The War of the Israeli Historians

Avi Shlaim

Annales, 59:1, January-February 2004, 161-67.

A nation, said the French philosopher Ernest Renan, is a group of people united by a
mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours. Throughout the ages, the
use of myths about the past has been a potent instrument of forging a nation. The
Zionist movement, the forerunner of the State of Israel, was one of the most successful
public relations exercises of the twentieth century. Yet this movement was not unique in
propagating a simplified and varnished version of the past in the process of promoting
its nationalist agenda. On the contrary, like all nationalist versions of history, the
standard Zionist version of the emergence of the State of Israel in 1948 and of its fifty
years war with its Arab neighbours, was selective, simplistic, and self-serving. This
version of history served a dual function in instilling a sense of nationhood in Jews from
various countries of origin and in enlisting international sympathy and support for the
fledgling State of Israel. The one cause it emphatically did not serve is that of mutual
understanding and reconciliation between Jews and the Arabs.

The last decade has witnessed slow and halting progress towards peace between Israel
and its traditional enemies but it has also witnessed the emergence of a new kind of war,
the war of the Israeli historians. This war is between the traditional Israeli historians and
the new historians who started to challenge the Zionist rendition of the birth of Israel
and of the subsequent fifty years of conflict and confrontation. The work of the new
historians has already had a significant impact on popular perceptions of the historical
roots of the conflict. And it may also turn out to have a part to play in breaking down
the remaining psychological barriers on the road towards comprehensive peace in the
Middle East.

Conquerors, my son, consider as true history only what they themselves have
fabricated. Thus remarked the old Arab headmaster to young Saeed on his return to
Haifa in the summer of 1948 in Emile Habibys tragicomic novel The Secret Life of
Saeed, the Ill-fated Pessoptimist. The headmaster spoke about the Israelis more in
sorrow than in anger: It is true they did demolish those villages ... and did evict their
inhabitants. But, my son, they are far more merciful than the conquerors our forefathers
had years before.

Most Israelis would be outraged by the suggestion that they are conquerors, yet this is
how they are perceived by the Palestinians. But the point of the quote is that there can
be no agreement on what actually happened in 1948; each side subscribes to a different
version of events. The Palestinians regard Israelis as the conquerors and themselves as
the true victims of the first Arab-Israeli war which they call al-Nakba or the disaster.
Palestinian historiography reflects these perceptions. The Israelis, on the other hand,
whether conquerors or not, were the indisputable victors in the 1948 war which they call
the War of Independence. Because they were the victors, among other reasons, they
were able to propagate more effectively than their opponents their version of this fateful
war. History, in a sense, is the propaganda of the victors.

The conventional Zionist account of the 1948 War goes roughly as follows. The conflict
between Jews and Arabs in Palestine came to a head following the passage, on 29
November 1947, of the United Nations partition resolution which called for the
establishment of two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jews accepted the UN plan
despite the painful sacrifices it entailed but the Palestinians, the neighbouring Arab
states, and the Arab League rejected it. Great Britain did everything in its power
towards the end of the Palestine Mandate to frustrate the establishment of the Jewish
state envisaged in the UN plan. With the expiry of the Mandate and the proclamation of
the State of Israel, five Arab states sent their armies into Palestine with the firm
intention of strangling the Jewish state at birth. The subsequent struggle was an unequal
one between a Jewish David and an Arab Goliath. The infant Jewish state fought a
desperate, heroic, and ultimately successful battle for survival against overwhelming
odds. During the war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled to the neighbouring
Arab states, mainly in response to orders from their leaders and despite Jewish pleas to
stay and demonstrate that peaceful co-existence was possible. After the war, the story
continues, Israeli leaders sought peace with all their heart and all their might but there
was no one to talk to on the other side. Arab intransigence was alone responsible for the
political deadlock which was not broken until President Anwar Sadats visit to
Jerusalem thirty years later.

For many years the standard Zionist account of the causes, character, and course of the
Arab-Israeli conflict remained largely unchallenged outside the Arab world. The fortieth
anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel, however, was accompanied by
the publication of four books by Israeli scholars who challenged the traditional
historiography of the birth of the State of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war. The four
books are Simha Flapans The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities, Benny Morriss The
Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, Ilan Papps Britain and the
Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-51, and my own Collusion across the Jordan: King
Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine. Collectively the authors
came to be called the Israeli revisionist, or new historians.

