Old Historians, New Historians, No Historians: The Derailed Debate on the Genesis of Israel

By Raphael Israeli

This polemical volume tackles the thorny and controversial issue of the vastly different narratives told (or manufactured) by the two parties of the conflict in the Middle East (the Arabs and Israel), focusing on 1948, where it all started. While all sides in this debate have vested interests, this author included, an attempt has been made here to reflect the factual truth on the events, although their interpretation will always remain controversial. Although the book argues principally with Benny Morris, the founder and leader of the so-called New Historians, it encompasses a wide array of controversial topics, like the evaluation of the 1948-49 War, the morality of the war (or the necessity to wage it as it was), and its main reverberations, such as the continuing conflict after seven decades, the aggravation of the Palestinian minority in Israel, and the essence of what history means. Israeli argues that the current debate between the so-called Old Historians and the New Historians--itself healthy if and when it is kept to the point and not allowed to degrade into personal libel and recriminations--is not really as unbridgeable as is often claimed. Both sides have erred at points and both sides have some important and complementary light to shed on the contentious events surrounding the birth of Israel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Apr 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781498279192

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Old Historians,

New Historians,

No Historians

The Derailed Debate on the Genesis of Israel

by Raphael Israeli

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Old Historians, New Historians, No Historians

The Derailed Debate on the Genesis of Israel

Copyright © 2016 Raphael Israeli. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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paperback isbn 13: 978-1-4982-7918-5

hardcover isbn 13: 978-1-4982-7920-8

ebook isbn 13: 978-1-4982-7919-2

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Israeli, Raphael.

Old historians, new historians, no historians : the derailed debate on the genesis of Israel / Raphael Israeli.

xvi + 226 pp. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references.

isbn: 978-1-4982-7918-5 (paperback) | isbn: 978-1-4982-7920-8 (hardback)) | isbn: 978-1-4982-7919-2 (ebook)

1. Israel-Arab War, 1948–1949. 2. Palestine—History—1917–1948. 3. Arab-Israeli conflict—History. 4. Morris, Benny, 1948–. 5. Palestinian Arabs. I. Title.

DS126.9 I87 2016

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

To Benny Morris

The intrepid innovator

who courageously broke conventions

and audaciously defied his detractors

Preface

In 2007, Benny Morris, the celebrated scholar of modern Middle Eastern history, who accomplished a tour de force by breaking conventional wisdom and questioning the fundamental premises of the genesis of the Arab-Israeli dispute, edited his seminal volume Making Israel, which purported to sum up the raging debate that he triggered between Old Historians and New Historians, as if a dividing line should for ever mark the boundary between historians of the old kind, who were thenceforth demoted as tools of the history they strove to write, and the emerging new generation of detached and uncommitted scholars who, aided by the wealth of documentation newly put at their disposal by state archives, have carved a new path in the rocky terrain of existing historiography, which purportedly elevated them above, and handily substituted their findings and interpretations for the now irrelevant, obsolete, and antiquated versions of the modern history of the Middle East in general and the Arab-Israeli dispute in particular.

Morris was not the first to break through that hurdle, for others like Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe had preceded him in their iconoclastic writings of contemporary Middle Eastern history. But, unlike them, who were reputed and stigmatized from the beginning as marginal haters of Zionism and the state of Israel (i.e. sworn critics under all circumstances), Morris had had a career as a middle-of-the road Zionist journalist before he ventured into academia. His analyses and revelations were thus greeted with more credibility, in spite of the initial harsh criticism that he encountered at the outset. Conversely, Morris remained persuaded that his most acrimonious rivals in Middle Eastern historiography—Pappe on the extreme left and Ephraim Karsh on the right—were such liars (in his words) that they did not deserve to be included in his book, as part of the legitimate gamut of views between Old Historians and New Historians, nor did he care to even address their arguments, not all of which were patently vain, and some were even demonstrably valid.

