State of Grace? Rethinking Israel's Founding Myths

Israel's first 50 years, friends and foes would have to agree, have been extraordinary. No state of equivalent size -- indeed, few states of any size -- have as consistently commanded world attention. Israel has been involved in almost every type of U.N. activity, beginning with the 1947 U.N. Special Committee on Palestine, followed in November of that year by the General Assembly resolution calling for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. From 1948 on, actions or reactions by Israel have produced cease-fire regimes, truce supervisions, refugee administration, and mediation efforts by U.N. secretaries-general, special envoys, or multiparty conferences. Israel has even been singled out in the infamous 1975 General Assembly resolution depicting Zionism as "a form of racism," repealed only in December 1991 in the wake of the Gulf War.

Israel's first 50 years have brought six wars: the 1948-49 War of Independence, the Suez war of 1956, the Six Day War of 1967, the 1969-70 War of Attrition, the October (Yom Kippur or Ramadan) 1973 war, and Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. These wars set in motion some of the most important and dangerous Cold War confrontations, including a limited U.S. nuclear alert during the 1973 fighting.

In May 1948 Israel had a tiny population of some 650,000 Jews. Even with the impressive ninefold increase over the following 50 years, its present 5.4 million inhabitants (almost 20 percent of them Arabs) give Israel the modest world population ranking of 200th. Not including the occupied territories, Israel is about the size of New Jersey, ranking 152nd. Yet this small state fought a tank battle against Egypt in 1973 that was larger than all but one of the World War II battles between those two behemoths, Germany and the Soviet Union.

In 50 years Israel has become a dominant Middle Eastern power, the only regional nuclear power, and the close ally of the world's sole remaining superpower. Since the June 1967 war, Israel has been engaged in a military occupation over Palestinian Arabs. Israel seemed like it might get out of the military occupation business after the historic handshake on the White House lawn in September 1993 between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasir Arafat, but the negotiations, often stalled, continue at a snail's pace. Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank began after 1967, have continued ever since, and are relentlessly creating facts on the ground.

EPIC HISTORY

Anniversaries are stocktaking times. How have historians interpreted this action-packed first 50 years of Israel's relations with the Middle East and the world? No easy answers here, for Israel's crowded history has been matched by a massive historiography. Israelis and foreigners, friends and foes, participants and observers, professionals and amateurs -- all have entered the debate.

For all this Babel, the writing of Israel's diplomatic record does largely follow one common pattern in historical studies: a standard or "canonical" interpretation gains favor. Conflicting interpretations never disappear but are marginalized. Then, at some point, revisionist challenges gain enough attention to compel reconsideration.

Martin Gilbert's Israel: A History is a 748-page, updated statement of what one might call the Israeli canon, based on interpretations advanced by those who controlled Israel for roughly its first three decades. The book does contain new information. The last English-language study of equivalent bulk and scope was Howard M. Sachar's A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time (1976) with a later second volume, From the Aftermath of the Yom Kippur War (1987). Gilbert provides a few new twists on earlier interpretations but offers no paradigm shift.

Gilbert, a British historian, the official biographer of Winston Churchill, and author of many other works, is no stranger to Israel. He has written several books on Jerusalem, historical atlases of the Jews and of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a study of Palestine under the British Mandate centering on the 1939 White Paper, and a general history, Exile and Return: The Emergence of Jewish Statehood (1978). Israel: A History is a work of synthesis by a knowledgeable historian.

It is not totally whimsical to view this genre of history as a prose variant of the classic epic. Like the epic, the national history is the story of a quest, in this case to create a state against all odds and then maintain it. The collective hero is the Israelis. Indeed, Israel is the subject, and other individuals or nations are brought in only to the extent that they flesh out the story.

A national epic is expected to be edifying, so as to play a role in nation-building. Gilbert, like most professional historians, would surely protest that he is not writing an edifying nationalist tract but doing the historian's job of faithfully recapturing the past. No need here to lapse into postmodernist lucubrations, but readers who look for the organizing theme structuring his account will view this book differently.

HISTORY, NOT HAGIOGRAPHY

To label his book a national epic is not to single out Gilbert or Israel. While the role of history-writing in producing a unifying national myth has been especially pronounced in Israel, writing history as a means of defining and defending the national myth is to be found in all states and, even more, would-be states. Think of the recent uproar attending plans in the United States to set national standards in the teaching of American history. As the shades of Macaulay and Michelet remind us, the national epic has been around for some time.