Review article on: Nur Masalha, Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History (London: Zed Books, 2018), 458 pp. ISBN: 978-1-7869-9272-7
Published in Bustan: The Middle East Book Review, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2021), pp. 129-149.
Among the side letters attached to the Camp David Accord, signed in September 1978, a letter was included from President Carter to PM Begin stating that:
I hereby acknowledge that you have informed me as follow
In each paragraph of the Agreed Framework Document, the expressions "Palestinians" or "Palestinian People" are being and will be construed and understood by you as "Palestinian Arabs."
In each paragraph in which the expression "West Bank" appears it is being, and will be, understood by the Government of Israel as Judea and Samaria.
Terminology and nomenclature are important components of every national conflict. At the heart of the conflict are the struggle for control of a specific territory and the respective claims by the contenders to absolute ownership of that territory. Such conflicts are normally accompanied by interrelated efforts to support a contemporary claim with a congruent narrative and terminology. Menachem Begin was unable to prevent the use of the term “Palestine” in the English language text referring to the Land of Israel and in the term “Palestinians” with regards to its Arab inhabitants, but he did manage to extract from President Carter a measure of consideration for the Israeli demand to use in the Hebrew text the term “Eretz Yisrael” (the Land of Israel) to designate the entity that had been deposited by the League of Nations as a mandate in the hands of Britain at the end of World War I.
Such a conflict over the very name of a contested territory is not unique to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A brief study of the modern history of the Nalkans or Eastern or Central Europe, arenas of conflict between great power, national movements and ethnic groups would easily reveal a series of similar cases. Thus, Greece has recently objected to Macedonia’s membership in the European Union arguing that Macedonia was a Greek entity. In order to be admitted to the EU, Macedonia was forced to change its name to Northern Macedonia. The Ukranian city of Lviv was Austrian-Hungarian Lamberg and Polish Levuv as the territory known once as Eastern Galicia changed hands several times.
There is quite a bit of irony in the process through which the name “Palestine” or “Palestina” was transformed in the course of the British Mandate from a term designating both for the Zionist Movement and in general usage the historic homeland of the Jewish people to a term designating an essentially Arab entity. In 1897, at the end of the First Zionist Congress in Basel, the “Basel Program” was adopted that had stated that “Zionism's purpose is the establishment for the Jewish People of a home guaranteed publicly and legally in Palestine.”
During the last decade of the 19th Century, “Palestine” was a geographic term (the term coined by Metternich with regard to Italy), namely a familiar term referring to a loosely defined area that does not constitute a political or administrative entity. In this respect, Ottoman Palestine was not different from other parts of the Empire, such as Iraq or Syria. The British Admiralty’s Handbooks published in the early years of the 20th Century reflect the lack of a clear distinction between Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. For the Jewish people and the Zionist Movement the term “Palestine” referred to the Land of Israel, the historical homeland of the Jewish People of the Land of the Bible. At that time there was no point and therefore no effort to define its borders. In the Christian world, the term Holy Land was current.
The first effort to define Palestine’s borders was made in 1916 in the Sykes-Picot Agreements, which determined that at the end of the World War and on the assumption that the Ottoman Empire would be dismantled, Palestine's territory would be placed under international protection. Britain’s subsequent quest to walk away from this commitment and to keep rival powers awaty of the Suez Canal was one of the motives of the publication in Novemenbt 1917 of the Balfour Declaration promising the representatibe of the Zionist Movement “to view with favor the establishemnt of a Jeiwsh Natinal home in Palestine [under British protection]”. The establishment of the British Mandate in Palestine turned Palestine into a semi-political entity with defined borders (a process completed in 1922 with the separation of Transjordan from Western Palestine). During these years, the Zionist Movement gravitated towards referring to the territory not as “Palestine” but as “Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel)”. But the pressure exerted by the Zionist Leadership on the British met with partial success: The latter agreed to use the term “Palestina - Eretz Yisrael” in a number of officla documents such a stravel documents, birth certificates and banknotes.
Alongside this Zionist tendency to prefer the term “Eretz Yisrael”, other significant forces at work reinforced the tendency to turn Palestine (Filastin in Arabic) to a termn identified primarily with the Arab majority of its population: The dominant role of Arab Nationalism as a successor to the Ottoman - Islamic identity of the Arab inhabitants and the emergence of an Arab-Palestinian National Movement (largely as a response and opposition to the Zionist enterprise). Still, until 1948, the conflict in Palestine was perceived and represented as a dispute between Jews and Arabs. Among the Palestinian Arabs, too, the transition to a common usage of the term “Palestinians'' was gradual. Thus, the leadership forum of the Palestinian majority was originally named the Higher Arab Committee. Ultimately, a dichotomy was fully established between the term Palestine or Filastin, representing the Arab Palestinian claim to the right and possession over the land, to the term “Eretz Yisrael” representing the Jewish-Zionist-Israeli counter claim.
