It Is Time to Take the Palestinian Narrative More Seriously
Michael Koplow
Credit: Kurt Hoffman, Shutterstock
Michael Koplow is the Chief Policy Officer of Israel Policy Forum and a Senior Fellow of the Kogod Research Center at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
During the Senate confirmation hearing for United States Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Huckabee recounted a piece of history that is intimately familiar to many American Jews. Asked about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, he said, “The Palestinians were given the opportunity in the year 2000, when Ehud Barak from Israel put everything on the table, virtually said, ‘Here it is. You get it all,’ and the Palestinian [sic] Liberation Organization walked away from it.” This event is a core element of the Israeli narrative of what has taken place in the land of Israel over the past century—a narrative that is hegemonic in mainstream American Jewish communal and educational institutions. In this account, Israel has routinely offered nearly everything the Palestinians want, and Palestinian intransigence has led them to reject each and every generous offer. This account is widely viewed by Jews not as an interpretation of events, but as an immutable truth, so much so that it is often pulled out as a trump card shutting down conversation when the other side catalogues alleged Israeli misdeeds or perfidy. It has cemented the idea that the conflict will never be solved since Israel constantly goes above and beyond in an effort to seek peace without having a partner on the other side that will ever agree to anything.
But while the dominant American Jewish view of the 2000 Camp David Summit comports with a reasonably objective reading of the history, it is far from universally accepted. It is also not the sole instance of a gap between what the mainstream American Jewish community thinks it knows as fact and what others think they know as fact. In fact, much of the standard Israeli narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is questioned or contested outside of the American Jewish bubble. Despite this, within the organized Jewish community, it is rare to find sustained exposure to how Palestinians frame and tell their side of the story, or systematic efforts to grapple with what we might gain from incorporating Palestinian narratives into our own formal and informal education systems. There are good reasons for this reticence, ranging from not wanting to give credence to efforts to delegitimize Israel or Zionism, to inculcating solidarity and a greater sense of Jewish peoplehood, to viewing the Palestinian narrative as mendacious. But as American Jews grapple with the unique and unprecedented challenges arising from the October 7 terrorist attacks and their aftermath, maintaining our narrative cocoon—which was mistaken well before Hamas’s assault—is increasingly untenable.
Engaging with the Palestinian narrative means reading about and listening to the way Palestinians describe their historical experience and current conditions. It entails understanding the Palestinian view of the last one hundred years of history in the Holy Land, and also seeking out firsthand Palestinian accounts, literature, and cultural expressions. We need to bring this narrative and these perspectives into American Jewish educational spaces if we want to remain relevant to the larger American conversation and if we want to retain our credibility with the next generation of American Jews.
This does not require us to agree with the Palestinian perspective or accept it as better or more truthful than the dominant Jewish perspective. It certainly does not require us to shed our Zionist commitments, which are rooted in the fundamental justice of and need for Jewish sovereignty given our historical experience. Our Zionist commitments also do not require us to view Zionism or Israel as morally spotless. Palestinian suffering does not negate Jewish suffering, and if our Zionism is so flimsy as to be unable to hold multiple and contrasting ideas in conversation with each other, we will have far bigger challenges beyond widening our aperture to incorporate the Palestinian view. But engaging with the Palestinian narrative does require us to bring an open mind in service of a more complete understanding, which will ultimately make for a more durable American Jewish Zionism as well.
My own Zionism has been transformed and strengthened by moving beyond the mainstream bubble that surrounded nearly every aspect of my own Jewish upbringing in the Orthodox community, in Jewish day school and summer camp, and on teen trips and a gap year living in Israel. Reading challenging works of Palestinian history, such as Rashid Khalidi’s Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1997, updated in 2009), watching wrenching films such as the Oscar-nominated The Present (2020), and talking to Palestinians living in the West Bank about their difficult day-to-day experiences has not made me any less Zionist, any less concerned about Israel’s future, or any less determined about the necessity of a sovereign Jewish state. It has, however, made me a more knowledgeable thinker, a more credible analyst, and a more influential proponent of policy ideas intended to safeguard Israel and its future without trampling the future of those on the other side of the conflict.
While the American Jewish community cannot control how others view history, we are doing ourselves a grave disservice by not more widely exposing ourselves to those other views. In addition to the uncomfortable fact that the Palestinian narrative contains truth, we are leaving ourselves unprepared to engage with the rest of the world. Considering only the Israeli narrative makes it harder to be informed and participatory citizens in American civic and societal discourse, creates a new generation of American Jewish leaders ill-equipped to engage on Israeli-Palestinian policy issues because they lack a basic understanding of how the other side thinks and what they want, and feeds into the growing crisis of anti-Zionist and non-Zionist attitudes gaining ground with younger American Jews who feel as if they were hoodwinked by the education about Israel they received within the Jewish community. Rather than do what we can to keep the Palestinian narrative out of our institutions, we should introduce it in a way that will strengthen, rather than weaken, our goals and values.
