1948 After Oslo: Truth and Reconciliation in Palestinian Discourse

摘要

The failure of the Oslo Accords has been widely attributed to its exclusion of issues of truth and reconciliation from the political process. As a result, the period since the Accords has witnessed a resurgence of the status of memory in Palestinian discourse, manifested in increasing commemorations of the Palestinian nakba and oral history projects. The article examines this upsurge of memory and 'truth and reconciliation' as political idioms in the discourse of Palestinian intellectuals, historians and civil society organizations. It examines the key means whereby the public acknowledgement of Palestinian and Israeli collective memories of violence in 1948 have been increasingly cast as preconditions for the endurance of any political order. It argues that the most sustainable Palestinian truth and reconciliation discourse is that which calls both for Israel to acknowledge responsibility for the creation of the refugee problem and for Palestinians to actively engage with the means whereby Israelis might be brought to recognize the necessity of an apology for it.