Summary
The popular paradigm of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a clash between two opposed national narratives, which Anna Bernard argues has lost the oppositional force of Said’s original ‘permission to narrate’ argument and become a liberal commitment to ‘balance’ that misconstrues both nationalisms (Rhetorics of Belonging, PDF p.39-41).
Details
- The paradigm gained popular purchase in Western Europe and North America after 1980, in no small part through international media coverage of the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, and still determines the conditions of reception for Palestinian and Israeli writing in English (PDF p.14-15).
- Said’s ‘Permission to Narrate’ (1984) noted the absence of the Palestinian narrative from metropolitan discourse (1984, 29); the two-narratives idea gained currency in the late 1980s and 1990s alongside the two-state diplomacy of the Oslo accords, which Said called a ‘Palestinian Versailles’ (1993) (PDF p.39).
- In its current form it casts the conflict — understood not as a settler-colonial conflict bolstered by US support for Israel but as an endless ethno-national war — as a ‘tragedy’ of “right versus right” (Oz, 1994, 37, quoted PDF p.40), in which, per Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian voice requires the reassuring presence of its Israeli echo and not the reverse (1997, 146–47) (PDF p.40).
- ‘Narrative’ is also used to delegitimize Palestinian claims, as by negotiator Tal Becker on restitution and refugee return, since the term suggests an idea falling short of universally accepted truth (PDF p.41).
- The paradigm has not produced metropolitan interest in the region’s actual cultural production; receiving literary texts as rehearsals of national narratives obscures the “contestatory nature of the struggle for nationhood” (Gopal, 2005, 19, quoted PDF p.41).