The New New Israel Historians

[Classical_Liberal]

The New New Israel Historians
By ETHAN BRONNER

Published: November 9, 2003



ifteen years ago, the Israeli scholar Benny Morris coined the term ''new historians'' to describe a handful of young Israeli writers who were recasting the standard Zionist narrative. Rather than a David-and-Goliath tale of outnumbered idealists miraculously outlasting invading hordes, they said, the story of Israel's triumphs was both more explicable and less heroic. Morris and his colleagues shifted the focus of historical inquiry away from the wonder of Jewish national rebirth to military and diplomatic maneuverings on the one hand and Palestinian suffering on the other. Dismissed at first as self-haters and even traitors, the new historians gained respect during the 1990's -- so much so that a 1998 series on state television to mark Israel's 50th anniversary borrowed considerably from their work, as did ninth-grade textbooks introduced the following year.

History does not get written or read in a vacuum. The new historians had an agenda -- promoting the peace process then beginning. And many Israelis, eager to put an end to their century-old conflict, were willing to be told that their successful nation building had come at a high cost to the Palestinians. They were adjusting their collective narrative to make room for coexistence with onetime enemies. This was a salutary process but it went unreciprocated. There were virtually no Palestinian ''new historians'' asking whether their leader in the 1930's and 40's, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was right to collaborate with the Nazis, calling for the killing of Jews ''wherever you find them.'' Few Muslim leaders questioned whether sending suicide bombers into Israeli cafes was a moral act. No Arab television station ran a series on David Ben-Gurion's confrontation with rebel Zionist militias. Israel's new historians were viewed by Arab intellectuals not as an invitation to self-examination but as further evidence that Zionism was a crime. Worst of all, in 2000, when Israel offered Yasir Arafat more than 90 percent of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip for a Palestinian state, his rejection was accompanied by a terrorist war that shows no signs of stopping.

The past few years have seen a stark shift in Israel's attitude. The 1999 ninth-grade textbooks have been withdrawn. Few Israelis worry about the suffering of the Palestinians; they are too focused on their own. Into this very different context, two accounts of Israeli history take us back to a more traditional Zionist narrative, a kind of corrective to the corrective. ''Right to Exist,'' by Yaacov Lozowick, the director of archives at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Museum, and ''The Case for Israel,'' by Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School, are polemics, not works of scholarship. But they are intelligent polemics. They don't seek to discredit the new history. Instead, they partly rely on it, while arguing vehemently -- and fairly convincingly -- that contemporary European and Arab discourse on the Middle East is indefensibly unbalanced against Israel. Both authors are liberals on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict -- they favor the establishment of a Palestinian state in nearly all of the West Bank and Gaza, they oppose the Jewish settlements in those areas, they are critical of many Israeli policies over the years. But the message of both books is that, taken as a whole, the history of the Jewish state is an admirable one, and the suffering of Palestinians has come as much from their own leaders' intransigence as from anything done to them by Israel.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/books/review/09BRONNET.html?ex=1068958800&en=4fad294101a4bb8a&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

[dfong63]

1. poor little israel, ever painting herself the victim

... despite the fact that Israel now has the region's mightiest military machine, supplemented with billions in aid every year from the world's #1 military power.

while arguing vehemently -- and fairly convincingly -- that contemporary European and Arab discourse on the Middle East is indefensibly unbalanced against Israel.

world opinion against Israel is no more "indefensibly unbalanced" than it was against apartheid South Africa.

[Jim Sagle]

2. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigggggggggggggghhhhhhhttttttttt!!!!!!

[rini]

3. We have "revistionist" historians here too

in academia there is only so much one can write about, if you don't write (publish or perish) you don't get tenure. So take facts, find a flaw and magnify it out of proportion or change the interpretation of the facts, and bingo tenure and prominance.