Irreconcilable Narratives and Overlapping Consensus

Peace by Satisfaction under Conditions of Reasonable Pluralism

In his later work, Rawls did not retract the argument of his book A Theory of Justice but argued that it suffered from a difficulty concerning stability. In it, he had assumed that the stability of political relations built on his proposed terms of cooperation would be secured by the liberal commitments of the persons involved (Rawls 1971, 513–87). But, once he took to heart in his later work that the free exercise of reason results in a multiplicity of reasonable but irreconcilable worldviews (or “comprehensive doctrines” as he calls them), he saw a problem. ⁷ His theory had previously assumed that a shared worldview was necessary for stable political relations. In it, he had implicitly conceived of adherents to worldviews other than a liberal one as complying with the terms of cooperation out of expediency rather than out of commitment. But as compliance out of expediency yields relations that are far less stable than relations yielded by compliance out of commitment, his theory had relied on the assumption that value pluralism does not allow for relations that are “stable for the right reasons.” ⁸

In his later work, Rawls devises conceptual tools to show that stability for the right reasons is possible between people who derive meaning and orientation from conflicting and potentially irreconcilable worldviews. For across their differences, they can comply with the same terms of cooperation out of commitment. He develops the tools of “free standing” terms of cooperation and “overlapping consensus” to address this question. When he conceives of the terms of cooperation as freestanding, Rawls does not imply that they are free from presuppositions (Rawls 1996, 374–75). Rather, he means that they are not justified on the basis of any one worldview (Rawls 1996, 140, 376). They are like a “module . . . that in different ways fits into and can be supported by various reasonable comprehensive doctrines” (Rawls 1996, 145), allowing adherents to different doctrines to “affirm [those terms] . . . from within their own [respective worldviews]” (Rawls 1996, 147). Once the freestanding terms of cooperation are anchored in this way in the moral psychology of people adhering to different doctrines, an overlapping consensus can be said to prevail between them over those terms (Rawls 1996, 142). Thus, when they comply, they act on “moral grounds” that “rest on [a] totality of reasons specified within the comprehensive doctrine affirmed by [each]” (Rawls 1996, 168, 171). The above two conceptual tools allow Rawls to show us how adherents to irreconcilable worldviews can accept the same terms of cooperation out of commitment, and not merely out of expediency, and therefore how between them stability for the right reasons is theoretically possible.

Rawls deploys the same tools for the relations between peoples. He traces the distinction between compliance out of expediency and compliance out of commitment when he follows Raymond Aaron’s distinction between “‘peace by power’ or ‘peace by impotence,’” on one hand, and “peace by satisfaction,” on the other (Rawls 1999, 47). The first yields a mere modus vivendi that simply encodes the balance of power and interests, and the second is stable for the right reasons. Between Israelis and Palestinians, a modus vivendi based on the calculation by each side that a cessation of hostilities for the time being is in its best interest has been in place for decades—albeit with occasional bursts of fighting. It has been formalized with the Oslo accords starting with the 1993 Declaration of Principles between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and with every renewal of the truce between Hamas and Israel, including the most recent one following the 2014 Gaza war. To conceptualize an end to the conflict is not to capture theoretically the existing peace by power and impotence but to theorize for a potential peace “by satisfaction” that is stable for the right reasons. The two publics’ adherence to irreconcilable political narratives and their expectation from one another of an affirmation of their respective causes poses one (by no means the only) challenge for conceptualizing such a peace. I show below that this challenge can be overcome by a limited deployment of Rawls’ tools. Telegraphically, my argument is that a list of freestanding acknowledgments that allow the two peoples to see their respective causes justified implicitly is incorporable into both of their existing core political narratives. This means that an overlapping consensus over those acknowledgments is possible even while the narratives remain irreconcilable.

