'Conquerors, my son, consider as
true history only what they themselves have fabricated.'[1] Thus remarked the old Arab
headmaster to young Saeed on his return to Haifa in the summer of 1948 in Emile Habiby's tragicomic novel The Secret Life of Sacid, the
Ill-fated Pessoptimist. The headmaster spoke about the Israelis more in
sorrow than in anger: 'It is true they did demolish those villages ... and did
evict their inhabitants. But, my son, they are far more merciful than the
conquerors our forefathers had years before.'[2]
Most
Israelis would be outraged by the suggestion that they are conquerors, yet this
is how they are perceived by the Palestinians. But the point of the quote is
that there can be no agreement on what actually happened in 1948; each side
subscribes to a different version of events. The Palestinians regard Israelis
as the conquerors and themselves as the true victims of the first Arab-Israeli
war which they call al-Nakba or the
disaster. Palestinian historiography reflects these perceptions. The Israelis,
on the other hand, whether conquerors or not, were the indisputable victors in
the 1948 war which they call the War of Independence. Because they were the
victors, among other reasons, they were able to propagate more effectively than
their opponents their version of this fateful war. History, in a sense, is the
propaganda of the victors.
The
conventional Zionist account of the 1948 War goes roughly as follows. The
conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine came to a head following the
passage, on 29 November 1947, of the United Nations partition resolution which
called for the establishment of two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jews
accepted the UN plan despite the painful sacrifices it entailed but the
Palestinians, the neighbouring Arab states and the Arab League rejected it. Great Britain did everything in its power towards the end of the
Palestine Mandate to frustrate the establishment of the Jewish state envisaged
in the UN plan. With the expiry of the Mandate and the proclamation of the
State of Israel, seven Arab states sent their armies into Palestine with the firm intention of strangling the Jewish
state at birth. The subsequent struggle was an unequal one between a Jewish
David and an Arab Goliath. The infant Jewish state fought a desperate, heroic
and ultimately successful battle for survival against overwhelming odds. During
the war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled to the neighbouring Arab
states, mainly in response to orders from their leaders and despite Jewish
pleas to stay and demonstrate that peaceful co-existence was possible. After
the war, the story continues, Israeli leaders sought peace with all their heart
and all their might but there was no one to talk to on the other side. Arab
intransigence was alone responsible for the political deadlock which was not
broken until President Anwar Sadat's visit to Jerusalem thirty years later.
This
conventional Zionist account or old history of the 1948 War displays a number
of features. In the first place, it is not history in the proper sense of the
word. Most of the voluminous literature on the war was written not by
professional historians but by participants, by politicians, soldiers, official
historians and by a large host of sympathetic chroniclers, journalists,
biographers and hagiographers. Secondly, this literature is very short on
political analysis of the war and long on chronicles of the military
operations, especially the heroic feats of the Israeli fighters. Third, this
literature maintains that Israel's conduct during the war was governed by higher moral
standards than that of her enemies. Of particular relevance here is the precept
of tohar haneshek or the purity of
arms which posits that weapons remain pure provided they are employed only in
self-defence and provided they are not used against innocent civilians and
defenceless people. This popular-heroic-moralistic version of the 1948 war is
the one which is taught in Israeli schools and used extensively in the quest
for legitimacy abroad. It is a prime example of the use of a nationalist
version of history in the process of nation-building.
