The Idea of Israel (17 page)

Born in Poland in 1911, Flapan joined the Zionist left group Mapam after arriving in Palestine in 1930. He joined Kibbutz Gan Shmuel – which appeared in our fourth chapter as the residence of several early anti-Zionist pioneers in the State of Israel – and became interested in Arab culture and language. As with many others who showed such inclinations, his knowledge was used to defeat Arab culture rather than cultivate good relations with it. In the 1930s he was already a member of the Hagana and took part in the war.

Mapam was the second largest party in the Knesset. It defined itself as a Zionist socialist party and had very strong ties to the Soviet Union until Stalin’s death. In the late 1950s Flapan became the head of the party’s Arab section, which succeeded in creating a constituency of a sort inside Israel’s Palestinian community. He worked in the party’s daily
Al HaMishmar
until he joined Martin Buber in founding the English-language journal
New Outlook
in 1957. While the journal rejected many of the oppressive policies against the
Palestinian minority inside Israel, nothing in it challenged the official Israeli version of the 1948 war.
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All this changed when in retirement, in the early 1980s, Flapan went to Harvard and met Walid Khalidi, the doyen of Palestinian historiography at the time and someone who had devoted his life to the chronicling of the 1948 Palestinian catastrophe. It was Khalidi who convinced Flapan that the official Israeli version, the one Ben-Gurion invented, was a fabrication. As Flapan wrote, ‘Like most Israelis, I had always been under the influence of certain myths that had become accepted as historical truth.’
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It was not until he was seventy-three that he decided to investigate the foundational mythologies of the State of Israel. The book which summarises his findings came out in 1987 under the title
The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities
(which, sadly, was published posthumously). In the book he debunks each of these myths in an effective and convincing way.
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The work of those who followed him was in many ways an attempt to sustain his research through the use of newly available material.

The first myth was that Israel accepted the UN partition resolution of 1947 and therefore agreed to the creation of a Palestinian state next to the Jewish one over more than half of Palestine. Flapan explained that this acceptance was ‘tactical’ and ‘a springboard for expansion when circumstances proved more judicious’.
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He proved quite convincingly that Ben-Gurion ignored the territorial dimension of the partition resolution, which divided Palestine into two states, and continually referred to the resolution only as granting international legitimacy for the idea of the Jewish state whose borders the Zionist movement, and no one else, would determine.

