Israel is a complicated subject, to put it mildly. Particularly for liberal American Jews like me. To a kid in the 1970s, Israel was the plucky underdog that had survived attacks and blossomed in the desert. It allowed us to return to our ancestral homeland, a land promised to us by God. It was our salvation after the horrors of the Holocaust. Despite its humble and tragic origins, somehow Israel had managed to be the poor victim of terrorists and hostile neighbors while simultaneously a powerful force for good. The victim and hero all rolled up into one – what a combination! As a child, I had no reason to question this mythology.
The story we were told went like this: Jews started looking for a homeland in the 19th century because of rampant antisemitism in Europe. At the urging of Theodor Herzl and other Zionists, some Jews started moving to their ancestral home, then a part of the Ottoman empire and called Palestine. After WWI, the UK took control of the land and promised in the Balfour Declaration to create a Jewish homeland. Later, six million Jews died in the Holocaust, proving Herzl’s point and convincing much of the world of the need for a Jewish state in the wake of the tragedy.
The Jewish community gratefully accepted the UN’s decision to partition the region into Jewish and Palestinian states in November 1947, but the Palestinians and other Arab states in the region refused to accept the UN’s decision and attacked the nascent state of Israel. With a combination of bravery, intelligence, and luck, Israel won the War of Independence and claimed much of the territory designated for the Palestinians. Over the next several decades Israel was repeatedly attacked either by other Arab states or Palestinian terrorists, but managed to survive and even thrive, turning the desert green and building an economic and military powerhouse. Even better, Israel was the only democracy in the Middle East, an outpost of liberal values in a sea of autocracies.
The rags-to-riches story of Jews and Israel over the last 100 years is a powerful one. As Yuval Noah Harari (perhaps not coincidentally, an Israeli scholar) argued in his book Sapiens, humanity has been wildly successful largely because of its ability to tell itself and believe in such stories. They unify and motivate us to accomplish great and terrible things.
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Here’s the version of the story that we weren’t told: Beginning in the late 19th century, European Jews started moving into Palestine in large numbers and establishing themselves in land that the Arab Palestinians had occupied for centuries. From the Palestinian perspective, whatever legitimate grievances the European Jews had at the time, their goal in Palestine was no different from that of the British in India or the French in Vietnam: colonization by white people of non-white people; Europeans taking over the land of non-Europeans. We Jews argue that we have historical ties to the land going back to biblical times, and that’s unquestionably true. But it’s equally true that the Palestinians and their ancestors made up the vast majority of the people who had been living continuously in the region from biblical times up until the 20th century.
In 1948, the UN adopted a partition plan that gave the new Jewish state 56% of the land in Palestine despite the fact that Jews made up only 33% of the total population of the region. The Palestinians and their Arab neighbors could not accept what they saw as a group of outsiders, particularly the West, imposing their will on their land and culture, and rejected the UN’s plan. From their vantage point, the UN had no right to divide up and give away the Palestinians’ land. As David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, put it, “[s]ure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country.”
Violence on both sides quickly escalated into war. What the Israelis call the War of Independence, the Palestinians call the Nakba, Arabic for the “catastrophe.” The conflict forced over 700,000 Palestinians living in the region to flee the towns and villages they had lived in for centuries, creating a refugee crisis that still has not been resolved. While the Israelis view the mass displacement as an unfortunate byproduct of the war and the Palestinians’ own decision not to accept the UN mandate, the Palestinians see it as the result of a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing.
The war and the Nakba form the core of the Palestinians’ mythology and cultural story. For them, it is a tragedy that continues to haunt their society and can only be resolved by Israel acknowledging its guilt and allowing the Palestinians to return to their ancestral homes.
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My perception of Israel began to change in 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon to root out the PLO. Although the invasion initially seemed like a justified action to ensure Israel’s security, it quickly took on a darker tone after the Sabra and Shatila massacre in September of that year. Hundreds or thousands of Lebanese civilians were murdered by a Lebanese Christian militia with the support of the IDF. For the first time, Israel started to look more like a bully and less like a victim in the eyes of many in the western world. I was just starting to become aware of world events – or at least a more nuanced version that didn’t come straight from older relatives and Hebrew school teachers.
