Historical narratives: How the Palestinian Museum tells history

At the al-Manara round­about in the center of Ramallah, I get into a shared minibus-taxi in the direction of Birzeit, the well-known university town in the Palestinian West Bank. After a twenty-minute drive, we reach the university. My destination for the next ten days, the Palestinian Museum, is located at the northern end of the campus. The building is elongated and bunker-like. It is made of the same white lime­stone that is typical of the region and fits organically into the terraced land­scape. On a clear day, you can see as far as the coast from here. It is May 2023.

The Palestinian Museum is the flag­ship project of the non-govern­mental organization Taawon, which is dedicated to the promotion and preservation of Palestinian culture. The history of the museum begins in the 1990s, when the idea emerged to found a memorial site for the Nakba. The Nakba, Arabic for catas­trophe, refers to the expulsion and dis­possession of more than 700,000 Palestinians before and after the founding of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948.

But the realisation of the project was any­thing but easy. The establish­ment of the museum was delayed by the out­break of the second Intifada in 2000, and con­struction only began in 2013. When the museum opened in 2016, the 24-million-dollar building was still completely empty. To this day, it does not house a permanent exhi­bition since most historical objects of the region are on display in Israeli museums. Instead, the Palestinian Museum regularly holds temporary exhi­bitions, mostly of Palestinian contem­porary art and ethno­graphic objects.

From September 2021 to June 2023, the museum presented its first historical exhi­bition entitled A People by the Sea: Narratives of the Palestinian Coast. Focusing on the cities of Jaffa, Acre, Gaza and Haifa, it told the story of the Palestinian Coast from 1748 to 1948, from the time of the Ottoman Empire to the British Mandate and the Nakba.

It is an under­statement to say that the history of Israel and Palestine is a highly contested subject. Israelis and Palestinians generally have dia­met­rically opposed views of the recent history of the region that lies between the Jordan River and the Mediter­ranean Sea. This is particu­larly relevant in the context of the on­going conflict between Israel and Palestine, since history is never just about the past but is always closely linked to the present.

Central historical narratives

On the Palestinian side, the central identity-forming historical narrative is derived from the Nakba. It forms the water­shed that divides Palestinian history into a before and after. Today’s oppression is seen as a conse­quence of this historic event, which is why many Palestinians insist on full reparation for this injustice. In doing so, they also legitimize the – some­times violent – resistance against Israel, even the terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023.

On the Israeli side, the memory of the Holocaust forms the central identity-forming historical narrative. This collective traumatic experience has funda­men­tally shaped the per­ception of Palestinian terrorist attacks. The founding of the State of Israel in 1948 stands for inde­pen­dence and self-determination, which must be defended at all costs. Israel perceives itself as to be under constant existential threat from its Arab and Palestinian neighbors and uses this as a justifi­cation for its military action against Palestinians, as in the current war in Gaza.

The founding of the state of Israel in 1948 exemplifies how the same historical events can be inter­preted in funda­mentally different ways. The Israeli and Palestinian per­spec­tives are even mutually exclusive. Moreover, national history is closely linked to identity; any claim to assert the other’s narrative is seen as an attack on one’s own identity, even on one’s existence. To gain clarity in the emotionally charged political debate about identity and about right and wrong in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, it is there­fore not only necessary to better under­stand the history of the region – but also the respective narratives of the opposing sides.

The Palestinian Museum plays an important in this regard, as museums are not places where history and reality are simply depicted «neutrally». Museums and exhibi­tions always have the inten­tion of conveying a message that can and should be examined, questioned and criticized.

The exhibition A People by the Sea is no exception. It is built around a central narrative that is con­veyed through a specific selection of objects, descrip­tive texts and means of presen­tation. What makes this exhibi­tion particu­larly interesting is that it tells an alter­native story to both the dominant Palestinian and the Israeli national narrative, reflecting a shift in the Palestinian culture of remem­brance.

A Christian Icon

The exhi­bition begins with a section on the historical figure Daher al-Omar al-Zaydani from Galilee, who gained indepen­dence from the Ottoman Empire as a local ruler in Acre in 1748. It then traces the successive rise and fall of the four Palestinian coastal cities of Haifa, Gaza, Acre and Jaffa up to the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.

The first object that exemplifies the exhi­bition’s perspec­tive on Palestinian history is a Christian icon in the section on the rise of Jaffa, a city that is part of Tel Aviv. In the late 19^th to early 20^th centuries, the city was an important regional trading center and expe­rienced a cultural heyday. The icon is a symbol of this pros­perity. It depicts the life of the Christian saint George of Lydda, who, according to tradition, suffered martyr­dom in the third century. He is depicted as a knight on horse­back slaying a dragon with a lance. Around him are depicted 24 stages of his life. The city of Jaffa can be seen in miniature on the right at the foot of the saint’s horse. The accom­panying text states that the icon was made by the artist Yanko Teodori in Jerusalem and donated to a church in Jaffa in 1875 by the wealthy citizen Gerges Debbas and his sons.

