Some people are born with historical consciousness. When they walk in the world, they do not think only about the present or the future but also feel the past. They move through Jerusalem with Abraham and Isaac, with David and Hizkiyahu, and their lips mutter the prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah. They see the new arrivals from Russia, Ethiopia, and France and think of the Jews in the Diaspora who prayed for generations for Zion. They take a bus down Herzl Street and they think of those who established the Zionist movement in order to enable the Jews of Europe to return to this place. The Arab siege of Jerusalem in 1948 is also part of their memories, even if they were born years later.

Those with such consciousness know very well that they would not have been here, in Jerusalem, under a sovereign Jewish state, without all this past. They feel part of this history and feel this history is part of them.

I guess I’m one of them. When I’m riding my motorcycle through the streets of Jerusalem and it starts to rain I feel joyful. (See? History can sometimes be useful.) How many Jews died without realizing their dream to come to Jerusalem? How many times did Jews pray for rain in Eretz Yisrael? How lucky I am to be caught in the rain in Jerusalem.

But when someone has a real historical consciousness he cannot lie to himself. He knows that according to the Bible, the days of David and Solomon were not a real golden age. He bears in mind the civil wars between the Hebrew tribes; he recognizes that the prophets called for social justice because there was no social justice in their times. He starts to differentiate between myth and reality.

And when one has a real historical consciousness, he cannot, of course, ignore history. So when he walks in the Old City of Jerusalem he remembers the Caliph Omar Ibn al-Khattab who conquered Jerusalem from the Byzantines in 638 and allowed the Jews to resettle in the City; he turns his thoughts to the Mamluks who established dozens of public buildings inside the walls; he considers the legacy of the aristocratic Muslim families of Jerusalem who held senior positions in the Ottoman administration. He remembers the riots in 1929 when Arabs massacred some 130 Jews —and remembers also the Palestinians who saved many Jews’ lives in Hebron and elsewhere. And when he goes (if he goes) to the biggest mall in Jerusalem, Malha Mall, he is aware that he is walking on the ruins of the village of al-Maliha that was destroyed in 1948, and that the inhabitants of this village now live in al-Aideh refugee camp and elsewhere; and when he goes to the income tax offices in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Givat Shaul he knows that it was built on the land of the village of Deir Yasin; and when he visits Tel Aviv University he knows that this institution “inherited” the land (and some of the buildings) of the village of Sheikh Munis. And he asks himself: what should be done with all this history? Isn ’t it better to forget? Do we have to teach Israeli schoolchildren the truth about the history of this country?

My answer is yes. We should all know much more about the history of our country. We should know what really happened in 1948. Where, when, and why the Arabs were the aggressors, and where, when, and why the Jews were. We should acknowledge the Palestinian-Arab history of the land, as the Palestinians should acknowledge ours. We should understand that the current Arab antagonism towards Israel is not an outcome of blind anti-Semitism but a consequence of a historical process in which the fear of the Palestinian Arabs that they would be thrown out of their land was realized. Sixty years after Israel won its independence, it is time to stop ignoring the fact that our country was established on the ruins of Palestinian society, figuratively and literally. It is time to start thinking about what that means to us, and what we should do with this tragic fact.