Dual Narratives

What is a fact?  Many people would argue that a fact is a proposition about the world that is completely verifiable as true and is pretty much incontestable.  A fact, it seems, should be obviously true.  The idea of truth, however, and the kind of verification desired, changes depending on what sort of propositions you want to verify.  Is the theory of Gravity true?  What about the statements on the UN's declaration of human rights?  There seems to be two kinds of facts: "brute" facts, things like "the Dead Sea is disappearing at a rate of about 1 meter per year" and social facts, things like "the depletion of the Dead Sea is a bad thing."  One is objective, the other is about values.

When it comes to history things might at first seem easier.  You can verify that Napoleon was crowned emperor of France on X date, or that the first printing press came into being some 400 years earlier.  So when Israelis and Palestinians come up with such different histories about how the current situation came to be, you'd think it would be easy to just check the facts and tell the story like it "really" happened.  Last PELS, however, we got a taste of how difficult this is.  Two people from the Peace Research Institute of the Middle East came in and told us about their project, essentially a way to expose schoolchildren to the narrative of the other side:

This project of the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME) focuses on teachers and schools as the critical force over the long term for changing deeply entrenched and increasingly polarized attitudes on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The goal of the project is to "disarm" the teaching of Middle East history in Israeli and Palestinian classrooms.
Specifically, teams of Palestinian and Israeli teachers and historians will develop parallel historical narratives of the Israeli and Palestinian communities, translate them into Hebrew and Arabic, and test their use together in both Palestinian and Israeli classrooms. Unlike other projects that are limited to revising existing Israeli and Palestinian texts, the PRIME project aims at engaging teachers on both sides in an entirely new collaborative process for teaching the history of the region.
At this stage in their polarized history there is not enough common ground for Israelis and Palestinians to create a single historical narrative. Rather, the project is designed to expose students in each community to the other's narrative of the same set of events. For the first time, students in each school system (beginning with 15 and 16 year olds) will not only learn what shapes their own community's understanding of historical events, but be required to confront the historical perspectives and contexts that shape the other community's sense of reality.
The project may, at a later stage, develop multiple narratives of events within each community, reflecting the fact that neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis have a monolithic view regarding the history of the region. The goal, in other words, is not necessarily to create a single "bridging" historical narrative that is shared in common by both communities, but to break down stereotypes and build more nuanced understandings by the next generation of citizens of the two states in the region: Israel and the future Palestinian State.

 You can find the booklets in pdf form here:  http://www.vispo.com/PRIME/

During the session we got a good sense of how difficult it was to reach a consensus on such touchy issues.  To give just one example, when talking about the 1948 war, both sides described their own fighters as soldiers and the other side's fighters as "gangs" (i.e. the Arab gangs or the Zionist gangs).  The outcome of the project was years in the making, and I think it's pretty damn impressive.