Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History

by Margaret MacMillan

  Palestinian and the wider Arab history is, not surprisingly, different. In their view of the past, the Jewish presence—the “usurping entity”—was planted in Palestine in the twentieth century by Western imperialism in a classic act of colonialism. Israel’s birth was assisted by powerful midwives, especially the United States. The Palestinians, who have been a people for decades, if not centuries, resisted but were too weak, and their Arab brethren were divided and, in the case of Jordan and Egypt, colluding secretly with Israel to seize Palestinian land. The refugees did not leave willingly in 1948 but were forced out, often at gunpoint, by Jewish soldiers. It is Israel, with its massive support from the United States, that is the region’s bully and warmonger. Israel refuses to hand back the land it seized in 1967, even though its occupation is illegitimate, and it treats the Palestinian inhabitants of the occupied territories in a way that resembles South African apartheid. The Palestinian leadership has tried to negotiate with Israel in good faith; if negotiations have failed, like the ones President Clinton sponsored at Camp David, it is Israel’s fault.

  Recent history is only part of the battleground and perhaps not even the most important. If the two sides can demonstrate that their peoples have a long-standing and unbroken connection to the land, then that, in the way pioneered by nationalist movements in Europe, becomes a title deed for the present. That is why the settler movement in Israel prefers to use the biblical names of Judaea and Samaria to describe the West Bank. As a spokeswoman for Gush Emunim, one of the more radical groups, put it, history was their “currency.” Not surprisingly, as Nadia Abu El-Haj has pointed out in Facts on the Ground, archaeology has assumed a central importance in the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians because it promises definitive answers. If, for example, Iron Age sites can be shown to be those of the Israelites, who conquered the land of the Canaanites, then that might establish a modern Jewish claim to the same land. If, on the other hand, the sites were shared by various peoples at different times, an unbroken connection might be harder to establish. “It would not be right,” said a Palestinian archaeologist, “to emphasize the history of one people among the many peoples who invaded Palestine and settled there.” Or what if, as some Arab archaeologists argue, the original inhabitants were Arabs whose land was taken by the Israelites? Each century becomes part of the debate. If a tenth-century mosaic is Arab, what does it mean for the Palestinian claims? “Do we have to tell the world this country was settled by Muslims?” an Israeli colonel once asked an archaeologist in exasperation.

  When agreements were reached, with great difficulty in the early 1990s, for Israel to withdraw from parts of the West Bank, archaeological finds were part of the bargaining. The Palestinians demanded them back; the Israeli government insisted on joint management of important sites. Who owned antiquities in places such as Jericho, which were due to be handed over to the Palestinian National Authority? In 1993, the Israel Antiquities Authority sent more than a dozen teams of archaeologists on a top-secret operation just before the Israeli withdrawal, to scour that part of the area for ancient scrolls, “like Indiana Jones,” wrote an Israeli journalist scornfully.

  Contrary evidence can be smudged out, explained away, or simply ignored. A nationalist Israeli archaeologist was deplored by his colleagues for labeling obviously Christian sites as Jewish. Names disappear from maps along with the peoples who once lived there. When archaeological excavations called into question many of the key components of the Old Testament and its whole chronology, many fundamentalist Christians and Israelis refused to believe the findings or simply remained indifferent. Many ancient historians and archaeologists have come to believe that the Israelites may never have been in Egypt. If there was an exodus, it may have been only a small affair with a few families. The Israelites may not have conquered the land of the Canaanites, and Jericho probably did not have walls to fall down at the blast of a trumpet. The great kingdom of Solomon and David, which was said to stretch from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates, was more likely to have been a small chiefdom. Remains from the time indicate that Jerusalem was a small city, not the magnificent one of the Bible. So why, asked Ze’ev Herzog in the respected Israeli newspaper Haaretz, has what is a major change in views about the biblical past not provoked a reaction, even from secular Israelis? His conclusion is that they find it too painful to contemplate. “The blow to the mythical foundations of the Israeli identity is apparently too threatening, and it is more convenient to turn a blind eye.”

  Reactions have not always been so muted. Nadia Abu El-Haj, an American of Palestinian origin, came under ferocious attack for arguing that Israelis had used archaeology to reinforce their claims to Israel. “This is a book which should never have been published,” commented a critic on the Amazon website. “This work is an effort to completely erase the historical connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel.” A vigorous campaign was undertaken to prevent her from getting tenure at Barnard College, where she was teaching. Historians who have examined Israeli history, as they would any other, trying to disentangle myth from fact and challenging accepted wisdom, have similarly found themselves in a minefield. The “new history” by historians such as Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris is, said Shabtai Teveth, a journalist and biographer of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, “a farrago of distortions, omissions, tendentious readings, and outright falsifications.” Israel, as we shall see, is by no means the only society to have its history wars, but because so much is at stake there, from the very identity of the nation to its right to exist on its land, the conflict can get ferocious.

