The Arab-Israeli conflict has always been as much about narrative as land. From the beginning of the conflict, even before the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, myths and histories have been layered over the facts of the struggle of two peoples for the same piece of land. That is what makes it so intractable.
One of the most powerful narratives on the Israeli side is the memory of the Holocaust. When the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas called it “the most heinous crime” on Holocaust Remembrance Day, he was widely praised for saying something that is still controversial in Palestinian – and even some Arab – circles. But why?
To understand the Palestinian reluctance to mourn the Holocaust requires an understanding of the centrality of two separate narratives, one Israeli, one Palestinian.
The Palestinians don’t deny the Holocaust existed, but they fear that magnifying its power reduces the moral force of their own dispossession.
The Holocaust lies at the base of the foundation myth of Israel: that the creation of an Israel on the land of Palestinians was justified because of the horrors of the Holocaust.
That’s one of the reasons Palestinians so fear the narrative. Because in response to the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust, many unprecedented policies might be justified, even, perhaps, the replacement of Palestinians with Israelis. Indeed, more than one Jewish intellectual has argued that the Nakba can be justified by necessity.
The fear of annihilation among Jewish communities can be difficult for Arabs to understand. Since the coming of Islam, there has only been one century where the Arabs were not part of a vast, powerful empire, and that is the century just passed. The idea of annihilation is remote. But for Jews, even those without direct experience of the Holocaust, it remains a powerful memory.
Palestinians, unsurprisingly, have asked why they should pay for the crimes of Europe. Neither Palestinians nor Arabs were involved in the Holocaust. Yet, today, the Palestinians exist on merely 22 per cent of their original land.
They are constantly told that Palestine “does not exist”, and indeed, that is what is taught to Israeli schoolchildren. Their customs, food, music, culture are all appropriated by Israel. They fear being erased from history just as surely as the Jewish communities do, even if the historical circumstances are not the same.
Those who draw an explicit parallel between the Holocaust and the suffering of Palestinians are mistaken; the crimes are not the same. But those who fail to see the Palestinian perspective are naive; the Nakba is central to the Palestinian’s understanding of their place in history, and the Israelis refuse to recognise it as such.
Neither side, then, can simply accept the Holocaust as a historical event and leave it at that.