The icon is sur­prising for several reasons and deserves a closer look. At one meter high and 70 centi­meters wide, it is not only the largest historical object in the exhibi­tion, but also one of the oldest. Most of the others date from the early 20^th century and most are replicas. The icon is also one of the few religious objects and the only Christian object in the exhi­bition. The high level of crafts­man­ship with which it was created and its numerous golden elements give an idea of its value.

Given the afore­men­tioned presence of historical narratives in all exhi­bitions, the question is: What are the curators trying to tell us with this object? For visitors who know Palestinian history only in the context of the conflict between the Jewish community in historical Palestine before the founding of the state of Israel, the Yishuv, and later Jewish Israelis, the object contrasts the common narratives and thus broadens the per­spec­tive on the history of the region both in terms of time frame and topic. Both the dominant Palestinian and the Israeli national narratives portray the last century of Ottoman rule as a time of decline and stag­nation. 400 years of Ottoman rule over historical Palestine are thus reduced to a marginal note in many historical works. The narrative of modern Palestine usually only begins with the British Mandate in 1920.

According to this narrative, develop­ments in the Ottoman Empire were primarily triggered by the growing ex­change with Europe, which led to the modern­ization of the region. Modern agri­culture and trade brought prosperity to a hitherto under­developed region. This narrative is embedded in a wide­spread normative modern­ization, discourse that is often closely linked to the goals of national historio­graphy. It presents the linear develop­ment of Palestine from a primitive to a modern status, at the end of which stands the nation-state – the state of Israel in the Israeli narrative, Palestinian nationalism in the Palestinian narrative. In both narratives, «external» factors, especially Zionist immigration, are the impetus for this growing pros­perity. This is inter­preted as a positive catalyst in the national Israeli narrative and as a negative in the dominant Palestinian narrative.

This shows that the two seemingly different narratives actually have a lot in common. They start from the same basic assump­tions and arrive at opposing con­clusions. Only the evaluation of the events, i.e. who are the «heroes» and who the «villains» of the story, differs. In fact, the image of a dis­inte­grating and stag­nating region under Ottoman rule before the arrival of the Jewish settlers is a Euro­centric projection. A People by the Sea challenges this view, opting instead for the narrative of an Arab Palestine before 1920, whose society was «modern» and prosperous.

Demarcation of a Palestinian «self»

A closer look at the icon reveals yet another dimension. St. George is the patron saint of Palestinian Christians and is also venerated by Druse and some Muslims. Through the presen­tation of the icon in the exhi­bition Palestinian Christians naturally become part of the narrative of Jaffa’s pros­perity in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. However, it is not the religious affiliation that is fore­grounded in this context but rather the ethno-national dimension.

According to legend, St. George came from Lydda, today’s Lod, or al-Lidd in Israel, that is, from the area of historical Palestine. The icon is primarily intended to be read as Palestinian – or, more comprehen­sively, as Arabic. This impression is reinforced by the Arabic script on the icon. In this sense, it invites identifi­cation and thus has an inte­grative character that allows religious differences to fade into the back­ground and unites Palestinians as part of an ethno-national group.

In this supra-religious, ethnically defined "Arab­ness", however, one group is not included: the Palestinian Jews. This group, which made up about five percent of the population of Palestine at the turn of the century, is not mentioned in relation to this object or else­where in the exhibition. This is an expression of an explicit decision in favor of a narrative that sees Jews exclusively as an «external» factor against which the Palestinian «self» is demarcated. The implication is that this «external» factor, the Jewish factor, dissolved the existing ethnic unity and religious coexistence, making conflict almost inevitable.

However, the situation in historic Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century was far more complex. Palestinian Jews were by no means unam­biguously for or against the Zionist movement and the immigration of European Jews to Palestine. Their reactions to the profound changes of the time were ambi­valent; ethnic, religious, regional and national affiliations coexisted.

Instead of addressing these nuances, however, the exhi­bition opts for a strict ethno-national binary. The complicated relation­ships between the ethnic and religious groups remain hidden. In doing so, the exhi­bition misses the oppor­tunity to present the various facets of the complex history of the city of Jaffa and its inhabitants, and ultimately remains stuck in the same categories of «self» and «other» that form the basis of the dominant Palestinian and Israeli narratives.