Until
recently this standard Zionist version of the events surrounding the birth of
the State of Israel remained largely unchallenged outside the Arab world. The
fortieth anniversary of the birth of the state, however, witnessed the
publication of a number of books which challenged various aspects of the
standard Zionist version. First in the field, most polemical in its tone, and
most comprehensive in its scope, was Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. A former Director of the
Arab Affairs Department of the left-wing Mapam party and editor of the Middle East monthly, New Outlook, Flapan
wrote his book with an explicit political rather than academic aim in mind: to
expose the myths that he claimed served as the basis of Israeli propaganda and
Israeli policy. 'The myths that Israel forged during the formation of the state', writes
Flapan, 'have hardened into this impenetrable and dangerous ideological
shield.'[3] After listing seven myths
to each of which a chapter in the book is devoted, Flapan frankly admits the
political purpose of the whole exercise. 'It is the purpose of this book to
debunk these myths, not as an academic exercise but as a contribution to a
better understanding of the Palestinian problem and to a more constructive approach
to its solution.'[4] Other
books which were critical in their treatment of the Zionist rendition of
events, though without an explicit political agenda, included Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee
Problem, 1947-1949[5], Ilan Pappe, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict,
1948-51[6] and my own Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement and
the Partition of Palestine.[7] Collectively we came to be
called the Israeli revisionists or the new historians. Neither term is entirely
satisfactory. The term revisionists in the Zionist lexicon refers to the
right-wing followers of Zeev Jabotinsky who broke away from the mainstream
Zionism in 1925 whereas the new historians are located on the political map
somewhere to the left of the mainstream. On the other hand the term new
historians is rather self-congratulatory and dismissive, by implication, of
everything written before the new historians appeared on the scene as old and
worthless. Professor Yehoshua Porath of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has
suggested as alternative terms pre-history and history. But this is only
slightly less offensive towards the first category of historians. So, for lack
of a better word, I shall use the label 'old' to refer to the proponents of the
standard Zionist version on the 1948 War and the label 'new' to the recent
left-wing critics of this version, including myself.
The
first thing to note about the new historiography is that much of it is not new.
Many of the arguments that are central to the new historiography were advanced
long ago by Israeli writers, not to mention Palestinian, Arab and Western
writers. To list all these Israeli writers is beyond the scope of this article
but a few examples might be in place. One common thread that runs through the
new historiography is a critical stance towards David Ben-Gurion, the founder
of the State of Israel and its first Prime Minister. Whereas the old historians
tend to view Ben-Gurion as representative of the consensus among the civilian
and military elites, the new historians tend to portray him as the driving
force behind Israel's policy in 1948, and particularly the policy of expelling the
Palestinians. Many of the recent criticisms of Ben-Gurion, however, are
foreshadowed in a book written by former IDF official historian,
Lieutenant-Colonel Israel Baer, in prison after he was convicted of spying for
the Soviet Union.[8]
A
significant start in revising the conventional Zionist view of British policy
towards the end of the Palestine mandate was made by Gavriel Cohen in a volume
with a characteristically old-fashioned title - Hayinu Keholmim, 'we were as dreamers.'[9]Yaacov Shimoni,
deputy-director of the Middle East Department in the Foreign Ministry in 1948,
published a highly perceptive article on the hesitations, doubts, reservations
and differences of opinion that attended the Arab decision to intervene in Palestine in May 1948.[10] This article which is at
odds with the dominant Zionist narrative is all the more noteworthy for having
been written by an insider. Meir Pail wrote another corrective to the notion of
a monolithic Arab world, focusing in particular on the conflict between King
Abdullah of Jordan and the Palestinians.[11] The Zionist version about
the causes of the Palestinian refugee problem was called into question by a
number of Israeli writers and most convincingly by Rony Gabbay.[12] Finally, the argument
that Israel's commitment to peace with the Arabs did not match
the official rhetoric can be traced to a book published under a pseudonym by
two members of the Israeli Communist Party.[13]
Although
many of the arguments of the new historiography are not new, there is a
qualitative difference between this historiography and the bulk of the earlier
studies, whether they accepted or contradicted the official Zionist line. The
difference, in a nutshell, is that the new historiography is written with
access to the official Israeli and Western documents whereas the earlier
writers had no access, or only partial access, to the official documents. This
is not a hard and fast rule; there are many exceptions and there are also
degrees of access. Nevertheless, it is generally true to say that the new
historians, with the exception of the late Simha Flapan, have carried out
extensive archival research in Israel, Britain and America and that their arguments are backed by hard
documentary evidence and by a Western-style scholarly apparatus.
Indeed,
the upsurge of new histories would not have been possible without the
declassification of the official government documents. Israel adopted the British thirty-year-rule for the review
and declassification of foreign policy documents. If this rule is not applied
by Israel as systematically as it is in Britain, it is applied rather more liberally. Both Britain and Israel have also started to follow the American example of
publishing volumes of documents which are professionally selected and edited.
