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BOOK REVIEW
History and Identity--A Creative Union?: Lessons from Israelis and Palestinians By Sumi Colligan Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Palestinian National Consciousness by Rashid Khalidi. Columbia University Press, 1997Despite what appears to be an increase in the global clash of cultures, a ray of hope can be gleaned from recent studies analyzing the emergence of national cultures and nationalist identities. The ray stems from the fact that the authors are themselves members of cultures that have been engaging in such conflict and yet demonstrate a willingness to examine their own nations or national claims as products and processes of "imagined communities." As such, they eschew any claims to an ardent nationalism because they recognize such claims would contradict their own endeavors. These efforts involve uncovering their own |
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national memories as historically contingent
inventions, riddled with inconsistencies, and continually unfolding.
The two works I have in mind are Yael Zerubavel's Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition and Rashid Khalidi's Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Palestinian National Consciousness. I have selected these works to commemorate Israel's recent fiftieth anniversary. Whereas this anniversary may have signaled, for some, a cause for celebration and triumph, and for others an occasion for mourning, I emphasize commemoration as an opportunity to reassess the past in order to forge an opening for new beginnings. History need not mean destiny if we can strip it of essentialized1 qualities that have been imputed to it. While for some the demise of master narratives may suggest a loss of control, instability, and an undermining of self-assuredness, I see in it an opportunity to escape the rigidity and fixity of bounded views that have contributed to current impasses in the global political arena. Yael Zerubavel, the first author mentioned above, is an Israeli with a background in folklore who teaches modern Hebrew literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She first became interested in exploring the socio-historical roots of her own national culture when she came to the United States and discovered that it was difficult for her to participate in American Jewish ritual practices because they differed significantly from practices with which she was raised and had assumed to be part of a timeless and uniform Jewish tradition. She felt further compelled to examine the |
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assumptions and impulses that contributed to
the making of this tradition when she was assisting her daughter with a
school project on family history only to discover that a family memoir
of her great-grandfather began with his immigration to Palestine and made
no mention of his Eastern European origin.
Rashid Khalidi, the second author, is a Palestinian who is a scion of several East Jerusalem notable families, teaches Middle Eastern history at the University of Chicago, and has been an adviser to several post-Oslo Palestinian delegations in their negotiations over peace accords with Israel. Khalidi states that, for his own part, his research in Lebanon on decisions made by the PLO during the 1982 War and his first-hand experience with helping to delineate the contours of an emergent national formation, caused him to come face-to-face with an ever changing conceptualization that the Palestinians held of themselves as a people. To some extent, the goals of the works are quite distinct. While Zerubaval is trying to deconstruct Israeli secular culture by demonstrating how collective memory selectively refashions past events in order to conform to contemporary agendas, Khalidi is attempting to offer support for the existence of the Palestinian people as a refutation of Golda Meir's 1969 statement that, "There was no such thing as Palestinians . . . They did not exist" (quoted in Khalidi, 147). His thesis reveals that while nation and state are often thought of as a single entity (as in nation-state), national consciousness can develop in the absence of statehood. Since statehood has been achieved in one instance and has yet to come |
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to full fruition in the other, the counterposing
perspectives of these two authors are not particularly surprising. Rescuing
"repressed history" has different implications for those who speak louder
from the privileged position of the victors or with the muted voices of
the losers.
