At the doom of history, continued

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Protestants established the Orange Order in 1795 – to commemorate the victory of King William of Orange over King James II at the Battle of the Boyne on July 12, 1690. The echoes of these long-gone events ring loudly in the tramping feet of the believers and the Orange Order’s exclusion of Catholics.

The annual Orange parades can still explode 200 years after the first procession. For the Catholics, victory marches are still an open wound, for Protestants they are a heritage the will not surrender. Demography has long ago changed “their” areas, so marching routes now pass through completely Catholic streets. For this, fights start and people still get killed over two long-dead Kings.

The return of Jews to their homeland 2000 years being scattered and persecuted in exile demonstrated the enormous power of historical heritage in action. For 19 centuries, they nursed a memory powerful enough to drive them, at the end of the 19th century, to rebuild the national home and revive the ancient language.

However, history is powerful all over the Middle East with its tangle of conflicting religious, ethnic and national historical symbols. Jerusalem is holy to Judaism, Christianity and Islam and over 3,000 years, countless battles have torn it apart, flattened it, and exiled its inhabitants.

A struggle for dominance has left the holy sites for the three religions interwoven in one small area between the walls of the old city.

Today the Palestinian-Israeli conflict groans under the immense burden of a multi-narrative historical memory. Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, for example, should long ago have been consigned to the realm of historical and archeological debate.

It is the supposed site of Abraham's sacrifice, the temptation of Jesus, and the ascent of Mohammed to heaven. The first and second Jewish Temples stood there before the Roman destruction in 70 AD, today the Islamic 7th century Mosque of Omar and 8th century Al Aqsa Mosque stand there.

The site most recently was the immediate cause of the latest Palestinian-Israeli clashes in October 2000. Ancient fears of religious war exploded again, making it impossible to reach the parties through simple logic.

Can history save?
One of the most important jobs of coexistence organizations is to challenge history's baleful influence. Professional historians should be encouraged to write a multi-narrative history that sorts out the different narratives of nations and ethnic groups involved in a given conflict. 

The new histories should present the different narratives side by side, acknowledging both of them without demanding that each opposing side adopts the other's narrative. Other "memory agents" (teachers, journalists, politicians, academics) should then help to plant the new seeds in the collective memory.

This would be a first step toward debunking "absolute truth" - that "my side" is always right and the victim,  "your side" is always wrong and guilty of past injustice. Such absolutism is always a major component of ethnic and national conflict. "You" must always give in to "our demands" 

When both sides cling to an absurd contradictory "absolute truth," everlasting collision is inevitable. Worse, both sides usually demand atonement that would bring a new round of injustice to people who know idea why they have to pay any price.

New violence locks the parties into a magic evil circle of conflict. 
Coexistence organizations must find the way out of these dead-end cyclical conflicts by seeking a new kind of absolute truth everyone can share - no historical truth whatsoever can justify any more hatred, bloodshed and death.

Dr. Irit Keynan lectures at Haifa University. She is a professional historian and author of a prizewinning book on the Holocaust 

KEYWORDS: keynan, northern ireland, history, jerusalem, orange order, jews, kosovo, narrative 

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