Yuval Abraham’s recent Academy Awards acceptance speech for the documentary No Other Land underlined the inseparability of Israeli and Palestinian histories and the necessity of a shift in US policy. “Can’t you see that we are intertwined?” he asked and continued, referring to the film’s Palestinian co-director, “that my people can be truly safe if Basel’s people are truly free and safe?” There is a “different path,” he went on, a “political solution without ethnic supremacy, with national rights for both of our people.” But he also deplored that US foreign policy was “helping to block this path.”
Abraham is right. A lasting solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, which goes back more than 100 years, starting decades before the foundation of the State of Israel, can only be imagined if the mutual enmeshment of traumatic Jewish and Palestinian histories is acknowledged.
Contemporary Israeli and Palestinian historians have made the argument of such inseparability. The Israeli historian Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin describes the connectionbetween the extermination of European Jews by the Nazis (“Holocaust” or “Shoah”) on the one hand, and the expulsion of eight hundred thousand Palestinians of their homes, villages and homeland (the “Nakba”) on the other, as “inescapable,” even in the face of “considerable efforts invested in trying to refute it.” The Palestinian-American historian Sherene Seikaly concurs: “Engaging the significance of the Shoah and the Nakba together reveals,” she notes, “the centrality of catastrophe in Jewish and Palestinian histories.” While they are often posed as oppositional, Seikaly insists that we must think and teach them together.
For most Americans, this approach might appear utterly novel, given how intractable they perceive the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be. A Pew poll from October 2024 showed that two thirds of Americans think that lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians is “not too (37%) or not at all (29%) likely.” Ami Fields-Meyer, a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, fears that American Jews have even been “conditioned to accept” that the “endless loop of dehumanization” of Palestinians is “the only way forward.” More than $300 billions in US military aid over the last six decades have not brought a solution, and the Abraham Accords of September 2020, touted as finally delivering elusive peace, excluded Palestinians altogether and normalized the Israeli military occupation of Palestinians land. The policy choices of the current administration exacerbate the problem. President Trump openly fantasizes about taking control over Gaza and illegally displacing more than 2 million people, and his ambassador to Israel is on the record for claiming that there are no Palestinians, and that the Occupied West Bank should be referred to by the biblical names of Judea and Samaria. This lays out a disastrous path for Israelis and Palestinians, and, given their deep involvement as taxpayers, American citizens would be complicit.
Some Israeli and Palestinian literary writers have shown the way towards an acknowledgment of the centrality of catastrophe in both people’s histories. In the canonical novella Khirbet Khizeh published just a year after the foundation of the State, the Israeli writer S. Yizhar, who had served as an intelligence officer in the Israeli Defense Forces, described in excruciating detail the expulsion of the inhabitants of a Palestinian village, and its subsequent wanton destruction. The soldier-narrator’s internal struggles are described with visceral intensity. At the story’s climax, the soldier-narrator realizes, as if struck by lightning, that his army unit is inflicting on the Palestinian villagers the same condition that had been the fate of the Jewish people for centuries: exile. The very state that had been founded as a protest against exile and brutal persecution, was now expelling masses of people into statelessness and rightlessness. It is only after Hitler’s ascent to power and the Nazis’ exclusionary and then murderous antisemitic policies that Jewish refugees fled in great numbers to Palestine, during a time in which no Western nation, including the US, opened their doors to them.
In Yizhar’s story, Jewish and Palestinian suffering are connected in their most existential dimension. Twenty years later, the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani also probed this intertwinement. His novella Returning to Haifa tells the story of a Palestinian couple, who return in 1967 after the Six-Day War to see the home they had fled in Haifa in 1948, where, in the chaos and terror that engulfed them, they also left their five-month-old infant behind. The suffering caused especially by this forced abandonment of their baby has never left them. When they arrive, a woman who found refuge from the Shoah in their city and house opens the door; she and her husband raised the Palestinian baby in the Jewish tradition as their child. When the now grown man returns in the evening clad in the uniform of the Israeli army, he rejects any relation with his biological parents. Fighting in the Israeli army would mean to fight against his biological parents and family. Meanwhile, in Ramallah, his brother considers joining the Palestinian resistance. For him too, taking up arms would mean to fight against his own brother. In the story, the two women, however, both refugees, attempt to hear each other’s story.
There is a “different path,” Yuval Abraham said at the Oscars. It begins with acknowledging that Israelis and Palestinians share a history of exile, trauma and pain that has inextricably intertwined their destinies. Importantly, many more are now understanding this, including in Israel. On March 3, the distinguished Israeli newspaper Haaretzpublished a lead editorial, in which it condemned official Israeli opposition to and censorship of the film. “The creators’ speeches at the Oscar ceremony encapsulated the only alternative for a sane life for two peoples that have no other land,” the editorial read. Rather than repressing reality, it continued, “Israelis would do better to watch this important film and understand that establishing a Palestinian state would give members of both peoples equal rights.”