Israeli and Palestinian national identities are mutually constitutive through negation

Evidence

Here, then, is the knotted dilemma facing the region: Israel’s sense of self, statehood, and security is predicated on restricting the scope of the same for those from whose landscape of life, loves, and longing the state of Israel was carved out. And Palestinian possibilities, in point of fact the very idea of a coherent Palestinian corpus, of Palestinian national aspirations, acquired a spirit, its very conception, as explicit resistance to and rejection of Israel’s stake, at the extreme, of its being as such. They need each other, at least rhetorically if not psychologically, as perpetual grounds and justification for their own existence as much as in seeking to undermine the possibility of the other. It’s as though existence of each is measured by the extent of the other’s demise. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 592 (#expands, via linked claim)

What is necessary for people to have a sense of belonging to their nation? To reach optimal distinctiveness (Brewer, 1991), of course, and to perceive their nation as high in entitativity (Castano, Yzerbyt, & Bourguignon, 2003), but also to forget many of the events of their country’s history (Renan, 1882). Since the nation is an imagined community (Anderson, 1991), the selective forgetting of negative events is part and parcel of the formation and maintenance of a national identity. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2087 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Israel’s right-of-return discourse asymmetrically privileges Jewish over Palestinian claims. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 582; Palestinian religious parties nationalized while Zionist national parties religionized — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 2468; Israeli self-conception requires inventing the Palestinian as its constitutive enemy (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Israeli and Palestinian national identities are mutually constituted as opposition #expands (0.97) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 592
• Selective forgetting of a nation’s negative history is required for national identity #complicates (0.72) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2087