"The land didn't really wait 2,000 years empty": Historian Alon Confino passes away at 65

Can one write a story of Palestinian destruction without concluding that Israel was born in sin?

As a child, Alon Confino didn't think much about the history of his #Jerusalem neighborhood. "I knew that Arabs used to live in #Talbiya," he wrote. "It was a vague, undefined piece of information." But the past was still palpable. He could easily identify the "Arab houses" - they were more elegant than the new ones built after 1948. People spoke about the past of these houses in hushed tones, as if it was a secret. "The Arab past was both present and absent, hinted at and denied."

He studied at the Hebrew Gymnasium in Jerusalem [prestigious high school that was founded in 1909 and is known for its strong emphasis on Hebrew language and culture]. "For many, including myself, #Zionism was a very positive value. In my youth, any comment that cast doubt on the pure Zionist narrative was immediately rejected as anti-Semitic," he said. In 1973, he won first place in a quiz about the War of Independence. "I knew every operation and every campaign," he wrote. "It was a war of the few against the many, good against evil. The displacement of the Palestinians was not part of the story."

Years later, as a historian at Ben-Gurion University, Virginia, and Amherst, Confino studied how we remember the past. "The story we tell ourselves about the past is always dependent on time, place, and social, cultural, and political context," he said. He explained how individuals and nations suppress, distort, or deny their past. "Our memories of the past don't reflect what actually happened, but what we wanted to happen," he said. "We remember the past to manipulate it, to build a more comfortable identity in the present, to forget uncomfortable pasts and justify them."

Hebrew [July 25] https://www.haaretz.co.il/magazine/obit/2024-07-25/ty-article/00000190-ea82-d603-abb5-fb83ae980000 or https://archive.ph/9H4Bp

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