Two factors account for the emergence of the new historiography: the release f the
official documents on 1948 by the government of Israel, and the change in the political
climate in Israel in the aftermath of the Lebanon War of 1982. Israel adopted the British
thirty-year rule for the review and declassification of foreign policy documents. Under
this rule, a vast amount of primary source material was released for research in the
Central Zionist Archives, the Israel State Archives, the Haganah Archive, the IDF
Archive, the Labour Party Archive, and the Ben-Gurion Archive. Arab countries have
nothing remotely resembling a thirty-year rule. Arab governments only give access to
their records, if they give any access at all, in a limited, haphazard, and arbitrary
manner. It is very much to Israels credit that it allows researchers access to its internal
documents thereby making possible critical studies of its own conduct such as those
written by the new historians.

If the release of rich new sources of information was one important reason behind the
advent of historical revisionism, a change in the general political climate was another.
For many Israelis, especially liberal-minded ones, the Likud's ill-conceived and ill-fated
invasion of Lebanon in 1982 marked a watershed. Until then, Zionist leaders had been
careful to cultivate the image of peace-lovers who would stand up and fight only if war
was forced upon them. Until then, the notion of ein breira, of no alternative, was central
to the explanation of why Israel went to war and a means of legitimizing her
involvement in wars. But while the fierce debate between supporters and opponents of
the Lebanon War was still raging, Prime Minister Menachem Begin gave a lecture to
the IDF Staff Academy on wars of choice and wars of no choice. He argued that the
Lebanon War, like the Sinai War of 1956, was a war of choice designed to achieve
national objectives. With this admission, unprecedented in the history of the Zionist
movement, the national consensus round the notion of ein breira began to crumble,
creating political space for a critical re-examination of the country's earlier history.

The appearance of the first wave of revisionist studies of the 1948 war excited a great
deal of interest and controversy in the Israeli political arena, in academic circles, and in
the media. The initial reaction was one of discomfort and even dismay at what looked
like the deliberate targeting of the sacred cows that all Israeli school children had been
educated to respect and revere. Some commentators felt that the new books constituted
a well-orchestrated attack on Israels reputation, an attack that must not be allowed to
go unanswered. Others were more sympathetic to the attempt to re-examine time-
hallowed truths in the light of fresh evidence. Even when the initial shock subsided,
opinion remained sharply divided on the merits of the new historiography. Veterans of
the 1948 war and members of the old guard, especially the old guard of the Labour
Party, continued to bristle with hostility towards the new interpretations.

Among the critics of the new historians, the most strident and vitriolic was Shabtai
Teveth, a journalist and biographer of David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the State of
Israel and its first prime minister. Teveths attack entitled The New Historians
appeared in four successive full-page instalments in the independent daily Haaretz in
May 1989. In September 1989, Teveth published an abridged version of this series in an
article entitled Charging Israel with Original Sin in the American-Jewish monthly
Commentary. In this article, Teveth described the new history as a farrago of
distortions, omissions, tendentious readings, and outright falsifications. Teveth pursued
two lines of attack. One line of attack was that the new historiography rests in part on
defective evidence, and is characterised by serious professional flaws. The other line of
attack charged that the new historiography was politically motivated, pro-Palestinian,
and aimed at deligitimizing Zionism and the State of Israel. Teveths polemics
generated more heat than light. Like so many members of the Labour Party old guard,
he showed himself to be incapable of distinguishing between history and propaganda.

