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Vol. 10, No. 3 Spring 1992 155 1948 and Mter: Israel and the Palestinians, by Benny Morris. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. 269 pp. $30.00. 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians invigorates a crucial historical and political debate, while simultaneously placing that debate in a historiographic context. Based on sources that have only recently become public, Benny Morris substantially adds to his pathbreaking work, tbe Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (1988). Rejecting the conventional Zionist wisdom that Palestine's Arabs made a conscious choice to flee their homes in order to return with the "victorious" Arab armies, Morris also refutes the Arab myth that the Jews waged a "premeditated , systematic campaign to expel the entire Palestinian population" (p. 87). At times Arab flight was expressly "engineered" by Jews (Chapter 9), but this was atypicaL In both books Morris scrutinizes specific cases and communities, showing that groups of Arabs left at different times for different reasons. However qualified by the exigencies of wartime and exaggerated fears, official Zionist and Israeli policies routinely contributed to the permanent expulsion of Palestine's Arabs-well beyond any immediate requirements of "security." But why a second book? Is there justification fora volume to "complement" his initial work (p. vii)? A partial, worthwhile rationale for 1948 and After is to discuss the storm over The Birth, and to place it in the spectrum of related books which have made use of newly declassified documents (most notably, Avi Shlaim's Collusion Across thejordan). Above all, Morris intends to buttress his side against the charges of Shabtai Teveth and others, who are fundamentaIly opposed to what the author terms the "New Historiography." Quite correctly Morris objects to being labeled a "revisionist," because he and Shlaim are not "revising" nearly as much as they are working with completely new material; also, understandably, Morris does not wish to be confused with the right-wing Revisionists. Although Morris' historiographic essay is informative, he might have acknowledged the broader context-that is, the current Israeli impasse over "land for peace," and the possible function of the "New History" in that conflict. Although his Rankian desire to practice history true-to-thefacts is consistently well executed, Morris might have enhanced his credibility by admitting that he is indeed involved in a debate about Israel's present and future-as has Yehosafat Harkabi. Perhaps to Morris and most Israelis this is all too obvious. Nevertheless, his claim of Olympian detachment is inappropriate, despite his solid history. In the remainder of the book, Morris reconstructs a series of events 156 SHOFAR based on vivid documentary evidence that deflates many of Israel's founding myths. In Chapter 2, Morris shows that while both the Mapam and Mapai parties publicly espoused Jewish/Arab friendship, they did little or nothing to curb expulsions, the destruction of villages, the harvesting of Arab fields for themselves, and the takeover of abandoned lands. Still, "a handful of Hashomer Hatza'ir activists" severely criticized the state's behavior and "their party's compromises," resulting in aid to "certain Arab communities" and prevention of further displacement (p. 65). Such acts, however, became ever more exceptional. Chapter six, "The Harvest of 1948," relates that "Arab crops were either burned or harvested by the Israelis, and Arab farmers were prevented from cultivating their fields ..." (p. 184). In explicating "the Israel Defence Forces Intelligence Service Analysis of June 1948" (Chapter 3), Morris supports one of his central contentions: that the Haganah/IDF "operations were the main cause" of Arab flight (p. 74). The author's close attention to the document is effective, yet he also might have used it to indicate how such events would be understood and assimilated by the victors. Even though the report was not produced with propaganda in mind, "its authors tended to minimize the role of direct expulsion orders in causing the Palestinian exodus" (p. 75). We see that the myth of Israel's immaculate conception was being fashioned even as an opposing reality was perpetrated, and similar evasions were replicated in other official reports (e.g., pp. 135, 183). According to the corroborated elements of this seminal document, the first stage of the Palestinian exodus was...

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