A Multitude of Truths
In addition to the instrumental advantages of knowing what the other side says, one important reason to incorporate what Palestinians say about themselves and about us is that there is truth in it. Pursuing truth, wherever it leads, is unquestionably a Jewish imperative, even when it leads to discomfort, and we should not shy away from it. That does not mean that the Palestinian version of events is right and ours is wrong, or that they are objective where we are biased. It means that, like most stories, this one has two sides. We can and should live with the discomfort that the Palestinian narrative presents without throwing out the Zionist narrative or having it destroy our Zionist commitments.
Israeli historians have persuasively demonstrated this approach for decades already, understanding that grappling with difficult aspects of Israel’s history does not delegitimize the state or compromise Zionism. Return, for example, to Huckabee’s invocation of the failed Camp David talks, where Barak did indeed accede to a Palestinian state—a first for an Israeli prime minister. Barak’s proposed state, however, included—in addition to Gaza—90 percent of the West Bank, divided into three separate zones separated by Israeli-controlled corridors, without corresponding equal land swaps to make up for the territory in the West Bank that Israel would retain. The Palestinian side viewed limiting itself to the West Bank and Gaza, thereby giving up 78 percent of its original claim to all of Mandatory Palestine, as unprecedented, so they deemed an offer of statehood that required even more significant compromises on territory and sovereignty untenable. Knowing and granting that Barak did not offer the Palestinians everything they wanted does not foreclose debate as to whether this was a fair offer, whether the Palestinian expectation of getting a better deal was reasonable in light of multiple rejections across a history of partition agreements, or whether the Palestinian response of rejecting the offer and then embarking on the Second Intifada was in any way justified. It does not weight the moral balance toward the Palestinians or automatically make Israel the bad actor; Barak’s actions can be easily defended and contextualized. But it is factually incorrect to characterize Israel’s offer at Camp David as giving the Palestinians everything they could have wanted. Accepting this puts the standard Israeli narrative of Palestinian rejectionism “no matter what is offered” in a different light.
Camp David is not the only instance where one can still fully maintain the view that Israel is in the right while also widening the historical aperture. Assigning Palestinians culpability and agency for their own mistakes in rejecting the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan, refusing for decades to recognize Israel, putting high-profile terrorism on the world stage, and shirking responsibility or institution-building in favor of victimhood and militancy does not change the fact that Palestinians are now a stateless people, a majority of whom live under direct or de facto Israeli occupation, and with no foreseeable prospects for this situation to change in a positive direction. It does not change the fact that the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Palestinians’ national representative, once demanded 100% of the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River and now asks for 22% of that territory, a more expansive concession than anything Israel has ever conceded or contemplated. It does not change the fact that Palestinians very much consider themselves a people and have a real national identity, even though there has never been a Palestinian state and even though Palestinian national identity is a relatively new development in historical terms.
These things are all true, and Jewish institutions should not shy away from acknowledging them. Granting these truths need not detract from our own truths and historical claims, and indeed it makes us more informed and more credible. Just because something is challenging or uncomfortable does not make it bad, and in this instance, morphing our discomfort with Palestinian claims into the fear that treating them with credence will create an existential threat to Israel is a mistake. Particularly in an era where the very notion of ascertainable facts and reliable history are under assault, we should not contribute to the dumbing down of discourse or the suppression of history. As in every situation, context matters, but we should not be afraid to point out facts. The Palestinian narrative is not a fabrication; it is a different perspective on a series of historical events and their consequences. Treating their side of the story as wholly illegitimate will not make it so, no matter how often we make that claim.
Maintaining Our Credibility and Engaging Beyond Our Bubble
While knowledge for its own sake is important, there are also pressing practical reasons for American Jewish institutions to become more familiar with the Palestinian narrative and to understand that it does contain truth. The first reason has been in front of our faces for a year and a half, as demonstrations against Israel have become routine on campuses and in public places, as Jews have been increasingly asked to renounce their Zionism, and as views of Israel as an aggressor have become more commonplace despite the country having suffered both an unprecedented terrorist attack and the ongoing brutalization of its kidnapped citizens. While many American Jews were shocked by the vitriol of some of these protests, few were surprised by them. Angry rhetoric and anti-Zionist litmus tests did not spring from nowhere on October 7, and alarm over the increasingly inhospitable environment on college campuses and other cultural spaces has been a source of Jewish communal angst for years.
