Fabricating Israeli History: The 'New Historians'

Fabricating Israeli History: The `New Historians,' by Efraim Karsh. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass and Co., 1997. xii + 205 pages. Index to p. 210. $35 cloth; $17.50 paper. Since the mid-1980s a group of Israeli scholars known as the "new historians" has opened a debate on critical issues in the history of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict. The most prominent members of the group-Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe and Avi Shlaim-have revised radically the history of the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli War, the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem, and the border clashes and other encounters between Israel and its neighbors from 1949 to the second Arab-Israeli war in 1956. They have also covered British attitudes towards the establishment of Israel, and Zionist and Israeli relations with Amir (later King) `Abdallah of Transjordan. Fabricating Israeli History: The `New Historians' is an attack on this entire historical school. Efraim Karsh joins several other Israelis, including novelist Aharon Meged, journalist and biographer of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion-- Shabtai Teveth-and historian Anita Shapira, who have previously and in similarly overwrought styles declared the "new historians" psychologically or professionally unfit. Karsh's vituperative tone may shock Anglo-American readers accustomed to more genteel scholarly debate, but this mode is not unusual in Israeli public culture. Fabricating Israeli History, challenges Morris, Pappe and Shlaim on four major points: The first is Morris's claim that the "transfer" of Palestinian Arabs was part of the thinking of Ben-Gurion and other labor Zionist leaders from the late 1930s through the 1940s. The second is Shlaim's argument that the secret meeting between Golda Meir, representing the Jewish Agency (the leadership body of the Zionist yishuv in Palestine), and King `Abdallah on 17 November 1947 produced a tacit agreement to divide Palestine between the Zionists and Transjordan. The third is Shlaim's and Pappe's interpretation of the meeting between Transjordanian premier Tawfiq Abu al-Huda and British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin on 7 February 1948, which, they argue, resulted in British acquiescence to this tacit agreement conditioned by Bevin's warning that the Arab Legion should not occupy the areas allotted to the Jewish state in the UN partition plan. Finally, Karsh questions the claims of Shlaim, Pappe, and Bevin's biographer, Alan Bullock, that British policy, in general, and Bevin's attitude, in particular, were less antagonistic to the emergent state of Israel than is commonly believed. Karsh correctly notes that Morris injudiciously dismisses the value of oral history and of Arabic sources more broadly. Morris does not seem to know Arabic well enough to use the full range of published materials or the Jordanian archives, which are apparently now available to researchers. And Morris's historical methodology is naively empiricist. Nonetheless, Karsh's main line of attack is tangential to the bulk of Morris's work. Morris is primarily a politico-military historian whose extensive work in the Israeli and British archives has revealed substantial contradictions between what Labor Zionists and Israeli leaders said and what actually occurred. Karsh's claim that Morris exaggerates and misrepresents the context in which Zionist leaders entertained the idea of "transferring" the Palestinian Arab population from the future Jewish state (pp. 37-68) misses this critical point. By returning the debate to the arena of intellectual history, Karsh constructs a defense of Ben-Gurion and Labor Zionism that avoids engaging Morris's archival discoveries. Karsh's main argument against Shlaim's collusion thesis is that Golda Meir never committed the Jewish Agency Executive to endorsing `Abdallah's territorial ambitions in Mandate Palestine and that, in any case, she had no authority to do so, nor did the Jewish Agency discuss or make a decision on this matter (pp. …