The Invention of Ancient Israel (38 page)

Conclusion

The history of ancient Palestine has been dominated by a single entity, ‘ancient Israel'. Possibly the most remarkable aspect of this domination is that it has not been achieved by a powerful political or geographically extensive entity. Palestinian history has been silenced by an entity which in literary terms is extremely small. The sections of the various works associated with the new search from the mid-1980s onward which offer positive constructions of Israel in the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition are strikingly brief (see Coote 1991: 42). In Lemche's case, of a work which is nearly five hundred pages long only twenty-four pages are devoted to his alternative explanation of Israel's origins which he terms ‘evolutionary Israel'. This would rise to forty-nine pages if his discussion of the archaeological evidence was included. Similarly, Coote and Whitelam (1987: 117–38) only devote twenty-one pages to the ‘emergence of Israel' out of 188. Thompson (1992a) is more difficult to quantify because his proposals are dispersed throughout a wide-ranging
review of scholarly discussions and archaeological data, although again it is a tiny percentage of a massive study. The bulk of these works is not given over to the exploration of Palestinian history but to the analysis of anthropological and historical parallels, the results of excavations and surveys, and reviews of previous scholarship. Yet in all this the focus is firmly on the search for ancient Israel while the idea of a Palestinian history remains confined in the background.

The welcome reassessment of the Persian and Hellenistic periods as the temporal locus for the development and crystallization of much of the biblical material has also opened up a consideration of the ideologies which have shaped these narratives. What has been ignored, to a large extent, is the ideological shaping of the history of the region by contemporary political and religious ideologies. The cross-examination of ancient sources to determine their trustworthiness has been unaware of or chosen to ignore the political, economic, and theological factors which have shaped contemporary scholarship. Thompson rightly acknowledges the importance of understanding Israelite and Palestinian history as part of the general cultural heritage, particularly in the context of ‘current political developments'. This, I think, encapsulates the problem which has been the central concern of this book: the problem that contemporary struggles for land and national identity between Israel and the Palestinians remain unspoken in biblical studies, or at the most, as in Thompson's concluding statement, raised in muted tones. These ‘current political developments' remain unspecified. Biblical scholarship has refused to acknowledge or face the problem of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. The question of the modern state of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians has been too delicate an issue to be raised in the discourse of biblical studies. It threatens at times to surface but each time it is successfully prevented. The enterprise which has been begun in the last few years to revise understandings of the history of ancient Israel and to develop Palestinian history as a subject in its own right freed from biblical studies will not be achieved unless this crucial issue of the political nature of the past and the Orientalist nature of the discourse of biblical studies is addressed explicitly.

Davies, however, is attuned to some of the ideological aspects of the construction of the past and their implications:

Biblical scholarship is not just involved in ‘retrojective imperialism', it has collaborated in an act of dispossession, or at the very least, to use Said's phrase, ‘passive collaboration' in that act of dispossession. The construction of the literary entity ‘ancient Israel', to which Davies refers, has silenced the history of the indigenous peoples of Palestine in the early Iron Age. He points out how biblical scholars have long assumed that there is no difference between ‘ancient Israel' and the population of Iron Age central Palestine: ‘Certainly, no biblical scholar has ever explicated that distinction' (1992: 32). It is the explication of that distinction which needs to be undertaken if the idea of a history of ancient Palestine is to be achieved. But it cannot be undertaken until the ideological influences which are inherent in all historical narratives are acknowledged and confronted. The failure to make this distinction clear, the failure to acknowledge that the constructions of the past which have dominated the discourse of biblical studies for the past century or more are shaped by political and social locations, has ensured the silencing of Palestinian history.

6

Reclaiming Palestinian History

Representing the History of Palestine

The right to represent the history of ancient Palestine for the Late Bronze and early Iron Ages, along with many other periods, has been claimed by Theology and Religion through the discourse of biblical studies. It is the continuation of a right claimed by European travellers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For the last two centuries, Palestinian history has become one of the many ‘excluded' histories as a result of the stranglehold on the study of Palestine and the ancient Near East which biblical specialists, historians, and archaeologists, have exerted (see Bowerstock 1988: 164). The consequence of this has been that Palestinian history has been denied a place in Western academic discourse. Europe's strategic concern with Palestine coincided with its quest for the roots of its own civilization as identified with ancient Israel and the Bible. Biblical scholars accepting, in broad outline, the construction of the past offered by biblical traditions began the search for Israel's physical presence among the monuments and ruins of the land. What they found, or were predisposed to find, was an Israel which resembled their own nation states: Israel was presented as an incipient nation state in search of a national homeland in which to express its national consciousness. Throughout the present century, this projection of ancient Israel has come to dominate and control the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. It is a representation of the past which was given added urgency and authority with the rise of the Zionist movement, an essentially European enterprise, whose own history was seen to mirror ancient Israel's conquest of the land followed by the founding of a nation state which soon dominated the region. Here in broad outline is a master narrative whose essential
outline, part of the ‘assured results' of biblical studies, remained unchallenged until the 1970s, despite the reformulation of various details. There might be questions as to the nature of ancient Israel, the manner in which it acquired the land, but for the discourse of biblical studies there was no question that this was Israel's past and Israel's land. The right of the indigenous population to the land or its own history was not a meaningful question in the context.

