X charges $5,000 per lecture on Palestine, to bestow his knowledge on a perplexed audience seeking answers regarding a seemingly indecipherable, never-ending conflict. X is not a Palestinian, nor did X ever live in Palestine for a long-enough period of time to justify his supposed first-hand account of the Palestinian struggle.
Y is roaming the globe offering ‘solutions’ to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Although Y is a Palestinian, his ‘solution’ is tailored to accommodate western sensibilities. His ideas have been largely developed in, and continue to exist within the confines of western academia, not the ailing walls of Palestinian refugee camps of Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan or Syria. Y’s ideas teeter between self-serving to noble. He is far removed from the pain, hurt and urgent priorities of his people. So much so, that his well-articulated narrative suffers from a near-complete disconnect with the reality under which his people subsist.
Z is a religious Muslim who sees Palestine as an exclusively Muslim issue. His narrative wins the applause of his peers, but confuses everyone else. Then there is the Israeli that declared himself an anti-Zionist and established a lucrative career based on his ultimate sacrifice and celebrated courage. Additionally, we see the socialist, who insists that the struggle for Palestine is part of a much larger anti-imperialist struggle worldwide. Fair enough, except that his understanding of Palestine is confined within a few slogans and symbols.
All of the above, and many other agents, purport to speak about and for Palestine and the Palestinians; to represent them, their history, their grievances, hopes and aspirations. Mostly missing from the panel of speakers are Palestinians with a real, genuine Palestinian narrative, true, realistic and if necessary, crude, rebellious and inconvenient.
But why does the Palestinian narrative have so many ambassadors, few of whom are Palestinian narrators?
The question occupied my thoughts as I, in an initially pointless exercise that lasted nearly an hour, flipped between two Palestinian television channels — Al Aqsa TV of Hamas in Gaza and Palestine TV of Fatah in the West Bank. While both purported to represent Palestine and the Palestinians, each seemed to represent some other place and some other people. Hamas’ world is fixated on their hate of Fatah and other factional personal business. Fatah TV is stuck between several worlds of archaic language of phony revolutions, factional rivalry and unmatched self-adoration.
It is no wonder why Palestinians are still struggling to tell the world such a simple, straightforward and truthful story. Factionalism in Palestine and among Palestinians in the Diaspora is destroying the very idea of having a common narrative through which they can tell one cohesive story, untainted by the tribal political mentality which is devouring Palestinian identity the same way Israeli bulldozers are devouring whatever remains of their land.
On the other hand, Israel’s official narrative of the conflict is entrenched in a decades-long consistent narrative, albeit fabricated and fictitious. For instance, on May 16, 2013, Shay Hazkani, described in a detailed Haaretz article the intricate and purposeful process through which Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion rewrote history. “Catastrophic thinking: Did Ben-Gurion try to rewrite history?” was largely based on a single file (number GL-18/17028) in the State Archives that seemed to have escaped censorship. The rest of the files were whisked away after Israel’s New Historians — Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev, Ilan Pappe and others — got their hands on numerous documents that violently negated Israel’s official story of its birth.
“Archived Israeli documents that reported the expulsion of Palestinians, massacres or rapes perpetrated by Israeli soldiers, along with other events considered embarrassing by the establishment, were reclassified as ‘top secret’,” Hazkani wrote in the Israeli paper. But GL-18/17028 somehow survived the official onslaught on history.
The lone document spoke of the “evolution of the Israeli version of the Palestinian Nakba (The Catastrophe) of 1948”. That evolution took place under the auspices of Ben-Gurion himself between the years 1960-1964, where he assigned one scholar after another to basically engineer historical narratives, as they surely did.
Salman Abu Sitta is one of Palestine’s foremost historians. The man has done more to preserve and document Palestinian historical records than any other historian I know. In an interview with Lebanon’s Al Akhbar newspaper on August 5, 2012, Abu Sitta was, of course, fully aware of the Israeli attempts at restyling history. “The Israeli maps of the 1950s were nothing more than the British survey of Palestine maps overwritten in Hebrew,” he said. “From 1960 onwards, the survey of Israel department started to issue maps devoid of all these original Palestinian names and replaced with Hebrew ones.” The reference to 1960 retrospectively corroborates Hazkani’s story based on the enduring file GL-18/17028.
Six-and-a-half decades later, that fight continues — between Israel’s attempts to erase the history of Palestine, while Palestinians, through independent efforts (no thanks to the warring factions), try to preserve their own. “The war runs along several fronts, not only militarily, but it is also a battle over the minds of people ... We are not trying to obliterate any other history — we are trying to say that we will not allow you (Israel) to erase ours,” Abu Sitta explained.
In March 2011, the Israeli Knesset (parliament) passed what is known as the “Nakba bill”. It financially penalises any organisation or institution that perceives and commemorates Israel’s founding as a day of mourning for Palestinians. The law, officially known as “Budget Principles Law (Amendment 39) — Reducing Budgetary Support for Activities Contrary to the Principles of the State,” was a continuation of Ben-Gurion’s project of physically erasing Palestinians, severing their rapport with their own land and presenting a construct of history to the rest of the world — a history that was deliberately misconstrued by few individuals following official instructions.
Alas, the current generation of Palestinians is yet to have a fully comprehensive, well-funded, long-term national Palestinian project that spans limited group interests and geography — one that is manned by qualified, well-trained Palestinian historians, spokespersons and scholars, so that a broad and unswerving Palestinian narrative can be presented throughout the world. All such efforts remain the responsibility of single individuals and small organisations with limited means, thus with narrowed outreach. But without such a unifying platform, it will be immensely difficult for the Palestinian narrative to reach the critical mass needed to overpower the fictitious Israeli version of Palestinian history, which continues to define mainstream thinking in many parts of the world, especially in the West.
Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is a media consultant, an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is: My Father was A Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press).
