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Brett Lee-Price Page 1
What are the principal causes of the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948?
The conflict between both Israel and the surrounding Arab countries is one of the most intense and
prolonged conflicts of the modern era and the principal cornerstone of the wars in the Middle East.
The conflict, itself, was stemmed from the years gradually leading up to 1948 in Palestine, and were
marked with volatile and excessive violence and ever-increasing tensions, and while many reasons
abounded for cause of the conflict. Only several became prominent as major causes of the rift
between the Jews and the Arabs. This includes the goals of Zionism, the actions of the Pro-Jewish
British, The UN’s partitioning proposal, the Past Events, and, naturally, the ability of the leadership of
both sides to escalate the conflict. A conflict that would eventually lead to seven major wars in the
region, all designed somewhat to crush an illegitimate country whom, in the eyes of the Arabs, had
stolen its lands, and simply didn’t deserve to exist.1
To take the conflict into the context of the time, there were many small scuffles between the Jews,
the Arabs and the British leading up to the 1948 Palestine war, and this tension originates back in
1916 before the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire which encompassed Palestine. It was British
policy during the war, to convince minor ethnicities in enemy countries to rise up against the triple
alliance, to aid them and hinder the supplies of the enemy and this was achieved with the Arabs, by
promises of a great Arab nation spaning “eastward from Alexandretta to the Iranian Frontier and
thence southward to the Persian Gulf and to include the entire Arabian peninsula with the exception
of Aden”.2
Furthermore, the Young Turks whom held power in Istanbul had a policy of Turkification
which sought to make the non-Turkic people of the empire fall in line with the culture and heritage
of the Turks, which, in consequence, led to inequality and discrimination against the non-Turkish
inhabitants.
With this promise of freedom against the Ottomans, and the potential of a great Arab state, Arab
nationalism was rife throughout the Middle-East. It was under these conditions, that the Great Arab
Revolt took place, which effectively hindered and limited the Ottomans in the regions it was active.
However, while the revolt was successful, the Arab’s dream of a great Arab nation was never to be
realized as the British came to other conclusions on what was best for British interests in the Middle-
East. This policy shift consisted of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, signed by Britain, France and Russia,
which divided the region into areas of permanent colonial influence and the more relevant Balfour
1Michael Neumann, The Case against Israel (AK Press, 2005), p. 100.
2 Tareq Y. Ismael, Politics and Government in the Middle East and North Africa (University Press of Florida, 1991), p. 38.
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Brett Lee-Price Page 2
Declaration which was issued in 1917 and aimed to support the Zionists, which stated that there
would be an “establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people” .3
These
seemingly contradictory promises made by the British to their wartime allies brought much
resentment by the Arabs, who realized after the war, that they had been lied to — there would be
no great Arab nation, but separate countries, with huge slices being taken by the British and French.4
At first, many Arabs were not outright against an influx of Jews into Palestine, due to promises that it
would not impact the Palestinians to a great extent, further stating in the Balfour Declaration that it
was “being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious
rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.5 Due to this many thought it was acceptable
to agree with the Zionists and even form closer ties to the organisation, with Emir Faisal, a
prominent Arab leader during the Great Arab Revolt, coming to terms with Chaim Weizmann, leader
of the Zionist movement, while at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. This agreement called for the
fulfilment of the Balfour Declaration but was hinged on the British promises of independence to the
Arab nations, which eventually were not kept. When the Balfour Declaration was put into gear, Arab
opposition grew much firmer, due to not only the breaking of promises by the British to them, but
they saw it in the way of a foreign power encouraging immigration into the country of a group which
then sought to dominate the country. Indeed, many Zionists had formulated their demand for
territory “not as a Jewish state in Palestine but as Palestine as a Jewish state ”6
and Weizmann,
himself, stating “Palestine will become as Jewish as England is English.”7
With statements like these being issued and an ever-growing Jewish population, the Arabs living in
Palestine had little reason to not be restive, and tensions soared between the Arab majority and the
Jewish minority. By 1922, the populace of Palestine consisted of 670,000 Muslims and only 84,000
Jews and in less than a decade, the Jewish population sprouted up to 175,000 while the Arab
population increased to 860,000. Effectively doubling the Jewish population, and bringing the Jewish
percentage of the total population from 11% to 16.8%.8 9
With this influx of immigration and more
calls for a greater immigration of Jews into Palestine in conjunction with firm statements of Jewish
nationalism, and the Arab belief that the Jews wanted a nation " from the Nile to the Euphrates”10
,
violent opposition from the local Arabs started to grow. Many Arabs were fearful, that due to the
3 Isaiah Friedman, The Question of Palestine: British-Jewish-Arab Relations, 1914-18 (Transaction Publishers, 1992), p. 257.
4 William Roger Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945-1951 (Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 278-284
5 Friedman, Op cit., p. 266.
6Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (Pantheon Books, 1987), pp. 23-24.
