Palestine/Israel is a textbook example of a conflict over historical narratives. Binary readings of the past pit Philistines and Israelites, Muslims and Jews, survivors of the Holocaust and the Nakba against one another. Many acknowledge the degree to which the past is securitized and weaponized in this now century-old conflict. In this paper, I ask whether the Israeli-Palestinian peace process sought to address the past. The main protagonists and scholars of the peace process insist that it did not. I challenge this claim and argue that it was actively involved in reshaping the Israeli and Palestinian narratives.
I offer three arguments to support this claim. The first questions the very idea of an "ahistorical" process, arguing that calls to "look forward" and "forget" constitute a performative contradiction that imposes memory while demanding forgetfulness. The second looks at the agreements themselves, especially the mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO as well as the Declaration of Principles (1993), and how they gave Palestinians a conditional permission to narrate their past after it had been denied by Israel since 1948. The third argument turns to the underlying formula of the peace process itself-partition-and how it offers a framework in which to negotiate conflicts over the past. Partition is not only a territorial solution, I argue, but also a historical one, premised on dividing geography as well as history, so that two states and two narratives co-exist side-by-side. I conclude by how these attempts to deal with the past reproduced power asymmetries between Israelis and Palestinians, creating yet more conflicts over the past instead of solving them.
