Do Israeli Revisionists Think Israel Is Doing the Right Thing?

About three years ago, at a conference in Aman on the subject of religion and peace, attended by representatives of all faiths in the region (I was a member of the Italian Jewish delegation, entering Jordan on an American passport, although I was permitted publicly to identify myself as an Israeli academic-so is the arabesque, no pun intended, of the Middle East), we were treated to about four or five versions of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, or should I say better, the conflict in the Middle East, of which the Israel-Palestinian struggle is one part. Each version had what to me were a series of fantasies. But I knew that were three or four Israeli historians of Zionism to speak-I, personally, study Jews in medieval and Renaissance Europe-we would hear three or four different Israeli versions of the recent past, each with its own questionable aspects.

Wholly frustrated, I spoke up strongly to say that until we buried the historical, especially the tendentiously historical, ax deeply under ground, irrespective of whether it was Arab or Jew who was wielding it, until, that is, we moved on to resolving current issues precisely as such, there was no hope for resolution. The applause was long, genuine, and sincere. This did not prevent the organizers from later acceding to what was called a"palace request" (read royal) and allowing a so-called Rabbi Hirsch, the head of the Neturei Karta, the most recalcitrant of Israel's ultra-Orthodox Jews (to whom the other ultra-Orthodox do not speak, and who has been named by Yasser Arafat as a kind of minister for Jewish affairs) to appear-in fact, after the formal congress was closed-to say that (un-messianically driven) Zionism was the direct cause of the Shoah. I spoke again, no less strongly, but certainly less dispassionately, in fact, with great passion, to denounce the offense. The Italian delegation seconded me. There was a great hubbub, but nobody suggested a group denunciation. This was before the Camp David summit. There was no Intifada. It was a period of hope.

In this light, it is hard to imagine that the debates among Israeli academic historians of Zionism and of Israel (in Israel everybody is a historian, but let me limit myself to those with a"driving license") have not been unaffected by recent events. No studies have appeared, and not everybody has expressed him or herself. Only proximate generalizations are possible. But it would not be overreaching to say that if conservative scholars are touting"vindication," as some are, the work of the"new" historians in Israel from here on will be more difficult. In the event, their contribution may already have run its course; some of its practitioners had already retreated from particularly strong positions, as one, at least, told me in a private conversation a year ago. Others have held fast, sometimes, however, overwriting history with emotion in order to do so.

THE FIRST MYTH: PALESTINIAN REFUGEES

"New" history in Israel does not refer to new methodologies, what has been called the new history in the United States and Europe. It means simply revisionism-which, many times, has been salutary. The first, and most important, contribution was to end the myth that Arabs left their villages in 1948 at the behest of the invading Arab States following the UN Partition Plan of November 29, 1947. We now know that Israeli troops pushed many Palestinians out. Even in Haifa, Arabs had to move to new neighborhoods, despite pleas by Abba Khoushy, Haifa's perennial mayor, not to go. At the same time, these issues require a measure of perspective. As their critics argue, often cogently, the new historians have sometimes over-read their documentation. Their ardor has also ignored context. The context is when the war began, and why.

One might debate until he or she was blue in the face about what the Jewish settlement meant before 1947, who was responding to it, and where the Arab peasantry that made up the country's principal population stood. It would be hard to say there was a local, national consciousness. The size of this population--after centuries of Turkish rule--was not great, no more than 750,000 in 1948 (Palestinian estimates today). The starting point for debate is what happened after November 29. And a glance at the partition plan map, easily available on the Internet, says most of what needs to be said. There were to have been two independent States, Israel and Palestine. Population transfer was not presumed; the irregular borders would have forced integration and cooperation. Had the partition been accepted, there would be no refugee problem today, no occupation, and, most of all, there would have been a (probably democratic and flourishing) Palestinian State. Once the partition plan was rejected, the rules changed. And all historical analysis must follow from this fact.

In particular, was it necessary, under the changed rules, to remove (sometimes militarily) parts of the Arab population? The issue is hotly debated, to wit, in justifications and denials--as opposed to a majority condemnation--of what is generally assumed to have been a massacre at Deir Yassin in 1948 by the Irgun, one of various"underground" militias that Ben Gurion suppressed, just as he insisted on absorbing the non-guerrilla Palmah, whose members included people like Yitzhak Rabin, into the formal Hagannah, the eventual Israel Defense Forces. Attempts to glorify these militias, which began with the rise to power of the Likud, many of whose members belonged to the militias, have received little serious historical support. Moreover, the IDF has always pictured itself as a moral army. The fact that it is a true people's army--the reservists who fought at Jenin, and it was only reservists we hear of there, were men whose average age is 28, often married and fathers, drawn from all walks of life, and conscripted by emergency order in the morning to begin fighting in the afternoon--generates continuous near unanimous support. Blanket opposition to any UN Commission of Inquiry, whatever else the objection, is based on the notion (as explained by the legal columnist of the liberal newspaper Haaretz, Ze'ev Segal, who is also a professor of law) that international, and possibly arbitrary, criminal prosecution--as opposed to internal discipline--must not threaten Israeli fathers and sons who acted to protect their country.

