Among the factors that explain the persistence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there is one that is underestimated, but which is nevertheless the most important: that of the Israeli and Palestinian national narratives, which make any reconciliation impossible.
As Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri, an exegete of Marx and Hegel and an emblematic figure of the Israeli left and peace camp, has pointed out, Israeli and Palestinian moderates do not speak a common language. This is because they are beholden to incompatible national narratives.
From a Palestinian perspective, the very creation of Israel constitutes a form of colonialism (a term understood as a synonym for theft). The fact that this land is the cradle of the Jewish people does not change anything. There is no historical right that allows a people to recover lands that they lost centuries ago (if such a right existed, endless chaos would ensue).
The most moderate Palestinians, who accept the existence of Israel as a fait accompli, therefore consider its founding to be a usurpation and demand, at a minimum, an apology and recognition of the injustice they have suffered.
Zionism
Now, from the Israeli point of view, Zionism (Jewish national movement) is a colonization movement without colonialism (without imperialist intentions), to use this concept developed by the theorists of left-wing Zionism at the beginning of the 20th century.e century.
Moreover, the Jews were in an almost unique situation, that of a people without a homeland. And the main argument invoked by the founders of Israel to justify the return of the Jews to a land inhabited by another people was that of the sharing of wealth: the Arabs who possessed a vast territory in the Middle East had to share a small parcel of it with the Jews who possessed none (there was no talk of a separate Palestinian state at the time, but of a large Arab federation in the Middle East).
Some respond that wealth sharing should only apply to the economic sphere. Others instead extend distributive justice to other spheres (during the pandemic, many demanded that Westerners share their vaccines with poor countries).
Need
However, beyond ideological considerations, Zionism was not a choice for the Jews, but a necessity; they had nowhere else to go (even in the late 1940s, they were still persecuted).
The Jewish community of Palestine would have declared its independence with or without the approval of the United Nations (in the spring of 1948, the United States tried to suspend the creation of Israel, without success).
The Palestinians naturally respond that they are not responsible for the misfortunes of the Jews. The Zionist left recognizes the validity of this argument. It thus sees this conflict as a clash between two legitimacies, and adopts the metaphor of the Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher, who compared this conflict to a man who jumps from a burning building and accidentally injures a passerby.
But the Palestinians dispute this parable. According to the great Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, the Palestinians are rather the “victims of the victims.” This is because in the eyes of the Palestinians, Zionism was not justified. At most, they recognize the right of Jews fleeing persecution to take refuge in Palestine in limited numbers, but not to establish a state there (and even less to expel hundreds of thousands of people, no matter who attacked first).
Absolute Justice
Even if they were still persecuted in the late 1940s, could not the Jews who had found refuge in Palestine have returned to Europe and claimed territory under American or Soviet occupation (in Germany, for example, the country that did the most harm to the Jews)?
Needless to say, for Israelis, the idea that the whole of Israeli society should be displaced once again and sent back to a place that had by then become an open-air tomb for Jews was cruel.
Thus, from the outset, absolute justice was unattainable, and only relative justice based on the division of territory seems legitimate in the eyes of Israeli moderates. However, from a Palestinian point of view, this reasoning is easy, because the Zionists had nothing to lose (and everything to gain) from such a division. For the Palestinians, however, it was an amputation, since they were the majority in Palestine.
In short, while moderates on both sides agree today on the need to create a Palestinian state, as for the origins of the conflict, despite all the goodwill in the world, their positions remain irreconcilable. Perhaps this is because they are all partly right!