Published: 25 April 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
The meta-narratives of entitlement, enmity and victimhood have prevented Israel from confronting the complex truths of the War of Independence, writes JEREMIE BRACKA.
On this Israeli Independence Day, as the nation enters its seventh decade, no conceivable horizon exists for reconciling with history. Despite the significance of 1948, or perhaps because of it, debating the past remains largely taboo. Politically, too, the passage of time has done little to relax the grip of official memory over national identity. But after 75 years, cracks are beginning to appear. Most importantly, Israeli civil society is redefining the boundaries of legitimate debate and should continue to do so.
Swept under the Rug
Facing 1948 is no small feat. Even during the golden era of peace-making, there were few attempts to address the conflict’s origins and historical footprints. Both Oslo 1 (Declaration of Principles) and Oslo II (Interim Agreement 1995) expressly deferred the Palestinian refugee issue until final negotiations. Any engagement with the past was simply postponed to a future, unspecified stage.
The accords failed to mention efforts to compensate or acknowledge refugees nor consider any symbolic measures to address the Palestinian right of return. While some peace plans footnoted 1948, none sought to grapple with the psychological and historical barriers impeding the parties. Unsurprisingly, Oslo’s demise is commonly attributed to the intractability over 1948.
What is undisputed is that the 1948 hostilities, which began in the wake of the UN partition plan, and erupted into full-scale war in May 1948, resulted in the exile of much of Arab Palestine. Everything else remains an open wound. Both sides, Israeli and Palestinian, traditionally ascribe responsibility for the mass displacement entirely to the other. Like borders and bullets, remembering and forgetting are also weapons on the national battlefield.
First Cracks in the Israeli myth of ‘1948’
But war stories can change over time. In the 1990s, Israeli scholarship challenged official history. Benny Morris was the first Israeli historian to admit that mass expulsions of Palestinians occurred in 1948 and to refute the claim that Arab leaders ordered the Palestinians to flee and clear the way for impending armies. Dubbed the “New Historians”, they raised a wide-ranging debate that spilled over from scholarly journals and academic conferences into the public domain.