The Nakba

An object that illustrates another aspect of the exhibition’s narrative is the artwork Cold Floors, by contemporary artist and theater maker Amir Nizar Zuabi. It is located in the last room of the exhi­bition, which is entirely dedicated to the Nakba. Spread across the floor of the room is a mosaic of hundreds of color­ful tile shards, forming a map of Jaffa as it was before the Nakba and the partial destruction of the city. The artist Zuabi collected the individual shards on the beaches of Tel Aviv. They are the remains of Palestinian houses that were demolished during the Nakba and which the sea has gradually washed back onto the beach.

The tiles are reminiscent of the flourishing city of Jaffa in the early 20^th century, at the same time as their frag­ments paint a picture of its destruction. The mosaic stands for Palestinian society before the Nakba, which was modern, urban, industrial, but also fragile. The art­work conveys the narrative that the Nakba inter­rupted the upward trajectory of Palestinian society. The «indigenous» process of moderni­zation was abruptly halted and the Palestinian «people», which had previously formed an ethno-national unit, was fragmented.

This is in stark contrast to the dominant narratives about the history of Israel and Palestine. The Israeli narrative minimizes the signifi­cance of the Nakba and rejects any responsi­bility for the expul­sion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Their flight is attributed solely to the call of the Arab leader­ship during the Palestine War of 1948 for Palestinians to leave their homes. On the national Palestinian side, the opposite is the case: the blame for the Nakba is attributed solely to Jewish para­military groups before the founding of the State of Israel and later to the Israeli military. Criticism of their own leader­ship during the war is not allowed. The Palestinian narrative presents the Nakba as a tragic cata­strophe to which Palestinians were fatefully subjected. It is constructed as a central, national myth that explains the past and the present, but also serves to mobilize collective resistance and functions as an integrative driver for national cohesion.

The Cold Floors art installation adds an emotional component to the factual texts that narrate the exhibition. The observer is left with a sense of unful­filled potential and injustice. The narrative strikes a balance bet­ween affective commemo­rative practices and historical presen­tation. It is an appropriate approach for a museum dealing with this traumatic historical event. At the same time, the mosaic connects the Nakba to the present and concep­tualizes it as ongoing. By collecting the remains of the prosperous coastal city, the artist builds a bridge to the past. At the same time, he emphasizes that the destruction of his city, or rather its Arab character, continues to this day.

Present Past

The artwork makes the historical event of the Nakba relevant to the present day by high­lighting its concrete effects. Palestinians in both the West Bank and East Jerusalem have been living under Israeli occupation for more than 50 years and have been increasingly restricted in their mobility, especially since the construc­tion of the Israeli West Bank barrier from 2002 onwards. Palestinians see this situation as a direct exten­sion of the Nakba, indeed, as part of it.

Political scientists David Myer Temin and Adam Dahl of the University of Michigan write in their text Narrating Historical Injustice: Political Responsi­bility and the Politics of Memory: "We only come to understand political responsi­bility for historical wrongs through narratives that provide a sense of temporal continuity and in turn root present articu­lations of collective identity in the past". The narrative of the ongoing Nakba provides this link between the past and present that makes it possible to assign blame and responsi­bility. In this sense, the artwork sounds like an accusation.

However, portraying the Nakba as on­going is not entirely unproble­matic. First, it obscures the differences that exist between the situation today and the events of 1948. By expanding the term from describing a specific historical event to designating a process, it loses its historical and analytical accuracy, especially when it is used as a container term for all injustice committed against Palestinians.

Second, the concept of the "ongoing Nakba" is also a narrative that has a historical origin and whose meaning is subject to change. This self-reflection is absent from the exhi­bition. The museum replaces the national Palestinian and Israeli narratives with another, presum­ably more constructive one. However, the changing signifi­cance of the Nakba in Palestinian culture of remem­brance and identity is not addressed. It would be much more disrup­tive and challenging to point out the fabri­cation of all historical narratives and their role in our under­standing of history instead of creating the illusion of – unquestioned – reality.

At the end of the exhi­bition, visitors enter a corridor that runs the entire length of the museum building and whose left side forms a single window front. A clear day reveals a breath­taking view of the coast. Thus the exhi­bition ends on a contem­plative note: although the coast is close enough to be seen, for most Palestinians from the West Bank it is hardly accessible. This expresses what the museum sees as an important part of its mission, and where the exhi­bition ultimately makes a valuable contri­bution to the debate about the history of Israel and Palestine: Keeping the memory of Palestinian history alive and passing it on to the next generation. Metaphor­ically speaking, the view of the coast should remain clear and unob­structed.

This article, originally written in German, was translated by Hanna Pahls.