The first four volumes in the series of Documents
on the Foreign Policy of Israel are an invaluable and indispensable aid to
research on the 1948 War and the armistice negotiations which ended it.[14]
On
the Arab side, there is no equivalent of the thirty-year-rule. On the 1948 War
little access is allowed to the relevant Arab archives and this restriction
does pose a serious problem to the researcher. It is sometimes argued that no
definitive account of the 1948 War, least of all an account of what happened
behind the scenes on the Arab side, is possible without proper access to the
Arab state archives. But difficulty should not be construed as impossibility.
In the first place, some official Arab documents are available. A prime example
is the report of the Iraqi parliamentary committee of inquiry into the Palestine question which is packed with high-level documents.[15] Another example is the
collection of official, semi-official and private papers gathered by the
Institute for Palestine Studies.[16] In addition,there is a
far from negligible literature in Arabic which consists of first-hand accounts
of the disaster, including the diaries and memoirs of prominent politicians and
soldiers.[17] But even if none of these Arabic sources existed, the other available sources
would provide a basis for an informed analysis of the 1948 War. A military
historian of the Middle Ages would be green with envy at the sight of the
sources available to his contemporary Middle Eastern counterpart. Historians of
the 1948 War would do much better to explore in depth the manifold sources that
are available to them than to lament the denial of access to the Arab state
archives.
If
the release of rich new sources of information was one important reason behind
the advent of historical revisionism, a change in the general political climate
was another.[18] For many Israelis, especially liberal-minded ones, the Likud's ill-conceived
and ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982 marked a watershed. Until then, Zionist
leaders had been careful to cultivate the image of peace-lovers who would stand
up and fight only if war was forced upon them. Until then, the notion of ein breira, of no alternative, was
central to the explanation of why Israel went to war and a means of legitimizing her
involvement in wars. But while the fierce debate between supporters and
opponents of the Lebanon War was still raging, Prime Minister Menachem Begin
gave a lecture to the IDF Staff Academy on wars of choice and wars of no choice. He argued
that the Lebanon War, like the Sinai War of 1956, was a war of choice designed
to achieve national objectives. With this admission, unprecedented in the history
of the Zionist movement,the national consensus round the notion of ein breira began to crumble, creating
political space for a critical re-examination of the country's earlier history.[19]
The
appearance of the new books on the 1948 War excited a great deal of interest
and controversy in Israeli academic and political circles. A two-day conference
on the end of the War of Independence, organized by the Dayan Centre and the
Institute for Zionist Research at Tel Aviv University in April 1989, turned
into a confrontation between the old Zionist version represented by historians,
journalists and veterans of that war and the new version represented by Benny
Morris and myself. Several of the speakers argued, with good reason, that the
new historians did not develop a new school or new methodology of historical
writing but used conventional historical methods to advance new interpretations
of the events of 1948. On the merits of the new interpretations, opinions were
sharply divided. Members of the old guard, especially the Mapai old guard,
bristled with hostility and roundly condemned the new interpretations. The
response of the Israeli academic community, both at the conference and in
subsequent reviews and discussions, was more measured. Some of the findings of
the new historiography, and especially the findings reported in Benny Morris'
book, became widely accepted in the Israeli academic community and found their
way into university reading lists and high school textbooks.
Among
the critics of the new historians, the most strident and vitriolic was Shabtai
Teveth, Ben-Gurion's biographer. Teveth's attack entitled 'The New Historians'
appeared in four successive full-page instalments in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz on 7, 14 and 21 April and 19 May 1989. Teveth subsequently published an abridged and
revised version of this series in an article entitled 'Charging Israel with
Original Sin' in the American-Jewish monthly, Commentary. In this article, Teveth describes the new history as a
'farrago of distortions, omissions, tendentious readings, and outright
falsifications.'[20] Teveth pursues two lines of attack. One line of attack is that the new
historiography 'rests in part on defective evidence, and is characterized by
serious professional flaws.'[21] The other line of attack
is that the new historiography is politically motivated, pro-Palestinian, and
aimed at delegitimizing Zionism and the State of Israel.
In
support of this last claim, Teveth quotes a passage from Benny Morris's article
on 'The New Historiography', a passage which states that 'how one perceives
1948 bears heavily on how one perceives the whole Zionist/Israeli experience...