  History is about remembering the past, but it is also about choosing to forget. In political campaigns, candidates challenge one another with what they have chosen not to put in their biographies. We do it in our personal lives. “You never told me that,” we say angrily or with shock. “I never knew that about you.” Some of the most difficult and protracted wars in societies around the world have been over what is being omitted or downplayed in the telling of their history—and what should be in. When people talk, as they frequently do, about the need for “proper” history, what they really mean is the history they want and like. School textbooks, university courses, movies, books, war memorials, art galleries, and museums have all from time to time been caught up in debates that say as much about the present and its concerns as they do about the ostensible subject of history.

  Educating the next generations and instilling in them the right views and values are things most societies take very seriously. The fact that so many countries, especially in the West, have received large immigrant populations has given the issue even more importance. Most Western societies have been shaken by evidence, acts of terrorism especially, that there are immigrants who are indifferent to the values of the host society and a smaller number who in fact actively despise them. Episodes like the murder of the controversial director Theo van Gogh or the discovery of a terrorist plot in Toronto have forced the Dutch and the Canadians to look at the ways in which they integrate, or fail to integrate, new arrivals. There are fears as well that even the well-established inhabitants do not properly understand their own societies or the key values they embody. As a result, there are repeated calls for the teaching of national values. (Finding agreement on what those might be is not always easy, as the case of France so clearly shows, where religious tolerance conflicts with a concern that Muslim immigrants become French and secular.)

  History is often used as a series of moral tales, to enhance group solidarity or, more defensibly in my view, to explain how important institutions such as parliaments and concepts such as democracy developed, and so the teaching of the past has been central to the debates over how to instill and transmit values. The danger is that what may be an admirable goal can distort history either by making it into a simple narrative in which there are black-and-white characters or by depicting it as all tending in one direction, whether that of human progress or the triumph of a particular grou
p. Such history flattens out the complexity of human experience and leaves no room for different interpretations of the past.

  The motto of the province of Quebec is “Je me souviens,” and the French speakers in particular do indeed remember, but often selectively. History, as taught in the Quebec schools, has stressed the continued existence of French speakers as an embattled minority in an English Canada and how they have struggled unceasingly for their rights. When the Parti Québécois, the political expression of the separatist movement in Quebec, was in power in the 1990s, its education minister, Pauline Marois (now party leader), promised to double the time spent on history by high school students. Hard-line separatists were not satisfied: the curriculum, in their view, included too much world history and paid too much attention to English and aboriginal minorities in the province.

  English-speaking Canadians have other fears, including that young Canadians are not learning enough about the past to give them pride in their country. The Dominion Institute conducts surveys every year and announces with much gloom that Canadians cannot identify their prime ministers or remember the dates when key events took place. In 1999, a group of philanthropists set up the Historica Foundation, whose mission is to fill in, as they see it, the gaps in the teaching of Canada’s past. In Australia, John Howard, prime minister from 1996 to 2007, caused a spirited public debate when he announced that he had had enough of the “black armband” view of Australian history. The charge came at a difficult time, as Australians were considering what to do about the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal children who had been taken from their families and given to white families. Professional historians, Howard said, were “self-appointed cultural dieticians” who had persuaded Australians that their history is a sorry tale of racism, filled with crimes against the Aboriginals. Journalists and other commentators, appealing to the strong strain of anti-intellectualism in Australian culture, attacked the “moral mafia” and the “chattering classes” with glee. Most Australians, one columnist said, would be happy to see reconciliation between the Aboriginals and mainstream society, if only the former would “stop talking about the past.”

