Making Israel

Benny Morris, Editor

Publication Year: 2007

Benny Morris is the founding father of the New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars who have challenged long-established perceptions about the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Their research rigorously documented crimes and atrocities committed by the Israeli armed forces, including rape, torture, and ethnic cleansing. With Making Israel, Morris brings together the first collection of translated articles on the New History by leading Zionist and revisionist Israeli historians, providing Americans with a firsthand view of this important debate and enabling a better understanding of how the New Historians have influenced Israelis' awareness of their own past. "The study of Israeli history, society, politics, and economics over the past two decades has been marked by a fierce and sometimes highly personal debate between 'traditionalists'---scholars who generally interpreted Israeli history and society within the Zionist ethos---and 'revisionists'---scholars who challenged conventional Zionist narratives of Israeli history and society. Making Israel brings together traditionalists and revisionists who openly and directly lay out their key insights about Israel's origins. It also introduces multidisciplinary perspectives on Israel by historians and sociologists, each bringing into the debate its own jargon, its own epistemology and methodology, and its own array of substantive issues. This is essential reading for anybody who wants to understand the different interpretations of Israeli society and perhaps the central debate among students of modern Israel." ---Zeev Maoz, Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis, and Distinguished Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya "Israel's 'new historians' have done a great service to their country, and to all who care about the Arab-Israeli conflict. By challenging myths, reexamining evidence, and asking truly important questions about the past they help to confront the present with honesty and realism. This book provides a sampling of the best of what these courageous voices have to offer." ---William B. Quandt, University of Virginia Benny Morris is Professor of Middle East history at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel, and is the author of Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999.

Published by: University of Michigan Press

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During the past two decades Israel has been undergoing a historiographic revolution. Scholars in their hundreds have assailed the archives, and a torrent of books, articles, and MA and PhD theses has poured forth. Inevitably, a substantial part of this revolution has focused on the history of Zionism and Israel, and particularly on the main foundational crises—the first Arab-Israeli War of 1948...

The New Historiography: Israel Confronts its Past

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pp. 11-28

On 11 July 1948, the Yiftah Brigade’s Third Battalion, as part of what was called Operation Dani, occupied the center of the Arab town of Lydda. There was no formal surrender, but the night passed quietly. Just before noon the following day, two or three armored cars belonging to the Arab Legion, the British-led and –trained Jordanian army, drove into town. A firefight ensued...

Remembering 1948

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pp. 29-46

Israelis have been revisiting the events of the 1948 war for the past fifty years, not only because they were branded with the personal memories of the generation that lived through them, nor simply because they were crucial to the Jewish state’s political and social makeup, but primarily because they still occupy a major...

The History of Zionist Historiography

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pp. 47-80

The writing of history cannot be separated from the era in which it is written. Changing perspectives define scope, fields and focal points, attitudes toward the objects of study, and even methodological developments. This essay attempts to trace the growth of Zionist historiography, that is, the writing of the history of Zionism (The Zionist movement and ideology, the prestate...

Hirbet Hizah

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pp. 81-123

The Debate about 1948

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pp. 124-146

The Contribution of Historical Geography to the Historiography of the Establishment of Israel

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pp. 147-177

A century of Zionist strivings to create a Jewish polity in Eretz-Israel and half a century of Israeli statehood have spawned a stratified historiography. ¹ The events, typically enough, were recorded in both real time and after the fact. The first instance produced a literature of memoirs and diaries; the second resulted in volumes...

“Critical” and “Establishment” Sociology in Israel’s Academic Community

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pp. 178-201

Israel’s academic community in recent years has been riven by sharp polemics between self-styled critical sociologists and those they refer to as establishment sociologists, with the controversy reverberating among students of Israeli society abroad. A similar debate has been taking place among historians, but here the distinction has been between New and Old Historians. In the...

The Future of the Past in Israel

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pp. 202-230

Israel’s historical scene has been in turmoil since the late 1980s. Relatively placid in the nation-building period, it has become a stormy arena in the postnational era. Historians passionately disagree on both matters of substance and matters of practice. Some contest, while others defend, accepted truisms about Israel’s past. Some champion suppressed narratives, others archival...

Israeli Historiography and the Ethnic Problem

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pp. 231-277

Israel’s Jewish ethnic problem—like the national conflict with the Arabs and the secular-religious Jewish cultural divide—poses one of its greatest challenges. While Israeli researchers may dispute its causes, they all nevertheless agree that in religious and national terms it is an internal, Jewish problem involving two...

Dialectical versus Unequivocal

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pp. 278-298

In November 1994, I helped organize a conference called “Vision and Revision.” Its subject was to be “One Hundred Years of Zionist Historiography,” ¹ but in fact it focused on the stormy debate between Zionists and post-Zionists or Old and New Historians, a theme that pervaded Israel’s public and academic discourse at the time. The discussion revolved around a number of topics...

A Palestinian Look at the New Historians and Post-Zionism in Israel

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pp. 299-318

Nearly six years have passed since this was written, two and a half of which have been dominated by the second Intifada, better known as the Aqsa Intifada. This has dramatically brought the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a new climax, impacting on, among other things, the essence of the discourse and the views...

Bibliography

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pp. 319-354

Contributors

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pp. 355-356

Index

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pp. 357-369

E-ISBN-13: 9780472026524
E-ISBN-10: 0472026526
Print-ISBN-13: 9780472032167
Print-ISBN-10: 047203216X

Page Count: 384
Illustrations: 2 Tables
Publication Year: 2007