For Israel, which dates back roughly to 1800 BC as a destination (Abraham heading to Canaan) and about 1020 BC as a kingdom (the ascension of Saul), 60 years amounts to the blink of an eye.
Yet as the country celebrates six decades of reborn existence on May 14 and books about it cascade into stores, the most important among them, Benny Morris's 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War (Yale University Press), reminds us of a revealing bent among Israeli historians: their passion for the "yearbook," that subgenre of history that suggests precision by focusing on just one year or span of years.
"New historians" such as Morris and Tom Segev, who began to question crucial foundational beliefs of Israeli society in the late 1980s, especially favor it. Morris, the subject of enormous commentary by other historians, counts among his works The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (1987), Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 (1999), and a volume of essays titled 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians (1990). Segev's classics include 1949: The First Israelis (1986) and 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East (2007).
It's as if by crisply saluting the calendar, one can defuse Israel's endlessly controverted history and perhaps reduce the belligerence with which Israeli historians tear one another's work to shreds. But Israeli history can't be saved by tricks of internal architecture from its hermeneutic plight. And the arc of Morris's career suggests the many complexities faced by an Israeli historian of the modern state.
A professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Morris first drew attention with The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, which, according to fellow historians Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim, "provided the first documentary evidence to demonstrate Israeli responsibility for the flight of Palestinians from their homes."
Conventional Israeli history held that Palestinians fled their homes in 1948 because their leaders ordered them to do so, confident they'd return once the five Arab countries that attacked Israel on its first day crushed the new state. But in that book, Morris attributed the flight of the Palestinians — called al-naqba, or "the catastrophe," by Arabs — to a mixture of causes. Some fled under direct attack. Some left in panic because they feared an attack. And some followed orders from Palestinian authorities. Morris also shook up standard Israeli history by declaring that Israelis, and not only Palestinians, committed massacres. (In a 2004 revised edition, he maintained those general views.)
In The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, Morris resisted the allegation that Jewish leaders before 1948 approved an official policy of "transfer," or expulsion, that prompted the flight of more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs, some 60 percent of Palestine's pre-war population. In a much-cited line, Morris stated that "the Palestinian refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab." Morris also stressed that Palestinian flight ultimately resulted from the war launched in 1947 by Palestinians themselves, followed on May 15, 1948, by the attack on Israel by Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Transjordan. But few paid attention to that observation.
Israelis on the right denounced Morris as an "Israel hater," while Palestinians thought he didn't go far enough. The Palestinian anthropologist Sharif Kanaana, of Birzeit University, wrote that Morris's view was "more dangerous than the previous line of Israeli propaganda" because it was "more sophisticated."
Over the years, Morris has largely stuck to his scholarly positions, though some have evolved, along with his personal politics. In a 2001 essay, Morris said he'd come to feel that a "virtual consensus" grew among leaders of the Yishuv, the Jewish community of pre-war Palestine, in support of a transfer of peoples to solve the Arab-Jewish problem — a notion endorsed by Britain's 1937 Peel Commission report. He now believes, based on further archival research, that Israeli commanders, witnessing growing Palestinian flight in late 1948, decided to encourage it, with Ben-Gurion's connivance. He still rejects the idea that "any overall expulsory policy decision was taken by the Yishuv's executive bodies … in the course of the 1948 war."
For Morris, opinions about Israel's prospects for peace should be distinguished from evidence-based judgments about Israel's birth. But can they be?
In a 2002 piece in The Guardian, Morris admitted that his thinking about whether Palestinians want peace had "radically changed" as a result of the second intifada. While most Israelis no longer seek a "Greater Israel," he wrote, Palestinians cling to their dream of a "Greater Palestine" that requires Israel's elimination. Those views seem to have made him less critical, at least in interviews, of Israeli behavior in 1948.
Speaking to the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz in 2004, Morris refused to judge any of the expulsions Israeli forces undertook as a "war crime," leaving aside instances of rape or murder. Because the Arabs tried to commit genocide against the Jews of Palestine, he remarked, the Israeli response was appropriate: "When the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide — the annihilation of your people — I prefer ethnic cleansing."
Even before his political views began to evolve, Morris found himself catching fire from both right and left. From the right, Efraim Karsh, a professor of Mediterranean studies at King's College London and author of Fabricating Israeli History: The "New Historians" (1997), claimed that Morris "systematically falsifies evidence" in his work. Morris initially dismissed Karsh's attacks as "a melange of distortions, half-truths, and plain lies," but defended himself with greater specificity down the line.
From the left, the younger new historian Ilan Pappé, author most recently of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), engaged him in vituperative exchanges. Reviewing Pappé's A History of Modern Palestine (2004) for The New Republic, Morris recalled that they'd once walked together "in uneasy companionship." He then charged that Pappé's "appalling book" included "errors of a quantity and a quality that are not found in serious historiography." The reason was that Pappé "consciously wrote history with an eye to serving political ends," intent on "blackening the Zionists and whitening the Palestinians."
