History Repeats Itself, the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Eric Bender

Intro to Modern Middle East
Section 2

Humans of New York project

History Repeats Itself, the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

There is a lot of debate and controversy surrounding the true motives of the Zionists and Arabs in 1948 Palestine. Both sides tell very different stories about the causes and conflict, the same way Union and Confederacy forces gave different accounts of the American Civil War, and Americans gave false accounts about the end of WW2. In this article, I will show how humans repeat history, and that recounts of the American Civil War and World War II are like the Zionist and Arab recounts of 1948 Palestine.

The Israeli Narrative

Historian Avi Shlaim compares the two sides of the Middle Eastern conflict with the article International Journal of Middle East Studies. In this article, he recites both the Zionist and the Arab recount of the war. Both sides attribute the start of the conflict to the United Nations partition resolution of 1947 that created an Arab and Jewish state. However, both sides have vastly different versions of what happened after the 1947 resolution.

The Jewish narrative is that they “Painfully accepted” the plan, even though they would be on the losing end of the deal by having to make more sacrifices than the Palestinians. However, the Arab League refused the resolution. Great Britain sided with the Palestinians and tried to do everything in its power to prevent Israel from getting established. But when this ultimately failed, and the state of Israel was declared, Arab countries sent their forces into Israel, intending to destroy the new-found country. A David and Goliath-like battle entailed, in which the Jewish state came on top, despite having the odds stacked against them. Palestinians fled the nation, even though Israel was pushing an agenda of peaceful coexistence. The Arab state would not come to terms with them, which caused decades of deadlock and tension between the states.

The history books that adopt the Zionist account of the story praise Israel, saying that its actions “governed by higher moral standards than that of her enemies” (Shlaim). They call these phenomena the tohar haneshek or directly translated to ‘purity of arms.’ This purity of arms states that Israel’s actions were pure and just. That the country only acted out of self-defense, no weapons were used against civilians. This version of the story has been passed down for generations in both hearsay and textbooks.

The Palestinian Narrative

However, it did meet opposition thirty years later, when Israel released its official source documents from the war time. Since the release of the documents, neo-historians have erupted, giving their own spin on the story. The neo-historians shift away the blame from the Palestinians, realizing that it was not their fault as much as the Israeli narrative makes it out to be. It is the leaders of the Arab nations that are truly to blame. Starting in the 1920s, the relentlessly anti-Semitic Palestinian Arab leaders pushed to stop the Israeli revival.

This was done much against the will of the Arab people, who had been peacefully coexisting with the Jews with very few violent interruptions. The Arabs had benefitted from the influx of Jews to their country between the world wars. Average life span, amount of industry, and agriculture had increased significantly. Conditions were much better than they had ever been, all thanks to the Jewish immigration. However, as the economic situation continued to improve for the Arab population, the social situation deteriorated. Palestinians were getting executed for simply “selling Palestine” to the Jews. The Arab leaders maintained control through their fear and power, and incited many acts of violence against the Jews, often killing several of their own people or British in the crossfire. This made thousands of Arabs flee, and those who stayed created agreements with their Jewish neighbors, hoping to avoid conflict. But despite the many agreements between villages of Jews and Arabs, the high government kept pushing its anti-Semitic agenda.

As the war began, there became even more variation in the stories. While the Israeli storyline makes out the Palestinians as “fleeing” the nation from their powerful army, documents show that they were getting forced out by their leaders. They wanted to vacate the area so that there would be less chance of casualties when they invaded, and less likelihood of Palestinian hostages being taken. The Jewish population wanted them to stay, understanding the economic repercussions of such a large population leaving the country.

And indeed, the Palestinians fled. They were surrounded by Arab nations, and walked into welcoming arms, whereas the Israeli’s were stuck in the middle of the action, with nowhere to flee to. They fought for their very existence, and came out on top, causing Palestine to lose more land than it would have if it had just accepted the initial peace agreement from the UN.

Part 2: create a debate on campus about your topic through a photo essay
(I asked students around campus what they thought about the American civil war, and asked if they could connect it to the same conflict that happened in Israel and Palestine)

Comparison to Modern History

#1        Like any conflict, two sides had firmly held beliefs that their cause was noble and true, while the other was inherently wrong. The Israeli’s wanted the land that the United Nations had granted them, while the government of Palestine refused to accept a Jewish State. In a similar way, the Union of America refused to accept slavery, while the Confederacy wanted to let it continue. The South had firm beliefs in white supremacy, that they were meant to rule over other “inferior races”, just like the Arabs tried to control the Zionists. These tensions lead to small outbursts of violence, that culminated in a bloody four-year civil between the north and south. Much the same, there were small instances of escalating violence between the Arab and Jewish sides, eventually leading to the conflict of 1948.

#2        Neither side truly wanted the American Civil War. Millions of young men died from the conflict, on both sides. Brother fought against brother, friend against friend, all over the morality of slavery. Although the death toll was much smaller in the 1948 conflict, the idea of neighbor fighting against neighbor remained. It’s sad to see that humanity has not learned from its mistakes, that almost 100 years after the civil war, men were still making the same mistakes. Hopefully, they can learn from what has happened, and conflicts like this can be prevented in the future.

