Empire, Erasure, and the Politics of Memory in Israel–Palestine

The Israel–Palestine conflict is frequently framed as a dispute over territory, religion, or security. While these factors are significant, such explanations obscure a deeper structural reality: the conflict is shaped by imperial legacies that institutionalized cultural and political erasure while favoring competing narratives of identity and belonging. At its core, Israel–Palestine reflects the long-term consequences of empires deciding whose history counts and whose must be rewritten.

Cultural and political erasure can be as devastating as physical destruction. Whereas death ends a people’s story, erasure rewrites it while they are still alive. Through renaming, administrative classification, and exclusion from political recognition, empires reshape identity without eliminating populations outright. This form of violence is slower and often more enduring, as it demands survival on terms that deny historical continuity and collective memory.

Roman rule in Judea provides an early illustration. Following Jewish revolts in the first and second centuries CE, Rome destroyed Jerusalem, expelled Jews from the city, and deliberately renamed the province Syria Palaestina. Historians widely interpret this act as punitive, intended to sever Jewish political and territorial association with the land by invoking the Philistines, ancient adversaries of the Israelites. Rome sought not only to suppress rebellion but to delegitimize the identity that produced it. Jewish sovereignty ended, yet Jewish historical memory endured in religious, cultural, and textual form.

British imperial governance in Palestine reproduced similar dynamics under modern legal frameworks. The Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations Mandate granted Britain administrative authority while deferring sovereignty and denying political self-determination to the indigenous Arab population. Palestinian Arabs were referenced as “existing non-Jewish communities,” a linguistic choice that erased political agency while facilitating Zionist settlement (Matthew 2013). As Golan argues, this asymmetry embedded competing national projects within a single territory without mechanisms for consent or reconciliation, ensuring conflict rather than resolution (Golan 2020).

Empires do not merely respond to rebellion; they manufacture it. Domination, exclusion, and humiliation generate resistance, which is then framed as disorder requiring repression. Jewish revolts against Rome and Palestinian revolts against British rule were predictable responses to imperial systems that denied political participation while imposing external authority. Shock at rebellion becomes the performance; repression, or more gently, containment, is the plan.

The contemporary conflict is further complicated by the distinction between ancient origin and continuous presence. Jewish political sovereignty existed in antiquity through the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, located in the same geographic space later known as Palestine. That sovereignty ended long before the modern era, and Jewish connection to the land became historical and religious rather than demographic. By contrast, Palestinians largely descend from populations that remained on the land through successive empires, gradually adopting new linguistic and religious identities, particularly following the Arab-Islamic conquests. Palestinians developed identity in place rather than in exile.

As Eriksson observes, identity-based conflicts persist because recognition of the other’s narrative is perceived as a threat to one’s own legitimacy. “We confront one another armored in identities whose likenesses we ignore or disown and whose differences we distort or invent to emphasize our own superior worth” (Eriksson 2015, 1). In such contexts, history becomes a zero-sum contest, and acknowledgment is mistaken for surrender.

Contemporary religious discourse, particularly among Christian communities in the United States, often collapses this complexity by asserting that the land belongs to Jews because they were “there first.” While rooted in biblical narrative, this claim conflates ancient theological memory with modern political entitlement. Applied consistently, such logic would destabilize most modern nation-states, including settler societies in the Americas. Biblical simplicity collides with geopolitical reality, and theology is conscripted into territorial arguments it cannot coherently sustain.

The tragedy of Israel–Palestine lies not in the absence of legitimate claims, but in their incompatibility when filtered through imperial legacies of erasure and selective recognition. One side’s ancient beginning collides with another side’s continuous presence. Both histories are real. Neither negates the other. Yet empires have repeatedly elevated one narrative while silencing another, determining whose story is preserved and whose is marginalized.

Understanding the conflict therefore requires moving beyond questions of firstness or legal title and confronting the human cost of erasure. Until the politics of memory and identity are addressed alongside territorial and security concerns, any resolution will remain fragile, and peace elusive.

References

Eriksson, Jacob. Small-State Mediation in International Conflicts: Diplomacy and Negotiation in Israel–Palestine. London: I.B. Tauris, 2015.

Golan, Galia. “Obstacles and Possibilities for Peace between Israel and Palestine.” Insight Turkey 22, no. 1 (2020): 33–46.

Matthew, H. C. G. “The Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate, 1917–1923: British Imperialist Imperatives.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 40, no. 3 (2013): 321–335.

Said, Edward W. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1951.