Before developing this argument in detail, I must first adapt Rawls’ conceptual tools to the context at hand. In Rawls’ theory, freestanding terms of cooperation emerge out of the thought-experiment of the “original position,” which allows him to assume pro tanto the justice of those proposed terms (Rawls 1996, 386). Since I am not offering an application of his overall theory, I do not rely on this assumption but merely assume that any proposed terms of cooperation would count as sufficiently just if they are widely accepted as such by the two publics. ⁹ It would suffice in Hussein Agha’s words if, “an idea of justice [is] . . . seen to have been achieved” (Gaess 2010, 146). What I wish to retain from Rawls’ conceptual tool of freestanding terms of cooperation, however, is the notion that these terms are modular having the potential to be incorporated into a number of incompatible and irreconcilable worldviews.

Another adaptation I make is to the idea of an overlapping consensus. In Rawls’ theory, the parties to such a consensus are assumed to be adherents to different comprehensive doctrines, which are far-reaching systems of thought (Rawls 1996, 152, note 17). I apply the idea to the adherents to the core Israeli and Palestinian political narratives which are far narrower in scope than comprehensive doctrines and are not equivalent to them, being more akin to “stories of peoplehood” than overarching worldviews (Smith 2003). My justification for applying the concept of overlapping consensus to political narratives is that they share two salient commonalities with comprehensive doctrines. These are the only commonalities I assume in my deployment of that concept. First, I assume that political narratives are meaning-giving and provide orientation in action, so that when terms of cooperation are incorporated into a political narrative, adherents to that narrative can on that basis comply with those terms out of commitment and not merely out of expediency. Second, I assume that like comprehensive doctrines political narratives are flexible and can be stretched (up to a limit). Rawls points out that the fit between freestanding terms of cooperation and a particular doctrine may not be evident at the beginning, but that this fit can develop over time, as there is a certain “looseness” to most doctrines (Rawls 1996, 159–60). The same applies to political narratives that can also be stretched to incorporate terms of cooperation to which they might at first appear inhospitable. I am not suggesting that all proposed terms can be made to fit into all narratives, only that such a potential fit is always worth exploring. ¹⁰ I utilize the conceptual tools borrowed from Rawls to argue that if political relations between Israelis and Palestinians are regulated by terms of cooperation that include indirect acknowledgments of both of their respective causes, these relations could potentially be stable for the right reasons. This applies even while the two publics continue to uphold irreconcilable political narratives. In the following section, I present the challenge that the irreconcilability of narratives raises, and in the subsequent one I propose a means for addressing it.

Irreconcilable Narratives and Demands that Cannot Be Met without Conversion

The question that anyone who gives serious thought to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict cannot evade is whether the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 was right and morally worthy, or whether it was a historic wrong. If it was right and the state turned out badly, there would still be an important moral achievement to preserve. If, however, it was a historic wrong and the state turned out well, the wrong would still need to be corrected. This question is at the core of the two peoples’ political causes. In this section, I first offer brief sketches of the two peoples’ core narratives and then explain why it is impossible for either public to explicitly affirm the other’s cause as long as both adhere to those narratives.

The core of the political narrative that holds sway among a large majority of Israel’s Jewish population across many of its divides can be condensed as follows. The persecution of the Jewish people did not end with the advent of the Enlightenment. Anti-Semitism proved to be deeply entrenched. Thus, it became necessary for the Jewish people to end their dependence on the good graces of others and to take control of their own destiny. Near the turn of the twentieth century, the Zionist movement affirmed the Jewish people’s right to self-determination and began the long process of establishing a state in the ancient Jewish homeland where this people could live in peace, security, and independence. In pursuing this goal, the movement was at the same time satisfying the longing of innumerable generations of Jews to return to the ancient homeland after two millennia of exile. Any doubts about the need for an independent Jewish state and the right to establish it should have been put to rest by the horrors of the Holocaust and its immediate aftermath when Jews seeking refuge were met with closed borders and immigration quotas. In 1947, the international community recognized the right of the Jewish people to a state alongside a Palestinian Arab state. But the Palestinian Arabs as well as their neighbors rejected this and waged war, forcing the Jewish people to win their state on the battlefield at great cost. During that war, some Palestinians became refugees.