Interestingly, individuals on the political right in Israel, whether scholars or not, respond
to the findings of the new historiography with far greater equanimity. They readily
admit, for example, that Israel did expel Palestinians and even express regret that she
did not expel more Palestinians since it was they who launched the war against her.
Right-wingers tend to treat the 1948 War from a realpolitik point of view rather than a
moralistic one. They are therefore spared the anguish of trying to reconcile the practices
of Zionism with the precepts of liberalism. It is perhaps for this reason that they are
generally less self-righteous and more receptive to new evidence and new analyses of
the 1948 War than members of the Mapai old guard. The latter put so much store by
Israel's claim to moral rectitude that they cannot face up to the evidence of cynical
Israeli double-dealings or brutal expulsion and dispossession of the Palestinians. It is an
axiom of their narrative that Israel is the innocent victim. Not content with the thirty
pieces of silver, these people insist on retaining for Israel the crown of thorns. And it is
their concern with the political consequences of rewriting history that largely accounts
for the ferocity of their attacks on the new historiography.

Whereas the initial debate revolved around the methods, sources, and alleged political
motives of the new historians, the subsequent debate related to some of their specific
findings. Five major bones of contention can be identified in the debate between the
traditional and the new historians: British policy towards the end of the Palestine
Mandate; the Arab-Israeli military balance in 1948; the causes of the Palestine exodus;
Arab war aims; and the reasons for the persistent political deadlock after the guns fell
silent.

The traditional Zionist version maintains that Britains aim in the twilight of its
Mandate over Palestine was the prevent the establishment of a Jewish state; that the
Jews were hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned; that the Palestinians left of their
own accord and in the expectation of a triumphal return; that there was an all-Arab plan
to destroy the infant Jewish state as soon as it came into the world; and that Arab
intransigence was the sole cause of the political deadlock that followed the war.

The revisionist version maintains, in a nutshell, that Britains aim was to prevent the
establishment not of a Jewish state but of a Palestinian state; that the Jews outnumbered
all the Arab forces, regular and irregular, operating in the Palestine theatre and, after the
first truce, also outgunned them; that the Palestinians, for the most part, did not choose
to leave but were pushed out; that there was no monolithic Arab war aim because the
Arab rulers were deeply divided among themselves; and that the quest for a political
settlement was frustrated more by Israeli than by Arab intransigence.

The last issue in the debate is particularly sensitive because it involves the allocating of
responsibility for the elusive peace. At the core of the old version is the image of the
Arab world as a monolithic and implacably hostile enemy. According to this version,
Israels leaders strove indefatigably towards a peaceful settlement of the dispute but all
their efforts foundered on the rocks of Arab intransigence. The revisionist version holds
that Israel was more inflexible than the Arab states and that she consequently bears a
larger share of the responsibility for the diplomatic stalemate that remained in place
long after the ending of military hostilities.

Evidence for the revisionist version comes mainly from the files of the Israeli foreign
ministry. These files burst at the seams with evidence of Arab peace feelers and Arab
readiness to negotiate with Israel from September 1948 onwards. The two main issues
on the agenda were borders and the rights of the Palestinian refugees. Each of the
neighbouring Arab rulers was prepared to negotiate directly with Israel in the hope of
gaining something on these issues in return for making peace.

King Farouk of Egypt demanded the cession of Gaza and a substantial strip of desert as
his price for a de facto recognition of Israel. King Abdullah of Transjordan proposed an
overall settlement with Israel in return for a land corridor to link his kingdom with the
Mediterranean. Even more subversive of the conventional wisdom is the case of
Colonel Husni Zaim, the chief of staff who captured power in Syria in a bloodless coup
in March 1949 and was overthrown five months later. On seizing power, Zaim offered
Israel full peace with an immediate exchange of ambassadors, normal economic
relations, and the resettlement of 300,000 Palestinian refugees in Syria in return for
moving the border to the middle of the Sea of Galilee. All three Arab rulers displayed
remarkable pragmatism in their approach to negotiations with the Jewish state. They
were even anxious to pre-empt one another because they assumed that whoever settled
with Israel first would get the best terms. Zaim openly declared his ambition to be the
first Arab leader to make peace with Israel.

In each case, though for slightly different reasons, David Ben-Gurion considered the
price being asked for peace as too high. He was ready to conclude peace on the basis of
the status quo; he was unwilling to proceed to a peace which involved more than
minuscule Israeli concessions on refugees or on borders. Ben-Gurion, as his diary
reveals, considered that the armistice agreements with the neighbouring Arab states met
Israel's essential needs for recognition, security and stability. He knew that for formal
peace agreements Israel would have to pay by yielding substantial tracts of territory and
by permitting the return of a substantial number of Palestinian refugees and he did not
consider this a price worth paying. Whether Ben-Gurion made the right choice is a
matter of opinion. That he had a choice is now undeniable.

