State of Grace? Rethinking Israel's Founding Myths

Like most epics, Gilbert's narrative is chronological, even putting the year under discussion atop each page. Individual Israelis figure prominently, with copious extracts from the writings of Israeli leaders, especially David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres. Little-known Israelis also appear throughout, especially those involved in battles and the victims of terrorist attacks. Others, whether Palestinians, Arabs, or people from other parts of the world, are drawn less sharply, and sometimes in rather negative terms.

Gilbert is a historian, not a hagiographer. His Israelis are no plaster saints. The dark spots of Israeli history, for example the 1948 massacre in the Arab village of Deir Yasin by pre-state militias, the 1954 Lavon affair, an Israeli covert attempt to subvert relations between Egypt and the West, and Baruch Goldstein's 1994 massacre of Arabs in Hebron, are duly noted. Still, his is a positive story. It is a picture of an Israel that persevered and prevailed, that was determined to survive and was unwilling to trust its independence to others but sought peace whenever possible. It is also essentially the story as presented by the dominant Labor leadership from Ben-Gurion to Peres. Accordingly, the final three chapters, beginning with the seemingly great breakthrough of an Israeli-PLO accord followed by a tedious, step-by-step deflation of those high hopes for peace and security, are more somber. The assassination of Rabin, the sharp polarization of left and right, and the stalling of the peace process end the book on a more pessimistic note.

Israel: A History may well be the valedictory of the once prevailing canonical statement of Israeli diplomatic history. The era in which Labor controlled politics and dominated the discourse ended in 1977 when Menachem Begin became prime minister as head of Likud. The years since have witnessed neck-and-neck competition between Labor and Likud, but the latter, with increasing support from the religious parties and the more extreme nationalist elements, seems to be inching ahead. Put differently, the revisionist Zionist ideology of the early twentieth-century leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, Begin, and their followers, marginalized during roughly the first three decades of Israeli history, has joined the mainstream.

Buffeted from the right, the dominant discourse has in recent years also been challenged on its other flank. A small group dubbed the "new historians" is questioning the benign, eager-for-peace interpretation of Israel's history.

The two challenges are incommensurable. On the right is a cluster of organized political forces currently in power and relying on ideological legacies (hard-line, expansionist secular, and religious nationalisms) that have long been on the scene. At the other end of the spectrum are a few academic historians whose interpretations are contested by other scholars. They do not currently represent a political force, but ideas are important, and the 50 years of Israeli history -- better, the over 100 years of Zionist history -- suggest that ideas are nowhere more important than in Israel.

THE NEW HISTORIANS

Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris exemplify these new historians. Both have concentrated on the period from 1947 to the early 1950s. The opening of Israeli state archives (plus those of Britain and the United States) for these years is one important reason to choose this early period. At the same time, for Israel as for many nations, the beginning years are the most important, or are at least perceived to be. (Interestingly, Gilbert devotes almost 100 pages to the 1947-49 fighting, 25 pages more than given to all the following five Arab-Israeli wars.)

Shlaim came to attention with his Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine, 1921-1951 (1988), which he revised and retitled as The Politics of Partition: King Abdullah, the Zionists, and Palestine, 1921-1951 (1990). He argued that the Zionists and Jordanian King Abdullah ibn Hussein had a common interest in dividing Palestine between them and preventing the creation of a Palestinian Arab state, which would be ruled by their common enemy, the mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini. This, Shlaim maintains, was also the least bad solution in the view of Britain. Moreover, the Hashemite-Zionist connection has deep roots, reaching back to soon after the establishment of the British mandate in Palestine. These ties, Shlaim suggests, also explain the long-standing Israeli preference for using Jordan as an intermediary to deal with and better control the Palestinians.

In The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (1987), Benny Morris lays to rest the old story that the flight of Palestinians from their homes was largely attributable to instructions from Arab leaders to get out of the way of the advancing Arab armies in order to return safely after Israel's defeat. With detailed documentary evidence, he offers instead a multicausal explanation, including not only the lack of effective Palestinian leadership (many of the notables left earlier) and the usual fears and confusions of wartime, but also more than a few deliberate Israeli military efforts to encourage or enforce evacuation.