Agnotology in Palestine/Israel

Abstract

Abstract This essay, a product of a reflection and dialogue between a Palestinian and a Jewish Israeli, revisits the so-called "Teddy Katz Affair," a heated debate that erupted first in 2000 but resurfaced recently due to a new documentary. The Affair was triggered by a newspaper article reporting about a master’s thesis, which relied heavily on oral testimonies, that concluded that war crimes against Palestinians were committed during the 1948 War in the village of Tantura. After chronicling briefly the sequence of events — which included a libel suit, a public debate, and retraction of the thesis by the university — this article assesses its broader impact on the historiography of Palestine/Israel. Finally, it proposes to employ the term “agnotology” to describe the mechanisms that were developed to distort and silence Palestinian narratives in Israel. Agnotology, it is suggested, is a concept that better captures the hierarchies of knowledge that were used to distinguish Jewish testimonials from Palestinian memories and the process by which they were absorbed and codified by academic historians following the Affair.