At the end of the 1948 War, a change in terminology took place, and the original conflict became the Arab-Israeli Conflict. The Palestinian issue remained at its core, but the Palestinians themselves were pushed to the margins. They returned to center stage in the mid of the 1960s with the establishment of the PLO and the first actions taken by the Fatah organization. The Palestinina National Charter, in its two versions (1964 and 1968), defined Palestine according to the boundaries of the British Mandate. After decades of violent conflict and mutual exclusion. Israel and the Palestinian Naitonal Movmenet agreed in Oslo in 1993 on mutual recognition, but the “Two State Solution” predicated on the partition of Palestine West of the Jordan was not fully accepted by other side. For many Israelis, one of the major arguments militating against acceptance of this compromise is the vagenece inherent in the term Palestine and the concern that a political entity carrying this name would embody a claim to the full territory of Mandatory Palestine. In recent years, the term Israel / Palestine is used among some academic researchers to designate this territory to the chagrin of many Israelis who view it as an early step towards a larger acceptance of what is known as the “One State Solution”.
Zionism and the Arab Question
The issue of Ziniosm’s attitude toward to the non-Jewish, mostly Muslim population which resided in the Land of Israel and its place in the Jewish national home or state, once it was established, preoccupied the Zionist movement from its early years prior to the formation of political Zionism by Theodore Herzl. An initial view tended to ignore the problem and to suppress it through a cliche determining that the Land of Israel was a “Land without a people for people without a land”. There were two prominent critics of this view: Achad Ha’am, in this essay “Truth from the Land of Israel” published in 1891, and Yitzhak Epstein in this essay “A hidden question” published in 1907. Both clarified in their own way that the Land of Israel was settled albeit scantly by an Arab population that was likely to oppose the establishment of a Jewish entity in the territory of Palestine. Such opposition was indeed manifested prior to the publication of the Balfour Declaration and the establishment of the British Mandate through physical violence and on the political and journalistic levels. Theodore Herzl himself was aware of the presence of an Arab population and its potential opposition to his enterprise, but he did not attach great significance to these issues.
During the coming decades, several schools of thought emerged in the Zionist Movement and in the political system of the Jewish community of Palestine with regard to the Arab majority and the national movement which led it. This panorama of positions and attitudes can be simplified by dividing it into four main schools: The dominant school believing in a gradual construction of “the embryonic state” while obscuring the ultimate quest for Jewish statehood, a left-wing school which sought class fartainity with an Arab public led an exploited by a landed aristocracy, a quest of the establishemnt of a bi-national state, and the Zionist right-wing School embodied in the revisionsit movmenet led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky.
The best known term in Jabotinsky’s political doctrine is “the Iron Wall” - the title of an article published in November 1923. A reading of the text would surprise anyone who expects to find in it the source of the Israeli nationalist right-wing worldview at the end of the 20th and the early 21st century. This worldview downplays the importance of Palestinian nationalism and its positions. Jabotinsky did believe that a collision with the Arab inhabitants of Palestine was inevitable. All efforts to conceal the true aims of the Zionist movement, to buy the Palestinian Arabs good will with money or other investments, or to reach an agreement with the Arab states, were all bound to fail. “All these good people”, wrote Jabotinsky, “understood that it is absolutely impossible to obtain the agreemnt of the Palestinian Arabs to the conversion of the one land of Israel from an Arab land to a land with a Jewish majority [...] every native people, whether it is civilized or wild, views its county as its national home [...] they must not be seen as a mob but as a people”. On this basis, Jabotinsky concluded that the only way to move the Zionist enterprise forward would be to build an “iron wall” (polticial and military). Only when the Palestinian Arabs would understand that they cannot crack the iron wall will they be ready to accept the Ziohnit project and to come to terms with it. Ironically, the doctrine of the “iron wall” was adopted in practice, though not in theory, by the dominant current in the Zionist movement and the leadership of the Jewish community in Palestine headed by David Ben Gurion.