As I got older, I became increasingly frustrated as I learned more about the history of the region and the fact that the simplistic narratives about the country I had heard as a child were incomplete at best. In ninth grade history, we were told to write a research paper on the country of our choice, and I picked Israel because of my lingering childhood interest. But during the course of my research, I came across some articles by scholars that painted a very different portrait than the one I’d been taught and believed.
The one that stands out, even decades later, is an essay I found arguing that the Six Day War, widely considered to be a great victory and a high point in Israel’s history, was actually a disaster. The writer claimed that the very fact that the win was so decisive created a belief in Israel and Jews in other parts of the world that the country could use military force to solve all of its problems. The IDF appeared to be unbeatable, and if you have an incredibly effective hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail. This arrogant and narrow-minded view would come back to haunt Israel in later decades.
Even worse, by the end of the war Israel had captured the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan. Israel eventually gave Sinai back to Egypt in the Camp David Accords, and ceded some control of Gaza and parts of the West Bank to the Palestinians, but it still occupies the Golan and significant parts of the West Bank. Israel’s decision to take that land and later build settlements on it had an entirely predictable effect, intensifying existing tensions with the residents of those regions, the rest of the Arab world, and much of the international community by several orders of magnitude. What initially looked like the fruits of a great victory created intractable long-term problems.
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The October 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent invasion of Gaza are the tragic result of the Israelis and Palestinians relying on these incompatible and unreliable narratives over the last 100+ years. Their blinkered views have led to Israeli arrogance and blind faith in the IDF and Mossad. Hatred and antisemitism by the Palestinians, as well as the acceptance of terrorism and murder as a negotiating tactic. And, most importantly, the inability to see the humanity in the other side.
Of course, these bad motives exist alongside good motives as well; many Jews view the invasion of Gaza and similar military actions as justified self-defense, and many Palestinians are driven by an understandable desire for safety and a place to call home, not by hatred. If anything, it’s the commingling of these good and bad motives that creates so much of the problem.
To find a real solution, both sides have to recognize that the other exists and is not going to vanish in a puff of smoke. You might think Israel is a country of colonizers that was built on top of ethnic cleansing, but the fact remains that Israel exists. That history cannot be undone any more than the U.S. Canada, or Australia can or will be given back to the native peoples who made those lands their homes. The bell cannot be unrung. Or you might think that the Palestinians gave up their claims to the region when they both refused to accept the UN partition and killed innocent Israelis with terrorism, but the Palestinians are human beings who need a home and aren’t leaving. Mutual recognition is a small step, but a critically important one.
Perhaps what we need is “radical acceptance,” a practice taught in therapy to help patients recognize their pain without judgment to help move beyond it. It’s the same idea as the Serenity Prayer taught in Alcoholics Anonymous: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference." Like the characters in the recent movie “Past Lives,” we must acknowledge that our choices led us inexorably to this point and no other. We can fantasize or wish for a different outcome or imagine a multiverse where other possible worlds exist, but we are stuck with the here and now.
Both sides also need something else: to forget.
Granted, that’s a tough pill to swallow. Human beings are consumed with history, both personal and political. How did we get here? What can we learn from the past? We all want to understand the forces that created us and our world.
There are countless books and stories about the power of memory. Proust had his madeleine. Fitzgerald wrote about boats beating against the current, “borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Faulkner said that "[t]he past is never dead. It's not even past."
By contrast, forgetting, or at least moving on from past trauma, is not as common a theme in literature and film, but I find it more compelling in many ways. And it’s a theme that dates back thousands of years. In Sophocles’ Electra, the titular character is consumed with grief over the murder of her father by her mother and stepfather. But the Chorus urges her to move on: “forget not thy foes, but refrain from excess of wrath against them; for Time is god who makes rough ways smooth.” Even her sister scolds Electra’s “vain indulgence of idle wrath.”