7Joseph Mary Nagle Jeffries, Palestine: The Reality (Longmans, Green and co, 1939), p. 267.
8
Mandate Government of Palestine, Department of Statistics, 1922 Census: Statistical Abstract of Palestine, 1944-45, p. 17.9Mandate Government of Palestine, Department of Statistics, 1931 Census: Statistical Abstract of Palestine, 1944-45, p. 23.
10Daniel Pipes, The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy (St Martin’s Press, 1996), p. 67.
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Brett Lee-Price Page 3
main goal of Zionism being the establishment of a Jewish state, with a Jewish majority, that a Jewish
nation would require the expulsion or subjugation of all existing non-Jews in Palestine.
The Palestinians saw this swift influx of Jewish immigration as potentially dangerous to both their
homeland and their national identity as a people. Furthermore, the Jewish policies of prohibiting the
employment of Arabs in both Jewish factories and farms greatly angered the Palestinians, as it was
generally felt that the Jews were coming to Palestine to reap the benefits from the land but not to
contribute back to the community. The overall tension from these events and circumstances evolved
from several small isolated scuffles to larger outbreaks of violence, eventually resulting in the 1929
Palestine riots; Which started over Arab anger at a violation of the law by the Jews, with the Jews
placing a screen to segregate Men and Women at the Western Wall, when the law prevented Jews
from making any 'construction' in the Western Wall area. This violent outbreak lasted for a week in
late August, and claimed the lives of 133 Jews and 116 Arabs, with 339 Jews also wounded.11
This
illustrated the clear discontent the Palestinian Arabs had with Jewish immigration and the policies in
place by the British mandate, and did nothing but increased the tensions between the communities
tenfold.
It should be noted that the conflicts thus far in Palestine was relatively minor in the broad context of
the Israeli-Arab conflict, and that the great turning point happened to be the persecution of Jews in
Europe throughout the 1930’s and into the first half of the 1940’s. This brought a huge surge of Jewish immigration into Palestine. Under British approval and the world’s sympathy, Palestine
became an open gate to all Jews whom sought refuge from the anti-Semitic governments of the
time. Accordingly, the number of Jews in Palestine rose up to 474,102 by 1941, becoming 29.9% of
the total.12
Many demonstrations broke out throughout Palestine, protesting against the British
policy of increased Jewish immigration, the unfair preferences for Jews, and many land purchases
which the Palestinians believed was eventually leading them to become a minority within the
mandate.13
One such protest was a general work strike in Jaffa in January 1936, to demonstrate against the
aforementioned points and the death of Sheik Izz ad-Din al-Qassam at British hands, he had violently
resisted the British in the name of a free Palestine. Due to the anger at both the British and the Jews,
the strike got out of hand, leading to the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt. Instrumental in this uprising was
the Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, whom assisted in leading the Palestinians
against the Zionists and the British. A general hope or goal of the Arabs in this uprising was to
11
Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Beacon Press, 2007), p. 86. 12Esco Foundation, Palestine: A Study of Jewish, Arab, and British Policies Vol. 1 (Yale University Press, 1947), p. 46.
13David Levinson, The Encyclopaedia of World Cultures (MacMillan Reference Books, 1995), p. 264.
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achieve immediate elections which, due to their demographic majority, they would have the ability
to have a government in which to restrict any further Jewish immigration.
About one month later, the leadership of the strike called for a non-payment of taxes, explicitly in
protest to Jewish immigration. 14 The strike was ended in October 1936 after an agreement with the
British, and the violence subsided for roughly a year while a commission was setup --- this was
known as the Peel Commission. The commission deliberated for nearly an entire year and came to
the finding that a partition would be in the best interest of all parties involved. This was thoroughly
rejected by the Arabs as unjust as they would formally be ceding land to the Jewish Immigrants. The
Jewish camp on the other hand was mixed; some rejected the commission’s findings as they wanted
more, while some such as David Ben-Gurion, who was to become the first President of Israel,
declared that “We are being given an opportunity which we never dared to dream of in our wildest
imagination.” 15
Overall, the population exchange between the two partitions suggested by the Peel Commission,
would have involved the transfer of roughly 225,000 Arabs and 1,250 Jews — a relatively small
amount considering the population of both ethnic groups at the time. However, the partitioning idea
was declared unworkable by the British, and was never implemented. Due to the disfavour of the
proposal by the Palestinian Arabs, the revolt reappeared in the autumn of 1937, and violence struck
out at both the British and the Jews, whom the Arabs saw as being partners in crime, the apex of therevolt being the assassination of British Commissioner of Nazareth, Lewis Andrews in August 1937.
And while violence continued throughout 1938, it eventually simmered down and ended in 1939.