These extremes raise some questions about the purely scholarly and totally detached nature of the debate, for it is human, all too human, that the substantive arguments of scholars, when drawn to extremes and tinged with personal one-upmanship, and threatened by mutual accusations of forgery, can easily be derailed into clashes of personalities and injured egos; and then, what is essentially an innocent and legitimate difference in the interpretation of facts between different scholars can be inflated into a world war and an obstinate alignment within a camp (like those of Old historians and New Historians) in defense of one’s intellectual turf against all others. It is therefore the purpose of this book to try to show that all too often the variety of views sounded by one party or another, does not evince such a deep and unbridgeable gulf between the rival opinions as initially claimed, and that more frequently than not, holders of one view rather address other aspects of the same issue than their contenders, and that the two sides of the debate are often rather complementary of each other rather than contradictory.

In historiography, and especially in sociology, new generations of researchers emerge constantly, who are in need to invent new theories to justify their innovative contributions, short of which they cannot find their place in the academic hierarchy. In the nature of things, any theory or paradigm adopted by the preceding generation is necessarily challenged by the new one, which otherwise would have nothing new to show. Thus, a new theory is born, a school of followers congregates around it, and mountains of research are published to give vent to the new prevailing trend, until it is reversed in its turn by the disciples of the founders. So it seems that the way to advance scholarship is not through the creation of new fads, fashions, and schools, which are sure to be erased in the future by other trends, but by individual scholars, each in his or her field, who create their masterpieces and let them compete in the international market of ideas. The best will survive and help to create culture, while the passing fads will disappear without a trace. Herodotus and Thucydides, Voltaire and Huizinga, did not need to belong to a school to immortalize their work.

As always, I am indebted to my home base at the Harry Truman Research Institute, of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which allowed me the office space, the research assistance, the funds and the facilities that permitted me to complete this volume. Above all, I am grateful to my friend and colleague, Benny Morris, for instigating this debate and remaining at the forefront of its proponents. I am also grateful to Enav Hecht and Edward Makhoul for their devoted search for materials. But any errors of fact or interpretation that may have befallen in this text remain completely mine, and I apologize for them in advance.

Jerusalem, Fall, 2015.

Introduction

Varieties of History

Jewish, Arab/Muslim, Chinese, and European

The meaning of history varies in different cultures, as does its instrumentalization in the service of the state, the nation, society, and scholarship. But the perennial question, which has always to be tackled by all historians in all places and in all times, is the choice of facts and events that possess enough historical significance to deserve to be recorded as history. For it was already clear in antiquity that not everything that happened was history. Moreover, the records of events and occurrences of a local micro-import, say a family wedding or an alliance between clans in a remote village, which may have been recorded as key-events in that locality, might remain for posterity as a local gazetteer for future writers of local history and never emerge as a development of national or world import when the macro history of nations or of international relations is drafted.

Then, there is the secret and unknown history of criminal gangs, secret societies, prohibited love affairs, or illegal commercial deals that may never come into the open. Should the historian strive to uncover them and write their history, or because they were part of a hidden occurrence, ought they to remain ignored by the general public, for only publicly known and open facts and events can be taken into account in the making of history? In the history of wars, are its writers the victors or the vanquished? How can one write a synthetic, detached, and objective history if one is a party to a war, conflict, dispute, agreement, pact, or deal? Can momentous events of this scale be entrusted for their accurate depiction to one of the rival parties in any human inter-relationship, or would fiction writers, journalists, chroniclers, and poets be better equipped to depict their side of the story? All too often in our modern world, all sides of a controversy, especially the weak and losers among them, plead for their narrative as a substitute for objective truth, which they claim never existed, for the truth is as subjective a reality as a made-up narrative. What happens then to historical truth?

Following Carlyle, who thought that history was the biography of great men, historians have often woven their historical research and writing around the dominant figures of the period they investigated. But then, assuming that they achieve access to the full available documentation, do they judge their hero by his thoughts, which included his social and family background, psychological make-up, aspirations, dreams, and the decisions he took in his political career, or by the way those resolutions were carried out and interpreted by his aides and subordinates, or by the state machinery whose duty it was to implement them? In the first instance that would reflect the will and intentions of the hero which are a genuine part of his bio-graphy (description of a lifetime); in the second, that would describe what happened in practice, outside the experienced life of the hero, and often against his will and intentions. For example, a leader can initiate, prepare, and launch a campaign of conquest, only to end up losing territory and bringing disaster to his nation (Napoleon, Hitler, Nasser). Who in the historical account is to be credited with the success of the idea, or accused of the failure of its implementation?