One of the most disquieting elements of post-October 7 protests against Israel is the revelation of just how many Americans who are not extremists do not take Israeli claims at face value. American Jews chortle at the college students who demand that Palestine be free from the river to the sea but cannot name either the river or the sea, holding that up as evidence of the students’ vacuous claims and shallow understandings. But rather than mock this display of ignorance, we should recognize the larger context, which is that large numbers of people, who have never heard of Yasser Arafat and who couldn’t spell Herzl given three tries, believe that Palestinians are victims of a grave historical injustice. The Palestinian narrative is compelling and their situation deserves empathy, and as a result, Americans are increasingly questioning not Israel’s post-1967 military occupation or the proliferation of West Bank settlements, but rather the legitimacy of Israel existing anywhere on land that used to be British Mandatory Palestine. That too many American Jews were thrown by that and don’t understand how or why anyone would embrace that narrative unless they were duped illustrates the problem. We want the world to see things precisely as we see them, but even if we are right in the justness of Israel’s cause, our views of the world are blinkered. If our own narrative continues to ignore the Palestinian experience, we will not understand why the Palestinian narrative is compelling, or why it leads those who hear it to resist the facts and legitimacy of the Zionist narrative.
By ignoring the Palestinians’ narrative of what has transpired since 1967, or 1948, or 1917, we are increasingly unprepared to deal with larger American society. Far too many American Jews arrive on college campuses never having even heard a story of the State of Israel that foregrounds the century of displacement, almost six decades of occupation, and daily routine abuses and humiliations suffered by Palestinians. But this version of the narrative plays an important role in American understanding of the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It isn’t that we aren’t adequately preparing younger American Jews to counter this interpretation of history; it’s that we aren’t adequately preparing them to even engage fully in American society. If the baseline Zionist narrative is that the State of Israel was created “in a land without people for a people without a land,” and others’ baseline is that the state was created by a group of outsiders who displaced the people who were already living there, we will be unable to have even elementary conversations. We cannot shut ourselves off to what the other side believes and teaches. It simply is not good for American Jews to be shocked by how many non-Jewish Americans see the State of Israel and its place in the world.
The stakes are larger than what happens in one-on-one conversations or in personal and professional communities. American Jewish communal and professional leaders are critical actors in the U.S. policy process on Israel and on Israeli-Palestinian issues. Jewish organizations provide advice and feedback to administration officials and members of Congress, Jewish communal debates signal to politicians what our priorities are, and Jewish leaders shape the contours of policy prescriptions and often the policies that are implemented. In the policy and political space that predominated for decades, where U.S. policy was relatively consistent and constrained within a narrow set of outcomes, a monolithic American Jewish narrative of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was not a policy drawback.
But that world no longer exists. It is not credible to insist that the Palestinian narrative has no factual basis, particularly if we want to be trusted sources of information and prescriptions for policymakers who want pragmatic guidance on Israeli-Palestinian issues, which they usually view as a political minefield. It is not credible to approach policy debates without a sense of what Palestinians actually want and how American leaders view their claims—not through the filter of Israeli ideas about what they want but through firsthand engagement with how Palestinians frame their story. If, for instance, Jewish community leaders have been raised in an institutional environment in which it is taken for granted that most Palestinians will not rest until they have driven Israel into the sea because they hate Jews, it will come across as deeply naive if they dive into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without understanding that this is not a consensus, or even standard, American view of Palestinians. It is critically important to know not only that Palestinians view Israel as carrying out a decades-long continuous nakba, but why they think that. It is imperative to know not only that Palestinians view Israel as an apartheid state, but why they insist so. Americans and their leaders still sympathize more with Israel than with the Palestinians, but their views of each side are unquestionably more complicated than they used to be. In April, a Pew study found that more than half of American adults now view Israel unfavorably, a result driven not only by Democrats but by Republicans under the age of 50. Spending time with the Palestinian narrative reveals why that is.
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Teaching Our Children
Finally, we must bring an openness to the Palestinian narrative into our educational spaces. The “you never told us” phenomenon of the last few decades, in which alumni of Jewish day schools and Jewish summer camps accuse their former institutions of having provided them with a one-sided, inaccurate view of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has contributed to a rethink in many quarters regarding Israel education. An Israel education curriculum limited to Zionist pioneers draining the swamps, defeating hordes of invading Arab armies, and creating the “Startup Nation” may still exist in some places, but it is no longer the default approach. This development is an unambiguously positive one, but it still carries with it a major drawback, which is that it filters the Palestinian narrative through a Jewish lens.
Introducing our students to the Palestinian narrative by exposing them to the Palestinian experience in Palestinians’ own words brings a fuller understanding of the conflict, and brings an added level of credibility to the endeavor. Students who are wary that they are getting an education in Israeli-Palestinian issues with the goal of inculcating a particular worldview and approach will be suspicious of curricula that exclude firsthand Palestinian accounts or the work of Palestinian scholars. Any credibility we gain with our young generation by introducing a more balanced approach to understanding the history and reality of the State of Israel will be limited if we focus exclusively on Israeli and Jewish sources. We must show that we are not afraid of encountering Palestinians in their own words and with their own ideas and that doing so does not destroy our Zionist commitments.
