It is almost impossible for the two sides to find common answers to such questions because history lies at the heart of both their identities and their claims to Palestine. Israeli history was for a long time very much what the founding fathers such as Ben-Zion Dinur had hoped it would become—an inspiring story to weld Israelis into a nation determined to survive. Israel belongs in Palestine because there has been a continuous Jewish presence there since the Romans conquered the last independent Jewish state. The Arabs, the argument went, were relative newcomers, drifting in over the centuries from elsewhere. Moreover, so political figures like Golda Meir insisted, they did not constitute a separate nation called Palestine. In the 1980s, an American writer named Joan Peters went still further, attempting to show, unsuccessfully, that there had been virtually no Arabs at all in Palestine when the Zionists settlers started to arrive at the end of the nineteenth century; attracted by the prosperity the Zionists were creating, so she claimed, they moved in. Modern Israel was born in adversity yet managed to triumph over its massed Arab enemies. In the years after 1948, it was attacked repeatedly by its neighbours and forced into three defensive wars, in 1956, 1967, and 1973. It hangs onto the occupied territories of Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights to ensure its safety. Israel, so this version says, would like peace, but the Arabs have been intransigent right from the start.
Palestinian and the wider Arab history are, 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 forces. 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 longstanding 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 Judea and Sumaria 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 Israeli Antiquities Authority sent more than a dozen teams of archaeologists on a top-secret operation just before the Israeli withdrawal, to scour the 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 labelling 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 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 what we choose to forget. In political campaigns we often see candidates challenging each other 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 or more 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 is something most societies take very seriously. The fact that so many countries, especially in the West, have received large immigrant pop
ulations 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 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 we have seen in France, 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 group. 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, Aboriginal children who had been taken from their parents 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 pensively 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, but it is entertaining and may encourage children to take more of an interest in their country’s past.
In countries that are, for whatever reason, lacking in self-confidence, the teaching of history can be an extremely sensitive matter. In Turkey the government takes a strong interest in the curriculum. Historians who argue for greater attention being paid to the history of Turkey’s minorities or who dare to suggest that there was an Armenian genocide in World War I can find themselves in serious trouble. In Russia, in 2007, President Vladimir Putin told a conference of schoolteachers that the time had come to get rid of the “muddle” and have a more openly nationalistic view of the past. He presented them with a new history manual that, he said, would present a proper view of Stalin and of his place in Russian history. There were, Putin admitted to the teachers, some “problematic pages” in Russia’s past but far fewer than in other countries. Stalin was a dictator but that was necessary at the time to save Russia from its enemies. In the great struggle of the Cold War, which, according to the manual, was started by the United States, “democratisation was not an option.”
In China, the Party’s Propaganda and Education departments keep a close eye on the schools to ensure that they teach students of the suffering of the Chinese at the hands of the imperialists and convey the lesson that history selected the Communist Party to lead China into its present happy state. (In imperial China, the mandate was conferred by Heaven, but the idea is much the same.) Recently, the authorities closed down a journal called Freezing Point after it carried an essay by Yuan Weishi, a well-known Chinese historian, in which he pointed out that high school textbooks were filled with errors and distortions. What is more, they gave highly slanted views of the Chinese past, to show, he argued, that Chinese civilization is superior to all others and that foreign culture should be seen as a threat. What really got him and the journal into trouble was the assertion that history, as it was being taught, justified the use of political power and even violence to keep people on the right path. Professor Yuan’s views, the authorities said, were heretical and attacked “socialism and the leadership by the party.”
In Shanghai, a group of academics boldly produced new school textbooks that gave less space to the old staples of Chinese Communist history such as the depredations of imperialism and the rise of the Chinese Communist Party and paid more attention to other cultures and to such topics as technology and economics. The texts also let it be known that there could be more than one viewpoint on the past. Their fatal mistake, however, was to downplay the role of Mao. When a New York Times article headed “Where’s Mao?” commented on the improvement over the old two-dimensional histories, the authorities swung into action. Historians in Beijing issued a statement: “The Shanghai textbooks depart from Marxist historical materialism, and simply narrate events, rather than explain their nature. There are serious mistakes in political direction, theoretical direction, and academic direction.” The texts were banned.
Fortunately, the teaching of history can change for the better. In South Africa, since the end of apartheid, the schools, as
part of the national project of truth and reconciliation, have tried to present a history that includes all South Africans. In the Republic of Ireland, history used to be similarly circumscribed by political pressure. The story told in the schools was a simple one: eight centuries of oppression and then the triumph of Irish nationalism in the 1920s. Episodes that did not fit this version—the civil war, for example, between the competing nationalists—were ignored. Today, as its president pointed out, the schools teach a much fuller and more rounded version—and let the students know that there may be more than one way of viewing the past.
Schools are only one battleground. In Australia, John Howard and the more conservative media also went after the new National Museum on the grounds that it presented the past as white Australia’s genocide against the Aboriginals and failed to highlight the great explorers and entrepreneurs who built up the country. Museums, especially ones that involve history, occupy a curious place in our minds. Is their purpose to commemorate or to teach? To answer questions or to raise them? The answer in most societies is not clear. The Chinese, for example, have what are described as museums of World War II but which more resemble Madame Tussauds’s wax works than the Royal Ontario Museum or the British Museum. Instead of labelled objects in glass cases, they feature tableaux where Japanese soldiers bayonet Chinese civilians and Japanese doctors bend over the victims of their hideous experiments. The distinction between museums and memorials is a blurred one and, as a result, gives rise to often angry debates over how the past should be portrayed and interpreted.
The Uses and Abuses of History Page 9