Jabotinsky, like other Zinioist leaders and thinkers, focused on the present and the future and not on the past. The Ziniost point of departure was that the Land of the Israel is the historical home and do the Jewish people that the bond between the people and the homeland was not severed during the years of exile, and that it was the right of the Jewihs people to return to the homeland, to establish in it a national state, to solve in this eaya the predicament of European Jews and to normalize the life of the Jewish people. Such question as “the right to the land”, the bond between “the people of Israel and the Land of Israel”, and “the contituniy of Jewish presence in the land of Israel” were bound to occupy a central position in Zinionst public relations and in the effort to persuade decision makers and international commissions that the Ziniost cause was just. But their place in the intra-Zinions discourse was marginal during the early years of the British Mandate, and occupied the more central position only with the exacerbation of the Arab-Jewish conflict.
The Palestinian Response
The timing of the emergence of a national Palestinian movement is a disputed issue both in Palestinian historiography and in the academic literature. Even the staunchest Palestinians are hard put to deny a decisive influence that the Zionist enterprise and the establishment of the British Mandate had on this process, but they tend to seek to downplay its role. As they see it, early indications of modern nationalist consciousness and activity were evident prior to World War I, and they crystallized into a Palestinian Nationalist Arab movement with the formation of the Mandate as Mandated Palestine became the arena of a protracted conflict between two national movements. The claim that a Palestinian national movement had appeared prior to World War I is constrained by the fact that at that time there was no clear distinction between Arab nationalism and separate Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian budding nationalisms.
Alongside the development of the Palestinian national movement in the 1920s and the 1930s, a Palestinian national historiography emerged that sought to prove the existence of a Palestinian Arab identity since ancient times. One important manifestation of this trend was the adoption of the theory of “The Semitic Waves” that had been developed by such Western orientalists as Hand Winkler and Leone Catane. According to this theory, the Fertile Crescent had been inhabited by a wave of immigration from the Arabian Peninsula that brought to it the Cananites, the Jebusites, the Emorites, and the Phoenicians. According to this version, these Semitic peoples were, in fact, Arabs so that the Palestinians in the 20th century could claim continuous presence in Palestine since the days of the Canaanites. One prominent member of this school was Mustafa Dabbagh who claimed that the first to settle Palestine had been the Cananites, whose origin was in the tribe of Banu al-Can’an in the eastern shore of the Arab (or Persian) Gulf. According to Dabbagh, the Banu Can’an were connected to the Emorites and the Phoenicians who emigrated from the Arabian Peninsula around 2500 BC. About a thousand years later the Filistains emigrated to the area from the Greek island and their convergence with the Cananites created contemporary Palestinian society.
This thesis moved swiftly from the hands of the historians to those of the Palestinian political leadership and became a sample argument in the effort to deny the Jewish claim to Palestine and to create a counter-narrative to the Zionist argumentation. This argument was supplemented by the claim that was raised at the same time that the modern European Jews are not the descendants of the ancient Hebrews; they originate, so goes the argument, from the Khazars or from different ethnic groups that joined the Jewish religion during the last 2000 years.
As a rule, the Palestinian claim to a continuum of a thousand years of history and the argument that the Semitic peoples in the Fertile Crescent had been part of the Arab family did not raise considerable interest or concern with the Zionists (and later the Israeli) party of the conflict. For the Zionists, and subsequently the Israelis, a pedigree beginning at the end of the second millennium BC and the existence of the Kingdom of Judea and Israel were sufficient. The mirror image of the Palestinian claim to thousands of years of Arab dominance in the Fertile Crescent, including Palestine, can actually be found in a scintillating but marginal ideological movement that appeared in the Jewish community under the Mandate - “The Canaanites”. The movement that was formed by the poet Jehonathan Ratosh was inspired by archaeological discoveries in the 1920s that shed new light on the cultures of the Fertile Crescent in such sites as Ugarit and by the clear connection between that culture and the Bible. Their argument was that the dominant culture in the region was Hebrew. According to them, Judaism was a late phenomenon, a deviation of sorts from the original Hebrew culture. Their conclusion was that two thousand years of exile should be erased and Hebrew culture and hegemony in Israel and in the region should be restored. This theory was not developed as a counter-narrative to the Palestinian version but in an intra-Jewish and intra-Israeli context, and its appeal remained limited.
