Time for Palestinians to stop fetishising victimhood stories
There is an excellent YouTube video of an interview with the coruscatingly brilliant Yuval Noah Harari in which he asserts his belief that wars and conflicts – including, he says, the conflict currently “tearing apart” his region – are not about land or territory but about “stories”.
The Israeli historian and philosopher who took the world by storm with his 2011 book, “Sapiens,” notes that “objectively” there is “no shortage of land” between “the Mediterranean and the Jordan River” and also that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not due to Russia suffering “any shortage of territory.” Thus, asserts Harari, wars happen because of “the stories people tell themselves;” people fight over “the stories in their minds.”
Personally, I think Harari has chosen to brush aside the appeal of nationalism and to ignore the “conquerors” from the Greeks, Romans, Mongols and Ottomans to Adolf Hitler, whose declared casus belli was lebensraum (living space). But I felt that he may have a point about the toxicity of “stories” and their impact– particularly in the Israel-Palestine conflict – after reading an interview given by Bella, one of the two Hadid supermodel sisters. Like sister Gigi, Bella is invariably styled as “Palestinian.” Both are vocal supporters of Palestinians and Gigi has made some strikingly anti-Israel comments.
In the interview, with online magazine The Cut, Bella – who was recently embroiled in a row over an Adidas sneaker advertisement – spoke about her family’s “personal history” of “displacement” from Palestine. The phrase “personal history” suggested Prof Harari’s thesis has validity, since her father who describes himself as “a Palestinian refugee” is the billionaire, Bel Air real-estate developer Mohamed Hadid.
As is clear from an interview he gave to another US magazine, he was in a refugee camp in Syria for a very brief period before spending his childhood in – one assumes from his comments, safety and relative comfort – in homes in Syria, Lebanon and Tunisia, before arriving in 1964 in the USA where he built his mega-successful business.
So, “refugee” is a tad disingenuous even if technically true according to, say, UNRWA. I am not denying Mr Hadid the right to claim to be “a refugee” nor saying he should not perceive himself as “a refugee” if he wishes to do so, nor am I disputing that his family had roots in Palestine – as, of course do many Jews, whose roots often go much deeper. Nor am I even disputing his right to claim that his family did not leave Palestine voluntarily. But I am suggesting that the fetishising of that aspect of his early life and the overt “yearning” to “return” gives credence to Prof Harari’s thesis in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict because irrespective of how much truth there is in that version, it is the story Mr Hadid has been told; it is the story he tells himself and it is also the story his American-born daughter tells herself, tells interviewers and tells the whole world.
It is the story millions of Palestinians – regardless of wealth, geographical location or the actual circumstances of their departure – tell themselves. And, of course, tell a receptive world because Palestinians deploy their “refugee” status and their “stories” in a way that is designed to continue to fuel a grievance. And the constant repitition has led to that grievance growingd and solidifying into something toxic – in rougly the same way that grit in an oyster ultimately grows into a pearl.
While I understand the pain of “displacement” – how could a Jew whose ancestors suffered “displacement” in almost every generation, not understand it – I see only one reason for the Palestinians to collectively fetishise and nurture their “story” of “displacement” across so many generations. And that is to “justify” terrorism (or so-called resistance). And, of course, to allow other power-blocs and nations to weaponise it and exploit it on their behalf (and not, of course for the benefit of the Palestinian people, but in pursuit of their own geo-political ambitions).
And we know there is another way, because the 900,000 Jews who were also “displaced” or “expelled” by Arab countries in 1948 – including between 17,000 and 40,000 made refugees from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem – simply got on with their lives without nurturing their sorrow or fetishising the pain they felt at being displaced, stripped of their wealth or in some cases seeing their families brutally butchered.
Perhaps we should also note that the “pain” for the Palestinian Arabs could have been mitigated – or avoided altogether –by staying in the new state of Israel in 1948 (as 150,000 Palestinian Arabs did in defiance of their leaders), or settling in one of the 20-plus Islamic states in the region. But no, unlike the Jews from Arab lands, the Palestinians carried on politicising and amplifying their “grief” by telling mournful (and possibly exaggerated) stories of “expulsions” to embellish a narrative of lies, half-truths and myths. And whether they are wealthy citizens of other countries or the Palestinians who stayed in Gaza or the West Bank, their “stories” are used to incite and radicalise; to help recruit suicide bombers and raise funds to underwrite terrorism.
Undeniably, we Jews tell ourselves “stories” too, but the key points of the Jewish narrative are rooted in objective reality. As well as ancient sources which indicate a Jewish presence in this land from Bible times onward (cf Old and New Testaments, the Quran and archaeological finds), land records, population censuses, birth certificates, passports and multiple authoritative contemporaneous sources prove a continuous Jewish presence in the ancestral Jewish homeland. Also, our “stories” are not used to incite, radicalise, recruit suicide bombers or fund terror
The Palestinians, however, continue to tell themselves (and their children and grandchildren) “stories” (despite the often tenuous link the stories have to reality) while those who exploit and weaponise their “pain” keep on exploiting and weaponising it.
So if – as the eminent “Sapiens” author believes – people really do go to war over the “stories they tell themselves” perhaps it is time for sentient, well-meaning Palestinians to stop telling “stories” that will be used to justify murder and terrorism, to fuel Jew-hate and ultimately to harm their own people.