The presentation of this past, through its constant repetition by the major figures in the field and in academic and popular handbooks, assumed a reality that was difficult to question. This reality was manifested for countless undergraduate and graduate students, professional academics, and interested lay readers in the ‘massed histories', to adapt Said's phrase (1994b: 26), which culminated in the publishing frenzy of the 1970s and 1980s. Most of these ‘biblical histories' of ancient Israel repeated or paraphrased the accounts in the Hebrew Bible. They were in the words of Davies (1991: 14) ‘an essentially midrashic historiography, in which rationalistic glosses are introduced into a paraphrase of the biblical story'. Yet the growing unease with the viability of such projects, represented in the criticisms of Davies, coincided with this publishing boom in new and revised histories. The fracturing of the contexts in which these narratives had been constructed (Sasson 1981), along with other shifts taking place in the discipline, helped to expose the extent to which this imagined past had been constructed on the basis of models of contemporary experience. The break-up of the Soviet Union, the debates on the future and unity of Europe, and, particularly, the Palestinian intifada have all contributed to the continued fracturing of perspectives which had been influential in the construction of this dominant narrative.

The growth of post-colonialist histories, however, has had remarkably little effect upon the historiographic enterprise of biblical studies. The stranglehold on the past achieved by European scholarship has been maintained by American and Israeli scholarship in the latter part of the century in projecting this as the period of Israel's emergence and dominance as a major state in the region. Said (1992: xvi) has pointed out the extent to which modern Israel, since its founding in 1948, has enjoyed an astonishing dominance in scholarship, as well as many other areas. The investment of vast resources, intellectual and financial, in the search for ancient Israel has no counterpart in the pursuit of Palestinian history for the same or any subsequent periods. The theological and political motivations behind the search in the West and in Israel have combined to deny the
claims of the indigenous population to representation in history. The history of ancient Palestine is a subject that has been excluded by Theology and ignored by History. The pursuit of post-colonialist history, the attempt to give voice to the many histories that have been deemed not to be part of officially sanctioned narratives, is not just a case of ‘kicking the dead dragon of colonialism', as Gellner (1992: 47) claims. Colonialism is not dead while the assumptions of superiority and the right of force which inspired it are inscribed in the rhetoric of the discourse of biblical studies, a rhetoric which has been taken up and reinforced in Israeli scholarship after 1948. It is this rhetoric which has been allowed to shape the imagined past of Late Bronze–Iron Age Palestine. It has produced and continues to defend a construction of the past which devalues indigenous cultures and histories. The rhetoric of biblical studies, just like the rhetoric of modern Zionism, refuses to acknowledge the inherent value of indigenous culture and its right to its own history.

The struggle for ‘the permission to narrate' (Said 1994a: 247–68) a modern Palestinian narrative, a struggle carried on by Antonius, Muslih, Tibawi, Khalidi, Abu-Lughod, and Said, among many others, has failed to retrieve the ancient past from the stranglehold of the West and Israel. This is epitomized in Bowerstock's (1988: 184) assessment that the Roman and Byzantine periods have enjoyed a resurgence of interest in the region in an attempt to restore part of this excluded history. He characterizes this as the era from the end of the ‘Biblical period' to the coming of Mohammed. Noticeably the Palestinian past of the ‘biblical period', the period prior to the Roman and Byzantine era, has been abandoned to Israel and the West. The invented Israel of the Late Bronze and early Iron Ages has cast its shadow of influence backwards to claim previous periods as its ‘prehistory'. It is part of the elaborate evolutionary scheme, whether temporal, political, or religious, which has informed and aided the displacement of ancient Palestinian history. Said's complaint about the contemporary situation is equally applicable to the construction and representation of the ancient past:

Biblical studies has formed part of the complex arrangement of scholarly, economic, and military power by which Palestinians have been denied a contemporary presence or history. As we have seen, countless scholars have referred to the area in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages as Palestine, including a ‘Palestinian economy', ‘Palestinian highlands', or ‘Palestinian coastline', but the population have remained anonymous or described by some ethnic label which reinforces the evolutionary assumption that they have been supplanted and surpassed by Israel. Said complains that one of the greatest successes of Zionism has been ‘the absence of a major history of Arab Palestine and its people. It is as if the Zionist web of detail and its drama choked off the Palestinians, screening them not only from the world but from themselves as well' (Said 1994a: 35). However, the silence of history is even more profound than Said appears to appreciate. His concern is with the modern history of Palestine as a counter-narrative to Zionist or Zionist-influenced histories dealing with the eighteenth century to the present. But Europe's search for itself, taken up and reinforced by Zionism seeking to legitimize its roots in the past, has removed the Palestinian claim to the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. This removal is so thorough that the idea of a history of ancient Palestine is not even contemplated by contemporary writers concerned with countering Zionist histories of the present. The oppressive weight of silence pervades the whole of biblical studies. Any recognition of the context in which biblical historians and archaeologists work, the contemporary struggle for land and self-determination, is absent. When it does appear it is couched in the form of regret or anguish for this troubled land and a hope for peace for its peoples. Yet it is a recognition of the realities and implications of the political struggle between Israel and the Palestinians which is not allowed to impinge upon the presentation of (objective) academic discourse. The implications of the construction of Israelite history for the contemporary struggle remain largely unarticulated, except for a few notable exceptions. It is epitomized in Silberman's (1989; 1992) recognition of the political implications of Albright's or Yadin's work but his failure to address the same issues in reviewing more recent hypotheses of Israelite origins (Silberman 1992).
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