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❖ 4 ❖ THE ARAB AND PALESTINIAN NARRATIVES OF THE 1948 WAR SALEH ABDEL JAWAD The 1948 Arab–Israeli war was one of the most important events in the contemporary Middle East. Its consequences and impact go beyond the geographical limit of the area and the historical time in which it occurred. Because of the issues left unresolved by the 1948 war and its aftermath—on the Palestinian side, the refugee problem in all its dimensions and the unmaking of a Palestinian state; on the Israeli side, control over the whole of Mandatory Palestine and hegemony over the region—the 1948 war soon became the “mother”of the many wars that followed.1 As a corollary to this unresolved struggle, the historiography of the war also became a battle¤eld for two opposing narratives. In the Arab–Israeli con®ict, writing history is a political act that “not only represents the past but also . . . molds the past.”2 To some degree, the struggle between narrative and counternarrative is universal. As Said put it: “The development and maintenance of every culture requires the existence of another, different and competing alter ego. The construction of identity . . . involves the construction of opposites and ‘others’ whose actuality is always subject to the continuous interpretation of their differences from ‘us.’”3 But in the Palestinian and Israeli cases, the writing of history is especially controversial and contested, as it constitutes one of the main foundations of legitimacy for both parties. The Jewish and Israeli Zionists have produced a comprehensive, coherent story composed of two sets of assertions. The ¤rst are the “foundational myths” which are principally a story of origins, going deep into the past. The second relates directly to the 1948 war, its immediate antecedents and consequences. The Palestinians,for their part,also have foundational myths and narratives of the 1948 war. This chapter explores some of the major reasons why the Palestinian narrative, although often containing more accurate insights, nevertheless remains fragmented and not fully comprehensive.4 Israeli versus Arab Narrative On the Israeli side, the foundational myth is composed of heroes (the Jews) and villains (the Arabs). Its main points are that Jews are a nation with 3000 years of history, who have been given the “Promised Land” as a contract between God and his own “chosen people”; Jerusalem is central to Jewish religion and history; the history of the land under Arab Muslim rule was a story of continuous decline; during the period of the Jewish diaspora, the promised land stood empty of people and civilizational achievements—only with the return of Jewish settlers did it bloom; Palestinian nationalism is nonexistent or, in the best case, only a reaction to Jewish claims.5 This is the common picture of an empty Palestine waiting to be redeemed by the Zionist modernizer.6 As is evident, the Israeli foundational myth has been formulated in such a way as to exclude Palestinians from the history of “the land.” The second set of legitimating myths concerns the reasons for and conduct of the 1948 war and its aftermath.7 These myths include those concerning Zionist acceptance and/or Arab rejection of the UN resolution to partition Palestine ; that the war was initiated by Arabs who are therefore responsible for all of its consequences including the fate of refugees; that Palestinians voluntarily left their homes on orders from Arab governments and Jews “made strenuous efforts to persuade their Arab neighbors to stay [but] they failed”; that the Arab states had united to destroy the Jewish state that had just been proclaimed; that Israel fought for its survival since Arabs wished to push them into the sea; that the utterly inadequate, poorly clad, and ill-equipped Jewish Defense Force alone met huge Arab armies (a Jewish David facing an Arab Goliath); that the Haganah (the military force of the Jewish Agency) and the Israeli army were “the most ethical in the world” (in this formulation the Deir Yassin massacre becomes an exception perpetrated by “dissidents”); and, ¤nally, that Israel subsequently sought peace but no Arab leader responded.8 In the shadow of this massive and partisan Israeli mythology, Palestinians did, in fact, construct their own story, sometimes independent of the Zionist mythology and sometimes in reaction to it, at times mythical and at other times more factual. The Arab mythology is also composed of two sets of stories : one also foundational and a second focused on al Nakba (the catastrophe), 73 ❖ The Arab and Palestinian Narratives of the 1948...

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