Books on New Israeli History

Dear Tom,

PRINTDISCUSSE-MAILRSSRECOMMEND...SINGLE PAGE

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

We seem to agree on at least one thing--that neither Benny Morris nor Avi Shlaim's new books add much to our knowledge of Israeli history, or even to Morris' and Shlaim's previous work. Fifteen years after the opening of Israeli archives to historians like Morris and Shlaim, little surprising has turned up in them. Whereas you speak of "new material" pertaining to such areas as Israeli "war crimes," Arab refugees, and military confrontations that Israel provoked, well-informed Israelis of all political stripes were always aware of these things. In a small country like Israel, in which everybody who is anybody knows everybody, and in which until recently nearly everybody served in the army and was privy to the stories circulating there, it has rarely been possible to keep major secrets for long.

This is why what is new about the "new history" is not the facts it cites, nor even its interpretation of them, but rather the acceptance of this interpretation by an unprecedentedly large and influential segment of Israeli society. Although, for example, every Israeli of your and my generation who did not deliberately stop his ears knew his share of atrocity stories long before the "new historians" came along, such acts were not generally considered to reflect fundamental flaws in Israeli society, let alone to call into question the legitimacy of Israel's case. Today they are widely assumed to do just that.

War crimes are always something to be disturbed by. But there has never been a war without them, and the question is not whether Israel fought, say, its 1948 war of independence with moral impeccability (it did not), but whether it fought it with moral justification. The confusion of these two things, even though you speak of the "new history" as an indication of a growing Israeli "maturity," is intellectually immature in the precise sense of the word; for it is typical of the young to be driven to disproportionate reactions by revelations of imperfection in their elders that a more experienced mind views with greater balance. Myth-puncturing as a step toward the historical truth is a part of the historian's task; as a shocked or cynical deflation of the world of one's parents, which is what a great deal of the "new Israeli history" strikes me as being, it is puerile.

My reference to Isaiah and the Bible yesterday was not glib. We Jews are an old people but one with little experience in self-government, so that to this day our attitudes toward politics tend to be influenced by religious traditions and modes of thought that we may be unconscious of not having entirely abandoned. Both on the Israeli left and the Israeli right there is often the implicit assumption that we are, if not a chosen people, at least unique in the demands that can be made on us; and if, as I wrote yesterday, this is sometimes expressed on the right by viewing Israel as an agent of manifest destiny exempt from normal moral standards, it takes the form on the left of holding ourselves to standards that are only partially applicable in the political domain. In either case, we continue to have the same difficulty as the biblical prophets, and as Jewish thinkers throughout the ages, in conceiving of politics as the merely pragmatic exercise in enlightened self-interest that a politically sophisticated people understands it to be.

The real dividing line in the contemporary writing of Israeli history does not, I think, pass between the "new historians" and the old ones, but between those of the "new historians" (a category in which I would certainly include Benny Morris and possibly even Avi Shlaim) who understand that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine was a supreme example of enlightened self-interest and those (like Ilan Pappe) who do not. That this state's establishment was not in the interest of the Palestinians is hardly debatable; but the responsibility for Palestinian interests in 1948 did not rest with the Jews. It became a Jewish responsibility, and one that was inevitably carried out badly, in 1967, when the Palestinians were conquered by us; and one reason that I have, since the early '70s, written in support of a Palestinian state is that only by giving the Palestinians the political means to defend their interests can we as Jews once more concentrate with a clear conscience on our own.

I wish I could agree with your judgment that "the very existence of Israel is no longer in danger." Perhaps I have an overly morbid Jewish imagination, but I can easily think of several scenarios to the contrary--one of which would be a combination of Palestinian irredentism, continued Arab political and military pressure, and Jewish demoralization leading to a series of piecemeal concessions having a disastrous cumulative effect. Although a nation's morale is not easily measured, it is a crucial factor in political behavior, and my main fear regarding the long-term effects of the "new history," and of the ideological revisionism associated with it, is that these will continue to undermine Israelis' confidence in the justice of their own cause to the point of imperiling the cause itself. The historical truth does not frighten me. Drawing the wrong conclusions from it does.

Sincerely,
Hillel

PRINTE-MAILRECOMMEND...RSS

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

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).

SPONSORED CONTENT