The Israeli public paid close and unremitting attention to the war of the Israeli
historians. This war was not conducted exclusively within the precincts of academe but
periodically spilled over into the public arena. Extensive coverage of this war is
provided by the media. Newspapers vie with one another in giving blow by blow
accounts of pitched battles fought at conferences, seminars, and symposia held on
university campuses. Consequently, it is not just a handful of scholars but the whole
nation which has been confronting its past. Such a high degree of public involvement in
a war in which the principal protagonists are university professors is uncommon in most
countries but not surprising in the case of Israel. The reason for this is that the debate
about 1948 cuts to the very core of Israels image of itself.

For a number of years after the publication of the first batch of revisionist books, the
war of the historians continued to concentrate on the birth of Israel and the origins of
the Arab-Israeli conflict. Gradually, however, the war extended to other fronts. In 1993
Benny Morris published a book entitled Israels Border Wars, 1949-1956: Arab
Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War. This formed a
natural sequel to his 1988 book on The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem and to
his 1990 volume of essays 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians. Taken together,
the last two volumes effectively undermined Zionist orthodoxy on the causes of the
Palestinian exodus. Israels Border Wars dealt with the formative period which ended
with the Suez war. Here too Morris made extensive use of recently declassified Israeli
and Western sources in an attempt to describe what actually happened. And here too he
drove a coach and horses through the orthodox version which placed the entire
responsibility for the escalation of the conflict on the Arab side.

Towards the end of 1999 another round began in the war of the Israeli historians with
the publication of two books: Benny Morriss Righteous Victims: A History of the
Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 and my own The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab
World. Both books are wide in scope: the first traces the turbulent history of the conflict
from its origins in the late 19th century to the end of the 20th century while the second
examines Israels policy towards the Arab world during the first fifty years of statehood.

The title of my book requires a word of explanation. It refers to a strategy which was
first formulated by Zeev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism. In 1923
Jabotinsky published an article entitled On the Iron Wall. He argued that it was nave
to expect Arab nationalists to welcome a Jewish state in Palestine. Negotiations with the
Arabs in the early stages would be futile. The only way to realize the Zionist project
was behind an iron wall of Jewish military strength. In other words, the Zionist project
could only be realized unilaterally and by military force.
The crux of Jabotinskys strategy was thus to deal with the Arabs from a position of
unassailable strength. But his article also incorporated a sophisticated theory of change
a change in Arab attitudes to a Jewish state. He envisaged two stages. The first stage
was to build the iron wall. This was expected to compel the Arabs to abandon any hope
of destroying the Jewish state. The shift towards moderation or realism on the Arab side
was to be followed by stage II, negotiations negotiations with the Palestinian Arabs
about their status and national rights in Palestine.

Jabotinskys article sparked a lively debate within the Zionist movement. Spokesmen
for the mainstream accused him of militarism and of betraying the values of the Zionist
movement. Jabotinksy poured scorn on his left-wing critics, on the vegetarians. He
called them hypocrites and he considered it a mitzvah a sacred duty to expose their
hypocrisy. He rounded on his critics in a second article entitled The Morality of the
Iron Wall. From the point of view of morality, he argued, there were two possibilities:
Zionism was either a bad thing or a good thing. If it was a bad thing it should be
abandoned; if it was a good thing, if it had justice on its side, then it must triumph,
regardless of the wishes of anyone else.
Jabotinskys analysis was surely correct: this was a conflict between two national
movements that could not be resolved by negotiation and compromise as long as the
Arabs thought they had a chance of winning. A voluntary agreement was unattainable. I
argue in the book that Jabotinskys strategy was adopted in all but name by his Labour
Party opponents, led by David Ben-Gurion. It became the cornerstone of Zionist
strategy in the conflict. And, most importantly, I argue that the strategy worked. The
history of the state of Israel is a vindication of the strategy of the iron wall.

