The Idea of Israel (42 page)

TWELVE

The Neo-Zionist New Historians

Honest readers [of the work of the New Historians] cannot deny most of the facts presented by these historians about Zionism’s policies in the past … and yet it seems that the conclusions that these historians were looking for are aimed at undermining the very legitimacy of the fathers of the nation, who are not alive anymore … We cannot underrate the perils of such an attack … No nation would be able to keep its vitality if its historical narrative were to be presented in public as morally defunct. [Moreover,] the novelty of what the New Historians did was in the perspective not the facts … these are not facts, but deep moral assessments.

– Daniel Pilser,
Techelet
, 2000
¹

T
he time that elapsed between the challenge posed by the ‘new historians’ addressing 1948 and their disappearance from the scene was short – less than two decades. The reason for this brevity is doubtless to be found in the fact that the 1948 war is not only a story closely linked to current politics but also a foundational myth. According to Louis Althusser, foundational myths are those most easily absorbed by society and according to which the social order is structured and maintained.
²
They provide the narrative that justifies the existence of the state, and as long as they remain relevant
to the existing social order, they retain their force. In the case of Israel, of course, and despite the appeal and prominence enjoyed by the post-Zionist discourse for a time, the social order had not changed, which could explain why the society so quickly reverted to its long-held beliefs. And because the history of the 1948 war is also linked to matters of war and peace, to relations with the Palestinians, and therefore to the entire future orientation of the country, any scholarly or academic conclusions about it were and are extremely relevant to an understanding of the political scene. This was recognised by the scholars themselves, as well as by the politicians involved in the peace process.

In this final chapter I would like to show how the pendulum switch from a post-Zionist to a neo-Zionist version of the idea of Israel has impacted the Israeli scholarly community, most particularly its professional historiography. Deciphering what lies behind the decision to produce a certain narrative is still an enigma – we are much better at exposing a narrative than we are at exposing the motives for constructing or revising it. Therefore, I have limited my attempt to pointing to the ways in which changes in the political atmosphere are reflected in the narrative of the works produced by practising historians who focused on the 1948 war. According to the ethos of academia, the work of these historians should in principle not be affected by changes in public mood or general political orientation. However, the case of the current Israeli historiography of 1948 indicates that, in this conflict especially, the writing of history absorbs and represents ideological disputes and political developments to a degree comparable to any other cultural medium. The difference is that other media or discourses do not pretend to be objective or neutral.

As described in the previous chapter, almost immediately after the outbreak of the Second Intifada a reinvigorated Zionist consensus, which had somewhat eroded at the height of the Oslo days, reasserted itself with force. Public discourse in Israel was reshaped along strictly consensual lines. Thus, just as the atmosphere and politics of the early 1990s had been conducive for local historians to open a window onto the Palestinian narrative and even to contemplate
acceptance of some of its major claims, so the changed conditions after 2000 provided fertile soil for a new generation of historians to entrench and barricade the narrative behind a wall of negation and fortify the collective identity in the face of renewed struggle.
³

It is important to emphasise that while the new Zionist consensus was immediately restored and re-embraced, the new historiographical narrative, which had already begun to assert itself prior to 2000, did not exactly reproduce the classical Zionist narrative. It is not only history, but also historiography, that does not repeat itself. What emerged instead was a new/old narrative, updated to fit the shifting political realities on the one hand and to take into account and absorb the new information coming out of the Israeli archives on the other.

The new historiography was Zionist in its ideological orientation, its mode, and its colouration, but it avoided the omissions, distortions, and denials of fact that had characterised the classical Zionist version. The post-Zionists and ‘new historians’, whose work had been based on Israeli archival sources to the extent that these were accessible at the time, had brought to light new facts concerning expulsions, massacres, and other war crimes committed in 1948 that the neo-Zionist generation could not ignore. Most important for their emergence was the release in 1998 of major new documentation from the archives of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Hagana, enabling professional historians in Israel to see with their own eyes, in government documents, the magnitude of the 1948 ethnic cleansing. Even ‘nationalist’ and Orientalist historians, who had scorned Arab or Palestinian sources and relied exclusively on Israeli sources, could no longer deny the massive, intentional expulsions.
⁴

