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Note: Although the first edition of Israel and Palestine: A Common Historical Narrative has been published, the document undergoes continuous refinement through ongoing stylistic and scholarly review. Text on this page may be changed from time to time as a result of this process.

Israel and Palestine:

A Common Historical Narrative

Afterword

By Jack Berriault, Rick Phillips, and Nancy Black

Our story stops with the events of the Gaza Flotilla in 2010, but history, as it must, continues. With the relentless pace of unfolding Palestinian-Israeli history over the past ten years, one might reasonably question why this story ends a decade ago.

A Common Historical Narrative ends three years following the original Palestinian-Israeli dialogue that created the foundation of this work. During this three-year period of initial academic review, writing, and textual refinement, the team faced the question of whether to end the narrative at 2007 or extend the narrative as history continued to unfold. We chose to continue development of the narrative but end it at 2010, out of respect for the defining characteristic of a common historical narrative: a story generated by the people who experienced the events chronicled in the story. We saw that to proceed much beyond the events of 2007, however well-intentioned, was to challenge the fundamental integrity of this collaborative process.

The purpose of this story is not to be up-to-the-minute, but rather to demonstrate the immense possibility of telling one story of a tragic and seemingly intractable conflict from the shared and blended experiences of the two great peoples who have endured it.

We intend this work to stand as a model for common historical narratives anywhere in the world, including contemporary and future extensions of the Israeli-Palestinian narrative generated by others, working in collaboration as we did.

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