The Arabs first the Egyptians, then the Palestinians, then the Jordanians recognised
Israels invincibility and were compelled to negotiate with her from a position of
palpable weakness. They learnt the hard way that Israel could not be defeated on the
battlefield. The real danger for Israel is to fall in love with the iron wall and refuse to
move to stage II: negotiations and compromise which means the partition of Palestine
with the Palestinians. Paradoxically, the politicians of the Right, the heirs to Zeev
Jabotinsky, are more prone to adopt stage I of the iron wall strategy as a permanent way
of life than the politicians of the Left.

Itzhak Shamir, who succeeded Menachem Begin as Likud leader and prime minister in
1983, conceived of the iron wall as a bulwark against change and as an instrument for
keeping the Palestinians in a permanent state of subservience to Israel. He had no
interest in negotiations. His aim was to preserve the integrity of the historic homeland,
to keep the whole Land of Israel, including Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) in
Jewish hands. As Avishai Margalit once wrote in the New York Review of Books:
Itzhak Shamir is a two-dimensional man: one dimension is the length of the Land of
Israel, the other is its breadth. Since his historic vision is measured in inches, it was
predictable that he would not yield an inch. It was the Labour Partys Itzhak Rabin who
took the plunge, who made the transition to stage II by negotiating the Oslo accord with
the PLO in 1993.

With the election of Binyamin Netanyahu in 1996, Israel was back to phase I of the iron
wall. Netanyahu did not accept the Oslo accords. He spent three years in power trying to
arrest, delay, and subvert the Oslo process only to discover that it had become
irreversible. The election held in May 1999 was a major landmark in the history of
Israels relations with her neighbours. The Israeli public passed a severe judgement on
Netanyahu and gave Ehud Barak a clear mandate to continue the Oslo process and to
proceed towards comprehensive peace in the Middle East. This is why I ended the
Epilogue to my book on an optimistic note, describing Baraks election as the sunrise
after the three dark and terrible years during which Israel had been led by the
unreconstructed proponents of the iron wall.

Political change in Israel helped to create a climate in which the new history could make
further headway. The shift towards more moderate attitudes in the political arena was
accompanied by growing awareness of the complex historical roots of the conflict and
greater sympathy for the suffering of the Palestinian people. The two processes
proceeded in parallel and reinforced one another. They were the product of greater
maturity and greater self-confidence on the part of the Israeli public and its leaders.
Self-righteousness and the habitual blaming of the Palestinians for their own
misfortunes began to give way to a better understanding of the part played by Israel in
causing the conflict and a more constructive attempt to heal the wounds of this conflict.

Two official pronouncements marked the beginning of the change in early October
1999. Prime Minister Ehud Barak, from the podium of the Knesset, expressed on behalf
of the State of Israel his regret and sympathy for the suffering of the Palestinian people.
Barak did not apologise, nor did he accept responsibility for Palestinian suffering.
Nevertheless, his speech was significant as a first step towards a public recognition that
without confronting the past, there could be no real reconciliation between Israel and the
Palestinians. Yossi Sarid, the education minister, went a step further. He apologised to
Israels Arabs for the massacre carried out by IDF soldiers in the village of Kafr Qasim
in October 1956, on the eve of the Sinai Campaign. Sarid accepted full responsibility
for the cold-blooded killing of Arab citizens of the State of Israel that had occurred 43
years previously. He also called upon Israels teachers to confront this dark chapter in
their nations past.

In relation to the Palestinians, too, there were further indications of soul-searching at the
official level. Shlomo Ben-Ami, the Moroccan-born and Oxford-educated foreign
minister, conveyed to his cabinet ministers some home-truths about the impact of the
past on the present. The prime ministers office prepared a long list of Palestinian
violations of the Oslo accords. As reported by Akiva Eldar in Haaretz on 28 November
2000, Ben-Ami opposed the distribution of the document on the ground that
Accusations made by a well-established society about how a people it is oppressing is
breaking rules to attain its rights do not have much credence. This was a remarkably
honest acknowledgement by a senior official that Israel, as the occupying power, could
not set the ground rules for a people struggling for their legitimate rights.

