why he thought it had beendeleted, he said that he didn’t know, he was surprised. That was theconfirmation. He went on to note wryly that he had given the censors somethingto do by mentioning Israel’s nuclear weapons, which he knew they would delete.

At the time, Israeli textbooks didnot mention the expulsions. Nor did the Israeli media pick up on the story,even after we ran the banned excerpt in The Times. The Israeli version,taught in schools, held that Palestinians were coaxed by their leaders to fleeand would return after an Arab victory. But Palestinians knew of the expulsions,which were later documented from declassified Israeli archives by the Israelihistorian and journalist Benny Morris, in TheBirth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949. He named villages andnumbers of Palestinians who were ousted deliberately, and others whoseresidents fled to avoid the fighting, as civilians always do in war.

They ended up in refugee camps inGaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan’s West Bank. Three-quarters of a centurylater, many of their descendants keep alive the impossible dream of returningto long obliterated villages inside Israel proper. Some still keep the keys totheir old houses. Demonstrators display posters of an old-fashioned key. A hugekey is carved into the entrance of a refugee camp near Ramallah. Communitycenter rooms in another camp near Bethlehem are named after vanished villages.

And so, while Israelis celebratetheir independence day each year, Palestinians mark it by mourning the nakba,the “catastrophe.”

To this secular dimension has beenadded history’s ultimate weapon: religion. Once secondary to the basicIsraeli-Palestinian dispute, the religious component was always present, but ithas gained influence in recent decades, giving the most extreme positions onboth sides a kind of divine imprimatur, a rationale both comprehensive and nonnegotiable.

After the 1967 war, a minority ofJewish settlers who called the captured West Bank of the Jordan River by itsbiblical names, Judaea and Samaria, cited Genesis in claiming the land asdeeded to the Jews by God through Abraham. The belief took root in thegovernment under Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

In those early years after 1967,and then while I was reporting there from 1979-1984, I never heard aPalestinian utter a doubt that Jewish temples had stood on what Muslims callthe Noble Sanctuary, and Jews call the Temple Mount. Now the site of al-Aqsamosque, it is a manmade plateau whose retaining wall, the Western Wall, is holyto Jews and a place of Jewish worship.

But in the early 1990s, a highschool student in Ramallah, told me categorically that no Jewish temple hadever existed there. She called the story a fabrication by Israelis to lay titleto Jerusalem. I noticed that she wore a small cross around her neck. So,summoning my background as a fallen Protestant, I asked whether she thoughtthat the New Testament was wrong in describing Jesus throwing money changersfrom the temple. That stopped her; she said that she’d have to think about it.

I don’t know how many Christian andMuslim Palestinians, have embraced that temple denial, but on subsequentreporting trips I heard it more and more widely until it seemed virtuallyubiquitous.

Historical truths are powerfulenough. But perhaps this suppression of history is one that is needed, afterall, to deny Jews their authenticity in the Holy Land, to remove theirbelongingness. The denial supports the Palestinian judgment that Jews arealiens, interlopers, colonists, a temporary presence that will also be erased.

If October 7 was conceived as astep toward that end, it will fail. But it has added to the arsenal of memory.