Irreconcilable with the above narrative is the narrative that is widely shared by Palestinians across their geographic and political divides. Its core is that the Palestinian people are the indigenous population of the land of Palestine and are deeply attached to it. They have for centuries lived in peace as a Muslim majority with significant Christian and Jewish minorities. As soon as they became aware of the goal of the Zionist movement they opposed it, recognizing it as a settler colonial movement that threatened their very existence. They knew that a Jewish state in Palestine could only be established at their expense. Furthermore, they had their own aspiration to self-determination. The year 1948 was the year of their Nakba or catastrophe in which their worst fears came true—78 percent of their country was taken from them by force, and the state of Israel was built on the ruins of their towns and villages. In the process, more than half of them were expelled from and fled their land and became refugees. Their situation deteriorated further in 1967, when Israel occupied the remaining 22 percent of their country, which it continues to control. Their right to self-determination even in that portion of their historic homeland remains unrealized.

When Israelis demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, and when Palestinians demand that Israelis recognize the Palestinian refugees’ moral right to return to their homes, they are each calling on the others to expressly accept their core narrative. I explain below why neither of those demands can be met without the type of ideological transformation that would require at least one people to shed its core narrative. Before proceeding, however, some clarifications are necessary to put the two demands in context.

Starting in 2002, Israeli government representatives began to express dissatisfaction with the 1993 recognition by the Palestine Liberation Organization of “the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security” as insufficient and began to speak of the need for Palestinians to recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people (Kuperwasser and Lipner 2011, 3, 5–6). This demand has gained traction among the Jewish mainstream in Israel (Hoffman 2014). Even left-leaning political and intellectual figures have come out in support of some version of it ¹¹ (Friedman 2014; Shavit 2014). In the mid-1990s, Israel’s political identity, which had previously been assumed by the Jewish mainstream to be granted as obviously Jewish became the subject of heated contestation (Zreik 2011, 32). Zionism itself became openly “problematized” (Silberstein 1999, 2). Today’s support for the demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people expresses the Jewish Israeli mainstream’s desire to end contestation over the identity of the state and to have the cause of Israel’s establishment in 1948 justified once and for all as morally worthy.

The long-standing Palestinian demand for Israel to recognize the right of the refugees and their descendants to return to their homes dates back to 1948 and is in direct conflict with the above demand. It has deep traction among Palestinians everywhere (R. Khalidi 1992; Nassar 2011). Beginning in the 1990s, however, Palestinian political representatives and many intellectuals began distinguishing between the recognition of the right of return as a non-negotiable abstract moral right and its negotiable practical exercise and implementation (Abdelrazek 2010, 148; Abu Zayyad 2008/2009; R. Khalidi 1994, 24). For the purposes of this argument, my focus is exclusively on the recognition of the moral right of return as an abstract right. Thus, I bracket here along with all other immediately practical questions and arrangements the admittedly far more urgent matter of that right’s exercise and implementation. ¹²

We can now consider what it would mean for adherents to the two narratives to grant one another the above two demands. The Palestinian political leadership has emphasized two reasons for its inability to recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people: doing so would negatively impact the status and rights of Palestinians living inside Israel, and would negate the refugees’ right to return to their homes (A. S. Khalidi 2011, 78–79). These reasons however do not get at the deeper underlying challenges contained in that demand. Recognizing Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people would entail taking seriously a claim to the land based on religious texts and a history that is thousands of years away, and indeed privileging that claim over Palestinians’ claim while in the same breath blaming those who resisted it in modern times (A. S. Khalidi 2011, 79–80). People who do not put much stock in the historical claim can interpret the above demand differently. They can view it in light of the necessity of establishing a safe haven for Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust. At the time, the die had been cast about the location of such a haven that could only be in Palestine (Gans 2008, 43–44; Slater 2012, 7–8, 12; Sternhell 1998, 338).