All this background is to explain why even historians who have questioned actions in the past, who support withdrawal from the territories, and who favor a Palestinian state have generally accepted the present campaign. These historians themselves have been soldiers; the draft in Israel is universal. And Israel is a country where everybody seems to know the"real truth" about everything, which is to say that cover-ups are not easy. Human rights violations of the worst sort by members of the Internal Security Service, a professional body, led to imprisonment.

DISPASSIONATE ANALYSIS IS IMPOSSIBLE

Some, of course, see matters only in terms of the Palestinians' fate after 1948, but most have been disillusioned by the flat rejection of Israel's attempts to right the situation. The history and the actuality are too close to be separated neatly. One cannot reflect on events since Israel's founding with the same dispassion one can have with respect to the temporally distant American Civil War. Continued claims about a massacre of hundreds, when even the U.S. based Human Rights Watch has said no more than 52 were killed--it disputes the number of civilians with the IDF--smack, more than propaganda, of a Palestinian flight from reality, a continued unwillingness to accept even 1947, much less the status of pre-1967; let it not be forgotten also that in 1967 what Israel" conquered," as the radio reminds us daily, was conquered from the Jordanians, who had occupied potential Palestinian lands in 1948, not from the Palestinians themselves. This continued Arab cynicism about what it once did to the Palestinians, and continues to do by maintaining them in so-called camps also makes judgment difficult for Israelis. Understanding the Human Right's Watch complaint about using Palestinians as human shields is no less difficult: had not the Palestinian militants used the entire Jenin refugee camp as a foil to begin with by placing their base (illegally) in the heart of a civilian population and then booby trapping civilian houses, often with that population's collusion?

Doubts expressed privately, as they have been to me, by Arab Christians about Muslim intentions, are also cause for reflection. Muslim majorities in Bethlehem and Nazareth, once staunchly Christian, as well as in Haifa's Wadi Nis-Nas--the real reason for the struggle over the Nazareth mosque--have shaken earlier Christian confidence; how much the more that of Jews about the willingness of Muslim Palestinians to operate within Western parameters of negotiation and settlement of disputes. Very few Israelis believe this willingness--indeed, the ability to operate this way--exists. There is little, if any, faith in Palestinian good will, even to accept what has been negotiated; to wit, Arafat's last minute dramas, when more than once he virtually held pen in hand to sign and then insisted on new concessions before putting pen to paper. The need for those in the West to overcome illusions that all people reason similarly is, and will be ever the more, a major desideratum in the coming years, and not just with respect to the Israel-Palestine dispute.

None of these issues, however, has dramatically affected the fundamental divisions in Israel about what should follow. Recent polls indicate a large majority of Israelis of all stripes favoring a solution, a withdrawal, a Palestinian state, no matter how skeptical most are about the will of the Palestinians to reach a negotiated peace. Others maintain simply that just as Arabs live in Israel, 19 percent, in fact, why may not Jews live in Palestinian territory (that these Jews would have to accept Palestinian citizenship seems not to be considered). And others still, the truly radical few, persist in seeing only Israeli crime.

Israeli historians divide along these same lines and in the same proportions, behaving for the most part, therefore, like Israelis in general. Again, reality and history are too closely intertwined in the Middle East neatly to separate them. More, when the effect of opinion may decide literally between life and death, when those expressing opinion are not comfortably ensconced in studies far from the battlefront, but live right on it, not knowing when and where the next bomb will explode, not to mention whether Palestinians, certainly their mythical leader, want peace or prefer the struggle to continue, then opinion cannot possibly be a (luxuriant) theoretical exercise. Finally, the reemergence of European anti-Semitism--complementing Palestinian anti-Semitism of the coarsest sort--has given additional reason for pause. Can anyone be trusted? No matter how they struggle to separate the two, for Israeli historians, the challenge to distinguish history from memory is always there. So, too--if we wish to draw a methodological lesson from all this--is the question whether even in the hands of seasoned practitioners these two antinomies (by definition) can today be kept correctly distinct. That dangerous historical ax I spoke of earlier will not easily be buried, not easily at all.