By Sherna Berger Gluck
The outbreak of the intifada on December 9, 1987, made the Palestinian cause a reality that could not be ignored.
No longer could a Golda Meir get away with her (in)famous pronouncement that there were no Palestinians — another version of the earlier lie that the land was empty before the Israelis took it over.
A growing number of books, slide shows, and videos produced since the beginning of the intifada bear testimony to the Palestinian cause.
But the compulsion to create symmetrical structures, to present interviews with both Palestinians and Israelis, that marks so many of these works, ends up creating a new mind set.
The Palestinians seem not to exist on their own, but only in relationship to Israelis.
Nevertheless, all these works help to humanise Palestinians, a noble task particularly because they are usually either discounted or demonised.
In an attempt to counteract past history of Palestinian armed struggle, the authors offer proof that Palestinians want peace.
On the other hand, in portraying Israelis, they attempt to counteract not the history of Israeli terrorism, but the persistent intransigence of the Israeli government.
Penny Rosenwasser's Voices from "A Promised Land": Palestinian and Israeli Peace Activists Speak Their Hearts (Curbstone Press, 1992), the most recent example of this genre of dual narrative structure, is the most genuinely respectful of, and sympathetic to, Palestinians.
Yet, by including interviews only with likable, peace-loving people, the author seems as intent on redeeming Israelis as on proving that Palestinians want peace.
The impulse to present parallel narratives of Palestinians and Israelis is misguided because it contradicts the reality of asymmetry inherent in the relationship between occupied and occupier, colonised and coloniser.
Palestinians in Rosenwasser's book who speak to us about peace, for the most part, are representative of Palestinian society.
They embrace the PLO position, and some cases, for example Faisal Husseini and Zahera Kamal, are people who have been selected by the PLO to speak on its behalf. Although there are segments of the Palestinian population who might disagree with their stated positions, these people are not marginal to their society.
The Israeli peace activists who Rosenwasser presents, on the other hand, by their own acknowledgment are marginal to their society.
Rather than being representatives, they are opponents, outsiders.
This is not to deny their importance or the need for us to support, encourage and publicise their activities.
But does it help either them or Palestinians to try to equate them with each other? Another thread that runs through works like Rosenwasser's is that dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis is proof that peaceful coexistence is possible.
Without diminishing the human significance of dialogue between members of enemy camps, we also have to take care that we do not reduce political problems to the level of individual friendship.
The long history of coexistence between Arab and Jews in historic Palestine is filled with accounts of personal friendships — and perhaps even more significantly, of shared culture.
What prevents these relationships from forming and blossoming is not individual enmity, but a political problem: the denial of self-determination to Palestinian people.
In terms of an American audience and constraints imposed by those who control the media, this genre of parallel narratives may be the only way that works sympathetic to Palestinians can be published or broadcast.
Ultimately, we might ask, does this genre not reinforce the idea that Palestinian identity has no foundation of its own, that it can be constructed only in relationship to Israel or Israelis? By heaping uncritical praise on these dual narrative productions and not criticising the underlying fallacy of symmetry, we may simply by perpetuating in a more palatable form the Golda Meir line.
[Abridged from Al-Fajr, Jerusalem Palestinian weekly, via Pegasus.]