  In the United Kingdom, there are repeated debates over what history schoolchildren should be learning. Should it tell, as the Conservative Kenneth Baker wanted when he was minister of education, “how a free and democratic society had developed over the centuries”? Or should it be the history of those who were oppressed and marginalized? History from the top down or history from the bottom up? Do children need a chronology at all, or are they better off learning about topics such as the family or women or science and technology? In the summer of 2007, Ofsted, the body that inspects British schools, set off a national debate when it complained that the history being taught was too fragmented and that students had no idea when anything had taken place or in what order. Many parents had already discovered this for themselves and had made a surprise bestseller out of an Edwardian history for children. Our Island Story takes for granted that British history has moved onward and upward over the centuries, that the British Empire was a good thing, and that Britain was generally in the right. It is filled with stories, of Richard the Lion Heart, Sir Walter Raleigh, Robin Hood, and, of course, King Arthur. There are heroes and villains. A pre-Raphaelite Boadicea (as she was still known then) gallops across an illustrated page with her golden hair streaming behind her. A thoughtful Robert the Bruce watches a spider weaving its web and learns persistence. The two little princes tremble together as their evil uncle Richard III prepares to kill them. It is not good history—it has nothing to say about the new, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural Britain of today—but it is entertaining and may encourage children to take more of an interest in their country’s past. The debates over what sort of history to teach often get entangled with the question, being hotly debated in so many countries today, of how to integrate immigrants into the host society. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Thatcher Conservatives worried that new arrivals were not being taught what it was to be British. Mrs. Thatcher herself wanted a “patriotic history.” More recently, the Labour Party’s Gordon Brown, who would presumably disagree with her on the content of such history, said that those who want to become British citizens should be able to show that they understand British history and culture.

  In the United States, it used to be taken for granted that immigrants would become assimilated into American society and that one of the most important ways of doing this was through the schools. The Civil War, perhaps because it showed how fragile the Union could be, stimulated a deep interest in American history. Textbooks showed a history that unfolded triumphantly from the early settlements and the Founding Fathers up to the present. Patriotic societies, by the hundreds, encouraged the veneration of the American flag and held parades and festivals to commemorate the great moments of the American past. Thanksgiving took on even greater importance as a time when Americans gathered to remember the founding of the nation. Theodore White, the distinguished journalist, remembered himself and his classmates, the children of Jewish immigrants from Central Europe, enacting the first meetings between the Pilgrim fathers and the local Indians. For him it was a part of becoming American. The newer Memorial Day, proclaimed after the Civil War, became a time to remember the dead soldiers. In many states, schools were required by law to teach American history and civics in a way that would encourage patriotism. Self-appointed guardians vetted textbooks to ensure that the right message was getting across. Arthur Schlesinger Sr., one of the giants of American history in the years between the two world wars, was roundly criticized by Irish Chicago politicians for writing a text that, in their view, promoted an unhealthy and unpatriotic admiration of the British and their institutions. In 1927, the mayor had a copy of one of his “treason-tainted” books publicly burned.

  Because history has been so intertwined with Americans’ views of themselves as a people and with making immigrants a part of that people, textbooks and curriculum in the schools have repeatedly stirred up public controversies. In 1990 the first president Bush unwittingly lit the fuse for the most recent explosion when he announced that the federal government would work with state governors to establish National Education Goals, partly to ensure that American students could compete in a world where education was increasingly important but also to prepare them to be good citizens. The Clinton administration, which succeeded in 1993, carried on with the project. One of the core subjects, along with English, mathematics, science, and geography, where goals were to be set was history. After much debate and consultation, the National Council for History Standards produced a set of guidelines for American and world history which states could accept or not as they pleased. Although there was more stress on multiculturalism and on non-Western civilizations, those responsible for the guidelines felt confident that they were successfully telling the story of the United States in a way that would appeal to students. Moreover, they had included aspects of the past—women’s or black history, for example—that had previously been neglected.

  Shortly before the document was to be released, Lynne Cheney, wife of Dick Cheney, and a prominent conservative Republican herself, carried out what would have been called, in words familiar to the second Bush’s administration, a preemptive attack. In an article in the Wall Street Journal, she deplored the proposed new standards, which, she argued, gave a “grim and gloomy” view of the American past. As she saw it, politically correct professors who were driven by a hatred of traditional political and chronological history had produced a story in which the Ku Klux Klan got more attention than Daniel Webster or Albert Einstein. Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio show host, was beside himself with patriotic righteousness. The historians responsible for the National History Standards, he said, were bent on inculcating in the young the belief that “our country is inherently evil.” Others, including members of Congress, were not far behind. Those reformed criminals G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North, now themselves hosting radio shows, talked about �
��the standards from hell.” Senator Slade Gorton of Washington State denounced the standards in Congress as a vicious attack on Western civilization. In the fall of 1995, Senator Bob Dole, who was preparing his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, went even further. The standards, he said, were treasonous, “worse than external enemies.”

  The attacks did not go unanswered. Indeed, the United States found itself in a nationwide and far-reaching debate about what history was and what it should be for. Teachers and professional historians were delighted to see history restored to a central place in the curriculum. Liberals felt that the standards reflected the new, increasingly diverse United States. Many simply liked the stress on content and chronology. The Los Angeles Times said with approval, “Would that college graduates could all meet the standards for knowledge of the Constitution that are set here.” In the end, after more discussion and revision, new guidelines were published in 1996. They included a new final section where students were asked to explore controversies over history itself.