Books on New Israeli History

Dear Tom Segev,

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The other day I was reading a book you may know, Efraim Karsh's Fabricating Israeli History: The "New Historians." Writing in 1997 about a younger generation of Israeli historians such as Benny Morris and Avi Shlaim, Karsh makes the point--correctly, I think--that we are dealing less with a "new history" than with a new ideology, since most of the documentable facts that Shlaim and Morris base their anti- or a-Zionist conclusions on were well-known in the past. Moreover, Karsh argues, this ideology itself is far from new. Some of its main components, such as the accusation that Zionism was from the start a colonial movement that set out to dispossess the Palestinians, are as old as Zionism itself; others, like the charge that Israel is as responsible as the Arabs for the perpetuation of the Arab-Israeli conflict, or that modern Jewish nationalism has debased traditional Jewish values, have been common fare among Arabs and left-wing intellectuals since Israel's establishment. What is new, I might add, is the sociology of this ideology in Israel. As late as the 1970s, such beliefs were restricted to small groups that operated on the political fringe and were negligible even in the ranks of the left. Today, one encounters them everywhere--in Israeli academic life, in the media, even in mainstream politics. In fact, it is no longer possible to understand Israeli politics without taking their influence into account.

The on-and-off progress of recent Israeli-Syrian peace negotiations seems to me a case in point. I won't argue with you about what the aim of these negotiations should be. You belong to the approximate half of our country that believes, along with the Barak government, that the entire Golan is worth yielding for the sake of a peace treaty with Syria, and I belong to the half that doesn't. I would, however, make two observations with which even you might agree. One is that, as a strict matter of tactics, Israel has behaved bizarrely by accepting in advance 99 percent of Syria's territorial claims while making none of its own, and more bizarrely yet by insisting on the binding validity of an old international border that the Syrians (who are demanding parts of pre-1967 Israel in addition to the Golan) refuse to recognize. The other is that while many articulate backers of the Barak government admit that Syria's extreme demands are motivated more by national pride than by geo-strategic interests, they counsel accepting these demands because such pride, while central to the Arabs, is of no importance to Jews, who should have loftier concerns. Such an outlook, I submit, is a direct result of the incremental effect of the "new history" on the ways in which many Israelis now think and in which their political leaders behave.

We commonly regard all this as part of an even broader phenomenon known today as "post-Zionism." And yet, I have begun to wonder about this term, as well. Just as is the case with the Israeli right, whose reversion to traditional Jewish religious attitudes (against which secular Zionism was originally a rebellion) has been called a retreat to "pre-Zionism," so much in the "new ideology" strikes me as being the same. The other day I came across the following passage in Isaiah, addressed to the Israelite population of Samaria in the late-8^th-century B.C. as the armies of the expanding Assyrian empire were drawing near:

Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees and that write grievousness which they have prescribed, to turn aside the needy from judgment and to take away the right from the poor of my people! ... And what will ye do in the day of visitation, and in the desolation which shall come from afar? To whom will ye flee for help? ... O Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, and the staff in his hand is mine indignation! And I will send him against an hypocritical nation, and against the people of my wrath will I give him a charge, to take the spoil, and to take the prey, and to tread them down like the mire of the streets.

What, really, is Isaiah's guiding assumption? It is that if another nation threatens Israel, this is Israel's own fault; it deserves to be threatened, even catastrophically defeated in battle, because of its moral corruption; in fact, Isaiah almost identifies more with Assyria, which is a moral instrument of divine punishment, than with his own people. Against the politics of self-interest, he proposes the politics of self-accusation.

This is extraordinary. Indeed, the Hebrew prophets, I venture to say, are the only great writers in all of antiquity to side by instinct with the enemies of their people, just as Jews throughout the ages, educated on such texts, have alone in the world consistently blamed themselves for the hostility of others. From Assyria to Syria, a brutal police state that at this moment is arming Hezbollah guerrillas to kill Israeli soldiers while Israeli intellectuals call for greater concessions to it, we have not come very far.

The Zionist revolution was, among other things, a repudiation of this outlook. But all revolutions, no matter how successful, sooner or later have their counter-revolutions, their "return of the repressed" in which old attitudes rise from the buried recesses of the national psyche. I must confess that the more I read of the "new Israeli history," the more this is what it seems to me to be. Its ideological presuppositions come from the oldest, deepest part of us, just as do those of its opposite number, the Israeli religious right, whose triumphalism identifies Jewish military conquest with the glory of God. There is nothing very new about either, and for my part they're equally dangerous.

Sincerely,
Hillel Halkin

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This week, a discussion of Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall (click here to buy it) and Benny Morris' Righteous Victims (click here to buy it). Hillel Halkin is an American-born author and translator who has been living in Israel since 1970. He is the author of, among other works, Grand Things To Write a Poem On (click here to buy it). Tom Segev is an Israeli journalist and historian. He writes a weekly column for Ha'aretz and is the author of 1949: The First Israelis (click here to buy it).

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