The books by Benny Morris and me appeared during this relatively hopeful phase in the
development of the peace process. Both books were first published in the United States
where they received much attention from the media and many reviews, often together.
On the merits of the books, opinion was divided but the great majority of reviewers
were sympathetic and supportive, reflecting a general shift in America towards a more
critical attitude to Israel. What ten years previously had been regarded as dangerous
revisionism, had become almost mainstream thinking.

Illustrative of this trend was a review published by Ethan Bronner on 14 November
1999 under the title Israel: The Revised Edition in The New York Times Book
Review. Bronner is the education editor of the traditionally pro-Israeli New York
Times. Yet his article was judicious and fair-minded and it helped to place the two new
books in their proper intellectual context. There is no question, writes Bronner, that
Shlaim presents compelling evidence for a re-evaluation of traditional Israeli history
His story is a bracing corrective to the somewhat mythic one told until now. Benny
Morris is praised by Bronner for writing with clinical dispassion which makes his
narrative more responsible and credible: 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 1880s 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.

At the same time, the new books were also subjected to some fierce criticism, notably in
the conservative, pro-Zionist, American-Jewish monthlies, Commentary and New
Republic. Hillel Halkin, a translator and writer, published in the November 1999 issue
of Commentary a long review article under the title Was Zionism Unjust? Predictably,
Halkin takes the view that Zionism was not unjust and that it is the new historians who
are unjustly harsh in their treatment of this noble, enlightened, and peace-loving
movement. Yet Halkin begins his article by suggesting that the case of The New
Historians vs. The State of Israel can be considered closed because the plaintiffs have
simply dropped the main charges.

Halkin was evidently relieved to discover that in our new books Benny Morris and I are
not as savage about Zionism as he expected us to be. This expectation, however, betrays
a mistaken view of the purpose and nature of the new history. Halkin clings to an ide
fixe (that all our critics seem to share although they can find no evidence for it) namely,
that the new history is driven by a not-so-hidden agenda of delegitimizing Zionism and
the State of Israel.

Halkins real concern is that by challenging the conventional Zionist narrative of the
Israeli-Arab conflict, the new historians deprive young Israelis of pride in the
achievements of their country and confidence in the justice of their cause. In this
respect, too, Halkin is typical of the establishment view. Aharon Meged, the Israeli
novelist, went much further in an article in Haaretz (16 September 1999), claiming that
the new historians are leading their country towards collective suicide. Meged himself
can claim poetic licence, but this is the kind of loose and irresponsible talk that gives
paranoia a bad name. The real question is whether the facts we present are true or false.
Halkin and Meged, however, do not want the facts to get in the way of the myths that
have come to surround the birth of Israel. They would like school history books to
continue to tell only the heroic version of Israels creation. In effect, they are saying that
in education one has to lie for the good of the country. Patriotism, it would seem,
remains the last refuge of the scoundrel.

The review published in New Republic, on 29 November 1999, was written by Anita
Shapira, a Professor of History at Tel Aviv University who is also known as the
princess of Zionist history. The cover announces The Israeli Revisionism Racket but
no explanation is given as to what the racket is. The article itself has a less offensive but
an equally ambiguous title: The Past is not a Foreign Country. A keeper of the
Labour-Zionist flame, Professor Shapira presents old history with a vengeance. Her
article is a breathless and relentless ten-page diatribe against the new historians. Her
tone is hysterical, her arguments are shabby, frequently imputing guilt by association,
and she misrepresents my position and the position of my confederates, as she calls
them, on almost every single issue. Professor Shapira does not engage with the findings
of the new history but simply regurgitates the conventional wisdom which portrays
Israel as the wronged party, and as the innocent victim of Arab predators. And she takes
the debate about Israels past rather personally. Whoever dares to oppose or to criticize
the pronouncements of these self-styled iconoclasts is savagely maligned, she asserts.
This is simply not true. So far most of the malice, venom, and ad-hominem attacks have
come from her side of the argument.

The one mildly interesting question raised by Professor Shapiras article is why the new
history makes her and her confederates so hot under the collar. Their answer to this
question would no doubt be that the new history is driven by a political agenda. This is
a serious charge but no evidence is brought forth to support it. The more likely
explanation for the anger and aggressiveness of the old historians is that they realize that
they are losing the battle for the hearts and minds of their compatriots. Professor
Shapiras own article is redolent of defeat on the intellectual battlefield.