The core Palestinian narrative cannot incorporate recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people by invoking either of the above two lines of argument. Both imply a superiority of the interests and needs of the world’s Jewish population over those of Palestinians. Any territorial shape that a Jewish state could have taken in Palestine in the 1940s would have entailed severe Palestinian hardship. If hypothetically a plan akin to the 1937 Peel Commission proposal were implemented, it would have entailed the uprooting and “transfer” of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians (Morris 2004, 47). Alternatively, if a version of the 1947 UN partition plan were implemented, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians would have overnight found themselves living against their will as a very large minority (virtually half the population) in a state with a Jewish political identity and cut off from the rest of their own society (W. Khalidi 1987, 714). For adherents to the Palestinian core narrative to accept the need for such a sacrifice, they would have to consider these predictably bad consequences to be a lesser evil all things considered than leaving the dream of a Jewish state unrealized. They would have to adopt something akin to Vladimir (Zeev) Jabotinsky’s reasoning when he argued in 1937 that “when the Arabs’ claim is confronted with [the] Jewish demand to be saved, it is like the claims of appetite versus the claims of starvation” (Maoz 2013, 34). But this reasoning assumes that only a Jewish state could have saved the Jewish people, that refuge alone in Palestine and elsewhere could not.

When Israelis demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, they are asking them to justify the state’s establishment and accept either that the thousands-of-years-old historic right to the land supersedes the Palestinians’ right, or that whatever pain they suffered was necessary to save the Jewish people. No matter how it is put, the message echoes Lord Balfour’s words in 1919: “Zionism . . . is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land” (Said 1980, 16–17). To recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, Palestinians would have to bring their core narrative to its breaking point and adopt a new one in which they would either feature as temporary occupants of the land or as necessary martyrs destined to sacrifice themselves for the sake of others.

As far as the Palestinian demand on Israel to recognize the refugees’ moral right to return to their homes is concerned, Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett’s 1949 articulation of his government’s position still reverberates today. Its gist is that far from having a moral right to return, the refugees were “members of an aggressor-group defeated in a war of its own making.” And “Israel cannot in the name of humanitarianism be driven to commit suicide” by accepting their “large-scale repatriation” (Morris 2004, 560). Successive Israeli governments have considered the possibility of admitting a small number of refugees into Israel but never have they recognized those refugees’ right to return to their homes. For example, in the Taba negotiations of January 2001 that succeeded the failed Camp David summit of the previous summer, Israeli representatives referred to the refugees’ “wish to return” (Moratinos 2002, 86). Where the language of the right of return has been tolerated and deployed by adherents to the core Israeli narrative and their supporters, it has been applied exclusively to a prospective Palestinian state located in the West Bank and Gaza. The Clinton parameters of December 2000, for example, specify, “There is no specific right of return to Israel itself” (Beilin 2004, 324). In the unofficial but well publicized Geneva initiative of 2003, refugees are presented with options for choosing a “permanent place of residence” of which only the choice of the prospective state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza is “the right of all Palestinian refugees” (Beilin 2004, 351–52).

Adherents to the core Israeli narrative tend to strenuously resist the distinction made by some Palestinians between the moral right of return and its implementation (Alpher and Shikaki 1998, 17, 20, 22; Oron 2008/2009, 103). This is not surprising, as recognition of the moral right of return, even when distinguished from its exercise and implementation, amounts to the evocation of an image that cannot be incorporated into the core Israeli narrative without causing it to disintegrate. The image is of everything else being held constant and Palestinian refugees imagined as having been allowed to stay in their homes in 1948 or allowed to return. In this image, despite the immigration of millions of Jews over many decades, the state of Israel would still have had a Palestinian Arab majority and a Jewish minority. When Palestinians demand that Israelis recognize the moral right of return, they evoke the above image and posit it as the standard of how things ought to have been. Thus, their demand is to have the goal of the Zionist movement be declared immoral and its realization a historic wrong. If Israelis stretch their core narrative to incorporate the above demand, it would disintegrate.