Throughout the revolt, the British cooperated with the Haganah, a Jewish Para-military organisation,
to crush Arab resistance wherever found and a working relationship developed which would later
form several security and defence forces mentioned later. Once the revolt was ultimately crushed,
the British then attempted to confiscate all weapon s from the Arab population. This combined with
the almost complete annihilation of Palestinian leadership during the revolt greatly limited their
military efforts during the 1948 war, nine years later.16
In addition, the revolt had two major affects on the Palestine issue; firstly it led to closer ties
between the British governance, and the Jewish populace, with the British recruiting, training, and
arming many Jews into a range of security and intelligence forces in collaboration with the Jewish
Agency, the self appointed government of the Jews. Examples of this include the Jewish
14
Susan Silsby Boyle, Betrayal of Palestine: The Story of George Antonius (Westview Press, 2001), p. 226.15Sabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs (Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 180-182.
16 Eugene L. Rogan, The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 190.
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Supernumerary Police, the Jewish Settlement Police and the pre-runner of the SAS, the Special Night
Squads.17
Secondly, to avoid further riots by the Arab majority to British rule, the British
implemented the White Paper of 1939. This paper proposed an end to Jewish immigration by 1944,
with a limit of 75,000 more immigrants by this point, and a supplemental 25,000 to be admitted
afterwards. After this cut-off, further immigration would depend on the permission of the Arab
majority.18
However, due to the circumstances in Europe, and Anti-Semitism spreading across
Europe, this quota was used up quickly. And by the end of the war, many Jewish Holocaust survivors
were determined to reach Palestine, this lead to the Aliyah Bet , or rather the mass illegal
immigration by Jews.
This gigantic influx of immigration consisted of over 100,000 individuals trying to gain illegal entry to
Palestine, often by boat, and was supported by many Jewish terrorist organisations, such as Irgun,
an extremist offshoot of Haganah, and the Stern Gang, which had committed several atrocities
against Palestinian Arabs. Over half of these attempts were prevented by the British authorities and
interned in camps on Cyprus. While the paper served to assure the Palestinians that further
immigration would be limited, it also alienated the Jews, and meant that British resources, in the
training of Jewish organisations, were being used against the hand which dispensed them. The
actions and feelings of the Jewish community are best summed up by the then leader of the Jewish
Agency, David Ben-Gurion stating 'We will fight the White Paper as if there is no war, and fight the
war as if there is no White Paper .' 19
Effectively, the British stuck to usage of the White Paper until the end of the Mandate, however
according to population statistics founded by the UN in 1946; The Jewish population had risen up to
608,225, an increase of the Jewish population by 28% since 1944, making the Jews 33% of the total
population.20
While the white paper sought to abate the tensions in the Palestine, it failed in its
practical aims of limiting the population to the goals set out, and to reduce the tension between the
Arabs and Jews which continued to grow. The British, being sick of this constant tension and the
involvement needed in Palestine, decided to bring the case before the newly founded successor ofthe League of Nations, the UN to decide on what to do with the Palestine issue. Like the Peel
commission before it, it felt that the best outcome and solution would be the partition of Palestine.
This idea was passed by 33 countries, and thus the 1947 Palestine Partition Plan was born. This idea
was thoroughly rejected by Arabs across the Middle-East, demanding, instead, a single state with an
Arab majority to depict that 67% of the population were Arabs. Instead the UN’s plan wished to
17Robert Silverberg, If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem: American Jews and the State of Israel (Morrow, 1970), p. 279.
18
James L. Gelvin, The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 118. 19Ibid., at 119.
20United Nations General Assembly, A/364, "UNSCOP Report to the General Assembly," September 3, 1947
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grant the Jewish 33% of the population, 56.47% of the land including the valuable coastal strip, while
giving the Arabs a smaller amount. To the Palestinians this was injustice of the worse form, as they
were being robbed of their land from usurpers, many whom arrived over the last decade. On the
other-hand, many of the Zionists and Jews were filled with joy at this proposal, but a considerable
number of others wanted more. It was clear that among the leadership especially, that if a suitable
opportunity presented itself they would take more than that allocated to them by the Partition. Ben-
Gurion himself saw the small Jewish state as a gateway to expansion, stating to confidents that “the
war will give us the land. The concepts of 'ours' and 'not ours' are only concepts for peacetime, and
during war they lose all their meaning.” 21
This echoed Zionist anger back in 1923 when Trans-Jordan
was politically separated from Palestine, as it reduced the area of any future national home of the
Jews.
Effectively, many Zionists did not accept this partition, regardless of the favourable benefits
allocated to them. Many Zionist terrorist organisations proceeded to seize areas beyond the UN’s
proposed borders, and were on an overly-aggressive offensive, to the point that before Israel
declared independence in May 1948, 300,000 Palestinians had already been either expelled from or
fled their homes, due to the actions of Irgun and Stern Gang among others.22
23
The leadership
wanted to unite the entire country under a Jewish flag, and were determined that Palestine would
become a Jewish nation with Ben-Gurion telling other Zionists, that “after we become a strong force,
as the result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of
Palestine”24
, the Jewish politician, Menachem Begin also weighing in with that “The partition of the
Homeland is illegal . It will never be recognized. The signature of institutions and individuals of the
partition agreement is invalid. It will not bind the Jewish people. Jerusalem was and will forever be
our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel, All of it. And forever .”25
Ultimately, the message was clear, there could only be a Jewish home in Palestine, and the Jewish
Leadership and Zionist organisations were chief reasons on the irreconcilable factors leading up to
the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. With the British both setting the ball rolling, and failing to find peace
between the two communities, tension and conflict was Inevitable. The motivation and interests of
all parties involved were found to be crucially different and vitally incompatible, and all prior
solutions at ending this conflict were futile. This eccentric mix of past events, the leadership of both
sides, and the failure of the British to maintain the area lead to a conflict which is still ongoing today.
21Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 45.
22Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky (New Press, 2002), pp. 131-132.
23
Morris, Op cit., p. 66.24Neumann, Op cit., p. 59.
25Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (South End Press, 1999), p. 161.
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Works Cited
Boyle, S. S. (2001). Betrayal of Palestine: The Story of George Antonius. Oxford: Westview Press.
Chomsky, N. (1999). Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians. Boston: SouthEnd Press.
Chomsky, N. (2002). Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky. New York: New Press.
Esco Foundation. (1947). Palestine: A Study of Jewish, Arab, and British Policies Vol. 1. New York:
Yale University Press.
Flapan, S. (1987). The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. New York: Pantheon Books.
Friedman, I. (1992). The Question of Palestine: British-Jewish-Arab Relations, 1914-1918. London:
Transaction Publishers.
Gelvin, J. L. (2007). The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Ismael, T. Y. (1991). Politics and Government in the Middle East and North Africa. Miami: University
Press of Florida.
Jefferies, J. M. (1939). Palestine: The Reality. London: Longmans, Green and co.
Khalidi, R. (2007). The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Boston: Beacon
Press.
Levinson, D. (1995). Encyclopedia of World Cultures. London: MacMillan Reference Books.
Louis, W. R. (1984). The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945-1951. London: Oxford University
Press.
Mandate Government of Palestine. (1947). Statistical Abstract of Palestine, 1945-45. London.
Morris, B. (2004). The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Neumann, M. (2005). The Case Against Israel. Oakland: AK Press.
Pipes, D. (1996). The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy . New York: St Martin's Press.
Rogan, E. L. (2007). The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948. London: Cambridge
University Press.
Silverberg, R. (1970). If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem: American Jews and the State of Israel. New York:
Morrow.
Teveth, S. (1985). Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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A question of historiography:the “new historians” of Israel
E T OTTMAN ※
Abstract
Controversy continues to surround the so-called Revisionist Historians of Israel,
whose retellings in the late 1980s of the true origins of their State were to cause
profound psychic aftershocks. Their leading historian, Benny Morris, has
retreated dramatically to a traditional Zionist-determinist position; scandal-
mired Ilan Pappe felt compelled to quit his position as a professor at the
University of Haifa and take up a post at a British university (Exeter), from
where he continues with greater impunity his campaign to have Israeli
universities boycotted. Avi Shlaim also criticizes from the judicious distance of
the UK (St. Anthonys College, Oxford). Despite Morriss apparent ideological
volte-face, accounts that have a powerful bearing on our interpretation of the
Israel-Palestine conflict continues to be produced, an approach that is
emphatically subjective, often but not always standing for the defeated over the
victorious (Pappe, 2004:121) Yet the question remains: is this history? The
author considers how the narrative that seeks to redress injustice, to rewrite,
indeed salvage, a history that was erased and forgotten (Pappe, 2004:xx)2
increases historical understanding.
Introduction
How can we ever know what really happened? How can we know why we are as
we are now? History should tell us; but often, it does not. For one thing, unless it
is in the recent past, it is intangible, unobservable; what remains is located in
archives, monuments and fragments. We simply cannot grasp history without the
※ Associate Professor, School of Government, Kyoto University
1. Pappe, I. (2004) A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
2. Pappe, I. (2004) Op. cit.
© The International Studies Association of Ritsumeikan University:
Ritsumeikan Annual Review of International Studies, 2008. ISSN 1347-8214. Vol.7, pp. 55-67
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E T OTTMAN
services of a medium, the one who constructs (not reconstructs, for the past
cannot be resurrected) the bridge of inquiry between ourselves and the past
(White, 1999): the historian3. And since history is written by humans, it is
inevitably shaped. Even setting aside Hayden Whites notion that all historians
operate from metahistories (their own perceptions of what history ought to be)
there is the simple proposition that from the moment that the historian is
interposed between ourselves and the past̶ the moment of interpretation̶ we
have noise or spin. There are facts, to be sure̶ dates and events̶ but it takes
narration to bring them together, to order them in a comprehensible fashion, to
emplot them (in Whitean parlance). No amount of rigorous pseudo-
wissenschaftlich methodology can transform history into hard science4:
History or rather historical studies remains the least scientific--in both its
achievements and its aspirations--of all the disciplines comprising the human and
social sciences. Ever so often, there is a move to make historical studies more
scientific, either by providing it a theoretical basis such as positivism or dialectical
materialism or by importing into it a methodology from one or another of the "social
sciences." But these efforts seldom succeed, largely because of the way that the
principal object of historical study--the event--is defined. Historical events are
considered to be time and place specific, unique and unrepeatable, not reproducibleunder laboratory conditions, and only mimimally describable in algorithms and
statistical series. (White, 1999)
Moreover, if there can be no end to history (and even Francis Fukuyama allegedly
did a volte-face on his own position) it is equally likely that that what we can
know about the past is not finite. Our knowledge will never be perfect.
