Israel: The Revised Version
A Review for Third Way of
"Righteous Victims : A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999" by Benny Morris
(London, John Murray, 2000)

The French philosopher Ernest Renan apparently once defined a nation satirically as "a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours." Unravelling the causes of the long and convoluted Arab-Israeli conflict is in many ways an unenviable and Herculean task, at least for the individual historian, let alone to the mutual satisfaction of both Zionists and the 'new historians', a phrase first coined by Benny Morris in 1988. The search for peace in the Middle East, as much as its historical analysis, has become intractable, clichéd in its complexity, with every dispute traceable to centuries of animosity and mutual mistrust, fuelled by cycles of violence and revenge, justified by sacred texts and the deep conviction that each side are the 'righteous victims' of the other.

A dramatic sea-change is, however, occurring in the Israeli educational establishment and historiography of which Benny Morris' new book, Righteous Victims, is both a reflection and instigator. Ethan Bronner, education editor of the New York Times, makes the following observations.

"When Israel's ninth graders began classes in September, they were carrying in their book bags tools of a changing national consciousness. Their 20th-century history textbooks had just been revised from the standard Zionist view of the state's founding in 1948 to include elements of a competing narrative. In the new books the term Palestinian is used not only to refer to a people but to a long-standing nationalist movement. In study questions, students are asked to place themselves in the shoes of Palestinian Arabs living in Jerusalem or Jaffa as the Zionists arrived and built their settlements. The students read that the 1948 War of Independence against the Arab world was not as lopsided a contest as Israelis have been brought up to believe. According to the new books, the Jews fielded more trained fighters than the Arabs and, apart from the very first weeks of battle, benefited from a military edge.

The new books, begun five years ago under the liberal administration of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and worked on quietly under the conservative Benjamin Netanyahu, were brought out in August under Prime Minister Ehud Barak without advance publicity. They have engendered substantial controversy...

The traditional history of the Jewish state portrays Zionism as a pure, almost naive movement of young socialists who fled European anti-Semitism beginning in the 1880's to return to the land of their forefathers. Palestine, this history relates, was a neglected arid strip with a small Jewish population and a larger but still insignificant Arab one. The Zionists bought land at exorbitant prices and extended hands of friendship and co-operation to the local Arabs. After the Nazis exterminated one-third of world Jewry during World War II, the international community understood the Jewish plight and voted at the United Nations in 1947 to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jews were overjoyed by this compromise, but the Arabs, inflamed by arrogance and hatred, declared war. Over the course of the following year, the tiny, lightly armed Jewish community in Palestine fought off and ultimately vanquished not only local Palestinian gangs but the well-trained armies of numerous Arab states. During the course of that war, the Arab governments called on the locals to leave so that the armies could do their work swiftly and efficiently. That led to the creation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. At the end of the war, Israel tried to make peace with its neighbours, but they rejected the overtures and cynically exploited the Palestinian refugee problem.

Arab scholars and some outsiders have long dismissed this narrative as false and self-serving. But until the middle 1980's, few Israelis saw much to challenge there. Then, with the opening of Israeli state archives and the maturation of a young generation of historians, many of them trained abroad... Israeli scholars began to question key elements of that history. They declared that the old history was myth, and that they were writing the ''new history.'' They have thus collectively become known as Israel's ''new historians,'' and when their work built up the critical mass of a genuine scholarly movement in the early years of this decade, it created quite a storm.

The old history of Israel was a heroic one, centered, in effect, on the question, How did this miracle happen? The new history has tended to focus on the tawdry and decidedly unmiraculous. State archives contain clear evidence of double deals, schemes to transfer Arabs out of the country and rebuffed gestures of peace by the Arab states."

For someone deeply critical of David Ben-Gurion, Benny Morris is now ironically Professor of History at Ben-Gurion University, Beersheba, Israel. He is one of the newly emerging Israeli historians, like Tom Segev and Avi Shlaim, who are revising and debunking the hallowed myths of Zionism, suggesting from the outset Zionism was "tainted by a measure of moral dubiousness" and that Israeli leaders bear substantial responsibility for the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbours. He has already proven his scholarship with earlier important works including 'Israel's Border Wars', 'Israel's Secret Wars: A History of Israel's Intelligence Services' and 'The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem'.

Benny Morris' writings mark a significant development in Israeli historiological self-consciousness. It is less than 10 years since historians like Morris were excluded from academic positions in Israeli universities, and only a year ago that the Israeli Education Ministry begun to revise its history curriculum to acknowledge Israeli expulsions of Palestinians during the 1948 war.

Righteous Victims is a comprehensive yet rigorous and dispassionate history of the Zionist-Arab struggle for exclusive possession of a piece of territory the size of Wales which both regard as home. With calmness and great clarity, Benny Morris traces the roots of this conflict to the deep and intractable religious, ethnic, and political ideologies which separated European Zionist immigrants from the indigenous Arabs of Palestine, and, more than a century later, still do.

Beginning with the Zionist dream of a Jewish homeland following the Russian pogroms in the 19th century, Morris describes the gradual influx of Jewish settlers, which was fiercely resisted by the Arabs during the decades of the British Mandate. The establishment of the State of Israel in 1947-1948 at last gave the Jews a refuge and homeland out of the pogroms, anti-Semitism and Holocaust. But tragically it also led to the mass exodus of Palestinians and the birth of a new diaspora, a festering refugee problem which today accounts for one in four refugees in the world. According to Ethan Bronner,

"Morris presents the best moment-by-moment, battle-by-battle explanation of how the Zionists won the 1948 War of Independence, known to Palestinians as the Naqba, or disaster... The ironies of history are on full display."

