The Israeli Revisionist Historians and the Arab-Israeli Conflict--Part One: From the Founding of Zionism to the 1967 War

The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. By Avi Shlaim. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. ISBN 0-3933-2112-6. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. 670. $32.50.

Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001. By Benny Morris. New York: Vintage, 2001. ISBN 0-6797-4475-4. Maps. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. Pp. 784. $18.00.

IN his introduction to The Iron Wall, Avi Shlaim names four "Israeli historians who have challenged the traditional historiography of . . . Israel"—Simha Flapan, Ilan Pappe, Benny Morris, and himself—and who as a result have come to be called "the Israeli revisionist, or new, historians." Shlaim and Morris, for example, have produced recent works which offer a comprehensive view of the Arab-Israeli conflict from the perspective of the Israeli political leadership. The authors do a good job of relating the history of Israel and its conflicts in these works, although much of the material they cover has been dealt with in previous literature. What makes these books revisionist is their use of new documentation and new perspectives to challenge the traditional view on a number of issues that have generally been handled in a manner more favorable to Israel than its adversaries. This effort is not based solely on a reinterpretation of existing evidence but also makes considerable use of Israeli archival materials released over the past decade along with information from other sources and interviews.

The two books under review here are not military histories set in a political context, but rather political histories in which the military establishment plays a vital role in the creation of national policy. Morris's book is exceptionally comprehensive in its scope, working from a broad base of primary and secondary material, much of the latter in Hebrew. Shlaim's work is more analytical and many chapters begin with an election, a new leader and cabinet, and then proceed to demonstrate the impact of these political changes upon Israel's conflict with the Palestinians and the Arab states.

There is much scrutiny of the careers of key political leaders, people who influenced the formation of Israel or provided its political direction: Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharett, Levi Eshkol, Abba Eban, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Ezar Weizman, Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Shamir, Shimon Peres, Binyamin Netanyahu, and Ehud Barak. Most of these people had military experience and many exercised high command, which in turn influenced their political views towards the Arabs and the peace process.

Morris devotes five chapters, one third of his book, to the modern Israeli state's prehistory: the Zionist movement and the early Jewish immigration to Palestine; the shifting relationships of the immigrants with the resident Arab population; the impact of World War I, with its various treaties and promises, on the Arab-Zionist relationship; the turmoil of the Mandate period and World War II; and the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. Again, these are episodes that have received extensive coverage in mainstream Israeli historiography; what the revisionists provide is new interpretations of these episodes, made possible to some extent by new evidence from the Israeli archives. This has enabled historians like Morris and Shlaim to take their distance from the conventional histories of Israel, which often portrayed the Jews as innovative, hard working, and altruistic, as opposed to the Arabs, who come off as primitive, mercenary, and hostile to both newcomers and change. Morris does not depart entirely from those views, instead refuting them in part, and portraying a Jewish leadership that alternated between exploiting, bribing, and ignoring the Arabs and their emerging aspirations, particularly after World War I. He also challenges the view that Jewish leaders such as Herzl, Weizmann, and Ben-Gurion believed...