Two of the most important developments of the twentieth century have been the return of large numbers of Jews to Israel (and the creation of the state of Israel following that return), along with the rise of a Palestinian people. In this book, we illuminate these events through an analysis of the trajectories of Palestinian and Israeli symbol use over roughly the last century. Our thesis is that symbolic practices—speeches, essays, poetry, and other public communication—have played a crucial role in shaping each society and the conflict between them.

Public communication has had influence in two ways. First,...

The handshake between Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister of Israel, and Yasir Arafat, chair of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), on the White House lawn on 13 September 1993 symbolized to some the dawning of a new age in the Middle East. With that handshake, suddenly it seemed that the Palestinian and Israeli people, who had hated and fought each other for generations, might be able to achieve peace.

Many of those who have focused on the handshake and other events in the Middle East peace process have explained the movement toward peace based on historical factors such as the demise...

Sketching the evolution of Israeli and Palestinian symbol use over most of a century raises a significant problem. Many useful critical analyses focus in depth on a particular persuasive message or a specific person’s use of persuasion.¹ In such analytical “snapshots,” the critic has the luxury of being able to carefully describe in detail a given speech, essay, or book. Our project requires a broader approach.

In order to explain the symbolic dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is necessary to have a coherent perspective for breaking down that symbol use and then putting it back together in an intelligible...

Most symbol systems are created like a seabed through a process of sedimentation. The new symbol system simply develops over time from the old one. Thus, the symbolic system of American conservatism in the 1990s clearly has evolved from an earlier conservative perspective. In other cases, however, a new symbol system may be created in response to a strong exigency, a perceived crisis. In that circumstance, the failure of the existing system to solve the crisis leads to the development of a new (often revolutionary) system of rhetoric/ideology/myth.

The three perspectives (Labor Zionism, Revisionist Zionism, and a traditional religious perspective)...

The Arabs of Palestine maintained a strong communal identification with the land of Palestine and Jerusalem for many centuries, an expression that took a nationalist form in the early twentieth century.¹ Before 1881, there was no need for a distinct “Palestinian” identity or nation. From 1514 to the end of World War I, the Arab residents of Palestine saw themselves as members of a vast Arab nation, as residents of the three local districts of southern Syria, as Moslem or Christian, and primarily as members of village and familial units.² When the conflict with the Zionists became intense and the...

In chapter 3, we described the genesis of the symbol systems of Labor and Revisionist Zionism. Here, we describe the development of the two systems from the birth of Israel until the Revisionist victory in the 1977 Knesset elections.

After birth, a mythic system (and both Revisionism and Labor Zionist were myth-based systems) may develop in one of four ways. The system may decline if it fails to meet the needs of the people in presenting a solution to the crisis that called it into existence or if it fails to respond to a shifting scene. To paraphrase Kenneth Burke,...

In chapter 4, we described the movement of the Palestinian people from a symbol system based to varying degrees on Arab, Islamic, and nationalist impulses toward a Palestinian Arab identity and movement rooted in myth. By 1937, the Palestinians had developed a symbol system that was based on ideological and mythic foundations that collapsed the scene (Palestine) and the agent (the Palestinian Arabs) into a consubstantiation. In this chapter, we examine the trajectory of Palestinian symbol use from the 1940s to 1960s.

We begin by analyzing three primary sources on the eve of the 1948 al Nekba:The Future of...

The slightly more than five-year period from Menachem Begin’s election as prime minister of Israel in 1977 through the war in Lebanon represents one of the most crucial periods in symbolic development in the history of Israel. This period was dominated by conflicting aspects of the Revisionist symbol system. On the one hand, Begin led Israel first to the Camp David Accords and then to a peace treaty with Egypt. In the development of the peace process, Begin’s rhetoric reflected the underlying myth of Holocaust and Redemption, including a strong commitment to maintaining Israeli control over Eretz Israel, but also...

The 1967 war and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip produced a second al Nekba for the Palestinian people, compounding the tragedy of 1948. From 1967 until the 1993 Oslo Accords, Palestinian Arabs were either outside of historic Palestine in the Diaspora, in Israel proper as second-class citizens, or under occupation. During this period, the trajectory of the Palestinian symbol system, which had hardened into an irredentist mold that demonized Zionism and vested Palestinian Arab nationalism with essentialist qualities, slowly changed. In this chapter, we will survey the changes in Palestinian ideology, myth, and rhetoric as...

The roughly fifteen-year period from Begin’s resignation as prime minister to the election of Benjamin Netanyahu can best be understood as a period of symbolic stagnation. The symbolic equation that had been established in the late 1970s and early 1980s remained firmly in place. Labor’s perspective, especially as enunciated by Shimon Peres, reduced itself to ungrounded pragmatism, what might be called a “Let’s Make a Deal” approach, in which there was no firm ideological principle to guide action. The absence of a grounded perspective on security created a symbolic weakness that became especially obvious in the aftermath of terrorist incidents....

The intifada dramatically influenced the Palestinian symbol system. Writing in 1989, Rashid Khalidi observed that the intifada had created a “strong sense of national unity, of loyalty to a unified set of symbols and concepts and of mutual independence which were lacking in 1967.”¹ Without question, the engine of Palestinian symbol transformation was the intifada. The intifada, in turn, helped make possible the Oslo agreement, which led to Yasir Arafat’s return to Gaza in July 1994 and the creation of the Palestinian National Authority.

In this chapter, we chart the symbolic precursors that made the Oslo Accords possible, account for...

The Oslo Accords could not have occurred without a transformed Palestinian symbol system. Palestinians involved in the Oslo talks recounted that the terms used in describing the Palestinians and the contested land were in dispute at Oslo. However, the Israelis came to accept the phrase “Palestinian people” and the words “West Bank” and “Gaza” rather than “Judea” and “Samaria” to describe a common reality. In turn, the Palestinians recognized the state of Israel. Indeed, demonstrating the importance of the symbol, the wording of the Oslo Accords and references to people and land were at the center of the negotiations.¹ The...

The 1996 Israeli election reflected the stasis that characterized Israeli politics for the fifteen years following the war in Lebanon. Labor and Likud existed in a kind of symbolic balance. The pragmatic Labor approach gave the party the advantage on “peace,” while Likud’s ideology and myth gave it the advantage on “security” and commitment to Eretz Israel. In this period, the stasis was broken only once, by the election of Yitzhak Rabin, whose personal credibility and gruff style reassured many Israelis that they could have both peace and security. After the death of Rabin, Shimon Peres was unable to marshal...

In the previous chapters, we have described how the hundred years of conflict between first Zionism and then Israel and the Palestinians has been shaped by the interaction of the symbolic trajectories of Labor and Revisionist Zionism and of the Palestinian people in relation to the events in the world. We now turn to a discussion of their shared symbolic trajectory and an evaluation of their symbolic evolution. At the end of the chapter, we draw implications from the symbolic practices found in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for Western liberal democratic societies in general and the United States in particular.

The...