Morris describes in detail these momentous events and the Arab and Western reactions that followed, as well as the causes for the later wars of 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982-1985 and Intifada of 1987-1991. He argues persuasively, for example, that for decades from the 1880's Zionists camouflaged their intention to control Palestine; how, contrary to popular opinion, in 1948 the newly founded State of Israel had both military and strategic superiority over its enemies; that the war of 1956 was provoked by Israel's desire to destroy the Egyptian army before it received further support from the Soviet Union; that the desire for territorial expansion dominated the Israeli political spectrum prior to 1967; and that Peres proposed the use of nuclear weapons in a pre-emptive strike against the Arabs a month before the Six Day War began.

Morris traces the successes and failures of military, political and diplomatic leaders on both sides, assessing their interaction with both accuracy and empathy, drawing on newly released archive material, memoirs, and other sources to give a most vivid account. So for example, Morris exposes the cynicism and hypocrisy of Zionist leaders such as Theodor Herzl and his successors who claimed Zionism would benefit the indigenous Palestinians while systematically expropriating more and more of their land by purchase, intimidation and confiscation.

Similarly, in analysing the involvement of the United States and Russia in the 1973 war with Egypt and Syria, Morris notes Kissinger's caustic description of Israel's threat to use its nuclear weapons as 'hysteria or blackmail'. On the question of the occupation of the West Bank and bombing of Lebanon, Morris is equally critical of Israeli belligerence. Bronner points out,

"The ironies of history are on full display. (The leaders of the Palestinian intifada earned their credentials and established connections while in Israeli prisons. Morris thoughtfully lays out what he calls at one point ''a crude and brutalizing perceptional symmetry.'')

Morris also assesses the faltering attempts to find a lasting peace from the initial negotiations of 1948 through to the Camp David (1977-1979), Oslo (1993-1995), and Wye (1998) Accords. He offers uncompromising and critical portraits of both Israeli and Arab leaders who were the chief protagonists of this contentious history, including Theodor Herzl, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, David Ben-Gurion, Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin and Benjamin Netanyahu. Both side of the Arab-Israeli conflict are shown to be so blinded by their own suffering that they still seem unable to empathise with the suffering of their foes.

Righteous Victims concludes with a shrewd analysis of the implications of Ehud Barak's election for the renewal of negotiations between Israel and its Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian neighbours. More a realist than optimist, Morris concludes:

"But there is no certainty that Israeli good-will or ill-will, flexibility or inflexibility, will decisively temper or resolve this century-old conflict. Islamic fundamentalism, Great Power rivalries or intervention, and nuclear weapons may prove far more telling."

The Zionist establishment will inevitably argue that Morris is both polemical and selective in his use of source material. Daniel Polisar, writing in Azure, for the Shalem Centre insists, for example,

"In his November 1988 Tikkun article, Morris raised the possibility that Israel "was besmirched by original sin" due to the manner in which the Jewish state had come into being. Last year, he went even further, describing the Zionist leadership's treatment of the Palestinian Arabs during the War of Independence as "a variety of ethnic cleansing." (Roy Gutman and David Rieff, eds., Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, 1999, pp. 28-37.)
These are not "facts" that one discovers in recently opened archives. They are indicative of profound moral evaluations, which may or may not have been shaped by some formative archival experience. It is such evaluations which have allowed Morris and others to write a sweeping new narrative of Zionist history that goes far beyond anything suggested by the revelations of recently declassified documents. Thus Morris' latest book, Righteous Victims, argues that Zionism was from the outset "a colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement," which was infected by "the European colonist's mental obliteration of the natives.'" It is this damning characterization that permits him to conclude that the Zionists reduced the Arabs to "objects to be utilized when necessary," rather than human beings with legitimate aspirations..."

The Jerusalem Post, has been equally critical of the new historical perspective Morris and others espouse. Last year it described the momentum as a "Post-Zionist Takeover" which would "undermine the moral case for Zionism" in Israeli schools. Derek Penslar, who hold the chair in Jewish history at the University of Toronto concedes,

"...this approach has opponents, who fear that self-criticism degenerates all too easily into self-laceration and romanticization of the oppressed. But if Israel is to maintain its strong cultural links with the West, the abandonment of once-cherished nationalist myths is essential."

Righteous Victims then represents the coming of age of Israeli historical self-criticism. In a review for the New York Times, Ethan Bronner concludes,

"Benny Morris writes with clinical dispassion. While that makes for a less lively narrative, it also makes for a more responsible and credible one. This is a first-class work of history, bringing together the latest scholarship. It is likely to stand for some time as the most sophisticated and nuanced account of the Zionist-Arab conflict from its beginnings in the 1880's... In short, this is new history as one would like it -not as part of a political or scholarly campaign but in the genuine pursuit of complex truth."

Righteous Victims is quite simply mandatory reading: a monumental work of narration and explication for all who want to make sense of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the prospects for peace.

For more detailed reviews of Righteous Victims by Benny Morris, see:
Ethan Bronner, New York Times - http://www.igc.org/traubman/history.htm
Daniel Polisar, Azure, Shalem Centre - http://www.shalem.org.il/azure/9-editor.html
Derek Penslar, Forward - http://www.forward.com/back/1999/99.10.08/arts.html

Stephen Sizer
28 June 2000