In her beginning chapters, Zerubavel writes about the temporal and spatial structure of Zionist thought as one that collapses Antiquity with Modern National Revival and erases or silences 2000 years of Exile to create a sense of continuity between the past and the present, thereby essentializing the bond between the Jewish people and land, language, and sovereignty (a strategy that was especially pronounced during the prestate period and early years of statehood). For example, she explores in depth how the siege at Masada and the Bar-Kokhba revolt, both instances in which Jews attempted to fend off the encroaching Romans, are used to argue for and illustrate a timeless seam with the contemporary Israeli nation and military. In so doing, she notes that the denial of Exile helped contribute to the misconception or propaganda that Palestine was uninhabited by Palestinians since denying Exile also meant lack of recognition that this Biblical land had a subsequent history and occupants following Antiquity. Additionally, such denial devalued or dismissed any common threads with Jewish Diaspora experiences or cultures since Jewish immigrants were encouraged to consider themselves "reborn." Khalidi, on the other hand, attempts to show that even prior to the arrival of Zionists at the turn of the century, there was an awareness among the inhabitants of Palestine concerning the |
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sacredness of Jerusalem as a Muslim site and
a regional identity crystallized by the memory of the Crusades---a memory
in contemporary times that has been conflated with European and Zionist
incursions into the area, particularly following the collapse of the Ottoman
Empire. Nonetheless, he is not attempting to offer evidence of a primordial
and totalizing Palestinian identity, but rather to portray the interweaving
of cultural continuities and overlapping identities as well as points of
disjuncture and fragmentation. Moreover, these disjunctures and fragments
are not attributed solely to silences and divisions imposed by external
domination, but also to internal cleavages. For example, he acknowledges
that land was sold to Zionist settlers by absentee Palestinian landlords
(although substantial amounts were also sold by outsiders); that Palestinian
peasant revolts in the earlier part of the century were indicative of an
awareness among peasants that their interests conflicted with those of
Jewish settlers and those of Arab merchants from Damascus, Jaffa, Haifa,
and Beirut who were purchasing large tracts of previously common land used
for agriculture and grazing; and that members of the Arab League in Haifa
told Palestinians to flee in the wake of the 1948 War (as did many Israeli
leaders).
Nonetheless, he does hope to challenge those who would delegitimize Palestinian claims to sovereignty by pointing to periods when Palestinian identity was not outwardly in evidence (for example, in the decade and a half following the 1948 War) or by dismissing Palestinian national consciousness as unauthentic simply because it emerged largely in response to Zionism. Indeed, he |
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counters such accusations by postulating (as
have others) that identity is, at least in part, relational and "can be
fully understood only in the context of a sequence of other histories,
a sequence of other narratives" (9). Thus the weakening or enfeeblement
of identity may simply signal a period of taking stock and of watchfulness
and/or a momentary need to focus exclusively on the demands of external
contingencies and to seek a "time out" in order to regroup.
Zerubavel, in discussing the making of Israeli national culture, also highlights its oppositional character. If Jews in Exile were overdetermined by external conditions and forces, acted upon, rendered passive, martyred, and scapegoated by virtue of their placement in restricted occupations, then the "new Hebrew" would be strong, heroic, a pioneer in the wilderness clearing the land for planting, would control his own destiny, and be willing to defend his people against all odds (I use the term "he" here because these images are rooted in a masculinist construction). The construction of these oppositional images contributes to underscoring instances of resistance in Antiquity while playing down the outcomes (in the case of Masada, collective suicide, and in the case of the Bar-Kokhba revolt, massive defeat). It also minimizes attention to the Holocaust (while at the same time organizing rescue missions and extending safe haven to its refugees) whose victims were cast only as "victims" and not also as courageous survivors. Thus, despite the contradictory aims of "constructing" or "deconstructing," both authors are in remarkable agreement concerning the dynamics involved in constituting identity and the |
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importance that giving shape to one's own historical
narrative plays in giving direction to one's own future. In substantiating
their arguments, both emphasize methods by which a sense of "horizontal
comradeship" (to use Benedict Anderson's term, 7) has been promoted and
instilled (through, e.g., literary writing, newspapers, and schools) among
Israelis and Palestinians. But, of equal significance, they stress that
memory and agency are not the singular domain of political and literary
elites. In so doing, it is possible to discern how ideological inconsistencies
in nationalist hegemonies give way to alternative hegemonies or popular
undercurrents. For example, Zerubavel notes that the secular national myth
of Masada was at once weakened by the integration of the Holocaust into
national memory following the Eichmann trial as well as by Masada's commercialization
and increased accessibility; and strengthened by the discovery of a synagogue
on the premises and by the political manipulation of national insecurities
in the aftermaths, variously, of the 1973 War, the War in Lebanon, and
the growing tensions in the Occupied Territories. These anxieties have
contributed to a nascent (or no longer so nascent) "traditionalism"
couched in nationalist-religious terms (Exile is back, but not in a guise
that it would itself recognize). The slipperiness of hegemony that allows
it both to disappear and reappear is best captured by the Israeli writer
A.B. Yehoshua in observing, "Masada is no longer the historic mountain
near the Dead Sea but a mobile mountain that we carry on our back anywhere
we go" (quoted in Zerubavel, 194).