The Transformation of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1947-1967
During the twenty years separating 1967 from 1947, the conflict over Palestine underwent several transformations. The UN Partition Resolution of November 1947 did not lead to the partition of Western Palestine to Jewish and Arab states but rather to a war that ended with the establishment of a Jewish state and in the partition of the area that was designated for the Arab Palestinian state among Israel, Egypt, and Jordan. The Palestinian leadership was crushed and the Palestinain population was divided into a number of groups: those who becam Israeli citiaens and were known at the time as “Israeli Arabs”, the original inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza who stayed in place and some 600 to 700 thousands refugees, some of whom settled in the West Bank and Gaza while others drifted to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Jordan was the only Arab state that, after annexing the West Bank, granted the Palestinians citizenship. The Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine was transformed into the larger Arab-Israeli conflict. That conflict was primarily conducted by the Arab states while the original Palestinein leadership headed by the Mufti wa pushed into the sidelines or banished altogether, but the “Palestinian question” remained the focal point of the conflict.
This state of affairs was fundamentally altered by the Six Day War. The war’s impact on the Arab-Israeli conflict and on its Palestinian component was manyfold. The conflict was deepened and expanded by the Arab defeat and was supplemented by two additional dimensions: Israeli occupation of sovereign Egyptian and Syrian territories, and Israeli control over the whole of Western Palestine. The loss of the Sinai and the Golan Heights led Egypt and Syria into another war against Israel in October 1973 but also created the territorial asset that would serve as a basis of a peace process predicated on “Territories for Peace”.
The 1967 war’s impact on the specific Israeli-Palestinian dispute and on the conflict over Palestine was even deeper. As we saw, the Palestinian question had been returned to the front stage in the mid-1960s with the establishment of the PLO as an instrument of the Arab states and with the initial open activity of the Fatah as an autonomous Palestinian organization. This development was expedited by war, which ended with the defeat of the regular Arab armies and the subordination of the entire of Western Palestine to Israeli control. Yasser Arafat and the Fatah took control of the PLO and became influential actors in the Middle East and in the global arena.
Israel was transformed by the war. The “Block of the Faithful” emerged as the main component of the messianic movement that saw the war and its outcome as harbingers of a new historic phase shaped by Israeli control over the whole of Western Palestine. If secular Zionis had established the State of Israel in part of the Land of Israel, the mission of religious Zionism was now to add the rest of the Land of Israel to the Jewish State. Loyalty and devotion to the Land of Israel became the principal article of faith of a (religious) Zionist stream that in previous decades had been led by moderate leaders. The Block of the Faithful hardcore was supplemented in the coming years by additional strata of an Israeli right wing defined primarily by deep loyalty to the Land of Israel and to the settlement project in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Inside Israel, the war generated a process of Palestinization of the Arab minority that was shaped in part by the renewed contact with the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza as well as by demographic growth which turned a small, weak Arab minority into a minority of some 20 percent affected by newly acquired self-confidence, modernization and self-awareness.
Intensification of the War of Narratives
The conflict between the Palestinian National movement in its new incarnation and Israel and, even more so, between it and the Israeli right-wing has been conducted during the last six decades as a violent, political diplomatic dispute and as a war of narratives. The rising political power of the Israeli right wing after 1967 was accompanied by pseudo-academic literature designed to support its claim to confirm Israeli control over the whole of Western Palestine. This literature took the two main arguments of the Zionist Israeli party to the debate that had unfolded since the 1920s (the Jewish people’s historic right over the Land of Israel and the negation of the Palestinain claim to territorial and a national identity and an ownership over “Filastin”) were taken further by spokesmen of the Israeli right.
Shmuel Katz, who served briefly as Menachme Begin’s spokesman after the formation of his government in 1977, had published in 1972 a book titled “Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine”. According to Katz, the blame lay with the policy of Britain for the invention for the Palestinians in 1947 of “historic rights” over Palestine that had existed presumably for a thousand years.
In 1995, on his way to leading the Likud party and to becoming Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu published his book “A Place Among the Nations” when he argued, among other things, that
In trying to shore up their claim to Palestine, the Arabs have not merely distorted the demographic and physical conditions of the country in the 19th century. They have tried to persuade the world that the Arabs of Palestine had forged a distinct and unique national identity over the centuries; otherwise, they knew, they would not qualify for self-determination. Thus, they claimed that when the Jews “invaded” they took over what had been an independent country, |Palestine”, inhabited by a distinct nation, “the Palestinians”. But this claim too makes a farce out of history [...]