History-writing can either describe a succession of events (we call that chronicle) or analyze how one event is generated by others or triggers others, or is linked to others (that is historiography). Even though chronicles, authentic or imagined, actual or faked, as well as ancient historiography, were designed to perpetuate and celebrate acts of God or gods, and were therefore more mythological than human history, they have all always exposed the human need to get back to the root of things, to determine how it all started, how and when any civilization had in the distant past come into being, and then differentiated itself from other human entities, so as to become specifically Chinese, Greek, Muslim, Jewish, or otherwise. Paradoxically, the more our world grows universal and seems to flow in the same river of world history, the more nations, cultures, and peoples tend to explore the tiny brooks and mountain rivulets where their particular identity had originated in the remote past. That means that the more we advance into history, the deeper we dig, and the harder we search into a farther past to bring to light our own distinctive characteristics.

Numerous and varied are the ways different cultures have understood the nature and purpose of history and history-writing, and have put historiography at the service of their national and cultural goals. Some have viewed history as a source of wisdom and learning, others as an opportunity to blame their own failures on everybody else but themselves. Some have used history to set yardsticks for exemplary or moral conduct, others to praise themselves and denigrate everyone else but themselves. Some traditions have built mounds to elevate themselves, others have dug holes to push in and demean their rivals. Some maintained oral traditions that were later put into documents, others had from the outset been obsessed with copying, documenting, carving inscriptions, and drawing the major events that had conditioned their lives. Collections of documents did not necessarily mean, however, that they led to history-writing. There were histories in ancient Greece without preceding massive archival preservation, and there was an obsessive storing of documents in ancient Egypt and Babylonia, which was not necessarily followed by any remarkable and systematic historiography.

It was the ancient Greeks who generated the idea that historical events were not only open to narration, but also to analysis. So much so that the Homer epic, which had been considered a historical account, lost its credibility as a historical source when it was questioned in the fifth century BCE. It was Herodotus who, instructed by the experience of the Persian wars, transcended the narrow scope of the Aegean region and turned to examine world history by including in his purview the Persian Empire, as another civilization that challenged his own within the world known to him then. Thucydides, who followed, acted like Josephus Flavius, his later Jewish-Roman successor, as a sharp-eyed observer on events of his time, a sort of investigative reporter in terms of our days. He wove into his narrative analyses of the prominent personalities of his time, trying to suggest that as human nature was permanent and not likely to change, similar events to the Peloponnesian Wars were likely to recur in the future. A historian who depicted the past but draws conclusions about the future, Thucydides was neither an old nor a New Historian, he was the father of all historians.

In many ways, Christian and then Western historiography have taken over from the ancient Greco-Roman tradition, but since the Renaissance ideas of freedom started to infiltrate historiography and to be set in this tradition as the purpose of history and of history-writing, projecting back onto ancient Greece and Rome some of those ideas, as if they had burgeoned then, only to become full-blown in the modern era. Thus the Greek polis was cultivated into an ideal democratic model of rule, which came to be emulated in modern times. This meant that the past, as in Chinese and Islamic thought, became the ideal pattern to dig up and cultivate in modern times, as the Western idea of projecting utopia into the future had not yet been born. Thus, national histories began to emerge, which understandably praised one’s nation, rule, and country, much like the old pre-Islamic oral tribal history, which later became didactic texts to teach young generations the history that preceded them. The Reformation, which facilitated the attacks on the papacy and the church, also paved the way to the rise of nationalism and national historiographies. Voltaire and Rousso symbolized the advances of modern Western historiography during the Enlightenment, and facilitated the rise of the contemporary academic historiography, which in its beginnings under Godfried Herder at the end of the eighteenth century still combined history and philosophy as one inseparable whole.