As long as the two publics’ mainstreams are divided by the irreconcilable narratives sketched above, a Rawlsian overlapping consensus over terms of cooperation would be impossible if these terms include recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, the recognition of the Palestinian refugees’ moral right of return, or both. This does not mean however that the concern for affirmation of the two peoples’ causes expressed by these two demands can be completely ignored. If we are to conceive of a peace by satisfaction, the above concern must be engaged. For, the two peoples’ ability to accept any proposed terms of cooperation out of commitment cannot be divorced from their concern with the justification of their respective causes. The question of whether the establishment of the state of Israel was morally worthy or a historic moral wrong cannot simply be swept under the rug. It might be impossible to answer authoritatively. But it must be engaged nonetheless. For, it is too important for both peoples’ sense of themselves to ignore.

Realistic Utopia: Stretched Narratives and Overlapping Consensus

In this section, I draw out from the above discussion six pleas for acknowledgment that go to the heart of the two peoples’ causes. Granting these acknowledgments would go a long way toward addressing both peoples’ expectation for a justification of their cause. Utilizing Rawls’ conceptual tools, I argue that an overlapping consensus is possible over the list of acknowledgments without requiring either people to undergo large-scale political conversion. This means that if freestanding terms for Israeli–Palestinian cooperation are proposed that prove acceptable to both peoples on the basic practical issues separating them (admittedly a very big if), the irreconcilability of their mainstream narratives need not preclude the possibility of a peace by satisfaction between them. This is the realistic utopian aspiration animating the present section.

Three acknowledgments that are inextricable from the core Israeli narrative sketched above are as follows: that the Jewish people have the right to self-determination and statehood, that their history gives them a particularly pressing need for a sovereign and independent state, and that they have a religious and historical connection to the land of Israel/Palestine. These acknowledgments are all incorporable into the core Palestinian narrative without bringing it to its breaking point. Inextricable from the latter narrative are three other acknowledgments: that the Palestinian people have the right to self-determination and statehood, that they are indigenous to the entire land of Israel/Palestine, and that their displacement and subjugation at the hands of Zionist and Israeli military and political forces was inherent in the Zionist movement’s goal. These acknowledgments are all incorporable into the core Israeli narrative without bringing it to its breaking point.

I now discuss these six acknowledgments in order. That the Jewish people constitute a nation and like all other nations have the right to self-determination and statehood is a claim that on its own merits is incorporable into the core Palestinian narrative, which itself accepts the logic of nationhood and applies it to the Palestinian people (R. Khalidi 1997). National identification is no doubt notorious for its myths and historical errors (Gellner 1983, 56–57; Renan 1990, 11). But once a group of people have come to feel the bond of nationhood, no one has any standing to reject the validity of that bond (Tamir 1995, 66). Furthermore, nationhood implies the right to statehood which is the emblem of nations’ sovereignty (Anderson 1991, 7). While nations do not always exercise this right, they retain the option of deciding whether to pursue it, as illustrated by Quebec and more recently Scotland and Catalonia. Thus, acknowledging the Jewish people’s right to self-determination means recognizing its right to pursue an independent state. Before Palestinians can incorporate this acknowledgment into their core political narrative, they might add a qualification to make it fit, namely, that the above right is not absolute and that it ought not to be exercised at the expense of the rights of others. This qualification notwithstanding, the general idea of Jewish self-determination is incorporable into the core Palestinian political narrative.