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Finally, I would like to return to the issue of undercurrents. Postcolonial theorists have commented that in many postcolonial states, nationalist fervor and anticipation have given way to cynicism and disillusionment. While neither Israel (because it combines elements of postcoloniality such as freedom from the British and escape from European genocide and oppression with elements of a settler culture) nor Palestine (because it has not yet entered a stage of postcoloniality) fully conforms to postcolonial criteria, it is still instructive to consider current trends in both societies in light of a postcolonial moral crisis. For instance, Zerubavel investigates the role of humor as a form of social protest. She explains how the siege of Tel Hai in 1920, an event celebrated by Israeli nationalists as a display of great heroism because the commander Trumpeldor defended this sparsely populated northern Jewish settlement singlehandedly (quite literally, since Trumpledor had lost one of his arms while serving in the Czarist army) against Arabs who were searching for French sympathizers, has recently been turned on its head. Stories abound that Trumpledor's dying words were not, "It is good to die for your country," but rather a juicy Russian curse, and that the statue of Trumpledor with a lion (the first statue erected to mark Israeli sovereignty) was not a symbol of national strength, not an indigenous wild animal that was tamed, but a domesticated one located in a nearby Egyptian zoo. Such humor clearly calls nationalist bravado into question. Likewise, Khalidi emphasizes that the intifada, the Palestinian uprising of 1987-1992, was as much a grassroots protest against the PLO leadership as it was |
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against the Israeli Occupation itself. Palestinian
civil disobedience in the West Bank and Gaza alerted leaders in exile that
they could no longer define the discourse or set the strategies for Palestinian
liberation because they were ineffectual and not grounded in the lived
experience of the Occupation. Thus moral crisis need not be destructive
and may budge people to be more receptive to novel solutions.
In short, I find a review of these works most valuable because they prove that national self-scrutiny does not necessarily lead to annihilation. If identity is indeed processual rather than given, then identity politics should focus on dialogue, transaction, and exchange, not identity as a zero sum game. While essentialzed "ties that bind" may cement solidarity, mobilize activism, and ward off challenges from the outside world, those very same ties may become constraints, even strangleholds. Whereas both Israelis and Palestinians have promulgated positions that rest upon a mutual denial of the other, there are nonetheless increasing indications of a growing recognition that the successful survival of each may require a degree of mutual acknowledgement. Some of my critics might argue that this scrutiny is simply the indulgence of isolated academics or point to the considerable influence of nationalist-religious movements on both sides of the divide that has served to undermine recent peace initiatives. I would counter that although such movements need to be taken seriously and monitored closely, it is equally important to pay attention to the formal and informal mechanisms through which individuals and groups situated at various strata of each society contest the validity |
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and rigidity of exclusivist and exclusionary
nationalisms and express a willingness to embrace a more uncertain (but
perhaps more secure) future.
WORKS CITED Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso, 1991. NOTES 1 To "essentialize" means to impute intrinsic and uniform qualities, a natural essence, or primordial, timeless roots to social categories and processes. It suggests that such categories and processes are impervious to the influences of changing sociocultural, economic, and political factors. Poststructural theorists have been instrumental in challenging this notion, pointing to the humanly constructed facets of these same categories and processes as well as the manner in which their emergence and reformulation are contingent on external interests, forces, and agents. 2 The extensive media coverage of the Eichmann trial in Israel educated the Israeli public to the struggles and tribulations of those who were caught in the deadly whirlwind of the Holocaust. Thus the demarcation between Masada heros and Holocaust victims came to be viewed as less significant. |
Sumi Colligan has taught anthropology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts since 1984. Her research interests include resistance and the politics of culture. She conducted her doctoral work in Israel on the Karaites, a Jewish sect originating in Egypt. Her articles have appeared in The Anthropology of Work Review, The Encyclopedia of World Cultures, and elsewhere. She recently participated in a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar entitled, "National Identity in China: The New Politics of Culture." Professor Colligan currently teaches an honors course examining nationalism from a cross-cultural perspective.