Jumping forward almost 2,500 years, John Sayles’ 1996 movie “Lone Star” ends with the memorable line “[a]ll that other stuff, all that history? To hell with it, right? Forget the Alamo.” The movie is set in a town on the southern border of Texas with a difficult history of racism and violence. But the town’s deep-rooted mythology makes it almost impossible to either understand that history or move beyond it. As Sayles himself has noted about the movie, “[i]t's in every relationship – racial history, personal history. In all of those histories, you have that question of – how much do I want to carry this?... Is it possible to say, ‘I'm going to start from scratch?’" In the end, the main characters decide to do just that and look forward instead of back.
Perhaps the most fulsome analysis of this theme is in The Once and Future King, T.H. White’s modern retelling of the Arthurian legend. White decries the obsession with litigating past wrongs, writing “if we go on living backward like that, we shall never come to the end of it....You simply go on and on, until you get to Cain and Abel.” White called the “blessing of forgetfulness” the “first essential”:
If everything one did, or which one's fathers had done, was an endless sequence of Doings doomed to break forth bloodily, then the past must be obliterated and a new start made. Man must be ready to say: Yes, since Cain there has been injustice, but we can only set the misery right if we accept a status quo. Lands have been robbed, men slain, nations humiliated. Let us now start fresh without remembrance, rather than live forward and backward at the same time. We cannot build the future by avenging the past. Let us sit down as brothers, and accept the Peace of God.
This attitude is also reflected in some aspects of our legal system. One important example is statutes of limitations, which sets a time limit to prevent the government or individuals from waiting endlessly to bring a claim against a defendant. Under U.S. federal law, prosecutions for non-capital criminal offenses must be brought within five years. After that point, the door is closed and the past is truly the past. There are several sound policy reasons for such limits, but the most important is that they force the parties to deal with conflict in a timely manner and move forward instead of letting past wrongs fester.
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Of course, it’s impossible for anyone to forget the past completely, despite what movies like “The Bourne Identity” would have you believe. There’s no switch in our brains we can flip. But perhaps we can try to adopt a healthier, more balanced view of the past, where it informs but does not define us.
As Lewis Hyde notes in his book A Primer for Forgetting, ancient Greek philosophers viewed the concepts of remembering and forgetting as dual, complementary forces. The former, aletheia, means unconcealed or disclosure, while its opposite, lethe, means oblivion, silence, and hiddenness. Aletheia and lethe are not good and bad forces, but rather two poles of a single force that work in harmony. There is no light without dark and no speech without silence.
Moderation in all things, as the saying goes. And this applies to memory and history as well; all aletheia with no lethe leads to an unbalanced, unwell mind. In his story “Funes the Memorious,” Jorge Luis Borges wrote about a man who could remember the precise details of every moment he had experienced and everything he had perceived: “[Funes] was able to reconstruct every dream, every daydream he had ever had. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day; he had never once erred or faltered, but each reconstruction had itself taken an entire day.” But his perfect memory was a curse, not a blessing. According to William Egginton, in his recent book, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality:
The man who perceives and remembers flawlessly the perception of everything around him is saturated in the immediacy of his memories. The very intensity with which he experiences the world interferes with that experience. For, if it takes an entire day to reconstruct the memory of a day, what has happened to that new day?
In other words, Funes’ brain was a map with a 1:1 scale – perfect in every respect, but completely useless for someone who wants to live in and understand the world.
Egginton goes on to argue that Borges had a profound insight: To truly understand your perceptions – indeed, to be human – requires some level of abstraction and generalization. According to Borges, “[t]o think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes, there were nothing but details." And abstracting our perceptions necessarily involves forgetting some of those details.
We would be well served to remember that lesson when confronted with frequent commands that we must remember. We’re told to “never forget” the Holocaust and other tragic events to prevent future ones. The goal of these demands is undeniably good and perfectly logical: It stands to reason that if we keep the horrors of the past top of mind we’ll be more likely to prevent similar horrors from occurring in the future. But it’s far from clear that this approach is actually effective. Education about the Holocaust hasn’t prevented subsequent tragedies in places like Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Syria, and China, among many others.
