Surviving the Story: The Narrative Trap in Israel and Palestine by Rosemary Hollis (review)

If I was us I wouldn’t startfrom here /For Here’s a swamp we’ve stoodin for too long. /We haven’t kept our headsabove the water. /And haven’t seen a thing wherewe have gone . . . /Each generation has a sacred task:To tell a better story than it wastold . . .

(p. ii)

The above excerpt is from Damian Gordon’s “If I Was Us, I Wouldn’t Start from Here,” a poem that now serves as a unique epigraph to Rosemary Hollis’s latest offering, Surviving the Story. Gordon initially wrote the poem for a 2018 public commemoration of Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Peace Agreement, but he noted that he created the piece with “two conflicts in mind: the ‘Troubles’ . . . that most recent episode of violence and unrest in my native Northern Ireland which has occupied so much of my lifetime and . . . the Middle East conflict . . .” (p. i). “If I Was Us” and Surviving the Story both underscore the often violent, all-encompassing, and trans-generational nature of conflicts between territories that are partitioned along ethnic and religious lines.

Gordon’s contributions to Hollis’s study are not limited to the poem; he was Hollis’s colleague at City, University of London’s Olive Tree Scholarship Programme, which provided willing and qualified Palestinian and Israeli undergraduates with full academic scholarships in exchange for their participation in a three-year “intensive cross-conflict dialogue exercise.” Hollis’s compelling and important study “recounts lessons . . . learned from working with [these] students” who took part in the program. Hollis’s book is a clear-eyed triumph that provides valuable and useable data for scholars and other professionals across disciplines, as well as meaningful pedagogical insights for teachers of all educational levels.

Hollis’s research, collected during the eight years she spent as the director of the Olive Tree (2008–16), challenges our most cherished hopes and beliefs about the role of cross-conflict people-to-people dialogue in what Hollis calls “the peace business.” Hollis begins her introduction by bracing us for the “unforeseen . . . insights” her work at the Olive Tree generated (p. 6). Hollis writes:

[C]onflicts . . . should not be understood as aberrations or departures from a peaceful ‘norm’ that otherwise prevails, even though it may be tempting to do so . . . tensions and conflicts . . . are ever present, even though these may not turn to violence across whole societies. The norm is the coexistence of relative harmony and disharmony at the societal level, war and peace at the regional and global level, all the time

(p. 2).

Here Hollis seems to be addressing stake-holders in peace and reconciliation projects first and foremost; treating conflict as exceptional, even deviant, indicates profound misapprehension and is ultimately counterproductive. Moreover, typical approaches to conflict resolution in Israel and Palestine tend to focus on solely on resolving disputed material issues are destined to fail, or at best yield only temporary results. Hollis contends that “call[ing] on the protagonists to ‘make the painful territorial compromises required’ to settle the dispute . . . [is to] assume that the warring parties can step outside the stories that define them” (p. 2).

And this kind of distancing, according to Hollis, is extraordinarily difficult. What “drives” conflict, Hollis convincingly argues, is not material loss or gain but group narratives, which are often shaped by profoundly divergent understandings of facts. Regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict specifically (which is just one of the conflicts Hollis has studied), Hollis offers this assessment: “I see [Israel/Palestine] as a cautionary tale, with relevance elsewhere, about the consequences of overinvestment in exclusivist group identities and narratives. It illustrates how two groups or identities can become so trapped in their respective narratives, that they cannot define themselves except in distinction from the other” (p. 6).

That groups in conflict tend to define themselves in relation to the “other” is not in itself a new insight. But Hollis’s findings — which...