The Middle East Conflict: A Struggle for Land and for Meaning

1948 was the year of war and also the birth of a set of contested ideas about the Middle East Conflict.  Even today, Arabs and Israelis who look forward to a resolution of their disputes are typically drawn back to confrontation over the 1948 foundational stories that define their identities and invest their collective actions with meaning.  Although many Palestinians and Israelis see their nationalist narratives as possessing the potential to draw them together because of the core idea they share of homeland as part of a discourse on Exile and on ending the wounds of dispersion, they are divided more than united when pondering their sacred tales. Words are not the same as deeds nor do they necessarily chart a single course of political action, but why have they have become weapons perpetuating confrontation rather than pathways toward reconciliation?  How words that could easily have been joined in common purpose by Israelis and Palestinians became deployed in such radically different ways with regard to land and sovereignty is the story I wish to tell because it is a story that has not yet been fully told.  My paper thus focuses on naqba and on the several Hebrew terms [milhemet ha-atzma'ut,milhemet ha-shihrur and milhemet ha-kommiyut] for the 1948 war to show how and why language, memory, and identity have become instruments central to the strategies adopted by both nations and the defining elements in their political encounters.

Donna Robinson Divine is the s Morningstar Family Professor in Jewish Studies and Professor of Government at Smith College.