Thus, from a purely factual standpoint, the neo-Zionist version of 1948 did not differ significantly from that of the post-Zionists or the new historians. The difference lay in the response or interpretation of the facts. What the new historians saw as human and civil rights abuses or even as atrocities and war crimes are treated in the new research as normal and sometimes even commendable actions by the Israeli military. What the post-Zionists interpreted as shameful chapters in Israeli history are, in the new research, justified.
⁵

From the neo-Zionist perspective, acceptance of the factual claims of the new historians was accompanied by the categorical rejection (shared by the Israeli public at large) of the
contemporary
moral implications that these critical new historians drew from their findings concerning Israel’s crimes in 1948, first and foremost being the dispossession of the Palestinians. The neo-Zionists did not merely reject the interpretation of the post-Zionists but also attacked them on moral grounds for dangerously undermining the legitimacy of the state. This approach is succinctly articulated in the quote that opens the present chapter.

That quote sums up the essence of the neo-Zionist response to the new historians: acceptance of the basic facts that they unearthed, combined with a castigation of them on moral grounds. This ambivalence produced something of a division of labour between the neo-Zionist scholarly attempt to reassert hegemony in Israel’s production of knowledge, specifically in the presentation of the ‘academic’ narrative of 1948. One group undertook to challenge the moral underpinnings of the critical historiography, while the other group focused on a re-examination of the factual evidence, so that a new/old Zionist narrative of the 1948 war could be (re)constructed in a way that would reflect the post-2000 mood in the state and an updated interpretation of the idea of Israel.

The Critique of the New Historians and the Moral Debate

Paradoxically, even as the post-Zionist approach – and with it, the critical spirit within Israeli society – was totally silenced and marginalised with the outbreak of the Second Intifada, the attack on the new historians (except for Benny Morris) showed no signs of abating. Even in its greatly diminished condition, the critique of Zionism from within Jewish society continued to be depicted as a grave danger to the Jewish character of the state. From 2000 onward, questioning the national narrative in general and that of 1948 in particular was perceived as an ideological threat that needed to be countered by academia at home and abroad. It culminated quite recently
with several new laws passed in the Israeli Knesset, as mentioned in the previous chapter, stipulating that, among other measures, public funding to any scholarly or educational entity that commemorates the Nakba be curbed, and academics who support the Palestinian academic boycott campaign be severely punished. It was followed by the exclusion of critical material from the educational system and the appearance of a new NGO, Im Tirtzu (If You Will It), whose main role is to monitor anti- or post-Zionist writing and teaching in academia. Im Tirtzu produced its own booklet on the Nakba, denying the new history of it in such a vulgar and insidious way that mainstream academia found it at best irrelevant and at worst embarrassing. This NGO is supported by another one, Israel Academia Monitor, whose board includes Israel’s leading political scientists and historians and who employ their own team in every university to eradicate all residues of post-Zionism. It took a while before their intimidation began to bear fruit, as admitted by
Haaretz
’s education correspondent Or Kashti:

The past four years mark a significant change from the past. During this period, the right has waged a systematic campaign that included delegitimisation, open and concealed threats and, at times, actual sanctions against whoever dared to undercut their complacent world view … The seeds of delegitimisation spread through the air three years ago with the publication, by Im Tirtzu and the Institute for Zionist Strategies, of pseudo-scientific studies of the post-Zionist bias that supposedly prevails in Israeli academia. The seeds were then sown by these groups’ supporters in the government, including Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar. And they were tended to by right-wing organisations like Yisrael Sheli.

Faced with the campaign being waged by the right to reshape reality, academia – as an institution based on values like skepticism, tolerance and pluralism – has barely raised its voice. At least, not in public. The number of academics who see public activism as part of their job description is declining. But even the larger organisations, like faculty groups, the various universities and the Israeli Academy of Humanities and Sciences, are trying to prevent any kind of statement being uttered about the increasingly ugly face of Israeli society. Self-censorship and conformity are more efficient than direct repression.