The most ambitious effort in this context was invested by the American-Jewish journalist, Joan Peters, who published in 1984 a thick volume titled “From Time Immemorial”, in which she tried to beef up the Zionist narrative and to reject the Palestinian one in the guise of an academic-research based book. The hard core of the book is chapter 8, “ ‘Palestina’: A Precedent of Prey”, in which she argues that
The claim that Arab-Muslim “Palestinians” were “emotionally tied” to “their own plot of land in Palestine” - based upon a “consistent presence” on “Arab” land for “thousands of years” - is an important part of that recent mythology. It was contrived of late in a thus far successful Orwellian propaganda effort - an appeal to the emotions that would “counter Zionism” and that “serves” tactical purposes as “a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel”.
The Peters book enjoyed wide circulation and generated a wave of both positive and negative reviews. Noteworthy among these reviews is the essay by Yehoshua Porath, the Israeli historian of Palestinian nationalism, published in the New York Review of Books. Porath, who underwent several transformations in his personal and public life, was a strict advocate of academic integrity and responded sharply to the academic garb covering Peters’ text. According to him
One feature of this battle of words and of history writing has been the two contrasting mythologies that the Arabs and the Jews have developed to explain their situations. Like most myths these generally contain some element of plausibility, some grain of historical truth, which through terminological ambiguity is then twisted into a false and grotesque shape: The unfortunate thing about Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial (1984) is that from a position of apparently great learning and research, she attempts to refute the Arab myths merely by substituting the Jewish myths for them.
One of the distinctive components of the Palestinian mythology (to use Porath’s terminology) is the argument that the Palestinians, as descendants of the Canaanites and other Semitic peoples who had arrived from the Arabian Peninsula in the third millennium BC, had a presence of thousands of years in Palestine. As we saw, Palestinian historians such as Dabbagh raised the arguments in the fourth decade of the last century. During the last few decades, the argument had been adopted by the PLO’s leadership and is often voiced by its leadership. In 1995 (when the Oslo II Agreement was signed), the Yebus (Jebusite) Cultural Center was established in East Jerusalem. The Center’s website states that “Yebus is the first name given to Jerusalem by the Jebusites. The Jebusites are Canaanite tribes that built the first city, Yebus, on the site of contemporary Jerusalem. Today, more than five thousand years later, the descendants of the Jebusites are still living in Jerusalem and continue to generate in the city a life of culture and art.”
In a more melodramatic fashion, a chariot race was held in Nablus during the same year after it had been transferred to the Palestinian Authority. The chariot drivers wore costumes that were supposed to be Canannites as a gesture to Yasser Arafat “The First Master of Canan”.
In recent years, the PLO’s leadership has tended to assign a larger role to the theory of the Palestinians’ “Canaanite origin”. Such leaders as Mahmoud Abbas and the chairman of the Palestinian Authority, Mohammad Eshtaya, and the late Said Ariqat have made frequent references to it. Thus, on December 14, 2019, a meeting was held in Ramallah under the title “Canaanite Palestine”. It was organized by the Palestinian Ministry of Culture and attended, among others, by Mohammed Eshtaya and the Palestinian Minister of Culture. “The meeting was designed to strengthen the connection between the Palestinians and the ancient Canaanites [...] as well as to combat the Israeli falsification of history.”
In 2019, the Palestinian academic Nur Masalah, who lives and teaches in London, published a thick volume seeking to anchor these arguments in an academic framework of sorts. Unlike Joan Peters, Masalah is an academic but his book is not essentially different from hers. “Palestine - 4000 Years of History” is an effort to document the argument for historical continuity between the semitic-Arab peoples who had inhabited Palestine and the contemporary Palestinians. For Masalah, Palestine is a defined entity with its own native population embodied in the Palestinian Arabs. There was also a Jewish presence in Palestine during the biblical period but it was brief and insignificant.
Masalha’s book does not meet any academic criteria and has indeed received negative reviews that expose its inherent deep flaws. Against this backdrop, the review by Glenn Bowersock in the New York Review of Books is of particular interest.
Bowersock is a senior historian of Greece and Rome and of the Ancient Near East. He does not try to disguise his hostility to the very essence of the Zionist enterprise. The Balfour Declaration was “infamous”. The support by President Truman and other statesmen for the establishment of the State of Israel was “politically driven callousness”. Is Bowersock not aware of the paternalism inherent in his approach to Masalah? He does refute the central thesis which appears in the book’s title and states that there were no 4000 years of Palestinian history and that Palestine did not have a native population. But at the same time, he commends Masalha for his scholarship and for some part of his book. While rejecting the argument that Palestine had existed continuously as a defined unit, but he does find some continuity between the classical period and contemporary Palestine based on the preservation of elements from the classical period by the 7th Century Muslim conquerors and he identifies these elements in the collective consciousness of contemporary Palestinians. For Bowersock, no one reflects this consciousness and the historical depth it represents than the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, and he is disappointed by Masahlah’s choice not to devote to Darwish more than three pages in his thick volume.
