La historia como herramienta para la transformación pacífica del conflicto y la reconciliación en Palestina/Israelnuevas aproximaciones al conflicto de 1948

Abstract

Abstract The object of the research is the relationship between the historical events of the period 1947-48, corresponding to the founding of the state of Israel and the transformation of much of the indigenous Palestinian refugee community into refugees stripped of all rights and properties, and the current conflictive situation that exists today in Palestine/Israel. We want to show that new ways to approach an historical event have an enormous potential to change perceptions of the human groups involved and thus facilitate a peaceful conflict transformation. The years 1947 and 1948 represent a turning point for the development of relations between the Zionist settlers and the indigenous people of the British Mandate for Palestine. Therefore our research focuses on the presence of the events of this period in the historical and collective memory as key to better understand the conflict and as a lens to study the development, between change and continuity, of the perceptions of the actors involved. Political and military events that led to the founding of the state of Israel and the destruction and looting of the Palestinian indigenous community have undergone a vast amount of research, publications, debates and all kinds of academic and journalistic production. As the conflict has continued to be active since 1948, the same historical narrative has become a battleground where the stronger part tried to suppress the other's point of view. What has been created is a plurality of narratives, often diverging between themselves, which exasperated the perception of the irreconcilability between the embattled communities. In particular the aspect that will receive the most attention throughout this research is the evolution of Israeli academic and social discourse about the founding of the state of Israel and its consequences. Of course the same evolution in the Palestinian society will be an integral part of the object of study, looking at it it from a comparative point of view in order to compare the results of the main line of research and to verify possible points of contact and integration between narratives that have been defined by many as irreconcilable. The first issue addressed is the creation of modern national identity as a cultural product, emphasizing the close relationship between this process and the development and the analysis and narration of the past. In our industrial societies characterized by extreme professional specialization this task is carried out largely by the academy and the results are transmitted to the whole society through a range of institutions. We will analyze these complex processes without the pretension to address them completely, but as a theoretical basis to analyze how the narratives of the events of 1947-48 and the rhetoric of the "War of Independence" have marked the perceived identity of the Israeli society and how the same historical events have been reproduced, rebuilt and revised over the 60 years of existence of the state of Israel. In parallel, we observe how these processes have also affected the narratives of the Palestinian indigenous community, centered on the concept of Nakba, "catastrophe" in Arabic. The comparison between the two accounts of this episode, to which both communities in conflict give a fundamental and existential importance will lead us to a reflection on these "identity totems" (Palestinian Nakba and Israeli War of Independence), and on the limits and the possibilities for conflict transformation residing in a deep revision of these ideologically charged concepts. To verify this potential for change we will study the case of an Israeli non-governmental organization that aims to change the perception of its own society on the issue of the Palestinian refugees. Zochrot, the feminine for ¿they remember¿ in modern Hebrew, is the name that this group based in Tel Aviv has chosen to identify itself towards a society that has kept the debate on the Nakba silenced and regarded as a taboo. The chapter devoted to the work of this organization will attempt to present in the most organic way the trajectory of the organization and its innovative methodologies, some of which have been witnessed during a period of participatory research in 2010 and 2011. Different forms of didactic, editorial, artistic and experimental proposals developed by this organization will be put in the context of the in the methodological and theoretical framework presented in the first part of the text, in order to verify the relation between academia and cultural and peace activism. Finally we will work to find the effects that these changes in historical narratives are causing in the embattled societies, trying to analyze the reactions to these changes in the historical narrative and the prospects for a peaceful conflict transformation in Palestine/Israel.