But while the new history is not propelled by political motives, it has already had
significant political consequences on at least three levels. First, it has acted as a spur to
a quiet revolution in the teaching of history in most Israeli high schools. Second, it
enables ordinary members of the Israeli public to understand how Arabs perceive Israel
and how they view the past. Third, it presents to the Arabs an account of the conflict
which they recognize as honest and genuine, and in line with their own experience,
instead of the usual propaganda of the victors. In all these different ways, the new
history helps to create a climate, on both sides of the Israeli-Arab divide, which is
conducive to the continuation of the peace process. As Bishop Tutu pointed out in the
South African context, it is difficult to know what to forgive unless we know what
happened. In the Middle East, as in South Africa, it is necessary to understand the past
in order to go forward.

It is melancholy to have to add that the breakdown of the peace process, the outbreak of
the al-Aqsa intifada, and the rise to power of Ariel Sharon at the head of a Likud-
dominated government in February 2001 have resulted in a swing away from the new
history towards the old history. Six months before the election, Sharon was asked what
changes he thought the education system needed. Sharon replied: I would like them to
study the history of the people of Israel and the land of Israel the children must be
taught Jewish-Zionist values, and the new historians must not be taught. Underlying
this reply was a sense, widely shared among the countrys conservatives, that the new
historians have undermined patriotic values and young peoples confidence in the
justice of their cause. Sharons aim was to nullify the effect of the new historians and to
reassert traditional values in the educational system.

Likuds return to power brought in its wake a regression to fundamentalist positions in
relation to the Palestinians and the reassertion of a narrow, nationalist perspective on
Israels history. Limor Livnat, the education minister, launched an all-out offensive
against the new history, post-Zionism, and all other manifestations of what she views as
the defeatism and appeasement that paved the way to the Oslo accord. In the Jerusalem
Post, on 26 January 2001, she published an article, or rather an electoral manifesto,
under the title Back to the Iron Wall. Ms Livnat accused the Left of lying to the public
about the Oslo process that was secretly and illegally initiated by Yossi Beilin in 1992.
She failed to explain, however, why a diplomatic process initiated by a deputy foreign
minister in a democratically elected government is illegal. The central theme of the
article is the contrast between the pacifism of the Left and the realism of the Right:

The ideology underlying Oslo was the direct opposite of the Iron Wall strategy, which
had guided the policy of Israels leaders since the establishment of the state. Jabotinsky
only stated the obvious when he claimed that the Arabs will never willingly accept the
existence of a Jewish state in their midst, but that only an Iron Wall of deterrence and
military strength would lower their aspiration to destroy Israel.

Ms Livnat goes on to warn against the false belief that preaching pacifism and
abandoning some of Zionisms national claims would be enough to end the Arab-Israeli
conflict. The doctrine of the permanent conflict is stated even more forcefully in the
conclusion:
It is time for Israel to rebuild the Iron Wall that will once again convince the Arabs
that neither military threats nor terrorism will weaken Israels determination to protect
the rights and freedom of the Jewish people. The Iron Wall, however, will not be
rebuilt as long as Prime Minister Ehud Barak is in power.

Ms Livnats summary of the strategy of the iron wall is so crude and simplistic that one
is bound to wonder whether she ever read the writings of Zeev Jabotinsky. Had she
read Jabotinskys work, she might have realised that he was not a proponent of the
doctrine of permanent conflict between the Zionists and the Palestinians but an advocate
of negotiations from strength in order to end the conflict. Like other prominent
members of her party, Ms Livnat treats the iron wall as an end in itself rather than as a
means to an end a satisfactory resolution of the conflict between Zionism and
Palestinian nationalism. The policies she advocates can only lead to more violence and
more bloodshed. As long as she, and people who think like her, remain in power,
Jabotinskys strategy is unlikely to be carried to its logical conclusion. One of the
obstacles to reconciliation through strength with the Palestinians is precisely the kind of
over-reliance on military force and disdain for diplomacy that Ms Livnat exemplifies. In
this respect, the new history is not part of the problem but part of the solution.