The Israeli-Palestinian battle of the narratives

Israeli journalist Zvi Yehezkeli pinpointed the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as he reflected on a post-interview conversation with Yasser Arafat, the late chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), more than two decades ago.

A one-time secular security official who became a religious West Bank settler and called on air for the slaying of 100,000 Gazans in the wake of Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, Mr. Yehezkeli said it took him years to understand what he believed the Palestinian leader was telling him once the camera stopped rolling.

“I don’t recognize your right to the land, and your logic is completely different from mine. The end of the conflict is your invention… I never agreed to it,” Mr. Yehezkeli quoted Mr. Arafat as saying.

In a recent email inviting recipients to subscribe to his monthly broadcasts, Mr. Yehezkeli offered an interpretation of Mr. Arafat’s remark that ensures the perpetuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rather than acceptance of a reality that potentially holds out the promise of an eventual healing of the wounds on both sides of the divide if adequately managed.

In Mr. Yehezkeli’s mind, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict constitutes a clash of worldviews and values, not just a land dispute.

“I understand that in the Arab, tribal space, there is…a different attitude towards human life… October 7 was, for many, a moment of painful disillusionment. Suddenly, we saw the real clash between two worldviews and two completely different logics. If we truly understood the Arab mind, we would not be surprised,” Mr. Yehezkeli said.

Reviving long-standing racial tropes involving notions of an opposed Arab and Jewish mind as propagated by Hungarian Orientalist Raphael Patai, Mr. Yehezkeli turned a blind eye to Israel’s killing of at least 50,000 people in Gaza, the majority non-combatants.

For US$13.33, a 50 per cent discount on the standard rate, Mr. Yehezkeli invited his audience into his online “living room” for “an opportunity to get inside the head of our enemy, to understand what really motivates him, what his weak points are, and how we can defend ourselves against him.”

Mr. Yehezkeli’s re-evaluation of Mr. Arafat’s remarks makes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a zero-sum game in which only one party can have a right to land in the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

As a result, Mr. Arafat’s recognition of Israel’s “right to exist in peace and security” in line with international law and diplomatic protocol was never enough for Mr. Yehezkeli and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

As far as they are concerned, Palestinians need to endorse Israel’s national myth, a concept that is not anchored in international law or diplomatic protocol, at the expense of their own lived experience that tells a different story.

By recognising Israel’s unqualified right to exist without an Israeli recognition of the Palestinians’ right to statehood, Palestinians would agree that they have no right to any part of the land.

As a result, Israel, backed by the United States, has perpetuated the conflict by turning the Palestinian refusal to abandon their narrative and rights into an existential question.

The cost of Israel’s refusal to accept that opposed national narratives can exist and is no riskier than seeking to repress the other party’s narrative is not exclusively calculated in the number of lost Palestinian and Israeli lives but also in the degree to which pillars of democracy, including freedom of expression and academic freedom, are undermined across the globe.

Similarly, the battle of the narratives is also at the core of Israel’s war on the United Nations, particularly the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which is responsible for Palestinian refugees and caters to half a million students in its schools.

Israel has used problematic elements in Gazan textbooks provided to UNRWA by the West Bank-based, internationally recognised Palestine Authority and assertions that Hamas infiltrated the agency to ban it as a terrorist organisation in territories it controls.

The ban intended to remove URWA as a bulwark against Israeli attempts to impose its narrative on the Palestinian curriculum.

Firing the most recent shot in the battle of the narratives, Impact-Se, an Israeli textbook watchdog, highlighted in a recent report the blurring of the lines between what are discriminatory texts and/or glorification or incitement to violence and what are Palestinian versions of history that, like their Jewish counterparts, are deeply held, have survived for generations, and frequently are mirror images of Israeli perceptions.

Among texts Impact-Se highlighted as problematic was an 11th-grade history text that claimed Zionists had “used false claims” to justify the establishment of a “Zionist settlement in Palestine.”

The false claims included that “Jews, despite belonging to various countries and societies, represent a single national group characterized by Semitic ethnic traits… and that there is no solution to the Jewish problem other than the establishment of a Jewish state in the Promised Land (Palestine).”

The text mirrors Israeli denials of Palestinian nationhood, the far-right notion that Jordan is Palestine, and that Palestinians are Arabs who already have 22 states they can go to.

Israel’s most recent denial of Palestinian nationhood is embedded in the Netanyahu government’s adoption of US President Donald J. Trump’s plan to resettle Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians elsewhere and turn the Strip into a high-end beachfront real estate development.

Similarly, Impact-Se took issue with the UNRWA textbooks’ maps that failed to show Israel, much like Israel’s refusal to acknowledge Palestine on maps of territories it conquered during the 1967 Middle East war that have since been internationally recognised as Palestinian, even if precise borders have yet to be negotiated.

The lines are most blurred in the double standards applied by Israelis and Palestinians to the violence both have employed for more than a century to further their national causes, often at the expense of innocent civilians.

As a result, Impact-Se questioned the use in textbooks of the Arabic word ‘shahid,’ which is a witness or a martyr who died while performing a religious obligation that could but need not include jihad in the form of armed struggle.

The report further questioned texts that glorified “the revolution,” a reference to the Palestinian national struggle and the first intifada or uprising against Israel’s occupation in the late 1980s and early 1990s in which protesters often resorted to stone-throwing.

Derogatory imagery of the other is one area where there should be no compromise. In one example, Impact-Se pointed to a religious text for 12^th graders that interpreted the Qur’an as portraying Jews in the early days of Islam as “liars and manipulators” hostile to the faith.

Inevitably, opposed narratives of a century of struggle against one another are and will be fact totems of the Israel-Palestinian relationship, whether they are allowed to exist openly alongside one another or fester clandestinely because of oppression.

With no guarantee that rival narratives will not fuel hostility, the trick will be to create an environment in which both sides embrace an equitable historic compromise and have a stake in managing rather than aggravating their historical differences.

Mr. Arafat was travelling down that road when he spoke to Mr. Yehezkeli, although the journalist’s hardline views have since persuaded him otherwise.

The road remains open; the question is for how long. Keeping it open will take much more than engineering a sustainable Gaza ceasefire, even if a truce is a mandatory first step.