National narratives, truth telling and the role of the historian during national conflicts: the Palestinian-Israeli case
National narratives, truth telling and the role of the historian during national conflicts: the Palestinian-Israeli case
Anyone who reads accounts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot but be intrigued by the contradictory narratives of events as recounted by historians from different perspectives. While it is hardly surprising that competing national movements produce competing narratives of conflicts between them, still it raises questions with regard to the motivations of historians to write in a certain way and to the role of the historian in times of conflict. In this lecture focusing on the historiography of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Prof. Hillel Cohen will unpack and analyze the tension between national loyalty and the historian's commitment to the 'truth', and stress the role of the historian’s own sentiments and feelings in determining his or her perspective.
A historian by training and an ethnographer by practice, Hillel Cohen has written on different aspects of the Zionist-Arab encounter in Palestine/Israel from the late Ottoman period to the present. His recent bestseller, Tarpat/1929: Year Zero of the Arab-Jewish Conflict in Palestine (2013, Hebrew), is an attempt not only to explore what 'really' happened during these bloody events, but also to understand the ways in which the events have been told by different Arab and Jewish narrators since 1929, how heroes have been created, and how crimes have been omitted from the collective memory of Jews and Arabs alike.
Light refreshments will be served. Please RSVP at http://israelstudies.umd.edu/upcoming-events.html
Event Flyer: https://jewishstudies.umd.edu/sites/jewishstudies.umd.edu/files/hillel%20cohen%20april%203.pdf