Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (13 page)

After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, which resulted in a humiliating defeat for France and the birth of the new Germany, the German generals insisted on claiming the two French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, partly as spoils of war, partly to provide a defensive barrier against future French attacks. German nationalists obligingly cast their demands in newer, more
acceptable clothes. In the past, Alsace and part of Lorraine had been part of the Holy Roman Empire and for much of their history had had German rulers. Louis XIV had seized Alsace and Louis XV Lorraine, but the time had come to restore them to their natural home. No matter if many of their inhabitants did not speak German or preferred to remain with France. Heinrich von Treitschke, one of Germany’s leading historians, said the German nation knew what was best for “these unfortunates” who had so sadly fallen under French influence. “We shall restore them to their true selves against their will.” A German newspaper recommended the nineteenth-century version of tough love. “We must begin with the rod,” it declared. “Love will follow the disciplining, and it will make them Germans again.”

In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, which marked the end of World War I, justification for claims to territory assumed huge importance because there was so much to be divided up and so many competing claims. The defeat of Germany, the collapse of Russia and the Russian Empire, and the disintegration of Austria-Hungary and of the Ottoman Empire meant that borders all over Europe and the Middle East were in a state of flux. Old nations, such as Poland, saw the chance to put themselves on the map again, and new ones, such as Czechoslovakia, had their chance to be born. Woodrow Wilson’s speeches and the talk of self-determination that was in the air everywhere encouraged dozens of groups to make their way to Paris to lay their cases before the great powers.

Their arguments fell into three main categories: strategic, that possession of a particular piece of territory was necessary for a country’s safety or for its economy; ethnographic, that the peoples on the ground belonged to the petitioning nation through language, customs, or religion; and finally, and this was often considered the clincher, by historical right. Strategic or economic arguments
did not always work, because neighboring countries could make the same case. Ethnography was also tricky where, as was the case in the center of Europe, populations were so mixed. History seemed to speak with authority—or did it? Europe, and it is true of the Middle East as well, has far too much history, as Winston Churchill memorably quipped about the Balkans, than it can consume. Empires and states, rulers and peoples, had come and gone. You could almost always find a basis for your claims in the past if you looked hard enough. Italy claimed much of the Dalmatian coast, partly to defend its own Adriatic coast, partly on the grounds that Italian civilization was superior to that of the largely Slavic inhabitants, but also because Venice had once ruled it. And human nature being what it is, when the petitioners at the peace conference ransacked history, those who spoke for emerging nations did not go back to a time when their putative forerunners had occupied a small piece of territory. Many Poles, including Roman Dmowski, leader of the Polish delegation to Paris, wanted at least to reestablish the borders of 1772, when Poland ruled over today’s Lithuania and Belarus and much of Ukraine. “When Dmowski related the claims of Poland,” said an American expert, “he began at eleven o’clock in the morning and in the fourteenth century, and could reach the year 1919 and the pressing problems of the moment only as late as four o’clock in the afternoon.” The Serbs longed for the boundaries of the fourteenth century, when King Stephen’s kingdom stretched from the Aegean up to the Danube. The Bulgarians preferred the tenth-century map, when their king Simeon had ruled over much of the same territory.

“Each one of the Central European nationalities,” the same American expert complained wearily, “had its own bagful of statistical and cartographical tricks. When statistics failed, use was made of maps in color. It would take a huge monograph to contain
an analysis of all the types of map forgeries that the war and the peace conference called forth.” Or the abuses of history. The records of the conference are full of sweeping claims buttressed by shaky histories which skip lightly over the centuries, the coming and going of states, the unending movements of peoples across the face of Europe, and all other inconvenient facts, and which purport to show that such and such a piece of land was always Polish or Italian. When Serbia and Romania both claimed the Banat, which lies between them, for example, they reached back to the Middle Ages for evidence to support their claims. Look, said the Serbian representative, at the monasteries in the Banat, which had always been Serbian. That, replied the Romanian, was because Slavs were more naturally pious than Romanians.