As to the Jewish people’s special need for a safe haven resulting from a history of persecution and genocide, there is Palestinian and broader Arab resistance to granting this acknowledgment for fear that it is the beginning of a slippery slope toward justifying Palestinian dispossession. ¹³ According to Gilbert Achcar, “Arab writers’ apparent indifference to, or silence about, the Holocaust . . . [is connected to their] hold[ing]—quite wrongly—that to speak out at length on the subject would be to fall into a Zionist trap” (Achcar 2009, 232). Engaging Jewish history, especially the horrors of the Holocaust, and acknowledging the special need that they make evident is not tantamount to ceding Palestinian rights. The resistance to engaging modern Jewish history seriously can be overcome without challenging the core Palestinian narrative, which can be stretched to incorporate it. Mahmoud Abbas’ recent statement that “what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust is the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era” is a clear indication that such an engagement is possible (Carlstrom 2014). In seeking to incorporate into their core narrative the pressing need for a state as a safe haven for the Jewish people, Palestinians can again add a qualification and ask the following: At what cost, and at whose expense, was the safe haven to be established? Thus, they can leave room for themselves to reason that once these added considerations are taken into account, the pursuit of that goal in 1948 was morally wrong. With Edward Said, they can say that they “must accept the Jewish experience in all that it entails of horror and fear . . . [but that they] cannot ever be made to acquiesce in the need to dispossess the whole Palestinian people” (Said 2000, 208–09). Serious and honest engagement with Jewish history would support the acknowledgment that as a historically persecuted people, the Jewish people have a particular need for a safe haven, without necessarily leading to the conclusion that the establishment of Israel in 1948 was morally worthy.

The third plea for acknowledgment involves the Jewish religious and historical connection to the land of Israel/Palestine. Acknowledgment of this connection can also be readily incorporated into the core Palestinian narrative. The leap made to modern-day land-claims, however, cannot. To nip that leap in the bud, adherents to the core Palestinian narrative often insist on viewing Zionist settlement in Palestine as a simple case of settler colonialism akin to the European colonization of the Americas and parts of Africa (Massad 2006, 14–24, 96–103). But setting aside that leap, the Palestinian core narrative can be stretched to include the idea that the land has religious and historical meaning to the Jewish people and that this connection cannot be dismissed or minimized. Furthermore, it can incorporate the notion that although Zionist settlement of the land utilized colonial tropes and practices and benefited from the protection and support of colonial powers, its meaning to those who value its goal is not reducible to that image. This acknowledgment and the other two discussed above can all be incorporated into the core Palestinian narrative simply by stretching it without causing it to disintegrate.

The remaining acknowledgments present challenges for the core Israeli narrative, but they too are incorporable into it without bringing it to its breaking point. The same logic that applies to incorporating the Jewish people’s right to self-determination and pursuit of statehood into the core Palestinian narrative applies to the incorporation of the same right for the Palestinian people into the core Israeli narrative. As to the plea for acknowledging the indigenous status of the Palestinian people to the entire land of Israel/Palestine, it too should not be difficult to incorporate into the core Israeli narrative. That narrative’s hold would be very weak indeed if it were to hang on as obvious a falsehood as the claim that the land was empty when the Zionist movement began to settle it (Finkelstein 1988). Adherents to the core Israeli narrative can acknowledge the indigenous status of Muslim and Christian Palestinians (including 1948 refugees) without nullifying their own claims. As they seek to incorporate this acknowledgment into their narrative, they might add the qualification that in addition to indigenous Palestinian Jews, Jewish populations everywhere were also indigenous to the land—albeit with a two-thousand-year absence, or they might insist that even if Palestinians of all backgrounds are the only indigenous population, other claims and rights to the land can trump the rights of indigenous peoples. ¹⁴

The final plea for acknowledgment is the most challenging. It involves two components. The first has to do with the role played by the state of Israel and the Zionist forces that fought for its establishment in turning large numbers of Palestinians into refugees. This is often articulated in the form of a demand for Israel to accept moral guilt for the plight of the refugees. The core Israeli narrative however cannot be stretched enough to meet this plea in exactly those terms. For, moral guilt is borne for wrongdoings that one now condemns categorically and thinks ought not to have been committed. It is borne for “sin” so to speak (Morris 1990, 28–29). Such an admission however would not leave adherents to the core Israeli narrative with enough wiggle room to accommodate their possible belief that extenuating circumstances may have rendered the actions in question morally justifiable or excusable.

