Old Historians, New Historians, No Historians

The Derailed Debate on the Genesis of Israel

Israeli

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498279192
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This polemical volume tackles the thorny and controversial issue of the vastly different narratives told (or manufactured) by the two parties of the conflict in the Middle East (the Arabs and Israel), focusing on 1948, where it all started. While all sides in this debate have vested interests, this author included, an attempt has been made here to reflect the factual truth on the events, although their interpretation will always remain controversial. Although the book argues principally with Benny Morris, the founder and leader of the so-called New Historians, it encompasses a wide array of controversial topics, like the evaluation of the 1948-49 War, the morality of the war (or the necessity to wage it as it was), and its main reverberations, such as the continuing conflict after seven decades, the aggravation of the Palestinian minority in Israel, and the essence of what history means. Israeli argues that the current debate between the so-called Old Historians and the New Historians--itself healthy if and when it is kept to the point and not allowed to degrade into personal libel and recriminations--is not really as unbridgeable as is often claimed. Both sides have erred at points and both sides have some important and complementary light to shed on the contentious events surrounding the birth of Israel.

Chapter 1

Old Historians and New Historians

The Contours of the Controversy, Themes, and Personalities

Having laid to rest the question of terminology, and identified the “New Historians” as leftist post-Zionist writers for the most part, who are out to bash Israel more than they care for scrupulous scholarship, we can now pursue the themes of their substantive controversies and try to delineate the boundaries of the two rival camps. It is noteworthy and paradoxical, however, that the pioneer and founder of the “New Historian” camp, Benny Morris, is the most salient exception to the characterization of his fellow camp-members, and this on two grounds:

1. Unlike the others, who have been accustomed to dry, boring, and humorless academic writing, he came from the journalistic tradition. Therefore his style is more crisp, vivid, and down to earth, which makes his arguments more easily persuasive and his discourse accessible to professionals as well to a wider readership. Maybe the only other member of his camp who shares such a background and blessed training is Tom Segev, a journalist from Ha’aretz, who has also written extensively in the same vein on the same era of Israel-in-the-making. Somewhat tinged by the same coloring was also Simcha Flappan, a noted socialist activist and member of the far left Mapam Party, who also gave vent to his ideological penchant when he wrote about Israel’s early years.

2. Unlike his colleagues, who boast their post-Zionist or even anti-Zionist convictions, Benny Morris has remained a loyal Zionist, and this has had a far-reaching impact on his writing and on the flexibility of his opinions and analysis. I.e., unlike the doctrinaire attitudes of some of his fellow New Historians, who seem to cling to their anti-Zionism at any cost, even at the cost of their selective reading of documents and distorted interpretation and judgment thereof, Morris has always seemed to stand by professional integrity above all, and did not even hesitate to revise some of his published analyses of the Middle Eastern situation, when it seemed to him that he had exaggerated or misread his evidence. So much so, that in one of his revised presentations, where his hosts expected him to parrot what he had previously written on the Palestinian refugees, he so stunned them by recanting on his previous version that they wondered whether he had undergone a “brain transplant.” Little did they know that Morris was not a sworn Israel-basher and that when appropriate he could change his mind, come to different conclusions, or word his presentations differently.

Except that he personally was not really “one of them” in upbringing, independence of mind, and maturity of convictions. Morris’ camp of “New Historians” and sociologists comprises a wide gamut of younger and upcoming scholars such as Avi Shlaim from Oxford, Tom Segev, a fellow journalist, Ilan Pappe, an Israeli who was ejected from academia in Israel and migrated to England, Mustafa Kabha, who takes an Arab view of the conflict, and old-time leftists who discovered revisionism well before Morris, like Flappan and Mordechai Baron. Across the aisle from that relatively younger gallery of scholars and ideologues, there is another equally respected generation of conventional and traditional scholars and publicists, who have been labeled “Old Historians,” just because they are situated in apposition to the self-appointed “New” ones, one of the most prominent of them being Ephraim Karsh, an Israeli prolific academic, who taught in England many years, then returned to Israel, and the author of many valuable contributions to the history of the Middle East and Islam. To that category, one can also add one of the historians of the 1948 War, Nethanel Lorch, and another journalist, Shabtai Teveth, who wrote on the 1948 War of Independence. Very close to this category, though not expressly identified with it, are the very respected author of a series of biographies of some of the great founders of Israel, noted historian Anita Shapira; and Yoav Gelber, one of the most salient researchers of Zionism in Israel and the author of an impressive book on the 1948 War, which preceded Morris’ by almost a decade.

