Addressing the United Nations General Assembly last year, the president of the United States of America, Joe Biden, referred to the fundamental transformation in his country’s relations with Vietnam over the past fifty years. From a bloody and long war, the two nations had moved to establish the “highest level” of “partnership”. From this, he concluded, “… our history need not dictate our future.” This is true. But there are cases of inter-state conflict periodically breaking out into violence and war where Biden’s hope does not hold good.
These conflicts continue over long periods, often becoming intractable, precisely because the nations concerned cannot shed the baggage of history. In these conflicts, historical memory, handed down from generation to generation, determines the present and the future. This phenomenon of historical memory and the desire to set right past wrongs defies reason. The path of dialogue and diplomacy to end such conflicts is eschewed by the parties concerned unless complete exhaustion sets in in one or both of them. The violence and the war may end but the conflicts become frozen. The Ukraine-Russia war and Israel’s war in Gaza fall in this category of conflicts where historical memory is decisively influencing the present and the future.
There is no set pattern to how historical memory operates but there are two factors that are often at play — the loss of land and the sentiments of betrayal. Both need not influence a particular conflict together, although they often do. In these cases, the conflicting parties are convinced of the righteousness of their respective viewpoints. The Israel-Palestine issue is a case in point — the war in Gaza is merely a subset of the larger Israel-Palestine problem.
Human history is a history of migrations from the time Homo sapiens left their place of origin in Africa. That stated, human groups develop strong bonds with lands they inhabit over time. But once these groups move from their lands, for causes ranging from aggression by other human groups to changes in climate rendering them inhospitable for their lifestyles, the attachment to the ‘lost’ lands fades and disappears with time. The Jews are perhaps the only people whose attachment to the land of Israel has continued over millennia. They believe that the land of Israel was given to them by god. Whenever they had to leave this land, they have clung to the belief of their ‘divine right’ to it. Their last exodus occurred in 70 AD when the second temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans leading to the Jewish tribes dispersing to distant lands. Yet, their conviction that they have a divine right to the land of Israel, including Jerusalem, continued. Indeed, the Hebrew Bible has, in Psalm 137, inter alia, these words: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth...”
The land of Israel, called Palestine by the Romans, was not vacant after the Jews left. It was inhabited by many peoples. After the coming of Islam, the people of Palestine became Muslims. Jerusalem, holy to the Jews and Christians, also became the third-holiest place for the Muslims. Thus, the establishment of Israel in 1948 on account of the sympathy for the Jews whom the Nazis slaughtered in the Holocaust led to the expulsion of the Palestinian Muslims from lands they had lived in for fifteen hundred years. The Palestinians call their expulsion ‘Nakba’ (catastrophe). The Arab-Palestinian conflict is thus rooted in different versions of historical memory and is not susceptible to an early resolution through a two-state solution, which the international community, including India, advocates. None of this implies that the horrors of October 7, 2023 or the brutal and continuing Israeli response can be justified.
Just before launching his aggression on Ukraine in February 2022, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, had accused the Ukrainians of betraying their common origin with the Russian people which lay in what is now Ukraine. He also accused them of betraying the ideal of their common Slavic heritage by turning away from Russia towards the West. Obviously, historical memory was operating here too. For the Ukrainians, this was nonsense. They take pride in their Ukrainian identity which they assert is different from that of the Russians. Besides, they argue that the notion of betrayal is unjustified because international law gives them the right to make national choices unfettered by the burden of historical memories in sections of the Russian people. In addition to these remote memories, for Putin, the expansion of NATO is also a betrayal by the West of understandings reached between it and the Soviet leadership at the time of Germany’s unification in 1990. Both these factors have led him to amalgamate parts of Ukraine into Russia as sovereign Russian territory.
That is a step that any Russian leadership will find difficult to reverse despite the recent occupation by Ukraine of some Russian territory in the Kursk region. India’s foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, while briefing the media after Narendra Modi’s recent meeting with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in New York, wondered “Will the war end”? He answered his own question by saying, “Only time will tell.” This did not reveal any optimism on his part. He went on to add, “The consensus is that we must find a way to achieve a ceasefire.” Can Ukraine accept one which leaves large swathes of its territory amalgamated by Russia even if the world does not recognise the Russian step? The historical memories of both peoples and their sense of betrayal do not give hope for a resolution and a ceasefire will only make the conflict frozen, adding another layer to the popular memories in both countries.
There are other conflicts where historical memory is vivid, making them intractable. Pakistan is trapped in the burden of memory which is making it impossible for it to pursue a rational India policy.
Finally, the Indian people must never allow the burdens of history to influence their social and political future. But that is a subject to be explored separately.
Vivek Katju is a retired Indian Foreign Service officer