White conceptualized historical narratives as a form of literary genre, a
discursive turn in which the attention focuses on the product (the text itself)
rather than on rendering an objective account of the past5: Thus historical
narratives are not neutral, but involve ontological and epistemic choices with
distinct ideological and even specifically political implications (White, 1987: ix).
The role of the historiographer is a consciously constructed one, collapsing the
3. Hayden White (1999) History as Fulfillment (Keynote Address) [online]. Available at http://
www.tulane.edu/~isn/hwkeynote.htm
4. White, op. cit.
5. P. Sutermeister (2005), Hayden White or history as narrative: A constructive approach to
historiography [online]. Available at http://www.grin.com/en/fulltext/get/25061.html
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A question of historiography
boundaries between primary and secondary sources, for although
… historical narratives proceed from empirically validated facts or events, they
necessarily require imaginative steps to place them in a coherent story; they also
represent only a selection of historical events. Thus, truth is limited. (Sutermeister,
2005)
Meanwhile, others envisioned history as inevitably coloured by (or tainted with,
dependent on ones perspective) ideology. History is therefore never history, but
history-for, wrote Claude Lévi-Strauss6 (Lévi-Strauss, 1972). For Collingwood7,
Benedetto Croce, and even White, history has a moral purpose, and true
historical investigation was always inspired by some moral concerns (Domanska,
1998: 176). Enquiry into war origins, then, is inseparable from our normative
concern, writes Suganami (1997) in Stories of war origins: a narrativist theory of
the causes of war.8 Thus, the best grounds for choosing one perspective on
history rather than another are ultimately aesthetical or moral rather than
epistemological (White, 1973: xii). And last (but by no means least) there is
history by omission, where actors or perpetrators are never directly named, and
the veracity of events as they actually occurred disappears down the rabbit-hole
of voluntary collective amnesia, described by Milliken and Sylvan (writing on American violence in Indochina) as a memory hole of non-existence (Milliken
and Sylvan, 1996: 321). No-one, it seems, writes history for posterity s sake.
Levisohn (2002) finds this deeply troubling: What of historical truth, where does it
lie? What or how should we teach our students?
… the popular easy solution of teaching both sides of controversial issues̶ both
stories̶ is hardly more defensible, since there is no readily available criterion to
determine when to teach the story and when to teach the conflict about the story, or
even which conflicting narratives deserve space in the curriculum. Moreover, if one
believes that students ought to learn how to engage in the practice of history, then
presumably one also believes that doing history entails something other than
6. C. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (La Pensée sauvage), (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. 1972) 257.
7. R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History: With Lectures 1926-1928, (Oxford: Oxford
Paperbacks, 1994) 10.
8. H. Suganami. Stories of war origins: a narrativist theory of the causes of war. Review of
International Studies (1997), 23: 418.
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E T OTTMAN
imposing a narrative on the past. Can this intuition be defended? (Levisohn, 2002:
466)
The “New Historians” of Israel
Thus we come to the compelling conundrum of the so-called New Historians of
Israel (also known as the Revisionist or Postzionist Historians), whose retelling in
the late 1980s of the true and less than heroic history of the origins of the State
of Israel, stripped of ideological myths, were to cause profound aftershocks in the
Israeli (but not the Palestinian) psyche, hitting the headlines abroad, well beyond
academic journals and the Israeli media. Writing about Zionist and Israeli
history will never be the same, thanks to scholars such as Avi Shlaim, Benny
Morris, and Ilan Pappe, comments Neil Caplan (Caplan, 1995: 96).
These days the historians are perhaps no longer so New (and indeed one of them,
Benny Morris, has fallen dramatically off the wagon and retreated to a traditional
Zionist position, but more of that later). However, controversy continues to
surround them with the publication of each new work, every new pronouncement
in the media adding to a snowstorm of letters to the editor, to such a degree that
one of their number, scandal-mired Ilan Pappe (Stein, 2002: 43), felt compelled toquit his position as a professor at the University of Haifa and take up a post at a
British university (Exeter, where he is chair of the Department of History, and
co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies) from where he
continues with limited impunity9 his campaign to have Israeli universities
boycotted (Lappin, 2007). Avi Shlaim also criticizes from the judicious distance of
the UK (as a Fellow of St. Anthony s College, Oxford, and a professor of
international relations at the University of Oxford). As Yoav Gelber observes,
Present post-Zionism … is mainly blue and white[the colours of the Israeli
national flag]̶ an Israeli product produced by people who were born and/or
9. Y. Lappin.(2007) writes in Israeli academic lashes out at 'Jewish student lobby,' students
reject allegations [online at http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3385189,00.html] an
article in the British Times Higher Education Supplement (THES), entitled 'Historian hits out
at Jewish student lobby,' extensively quoted Pappe as complaining that UK Jewish students
have formed a "lobby" aimed at quashing open debate on the Middle East. " …Professor Pappe
may find that Britain is not the haven of peace and tolerance he seeks. Jewish students' groups
have already complained about his appointment, saying he is anti-Zionist," the article said.
