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Narrative Dissonance

[New Republic] Martin Peretz - More and more, history has become a competition between and among narratives, self-consciously disdainful of what we used to think of as fact. But real history is the telling and interpretation of actual happenings, and it requires what used to be called knowledge - correct facts and warranted interpretations of them. There are two basic narratives to the nearly century-old Jewish and Arabs-of-Palestine dispute. What is most brazen or, at best, bizarre in Obama's historical recitation in his Cairo speech is the stark omission of the whole Zionist enterprise. Instead, he chose to understand the Jewish presence in Palestine as a sort of restitution for the Holocaust. The result was to diminish the determination of the Jewish people through the ages, and especially since the age of nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century, to reclaim their homeland and restore its dispersed sons and daughters to Zion - not as a reparation, but as a right. By the time World War II - before the Holocaust - began, there were already more than 500,000 Jews in Palestine. Most of them had arrived as their palpable reply to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, to the approval by the League of Nations of a British mandate for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Jewish sovereignty in postwar Palestine was only one of several rearrangements contemplated for the vast territories that had been governed by the Ottoman Empire, now expired. From this land mass emerged the states of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, North Yemen, and various other adjustments of frontiers on behalf of the Wilsonian principle of the self-determination of nations. These countries, composing almost the entire Fertile Crescent, were vouchsafed to the Arabs, their first experiments at self-government in history. Tiny Palestine was intended for the Jews. They were already at work in the desert, in the swamps, in their kibbutzim, in their new cities, including Tel Aviv, in their bourgeois enterprises, in their universities and research institutions. And, moreover, they had revived their ancient language, making it a living tongue. Hitler had nothing to do with this revolution. Is all this not a revolution worthy of presidential recognition?
2009-07-03 06:00:00
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