Today, China uses history to recast its invasion and occupation of Tibet as not anything of the sort. In the view of the Chinese government, it simply reasserted its historical rights, which had been established over the centuries. Taiwan, at least to the Chinese, presents a similar case. As Zhou Enlai said to Henry Kissinger in 1972, “History also proves that Taiwan has belonged to China for more than a thousand years—a longer period than Long Island has been part of the U.S.” In fact, history proves no such thing. In the case of Tibet, it is true that Dalai Lamas from time to time recognized the mandate of heaven of the emperor in far-off China, but for most of the time the remote mountain land was left to its own devices. Taiwan has had even looser ties with China. It was too far across the sea for most Chinese dynasties to bother with. Only the last dynasty, the Qing, tried to assert some control, partly because the island had become a refuge for pirates and rebels.

History takes on particular importance when land is under dispute. In Canada, aboriginals use printed records such as
treaties and dispatches as well as oral histories and archaeology to claim back what they argue are their ancestral lands. Romanians claim, as they did in Paris in 1919, that the rich prize of Transylvania should be theirs because they are the descendants of Roman legions and therefore have been there much longer than their Hungarian opponents, who only arrived in the ninth century. Albanians claim that Kosovo is theirs because they are descendants of ancient Illyrians, who were known in classical Greek times, while the Serbs only came in the eleventh century. Serbs counter with the argument that most of the Albanians in Kosovo are new arrivals, part of the wave that came in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In one of the most difficult and dangerous disputes in the present, Israelis and Palestinians argue over possession of the small piece of land that was once Palestine in the Ottoman Empire. Every aspect of their joint history is disputed. Did Palestine really have a population of 90 percent Palestinian Arabs and 10 percent Jews at the time of World War I? Did the Palestinians turn down chance after chance to cooperate with the Jews? Or did the Jews increasingly exclude them from the economy and from power? Is it really possible to speak of a “Palestinian people”? (Golda Meir and David Ben-Gurion both thought not.) Was 1948, when the state of Israel was proclaimed, a triumph or a catastrophe? Did the Palestinian refugees leave willingly because they thought they would be coming back with victorious Arab armies, or were they pushed out? Has a tiny Israel always been circled by an iron ring of implacable Arab enemies? Was its survival a miracle or because it had a lot of advantages on its side? Did the Palestinians support the Axis in World War II? Is Zionism another version of Western colonialism?

It is almost impossible for the two sides to find common answers to such questions because history lies at the heart of both
their identity and their claims to Palestine. Israeli history was for a long time very much what the founding fathers such as Ben-Zion Dinur had hoped it would become—an inspiring story to weld Israelis into a nation determined to survive. Israel belongs in Palestine because there has been a continuous Jewish presence there since the Romans conquered the last independent Jewish state. The Arabs, the argument went, were relative newcomers, drifting in over the centuries from elsewhere. Moreover, so political figures like Golda Meir insisted, they did not constitute a separate nation called Palestinians. In the 1980s, an American writer named Joan Peters went still further, attempting to show, unsuccessfully, that there had been virtually no Arabs at all in Palestine when the Zionist settlers started to arrive at the end of the nineteenth century; attracted by the prosperity the Zionists were creating, so she claimed, they moved in. Modern Israel was born in adversity yet managed to triumph over its massed Arab enemies. In the years after 1948, it was attacked repeatedly by its neighbors and forced into three defensive wars, in 1956, 1967, and 1973. It hangs on to the occupied territories of Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights to ensure its safety. Israel, so this version says, would like peace, but the Arabs have been intransigent right from the start.

Palestinian and the wider Arab history is, not surprisingly, different. In their view of the past, the Jewish presence—the “usurping entity”—was planted in Palestine in the twentieth century by Western imperialism in a classic act of colonialism. Israel’s birth was assisted by powerful midwives, especially the United States. The Palestinians, who have been a people for decades, if not centuries, resisted but were too weak, and their Arab brethren were divided and, in the case of Jordan and Egypt, colluding secretly with Israel to seize Palestinian land. The refugees did not leave willingly in 1948 but were forced out,
often at gunpoint, by Jewish soldiers. It is Israel, with its massive support from the United States, that is the region’s bully and warmonger. Israel refuses to hand back the land it seized in 1967, even though its occupation is illegitimate, and it treats the Palestinian inhabitants of the occupied territories in a way that resembles South African apartheid. The Palestinian leadership has tried to negotiate with Israel in good faith; if negotiations have failed, like the ones President Clinton sponsored at Camp David, it is Israel’s fault.

