91. Nationalism, History, and the 1948 War
- Author:
- Weldon C. Matthews
- Publication Date:
- 05-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Journal of Palestine Studies
- Institution:
- Institute for Palestine Studies
- Abstract:
- Efrat Ben-Ze'ev has produced a brief but thought-provoking response to the literature on the 1948 Palestine war that is bound by the parameters of official and academic nationalist narratives. Implicit in her book is a critique of the historical method that synthesizes textual and oral evidence to understand 1948 as the culmination of the Zionist project or the failure of the Palestinian Arab nationalist enterprise and seeks to assign culpability for the creation of the conflict to either of the nationalist movements. The production of these narratives deploys individuals' memories of 1948 as evidence, and those individuals' identities are consequently defined in terms of the nationalist narratives. Such a methodology obscures the instability of memory and the processes of reproducing it.
- Political Geography:
- Palestine and Arabia