Over the last three decades, since the opening of the Israeli archives on the 1948 period, controversy among historians of that period is no longer focused on what happened as it used to be in earlier decades (Hitchens 1988; Shlaim 2007) but on how to interpret and make sense of what happened (Masalha 2003; Morris 2004). According to Benny Morris, one of the most prominent historians of 1948 and a committed Zionist, Palestinian flight in 1948 was “above all . . . caused by attacks by Jewish forces on Arab villages and towns and by the inhabitants’ fear of such attacks, compounded by expulsions, atrocities, and rumors of atrocities” (Morris 2001, 38). There is also no doubt that in the summer of 1948, there was an Israeli cabinet decision to bar the return of refugees (Morris 2004, 323), and that in a short span of time, hundreds of Palestinian villages were systematically destroyed for military as well as political reasons (Morris 2004, 348–60). As to whether all this amounted to premeditated ethnic cleansing or whether the extenuating circumstances of war gave it a different meaning, the debate continues and remains predictably inconclusive (Masalha 1992, 3; Morris 2004, 588–600; Pappé 2007, xv–xviii). What matters for this argument’s purposes is that adherents to the core Israeli narrative can adopt a position that is consistent with the historical record and that while stretching their narrative does not take it beyond its breaking point. They can acknowledge the central causal role that Zionist forces played in the displacement of Palestinians without conceiving of Israel and Zionist forces as morally guilty. For, they can make the case that extenuating circumstances and excuses soften the moral judgment to be made.

A key point should not be overlooked here however. The choice is not between accepting moral guilt and mere regret. The latter is the attitude of spectators, and in the story of Palestinian displacement Zionist forces and the state of Israel were not mere spectators. They did it. And the agents of a deed, even if it turns out that they did not intend it, or even if they felt compelled by other factors to do it, are still its agents (Williams 1981, 28–29). Taking a page from the law of tort, the Israeli core narrative can be stretched to include acknowledgment that Zionist forces and the state of Israel largely caused the Palestinian refugee problem and that they thereby incurred a special burden to make things right without conceiving of them as morally guilty. The extenuating circumstances and excuses of a war that they consider to have been initiated by Arab forces do not obliterate the special connection between them as doers and their deeds’ consequences. ¹⁵ There are historical precedents for finessing the language with which acknowledgments of this type can be made (Lustick 2006, 57–58).

The second component of this plea for acknowledgment involves the relationship between the goal of the Zionist movement and Palestinian suffering. By the 1930s and 1940s, the Palestinian Arab and Zionist Jewish political leaderships had both come to recognize that establishing a Jewish state in Palestine at the time necessarily involved either displacing or subordinating large numbers of Palestinians (Abdel-Nour 2013, 28, 31; Morris 1999, 658). The core Israeli narrative can be stretched to incorporate this point as well. For, if the realization of Zionism’s goal was only possible by either displacing or subordinating Palestinians that does not necessarily lead all to conclude that Zionism is morally defective (Gans 2008; Shavit 2013; Sternhell 1998). The question would still have to be answered as to which was the lesser evil—to bring about this displacement and subordination or to leave unrealized the goal of establishing the state. Adherents to the core Israeli narrative may reason that after the Holocaust it would have been the height of irresponsibility to abort the goal of establishing the state once it was within reach. They may ask whether the survivors of one of history’s most horrific events should have been left at its end with no greater protection from harm, no more assurance of their security than they had before it happened—the good graces of others—whether in other words after all that was done to them they should have been left without the ability to protect themselves on their own terms. Thus, adherents to the core Israeli narrative can acknowledge that the realization of the goal of the Zionist movement necessarily entailed harm to Palestinians. And as they seek to fit this acknowledgment into their narrative, they might add the qualification that the cost that Palestinians had to pay for the establishment of the state was unfortunate but necessary (Said 2000, 275; Shavit 2004). This would leave them with enough room to draw the conclusion that the establishment of the state was morally worthy, all things considered.

