Description
The conflict in Israel-Palestine is in a catastrophic phase. This paper explores the role of Jewish Israeli and Palestinian trauma-driven collective narratives in perpetuating the conflict and argues that those narratives must be transformed before any political settlement can succeed. The paper engages with scholarship on the collective memory of both Holocaust and Nakba to analyse the process of emplotment by which those events are constituted and remembered through acts of narration. It illustrates how the traumatised worldview of survivors has entered the bloodstream of each community’s narrative culture, engendering fear, anger, defensiveness and distrust. Every episode in the conflict is generated by, and interpreted through, these trauma-driven collective narratives.
The paper then looks to the memoirs written by key actors in the Oslo Channel of 1993 and poses the question: what can these texts teach us about the possibilities for the reshaping of collective trauma memory? Key findings are developed through close textual analysis of memoirs by the likes of Uri Savir, Ahmed Qurei, Yair Hirschfeld and Mahmoud Abbas. The Oslo Accord failed to achieve a lasting settlement because the collective narratives of each community generated violent opposition from maximalists on both sides. However, at the same time, the negotiators’ memoirs show that constructive interaction between longstanding enemies can build trust and friendship. We might call this the Oslo Effect. This paper’s key findings support the view that, for any future settlement to succeed, collective narratives must first be reshaped through the recreation of the Oslo Effect at a societal scale. Drawing on intergroup contact theory, I argue that the wider population can experience the same transformation through slow processes of constructive intergroup contact to generate new forms of memory emplotment.
