New Historians

The New Historians (Hebrew: ההיסטוריונים החדשים‎, HaHistoryonim HaHadashim) are a loosely-defined group of Israeli historians who have challenged traditional versions of Israeli history, including Israel's role in the Palestinian Exodus in 1948 and Arab willingness to discuss peace. The term was coined in 1988 by one of the leading New Historians, Benny Morris. According to Ethan Bronner of The New York Times, the New Historians sought to advance the peace process.^[1]

Much of the primary source material used by the group comes from Israeli government papers declassified thirty years after the founding of Israel.^[2] Morris, Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev, Hillel Cohen, Baruch Kimmerling^[3] and (retrospectively) Simha Flapan are counted among the "new historians." Many of their conclusions have been incorporated into the political ideology of post-Zionists. The political views of the group vary, as do the periods of Israeli history in which they specialize.

Main arguments

Avi Shlaim described the New Historian's differences from what he termed the "official history" in the following terms. According to Shlaim:

• The official version said that Britain tried to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state; the New Historians claimed that it tried to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state
• The official version said that the Palestinians fled their homes of their own free will; the New Historians said that the refugees were chased out or expelled‎
• The official version said that the balance of power was in favour of the Arabs; the New Historians said that Israel had the advantage both in manpower and in arms
• The official version said that the Arabs had a coordinated plan to destroy Israel; the New Historians said that the Arabs were divided
• The official version said that Arab intransigence prevented peace; the New Historians said that Israel is primarily to blame for the dead end.^[4]

Pappé suggests that the Zionist leaders aimed to displace most Palestinian Arabs; Morris sees the displacement happening in the heat of war. According to the New Historians, Israel and Arab countries each have their share of responsibility for the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian plight.^[4]

Criticism

The writings of the New Historians have come under repeated criticism, both from traditional Israeli historians who accuse them of fabricating Zionist misdeeds, and from Arab or pro-Arab writers who accuse them of whitewashing the truth about Zionist misbehaviour. They are accused of ignoring four critical questions: Who started the war? What were their intentions? Who was forced to mount a defence? What were Israel's casualties?^[5]

Early in 2002, the most famous of the new historians, Benny Morris, publicly reversed some of his personal political positions,^[6] though he has not withdrawn any of his historical writings. Morris says he did not use much of the newly available archival material when he wrote his book: "When writing The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947–1949 in the mid-1980s, I had no access to the materials in the IDFA [IDF Archive] or the Haganah Archive and precious little to first-hand military materials deposited elsewhere."^[7]

Anita Shapira offers the following criticism:

One of the more serious charges raised against the "new historians" concerned their sparse use of Arab sources. In a preemptive move, [Avi] Shlaim states at the outset of his new book that his focus is on Israeli politics and the Israeli role in relations with the Arab world—and thus he has no need of Arab documents. [Benny] Morris claims that he is able to extrapolate the Arab positions from the Israeli documentation. Both authors make only meager use of original Arab sources, and most such references cited are in English translation... To write the history of relations between Israel and the Arab world almost exclusively on the basis of Israeli documentation results in obvious distortions. Every Israeli contingency plan, every flicker of a far-fetched idea expressed by David Ben-Gurion and other Israeli planners, finds its way into history as conclusive evidence for the Zionist state's plans for expansion. What we know about Nasser's schemes regarding Israel, by contrast, derives solely from secondary and tertiary sources.^[8]

Israeli historian Yoav Gelber criticized New Historians in an interview, saying that aside from Benny Morris, they did not contribute to the research of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War in any way. He did however note that they contributed to the public discourse about the war.^[9]

Post Zionism

Some commentators have argued that the historiography of the New Historians has both drawn inspiration from, and lent impetus to, a movement known as post-Zionism. Generally the term "post-Zionist" is self-identified by Jewish Israelis who are critical of the Zionist enterprise and are seen by Zionists as undermining the Israeli national ethos.^[10] Post-Zionists differ from Zionists on many important details, such as the status of the law of return and other sensitive issues. Post-Zionists view the Palestinian dispossession as central to the creation of the state of Israel.

Zionists and old Historians argue that Post-Zionism is a total denial of the Zionist project and endangers the very legitimacy and existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish nation state, by viewing Zionism as a colonial phenomenon and not as a national movement. Shlomo Avineri in "Post-Zionism doesn't exist" printed in Ha'aretz has said that "post-Zionists are simply anti-Zionists of the old sort."^[11]

Benny Morris

• The "Old Historians" lived through 1948 as highly committed adult participants in the epic, glorious rebirth of the Jewish commonwealth. They were unable to separate their lives from this historical event, unable to regard impartially and objectively the facts and processes that they later wrote about.^[12]
• The “Old Historians” have written largely on the basis of interviews and memoirs and at best made use of select batches of documents, many of them censored.^[12]
• Benny Morris has been critical of the old Historians, describing them, by and large, as not really historians, who did not produce real history: "In reality there were chroniclers and often apologetic",^[13] and refers to those who produced it as "less candid", "deceitful" and "misleading".^[14]

Major debates

On a few occasions there have been heated public debates between the New Historians and their detractors. The most notable:

• Benny Morris and Avi Shlaim versus Shabtai Teveth
  Teveth is best known as a biographer of David Ben-Gurion. Teveth: Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 26 (1990) 214–249; Morris: 1948 and After; Teveth: Commentary; Morris and Shlaim: Tikkun.

