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

The periods covered by the two books converge only partly. Benny Morris' Righteous Victims begins with the start of major Zionist settlement in Ottoman Palestine in 1881 and ends in 1999, whereas Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall extends from Israel's creation in 1948 to the present. The bulks of these two volumes may make readers decide that one is plenty, but they are more complementary than redundant. While Morris concentrates on the details of military history, which he combines with an account of the politics of the conflict, Shlaim focuses on the diplomatic history of Arab-Israeli relations.

As in his earlier work -- most notably, on why some 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes during Israel's War of Independence -- Morris provides a very rich account of the military and political aspects of the conflict and a very thin interpretive framework. The greatest merit of this bulky "synthesis of existing research" is that the massive body of facts it builds defies sweeping generalizations about the conflict and facile attributions of moral responsibility to any one side. As such, Morris' book provides a timely account for readers who have been learning to regard parts of Israel's past with ambivalence rather than apologetics. His work can help Israelis face the contradictions and ironies of a narrative of liberation that entailed a narrative of conquest and displacement. Where Zionists repeatedly recalled the Arab threat "to throw the Jews into the sea," Morris quotes the fuller statement made during World War I by the Jaffa Muslim-Christian Association: "We will push the Zionists into the sea -- or they will send us back into the desert." Morris describes the role of rightist Jewish militias in introducing the indiscriminate bombing of civilians into the conflict by attacking the markets of Haifa and Jaffa in 1938, but he does not exonerate the Arabs for their share of the terrorism. He details the Israeli army's edge in both numbers and equipment but does not underestimate the superior motivation of Israeli soldiers or the demoralizing effects of internal Arab rivalries.

Righteous Victims illuminates the historical evolution of Jewish perceptions of Arab violence -- particularly the shifts from viewing it as merely the result of incitement by a few belligerent leaders like Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the mufti of Jerusalem in the 1920s and 1930s, to regarding it as a consequence of innate Arab and Muslim aggressiveness, to the post-intifada view of Palestinian violence as an expression of national aspirations. But when Morris examines the way Israelis look at their own armed forces, his book suffers from his unwise assumption that one can separate a nation's military from its social and cultural history. Hence, he does not consider the nexus between the evolution of Jewish perspectives on force and the Zionist aspiration to make the Jew into a soldier -- to create a new Jewish identity to replace the Jewish merchant or the feeble religious scholar. Against this background, the debate between activists such as the country's founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and moderates such as his foreign minister, Moshe Sharett, reflects not only competing strategies for handling the Arabs but competing notions of modern Jewish identity and the meaning of freedom and statehood for post-Holocaust Jews.

Since writing history, however empirically based, is inevitably also an exercise in interpretation, Morris should have been more explicit about how he chose his sources and weighed his evidence. The impression of a neutral, factual description may be misleading even when the historian tries to be fair.

BETWEEN GUN AND OLIVE BRANCH

Avi Shlaim takes a bolder and richer approach than Morris'. His mastery of the sources and his explicit preferences win him the reader's trust for his decisions about what to highlight, when to summarize, and which shortcuts to take in retelling the complicated history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. By advancing a reasonably coherent interpretation and constructing a flowing narrative, Shlaim risks the criticism that the "real world" is too messy, contradictory, and ambiguous to fit into neat patterns. But this is usually a worthwhile price to pay for parsimony and provocation.

The principal theme of The Iron Wall is the constant disagreement between Israeli moderates and military activists on how to handle the conflict with the Arabs. According to Shlaim, moderates like Sharett, Levi Eshkol, and Abba Eban usually read the Middle East situation correctly and relied on diplomatic rather than military means, whereas activists like Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Ariel Sharon, Golda Meir, and Menachem Begin tended to miss important opportunities for negotiations that might well have prevented costly wars.

Shlaim's account of the competition between these two schools makes fascinating, revealing reading, although the dichotomy he draws between them is sometimes too sharp. Despite the sympathy the reader might feel toward the moderates, one doubts that the bridges they proposed building would have served Israel better during its formative years than the "iron wall" that the activists, and especially the militants, actually built around the Jewish state -- on the theory that after they had bashed their heads against it often enough, the Arabs would eventually reconcile themselves to Israel's existence. The echoes of these opposing approaches can still be heard in the two parallel conceptions of the ultimate goals of the peace talks with the Palestinians -- the Rabin school, which seeks to separate Israel from the Palestinians, and the school of his rival and successor, Shimon Peres, which seeks to link the Palestinian and Jewish states.