Who Writes History?

I have been disturbed by a thought that is not new to me, but one that has hit me afresh. I have been reading the book The Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe -- and I have simply been astounded by the documented events that happened in the formation of the nation of Israel in 1948 that I simply was not told. Ilan Pappe is actually an Israeli historian who simply could not stand to have the truth not be told about the atrocities that have happened to the Palestinian people during these years of "destiny." By all measures, Ilan Pappe documents through transcripts of meetings, military orders, diaries, and other resources the atrocities committed by the Israeli people toward the Palestinian people who owned 94% of the land that was taken away from them, by force, and given to the nation of Israel (England played a major role in all of this happening until 1936 when they decided to let the UN make the decision about Palestine -- which after 9 months of looking at the issues ignored the pleads of the Palestinians [the natives of the land] and the other Arab nations ruling in favor of the Jewish people because of the recent Holocaust).

The methods planned out by the Israeli people in what is known as "Operation Dalet" (the fourth letter of the Hebrew alphabet) include: village raids, key individual executions in front of entire villages held at gun point, burning down of houses, planting of land mines in rubble to keep people away, rapes, and other atrocities (I am starting to understand more and more why the Middle Eastern countries do not favor the Western nations supporting Israel). By the end, over 800,000 Palestinians were forcefully displaced from their homes. While I was totally sickened by these truths that do not surface in any of my history books -- it struck me like lightening once again -- history is often written by those that are victorious in battle.

While it sometimes does occur, we often ignore, if not silence, the victims of empires expanding their spoils of war. For example, do we hear of the modern histories of the American Indians that lost their land in the war? Or more close to home, if we did not have the Bible, where would we hear in the annals of Roman history about the atrocities done to Christians? Very little information (outside of the antics of Nero) are found about the way in which Christians were constantly persecuted as atheistic, incestuous, treasonous, anarchists that were probably even cannibals -- at least that's the rumor.

I do not think, however, that this means that we should be suspicious of all history, but I do think this should make us think more critically about "the way things are." For example, I know the history books will write about the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime and the "War on Terrorism," but who is going to write about the perspective of the impoverished Iraqi who is trying to stay away from the crosshairs of each side? Who is writing about the women in Afghanistan who are caught in the middle of a political tug-of-war of the east trying to keep them hidden in traditional Islam and the west trying to "free" them by exposing them to shameful situations from their culture's perspective? Who will write the history of the generation of children experiencing genocide on the losing side of the chaos in Darfur?

All in all, I hope we are careful in our devotion to an idea of innocence toward a nation as written by history, because terrorism is simply a matter of perspective -- I pray we are constantly keeping God's call to a pure and faultless religion in the forefront of our minds. I pray we are caring after the one's lost in the cracks of our history books: the orphans and the widows.