• Benny Morris versus Norman Finkelstein and Nur Masalha
  This took place in three articles in the Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. 21, No. 1, Autumn, 1991. While acknowledging that Morris had brought to light a vast quantity of previously unknown archival material, Finkelstein and Masalha accused Morris of presenting the evidence with a pro-Zionist spin. Finkelstein wrote "Morris has substituted a new myth, one of the "happy medium" for the old. ... [T]he evidence that Morris adduces does not support his temperate conclusions. ...[S]pecifically, Morris's central thesis that the Arab refugee problem was "born of war, not by design" is belied by his own evidence which shows that Palestine's Arabs were expelled systematically and with premeditation." Masalha accused Morris of treating the issue as "a debate amongst Zionists which has little to do with the Palestinians themselves", and of ignoring the long history that the idea of "transfer" (removal of the Palestinians) had among Zionist leaders. In his response, Morris accused Finkelstein and Masalha of "outworn preconceptions and prejudices" and reiterated his support for a multifaceted explanation for the Arab flight.

• Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappé versus Efraim Karsh
  Efraim Karsh of King's College, London, is a founding editor of Israel Affairs. Starting with an article in the magazine Middle East Quarterly,^[15] Karsh alleged that the new historians "systematically distort the archival evidence to invent an Israeli history in an image of their own making". Karsh also provides a list of examples where, he claims, the new historians "truncated, twisted, and distorted" primary documents. Shlaim's reply^[16] defended his analysis of the Zionist-Hashemite negotiations prior to 1948. Morris declined immediate reply,^[17] accusing Karsh of a "mélange of distortions, half-truths, and plain lies", but published a lengthy rebuttal in the Winter 1998 issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies. Morris replied to many of Karsh's detailed accusations, but also returned Karsh's personal invective, going so far as to compare Karsh's work to that of Holocaust deniers. Karsh also published a review^[18] on an article of Morris,^[19] charging him with "deep-rooted and pervasive distortions". Karsh systematically rejects the methodology of new historians such as Morris in his book Fabricating Israeli History: The 'New Historians' (Israeli History, Politics and Society) (2000).

• Teddy Katz versus Alexandroni Brigade
  In 1998, Teddy Katz interviewed and taped Israeli and Palestinian witnesses to events at Tantura in 1948 and wrote a master's thesis at Haifa University claiming that the Alexandroni Brigade committed a massacre in the Arab village of Tantura during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The veterans of the brigade sued Katz for libel. During the court hearing Katz conceded by issuing a statement retracting his own work. He then tried to retract his retraction, but the court disallowed it and ruled against him. He appealed to the Supreme Court but it declined to intervene. Meanwhile a committee at Haifa University claimed to have found serious problems with the thesis, including "quotations" that were contradicted by Katz's taped records of interview. The university suspended his degree and asked him to resubmit his thesis. The new thesis was given a "second-class" pass. The Tantura debate remains heated, with Ilan Pappé continuing to support allegations of a massacre.

Notes

See also

• Historiography
• Historical revisionism
• History wars (comparable Australian phenomenon)

References

• Efraim Karsh, Rewriting Israel's History, Middle East Quarterly, June 1996, Volume 3, Number 2.
• Efraim Karsh, Benny Morris and the Reign of Error, Middle East Quarterly, March 1999, Volume 6, Number 1.
• Efraim Karsh, "Resurrecting the Myth: Benny Morris, the Zionist Movement, and the 'Transfer' Idea", Israel Affairs, Vol. 11, No. 3 (July 2005), pp. 469–490.
• Benny Morris, Peace? No chance, The Guardian, February 21, 2002.
• Benny Morris, Undeserving of a Reply Middle East Quarterly, September 1996, Volume 3, Number 3.
• David Ratner, PA paid legal defense fees of 1948 Tantura affair historian, Haaretz online, article undated, retrieved February 25, 2005.
• Anita Shapira, The Past is not a Foreign Country, The New Republic, 11/29/99.
• Avi Shlaim, A Totalitarian Concept of History, Middle East Quarterly, September 1996, Volume 3, Number 3.

Further reading

• The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians, co-edited by David N. Myers and David B. Ruderman ISBN 0-300-07216-3.
• Fabricating Israeli history: The 'New Historians', Efraim Karsh, ISBN 0-7146-8063-X.
  • Refabricating 1948, Benny Morris, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol 27, Issue 2 (Winter 1998), 81–95. (Morris' rebuttal to Karsh.)
• The making of the Arab-Israeli conflict, 1947–1951, Ilan Pappé (1994), ISBN 1-85043-819-6.
• The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappé, Oneworld, Oxford: 2006 ISBN 1851684670
• Benny Morris, 1948, Yale University Press, 2008, ISBN 9780300126969
• The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, co-edited by Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim

External links

• Avi Shlaim, The War of the Israeli Historians
• Angela French, Reexamining Israel's History, Mitzpeh, May 2002.
• A critical Palestinian perspective
• Jerome Slater, What Went Wrong? The Collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process, Political Science Quarterly, Volume 116, Number 2, Summer 2001.
• Daniel Polisar, Editorial: "Making History", Azure, Azure Spring 5760 / 2000; editorial is dated February 1, 2000.