Reading Response: April 4

As noted by many, in conversations about the Israel-Palestine dispute (in general, and Jerusalem specifically), the dialogue often devolves into a "who was here first?" argument.

The readings for Monday's class certainly tread upon this territory. Like many supportive of the Israeli side, Reba Rubin (in Jerusalem: The Holy City Through the Ages) draws upon biblical and historical support for ancient Jewish claims to Jerusalem. For Rubin, the Bible is proof of Jewish presence and thus historical claim to territory. Archaeological evidence fits neatly into this narrative--not necessarily 'archaeological fact,' because especially in the context of Israel/Palestine, political (and religious) agendas exert a great deal of influence on archaeological evidence ex post facto. In other words, evidence is tailored to suit explicit political/religious motives.

Counter to Rubin and other Zionist accounts, Khalidi (in The History of Jerusalem: An Arab Perspective) deconstructs the notion of objectivist history, and argues against many of the traditional pillars of Zionist argument for historical claims justifying contemporary Israeli control of Jerusalem. Interestingly, Khalidi leans on Enlightenment (particularly from Grotius) notions of property claiming and ownership--in that to truly retain a right to ownership of land, one must improve it and make it more productive--to create a context justifying Arab/Palestinian claims upon Jerusalem. As an example, Khalidi discusses Muslim architecture and monumental structures in Jerusalem, as evidence that not only was there a persistent and continuous Palestinian/Muslim presence in Jerusalem from antiquity, but that these ancestors of today's Palestinians weren't just itinerant and negligent squatters. They inhabited, ruled, and improved the land. This is in line with Khalidi's other writings on the subject, wherein he takes an aggressive anti-colonial/anti-imperialist stance, vilifying the notion that Palestine was ever "a land with no people for a people with no land."

The most "objective" piece of the readings for today, by Jeremy Pressman (A Brief History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict) strikes me as less objective than a neophyte might think. I won't go into a laundry list of the elisions that Pressman makes that gloss over some of Israel's bad behavior, but I will sum things up by saying: any historical narrative that puts on objectivist clothing is inherently dangerous. Though Bernard Lewis is a very knowledgeable historian, Edward Said argued very vehemently (and to me, convincingly) that the knowledge that Lewis shares as "objective" history is all couched in language and ideas that are themselves biased and partial.