Unwritten history

AS I WRITE, with rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah unable to agree on the fundamental basis for a new coalition government, and with the devastating effects of the Israeli and international boycott provoked by Hamas's victory in last January's elections, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza Strip appears to be tottering. Whether it survives or not, the prospect of the independent state that the Palestinians have never had, and that many expected to emerge from this Authority, seems as distant as ever.

The United Nations resolution of 1947 that led to the establishment of Israel called for such a state. In the years before that, Palestinians similarly failed to win independence from the British, who held a League of Nations mandate over Palestine, in part because of internal rivalries, but also because of the constellation of forces arrayed against them.

Why did the Palestinians fail to establish an independent state before 1948, and what was the impact of that failure in the years that followed, down to the present? These questions are important, first, because Palestinian history must be properly understood if we are to comprehend the present, and because this history has significance in its own right.

In the West this is a hidden history, one that is obscured by the riveting and tragic narrative of modern Jewish history. In a sense, the history of the Palestinians has disappeared under the powerful impact of the painful and amply recounted story of the catastrophic fate of the Jews of Europe in the 20th century. However, achieving any serious understanding of the Middle East conflict requires comprehension of Palestinian history in its own terms, which includes but cannot be subsumed by Jewish and Israeli history.

This effort is important for another reason: namely, to ascribe agency to the Palestinians, to avoid seeing them either as no more than helpless victims of forces greater then themselves, or alternatively as driven solely by self-destructive tendencies and uncontrollable dissension.

The Palestinians were facing an uphill struggle from the beginning of the British Mandate over Palestine in 1920 and still face one today. Palestinian society and politics were and are divided and faction-ridden, in ways that gave hostile forces many cleavages to exploit. But the Palestinians had many assets, were far from helpless, and often faced a range of choices, whether in the 1920s or the 1990s, some of which were better, or at least less bad, than others.

Writing this history from such a perspective makes it possible to put the Palestinians at the center of a critical phase of their own story, and also to understand some of their present dilemmas. Doing so, however, is an uphill struggle in itself, and the unique challenges it presents reflect some of the larger challenges that have faced, and still face, the Palestinian quest for statehood.

ALTHOUGH A FRESH LOOK at Palestinian history is needed, it cannot be ``revisionist" history in the standard sense, along the lines of what has emerged from Israel in recent years. Revisionist history requires as a foil an established, authoritative master narrative that is fundamentally flawed in some way. Thus, the ``revisionist" works written by a number of Israeli historians-such as Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev, and Benny Morris-argue against the country's nationalist mythology, which has become the backbone of the received version of the history of the conflict as it is perceived in the West.

One of the most important of these myths about the infant state of Israel has the number of Arab armies that invaded Israel after its establishment ranging from five to seven. However, there were only seven independent Arab states in 1948, two of which, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, did not even have regular armies. Lebanon's army never crossed the international frontier, Transjordan's and Iraq's never entered the territory the UN allotted to the Jewish state, while Syria's made only minor incursions. The only serious incursion into the territory of the Jewish state was that of the Egyptian army. This story of an invasion by multiple, massive Arab armies is not just an important element of the Israeli myth of origin, it is a nearly universal myth.

By contrast, there is no established, authoritative Palestinian master narrative, although there is a popular Palestinian nationalist narrative that includes its share of myth. Some of the myths worth debunking in the Palestinian version of events include mistaken and simplistic ideas relating to the Zionist movement and Israel and their connections with the Western powers; the relation of Zionism to the course of modern Jewish history; notably a failure to understand the central place of the Holocaust in this history; and the reductionist view of Zionism as no more than a colonialist enterprise-it was both this and a national movement. Deconstructing such misconceived notions on both sides will be crucially important to an eventual reconciliation of the two peoples.

The Palestinian nationalist narrative is, in any case, virtually unknown outside the Arab world (and is contested by scholars and governments within it). However, as the Israeli new historians have been showing, many elements have in fact been borne out by archival research. These include the causes for the flight of the Palestinian refugees; the collusion between Israel and Jordan, and between Britain and Jordan, against the Palestinians; and the absolute superiority of the Zionist and later the Israeli armed forces against those of their adversaries in the field throughout most stages of the 1947-49 conflict.

