A conqueror with the mindset of the conquered

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By Emily L. Hauser. Emily L. Hauser is an American-Israeli writer and peace activist. She lives in Oak Park
Published May 22, 2005

URI SAVIR, president of the Peres Center for Peace and a former member of the Israeli Knesset, once wrote that Israelis "may have been the first conquerors in history who felt themselves conquered."

Rereading this, I am reminded of something an Israeli friend said one evening: "We've raised a generation who've never been anything but conquerors," she said, reflecting on her three sons, all of whom served in the military, "and taught them they've never been anything but victims."

These comments seem to point to the very core of our relationship with the Palestinians and the intifada.

Have Israelis been victims? Without question. Every bloody body lying on an Israeli sidewalk testifies to the fact that Israelis have too often fallen to heart-rending violence.

Beyond that, however, our national narrative posits the Jewish state's suffering as the continuation of a history of persecution. Education Minister Limor Livnat doesn't equivocate: "For Israelis, and for Jews everywhere, the awareness of the Holocaust is part and parcel of our very identity," she wrote this March in Forward, America's leading Jewish publication. "As such, in our worldview it's a clear line that unifies the ancient Persian tyrants who sought our destruction . . . to the murderous Nazis who practiced genocide against us, to the current Islamic suicide bombers who have devastated our Israeli cities."

But have Israelis also been conquerors?

Yes. As Israeli revisionist historians such as Benny Morris and Tom Segev have documented, we have been in the conquering business since before we were, in fact, Israel.

From the earliest stages of Zionism on, Jewish and then Israeli authorities have consistently worked to remove Palestinians from their land. Around the time of statehood, this occasionally took the form of loading whole villages onto trucks and dumping the residents across the nearest border.

Today, we call that ethnic cleansing--and it's been documented that the state's founders understood it was best to speak about it only rarely on record. Indeed, when the English mandatory power proposed a population transfer in 1937, there was general agreement that the notion be presented as entirely British. In 1948, though, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, made his feelings very clear: "The Arabs of Eretz Yisrael have one role left--to flee."

Here's the thing--I don't find that shocking.

I would even venture this inflammatory guess: If the Palestinians had been the ones with British backing and a strong, international organization, they might well have done the same.

We were two small peoples locked in vicious battle over the same tiny piece of land, each convinced that the other had no claim. That's nationalism, and it's not pretty.

Bottom line, though, the Israelis won. We are the conquerors. The victims on our side have jet fighters to avenge their deaths; on the other side, they have more victims and not a single jet. To return to Livnat's writing, the only cities that have actually been "devastated" during this intifada--"ravaged," in the words of a recent Newsweek report--are Palestinian.

Yet our narrative leaves little room for this.

The attitude, says Gideon Levy, a columnist with the daily Haaretz, "is that we are the ultimate victim, and the only one--that after the Holocaust, we can do whatever we want."

Amira Hass, also with Haaretz, described the paradox in her book "Drinking the Sea at Gaza": "Israel's misreading of Palestinian intentions is rooted in its own illusions, in Israeli society's skewed grasp of reality whereby it fails to recognize its clear superiority in every sphere."

"Inherited and manipulated fear, the perception of oneself as the perennial victim, and the primordial Jewish dread of the gentile are projected on [the Palestinians]. . . . In this light, all Palestinian behavior is explained in terms of past Jewish experience."

To Stephen Worchel, a University of Hawaii psychologist specializing in ethnic conflict, this isn't surprising.

"History, both Jewish and Palestinian, justifies the fear of the other group and efforts to destroy the other group," he says. Group memory provides our link to a communal heritage, he says, and "these links give us place, identity and justification. So history, or better, the interpretation of history, plays a vital role in human/group behavior."

The fact that there have been Israeli victims does not undo our history as conquerors. Sometimes, almost in spite of ourselves, we seem to understand this. Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak once announced that if he were living in a refugee camp, he, too, would be throwing rocks; current Prime Minister Ariel Sharon--hardly a dove--has admitted that what Israel long called an "administration" is in fact an occupation.

ny Israelis have long fought for the recognition of this truth--look at Rami Elhanan, whose daughter, Smadar, was murdered by terrorists more than seven years ago. She was 14. Elhanan is a longtime member of the Parents Circle, a group of Israeli and Palestinian peace activists who have all lost family members to the violence.

"Every innocent victim from both sides is a victim of the occupation," he wrote from Israel in an e-mail exchange.

"You can't ignore history," Worchel says, "but you can share interpretations. The conditions to achieve co-existence [are present] . . . but because neither side is secure in its identity and its existence, this end is difficult to achieve."

To my mind, hope lies in seeing both pieces of our identity. Israelis and Palestinians alike must certainly mourn our victims, but we must not allow their blood to blind us to the role we play in their deaths. Let us share our interpretations of history. Otherwise, I fear we will do nothing but repeat it.