Nadim Khoury – Receding chronology, fragmented narratives | Society and Space - Environment and Planning D
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With the latest war on #Gaza, it is not only Palestinian geography, but Palestinian chronology that has receded. It is a whole history of dispossession that was divided into shorter and separate narratives. Listen to the Israeli justifications of the war on Gaza and pay attention to their storyline.
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With every argument, with every press conference, history becomes narrower, and as it shrinks, so does the framework of argumentation. Experts and commentators engage in detailed conversations about who violated what and when. Conversations hone in on the election of a “terrorist group” and specific ceasefires. As we sink into details, we lose sight of the larger history of Palestinian dispossession and the colonial policy that is at its root.
This “shrinking of history” is not new. With the initiation of the peace process in the 1990s, history suddenly contracted back to the 1967 war. The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe recognized this when he noted that the Israeli Left, which signed the Oslo Accords, “accepts criticism of post-1967 Israel,” but “the period 1882-67 is off limits.” By deciding to begin the conversation with the 1967 war, a specific diagnosis of the Palestinian predicament becomes readily available: the problem, it seems, is one nation-state illegally occupying the land of a stateless nation. Within this framework, discussions revolving around 1948, the creation of Israel, and the plight of 750 000 refugees remain “off-limits.”
Notice how this fragmentation of history mirrors the division of a people. Start in 1967, and you separate Palestinians in the occupied territories from those currently under Israeli sovereignty. Begin with Hamas’ democratic election in 2006 and you separate Gaza from the West Bank. Consequently, and most disconcerting, the issues of Gaza, the West Bank, and 1948 Palestinians become disentangled.
Within diplomatic circles, they branch out into different negotiation processes, each requiring its own conditions and terms of references. We get lost in details and micromanagement, while Zionist expansion grows and grows. This is perhaps what is meant by “facts on the ground”: new facts erase old ones, middles become beginnings, and origins are progressively forgotten. We no longer determine the master narrative; instead, we are slaves to its plot. We lost our right to narrate, so we fight to become characters in a play.
For Palestinians, however, these “separate” histories are one. The war on Gaza is a war on its people, an affront to its demands for rights and dignity. It is a war whose logic is at the heart of Zionism—especially in its revisionist version—rather than accidental to it. It is a repeat of the Gaza massacres of 1955, and it is directly linked to the massacre of Deir Yassin in 1948. Solidarity with Palestinian self-determination means that we should reclaim this history. As we reach back, we also reach deeper into the roots of the problem and reclaim new interpretative frameworks: settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and imperialism. Armed wih these interpretative tools, we reconnect the dots. The discrimination against “Arab Israelis” is no longer separate from the silent transfer of East Jerusalem, nor is it any different from the colonization of the West Bank, the plight of the 1948 refugees, or the destruction of Gaza. These are one and the same. Separating is the problem, uniting, the solution.
#narrative #récit #rétrécissement #chronologie #révisionnisme #sioniste #Israël #Israel #Palestine