The claim of 4000 years of history is a dominant but not an exclusive component of the Palestinian narrative. One of the most prominent advocates of the Palestinian cause, the American Palestinian Professor Rashid Khalidi, in his book Palestinian Identity is explicitly critical of it. “These groups [that formed the PLO], which have probably represented the views of a majority of Palestinians since some time in the mid- or late 1960s, emerge from a relatively recent tradition which argues that Palestinian nationalism has deep historical roots. As with other national movements, extreme advocates of this view go further than this, and anachronistically read back into the history of Palestine over the past few centuries, and even millennia, a nationalist consciousness and identity that are in fact relatively modern.”
According to Khalidi, there is no need to go back as far as the 3rd millennium BC in order to denounce Israel and to reinforce the Palestinian argument. Zionism and Israel are, in any case, reprehensible enterprises of a “settler colonialism”. Palestinian nationalism was influenced by the Zionist challenge but it had developed towards the end of the Ottoman era as part of the nationalist revival in the Levant. Its deep roots go back to the Crusades and the sense that Palestine was a holy land under permanent danger of a new Western offensive served to reinforce the feeling of identity and distinctiveness which developed in Palestine during the coming centuries.
Another prominent Palestinian spokesman who joined Khalidi in taking a distance from the Canaanite argument was the former member of Knesset Azmi Bishara, the founder of the nationalist Balad party. Bishara rejects the Zionist narrative and argues that “the legacy of Palestine is the legacy of every one who came through here, including the Canaanites, the Hebrews and the Jebusites.” At the same time, he argues that “the selective mobilization of history designed to create a continuum between the Canaanites and the Palestinians actually accepts the rules of the game dedicated by Zionism.” According to Bishara, the right of the Palestinians to the land does not derive from their Canaanite ancestry but from their being the inhabitants of the land for ages. According to him, “the effort to find a collective memory that is not true and not imagined is an effort to write what cannot be imagined [...] the Arabs of the country can identify with Salah a-Din and with Gamal Abd al-Nasser [...] but they cannot identified with Canaan because it does not concern their imagination. Canaan is history without a memory.”
Khalidi’s position with regard to the origins of Palestinian nationalism was supported by an Israeli academic, the Hebrew University's Prof. Haim Gerber. Gerber was not hostile to the Zionist project but critical:
On the negative side, for a long time, I have been less than happy with the traditional Zionist ideological approach to the Palestinians, an approach presented as sociological and historical reality and characterized by complete denial of their very existence as a movement or a nation. Palestinian identity, to the extent it was at all recognized, was set to be parasitic on Zionist identity and an imitation of it.
Gerber’s research ended with a series of conclusions most important of which was:
[...] that ever since the Crusades there existed in Palestine certain elements of identity, such as that the country was named Palestine; it was an Islamic holy land under constant threat of being attacked again by Crusaders, never forgotten for even a minute.
The Bible: Archeology and History
“Biblical minimalism” is the name given to a research school largely identified with the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and Sheffield University in Great Britain, that have crystallized in the 1990s of the previous century. This school was led by Prof. Peter Lemke, Thomas Thompson, Philip Davis and Keith Whitlam, and adopted a skeptical approach towards the bible as a historical text, that had originated in biblical criticism, and led it to radical shrinking and sometimes total disregard for the biblical text as a historical source. The minimalists challenged the dominant school in the study of “biblical archeology” that was largely identified with the figure of William F. Allbright. Allbright was the son of evangelical missionaries and his scientific enterprise was influenced by his desire to consolidate the biblical narrative championed by the evangelists through archeological discoveries. The critics of the minimalist school maintained that while the biblical text lacks full precision and reliability, it still reflects the historical events and could alongside sources from other disciplines, serve as an important source for understanding the period.