Recent history is only part of the battleground and perhaps not even the most important. If the two sides can demonstrate that their peoples have a long-standing and unbroken connection to the land, then that, in the way pioneered by nationalist movements in Europe, becomes a title deed for the present. That is why the settler movement in Israel prefers to use the biblical names of Judaea and Samaria to describe the West Bank. As a spokeswoman for Gush Emunim, one of the more radical groups, put it, history was their “currency.” Not surprisingly, as Nadia Abu El-Haj has pointed out in
Facts on the Ground
, archaeology has assumed a central importance in the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians because it promises definitive answers. If, for example, Iron Age sites can be shown to be those of the Israelites, who conquered the land of the Canaanites, then that might establish a modern Jewish claim to the same land. If, on the other hand, the sites were shared by various peoples at different times, an unbroken connection might be harder to establish. “It would not be right,” said a Palestinian archaeologist, “to emphasize the history of one people among the many peoples who invaded Palestine and settled there.” Or what if, as some Arab archaeologists argue, the original inhabitants were Arabs whose land was taken by the Israelites? Each century becomes part of the debate. If a tenth-century mosaic is Arab, what does it mean for the
Palestinian claims? “Do we have to tell the world this country was settled by Muslims?” an Israeli colonel once asked an archaeologist in exasperation.

When agreements were reached, with great difficulty in the early 1990s, for Israel to withdraw from parts of the West Bank, archaeological finds were part of the bargaining. The Palestinians demanded them back; the Israeli government insisted on joint management of important sites. Who owned antiquities in places such as Jericho, which were due to be handed over to the Palestinian National Authority? In 1993, the Israel Antiquities Authority sent more than a dozen teams of archaeologists on a top-secret operation just before the Israeli withdrawal, to scour that part of the area for ancient scrolls, “like Indiana Jones,” wrote an Israeli journalist scornfully.

Contrary evidence can be smudged out, explained away, or simply ignored. A nationalist Israeli archaeologist was deplored by his colleagues for labeling obviously Christian sites as Jewish. Names disappear from maps along with the peoples who once lived there. When archaeological excavations called into question many of the key components of the Old Testament and its whole chronology, many fundamentalist Christians and Israelis refused to believe the findings or simply remained indifferent. Many ancient historians and archaeologists have come to believe that the Israelites may never have been in Egypt. If there was an exodus, it may have been only a small affair with a few families. The Israelites may not have conquered the land of the Canaanites, and Jericho probably did not have walls to fall down at the blast of a trumpet. The great kingdom of Solomon and David, which was said to stretch from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates, was more likely to have been a small chiefdom. Remains from the time indicate that Jerusalem was a small city, not the magnificent one of the Bible. So why, asked Ze’ev Herzog in the
respected Israeli newspaper
Haaretz
, has what is a major change in views about the biblical past not provoked a reaction, even from secular Israelis? His conclusion is that they find it too painful to contemplate. “The blow to the mythical foundations of the Israeli identity is apparently too threatening, and it is more convenient to turn a blind eye.”

Reactions have not always been so muted. Nadia Abu El-Haj, an American of Palestinian origin, came under ferocious attack for arguing that Israelis had used archaeology to reinforce their claims to Israel. “This is a book which should never have been published,” commented a critic on the Amazon website. “This work is an effort to completely erase the historical connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel.” A vigorous campaign was undertaken to prevent her from getting tenure at Barnard College, where she was teaching. Historians who have examined Israeli history, as they would any other, trying to disentangle myth from fact and challenging accepted wisdom, have similarly found themselves in a minefield. The “new history” by historians such as Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris is, said Shabtai Teveth, a journalist and biographer of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, “a farrago of distortions, omissions, tendentious readings, and outright falsifications.” Israel, as we shall see, is by no means the only society to have its history wars, but because so much is at stake there, from the very identity of the nation to its right to exist on its land, the conflict can get ferocious.