Unfortunately, the response of Israel’s mainstream cultural leadership has been less than inspiring. Efforts to take on the new historians have frequently missed their target, precisely because they have mistaken the broad assault on the Jewish nationalist perspective on history for an argument about facts. Typical of this problem is Efraim Karsh’s Fabricating Israeli History, which was published in English in 1997 and first translated into Hebrew last year. While Karsh does succeed in showing that some of the claims put forward by new historians such as Morris and Shlaim are based on sloppy archival work, if not deliberate falsification of the sources, the points on which he goes to the mat with them are peripheral to their central theses. He takes Morris to task, for example, for distorting the evidence in trying to show that from the mid-1930s on, Ben-Gurion and the mainstream Labor Zionist leadership favored the wholesale transfer of Arabs from the areas of Palestine slated for a Jewish state. Yet even if Karsh is right on this point—which he almost certainly is—Morris’ main claims about Israeli actions during the War of Independence remain unaffected. Moreover, when Karsh presents his own interpretation, which seeks to vindicate the Zionist leaders, his elaboration of their motives is so implausible as to all but ruin his case. For example, Karsh insists on taking at face value speeches in which Ben-Gurion waxed poetic over his desire for idyllic relations with the Arabs—desires which may have been sincere in the abstract, but which were frequently at odds with the hard-nosed character of his policies.

To compete effectively, scholars who do not share the new historians’ ideological predilections must set as their primary task the formulation of an appropriate perspective from which Israeli history can be understood. And this means, first and foremost, a clarification of the moral standards by which the actions undertaken by the Zionist leadership are to be judged. Underlying much of the work of the new historians is the unspoken premise that the wielding of power necessary to found and defend a state is morally problematic in general, and especially so in the case of Israel. This premise leads them to take a magnifying glass to those cases in which the Zionists’ use of power led (or may have led) to the suffering of others—both Arab and Jew—while downplaying the circumstances that rendered those actions necessary. In responding, it is necessary to articulate and defend a competing set of premises, which more faithfully reflect the proper application of morality to politics: That the behavior of historical actors must be assessed in light of their obligation to wield power on behalf of the people whose interests they were bound to protect; that the establishment and preservation of a state for the Jewish people was not only legitimate but a moral imperative; and that Zionist leaders have generally been faced by international and local exigencies that have compelled them to make difficult choices. This, of course, does not mean accepting the idea that everything the Zionists did was right, or even reasonable. But it does make it possible to take historical facts that come to light and put them in their proper place within a narrative whose conclusions remain fundamentally sympathetic to Zionism.

We can take as an instructive example the research done by Benny Morris in Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. Despite occasional inaccuracies, Morris’ account of the subject is more detailed and accurate than anything that preceded it. If we consider the facts Morris presents, it is reasonably clear that the flight of much of the Arab population from the territory that became Israel stemmed from battles between Arab and Jewish forces, and from the fears of Arab civilians of getting caught in the fighting. The Zionist leadership, Morris’ research shows, correctly understood the danger that the Palestinian Arabs posed to the nascent Jewish state, and therefore did little to prevent their departure, at times encouraging or even precipitating it through political or military actions. In fact, Morris’ own research does much to disprove the claims of his recent writings that what happened during the War of Independence was “ethnic cleansing.”

This is not to say that one cannot document cases of unjustified Jewish brutality. Recording and condemning such atrocities is the duty of a balanced history. But these do not necessarily warrant Morris’ conclusion that from the outset, the Zionist enterprise was “tainted by a measure of moral dubiousness.” The fact that Israeli troops at times used excessive force in retaliating against terror attacks in the 1950s does not, for example, prove that Israel’s counterterrorism efforts of this period were unnecessary or immoral. On the contrary, when viewed in the context of the challenges that Israel faced, and in light of how other nations responded to comparable dangers, the Zionist record remains admirable. Likewise, the fact that Holocaust survivors and immigrants from Arab countries were not always received in Israel with appropriate dignity does not fundamentally alter the picture of a Zionist leadership deeply committed to the safety and well-being of these Jews.

Rather, what these and other errors demonstrate is that practice sometimes fell short of national ideals—a fact that should serve as a reminder of the responsibility that comes with statecraft, and of the vigilance that is needed in order to prevent the exigencies of power from leading to moral corruption. Only people who believe that the Jewish state should be held to standards of purity that are incompatible with the exercise of sovereign power, or who think that such errors are representative of Israel’s entire past, need fear an honest stocktaking with regard to the nation’s history.

 

At the same time, however, it is a mistake to respond to the challenge posed by the new historians in a purely reactive manner. Because of the perspective that guides their research, the new historians invariably focus on those topics that best lend themselves to uncovering evidence of Zionism’s sins, both real and imagined. If they are allowed to dictate the agenda for scholarly debate, public discourse about Israel’s legacy will be reduced to a series of arguments concerning the precise degree of blame to be assigned the Jewish state in the most problematic chapters of its history. To mount a successful opposition, scholars of Zionist and Israeli history need to concentrate on producing original works that reflect the full range of significant events, and that employ a comparative perspective appropriate for describing the establishment and development of a state born under difficult circumstances. In doing so, they will necessarily give the most noble aspects of Zionism their due, without whitewashing the failures that are part of every major historic enterprise.

In describing the individuals who shaped this enterprise, there is no reason to try to cast great men and women as angels. Rather, they should be depicted as they were: As great men and women, faced with terrible choices, who took responsibility for the fate of their people, with all of the good—and ill—that this entails. One need only think of Anita Shapira’s two-volume masterpiece Berl (1980), or Shabtai Teveth’s three-volume The Burning Ground (1976, 1980, 1987)—monumental biographies of leading Zionist figures Berl Katznelson and David Ben-Gurion, respectively—to see how painstaking works of scholarship can also become a source of national pride. Though markedly different in their approach to the craft of writing history, these authors carried out exhaustive research, recorded the most problematic elements in the lives of their subjects, and still painted a picture that elevates the reader’s respect for these leaders. It is in the hard labor of producing such works that scholars refine a perspective which is capable not only of destroying myths that lack a real basis, but of contributing to the creation of legends solidly grounded in truth. Though there doubtless are further skeletons waiting to be exhumed from the Zionist closet, there are also many stories marked by heroism and justice which await the appropriate chronicler. To be a Zionist historian is not to deny the existence of the former. It is to believe that—taken on the whole—it is the latter that dominate a fair and truthful retelling of the history of the Jewish state.

If the new historians spur scholars more sympathetic to the legacy of the Jewish state to retell the story of Zionism in a manner that is theoretically compelling, and which takes full advantage of newly available sources, they will have performed an invaluable service. Such an outcome, however, depends not on the new historians, but on those intellectuals whose assessment of the Zionist heritage is more positive. It is they who will have to display the creativity and diligence necessary to vindicate their nation’s past in the eyes of scholars and the broad public alike. The future of the Jewish state may well depend on their success.

Daniel Polisar, for the Editors
February 1, 2000