| Abstract | Unlike most of the criticism that has been published about the "new historians," it is not my primary intent here to impugn their claims about Israeli behavior during the 1948 war. Rather, I wish to call into question their historiographical understanding, selfimage and theoretical frameworks. The new historians do Israeli historiography a disservice by depicting their relationship with previous scholarship solely in terms of an opposition to an official military history which they are the first to challenge. [Benny Morris] poses a neat dichotomy between "a generation of nation-builders," who lived through 1948 as "committed adult participants," and a new generation, born around 1948 and raised in a "more open, doubting, and self-critical Israel than the pre-1967, pre-1973, and pre-Lebanon War Israel of the old historians."(2) This statement flattens the entire period from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s into a single point, thus conjuring away an entire generation of scholars who founded the study of Zionism and the Yishuv (Jewish community in Palestine) as a serious academic discipline. Israeli historiography is admittedly a young creature, but it was not born with the emergence of the new history in the mid-1980s. Rather, as this article will explain, the "new history" represents a continuation of and response to the generation of Yishuv scholars who came of age during the early 1970s. The new history is part of an ongoing process of innovation -- innovation which began before the advent of this new cohort and which goes on outside of it.
Israel, the victor of 1948, falls into the latter camp, and its new historians are subjecting Israel to the same sort of criticism employed in the 1960s by the self-styled revisionist school of American diplomatic historiography. The revisionist literature on the origins of the Cold War accused the Truman and Eisenhower administrations of unwarranted aggressiveness toward and hysterical fear of the Soviet Union.(30) These lines of argumentation are certainly familiar to any student of the new Israeli historiography. Like the Israeli new historians, the American revisionists unleashed a stormy national debate about the morality of the country's foreign policy and the justice of its use of force. As the historian Peter Novick has written, "Given the centrality of the cold war in American society since the 1940s, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that cold war revisionism threatened the myth which defined and justified the postwar American polity...."(31) Substitute the term "Arab-Israeli conflict" for "cold war," and "Israel" for "America," and you have a good summary of the public ramifications of the Israeli new historians' contentions.
Moreover, the new historians' desire to compensate for the errors of official Israeli military historiography can skew their presentation. Morris's books make only a modest effort to convey the traumatic effects of the 1948 war on the Israelis, and the books of [Avi Shlaim] and [Ilan Pappe] elide this subject almost completely.(36) Pappe's The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict offers an apparently impartial (if questionable) distinction between the 1948 war's military history, which he describes as "microhistorical" and hence unimportant, and its political-diplomatic history, which is "macrohistorical" and thus the center of the author's attention. True to form, Pappe's book overlooks Jewish military defeats and civilian massacres, but somehow the mass murder of Arabs at Deir Yasin counts as "macrohistorical" and thus receives close attention. Moreover, Pappe and other new historians are more likely to employ moralistic and uncomplimentary language when describing Israeli behavior than when describing that of the Arabs. For example, although Shlaim argues explicitly that Palestinian militancy and rejectionism left the Yishuv no choice but to thwart the creation of a Palestinian state, he describes Israeli military action in the Arab areas of the UN partition resolution as "Jewish aggressiveness." In Pappe's work, Arab aggression, such as the renewal of fighting in July 1948, is termed an "Arab initiative." Since it was during the subsequent days of fighting that Israel conquered much of the territory beyond the partition resolution boundaries, Israel is portrayed as the aggressor in the July fighting which, he acknowledges, the Arabs started.(37)
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