Since the French Revolution, state archives became the main tool of history-writing, once historians were given access to the accumulated documentation there. Concurrently, the new trend of critical historiography began to take roots, especially in national history-writing, with the publication of personal memoires and compendia of official documents. The German historian, Leopold Ranke rendered to history its universal import as he indicated the links between various national histories, and he deservingly won the epithet of the father of modern historical scholarship. He separated history from philosophy as an autonomous discipline. Although he insisted on unswerving impartiality when he wrote about every single event as it had actually happened, he regarded every development as part of universal history.¹ Many schools of history followed, but no one has surpassed his strict criticism of the sources, his ferocious attempt at impartiality, even when he was writing his country’s history. He focused, however, on political history, leaving for a century after him the occupation with social and economic history, cultural history, and the synthesis thereof. This is more or less the method followed by the writers of 1948 history and thereafter, both the New and the Old, since their bitter controversies centered on the political issues of the day, with little social and cultural historiography disturbing this pattern at that point.

The Chinese dynasties were in the custom of writing the history of the rulers who preceded them, because only by showing the rise and fall of the preceding dynasty could they prove how the Mandate of Heaven, which legitimized their rule, had been first awarded to others as long as they were righteous, and then removed from them, when their virtues were wanting and their rule disintegrated, and transferred to the replacing rule. At the same time, the conviction that China was the center of the universe, the only culture, while the others were barbarians, did not generate much interest in the periphery, for China’s history, or more precisely the history of its rulers and dynasties, was, in their perception, the only worthy history of the world. At any rate, the yardstick by which the morality of a regime was gauged was its effective rule over the country, and the peace and prosperity it brought to the land. Failure to please the population or to bring order and plenty to the land, was considered a failure of the ruler, hence the approaching end of his Mandate. If this had been the criterion pursued by contemporary Arab and Muslim rulers, it is doubtful whether any of them would have survived on his seat.

History then became for the Chinese a repository of ancient wisdom and morality, to draw from both positive and negative lessons. The first century BCE saw the rise of Sima Qian, who during the rule of the Han’s legendary Wu Emperor wrote the Shiqi, the first comprehensive history of China, which became the object of adulation and emulation for future writers. The author cross-checked information and dismissed some of his evidence, complemented documents with oral evidence he collected from knowledgeable notables and scholars of his generation, and included not only laudatory reports on his historical personalities but also criticism when warranted. As these characteristics were disclosed to the West when it showed particular interest in China after World War II (for the first time since the era of Voltaire, Rousso, and Leibnitz), the Chinese experience came to be regarded by some Western historians as an integral part of human experience that should be understood for what we can learn about human condition.² That was a sign that China had become part of world history and that its study and analysis had grown as important and useful as the study of any other specialized history. Moreover, in the cosmopolitan world of ours, where the problems confronting China resemble more and more the questions that preoccupy us, the study of China is no longer an area study but an illustration and exemplification of a set of problems that interest every historian everywhere.

Sima Kuang, the first worthy historian who followed Sima Qian one millennium after his great predecessor, lent more attention to analyzing sources and documents and tried to harmonize between contradictory reports, but basically the method of copying ancient texts and reiterating their line of argument persisted almost into modern times. Thus, rather than developing a historical and cultural background and suggesting conclusions to be drawn or lessons to be learned, events were reproduced as a chain of happenings without necessarily probing the links between them or the causal relationships that triggered them. These works, as well as the great historical compendia under the Kangxi Emperor (seventeenth century), rather than attacking the existing establishment and challenging the past, as Diderot and D’Alembert had done in Europe in their Encyclopaedic work, tended on the contrary to preserve the past out of a deep reverence to it. That meant that China’s historiography remained the business of the state, which assiduously produced volume upon volume of official history, and did not become the domain of individual researchers and historians. Even when such individuals later took the initiative of writing history, they were former bureaucrats, members of the literati class, who had been cultivated within the official Confucian tradition and were groomed to revere the same prevailing state ideology. Therefore, this long and deeply rooted historical tradition was slow to come out of its infancy and did not join the community of critical historians before the partial liberation of Chinese scholarship from its enslaving and docile past under the communist regime, in the post-Mao era.

