The Revisionists and New Historians

Works Cited

 

Finkelstein, Norman. "Myths, Old and New." Journal of Palestine Studies 21.1 (1991): 66-89.
---. "Rejoinder to Benny Morris." Journal of Palestine Studies 21.2 (1992): 61-71.
Karsh, Efraim. "Benny Morris and the Reign of Error." Middle East Quarterly 6.1 (1999).
---. Fabricating Israeli History : The `New Historians'. London: Frank Cass, 1997.
Khalidi, Rashid. Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Kimche, Jon, and David Kimche.

The Revisionists and New Historians

Conclusions

            Benny Morris is guilty of the same bias he accused the 'establishment' of in Tikkun in 1988.  He claimed that the new historians were more impartial and fair because they matured after the defining years of the 1947-1949 war whereas the old historians who lived through the war "were unable to separate their lives from this historical event, unable to regard impartially and objectively the facts and processes that they later wrote about."[21]  The new historians had the opportunity to mature during the 1982 Lebanon War and their analysis is better because the country grew more skeptical of the

The Revisionists and New Historians

Shlaim Compared To Morris

By: Matthew RJ Brodsky

            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.

The Revisionists and New Historians

The Birth vs. The Birth Revisited

By: Matthew RJ Brodsky

            The Birth Revisited is nearly twice as long as the original and had the additional benefit of new documents made available in the Israel Defense Forces Archives.  Like his first book, The Birth Revisited lays out an impressive indictment against Israel and once again, in the conclusions, one wonders if they were guided by the preceding hundreds of pages of evidence he offered. 
            In the introduction to The Birth, Morris clearly states: "It cannot be stressed too strongly that, while this is not a military history, the events it describes - cumulatively amounting to the Palestinian Arab exodus - occurred in wartime and were a product, direct and indirect, of that war."[14]  From that point forward, the book concentrates on Israeli actions, loses the context of war, and proceeds to quote and misquote Ben Gurion enough to give the reader the belief that Ben Gurion was a cold-hearted, deliberate, and life-long planner of ethnic cleansing.[15]  In his conclusions, he begins by restating that the refugee problem was a product of war and not by design.  However, there are some subtle and important differences between the two sets of conclusions.  The following are the two opening paragraphs:
 

The Revisionists and New Historians

Morris' Ideological Journey

            More than anything else, it was Arafat's rejection of the Clinton Parameters in late 2000 and the subsequent Palestinian launching of the war of attrition that dramatically affected Morris' thinking on the Arab-Israeli conflict.  However, whereas his interviews and non-scholarly articles after 2001 certainly demonstrated his new political leaning, his scholarly research and books were balanced, accurate, apolitical, and detached.  This was a continuation of the process he began in the later 1990s when he started  to add more context to his works.
            Benny Morris was born in 1948 to Jewish immigr

The Revisionists and New Historians

Benny Morris, the Revisionists, and the New Historiography

By: Matthew RJ Brodsky



            During the 1980s, the "new historians" or revisionists (Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, and others) rose to challenge the established, orthodox history regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict.  The topic of choice and challenge was the 1947-1949 war for Israel/Palestine.  The new historians believed that only two diametrically opposed narratives existed, the official Israeli line, and the Arab line.  The Israeli orthodox narrative, as explained by the new historians, was that Zionism was a well-meaning progressive national movement.  Israel was attacked by the Arabs who sought to prevent the establishment of the Jewish State.  During the war for independence, Arab leaders called for the Palestinians to vacate their homes and land in order to allow their armies to defeat the Zionists, at which point the Palestinians would return to their homes as victors.  The poorly armed and vastly outnumbered Jewish community or Yishuv fought bravely and defeated the Arab armies - David defeated Goliath.  All peace and reconciliation attempts made by Israel in the wake of the war were rebuffed by the Arabs.
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