What's more, any real revisionist history depends largely on archival revelations to upset established narratives. Thus, in the case of the Israeli new historians, a state's well-organized records regarding the 1948 war, opened up in the 1980s, were used to undermine the version of its genesis that its founders and supporters had always espoused, and that has since gained universal currency worldwide.

The archival situation could not be more different on the Palestinian side. There is no Palestinian state to create and maintain a Palestinian state archive. There is no central repository of Palestinian records, and a vast quantity of private Palestinian archival material-a considerable portion of the patrimony of an entire people-has been either irretrievably lost in 1948 or was carried off by Israel, to be deposited in the Israeli national library and national archives.

There is, however, a plethora of scattered archival and other documentary sources that can be used to piece together aspects of Palestinian history before 1948. These include the records of the various great powers involved in the Palestine question, and the archives of the League of Nations and the United Nations. A number of official Arab archives can also be tapped. Among the most important sources is the Israel State Archives, where beyond the records of the Israeli state itself, many sets of private papers of leading Palestinian figures now reside, by default rather than due to the choice of their authors.

This basic asymmetry with respect to archives is a reflection of the asymmetry between the two sides. One side, operating through a modern, successful nation-state, has used its documentary and other resources to produce a version of its history that has subtly shaped the way the world sees the conflict, a version that is now ironically being undermined from within via use of these same resources. On the other side, the production of a standard ``official" Palestinian narrative was never really possible.

IT IS POSSIBLE, NEVERTHELESS, to ask why the Palestinians were not more successful in their quest for independence before 1948 and afterwards, and specifically why they failed to create viable state structures in all this time.

For example, did the Palestinians have options in the 1920s and 1930s that they did not fully take? Before the rise to power of the Nazis and the subsequent doubling of the Jewish population of Palestine in a few years, were there opportunities, either for compromise with the Zionist movement, or for more vigorous confrontation with the British, that their leadership did not explore? Similarly, after the 1936-39 revolt, could the Palestinians have taken steps they did not take, whether towards Britain, or in terms of their own internal organization?

More recently, in the 1990s, could the PLO have held out for a better deal than the highly disadvantageous terms of the Oslo Accords? Could not the Palestinian leadership, even within the straitjacket of these accords, and under continuing and ever more restrictive conditions of Israeli military occupation, have done more to create structures of state and a rule of law?

These are the kind of hard questions that in the past have found answers that in my view are too glib, too easy, and are sometimes unfair to the actors involved - such as Abba Eban's witty and unfair dictum that ``The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity."

It is a tall order to explain why something did not happen, and taller still when much of the evidence has been scattered by the very events we are trying to elucidate. I nevertheless think that not only can explanations be offered, but that they will illuminate the history of the Palestinians before 1948, and much that has happened to them and to others since then. These explanations include the failure of the Palestinians themselves to focus on gaining control of the state structure created by the British or to create alternative structures of their own; the constitutional strait-jacket they were immured in by the British, which obliged the Palestinians to accept the formula which negated their national existence; and divisions among the Palestinians themselves, divisions that were exploited and fostered by their enemies.

These are not minor or arcane matters. They are essential to our understanding of whether the Palestinians can today create effective structures of state in the face of fierce opposition and extraordinarily difficult conditions, including an Israeli military occupation that is now in its 40th year, and the continuing dispersal of over half of the Palestinian people outside of Palestine.

Resolution of this problem will help determine whether Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, and other areas where Palestinians live, will continue to live in instability and distress or whether they and their neighbors, Arab and Israeli, will finally be able to enjoy stability and peace after nearly 60 years of suffering.

Rashid Khalidi will speak at the Cambridge Forum, at 3 Church St. in Cambridge, on Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. See www.cambridgeforum.org for details.

Rashid Khalidi holds the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies at Columbia University, where he directs the Middle East Institute. This essay is adapted from his new book, ``The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood" (Beacon Press).