Dual(ing) Narratives

Well - quadruple or quintuple narratives.

I’m writing this in Bethlehem, where I’m helping lead a group of students in both the footsteps of Jesus and the complexities of the this land. This is my 23rd year of visits to this land, and the 14th leading groups of students.

This year our students started with a couple of days in Jerusalem being guided in what is often called a “dual narrative” approach to understanding Israel and Palestine. This isn’t my favorite approach, but then I don’t always call the shots. I prefer that our Israeli and Palestinian partners decide how to represent their experience. 

As for my own experience? In my years coming here I’ve heard far more than two narratives. I’ve heard dozens. 

For example. In Israel there are two Israeli narratives at least. One is the narrative of how people of different religions and ethnic backgrounds can build a new nation together out of the detritus of a thousand years or more of colonialism. The other is the narrative of how a Jewish state cannot exist without marginalizing a dangerous non-Jewish Arab citizenry while holding their terrorist Palestinian brethren at bay. 

But there are also different narratives in Beer Shiva and Tel Aviv and Haifa and Jerusalem. Different narratives among the Ultra Orthodox and the Secular Jews. Different narratives among the pioneering families and the just-arriving immigrants. After all, this is a country with a dozen or more political parties, none of which has ever won a majority of the vote and all of which await, again, a general election to shuffle the deck for a new deal from which the future may be drawn. 

But there are other narratives as well, such as conflicting narratives about the meaning of Israel as a Jewish nation, and in particular how you define who a “Jew” really is. So (to illustrate) on the 3rd of January the Jerusalem Post ran a long article on how more than half of the past year's immigrants met the state requirement to be regarded as a Jew (one grandparent was Jewish) but were not Jews. They were in fact  Russian Orthodox Christians or just atheists. Apart from these Christian “Jews” (not to be confused with Messianic Jews) there are huge numbers of practicing Jews whom Israel’s chief rabbinate doesn’t recognize as Jewish! 

Here in a Jewish state Jews sometimes cannot share graveyards and wedding ceremonies and even neighborhoods, while Christians divide themselves into feuding sects based on ancient ethnic and theological divides. The key to the shrine atop the burial place of Jesus is held by a Muslim family, because the ancient Christian communities don’t trust one another to hold it. 

In Palestine (aka West Bank, Palestinian Territories, Occupied Palestine) there is also more than one narrative. At the very least there is the Hamas narrative that Palestinians cannot possess their full identity without the destruction of Israel, and the Fatah narrative of a negotiated statehood that recognizes Israeli nationhood. There are also different narratives concerning the history and future of Christian Palestinians in the face of gradual Islamization. In a single day I have heard one Palestinian leader calling for a two state solution as the only way forward, and one calling for a single state with full rights for Palestinians as the only way forward. 

And there are varying narratives about national identity as what were refugee camps become third and forth generation cities and towns. And there are very different narratives in Gaza and the West Bank and in the vast Palestinian diaspora marooned in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon or adrift in Europe or the US. Listen to three taxi drivers and you will hear three different narratives - each claiming to be authentically Palestinian. 

And all of these contemporary narratives are linked to older narratives about just what happened and is happening since the beginning of significant Jewish in-migration to the old Turkish Vilayet of Damascus, the Palestine, the Mutassarifate of Jerusalem, and the Mandate. After all, what happened in what is now Israel and Palestine can’t be separated from larger narratives that include the Napoleanic wars in Europe, the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of the Zionist movement, the first and second World Wars, the Holocaust, and declaration of Israel’s statehood and the formation of other middle eastern states by the colonial powers. And those are not single narratives either.

Every narrative in this land is a source of identity and self-understanding. Palestinians and Israelis tell themselves into existence as peoples distinct from their ancestors. Yet their ancestors are retrospectively drawn into the narratives in odd ways, ways they might not themselves recognize were they to come to life. 

Would the Sephardic Jew of two centuries ago, settled under the Ottoman Caliphs for hundreds of years, seamlessly integrated into Arabic speaking society of the region, imagine herself an important link in a narrative chain of continuous Jewish presence vital to the narrative of a modern Jewish State? Would an Arab farmer two centuries ago, making an existence amid olive groves and garden farms trace his lineage the “people of the land” whose continued existence for thousands of years provided a key rational for a modern Palestinian identity? 

Every narrative is a prison into which we drag the past to provide company even as we silence its varied voices to hear only that which fits the story we want to tell about ourselves today. Every narrative prevents its teller from becoming anything other than the story allows, as all the stories we tell of our lives define the limits of our imagined individuality and peoplehood. It is the same for all of us; Palestinians, Israelis, Americans, and (good to remember) United Methodists. We build prisons from the stories we tell about ourselves. 

And not surprisingly those who choose to step outside the most widespread and long-standing narratives are reviled on all sides as traitors rather than pioneers of new possibilities. The artists and teachers and common citizens who shake the bars of their narrative prison are seen as the authors of a chaos in which stories from the past and present might break free. They are seen as traitors who by offering new possibilities destroy the old, secure, identities so lovingly tended for so long in the hard ground within the prisons we call our nations. 

Even we who visit these lands don’t really want to hear these creative voices, because their freedom would shake our entrenched ideas about this “holy” land. Their shattering of the dual narrative disturbs how quickly we can set aside our narrative of inevitable conflict, or of pre-defined justice, so we can go about our personal walks among the ruins with Jesus. 

Maybe that is why dual narratives, whether in this land or back in my own United States, are ultimately embraced as a comfort. They hide the complexity from which both the destruction and creation of identity is found. 

But it is the creative people, those who draw from the deep primordial silence from which all the imprisoning voices that clamor to define us have been banished, it is they who will give us the stories of peace. I hope we hear, however faintly, those stories in the next few days. Sing to the Lord a new song - not because the Lord does new things, but because these songs open the only pathways by which the Divine can traverse the human heart and do new things.