Since Israel's founding in 1948, there have been two Arab-Israeli
conflicts. The first one is military in nature. Played out on the
battlefield, it has heroes, villains, martyrs, and victims. The second
conflict, less bloody but no less incendiary, is the battle over the
historical culpability for the 1948 war and the displacement of large
numbers of Palestinian Arabs.
The Israeli narrative views the Palestinian tragedy as primarily self-
inflicted, resulting from their vehement rejection of the 1947 United
Nations resolution calling for two states in Palestine, and the
violent attempt by regional Arab states to abort the Jewish state at
birth. By contrast, Palestinians view the episode as one in which they
fell victim to a Zionist strategy that dispossessed them from their
patrimony.
The New Historians
In the late 1980s the Palestinian narrative was bolstered by the
advent of a group of Israeli "new historians" who systematically
rewrote the history of Zionism, warping the saga for Israel's
survival. Aggressors were characterized as hapless victims and victims
became aggressors. Rarely found in these revisionist accounts was the
outspoken Arab commitment to destroy the Jewish national cause since
the early 1920s, or the dogged efforts of the Jews to achieve peaceful
coexistence. Instead, Zionism is depicted as an aggressive and
expansionist movement, or an offshoot of rapacious European
imperialism. According to Avi Shlaim, a noted new historian, Israel
was an "aggressive and overbearing military superpower," while
Palestinian Arabs could "only be seen as victims."
Aware that many of their key arguments and revelations were already
negated by the existing work of "Israeli writers, not to mention
Palestinian, Arab, and Western writers," as Shlaim noted, new
historians staked their legitimacy on their supposed use of recently
declassified do***ents from the archives of the British Mandate period
and Israel's early days. This pretense, however, was debunked inter
alia by a startling admission by Benny Morris of Ben-Gurion University
in Beer Sheva.
In researching The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-1949,
the most influential work of the new historians, Morris had "no access
to the materials in the IDFA [Israel Defense Force Archive] or Hagana
Archive and precious little to first-hand military materials deposited
elsewhere." Nevertheless, he insisted, "the new materials I have seen
over the past few years tend to confirm and reinforce the major lines
of description and analysis, and the conclusions, in The Birth."
This revelation was very damning. What made Morris and his colleagues
worth reading was their claim to have studied newly available
do***entary evidence. It was this evidence, the new historians argued,
that necessitated a reevaluation of Israeli history. Yet there was
Morris, admitting that he had not "had access" to, or "was not aware
of," the voluminous archives of Israeli institutions whose actions in
1948 formed the basis of his indictment.
Morris and other new historians also failed to confirm and reinforce
their conclusions with previously available sources. What they did
confirm was what was already known: the collapse and dispersion of
Palestinian society was largely the responsibility of Palestinian and
other Arab leaders, not of the Zionists.
Morris' Distortion
Upon close examination, it appears that Morris and other new
historians engaged in systematic falsification of evidence. They seem
to have invented an Arab-Israeli history that fits with the political
agenda they promote. Tactics range from the "innocent" act of
extrapolating incorrect conclusions from do***ents, to tendentious
truncation of source materials in ways that distort their original
meanings, and even rewriting original texts to convey things they did
not intend. Two brief examples are worth noting.
In a letter to his son in 1937, David Ben-Gurion, the first prime
minister of Israel, wrote:
We do not wish and do not need to expel Arabs and take their place.
All our aspiration is built on the assumption - proven throughout all
our activity - that there is enough room for ourselves and the Arabs
in Palestine.
In The Birth, however, Morris claims Ben-Gurion penned the opposite:
"We must expel Arabs and take their place." Curiously, in his Hebrew-
language writings, Morris rendered Ben-Gurion's words accurately,
perhaps knowing that readers could check the original source.
In a separate article, Morris distorted Ben-Gurion's words from an
Israeli cabinet meeting on June 16, 1948:
We did not start the war. They made the war, Jaffa went to war against
us. So did Haifa. And I do not want those who fled to return. I do not
want them again to make war.
The key sentence, "I do not want those who fled to return," is simply
not found in the text of the meeting transcript. Rather, it reads as
follows:
We did not start the war. They made the war. Jaffa waged war on us,
Haifa waged war on us, Beit Shean waged war on us. And I do not want
them again to make war.
Again, in the Hebrew version of his article, Morris did not distort
Ben-Gurion's words.
At What Risk?
The discipline of history, the rigorous search for the truths of our
past, typically eschews the blatant distortion of facts. Yet, in the
highly politicized field of Middle Eastern studies, the new historians
are lionized as pioneers. They are viewed by their colleagues and
understudies as courageous for debunking Zionist "mythology" at a
considerable professional risk.
The new historians have not faced the slightest risk to their careers,
however. The humanities and social sciences faculties in most
American, European, and even Israeli universities are dominated by
like-minded academics. Indeed, the new historians have become
celebrated figures and have cashed in on their prestige. They receive
book deals and travel op****tunities to share their "findings" around
the world. As Tom Segev, a journalist and new historian joked, "we
perform at weddings and bar mitzvas." Even a minor figure like Haifa
University student Teddy Katz, who published phony allegations of a
1948 Israeli massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in the village of
Tantura, was taken on a U.S. campus tour to promote his fabrications.
