Shared Land/Conflicting Identity: Trajectories of Israeli and Palestinian Symbol Use.

• Author: Kiewe, Amos
• Position: Book Review

Shared Land/Conflicting Identity: Trajectories of Israeli and Palestinian Symbol Use. By Robert C. Rowland and David A. Frank. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2002; 416 pages. $74.95.

The study of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has generated a great deal of scholarship over the past fifty years. Yet, this book is different and unique in its focus and analysis. The authors have produced a first-rate scholarly project that maps the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over a one hundred year period. At the intersection of politics, rhetoric, symbolism, myth and ideology, the authors reveal a layer of discourse that usually is not covered nor deemed essential for comprehending the conflict. The book is balanced, meticulously researched, very well written, and profoundly insightful. The book is based on a solid rhetorical foundation to explain and analyze the conflict, offering a pragmatic usage of rhetorical theory for everyday consumption.

The authors patiently explain the roots of Israeli and Palestinian rhetoric, myth and ideology as foundational to the conflict. A historical survey allows for a clear understanding of the Israeli identity formation and the modifications to that identity developed over many decades. Rooted in European anti-Semitism, Israeli identity developed along a Labor and Revisionist ideological divide. Nation building was the line pursued by Labor while Revisionists advocated a quick exit from Europe amid growing dangers to Jews and the building of a Jewish state. While Labor minimized the role of the Arab population and their resistance to a Jewish state, the Revisionists understood the potential for a conflict with the Arab inhabitants of Palestine yet were determined to build a state. The Holocaust would reconfigure the Jewish, and later the Israeli, psyche, especially for Revisionists and to a lesser degree for Labor. These foundations would affect decades of differing mythic discourses.

In discussing the symbolic construction of the Palestinians, the authors take the reader through the Palestinian struggle to formulate a symbolic identity. From Arabism, Islamism and nationalism, Palestinian identity grew out of the need to confront the Zionist symbolic system. Fearing for the sacred mosques of Jerusalem and the perceived threat by Zionists "to rebuild Solomon's temple" (p. 81) (the implied recognition of Jewish history deserves more commentary, however) was an important phase in the Islamization of...