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When I was a graduate student and the crust of the earth was still warm, we looked forward every week to an announcement by our professor of American history of some brilliant "revisionist" book demanding our immediate attention. If the topic of today's seminar was the establishment of the Constitution of the United States, then what we must read first was the work of Charles Beard, in which we would learn that not the disinterested patriotism of "the Fathers," but rather profit-making opportunities available to the insiders through the upcoming assumption of the debts of the States, was the driving force in the creation of that document. If our topic was America's entry into World War II, we should at once get familiar with the literature outlining the hidden history behind Pearl Harbor. As budding scholars, it was essential that we not be duped by the unexamined assumptions that informed popular history and the high school textbooks.
A lifetime later, nobody reads Charles Beard or has even heard of him. Meanwhile, most of the assumptions that Beard and all the other revisionists undertook to overthrow are back in place. George Washington still stands as the father of his country, his reputation, if anything, improved. Franklin Roosevelt—whose name, we were given to understand, would be forever blighted by the Truth about Pearl Harbor—stands higher than ever.
We should never regret or resent the exercise of revisionism. The honest and tenured scholars never tire of hearing about new evidence, and they welcome excuses to go back to the archives. When the latest revisionist spasm has passed, the result is usually reinstatement of the hoary generalities, more confidently stated because tested against the challenges of the revisionists.
The more passion is aroused by a subject, the more likely it is to attract revisionism, and few subjects generate as much passion as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to Neve Gordon (a Senior Lecturer in Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University, Beersheva, Israel), the full and sufficient explanation for why everything has gone wrong in what used to be the Palestine Mandate and became Occupied Palestine and Israel is Israeli contempt for human life. In Israel's Occupation, which will no doubt be cited to provide context for many accounts of the recent clash between Israeli forces and Hamas in Gaza, Gordon re-tells the history of Israel from this perspective.
The fundamental Israeli contempt for Palestinian life in particular was first demonstrated in 1947-1948 by Israel's "campaign of ethnic cleansing," effectively accomplished by the beginning of 1949. But the 1948-1949 war was just the opening stage of a "macabre" policy intended to accomplish the liquidation of the Palestinian people. After its victory in the Six Day War of 1967, Israel's game shifted. Henceforth, Israel pursued "a politics of life," allowing it to present its actions toward Palestinians as "moral." The scheme (quoting a 1970 report by Israel's military) was this: "The only way to avoid a potential outburst of social forces is to strive continuously for the improvement of the standard of living and the services of this underprivileged society." (How diabolical can you get? Thank God this did not occur to Hitler.)
In the 1990s, following the First Intifada, Rabin's government lured the Pollyanna Arafat and the PLO into the Oslo agreement, knowing that self-government among the Palestinians would fail. Having set up the Palestinian Authority and having given over to it full responsibility for the care and feeding of its people (another master-stroke of subterfuge—"outsourcing the occupation," as Gordon writes), it only remained for Israel to sabotage every project that the pa launched, so that chaos would result. The end game, Gordon suggests, should be called "the Somalia Plan," as it is meant to leave the Palestinians where we find the Somalis today—in a field of "warlordism." Understood in this way, Hamas is Israel's creation, notwithstanding that the leaders of Hamas imagine that it is their message and their good deeds that have won them the right to govern. In all its phases, Israel's regime has been marked by sadistic behavior toward Palestinians, extra attention being given to the slaughter of women and children. The Palestinian has been reduced to "homo sacer, people whose lives can be taken with impunity." The Israelis seek to persuade us that they are at risk of death because of suicide-bombers and the incessant rhetoric about the Muslim duty to annihilate the sons of pigs and monkeys. None of this is needed to explain Israel's conduct, however; that's simply the way Jews are. By contrast, Palestinian leaders, from the days of Yasir Arafat and the PLO down to the present Hamas leadership, have always dealt out life and promise. That's simply the way Arabs are. There is no denying this book's qualification as scholarly. Its conclusions are drawn from the reading of a considerable body of scholarly monographs, research papers, and government reports. To the interpretation of these sources, alas, Gordon brings a toxic, irrational, cynical spirit, contempt for Israel's politicians and a deaf ear to anything that Israel has to offer in defense of its own actions. The book has no claim to the honorable adjective "revisionist." It is sheer vilification.
But Israeli historiography has been alive with honorable revisionism for many years. The back-cover blurb of Benny Morris' new book accurately describes him as "the leading figure among Israel's New Historians, who over the past two decades have reshaped our understanding of the Israeli-Arab conflict." In Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (published in 1999) and in earlier monographs Morris challenged the popular historians and the controversialists who plunder the history books for one-liners. In 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, Morris has reviewed all the revisionist literature, re-worked the shelves of the archives to make sure that nothing has been overlooked, and given us a meticulously researched day-by-day narrative of the first Arab-Israeli war.
After the first two chapters, which review the history down to the Partition Decision of November 29, 1947, the account becomes almost exclusively military, although the political and diplomatic context is brought into place whenever needed. Morris' recital is always deliberate and thorough. While the landscape of what was then Mandate Palestine is incredibly varied, its geographical scope is compact (when compared, that is, to the setting of the great wars of past and present). Readers who do not know the ground from personal experience will find Morris' descriptions of all the battles perfectly lucid. There is a generous allotment of maps, all conveniently located in the text.
Morris addresses every issue that has engaged the revisionists, marshalling the relevant documents and setting out the defensible facts. He has calmly weighed the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two sides in 1948 and, not surprisingly, has concluded that the Israelis had advantages in some categories (for example, in access to weapons, to supplies and to funds) where popular pro-Israel historians notice only disadvantages, so as to underscore the David vs. Goliath theme. He has examined thoroughly the role of the British, the Americans, and the Russians; the lobbying at the UN in the days before the Partition vote; the tug-of-war within the Truman Administration; the facts about Deir Yassin and Kfar Etzion; the Haifa campaign of 1947 and the Mount Scopus ambush; the actual makeup of the several invading Arab armies, their strengths, their different war aims, and their differences of behavior; the facts about diplomacy between Abdullah of Jordan and the Zionists; the facts about what the Zionist leaders hoped to gain and what they wanted the local Arabs to do; their expectations about the eventual boundaries, the motives behind their strategic decisions—and, most contentious of all, the facts about refugees.
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