If Israel was born tarnished, besmirched by original sin then
it was no more deserving of that [Western] grace and assistance than were its
neighbours.' Teveth goes on to say that the original sin Shlaim charges Israel with consists of 'the denial to the Palestinian Arabs
of a country' while Morris charges Israel with 'creating the refugee problem' and both charges
'are false.'[22]
Teveth
must have gone through the two books in question with a fine tooth comb to
discover evidence of the political motive that he attributes to their authors
but he came up with nothing. This is why he was reduced to quoting from the Tikkum article which he builds up in a
farrago of distortions of his own into the political manifesto of what he calls
'the new historical club.' But even the quote from the article does not
demonstrate any political purpose; all it does is to point out that Western
attitudes towards Israel are influenced by perceptions of how Israel came into the world. This is surely undeniable. Benny
Morris replied in Ha'aretz and in a
second article in Tikkun that, as far
as he is concerned, the new historiography has no political purposes whatsoever.
The task and function of the historian, in his view, is to illuminate the past.[23] My own view is that the
historian's most fundamental task is not to chronicle but to evaluate. The
historian's task is to subject the claims of all the protagonists to rigorous
scrutiny and to reject all those claims, however deeply cherished, that do not
stand up to such scrutiny. In my view many of the claims advanced by the old
historians do not stand up to serious scrutiny. But that does not mean that
everything they say is untrue or that Israel is the sole villain of the piece. In fact, neither
Benny Morris nor I have charged Israel with original sin. It is Shabtai Teveth who, in face
of all the evidence to the contrary, continues to cling to the doctrine of Israel's immaculate conception.[24]
It
is Teveth's counter-attack which is politically motivated. Like so many other
members of the Mapai old guard, he is unable to distinguish between history and
propaganda. Any attempt to revise the conventional wisdom with the help of new
evidence that has come to light is therefore immediately suspect as unpatriotic
and calculated to harm the reputation of the leader and the party who led the
struggle for independence. For Teveth and other members of the Mapai old guard,
the events in question do not yet fully belong to history but represent their
party's and their country's finest hour. They are too wedded, personally and
politically, to the heroic version of the creation of the State of Israel to be
able to treat the new historiography with an open mind.
Interestingly,
individuals on the political right in Israel, whether scholars or not, respond to the findings of
the new historiography with far greater equanimity. They readily admit, for
example, that Israel did expel Palestinians and even express regret that she did not expel
more Palestinians since it was they who launched the war against her.
Right-wingers tend to treat the 1948 War from a realpolitik point of view rather than a moralistic one. They are
therefore spared the anguish of trying to reconcile the practices of Zionism
with the precepts of liberalism. It is perhaps for this reason that they are
generally less self-righteous and more receptive to new evidence and new
analyses of the 1948 War than members of the Mapai old guard. The latter put so
much store by Israel's claim to moral rectitude that they cannot face up to the evidence of
cynical Israeli double-dealings or brutal expulsion and dispossession of the
Palestinians. It is an axiom of their narrative that Israel is the innocent victim. And it is their concern with
the political consequences of rewriting of history that largely accounts for
the ferocity of their attacks on the new historiography.
Although
politics and history have got mixed up in the debate about 1948, and although
this debate often resembles a dialogue of the deaf, the very fact that a debate
is taking place is a welcome change from the stifling conformity of the past. A
J P Taylor once remarked that history does not repeat itself, it is historians
who repeat one another. The old historiography on the emergence of Israel is a striking example of this general phenomenon. As
for the new historiography, whatever its faults, it at least has the merit of
stimulating a re-examination of time-hallowed conventions.
Six
major bones of contention can be identified in the ongoing debate between the
new and the old historians: Britain's policy at the end of the Palestine
mandate, the Arab-Israeli military balance in 1948, the origins of the
Palestinian refugee problem, the nature of Israeli-Jordanian relations during
the war, Arab war aims, and the reasons for the continuing political deadlock
after the guns fell silent. Let me now review briefly the main arguments and
counter-arguments on these six key issues in the debate, bearing in mind that I
am not a detached or neutral observer but one of the protagonists in the
debate.
1. British Policy
The
first bone of contention concerns British policy in Palestine between 29 November 1947 and 14 May 1948. Zionist historiography, reflecting the suspicions of Zionist leaders
at that time, is laden with charges of hostile plots that are alleged to have
been hatched against the Yishuv during the twilight of British rule in Palestine. The central charge is that Britain armed and
secretly encouraged her Arab allies, and especially her client, King Abdullah
of Jordan, to invade Palestine upon expiry of the British Mandate and do battle
with the Jewish state as soon as it came into the world. For Ernest Bevin, the
Foreign Secretary in the Labour Government headed by Clement Attlee, is
reserved the role of chief villain in this alleged conspiracy.