Both narratives can be stretched to incorporate all six of the above acknowledgments without disintegrating. Thus, an overlapping consensus over questions that get to the heart of the two peoples’ respective causes for which they seek affirmation from one another is possible. That in order to incorporate those acknowledgments into their respective narratives adherents to both might resort to adding qualifications is to be expected. But, necessary as these qualifications may be in helping anchor the acknowledgments in the respective narratives, they should not detract from the main point, which is that all six are in fact incorporable into both narratives.

Conclusion

An overlapping consensus between adherents to the core Israeli and Palestinian narratives is possible over the following: (1) that the Jewish people are a nation with the right to self-determination and the pursuit of statehood, (2) that their history has given them good reason to seek the establishment of a safe haven in the form of an independent state, (3) that they are connected to the land of Israel/Palestine by deep bonds that cannot be dismissed by reducing their presence in it to the image of mere colonial settlers, (4) that the Palestinian people are a nation with the right to self-determination and the pursuit of statehood, (5) that they are indigenous to the entire land of Israel/Palestine, and (6) that the displacement of more than half of them in 1948 was mainly caused by the actions of Zionist forces and the state of Israel, and that indeed harm to them was inherent in the very goal of the Zionist movement which could not have been realized at the time without either displacing or subordinating large numbers of them.

Adherents to the core Israeli narrative can find in the first three acknowledgments the main pillars for justifying their cause that the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 was morally worthy. Adherents of the core Palestinian narrative can find in the last three acknowledgments a justification of their cause that Israel’s establishment was a historic moral wrong. But nothing about any of the first three acknowledgments individually or in combination necessarily justifies the Israeli cause, and similarly nothing about the last three acknowledgments individually or in combination necessarily justifies the Palestinian cause. If the above six acknowledgments are included in the terms of a hypothetical agreement that outlines the terms of cooperation between the two peoples, both publics would be able to accept those acknowledgments for their own reasons from within their own respective core narratives, allowing each to find in the terms of that agreement the main pillars for the justification of its cause.

Thinking back to Rawls, we can conceive of a proposed agreement between Israelis and Palestinians as freestanding and modular. If hypothetically terms for dealing with the basic practical issues of the conflict are found and are widely accepted by the two publics as sufficiently just, the irreconcilability of narratives need not present an obstacle to their future relations. For if in addition to its practical terms, the hypothetical agreement were to include the above six acknowledgments, an overlapping consensus over them would be possible between the two publics allowing each to see its cause justified by the other, without such justification being offered explicitly. Partly legitimized by such an overlapping consensus, the agreement could then undergird a peace by satisfaction and not a mere modus vivendi, even if the two publics continue to adhere to their irreconcilable core narratives. Consensus over the above six acknowledgments places beyond the pale any challenge to the right of either people to live in the land of Israel/Palestine. It also encodes the two peoples’ acceptance of one another’s right to self-determination and its exercise in two independent states, one binational state that includes both peoples equitably or another arrangement. Furthermore, it ensures that the two peoples face and accept the deepest (admittedly asymmetrical) grievances and horrors in one another’s respective pasts rather than denying or minimizing them. All this is necessary for stable relations, even though by itself it does not suffice as it must be supplemented by a consensus on the underlying terms of cooperation (whatever these turn out to be).

There is a utopian impulse in this argument, but it is a realistic one. For, the two peoples could offer the above acknowledgments without undermining the mainstream political narratives that give them meaning and orientation. Should they do so, they would also internalize that in addition to their conflicting material interests, they are separated by a gulf of meaning, and that in addition to its other features of occupation and domination, their conflict is also an instance of reasonable pluralism. For, the question that separates them most deeply cannot be answered definitively by more knowledge or better arguments. On it, “Reason” does not dictate one path and does not ineluctably lead to one conclusion. Until they can arrive at a common answer to the fundamental political question of how to assess the moral standing of the establishment of the state of Israel, they can live under stable relations with people with whom they disagree deeply on that question. They would simply have to be prepared to often shake their heads in disbelief at their neighbors or fellow citizens who, knowing what they know and acknowledging what they acknowledge, still persist in not getting the most important point: that the establishment of Israel was morally worthy or was a historic moral wrong.