Nationalist movements generate their own historical narratives in the struggle for statehood. These are, of course, usually distorted and self-serving. The official or semi-official history of the Zionist movement is no exception. Sixty years after the proclamation of the state of Israel, the origins of the state continue to preoccupy professional historians as well as the public.
The debate initially focused on 1948, on the birth of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war. This debate is not so much between Arab and Israeli historians as it is between different groups of Israeli historians. And it has excited intense interest outside as well as inside universities, because it cuts to the core of Israel's image of itself.
Zionist historians have tended to portray Israel as the innocent victim of Arab aggression, as a peace-loving nation that resorts to military force only in self-defence. According to this school, the cause of the long-running conflict has been not Israel's occupation of Arab land, but the implacable hostility of the enemies of the Jewish state.
Over the last two decades, this argument has been critically scrutinised by a group of new Israeli historians. This re-evaluation was made possible by Israel's liberal policy of releasing its official documents to researchers after 30 years. It is very much to Israel's credit that, unlike the Arab states, it allows access to its archives, thereby making possible critical studies such as those written by the "new historians."
The original group included Ilan Pappé, Benny Morris and myself. All three of us published books in 1988, on the 40th anniversary of the creation of Israel. Our books deal with different aspects of the 1948 war. Pappé, in "Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-51," argues that Britain's real aim in the twilight of its mandate over Palestine was to abort the birth of a Palestinian state rather than to prevent the creation of a Jewish one. Morris, in "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949," sees many causes behind the Palestinian exodus, including deliberate Jewish political, psychological and military pressure. He therefore concludes that Israel bears at least a small share of the responsibility for the creation of the persistent Palestinian refugee problem.
My own book was called "Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine." I argued that the Arabs were not united in their desire to strangle the Jewish state at birth, and that one of them—the ruler of Transjordan—had a tacit understanding with the Jews to divide up Palestine between themselves at the expense of the Palestinians. All three of us relied on recently declassified official Israeli documents, and all of us depicted the Palestinians as the main victims of the war for Palestine.
The new history had a significant impact on a number of different levels. First, it influenced the way the subject is taught in Israeli schools. Textbooks were rewritten to incorporate some of the findings of the new historians. Students were exposed to different and conflicting interpretations of the birth of Israel.
Second, the new history helped Israelis to understand how the Arabs view them and the conflict. Third, to Arabs the new history was in line with their own experience instead of the one-sided account of the victors. And finally, the new history helped to create a climate, on both sides, in which the Oslo peace process could move forward in the early 1990s.
Palestinian negotiators at the Camp David summit hosted by Bill Clinton in July 2000, and in the bilateral talks held in Taba in the Gulf of Aqaba early the following year, referred to the work of the new historians, especially Benny Morris, in trying to establish Israel's share of responsibility for the plight of the 1948 refugees.
Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former professor of history at Tel Aviv University, was Israel's foreign minister at the time of these negotiations. He says, "the new historians definitely helped in consolidating the Palestinians' conviction as to the validity of their own narrative… the Israeli peacemakers also came to the negotiating table with perspectives that were shaped by recent research… But the introduction of new and powerful arguments on the 1948 war into the public debate in Israel became part of the intellectual baggage of many of us, whether we admitted it or not." In short, it was a history that made a difference.
The impact of history on politics, however, is not a one-way street. Just as the "new history" helped to promote the Oslo peace process, the breakdown of this process led some of the new historians to re-examine their beliefs. In the case of Morris, the consequences were far-reaching, effectively terminating his membership of the club. Following the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000, and more particularly the resumption of suicide bombing, Morris's view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict changed radically. He no longer believes in the possibility of a peaceful solution. And he now thinks that it was a mistake on the part of Israel's founding fathers to allow even a small Palestinian minority to stay within the borders of the Jewish state.
The debate today on the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem is not between old and new historians, but within the ranks of the original group of new historians. Ilan Pappé maintains that in 1948 Israel acted on the basis of a master plan for the expulsion of the local Arabs. This conviction is reflected in the title of his 2006 book—"The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine." Benny Morris has just published another book—"1948: The First Arab-Israeli War." He is now inclined to see 1948 not as a struggle between two nations over a piece of territory, but as a jihadi onslaught by the Muslim world against the Jewish community in Palestine. Pappé blames Israel for the expulsion and the dispossession of the Palestinians; Morris comes closer than ever before to blaming the Palestinians for their own misfortunes. Some arguments never end.
