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My first foray into the troubled world of Israeli-Palestinian politics came in the late 1980s, not long after the outbreak of the first Uprising (the Intifada). I was leading trip after trip to Israel, guiding students around the countryside teaching the Bible from a wide array of biblical sites. When I finally stepped off Israel's well-worn tourist trail, I was astonished at what I saw in the Palestinian territories. I thought I was in another country.
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I wrote up these experiences in 1993 (Who Are God's People in the Middle East?) and naïvely thought that my evangelical readers would be fascinated to learn that there was another side to the story. That there was something else, some other narrative, if you just turned off the famous road to Bethlehem, if you dared go to Bet Jalla or even Hebron. Some evangelical readers were interested. Some were decidedly not. My formal work on the problem—as a theologian masquerading as a political scientist—began in the 1990s and culminated with another book (Whose Land? Whose Promise?) that set me deeper at odds with evangelicalism's political-right turn during that same decade. We had publicly decided on our narrative to explain the Middle East, and we weren't going to budge.
Most work in this area concerns the plight of those Palestinians who live under Israeli military occupation (over 3 million) or the many others (4.2 million in the Middle East alone) who have been made refugees by Israeli land seizures following a series of wars (1948, 1967, 1973). When television footage shows conflict with so-called Palestinian "terrorists" with gunfire and smoking tires, these scenes generally come from Gaza or the Occupied West Bank, areas captured by Israel in fighting that effectively took millions of Arabs captive. Two uprisings later—one that began in 1988 and another in 2000—the story continues to draw our interest. Peace proposals rise and fall; exhausted people hope and despair; the news moves on.
But there are two more stories that are now unfolding. First, Israeli historians have begun to revisit their country's cultural narrative and challenge its sacred mythologies.1 Some Israelis (such as the prolific Benny Morris) and American Jews (Norman G. Finkelstein at DePaul University) have been bold in their critique and in many cases inflammatory. They challenge the usual perception of a besieged Israel surrounded by massed Arab armies and the near-miracle victories of wars in 1948 and 1967. Using research from Israel's own archives and the stories of Arab and Israeli witnesses, they describe the conquests of these early decades, atrocities on both sides, the mass expulsion of Palestinians, and the intentional confiscation of Arab land. And they understand the present Palestinian uprising as a reaction to Israeli oppression and occupation. When they refer to these events as an "Israeli Pogrom" against Arabs, their words are guaranteed to ignite debate. And when they refer to walled-in Palestinian villages with terms such as "apartheid" or "prisoner camps," well, you can just imagine.
Despite the combative voices either dismantling the Israeli myth (Finkelstein) or defending it at all costs (Alan Dershowitz), even mainstream Israeli scholars and diplomats are writing up the story with a new sensitivity to the evils brought by both sides in this conflict. Shlomo Ben-Ami is an Israeli with a distinguished record of achievement: Oxford-educated, he taught at Tel Aviv University before beginning an illustrious career in public service that culminated with an appointment as Israel's Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was a participant in many of the Arab-Israeli peace conferences and attended the Camp David summit in 2000. In Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy, Ben-Ami gives what may be the most comprehensive study of Israel's modern history to date. What is remarkable is his ability—limited still, but impressive nonetheless—to openly describe the faults of Israel's own behavior:
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