A fine piece in the Jerusalem Post by Yossi Klein Halevi gets to the heart of why dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians is so difficult:

'My journey into the faiths of my neighbors was part of a much broader attempt among Israelis, begun during the first intifada, to understand your narrative, how the conflict looks through your eyes. Your society, on the other hand, has made virtually no effort to understand our narrative. Instead, you have developed what can be called a "culture of denial," that denies the most basic truths of the Jewish story.

'According to this culture of denial, which is widespread not only among your people but throughout the Arab world, there was no Temple in Jerusalem, no ancient Jewish presence in the land, no Holocaust. Nowhere is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as popular as in the Arab world, which has also become the international center for Holocaust denial. The real problem, then, is not terrorism, which is only a symptom for a deeper affront: your assault on my history and identity, your refusal to allow me to define myself, which is a form of intellectual terror.

'In your society's official embrace, through media and schools and mosques, of the culture of denial, you have tried to reinvent us, to redefine us out of our national existence. We too once tried to define you out of national existence, insisting that you weren't a real people but an appendage to the Arab world. Today, though, only the Israeli hard Right repeats Golda Meir's insistence that there are no Palestinians. Yet your political and spiritual leadership routinely insists that there is no Jewish people – only a Jewish faith, or an invented identity like General Yusuf's "Arab Jews," or an ersatz people descended from the Khazars. In so doing, you ignore how Jews have always defined themselves: as a people with a faith.
‘True, it's easier for the powerful than it is for the powerless to develop more nuanced attitudes toward the conflict. When you have an army and a thriving economy, you can afford to rethink your own history and even accommodate a competing narrative. Yet in truth you have never understood us, never understood that we aren't a modern version of the Crusaders but an indigenous people returning home.'

All very true, except for one point with which I would cavil. Golda Meir did not, as far as I recall, insist that there were no Palestinians. What she said was that there was not a Palestinian people. The indefinite article was crucial. There were people who were Palestinian, of course, but not ‘a’ people – because the Arabs who were already in or had immigrated into Palestine considered themselves to be Syrian or Egyptian or part of the Arab people. Palestinian national identity was constructed as an artifice to bamboozle the world and finally drive out the Jews. It succeeded in the first aim beyond their wildest dreams, and has now become a created fact. Halevi’s article, which poignantly demonstrates that while the Israelis want co-existence in two separate states the Palestinians do not, suggests why the second aim remains still tragically alive.

Posted by melanie at October 6, 2005