More important perhaps than the list of contending proponents in each camp, are the issues of substantive controversy between the parties, which have become the testing ground of each regarding loyalty, affiliation, and scholarly identity. These themes must be distilled from the immense quantities of slime, libel, and calumny that have accumulated over the years in both camps, one against the other, to the extent of becoming personal grudge and denigration to a degree unfit to scholarship in particular and to human conduct in general. One cannot help reminiscing of Henry Kissinger’s humorous adage that “intrigues in academe are so rabid because the stakes are so low.” Therefore what this volume aspires to achieve is a cool-headed discussion of each of the themes in this debate, with as detached an analysis as possible of the facts and their interpretation, so as to show that the controversies and the accompanying accusations around them have been for the most part grossly exaggerated, and that, more often than not, it is possible to bridge them. The attempt to do so is also worthwhile because it is imperative to return the debate to its civilized and humane course.

The five major issues on which the debate has been raging are:

1. The question of whether “Israel was born in sin” in 1948. Much of this argument and many of the facts, events, and interpretations, were laid to rest by Morris himself in his definitive (if there is anything definitive in historiography) and monumental 1948 book, probably the masterpiece of all his prolific scholarly production. But while this volume is remarkably well-balanced, other writers persist in their denigration of the Jewish state and take the view that it was all illusory, unjustified, and achieved at such an exorbitant price as to make it humanly and morally unsustainable, and politically and pragmatically indefensible. This view is further pushed to the extreme in Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim historiography, which usually regards any attempt of Jewish self-determination as a deviation from the natural course of history, where Jews had been condemned to dispersion among nations for at least two millennia, therefore there was no justification today to reverse that verdict of Allah and history. One can discern an element of anti-Semitism in this attitude, for it claims in effect that while all nations of the world, including the most tiny and unlikely ones, deserve self determination, the Jews—who are one of the oldest, most cultivated, and resilient of them—are alone exempt of this rule.

2. The conduct of the 1948 War by Israel, a theme that is adjacent and complementary to the previous topic of the very creation and birth of the Jewish state. This is in fact the core issue of Morris’ seminal book and also of Gelber’s preceding publication on the same topic,3 which had a similar wide scope of discussion and analysis, though both lack an adequate coverage of that era by Arab sources and historians. This has been primarily due to the unavailability of Arabic archival documents, and to the inability of those two gifted writers to tackle directly Arabic documentation, to the extent that it was available. But then, adequate translations could have bridged that gap if needed. However, it is not only Palestinian historians and ideologues who have continuously and uninterruptedly negated—lock, stock, and barrel—the entire idea of the Jewish state, and certainly its conduct of the war that Israel dubs “of Independence,” but some “New Historians” have raised serious doubts about certain measures in Israel’s conduct of the war, to the point of either totally dismissing the Jewish state due to its “ethnic cleansing” of the Arabs (e.g., Ilan Pappe) or at least taking it to task for its “immorality” (e.g., S. Yizhar), as if there were any moral wars in existence and as if it was Israel who launched the war.

3. The other controversial issue is the attitude to Zionism. While the New Historians, with the crucial exception of Morris, are usually post-Zionist or even anti-Zionist, their “Old” rivals have been fervent Zionists and among its most zealous practitioners. Naturally, those who denigrate Zionism and heap the blame for all the misfortunes of the world on it, also lend salience to its inherent deficiencies, the most severe of them having “colonized” the land of Palestine as if there were no other people who laid claim to it. Of course, the Palestinians and other Arabs would cling to this argument and found their own national aspirations on the elimination of the Zionist “intruder”; however, we are talking here about Jewish writers who are tormented in their guts by a penetrating sense of guilt, and even a desire to repent on the “wrong” done to other people, regardless of the destructive effect this would have on their own national thinking and existence. The Old Historians, and even Morris himself, have no excuses to present to the Arab world, and are so imbued by their sense of justice that Zionism rendered to the Jewish people, that they stand up proudly in defense of their movement of national liberation and regard it as having generated the poetic justice that rehabilitated the Jewish people after millennia of persecution which culminated in the Sho’ah. After having experienced so much history and so little geography for centuries, the Zionists who converged on Israel were now debating the issues of Jewish immigration to Palestine, the maintenance of Jewish security, and the right of Jews to settle the land and take root in it. These fundamental manifestations of Zionism have also become a source of controversy between the two parties.