"Jewish student organizations have ceased to care for the interests and concerns of Jewish
students but have become a front for the Zionist point of view. They act as an arm of the Israeli
embassy," Pappe was quoted as saying.
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A question of historiography
educated in Israel though now some of them may live abroad (Gelber, 2007).
What enabled this new history to emerge, and why was it a tale untold
before? In his introduction to The Israel/Palestine Question: Rewriting Histories,
Ilan Pappe attributes the revision of traditional Zionist historiography to the
influences of recent historiographical debates taking place around the academic
world at large, a general trend towards interdisciplinarity, and the desire to
inject a more skeptical view towards historical narratives written under the
powerful hand of nationalist elites and ideologies (Pappe, 1999: 1). But the
origins of the new history were somewhat more mechanistic; indeed, nothing
could better illustrate that what we know about the past may be always
incomplete. Modelled on the British Public Records Act with its 30 year rule,
Israel also regulates the release of information from its national archives for an
identical period of time. Archival documents written during the period of the
creation of the Israeli state thus became accessible from the late 1970s, and by
1987, the first and most celebrated work of the New Historians emerged, Benny
Morriss The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-1949.
Past historiography claims that in 1947, Palestinian Arabs voluntarily left their
homes following the Arab leaders orders of temporary evacuation. Morris,however, was the first to offer a very different explanation, one which tallies with
Palestinians account of Nakba (catastrophe). He revealed that many Palestinians
fled in terror from the Zionist militias invasion of certain Palestinian Arab
villages, and also how some Palestinians were compulsorily expelled from their
land. In addition, he recounts that Zionist militias conducted massacres of
Palestinians. An extended version of this work was republished in 2004 as yet
more documents became declassified.
While the validity and supposedly groundbreaking nature of these
historiographies rests on their access to previously unseen national archival
documents that describe objective facts (as opposed to the prior ideologically-
tainted accounts): but this exclusive dependence on national documents is also
the Achilles heel of certain New Historians approach. Nevertheless Morriss
account stood out in sharp relief to the accepted version of the truth of previous
generations. In The History of Zionist Historiography, Yoav Gelber (2003, online)
excuses the first generation of pre-state Zionist historians, who focused on
portraying the relationship of Diaspora Jews with the land of Israel and with the
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E T OTTMAN
Yishuv (early settlers):
The writing of history cannot be separated from the era in which it is written.
Changing perspectives define scope, fields and focal points, attitudes to the objects of
study, and even methodological developments. …Within the context of its time frame,
Zionist historiography itself becomes part and parcel of the history of Zionism. …
Early historians of Zionism were, on the whole, amateurs - Zionist activists who under
certain circumstances became historians. (Gelber, 2003)
For the second wave of Zionist historiographers, writes Gelber, statehood changed
everything, distorting perspective on accounts of the Holocaust, which for a long
time was covered mainly through journalism (Gelber, 2003; Arendt, 1963, 1994):
Under the new circumstances, the writing of Zionist history lost its apologetic tone
and, moving to the opposite pole, began to distribute laurels to the victors. For many
years, the euphoria in the wake of the Zionist triumph blurred the central issue of
modern Jewish history the Holocaust. (Gelber, 2003)
It also blurred the sharp political divisions between the ruling Labour Zionist
party, Mapai, led by the first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion and firstpresident, Chaim Weizmann, and the right-wing Revisionist Party, led by Zeev
(Vladimir) Jabotinsky.
The New Historians (who also included Simha Flapan, Uri Milstein, Michael
Cohen, Anita Shapira, Uri Bar-Joseph, and critical sociologist Baruch
Kimmerling) emerged in the wake of the dilemma of the third generation of the
more academically sophisticated Zionist Historiographers, who were infected with
a similar desire to European historiographers, the dedication for objective
history, but hampered by their attachment to portraying the undivided
relationship of Diaspora Jews to the land of Israel. Through revealing historical
facts from the newly declassified archives, the new scholars moved beyond the
ambiguous impulses of the third generation, although not all were successful in
completely escaping their tenuous links to Zionist ideologies. (The author uses the
plural form here advisedly, for the ideologies were far from monolithic, containing
numerous strains, from the Political to Cultural or Spiritual Zionism, Labour,
Socialist, Revisionist, Practical, Liberal, Synthetic, Religious and Radical
Messianic Zionisms, to anti-Zionist Autonomists and the Neturei Karta [Ottman,
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2004; JAFIa; JAFIb, both undated.]) Nur Masalha (1992:91 ) found that although
the new histories thoroughly demolish a variety of assumptions which formed
the core of the old history, Morris did not always live up to his claim of using
this material in a critical manner and as a result this casts doubts on his
conclusions, ignoring recent works by non-Zionist scholars and thus giving the
impression that these discourses are basically the outcome of a debate among
Zionists which unfortunately has little to do with the Palestinians themselves.
