JERUSALEM: How do you make peace with someone whose entire view of recent history is completely different from yours?
For Jews, 1948 stands out as one of their finest hours – tiny, beleaguered Israel heroically stood up to vastly superior Arab forces in the War of Independence, which gave birth to a dream of 2000 years, an independent Jewish state in Palestine.
Palestinians call the 1948 war “Al-Nakba , “The Catastrophe , a time when the colonizing Zionists, with international support, expelled hundreds of thousands of Arabs from their homes and turned them into refugees.
The way that the Jews tell their story, they have been in Israel continuously since the days of Joshua, 3,400 years ago, sometimes fewer in number, sometimes greater. When Jews started returning in larger numbers, in the late 1800s, Israel was an empty place, swampy and desolate. They came home and made the desert bloom. Arabs from around the region started moving in when the Jews created a functioning economy.
The Palestinians say they have always lived here. In the late 1800s they were peacefully minding their own business when imperial colonizers bought up land from absentee landlords, driving the local inhabitants off land they had worked for generations. Zionists, people who came from Europe and knew little about Palestine or its people, took the land away from its rightful inhabitants.
How can people with such completely different views of history reconcile their perspectives sufficiently to make peace with each other?
By accepting that different people will see the same facts in a different light. The Jewish tradition teaches “shivim panim batorah , there are 70 faces to the Torah (Midrash Bamidbar Rabbah 13:16). Jews will always see their return to Zion as the fulfillment of a 2000 year-old dream. Palestinians will probably have a hard time ever seeing the same facts as anything but a colonialist imposition.
My volunteer work with Rabbis for Human Rights affords me the opportunity to meet Palestinians from the West Bank and to hear their stories. It’s one thing to read about the problems facing farmers in the West Bank in the newspaper; it’s another thing completely to hear it first hand, or even more powerfully, to experience the problems in real time, or to share the experience of being tear-gassed, as I have.
What I have found is that hearing their story does not invalidate my story. We need to become comfortable with contradiction. F. Scott Fitzgerald said “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function . We need to be able to live with the contradiction that what the Jews see as their finest hour, the Palestinians see as their “Nakba .
For peace to come, each side needs to appreciate the core perspective of the other:
Jews need to appreciate that Palestine was not “a land without a people . For too long Israel has ignored the fact that Palestinians also have long-standing and deep ties to this land.
Palestinians need to appreciate that Zionism is not colonialism. Many Palestinians think of the arrival of Jews in Israel as a colonial phenomenon, like the Belgians going into the Belgian Congo. It’s not. The Jews are not “going back where they came from . They are back where they came from.
A few weeks ago I was at a joint Israeli-Palestinian retreat, and was very surprised to hear one of the Palestinian participants, Dr Taleb Al-Harithi, proudly describe how he was descended from Bar Kochba, the great 2nd century Jewish rebel who was crushed by the Romans. Surprised, but it makes perfect sense that the Palestinians are descendants of the Jews who stayed – many of whom converted to Islam – just as many of the Jews who left converted to Christianity.
To make peace in Israel we need to make peace with contradictions; contradictions such as a Palestinian descended from a Jewish rebel, Jews being “home after 2,000 years of wandering, and how one nation’s “finest hour is another nation’s “catastrophe . We need to stop fighting about who is right. We both are.
Barry Leff is an American-Israeli rabbi, human rights activist and business executive who lives in Jerusalem. He blogs at www.neshamah.net. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