4. The Palestinian refugees are perhaps the most traumatic tragedy that has been the most insoluble bone of contention between Israel and Arabs, because not only did the years not heal the wound, but it continues to fester ever more desperately, to increase the numbers of refugees and their posterity, and to raise ever deeper aggravation, both among the Palestinians who are seeking their “right of return” and among the Israelis who are frustrated by this unending issue, and exasperated by its continued maintenance as a political issue, which masquerades as a humanitarian burden that cries for an urgent solution. It is noteworthy that it was precisely by touching the sensitive nerves of this problem that Morris launched his revisionist history and his academic career, and achieved a name for himself, although he also aroused an outrage among his traditional rivals by allegedly distorting and selecting his textual sources and misinterpreting their significance. Morris addressed principally the thorny question of “who caused the refugee problem,” trying to navigate with remarkable agility and sensitivity between the blanket claim of the Arabs that they had been all “expelled” by Israel during the 1948 War, and the Israeli conventional argument that most of them had fled the frontlines during the heat of the battles, or had been encouraged by their leaders to evacuate the grounds before they could return as victors when the Arabs defeated the fledgling Jewish state. Acceptance of one or the other thesis implied far reaching ramifications as far as shouldering the blame/responsibility for the disaster, for the burden to compensate the victims, and for the very legality of the state of Israel.

5. The making of the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel—which has increased tenfold since the birth of Israel, from 150,000 to close to 1.5 million, despite the claims of “ethnic cleansing” advanced by some New Historians—often relates the plight of this Arab minority to the fate of their Palestinian brethren during 1948–49, and lends some moral justification to their demand to be recognized as a corporate national minority rather than an ethnic, religious, cultural, and linguistic group of individuals who reside in a Jewish state. The older historians, who recognize the negative examples of bi-national states such as Canada, Cyprus, Belgium, or Bosnia, and understand the perils of inter-ethnic and inter-religious clashes, reject totally that idea, especially in the state of war that has continuously existed since Israel’s inception with its immediate neighbors. Some post-Zionists would not mind to see the Jewish state disintegrate and be replaced by a bi-national entity where the Arabs would gain the majority in the long run, while the present Jewish-Zionist majority understandably abhors that prospect. Naturally, this issue, which has become one of Israel’s nightmares,4 has had the most threatening impact on Israeli society in view of the intermingling between Jews and Arabs within it.

On the first account, the legitimacy of the establishment of Israel, was launched by the UN General Assembly, which adopted the resolution on the partition of Palestine on 29 November, 1947, where two thirds of the participating nations, including the US and the Soviet Union, adopted that momentous decision, while a third, consisting of Muslim nations and their allies, rejected it. Previously, the international legitimacy for the Jewish state in Palestine had relied on the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, when the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour, who was a fervent Zionist, wrote to Jewish leader Lord Rothschild an official letter where he pledged that Britain, then the victorious power that was to rule Palestine as a mandate from the League of Nations, would facilitate the emergence of a “Jewish home in Palestine.” Many interpretations were thereafter attached to that nebulous promise, but in view of the Jewish suffering in the Sho’ah—sufferings to which the Arab leader of the Palestinians, Haj Amin al-Husseini, had contributed his utmost—the determination of most nations of the world to relieve the plight of the Jews had weighed so heavily that the balance had shifted in their favor in the international arena. But when the Arabs rejected that resolution, they put themselves on the collision course with newly born Israel, and the war ensued in 1948, followed by an unending series of more wars and clashes that do not seem to end. This pattern of recurring wars could be broken only by either the Arabs accepting Israel and recognizing it (as President Sadat declared in the Knesset in 1977) or by Israel giving up its independence and national existence and bowing to Arab demands. Otherwise, the very same question of legitimacy of Israel remains pending.

On the question of the conduct of the war, it is evident that any war is unpleasant and causes suffering, and that it never unfolds the way it was conceived and carried out in the first place. Even with the best intentions in the world, civilians and other innocent people are inevitably harmed and displaced, even in civil wars situations (as in Syria and Iraq these days), so much more so in international wars where the rivals are by definition more hostile and less meticulous in their measures of caution. We saw in the world wars, in the Korean and the Vietnam war, and in the more recent Gulf wars and the American incursions in Iraq and Afghanistan, or in the Israeli retaliations in Lebanon and Gaza, many uninvolved victims killed by accident or as a result of collateral damage, which could not be helped. There are also sometimes intentional evil measures against innoce...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction: Varieties of History
• Chapter 1: Old Historians and New Historians
• Chapter 2: The Arab-Muslim Background of Hatred and Enmity towards a Jewish Political Entity
• Chapter 3: Themes of the Controversy
• Chapter 4: The Arab Historians and the Israeli New Historians
• Chapter 5: Israel and the Arabs in War and Peace and their Cost
• Conclusions
• Bibliography