The second myth was that all the Palestinians followed al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, in his resistance to any UN peace plan. Flapan showed that al-Husayni was not very popular and did not succeed in organising any significant resistance to the resolution or to its implementation. In his book, Flapan introduces assessments written by Ben-Gurion’s chief advisers on Arab affairs that reaffirm his own analysis: the advisers reported to the Zionist leader that the vast majority of Palestinians accepted partition. He further claimed that in most cases, the Palestinians resorted
to violence only for self-defence. Flapan’s unconventional description of how the Palestinians reacted to the UN policy was based in part on his own memories from that period, during which he was close with top political and military leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine.
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The third myth was that the Arab world was determined to destroy the Jewish state in 1948. First of all, explained Flapan, the Arab world was fragmented and did not have a unified policy on the question of Palestine. Iraq and Transjordan, important powers in the Arab world and both of them Hashemite kingdoms, were seeking an understanding with the new Jewish state. As a result, Ben-Gurion concluded a secret treaty with Jordan, under which the two sides agreed to divide Palestine between them after the British withdrawal from the country. In fact, that agreement had already been reported in two sources. One was the memoirs of Abdullah al-Tall, the Jordanian commander of the Jerusalem front, who had decided to disclose these secret details because he fell afoul of his masters in the early 1950s and had to flee to Egypt.
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The other source was Israel Baer, who was a strategic adviser to Ben-Gurion in 1948; his reason for betraying this secret was his arrest in 1961 on the charge of spying for the Soviet Union. While in jail he wrote a book titled
Israel’s Security: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
, in which he disclosed the existence of this treaty.
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The fourth myth was that the Palestinians left their homes because they were told to do so by their leaders and the leaders of neighbouring Arab countries. There is ‘no evidence’ for such an allegation, declared Flapan. Furthermore, it made no strategic sense for the Arab side to demand such a flight, which would only have made the battlefield more complicated for them.
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The reason the Palestinians became refugees was that the Zionist leadership was determined to reduce their numbers by all possible means.
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Although Flapan had no access to official documentation and was only postulating that there were no direct orders of expulsion, he was convinced that there was no need for such orders, since the atmosphere was such that military commanders knew exactly what to do: namely, expel the Palestinians from their villages and towns.
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Yet a fifth myth was that Israel was a David that miraculously defeated an Arab Goliath. Flapan was convinced that at any given stage in the confrontation of 1948 ‘the superiority of the Jew[ish forces] … was never in dispute’. In addition, the ‘Goliath’ was disunited and weakened by internal strife and animosity.
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Flapan’s sixth and final myth was that Israel extended its hand for peace after the war and was rejected by the Arab states and the Palestinians. He refutes this assertion by pointing to the Lausanne Protocol, signed on 12 May 1949 by Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Israel in an international peace conference on Palestine convened by the United Nations. That protocol set three principal guidelines for peace in Palestine: recognition of the earlier partition plan and therefore, the existence of Israel, the internationalisation of Jerusalem, and the repatriation of Palestinian refugees. Flapan further showed that there were serious initiatives for peace on the part of Syria and Jordan that were rejected by the Israeli government.
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One year later, in 1988, in the liberal, American Jewish journal
Tikkun
, the historian Benny Morris discussed Flapan’s work along with his, mine, and that of Avi Shlaim as constituting a new wave in Israeli historiography concerning 1948, and he coined the term ‘the new history of Israel’.
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The term caught on and has been used ever since. The following year, in an article in
Haaretz
, the prominent Israeli historian Shabtai Teveth adopted the term ‘new history’ for the books we have written; he also rejected our findings and accused us of treason.
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This was the start of a long discussion on our findings, which led to a more general debate on the scholarly challenge of the idea of Israel and which is discussed in subsequent chapters. But in Israel at least, ‘new history’ until today refers to that group of historians who challenge the accepted version of the 1948 war.

And yet this term, borrowed from the ‘new history’ in Europe, is misleading. The European ‘new history’ was an interdisciplinary effort to place diplomatic and élite history in a wider social and nonélite context. The Israeli ‘new historians’, in contrast, questioned only the élite analysis of politics. For this reason, they/we would more aptly be described as revisionists, in a sense similar to the revisionist school in American historiography on the Cold War. One difficulty with
this term, however, is that it creates confusion with the Revisionist historians – namely, historians who belong to the Revisionist Zionist movement of the right.
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An additional problem with the term is that in Germany, France and Italy, ‘revisionist’ is also associated with those who tend to minimise the horror of the Holocaust or the Nazi-Fascist experience.

In any case, what all our works had in common was that they jointly debunked the fundamental Israeli mythologies of the 1948 war. Let me now recap who we were and what were our motives, as well as our main contributions and how they related to the mainstream narratives on both sides.

The ‘New Historians’

Let us first look at the period during which we produced our challenge. The Israeli assault on Lebanon in June 1982 appeared to be a retaliation for the abortive assassination attempt on the Israeli ambassador in London but was really an operation meant to destroy the PLO’s base in Lebanon. The assault failed to win public support in Israel itself, and thus became the first non-consensual war in Israel’s history.

The oppositional public opinion concerning the war set a precedent. It branded the war in Lebanon as unnecessary and a war of choice. Questioning the logic or justification for a war had hitherto been taboo. For professional historians, the assault on Lebanon was a watershed, as it opened up the inquiry into Israel’s previous wars. Further doubts arose, especially among the intellectual and cultural élite, when the First Intifada – an unarmed uprising in the occupied territories – was brutally crushed by the Israeli army in 1987.