Muslims inherited from the Jahiliya (the Era of Ignorance) that preceded the Prophet of Islam, the tribal oral tradition of praising one’s own kin in order to boost their morale and diminish, to the point of de-humanizing, the stature of the rivals in order to make them easy prey in the tribal battles that had characterized Ayyam al-’Arab (the oral Chronicles of the Arabs). The only difference is that today Muslim, and particularly Arab, rulers, as well as their subservient journalists and authors, have taken up the task reserved in the ancient illiterate world to the Sha’ir (the poet), who had memorized past oral history of his clan and kept recording orally the unfolding new one. Hence the permanent whining in Arab and Muslim circles today about others’ faults and guilt, and their own victimization at the hands of others.

This view somehow contradicts the other assumption of Muslim historiography, which is either hagiographic—that is, taking the exemplary biography of the Prophet (Sira), and to an extent that of the his righteous (Rashidun) followers, as divinely-guided, therefore indisputable and immutable—or as acts of Allah, whose word and whim determines everything and every minute of human history on earth. It followed that if everything is Allah’s will, then how can the believers complain against what His non-Muslim creatures do, say, or think? This remains an insoluble dilemma.

The Prophet’s biography, the Islamic campaigns of conquest (futuh), as well as the lives of the personalities who took their privileged places in the chains of transmission of the developing Hadith literature, necessarily generated a flurry of historical, geographical, biographical, and military writings covering the entire swaths of territory that surging Islam had subjugated in its lightening-like spread all over the known civilized world. Thus, Islamic historiography had to become from the outset universal and all encompassing. However, this historiography was primarily founded on witness reports of the time and on personal records and oral evidence of the major actors in those campaigns, rather than on archival materials. The greatest Muslim historiographer after Tabari, who had written his wide-scope history in the tenth century, was fourteenth-century Ibn Khaldun, who analyzed in a pre-modern inter-disciplinary style the rise and fall of nations, the relations between nomadic and settled peoples, thus providing for the first time a coherent world history sustained by sociological underpinnings, which unfolded in universal cyclical patterns.

Islamic history has differentiated since its inception between conquest (fat’h) for the sake of Islam, which literally means opening (up new countries to Islamic rule), namely an entirely positive ideal (hence the name of Yasser Arafat’s faction within the PLO); and others’ conquest or occupation of Islamic lands by non-Muslims, which is derogatively dubbed ihtilal. In Western languages the terminology varies insofar as it distinguishes between the violent phase of conquest—that is, taking over a territory outside one’s own—and occupation, which connotes the more gentle and administrative task of managing the acquired territories. In Western thinking, Germany first conquered Western Europe and then occupied it until liberation, and so did the Western counter-attack, which first conquered Germany and then divided it between the four Occupation zones supervised by the victorious Powers. In the Islamic world, the title of Conqueror (fatih), like the one given to Mehmet II, the Turkish conqueror of Anatolia from the Byzantines, is regarded with great reverence, because he acquired land for the cause of Islam and did much to Islamize the conquered territory under his rule though massive conversions of the occupied peoples or their transfer to other areas of the emerging Ottoman empire. But in their relations with foreigners, Muslims always accuse the others of occupying their lands; thus they dub the Israeli takeover of Palestine, the Indian domination of part of Kashmir, and even the modern Spanish dominion over the erstwhile Islamic Iberian Peninsula, then called Andalusia (even though it was Muslim intruders from North Africa who had invaded and conquered that land from the Christian Visigoths who preceded them).

