Side By Side: Parallel Histories Of Israel-Palestine, edited by Sam Adwan, Dan Bar-On, Evil Naveh Prime

If I think this book is praiseworthy, it is on somewhat modest terms. This book deserves praise for its existence far more than its modest achievements as a historical work. As a historical work, there is a lot of bias here. Given that the book presents to provide a parallel history of Israel and Palestine over the course of the time from the late 1800’s to about 2000, it is perhaps inevitable that the work would be biased. Indeed, the book’s entire existence is predicated on the fact that there are Israeli and Palestinian perspectives that are so antithetical that they cannot be viewed as one history but must be seen in a fragmented fashion in order to appreciate the Rashomon-like inconsistencies between them that must be acknowledged when addressing the reality of the situation. The fact, though, that the editors have managed to stitch two coherent accounts, one of which can be said to be a largely leftist view of Israeli history and a view of Palestinian history that continually harps upon the unwillingness of Palestinian leaders (and possibly people) to deal with the existence of Israel as a fact on the ground, is itself admirable. One can see how both sides of this perspective–even if neither side of them happens to be the way I view the history of the area–manage to think. The editors acknowledge both explicitly within the work and implicitly by the structure of the work that there is not room for both sides’ viewpoints to be seen as true, but the existence of a work like this also expresses hope that by understanding where someone else is coming from, even if we cannot agree with them and think their perspective hopelessly biased and intransigent and irrational, at least we may respect them as people and hope for a similar attitude of tolerance by others towards our own irrationality and intransigence, when it shows up.

One of the achievements of this work, even if I find fault with the leftist perspectives on both sides of the page, being a person of rather deeply right-of-center perspectives that combine religious-messianic and national security aspects, is that I would like to see this perspective repeated when it comes to other frozen conflicts around the world in which there appears to be no hope of resolution. I would love to see, for example, an account of Cyprus and Northern Cyprus that showed the side-by-side perspective of Greek Cypriots who sought enosis with Turkish Northern Cypriots who viewed this aim as the act that made cohabitation impossible for them. I would love to see accounts of Irish and Northern Irish that pointed to the historical events and attitudes that have made reunion of Ireland impossible to date. I would love to see parallel histories of Taiwan from 1895 to today from the perspective of mainland Chinese and Taiwanese, of Western Sahara from Moroccans and Sarwahi, of Somali history from 1960 onward from the point of view of Somalilanders and Somalis, and so on. Frozen conflicts exist because wildly different visions of reality exist in the minds of people divided by lines hardened by conflict, sometimes walls that exist in reality, as is the case in Cyprus and Morocco (as well as Israel). I do not know who would be qualified to make this sort of series into a reality, but I think it would be an excellent series to accomplish.

In terms of its contents, this book is about 400 pages long or so. It begins with a memoriam to the person behind the work, professor Dan Bar-On, as well as an explanation of the dual-narrative approach taken by the book as a whole in the absence of a narrative that fits both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The rest of the work is divided where text and photos and maps relating to Israel’s perspective is on the left and Palestinian equivalents are on the right. The book itself is divided into nine sections, which are slightly labeled on the two sides. The first section discusses the situation in the promised land from the Balfour Declaration to the British Mandate in Palestine/Eretz Ysrael or, for the Palestinian side, a screed against the perfidious Balfour declaration (1). This is followed by discussions of the land of Israel and the Yishuv/Palestine in the 1920’s (2). After this comes a discussion of the land of Israel from 1931 to 1947 on the one hand and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict during the 1930’s and 1940’s on the other (3). This is, in turn, followed by a discussion of the War of Independence and the founding of the state of Israel on the one hand and the Al-Nakbah in 1948 on the other (4). The state of Israel in its first decades of the 1950’s and 1960’s is then contrasted with the years of homelessness and despair for Palestinians in the same period (5). The Six-Day War is told on one side (6) along with a chronologically muddled account of so-called Israeli aggression against Arab lands on the other. This is followed by a discussion of Israel in the 1970’s and 1980’s on the one hand and Palestine and the Palestinians between 1967 and 1987 on the other (7). An entire chapter is devoted to differing views of the Intifada (of 1987) (8), and the book ends with a discussion of the 1990’s as a period of reaching for a settlement between the two sides, which appears to be a teleological aspect to the history not born out by events in the more than two decades since then (9). The book ends with notes, an Israeli and Palestinian glossary, references, and teacher’s personal trajectories.