= new reply since forum marked as read
is that if you were looking for the best example of a one-eyed, simplistic, narrative-driven approach to history (what the author would call a "single story"
you would be hard pressed to look past the lachrymose history of Jewish history and anti-semitism that is typically served up by mainstream Jewish organisations.
Almost invariably, these histories paint a picture of an always-beleaguered, suffering and faultless people whose own atrocities are always carefully omitted. The Sack of Jerusalem in 63BC and the killing of 750 000 Jews by the Romans is always mentioned, the slaughter of 500 000 Greeks and Romans and the depopulation of entire cities by Jewish rebels in the Cyrene massacres 100 years later is just as pointedly ignored. The actual causes of all these historical events are never touched upon. To actually explain them would just get in the way of resolving that it was anti-semitism that caused it all, so that we can draw an unbroken straight line between the Romans and Hitler.
You could apply the same scepticism to the Hannukkah story - which historically started out as a civil conflict between religious Jewish zealots and secular, Hellenistic, pro-Roman Jews - but has somehow morphed into some samey parable about olive oil burning and Lucius Quietus marching all the way from Rome just so he could kill some Jews. Or the Masada story.
I suspect that the reason the author discourages any attempt to apply a narrative to the Israel/Palestine conflict is not because she dislikes narrative history in the abstract - after all, what is the job of a religious cleric if not to interpret history in a parochial way? - but because she realises that no one is going to believe that the Israelis are the poor, downtrodden victims of Palestinians, and that the traditional prism for interpreting Jewish history is just not going to fly.