It was not surprising that the minimalist school led some of its members and readers to apply its arguments in the context of the debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If the Israeli argument to “the right over the land” relied largely on the biblical description of the history of Israel and Judea, the rejection of this description undermines the validity of the Zionist-Israeli argument. A member of the minimalist school, Keith Whitelam, is the most prominent representative of this tendency. The title of his book, “The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History”, speaks for itself. In the introduction to his book, he addresses the challenges that he had faced, most importantly:
What has begun to emerge in recent years in a variety of different places is a conception of a wider Palestinian history as a separate subject in its own right, increasingly divorced from Biblical studies as such. This means that Israelite history and Second Temple Judaism, the domain of Biblical studies until very recently, form part of this Palestinian history, whereas Israelite history under the influence of Biblical studies has domintated the Palestinian landscape to such an extent that it has silenced virutally all other aspects of the history of the region from the late Bronze Age to the Roman period.
For Whitlam, ancient Israel is a lonely moment, single and brief, in the history of Palestine. Ancient and biblical Israel is the product of the Christian world’s pangs of consciousness in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The Christian-Zionist biblical research silenced the Palestinian voice.
In the process of the national and cultural renaissance of the East European Jewry and in the history of the Zionist enterprise, the bible played a central role. This role began to unfold during the Enlightment Period and continued more vigorously with the beginning of the Zionist settlement in Palestine. Reliance on the Bible was not necessarily meant to reinforce the argument for the Zionist claim on the land but was rather a cardinal instrument in the construction of a new identity, Zionist and subsequently Israeli. Reliance on the Bible reached its zenith in the 1950s under the aegis of the founding father, David Ben Gurion. The Bible Circle held at Ben Gurion’s residence and the annual Bible quiz were two prominent manifestations of this effort. Archeological research was a second pillar in the process of nation-building during the 1950s. The annual meeting of “The Society for the Study of Eretz Yisrael and its Antiquities” and the large scale digs conducted by the former Chief of Staff of the IDF, Yigael Yadin, were major manifestations for the quest to rely on archaeological discoveries in order to reinforce the connection between the people and the land.
During the years of the British Mandate and in the early years of statehood, the Israeli scholars studying the historiography of ancient Israel and the Bible were able to steer successfully between the discoveries of modern research and the national consensus. Israel’s academic archaeologists remained under the influence of Allbright and his followers, who accepted the Bible as a historical source. Even those who thought that large parts of the Bible, first and foremost, the stories of the Patriarchs were not a reliable historical source, estimated that in the main the historiographic part of the Bible did reflect a historical reality and argued that even if not every biblical sentence should be accepted as a historical fact, the importance of the bible as a national ethos and a seminal document of humane culture cannot be ignored.
In the post-1967 decades, as the chasm between left and right in Israel became deeper, it began to affect Israeli archaeological research and writing. Curiously, the members of “the block of the faithful” and the settlers in the West Bank had at the time little interest in archaeological digs in order to reinforce their claim to these parts. They probably felt that their case was strong enough and needed no academic or archaeological support. This state of affairs changed more recently as a significant number of members and supporters of this political camp have joined the ranks of students in Israel’s departments of archaeology.
The leading project in this context is the archeological dig in the City of David due to the particular importance of Jerusalem and the intensity of the conflict over the city. The project is led by the E.L.A.D NGO (E.L.A.D is an acronym in Hebrew for “to the city of David”). The project is headed by one David Be’eri, a prominent right-wing activist. In the shadow of the lingering hegemony of the right wing in Israeli politics, Israel’s governmental antiquities authority abandoned, in fact, its position in the City of David dig and left it to the ELAD NGO. In 2017, David Be’eri received the Israel Prize for a lifetime achievement. Yet another manifestation of the politicization of Isaeli archaeology was the establishment of the left-leaning group “Emek Shave”. The academic archaeologists are as a rule careful to avoid an explicit political affiliation, though the positions of some of them both left and right are an open secret. An interesting reflection of the political controversy within the Israeli archeological community is the essay published by Amnon Bentor in a site called “Ratio” under the title “The minimalist archaeologists are ignoring facts and their own statements”. An opposite perspective is represented in an essay published by Rafi Greenberg under the title “A shallow forceful archeology”. Greenberg complained that the balance that had existed until recently in the archeological research in Jerusalem was broken due to “pressures by interested political actors seeking ‘proofs’ to our historic right in the city or, alternatively, in evacuating territory for construction.”