I do not mean to suggest that this broader approach is not without risks. Jewish education is not a values-neutral proposition, and it cannot be treated as the equivalent of torah lishmah, learning for its own sake. The goals of Jewish education extend beyond creating a knowledgeable community and include shaping students’ identities as Jews. Educators generally aim to ensure that their students feel themselves to be part of the Jewish people, that they feel connected to the land of Israel and the modern state of Israel, and that they support Israel and Israeli Jews. Including Palestinian perspectives introduces an element of uncertainty into the equation, and we must acknowledge the potential risks and weigh them appropriately.
For some, exposure to the Palestinian narrative will not be a helpful intervention that better prepares them to engage in larger political, policy, and societal conversations. For those students, exposure will cause a break with the mainstream American Jewish community and a shift toward anti-Zionism. This is an inevitable consequence on some level, and the fact that it is foreseeable and also increasingly documentable will give many pause. The Palestinian narrative of a constantly dispossessed and downtrodden people who are steadfast in resisting their oppressors and in holding on to their identity and dreams of return is a sympathetic one, and one that feels intimately familiar to Jews. There is a reason that Israel’s self-image as a David fighting a larger Arab Goliath was so effective in making Zionism mainstream, and a reason that the spreading view of Israel as the Goliath to Palestinians’ David is so difficult for American Jews in particular.
The Palestinian narrative is tailor-made for progressive sensibilities and a more liberal worldview, which is where a majority of American Jews—and an even larger majority of those under forty—find themselves. Actively introducing it into the American Jewish conversation can be a counterproductive own goal in light of how it might reverberate in ways antithetical to broad communal priorities.
In the current environment, the natural impulse for many is to double down on the wars over narrative and who controls it, to counter every mention of Palestinian displacement in the Nakba with Jewish displacement in the Baghdad pogroms of the Farhud, to counter every reference to the Jewish supremacist and extremist Meir Kahane and his current heirs with the Palestinian, Hitler-supporting Hajj Amin al-Husseini. These tactics may succeed in the short term, but the growing anti-Zionism, non-Zionism, or plain apathy among younger American Jews who have grown up in Jewish institutions suggests that the tactics will fail in the long term. Without an authentic reckoning, American Jews will encounter Palestinian narratives in settings that make them question why they were not exposed to them earlier, only leading to questions about whether their education is redeemable. Far better to present challenging ideas and texts within a nurturing environment, where grappling with them may be painful and difficult but will not come as a complete shock that risks upending an entire belief and values system.
It is not only that American Jews should learn an authentic accounting of what Israel has done that is admirable and what it has done that falls short because this is a truer account—more historical than hagiographic. It is that in order to engage with wider American society beyond the protective Jewish community walls, understanding how Israel is viewed in many places and why it is viewed this way is a necessary component. That must include the harsh views that many Palestinians and their supporters hold of Israel—and not only of Israeli behavior—despite those views being unbalanced and, in some instances, built entirely on fabrications. American Jews should not be caught off guard to learn that a core component of Palestinian claims is that Israel’s existence is illegitimate, and not only that the occupation of the West Bank must end. They should also not be caught off guard to learn that Palestinians have strong reasons to view Israel as illegitimate, even as American Jews hopefully are able to marshal the obvious counterarguments as to why erasing Israel would be a deeply unjust and fruitless endeavor.
Finally, acknowledgment is not the same as acceptance. It is myopic to treat the acknowledgment of Palestinian narratives and the acknowledgment of some Palestinian claims as a gateway drug that will lead to virulent anti-Zionism. If our Zionism and connection to Israel is that tenuous, then we have much graver concerns. The story of Israel-Palestine cannot be truly understood without seeing it through the lens of the people on the other side. Incorporating Palestinian narratives into our educational institutions will ultimately benefit us through greater understanding, greater ability to navigate the American political environment, and greater empathy for others.
One adage that the American Jewish community has adopted and often repeated is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be solved overnight if Palestinians would only acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. We want Palestinians to give credence to our narrative of indigeneity and history in our homeland, and to our rightful return after millennia of exile. We must be willing to do the same in return, and to acknowledge that Palestinians have lost much, due in large part to Israel’s founding. Just as we do not expect Palestinians to become Zionists when granting Israel’s legitimacy, acknowledging Palestinians’ historical injustice does not involve casting aspersions on Israel’s legitimacy, but simply involves granting that even good and necessary outcomes have adverse consequences. Yet neither we nor they will ever get to this place if we are not willing to treat Palestinian narratives as worth engaging. In a best-case scenario, shifting the way we operate will lead to mutual understanding and trust, and contribute to a durable peace between Israelis and Palestinians. At worst, it will give our community a better sense of how to navigate the increasingly fraught and complex domestic dynamics around Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Either way, the risk is worth the reward.