The Palestinians now appeared, not as the enemy, but as the victim: the weaker party in the balance of power. The First Intifada was a clash between an army and a civilian population, and consequently it reminded at least some of us of the clashes of 1948. Many confrontations during the 1987 uprising took place in the refugee camps of 1948 and were seen by the Palestinians themselves as part
of the same struggle they had been involved in ever since their dispossession forty years earlier. Thus the 1980s brought back, for both sides, memories of the 1948 war. And for some of us it also triggered new thinking about the past.

The work on 1948 was executed while an inevitable comparison was consciously or unconsciously affecting our reconstruction of the past. The attitudes and policies of 1987 looked relevant to the 1948 war. That even the mainstream Israeli press called the situation in 1987 a war with the Palestinians and explored the similarities to 1948 only accentuated the fact that what was done and condemned in 1987 had already been done in 1948. As for the atrocities Israel had committed in Lebanon, we felt unable to identify with the war’s goals and plans, even though we were all Zionists in one way or another. Additional doubts, for myself, and I think as well for the other two ‘new historians’, appeared when we found ourselves unable to identify with the brutal Israeli response to the uprising in the occupied territories that broke out in December 1987.

Benny Morris was born in Israel in 1948 to an Anglo-Jewish family. His father was an Israeli diplomat serving in various Western posts, including the United Nations in New York, where Morris spent much of his youth. He graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and finished his PhD studies in Cambridge with a thesis on modern European history. His interest in the history of the conflict was aroused by his journalistic work, which he started at the
Jerusalem Post
in the late 1970s, and in particular through his coverage of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. In 1988, as a reserve soldier, he refused to be posted in occupied Nablus. For his refusal, he spent three weeks in jail.

That same year, Morris published
The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949
, in which he confirmed Flapan’s refutations of the fourth foundational myth: that the Palestinians left their homes because they were ordered to do so by their leaders in and outside the country. Like Flapan – and before Flapan, the Irish journalist Erskine Childers – he found no evidence for such a statement. As for Flapan’s claim that the refugee problem was caused by multiple instances of expulsion and dispossession, Morris was able
to verify this by mining the Israeli archives of both the IDF and the paramilitary organisations.

Israel followed British law and so declassified political documents after thirty years and security documents after fifty years. Thus, by 1978, both the British and the Israeli documents on 1948 were open to the public. Morris worked mainly in the archives of the Hagana and the IDF, looking at reports from the battlefield and discussions among the politicians of the day. He concluded that the archival material did not indicate a systematic plan to expel Palestinians but that the residents’ inevitable fear and the consequences of the fighting were the major causes that led people to leave their homes. But in a very detailed manner, he did adduce quite a few cases in which local commanders in fact decided to expel the population. In addition, he pointed out that there was a deliberate policy not to allow them to return. When this book was published in Hebrew in 1991, it was for many Israeli readers their first encounter with the possibility that their army had expelled people by force. The fact that Palestinians were not allowed to return seemed to all of Morris’s reviewers and readers the only possible policy that a Jewish democracy could have adopted.

Avi Shlaim made similar use of the declassified material, in his case to reaffirm Flapan’s refutation of the third foundational myth: that the Arab world was united in its determination to destroy the future Jewish state. Shlaim was born in Baghdad in 1945 and emigrated to Israel in 1951.
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As a sixteen-year-old, he was sent to England to complete his high school studies. He went back to Israel, served in the army, and then returned to England, completing his BA in history at Cambridge and then a PhD at the University of Reading in the early 1970s, where he was a lecturer until moving to St Antony’s College at Oxford in the 1980s. As with Morris, Shlaim’s doctoral dissertation dealt with European history, and it was the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon that orientated him towards the history of the Arab–Israel conflict in general and that of the 1948 war in particular.