For Norman Finklestein, too, Morris did not go far enough and was frequently
inconsistent (Finklestein, 1991, 1992).
Zionist historiographers fought back in the battle for Israels history. Ephraim
Karsh (professor of Mediterranean studies at King's College, University of
London) is one of Benny Morriss most vociferous critics:
As a general rule, every war is fought twice: first on the battlefield, then in the
historiographical arena. The Arabs failed to destroy the State of Israel in 1948; in the
next fifty years, they and their Western partisans waged a sustained propaganda
battle to cast the birth of Israel as the source of all evil. In the late 1980s this effort
received a major boost with the advent of a group of Israeli academics calling
themselves the New Historians who claim to have discovered archival evidencesubstantiating the anti-Israeli case. (Karsh 1999, online)
Claiming that the new politicized historians had turned the saga of Israel's
birth upside down, with aggressors turned into hapless victims and the reverse
(authors emphasis) Karsh (1999) accuses Morris of systematic falsification of
archival source material. Morris, he said, had engaged in five types of distortion:
he misrepresents documents, resorts to partial quotes, withholds evidence, makes
false assertions, and rewrites original documents. Karsh takes Morris to task
again in a systematic investigation of Morriss version of history, Fabricating
Israeli History: The New Historians (Karsh, 1997). Presenting a detailed
knockdown of the central claims of the revisionist historians, he adds that
newness of the facts unearthed was also at issue (Karsh, 1997:195). Later, in
2005, Karsh gave an equally harsh review to the expanded latest edition of
Morriss The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Morris, 2004):
The Birth Revisited is a misnomer. Rather than offer a reassessment of Morris's
previous writings on the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem, The Birth
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E T OTTMAN
Revisited is but a longer replica of its dishonest and shoddy predecessor. To downplay
his failure to consult the most important archives in the preparation of The Birth,
Morris argued that "the new materials … tend to confirm and reinforce the major
lines of description and analysis, and the conclusions, in The Birth."… And so, The
Birth Revisited continues the stubborn refusal of Morris to base his arguments and
conclusions on archival evidence and the historical record. Far from confirming and
reinforcing his arguments, archival documents demonstrate that "the Palestinian
refugee problem" was the creation of Palestinian and other Arab leaders, not of the
Zionists. (Karsh 2005, online).
Morris, as alluded to earlier, recanted in spectacular fashion in the Israeli media
(Shavit 2004, online). That is to say, he stood by his story, but claimed that his
position was never that of anti-Zionist or Post-Zionist.
Zionism was not a mistake. The desire to establish a Jewish state here was a
legitimate one, a positive one. But given the character of Islam and given the
character of the Arab nation, it was a mistake to think that it would be possible to
establish a tranquil state here that lives in harmony with its surroundings. (Shavit
2004, online)
Yes, there was expulsion; yes, there was rape and ethnic cleansing; yes, Ben
Gurion did advocate transfer of Palestinians (whom Morris describes as a time
bomb. Their slide into complete Palestinization has made them an emissary of the
enemy that is among us. They are a potential fifth column.). Without all of these,
the fledgling state would never have come into being:
Because I investigated the conflict in depth, I was forced to cope with the in-depth
questions that those people coped with. I understood the problematic character of the
situation they faced and maybe I adopted part of their universe of concepts. But I do
not identify with Ben-Gurion. I think he made a serious historical mistake in 1948.
Even though he understood the demographic issue and the need to establish a Jewish
state without a large Arab minority, he got cold feet during the war. In the end, he
faltered. … You have to put things in proportion. These are small war crimes. All told,
if we take all the massacres and all the executions of 1948, we come to about 800 who
were killed. In comparison to the massacres that were perpetrated in Bosnia, that's
peanuts. In comparison to the massacres the Russians perpetrated against the
Germans at Stalingrad, that's chicken feed. … There are cases in which the overall,
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final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.
(Shavit 2004, op.cit.)
Asked if the historical reality of the conflict is intolerable, Morris replies that it is
more so for a people that suffered for 2,000 years, that went through the
Holocaust, arrives at its patrimony but is thrust into a renewed round of
bloodshed, that is perhaps the road to annihilation. He found this far more
shocking than what happened in 1948 to a small part of the Arab nation that was
then in Palestine. Talking about his book, Righteous Victims: A History of the
Zionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 (Morris, 2001) Morris indulges in relativism,
describing the Jews as the greater victims in the course of history. They are the
weaker side … a small minority in a large sea of hostile Arabs who want to
eliminate us. One day, says Morris, Everyone will understand we are the true
victims. But by then it will be too late (Shavit 2004, op. cit.).
