During the course of the negotiations that would culminate in the Declaration of Principles (DOP), or the Oslo Accords, historical narratives were effectively barred from the negotiating table. “History,” as Paul Scham argues elsewhere, “was considered too hot to handle.”Footnote ¹ As a result, the so-called “mutual recognition” codified in the DOP was enormously limited. Although it addressed the political future of the negotiating process, however contingently, the past was not afforded equal attention—a critical blind spot in the substance of “recognition” that led to successive failures in subsequent negotiations over the status of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees.

Shared Histories: A Palestinian–Israeli Dialogue returns us to the terrain of history. The editors argue that counter to the “conventional logic of peace-making,” a mutual understanding of the historical narratives on which Israelis and Palestinians stake their respective political claims is a sine qua non of conflict resolution. This is not a call for historical consensus. Rather, it is an attempt to foreground the narrative discontinuities and historical disagreements on which politics is built. Although this is not a text grounded in political pragmatics, peacemaking is its explicit horizon. In their introduction, the editors argue that an appreciation of the stakes in history and a mutual understanding of the divergent ways that Israelis and Palestinians tell their own pasts will advance peace building, that now elusive project. Originally conceived in 1999—prior to the failures at Camp David, the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada, and the election of Prime Minster Ariel Sharon—the volume emerged from what now seems, in retrospect, a much more hopeful time.

Emerging out of a series of conversations in Cyprus and Jerusalem in 2002, the volume consists of a set of conversations between Palestinian and Israeli scholars about particular historical processes and events (1882–1949) about which there has been considerable scholarly disagreement. These include processes of social change in late Ottoman Palestine and Zionism's role in “the modern era,” Jewish and Palestinian nationalism in the prestate period, the Holocaust and the Israeli state, the 1947 partition plan, and the 1948 war and “Palestinian refugee problem.” Also included are essays by (in the order of their appearance) Ruth Kark, Adel Manna, Ran Aaronsohn, Issam Nasser, Manuel Hassassian, Norman Rose, Dalia Ofer, Ata Qaymari, Moshe Ma'oz, Avraham Sela, Adel Yahya, Moshe Amirav, and Salim Tamari. Nasser's discussion of Palestinian identification in the decades prior to nationalism (“The Pre-History of Palestinian Nationalism”) stands out for its insight and complexity. His account of Palestinian identity and sociality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries forcefully argues against an anachronistic resuscitation of Palestinian nationalism or national identity before its time—a tactic often employed by scholars to combat the nationalism that structures much Zionist historiography—therein complementing work in this vein by Beshara Doumani and Rashid Khalidi.

Much of the historical terrain covered here has been well traversed by scholars of the last two decades. Yet, scholarly novelty is not the volume's primary aim; indeed, many contributions are abbreviated versions of research published elsewhere. Instead, the volume endeavors to present systematically the divergent ways that Israelis and Palestinians have told their national pasts, highlighting ideological and interpretive variances that are usually accessible only by reading across divergent historical literatures. This volume is organized chronologically as a set of modules that offer a history and counterhistory of the same event or period, followed by transcription of the debates that occurred among conference participants. Readers are thus privy, in often fascinating ways, to the deeply contested nature of historical memory—to the forms of discord among scholars and schools that are invisible in most scholarly accounts.

Yet, this formal choice is only a partial success. Although interesting for the specialist, the import of such debates may be lost on nonspecialists (notably, undergraduates), for whom the editors have not provided adequate road maps signaling the relative importance of the debates dramatized here. A heavier editorial hand would have improved clarity.

The volume has a bold premise, presenting readers with historical debates among scholars that typically exceed the parameters of formal academic writing. Nonetheless, a certain conceptual limitation hampers this project. The editors rely on a story of dyadic histories—Israeli versus Palestinian history. The introduction spells this out quite clearly: “We called the project ‘Shared History’. . .as our premise is that there are two basic narratives of the past. . . . We believe that the two narratives both can and must be enriched by a knowledge and understanding of the ‘other”’ (p. 3).

To be sure, dyadic thinking has characterized the dominant terms of Israeli and Palestinian nationalist ideologies at particular historical moments. However, the editors' failure to think beyond the dyad, or to suggest the contingent applicability of this paradigm, is troubling. Strangely missing are lessons learned from over a decade of revisionist historiography and sociology, authored primarily but not exclusively by Israelis, that has brought questions of difference within the national formation to the scholarly fore, urging scholars to reconsider the presumed heterogeneity of the nation through questions of gender, ethnicity, generation, and—more recently—sexuality. Written in 2002, this volume returns to the dyadic paradigm with a vengeance. One is tempted to give this a symptomatic read—to note how the resurgence of the conflict paradigm after 2000 has perhaps authorized a return to polarities and simplifications of this kind.

A final word about the conditions of historical production within the Israeli and Palestinian academies: as noted briefly by the editors, neither Issam Nasser nor fellow participant Salim Tamari were present at the workshops, due to Israeli strictures on Palestinian mobility. Greater attention to the discrepant conditions of academic production for scholars living in Israel and the Palestinian territories, and the ways that the Israeli occupation conditions the very possibility of dialogue, would have been a welcome supplement to the narrative of reciprocity by which the volume is framed.