Thus, under any circumstances, for the Palestinians and the rest of the Arabs and Muslims, it was the Zionists who conquered the Muslim land of Palestine, and that is the perennial violent interpretation they lend to their use of ihtilal in this context, not the softer connotation of administering, or managing what is in their eyes the occupied territory. Therefore, all Jewish claims to ancient rights on that land and all the archaeological, historical, and religious arguments in that vein, are completely rejected as fake and distorted, for the only valid history of the land, like the only valid history of the world, has unfolded only subsequent to the advent of the Prophet of Islam; before his era, Jahiliya (ignorance and darkness) had reigned supreme in the world, meaning that only the Islamic narrative of history is worthy of consideration. If that is the underlying creed of Muslims, then what would have been the use of making this or that concession to them in order to gain a recognition from them? So, it appears that the torment today of many New Historians and other bleeding hearts about what Israel should have done in 1948 to accommodate Muslims, so as to generate peaceful relationships with the Palestinians, appear vain and irrelevant. For in a situation where Arabs are demanding everything and do not seek any compromise based on the rights and demands of the other party (as do admittedly some zealous Israelis on their part vis-a-vis the Palestinians), then what is the point of negotiating and seeking an accommodation? Hamas half of the Palestinian people has at least been candid in their demands, and they honestly emphasize the futility of such measures. In fact, Hamas have been pursuing the line of the Mufti of Jerusalem, who had collaborated with Hitler during WW II, and then led the Palestinian people in 1948 during the war, thus driving the negotiations into an impasse ever since.

In Jewish history, the most striking trait is the assumption of responsibility for past faults, for the major tragedies in Jewish millennial memory were all due to our sins, hence the Jews’ continued sense of guilt and constant digging into the microscopic details of their deeds, real or imaginary, in order to assume responsibility, repent on their doings, let the world know about them and join in their condemnation. Jewish prophets had written about past events and interpreted them in light of man’s attitude towards history. The Bible talks about the God who revealed himself in history, shows interest in humanity’s deeds, and even participates in mundane events. That helped ancient Jews to struggle against polytheism, as they emphasized their One God who rescued them from bondage in Egypt. God turned also to become the highest manifestation of morality, and the history in which He was involved became a yardstick to gauge moral conduct. Hence the growth of Jewish history as one of praise and gratitude to God on the one hand, and on the other hand, as a repository of Jewish sins, faults, and travesties to be avoided in the future.

In the modern world, and up until the creation of modern Israel in 1948, the Jews have been facing the same problems and choices between clinging to their millennial tradition, or adopting the history and identity of the Diaspora countries in which they lived in exile. But while in their dispersion among nations, Jews had simply refused to disappear (by clinging to their ancient and separate tradition, identity, and history), their convergence onto the State of Israel since its birth, has considerably relieved them of the burden of that choice by enabling them to be normal once again in their own national homeland. Yet, contemporary Israelis are still divided about the ways to achieve normalcy, a division that governs the political factionalism in the country roughly along the right/left dichotomy, with the left mostly sustaining the radical and sometimes anti-Zionist line of thinking of the New Historians; and the right upholding the conservative and traditional Zionist historians, who in apposition to their rivals have gained the epithet of the Old Historians. This means that rather than defining the profession of historians in clear and tested criteria of qualifications, training, and style of writing, they have increasingly been subject to divisive political definitions.

The inability in the modern Israeli discourse to characterize historians and sociologists according to the questions they ask and to the significance they find in facts and events, is the main reason for the polarization that has unfolded between historians of various kinds, for the hostility they have developed towards each other, and for the futility of their vain hair-splitting debates about issues where both positions can be complementary to each other, and where the accusations thrown by the New Historians towards their preceding Old colleagues, and vice-versa, can be easily bridged over via civilized debate and relaxed exchange of views. For both are valid, as we shall see, and their differences emanate more from the various circumstances under which they lived, the generational gap between them, the pressures exercised on them by their social environment, each in its time, rather than from a purposeful design to distort documents and lie about them, as accused by some, or from the ignorance, bias, and other human failures that are alleged by others.

Thus, one turns one’s own traumatic obsession with guilt into a new school of history, either by terming oneself a New Historian in order to preserve the scholarly mantle over one’s psychological complexes, or by legitimately questioning this whole new artificial differentiation between New Historians, which necessitates to be counteracted by the equally artificial appellation of Old Historians, as if historiography, and especially schools of sociology, recognized such a distinction. The validity of a school or style of writing has never depended on