Pals of the Palestinians
Not surprisingly, the Palestinian propaganda machine has embraced the
new historians with alacrity. Who could possibly provide better
"proof" of the validity of the Palestinian narrative than Israeli
scholars who claim access to declassified Israeli do***ents?
Prominent politicians, including Palestinian Authority President
Mahmoud Abbas and PLO mouthpiece Hanan Ashrawi, and Palestinian
academics, including the late Edward Said and Columbia University's
Ra****d Khalidi, have regularly cited the new historians in sup****t of
Palestinian territorial and political claims. The partisan Journal of
Palestine Studies has made new historians their favorite contributors.
Palestinian propaganda websites contain countless "facts" drawn from
their writings. Palestinian negotiators in the failed Camp David (July
2000) and Taba (January 2001) peace summits re****tedly invoked the
work of new historians, notably Morris' Birth, in attempts to
establish Israel's culpability for the 1948 naqba (catastrophe).
Impacting Israel
The new historians also had a profound impact on mainstream Israeli
opinion during the Oslo years. Fatigued by decades of terrorism,
yearning for normalcy, and desperate for reconciliation with the
Arabs, many educated Israelis warmed to the factually incorrect notion
that much of the fault for the conflict lay with their own country. If
reconciliation with the Arabs could not be achieved through military
deterrence, they reasoned, might not a new start be made by
accommodating Arab demands, acknowledging Israeli culpability for Arab
suffering, and agreeing to political and territorial concessions
stemming from the "original sin" of the Jewish state?
This mindset helps explain, in part, the headlong embrace by so many
educated Israelis of the Oslo process, and their insistence that it
would solve the problem of Arab intransigence. For them, Palestinian
violence and vitriol made it more necessary than ever to embrace the
idea of Jewish culpability. Convinced that Arab grievances were rooted
in Israeli aggression, many Israelis believed that violence could only
be overcome by appeasement and concessions.
Throughout the 1990s, the new historians' interpretation of the
conflict became increasingly embedded in Israeli thinking, the
mainstream Israeli media, and even Israeli educational curriculum.
"Only 10 years ago, much of this was taboo," the Israeli author of a
new ninth-grade textbook boasted to the New York Times. "Now we can
deal with this the way Americans deal with the Indians and black
enslavement."
Embracing 'New History' Under Fire
Even the Palestinian war of terror in September 2000 (also known as
the al-Aqsa intifada) failed to awaken many Israelis to the dangers of
the new historians. Indeed, Israel continued to negotiate for peace,
even as Yasir Arafat made it clear that he had launched a war to
"liberate" Jerusalem.
One Israeli negotiator, Shlomo Ben-Ami, lauded the contribution of new
historians to the political process. "The negotiations," he said,
"were a struggle of narratives, and the new historians definitely
helped in consolidating the Palestinians' conviction as to the
validity of their own narrative... the Israeli peacemakers came to the
negotiating table with perspectives that were shaped by recent
research." So impressed was Ben-Ami with this "recent research" that
he vested Avi Shlaim, the new historian from Oxford University, with
the task of reading the manuscript of his 2006 book on the Arab-
Israeli conflict.
The Song Remains the Same
Years after the demise of the Oslo peace process, the deleterious
effects of new history can still be observed. The intensely anti-
Israel and anti-Jewish atmosphere that emerged in the years after the
launch of the intifada has not waned. The despicable equation of
Zionism and Nazism has become commonplace, alongside outlandish
conspiracy theories regarding Jewish and Israeli domination of world
affairs. There has even been a surge in attacks on Jewish targets
throughout Europe at a level not seen since the 1930s.
Here, too, the new historians have played a role. Take, for example,
the working-paper-turned-book by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer on
the supposed hijacking of U.S. foreign policy by a ruthless Jewish
cabal beholden to Israel. Walt and Mearsheimer cite the new history in
an attempt to prove Israel's alleged mistreatment of the Palestinians.
Indeed, the two international relations theorists cited so much from
the new historians that their book drew an angry riposte from Morris
for allegedly misquoting him and taking his writings out of context.
Did Morris have a minor pricking of conscience over the untold damage
he had wrought on Israel and the discipline of history? In addition to
lambasting Walt and Mearsheimer, he was critical of Yasir Arafat and
the Palestinian Authority's campaign of terrorism after the failure of
the Taba talks. But even as he strove to redress some of the damage he
had wrought, Morris brought out a new version of The Birth, which
rehashed some of his worst anti-Israel canards and re-writings of
history.
Other new historians, including Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe, have
seemingly had no misgivings. Pappe falsely claimed to have been
persecuted by his university, providing the pretext for the 2005
boycott of Haifa University by Britain's 48,000-strong Association of
University Teachers (AUT). In countless tours and media appearances in
Europe and North America, Pappe derides the Jewish state as a racist,
artificial, colonialist implant in the Middle East, and as worthy of
extirpation as the former apartheid regime of South Africa. He is
joined by Shlaim, who, in recent years, has become a proponent of the
"one state solution" - a euphemism for replacing Israel with an Arab-
Muslim state and reducing Jews to a permanent minority.
Despite his overt advocacy of politicide, along with malevolent
falsifications of Israeli history, Shlaim was recently invited to
lecture at Tel Aviv University's Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and
African Studies. This invitation affords a stark illustration of the
intellectual malaise afflicting Israeli academia, and the Israeli
public more generally, to which the new historians have made a
significant and corrosive contribution.
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