New History for a New Israel: Two Landmark Looks at a Sentimentalized Past

The education minister in the dovish new Israeli government led by Ehud Barak caused a stir recently. Yossi Sarid decided that Israeli high schools should teach their students about something most Israelis would just as soon not dwell on: the massacre by Israeli soldiers of dozens of Israeli Arab civilians who broke a curfew in and near the village of Kafr Kasim some 43 years ago. The shootings were followed by a trial and an Israeli court's landmark decision to pin individual responsibility on Israeli soldiers who follow illegal orders. With Sarid's directive, dirty laundry from Israel's founding era was to be aired for its next generation.

This was something quite new under the sun. For decades, Israelis were raised on a celebratory, heroic version of their history -- a story of the return to Zion, of the resettlement of the desolate Jewish homeland, of a war of liberation in which the few stood up to the many, and of a constant struggle by the newly established state to survive in a sea of Arab hostility and brutal violence. This epic was founded on ideas and beliefs that most Israelis held as self-evident: the Jewish nation is ancient, and the Palestinian claim to nationhood is questionable at best; Israelis are innocent, and Arabs have an innate propensity to terrorism; Israel's humanistic soldiers were driven to fight by necessity, not fear or hatred; the Arabs are determined to push the Jews into the sea; the Israeli army's victories were made possible by the spirit of the Israeli fighters, not their superior numbers or weapons; the Arabs have failed to modernize and to ameliorate their economic condition; Israel is a tiny sliver of land in a region of vast Arab territories; the Palestinian refugee problem was created by Arab leaders; and many costly wars could have been prevented if not for Arab intransigence, starting with the 1947 U.N. partition plan and continuing through the many rebuffed Israeli peace initiatives.

Toward the end of the 1980s, however, these certainties began to be shaken. A small group of revisionist historians, including Avi Shlaim, an Oxford professor, and Benny Morris, who teaches at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva, published more skeptical versions of the early phases of the Arab-Israeli conflict. These studies elicited some legitimate criticism from professional academics. But the Israeli public -- including much of the intelligentsia -- was unwilling to sympathetically consider a more complex version of Israel's history that implied greater Jewish responsibility for the Palestinian refugee problem, criticized Israeli diplomatic blunders that prolonged the conflict, and exposed Israeli soldiers' involvement in some atrocities. The works of the "new historians" triggered an angry public debate that quickly deteriorated into a clash between apologists for both the received Israeli master narrative and its "post-Zionist" debunkers.

Shortly after Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization formally recognized each other in September 1993, a Palestinian friend living in exile in Paris asked me, "Now that we have recognized you, will you start remembering what you did to us?" Israelis have. For nations in conflict, the selective processes of remembering and forgetting are always shaped by the fluctuations between war and peace. The Oslo breakthrough and its aftermath demonstrated that -- despite such grave setbacks as the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the 1996 wave of Islamist bus bombings -- once they thought of the Arabs not as the enemy but as neighbors and future partners in peace, battle-hardened and skeptical Israelis could reassess the extent of their responsibility for the conflict and even recognize some of their adversaries' claims. This ability to share blame for the costly struggle has let former fighters, some of them notoriously ruthless, meet again as diplomats around the negotiating table and convert their military reputations at home into the political authority that can sanction painful compromises with erstwhile foes.

Although the peace negotiations with the Palestinians have made Israelis more ready to replace unexamined, self-glorifying notions of the past with more complex and even painful historical accounts, the new Israeli openness must also be traced to deep social and cultural transformations. Recent decades have brought a slow, steady erosion of the almost automatic national solidarity and docile public conformism on which Israeli governments once counted, especially during emergencies; a growing fragmentation of Israeli society into competing groups (Sephardim, the ultra-Orthodox, Israeli Arabs, Russian immigrants, and so on) with distinct senses of identity and profoundly divergent takes on the meaning of the Jewish state; and perhaps most significant, the rise of Israeli individualism, which brings with it a spreading distrust of authority in almost all spheres of life.

Taken together, these developments mark a dramatic shift from an epic culture and politics to a post-epic Israel. In the new, more jaundiced Israeli mood, the once-hegemonic version of Israel's past can survive only as another partisan history. What used to be the official heroic Israeli narrative of the Arab-Israeli conflict is today mostly the version of the Israeli right.

In this climate, the two major new books by Morris and Shlaim are more likely to trigger debates among academics than among ideologues -- an improvement on the debate over their earlier books some ten years ago, which demonstrated that very little light is shed when the bias of apologists meets the bias of debunkers. But now there is a very different Israel to read the new historians.

WOUNDED SPIRITS