The Revisionists and New Historians

            The central failing of the new historians is the removal of historical context and their selective focus.  It's easy to look back on 1948 in 1988 and claim that Jewish victory was assured; however, at the time, the future was far from clear and neither the Israelis, nor the Arabs held a crystal ball.  Avi Shlaim presented a similar view in his 1988 book, Collusion Across the Jordan, where there was a war in 1948 between the Yishuv, the British, and the Jordanians.^[17]  There were no other actors.  Israel and Jordan colluded with one another with British help - never mind the fact that the most difficult and protracted battles of the war that yielded the most military casualties occurred between the Israelis and Jordan's Arab Legion.

            Unlike Morris who demonstrated a consistent internal identity struggle, Shlaim is a master of context removal and selective focus - the only villains are Israel and the West.  In the introduction to Collusion, Shlaim explains (p. 4), "Jewish immigration and settlement could not take place without the consent of the country's Arab owners, and this consent was emphatically denied."  Yet, in Palestinian Identity, Rashid Khalidi quotes Kenneth Stein, and comes to the following conclusion: "There can be little doubt that under the kind of economic pressure combined with financial inducements that Stein describes, Palestinian landlords, both absentee and resident as well as fellahin cultivators, often sold land."^[18]  Shlaim simply ignores the fact that the Arab land owners sold land to Zionists, which accounted for the bulk of Zionist land purchases prior to 1948.

            Another example of context removal and selective language and focus comes two pages later in Collusion (p. 6): "Doubting that Jewish immigration flowed from a spontaneous desire to return to the Orient, the Palestine Arabs saw it as a Western bridgehead established under the spurious guise of international legality."  There was a Holocaust in Europe - is it possible that the systematic killing of six million Jews affected the Jewish psyche and contributed to a spontaneous desire to live, anywhere, and be free to control their own destiny?  Does Avi Shlaim really mean to imply that the Jewish desire to return to Israel was something without religious precedence?

            Shlaim's Collusion caused such a stir that soon after he released an abridged edition (roughly half the size) in paperback under a different title: The Politics of Partition.^[19]  In the three-page preface he explains that "when I used the term 'collusion' I did not mean to imply the precise and definitive political and military agreement of the kind reached between Britain, France, and Israel in 1956..."  He admits: "Occasionally I may have pressed my argument a little too far...I can only hope that my adoption of a more neutral title for the paperback addition will go some way towards expiating my original sin."  He employs a clever use of words by sticking to the point that Israel and Britain colluded together anyway, and his reference to his "original sin" is his way of reminding the reader that Israel's birth was the original sin.

            Most striking is that based on the very same research and the very same sources, he revised many of his earlier judgments.  "On some episodes I now put a slightly different gloss, on some issues I have had second thoughts, and on others I have frankly changed my mind.  The conclusions have been written afresh.  What has not changed is my conviction that the historian's fundamental task is not to record but to evaluate." 

            How can the exact same sources make Shlaim change his mind if he had clung to his "conviction" to "evaluate?"  It is because as an evaluator, he was free to remove any context against his thesis and pull out of context the quotes necessary to make his predetermined case.  Furthermore, while it is true that the task of a historian is to evaluate, it is also to record and present within the actual context of the period in question.  History should be written from the point of view and context of the time in question.  Shlaim utterly fails to do that.  Unlike Morris, whose revised edition of The Birth provided more context and balance (at least in the conclusions), Shlaim's revised edition leaps further to the extreme.  His starting point is that Israel is wrong and should be blamed, and he sets out prove his case.

            Avi Shlaim's preface in his 2001 work, The Iron Wall states:  "My aim in the present book is to offer a revisionist interpretation of Israel's policy...the emphasis throughout is on Israel - on Israeli perceptions, Israeli attitudes, and Israeli behavior in the conflict.  The structure of the book is chronological, but I have tried to provide a critical analysis of Israeli foreign policy and not simply a chronology of events."^[20]  A historical study that chooses to only focus on Israel while dismissing the Palestinians, the Arab states, Britain and France (in 1948 and 1956) as influential actors is bound to skew in a biased direction.