Clash of Narratives Drives Events in Holy Land

The clashes between Israelis and Palestinians in the Holy Land are not just physical; the two sides cannot agree on what they see, how they got here, who is to blame or where they should go
Clash of Narratives Drives Events in Holy Land
Palestinians chant slogans during a protest in Jerusalem's old city, on Sept. 13, 2015. (AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov)
The Associated Press
10/19/2015
Updated:
10/19/2015

— More than 2 million Palestinians live in the surrounding West Bank, which from 1948 to 1967 was held by Jordan, like east Jerusalem. They live mostly in a maze of autonomous zones surrounded and dominated by the Israeli army. With little control over their travel, they observe helplessly the constant expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied land between their disconnected areas. The settlers have disproportionate water rights and live under a separate legal system; they enjoy favored funding and can vote as part of Israel’s democracy, while the Palestinians endure strict security measures—without which the settlers might indeed come under constant attack.

Israel cannot decide what to do about this extraordinary situation. Despite occupying and settling the West Bank with Jews for almost 50 years, it has not annexed it for fear of having to officially absorb the millions of Palestinians into its democratic system. While these Palestinians are not at the center of the current wave, in some cases they have protested and attacked soldiers and settlers. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, while being careful not to condemn the stabbings for fear of appearing too close to Israel, has nonetheless instructed his security forces behind the scenes to try to calm the situation.

— Another 2 million Palestinians live in Gaza, an enclave that between 1948 and 1967 was held by Egypt. The area is squeezed between Israel and Egypt and ruled by the Islamic militant group Hamas as a theocratic police state where women are subjugated, dissent is punished, and alcohol is banned. They are cut off from Israel but feel occupied nonetheless because they are fenced in—even by Egypt to the south—and Israel controls the skies and seas. Several have been killed and injured lately in protests at the border.

Sporadic peace talks over the past two decades have failed to progress beyond the autonomy arrangements of the 1990s. The tangle is too tight and the sides cannot agree on the terms of divorce—or even on what happened in the talks.

Israelis feel that past leaders who in vain offered the Palestinians a state in Gaza and almost all the West Bank with a foothold in Jerusalem—in 2001 and 2008—were acting in good faith and exposed Palestinian intransigence. The Palestinians say they have already compromised by giving up their longstanding claim to land that now makes up Israel, and they are in no mood for accepting less than all the land occupied in 1967. They also have a host of explanations for what many around the world see as missed opportunities that may not come again. Some say Israeli offers were not as serious as leaders have claimed, as proved by continued settlement-building.

The world community mostly considers Israel to be in violation of accepted norms by changing the status quo in occupied territories through these settlements, and the disproportionate death toll among Palestinians in bouts of violence also draws fire. But despite the global hectoring, Israel has not been truly punished: it has a mighty alliance with the U.S., favored trading status with Europe, growing relations with Asia and a per capita gross domestic product to rival Britain’s.

In this situation, many Israelis prefer to ignore the Palestinians, most of whom are beyond fences in areas Israelis rarely visit.

Many believe the Arab world is not ready for democracy—the failures of the Arab Spring hardly negate such a thesis—and the Palestinians should be happy with their lot compared with the brutal dictatorships and murderous chaos that have typified other corners of the Middle East, past and present.

Israelis also feel that the Palestinians are being incited—whether by Gaza preachers shouting at the masses to “stab, stab, stab,” or by politicians claiming, with meager basis if any, that the desires of Israeli fanatics to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem or alter the status quo there are secretly the official Israeli policy as well. Palestinians tend to dismiss these things as secondary to a justifiable anger that is consuming their hopeless youth, who undeniably have also gotten worked up through inflammatory videos making their way around Facebook.

On both sides there is a minority that watches the violence in despair—arguably more so in Israel, with its more individualistic society and culture of debate and introspection. To these more liberal Israelis, the apparently perpetual occupation of the Palestinians is a moral stain that also, by tying Israel inexorably to a Palestinian population equal to its 6 million Jews, contains the seeds of self-inflicted ruination.