Moreover, demands that we remember past injustices also seem to ignore the importance of forgiveness. Why should “never forget” outweigh “forgive and forget”? Forgiveness requires letting go of anger and resentment, and it’s hard to do that when you’re using most of your valuable mental energy thinking about old wounds.
If anything, the relentless fixation on past wrongs can lead to the opposite of forgiveness. Perhaps it’s possible for some people to think about painful memories in a calm and objective way, but most of us can’t help but get angry. As the saying goes, hurt people hurt people.
The Jewish community’s focus on the Holocaust and other past wrongs has arguably led directly to the mistreatment of the Palestinians for the last 70 years. The causal chain is obvious: We cannot forget the suffering of our people, and we don’t want them to ever suffer again. Therefore, any actions, no matter how morally questionable, that might conceivably prevent that type of suffering are justified. Of course, the same is true from the Palestinian perspective. In their minds, the decades of hardship brought about by the Nakba have justified all sorts of despicable beliefs and actions. When the story in your head is that you’re the victim, it becomes almost impossible to accept that you can do anything wrong.
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To be sure, the notion of encouraging people to move on from and forget past wrongs isn’t a new idea. After the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, leading political figures in Spain agreed not to dwell on the dictator’s horrific crimes and instead work towards building a new, democratic country. According to Omar Encarnacion, a political science professor at Bard College, this “Pact of Forgetting” made “it all but impossible to prosecute the human rights abuses of the old regime.”
The “Pact of Forgetting” seems totally alien to our current climate of extreme openness about personal and political trauma, where nothing should be buried and everything should be discussed. But in Encarnacion’s view, the Pact worked:
Contrary to what the conventional wisdom would suggest, neglecting to confront the past during the transition did not prevent the rise of successful democracy in Spain. Indeed, a common factor cited for Spain’s successful democratization is the decision not to delve into the past as a representative government was finding its footing.
The people of Spain understood that it would be impossible to build the future and create a stable, democratic state if they spent years settling old scores.
The Pact has come under fire in recent years, and Spain enacted the Historical Memory Law in 2004 and the Democratic Memory Law in 2022 to help the country come to grips with the legacy and history of the Franco regime. The former condemned the Franco regime and recognized its victims, while the latter went a step further by requiring schools to teach high school students about Franco’s crimes and exhume and identify the bodies of Franco’s victims.
Some might argue that the Democratic Memory Law and the country’s need to finally address Francoism shows that the Pact of Forgetting failed – Franco’s victims couldn’t repress their feelings forever. But perhaps permanent repression was not (or at least should not have been) the goal of the Pact of Forgetting. In this view, the new law isn’t inconsistent with the Pact of Forgetting, but rather a logical next step. Instead of immediately forcing Franco’s victims to confront their oppressors, the Pact allowed the country to heal first, and then later, when the country was a thriving democracy and time had made “rough ways smooth,” confront the horrors of the Franco regime.
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In a world saturated with memories and history, a conflict emerges: Remembering is both a source of wisdom and a potential hindrance. Finding a delicate balance between remembering and forgetting, forgiveness and moving forward, is the key to navigating the complex interplay of past, present, and future. As we grapple with our competing histories and mythologies, the challenge lies in forging a path that embraces the lessons of the past without being enslaved by its burdens.
The Israelis and Palestinians must recognize that both sides are guilty; both sides have been wronged and done wrong; both sides have legitimate grievances; and both sides have lied and exaggerated when convenient. Moreover, there are no good guys anywhere in this story: the Israelis, the global Jewish community, the Palestinians, the United States, Russia and the Soviet Union, England, France, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Iran all have blood on their hands. Trying to untangle the web of causality and blame is largely a waste of time. T.H. White said it perfectly: “Let us now start fresh without remembrance, rather than live forward and backward at the same time.”