Morriss recantation provoked a shocked response from Tel Aviv University
philosopher Professor Adi Ophir (2004, online), who wrote, If there is a sick
society here, the publication of this interview is at one and the same time a
symptom of the illness and that which nourishes it.
Despite Morriss apparent volte-face, new history that has a powerful bearing on
our interpretation of the Israel-Palestine conflict continues to be produced. For
one thing, postzionists (and others) have accepted the responsibility of speaking
out against what they consider to be unjust power relations in society notes
Silberstein (1999:209). Theirs is a transformative, revolutionary role, in the
struggle against exclusion and domination. Quoting Foucault10, Silberstein
views these intellectuals as having a duty:
to speak on this subject, to force the institutionalized networks of information to
listen, to produce names, to point the finger of accusations, to find targets … [This is]
the first step in the reversal of power and the initiation of new struggles against
existing forms of power. (Foucault 1996:79, in Silberstein, 1999:209)
For another thing, says the Andersonian Ilan Pappe (Pappe, 2004), it is the
zeitgeist; the timing is right for a story told from a humanist, and not nationalist,
10. Michel Foucault, 1996. Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvere
Lorringer. New York: Semiotexte.
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ethnic or religious, perspective (Pappe, 2004: xix). Students, Palestinians and
Jews, wish to hear it. And in the true fashion of epic narration, Pappe will offer
them heroes and villains. The heroes are good, old-fashioned underdogs,
victims of these calamities: women, children, peasants, workers, ordinary city
dwellers, peaceniks, human rights activists; the villains are the arrogant
generals, the greedy politicians, the cynical statesmen and the misogynist men
(Pappe, 2004: xix).
Without a shred of irony, Pappe reminds us that first one needs to rewrite, indeed
salvage, a history that was erased and forgotten (Pappe, 2004: xx). And this is the
paradoxical question: if history has been erased and forgotten, from where does
the historian derive her primary source? Elites left behind their historical records,
whether one accepts them or not; but local Palestinian subaltern society, the
actors who were absent or totally marginalized did not so conveniently provide
documents for historical validation (Pappe, 2004:8). Clearly, there are two
conflicting versions of the narrative; dualistic thinking would suggest that
accepting one version makes a lie of the other (although Pappes stated mission is
rather to expand the understanding of the marginalized vector). In particular, the
national historiographical approach presumes each side s tale is synonymous
with its history of nationalism (Pappe, 2004:7), an elitist narrative that excludesthe poor and specifically, women (since nationalism is taken to be a hetero-male
project).
Pappe has something more organic, holistic and expansive in mind, an
alternative narrative that recognizes similarities, criticises overt falsifications
and challenges the sequential modernist paradigm that zeroes in on the
departure point for the history of modern Israel and Palestine (Pappe, 2004: 12).
He would rather tell of ordinary human past, writing out of compassion for the
colonized not the colonizer, siding with the workers and not the bosses. He
feels for women in distress, and has little admiration for men in command. Nor
can he feel indifferent towards mistreated children (Pappe, 2004:12). It is a
redressive approach, one which he admits is subjective, often but not always
standing for the defeated over the victorious, a moving and a timely read, and
one which is deeply pertinent for the better understanding of the Israel-Palestine
conflict: but the question remains: is this history?
Historiographical text and historical context are closely bound, writes another of
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the new historians, Uri Ram (Ram, 2003:35), recognizing the close coupling of
the politics of knowledge and the politics of identity. For Ram, there is no pure
identity (least of all that of the historian?) or objective memory. Historians may
dispute past events (Ram, 2003:36), but the nature of the dispute often says
more about the present than about the past; in quasi-Hegelian dialectical tension,
it reveals what is of more immanent sociological significance. Or, as Nick
Vaughan-Williams notes, history has long been considered exogenous if not
superfluous to IR: at best a quarry to be mined in support of theories of the
present (Vaughan-Williams, 2005:115). In the grand scheme of things, unless one
can designate with surety an endpoint to the quantity of facts to be uncovered
from primary sources about a historical event, there is no absolute history,
whether the approach is more scientific or more humanist. The historical truth,
or the problem of history--in other words the impossibility of getting historical
interpretation one hundred percent right (Vaughan-Williams, 2005)̶ remains a
constant condition, residing somewhere in between the binaries of fact and
narrative (while the latter, being composed of language that may change in
meaning, is in itself unstable and subject to Derridean differance11). All that we
can say is that it takes many histories to get a better picture, and that we had
better be aware which kind we are reading in order to make a more informed
judgment. As we try to comprehend the past, historical consciousness isindispensable.
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