#3       The Civil War was so bloody and unnecessary. Great Britain and most other nations had abolished it by that time, but America held onto slavery, seeing it as a way of life. It is a shame that in a nation like ours that prides itself on equality and democracy for all, we come from such horrible roots. A lot of our nation’s famous buildings and infrastructure were built upon the backs of slaves, which is so shameful. But it was a different time, and there wasn't really a dialogue about whether slaves should have rights or not. That's why it is important to build debate about social issues like the conflict between Palestine and Israel. If no one talks about it, nothing changes. Voicing your concerns is what makes progress. 

#4        It’s amazing how differently history is told based on who’s telling the story. The Israeli’s blame the war completely on the Palestinians, while the Palestinians blame it on their leaders or the unreasonable requests by the 1947 UN meeting. Everyone likes to point fingers at each other, but at the end of the day, I think the cause was just human's being aggressive. Humans have been fighting for the Jerusalem since the crusades almost a thousand years ago. Several factions think they have a righteous claim to the area, that they deserve to control it. People are so set in their beliefs, that they are willing to fight and kill for them. If people could learn to work out compromises, rather than declare jihad or fight, the world would be a better place. But no one learns this lesson, which is why these righteous crusades and jihads have continued into modern times.

#5                    As awful as slavery is, I can play devil’s advocate. If you think about it from the southern standpoint, slavery is indispensable. Without slavery, the southern economy would fail. They relied on cotton picking to create wealth, and they relied on the extremely cheap cost of labor provided by slaves to give them dominance of the market. The south did not want to see a war. Doing so would ruin their ability to create cotton. Resources would be allocated to the war effort, not cotton, thus ruining their economy. The north, however, was a largely industrial area, and war would boost its economy as demand for manufactured supplies increased. If you think about it from that perspective, the confederates had reasonable cause to call it the War of Northern Aggression. Even though modern history textbooks will say that the Civil War was a righteous battle over slavery, a popular belief in the south was that big business in the north just wanted to boost its economy by destroying the south. They way history is portrayed changes significantly based on who is being asked, and when they are being asked. This belief about the economic causes of the war has receded significantly the past century, and more and more people side with the Union's story, a righteous crusade for emancipating slaves.

#6        I was raised by Jewish parents, and they always told me that our people fought valiantly against the aggressive Palestinians. They made me believe Palestinians were evil, the same way parents tell their children to be afraid of a monster under the bed or in the closet. But once I got old enough, I began doing my own research and saw that there were two sides to the tale. I began to realize that most Palestinians meant no harm, that the actions of their leaders are what caused the conflict. It makes you wonder how different life would be if they had just accepted the peace accords. They were very reasonable agreements, but since they did not accept, the country lost more land than they initially had, and created tension between the Palestinians and Jews that lasts till this day.

#7        My family line can be traced back to the days of slavery. My great great great great grandfather worked on a plantation in Georgia when the war broke out. I don’t know much about the story, most of it has been lost in the 160 years that passed since the war. But I know for sure that if the Union had not taken a stand against the Confederacy, slavery would have continued in America. Who knows, maybe it would still be going on now. I’m grateful for all the brave souls that died, trying to free my people. But even though the chains are broken, we still aren’t free like we should be. Racism is very much alive in this country, as this most recent presidential election proves. We may have gained our civil rights 50 years ago, but I still see prejudice and hatred in our country. I don’t know too much about the conflict in the middle east, but I know that the groups of people who live there show the same hatred that our country has shown between whites and blacks for centuries.

#8        History is supposed to be made up of objectively told facts, but that never seems to be the case. There is always a hidden agenda behind the way a story gets told. This can be seen through the America Civil War and Israeli Palestinian Conflict, but also through the American version of how WWII in Japan ended. The Americans have recanted for decades that the dropping of the atomic bomb scared the Japanese into surrender. The idea of one massive bomb wiping out an entire city scared them, and forced them to give up. But this was not the case, just propaganda by the American Government to justify the use of the atomic bomb. The war ended because the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria and other territories acquired by the Japanese empire during the war. The Japanese had been on the losing side of the war for a while, but with the entrance of the Soviet Union, they became even more so on the losing side. The Japanese were now being attacked on two war fronts, losing more and more territory every day. That is what made them surrender, knowing that the Soviet Union would take away all the territory they gained. America likes to blame it on the dropping of the atomic bombs, but the bombs did not make much difference to the Japanese. They had been getting their cities torn to shreds by American bombings for months. Whether these bombings came from thousands of smaller bombs, or one giant bomb, made no difference. The losses were still the same for the Japanese. The atomic bomb was used in hopes of intimidating the Soviet Union in the post-war world and was completely unnecessary for ending the war.

One’s perception of history can change vastly, just based on where one gets their information. The same can be said for Palestine and Israel in the modern Middle East. The Israelis make the Palestinians as aggressors who wanted to fight, but the Palestinians were for the most part against the war. Now the nations are in political gridlock, and tensions run high even though the conflict was settled over half a century ago. People need to be careful where they get their information, and need to thoroughly examine the information before they come to conclusions.

*** All parties interviewed consented to their words and pictures being used***