The contretemps illustrates the treacherous landscape in which both men work. Pappé, to be sure, has publicly established his politics in spectacular fashion. He declared support for Hamas's resistance to Israeli occupation, backed the attempted boycott of Israeli academe by European universities, and faced a campaign to get him dismissed from the University of Haifa before he left Israel last year for the University of Exeter.
Plainly seeking to distinguish himself from Pappé, Morris wrote in The New Republic that regardless of politics, scholars bear an obligation "to try to arrive at the truth about a historical event or process." Pappé retorted that Morris was the biased party. He denied earlier friendliness toward Morris and accused him of holding "abominable racist views." Morris's comment that the second intifada had "sent the new historians spinning toward opposite corners of the political universe" seemed an understatement.
Does 1948, a return to his primary scholarly territory, show that Morris the historian has changed as much as Morris the political observer? A comparison of conclusions there with those in Righteous Victims reveals more a shift of emphasis, an expansion of the context in which he analyzes Israel's birth.
In Righteous Victims, Morris mainly describes modern Arab intransigence toward Jews and Israel without exploring its motivations. He says that the Palestinian Arab community saw the Yishuv's expansion as "posing a vague threat to its Arab and Muslim mores and character," as well as its "lands and livelihoods." If Zionism's project was "tainted by a measure of moral dubiousness," Palestinian society, characterized by "regionalism, a Muslim-Christian split, clan feuding, a venal aristocracy, general illiteracy, and technological retardation," couldn't exploit that edge because of its "divisive deformities and general cultural backwardness." So it "refused all compromise" and was, eventually, "humiliated."
In 1948, by contrast, Morris broadens the context in which the war should be judged, both psychologically and geographically. Ben-Gurion, he writes, "failed fully to appreciate the depth of the Arabs' abhorrence of the Zionist-Jewish presence in Palestine … an abhorrence anchored in centuries of Islamic Judeophobia with deep religious and historical roots. The Jewish rejection of the Prophet Muhammad is embedded in the Qur'an and is etched in the psyche of those brought up on its suras." Morris contends that the "1948 war, from the Arabs' perspective, was a war of religion as much as, if not more than, a nationalist war over territory."
That doesn't reduce Morris's admirable willingness to state facts as he sees them and apportion blame to both sides. "In truth," he writes of the 1948 war, "the Jews committed far more atrocities than the Arabs and killed far more civilians and POW's in deliberate acts of brutality." On the other hand, "Zionist expulsionist thinking" was "at least in part a response to expulsionist, or murderous, thinking and behavior by Arabs and European Christians."
In another widening of his lens, Morris reminds readers that after the 1948 war began, some "five to six hundred thousand Jews who lived in the Arab world emigrated, were intimidated into flight, or were expelled from their native countries," usually with their property confiscated. The world forgets those refugees, he points out, because Israel and Western countries took them in, while Arab countries forced their fellow Muslims to remain refugees.
Some critics may accuse Morris of simply reading current Islamic fervor back into the mentalities of Palestinians under the Ottoman Empire and British Mandate. That would be unfair because Morris, as in all his best scholarship, repeatedly cites contemporary documents to support a jihadi rationale for Arab intransigence, such as a 1943 letter from the king of Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud, to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt citing the "treacherous conduct of the Jews toward Islam." A more accurate reading of Morris's approach today is that continued Palestinian rejection of Israel, confirmed for him by such evidence as Yasir Arafat's duplicity and Palestinian popular support for Hamas, forced him as a historian to push past surface descriptions of Arab actions in 1948 to a deeper probe of their motivations.
No history of Israel's origins, however, can achieve definitive status for now. While Israel routinely declassifies much state material after 30 years, the Arab states that attacked Israel keep their archives comparatively closed. Rogan and Shlaim, writing in 2001, saw "no immediate prospect" for declassification of their key documents because "Arab scholars would find no support for critical revisions of their historiography." While the Israeli historian Anita Shapira has pointed out that Jordan opens its archives to a limited extent, materials that might resolve factual disputes — such as the degree of sincerity or cynicism on the part of Arab leaders about Islamic jihadism — are not available. Perhaps frustration fuels the hyper-aggression among Israeli historians.
Can the rocket fire among them be squelched? In his thoughtful, just-published A History of Histories, John Burrows, a professor of European thought at the University of Oxford, praises the community spirit among Clio's devotees, first expressed by Polybius, who believed "that if he died before he completed his history, another historian would carry the subject on."
Doubtless some peer would do the same for a departed Israeli historian. It's equally clear that others would cheer the fact that the biased, manipulative so-and-so was gone. The past, historians say, is another country. Israeli history is another galaxy.
Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle Review and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.