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(A History of Palestine for All Palestinians)
Kurset afholdes på dansk
Because of radical changes in our perspective of Palestine’s ancient history since the 1970s, it now seems in order to reorient our understanding of Palestine’s early history away from a once dominant ‘biblical archaeology’, oriented toward both a western colonialist and evangelical biblical interpretation of the origins of Judaism and Christianity that has supported a Zionist, nationalist political heritage for the modern state of Israel at the cost of an understanding of the heritage of other Palestinians. While there has been considerable success during the past 40 years in correcting some of the most obvious distortions of this trend in our understanding by grounding Palestine’s history independently of a biblical perspective and in a more critical evaluation of the historical and archaeological evidence, our understanding of Palestine’s past continues to focus on legitimating theologically and politically committed histories, creating claims on not only the ancient heritage of Judaism but also asserting unique historical rights to the land, identified with this heritage by political Zionism. In recent years, new perspectives of what we know about Palestine’s past, which are not rooted in the literary, allegorical traditions of biblical discourse, now make possible many necessary revisions and corrections of Palestine’s history: relatively simple changes of fact and orientation which have been seriously neglected, especially in regard to the teaching of history within the education systems of both the State of Israel and in the schools under the Palestine Authority. An unfortunate aspect of such neglect and distortion is that modern scholarship generally - both orientalist and Israeli - has relegated to the marginal whatever has not been oriented towards either ancient Israelite and Judean history or to the origins of Judaism and Christianity. This distortion has been politically rooted and reflects the political and religious commitments of much past research in both archaeology and biblical studies. Central to this has been an active and aggressive “de-Arabization” of Palestine’s heritage which is hardly warranted by the knowledge we have of the past, in favor of a politically and historically tendentious Israeli and Christian-evangelical narrative, which claims a monopoly over the Pre-Roman past of Palestine. The systemic denial of the legitimacy of the historical heritage of such a large portion of Palestine’s indigenous population - most notably Palestine’s Arabic speaking Muslims - has turned history into nationalist propaganda, which deeply distorts central aspects of Palestine’s culture: not least its religious and linguistic heritage, which is deeply indebted to both the continuity with the past that has been established and maintained through Arabic toponymy and through the modern Muslim-Palestinian community’s continuity with Islam’s seventh century reformation of the Samaritan-Jewish-Christian tradition. It is also important to recognize that even the presumably well-recognized heritage of Judaism and Christianity - so importantly reflective of their immediate roots in the late antiquity of the eastern Mediterranean - cannot be understood apart from what has been hidden, neglected and rejected.
The brief sketch of the cultural and historical heritage of pre-Roman Palestine, which this course of lectures will attempt to present and discuss, intends to include the most significant aspects of the formation and development of Palestine’s indigenous population in its wide variety of “ethnic” and religious forms of self understanding. It is hoped that an evidence-oriented perspective will enable us to open the region’s ancient heritage that it might support and nourish the distinctive religious, cultural and ethnic groups within an indigenous population that has been formed within an interrelated cultural continuum of now some ten millennia. The treatment of the rich and ancient heritage which we can identify from Palestine’s ancient past hopes to represent this region’s cultural heritage in a way which respects the interplay of the economic, religious and social developments which have formed all of Palestine’s peoples. The discussions and lectures will be oriented towards developing a handbook for high school teachers of history. For this reason, it is a central interest of this course to seek a revision of how we understand Palestine’s cultural heritage, by exploiting the deep changes in our perspective about Palestine’s history since the 1970s in the hopes of developing a regional, anthropologically oriented history, which gives greatest weight to those aspects of Palestine’s past which we know best and which are based on evidence and arguments which are widely recognized by historians and archaeologists. Given the immense antiquity of Palestine’s history, the presentation of information will be aimed at brevity and cannot hope to include a comprehensive picture of any given period or aspect of Palestine’s past. What we can manage in the course of a semester is necessarily but an inadequate sketch of Palestine’s historical and cultural past, but one which might, nevertheless, effectively alter our perspective of the relevance of that heritage for the self-understanding of young Palestinians. In order for the presentation of historical “content” of such a teaching program to function effectively, each of the historical ‘paragraphs’ or segments of a course in the ancient history and culture of Palestine will require fuller discussions and even debates on the various relevant issues, which might best support a young Palestinian’s understanding of this period or aspect of his land’s past heritage.
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