Israel's Border Wars 1949-1956 (review)

172 SHOFAR Winter 1997 Vol. 15, No. 2 arid cultural evaluation that should be read by literary critics as well as historians and political scientists interested in contemporary Israel. Esther Fuchs Judaic Studies University of Arizona Israel's Border Wars 1949-1956, by Benny Morris. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. 451 pp. £40.00. Benny Morris is the foremost figure among the "new historians" who have revolutionized the historiography of Israel in recent years. Drawing on the massive archival materials now available for the country's early history, they have cut away encrusted myths and ideologically inspired idees refUes. Morris's first book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, published in 1988, evoked a stormycontroversy, with its radical reinterpretation of the causes of the Arab exodus during the Israeli War ofIndependence. In a subsequent work, 1948 andAfter (1990), Morris effectively answered his critics, adding abundant new evidence that fortified his original conclusions. In his new book, Israel's Border Wars, Morris carries his analysis forward to the period leading up to Israel's Sinai Campaign of 1956. As before, he bases his argument on a wealth ofnewly uncovered documentary evidence, mainly from Israeli archives, including, in this case, important materials found in kibbutz and other local repositories. As before, he writes with unsentimental detachment and without ideological bias. As before, he reaches conclusions that challenge the conventional wisdoms of older Israeli historiography. The central thrust of his argument is the linkage between the Arab exodus of 1948 and the border violence that characterized the next eight years. "The main agency and cause of Israeli-Arab violence during 1949-56," he writes, "was Arab infiltration to Israel, in large measure a direct consequence of the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians...." He demonstrates that until 1954 this infiltration was overwhelmingly not political or terroristic in its primary intention but "economically or socially motivated." The fedayeen attacks that began in 1954 were initially "designed to avenge IDF [Israeli Army] attacks on Egyptian personnel," notably the brutal reprisal raids carried out by Ariel Sharon's "Unit 101." Morris lays out with admirable clarity the chain of diplomatic and military events that culminated in the Suez War. He sees Book Reviews 173 the critical turning point as the Israeli raid on Gaza in February 1955, after which Egypt and Israel "plunged headlong down the road to war." Morris calls the Sinai Campaign a war of "retribution, expansionism, and pre-emption" on the part of Israel. He shows how David Ben-Gurion, (prime Minister for most of the period) and Moshe payan (Chief of Staff from 1953 to 1958) were determined to provoke a pre-emptive war with Egypt in ord;er to ensure that the "second round" of the Arab-Israeli conflict, which they regarded as inevitable, would be fought before the Arab states became strong enough, with the help ofCommunist-bloc arms, to pose a serious military challenge to Israel. The more peaceable Moshe Sharett, Israel's first Foreign Minister, and Prime Minister in 1954-55, emerges as a weak, vacillating, indecisive, and patheticallywell-intentioned figure who was unable to impose his authority on his "activist" rivals. In a Cabinet meeting in October 1953, Sharett warned his colleagues "about the acute contradiction between our complete, objective dependence on the aid and support of the world and our subjective, psychologicaVspiritual divorce from the world-our selfcentredness ." But he failed to win over those who believed that the only language the Arabs understood was force. During his brief stint as Prime Minister, Sharett was frequently misinformed or even not informed by the military command about planned reprisal attacks. "Hemmed in, cajoled, and browbeaten by the defence establishment," Sharett found himself reduced to. a political nullity, penning distressed comments in his sadly revealing diary. More than anything what emerges from this book is the lamentable gap, in literally hundreds of instances, between the public statements of Israeli governments and what those making the statements knew privately to be the truth. On one occasion, in 1954; a Foreign Ministry official noted that "for years the army has been informing the Ministry and the outside world that infiltration is being sponsored, inspired, guided, or at...