This was in 2013 but until then it seemed that the new historians’ critique continued even as their influence disappeared, but now there were new grounds that reflected neo-Zionism’s preoccupation with demonstrating the morality of the Zionist venture. Whereas in the early years of the post-Zionist challenge, the argument addressed the facts, it has now shifted to ‘exposing’ what lies behind the critical history and sociology that emerged in Israel as of the late 1980s. The earlier response was epitomised by Efraim Karsh, who accused the new historians of fabricating the facts – an allegation he summarised in his book
Fabricating Israeli History: The ‘New Historians’ –
but made no mention of morality.
⁶
In fact, the above-mentioned article in
Techelet
explicitly rebuked Karsh for failing to morally and ideologically confront the new historians while going to battle against ‘undeniable facts’.
⁷
The editors of the journal concluded that Israeli academia could not permit the new historians to set the research agenda on 1948 – another critique absent from the earlier Zionist response.

The moral battle was waged energetically outside Israel, where the message of the post-Zionists had made more lasting inroads. Of the numerous books representing the neo-Zionist perspective on the 1948 war that appeared in the United States in the years following the eclipse of the new historians, the best example was a collection edited by Anita Shapira and Derek J. Penslar, titled
Israeli Historical Revisionism: From Left to Right
.
⁸
In their introduction, the editors declared that the new historians, whom they named the ‘revisionists’, excluding Morris, had been waging an attack on Zionism itself. But it was the political philosopher Michael Walzer who led the moral battle with the greatest passion. Presenting Zionism as a liberation movement of exceptional morality, Walzer characterised the debate over the 1948 war as an existential battle against the forces of evil.
⁹
He did not confront the facts but instead employed the discourse of ‘complexity’ to stifle debate. The dispossession of almost a
million Palestinians, the discrimination against almost five million more, and the control through occupation were all characterised as complex issues. In a similar vein, Zionist historian Daniel Gutwein of the University of Haifa, after arguing that there was nothing new in the factual claims of the ‘new history’, depicted post-Zionism as a formidable enemy, a movement that, according to him, included postmodernists and nihilists bent on privatising the collective sacred national memory for their own selfish, if not perverse, interests.
¹⁰
Others, as we have seen, accused the new historians of outright treason.
¹¹

Before examining the works of the neo-Zionist historians, a few words should be said about Morris, one of the most important of the new historians, who, following what he described as his ‘turning point’ in 2000, could be said to embody both of neo-Zionism’s hallmarks: its positivism and (in his political writings and interviews) its moral justification of the ethnic cleansing that took place during the 1948 war. Morris did not shy away from providing evidence damning to the Zionist narrative. His book
The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949
, provided the first systematic evidence, based on IDF sources, of major expulsions during the 1948 war. When the documents were first released in 1998, showing the expulsions to be far more premeditated, systematic, and extensive than had been shown in the more limited documentation available a decade earlier, Morris, ever the positivist, undertook what he referred to as the correction of a mistake, and so he revised and expanded his book to reflect the new evidence.
¹²
By the time the new edition was published in 2004, however, the Second Intifada was well underway, and the revelation of what would earlier have been seen as damning new information about 1948 now fused conveniently with the closing of the public mind with regard to the Palestinians in the wake of the uprising. In this new atmosphere, not only were Israel’s brutal military operations against the Palestinians during the new intifada seen as justified, but so was their systematic expulsion in 1948. Morris, who had earlier been wrongly accused of being an ‘Israel hater’ and a post-Zionist, now set an example for the neo-Zionists, inasmuch as he was ideally situated to provide hindsight justification for the 1948–49
expulsions. In an interview with Ari Shavit published in
Haaretz
on 9 January 2004, he provided the ultimate justification for the ethnic cleansing in 1948: ‘Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.’
¹³
Furthermore, he faulted Ben-Gurion for failing to ‘cleanse’ the ‘whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River’, which ‘would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.’
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