During the last few decades revisionist groups emerged in several branches of the Israeli academy that challenged the dominant schools of an earlier phase. “The New Historians” and “The Critical Sociologists” attacked these schools from the left. Against this backdrop, it is curious to note that in the field of archeology and the study of ancient Israel, scholarly groups emerged seeking revision but not revisionism regarding the conventional wisdom. The archeologist Israel Finkelstein and the historian of Ancient Israel, Nadav Ne’eman, are prominent members of this school. This school, sometimes called the “Tel Aviv School”, was confronted by a more conservative school sometimes called the “Jerusalem School” in the ranks of which Dr. Ayelet Mazar played an important role. Finklestein prefers to define his project not as “a revision” but as a “positive deconstruction”. In his work, Finkelsten presents Judea and Israel as historical entities, though at part of the time smaller than suggested by the Biblical description. He challenges the Exodus as a historical fact. The origin of the original Israelites is to be found among the Canaanites of the coastal plain who migrated to the hills, adopted monotheistic beliefs, and gave birth to the People of Israel. This theory is not palatable to the adherence of the Biblical narrative but it does not undermine the central arguent of the Zioist argument, according to which the modern Jewish nation has retruend to its historci homeland under the Zionist enterprise (Finkelstein evades the problems associaited with the term “Palestine” by using the term “the Southern Levant. He himself explains the broader context of his project in an essay he published over the pages of the journal “Alpayim”):
Economic and social processes that unfolded in Israel since the late 1960s brought prosperity, broke the mental isolation and the atmosphere of siege in Israeli society and produced a new openness to the world to a previously unfamiliar extent. A new current of ideas and methods penetrated all areas of research, archaeology as well. Many of the Israeli archaeologists began to go out into the world and became closely familiar with more diverse trends of thought and research. This is how the isolationist road blocks of socialist, Spartan Israel were removed and “an Athenian” age began in Israeli academy, certainly in Israeli archaeology [...] These paradigms paved the way for the transition of some Israeli researchers from a concept viewing technical archeologists dealing almost exclusively with material culture to what I would call a concept defining him as “a historian dealing in archeology”, namely who relied on archaeology in order to reconstruct historical processes. It is self-understood that a renewed closeness to the tradition of European Biblical research, mostly its German version, supported this process. All these led to releasing Israeli archeologists from the onerous bondage of the old Biblical archeology.
These publications gave rise to sharp controversy among the Israeli archeologists and bible researchers. A wide variety of opinions voiced by Israeli senior archaeologists can be found in Alex Zeitlin’s YouTube channel.
In 2017, a professor of archeology at Tel Aviv University, Zeev Hewrzog, published an interview in the weekly supplement of Haaretz under the title “The Bible: No findings in the field”, in which he summarized the trends discussed above and determined that:
A challenge to the authenticity of the biblical narrative is conceived as a challenge to “our historic right to the land”, and as the dismantling of the myth of the people reviving the Kingdom of Ancient Israel. These symbolic elements constitute such an important component in the construction of Israeli identity that any attempt to consider their veracity meets with hostility or disregard.
Zeev Herzog provided a faint expression to the linkage between biblical archeology's revisionism and the Israeli claim to “the right over the land”. The person who sought to state this issue fully and acrimoniously was his Tel Aviv University colleague, Prof. Shlomo Sand. Sand’s academic field is modern European history and he went beyond this field in the two books he published under the titles “The Invention of the Land of Israel : From Holy Land to Homeland” and “The Invention of the Jewish People”. These titles speak for themselves. The academic dimension of these books met with strong negative reviews but they significantly nourished the political-ideological debate in Western Europe over the legitimacy of Zioninsm and the State of Israel.
Deus Ex Machina
The Israeli-Palestinian war of narratives was enriched in recent years by the policy of the Trump Administration whose policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was largely influenced by American Evangelists and right-wing Jews. The influence exercised by 21st Century Evangelists over the policy of the Trump Administration towards the Israeli-Palestinain conflict closes a circle started by William Allbright’s scientific enterprise. The publication in the winter of 2020 of “Trump’s Roadmap” was a turning point since, for the first time, the US adopted the Israeli narrative. This was not done explicitly but rather incrementally. A reading of the document shows that in every point of disagreement, the drafters of the plan adopted the Israeli narrative, thus creating an accumulative effect of accepting and preferring it over the Palestinian narrative. Some in Israel view this as a historic achievement while others were skeptical. Indeed, in the aftermath of the 2020 US Presidential Elections, the formation of the Biden administration and the larger role played by the left wing of the Democratic Party, have taken away much of the impact of the Trump Roadmap at least for the time being.
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