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❖ 1 ❖ BUILDING LEGITIMACY THROUGH NARRATIVE ROBERT I. ROTBERG Wars are fought over tangible resources: rights to, and control over, land, water, and minerals. Wars are also fueled by other palpable grievances: forced removals; episodes of ethnic cleansing; fears of being overwhelmed; objective or imagined security concerns; actual or invented slights; ethnic, religious, or linguistic discriminations; a refusal to respect traditions or claims; and a host of other complaints. Old sores are rubbed raw, and revive antagonisms. New disparities recall earlier subordinations and attacks. One generation’s integrated harmony is overtaken by contemporary contentions and bitter rivalry. The urges of nationalism and self-determination arise out of the stony ground of travail, arousals of teachers and preachers, an envy of presumed usurpers, and a gradual rejection of a recon¤gured helotry. All of these antecedents to combat, however politicized, emerge out of, or draw upon, a profound historical consciousness. History is the reservoir of resentment, the fount of blame. History legitimizes ; history thus sancti¤es. Harking back to foul or fair deeds in an ancient time demonstrates the justness of today’s cause and the per¤dy of today’s opponent . Without an acceptable recourse to the past, gaining legitimacy for rebellion and hostility, plus terror, is impossible. No contemporary cause, however implausible, achieves widespread following without such legitimation— without an evocation of a hoary entitlement or a resurrected accusation of hurt. All of these truisms, and more, come together in Palestine/Israel, where con-®ict is endemic and intractable, peace elusive, and each side unfurls an interminable litany of charges and countercharges, claims,and demands.Each proffers credible concerns for security. Each fears the other in enumerated and innumerable ways. Each can point to many instances of per¤dy—to abundant reasons for mistrust. Both sides justify this inability to trust by analogy, by reciting a dirge of recent or distant traumas perpetrated by the other. Who did what to whom, and when and why, are the very fodder of contemporary attack and counterattack, and the essence of the dif¤cult security dilemma for both sides under any currently imaginable set of territorial realignments, income readjustments, external security guarantees, political empowerments, and so on. That one party is conventionally stronger, and one conventionally weaker, hardly helps. Nor is a resolution assisted by demographic disparities, differential fertility rates, the sympathies and tensions of the neighborhood, the postures of the big powers, guilt in Europe and America, a new civil war in Islam, or an upwelling of conservative Islamism. The gulf of history separates the contenders. Both reach back deeply into the past to legitimize their territorial claims to the lands of the Book. Both reinterpret in their own interests the peopling of these lands or this land. Both draw on and speak authoritatively of attachment to the territory, of rights to all of it or to this or that portion of it. There are few overlapping areas of agreement , for to grant X without receiving Y would vitiate an essential right to Z, and risk losing a bargaining step on the bitter snakes and ladders of ultimate adjustment. History’s Double Helix is an apt metaphor for the Palestinian–Israeli con®ict, and for the way that their intertwined reckonings of the past provide fodder and direction for thetit-for-tatbattles of the intifada and its inevitable response. Palestinians and Israelis are locked together in struggle, tightly entangled, and enveloped by a historical cocoon of growing complexity, fundamental disagreement , and overriding misperception of motives. Despite decades of Israeli revisionist historical reconstruction, and revisions of the revisionism, plus important Palestinian research, much of the fundamental explaining and legitimating of today’s con®ict remains as hotly contested as it was in 1948 or 1967. A greater appreciation of the separate truths that drive Palestinians and Israelis could plausibly contribute to con®ict reduction. Setting out the two justifying/rationalizing narratives helps us to understand the roots of the con-®ict and the differentially distorted prisms that fuel it. The two narratives butt up against each other. They view similar events from different angles. They dispute the relative importance of the events themselves and the selection of particularly chosen turning points. They approach legitimacy with different versions of the same story and with varied stories. The two narratives speak strongly about this grievance or that slight, but from perspectives that are placed orthogonally to each other, or juxtaposed in an unexpected manner. Understanding the two narratives is critical to an appreciation of why...

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