Ilan
Pappé, using English, Arabic and Hebrew sources, has driven a coach and horses
through the traditional Zionist rendition of British policy towards the end of
the mandate, and I tried to follow along the trail that he had blazed[25] The key to British policy
during this period is summed up by Pappé in two words: Greater Transjordan.
Bevin felt that if Palestine had to be partitioned, the Arab area could not be left to stand on its
own but should be united with Transjordan. A Greater Transjordan would
compensate Britain for the loss of bases in Palestine. Hostility to Hajj Amin al-Husayni, who had cast his lot with the Nazis
during the Second World War, and hostility to a Palestinian state, which in
British eyes was always equated with a Mufti state, were important and constant
features of British policy after the war. By February 1948, Bevin and his
Foreign Office advisers were pragmatically reconciled to the inevitable
emergence of the Jewish state. What they were not reconciled to, was the
emergence of a Palestinian state.
The
policy of Greater Transjordan implied discreet support for a bid by Abdullah,
nicknamed 'Mr Bevin's little king' by the officials at the Foreign Office, to
enlarge his kingdom by taking over the West Bank. At a secret meting in London on 7 February 1948, Bevin gave Tawfiq Abul Huda, Jordan's Prime Minister, the green light to send the Arab
Legion into Palestine immediately following the departure of the British
forces. But Bevin also warned Jordan not to invade the area allocated by the UN to the
Jews. An attack on Jewish state
territory, he said, would compel Britain to withdraw her subsidy and officers from the Arab
Legion. Far from being driven by blind anti-semitic prejudice to unleash the
Arab Legion against the Jews, Bevin in fact urged restraint on the Arabs in
general and on Jordan in particular. Whatever sins were committed by the British Foreign Secretary
as the British mandate in Palestine approached its inglorious end, inciting King Abdullah to use force to
prevent the emergence of a Jewish state was not one of them.
If
Bevin was guilty of conspiring to unleash the Arab Legion, his target was not
the Jews but the Palestinians. The prospect of a Palestinian state was pretty
remote in any case because the Palestinians themselves had done so little to
build it. But by supporting Abdullah's bid to capture the Arab part of Palestine adjacent to his kingdom, Bevin indirectly helped to
ensure that the Palestinian state envisaged in the UN partition plan would be
still-born. In short, if there is a case to be made against Bevin, it is not
that he tried to abort the birth of the Jewish state but that he endorsed the
understanding between King Abdullah and the Jewish Agency to partition Palestine between themselves and leave the Palestinians out in
the cold.
The
Zionist charge that Bevin deliberately instigated hostilities in Palestine and gave encouragement and arms to the Arabs to crush
the infant Jewish state thus represents almost the exact opposite of the
historical truth as it emerges from the British, Arab and Israeli documents.
The charge is without substance and may be safely discarded as the first in the
series of myths that have come to surround the founding of the State of Israel.
2. The Military
Balance
A
second myth, fostered by official and semi-official accounts of the 1948 War,
is that the Israeli victory was achieved in the face of insurmountable military
odds. Israel is pictured in these accounts as a little Jewish
David confronting a giant Arab Goliath. The war is portrayed as a desperate,
costly and heroic struggle for survival with plucky little Israel fighting off marauding armies from seven Arab states.
Israel's ultimate victory in this war is treated as nothing
short of a miracle.
The
heroism of the Jewish fighters is not in question. Nor is there any doubt about
the heavy price that the Yishuv paid for its victory. Altogether there were
6,000 dead, 4,000 soldiers and 2,000 civilians, or about 1 per cent of the
entire population. Nevertheless, the Yishuv was not as hopelessly outnumbered
and outgunned as the official history would have us believe. It is true that
the Yishuv numbered merely 650,000 souls, compared with 1.2 million Palestine
Arabs and nearly 40 million Arabs in the surrounding states. It is true that
the senior military advisers told the political leadership on 12 May 1948 that the Haganah had only a 'fifty-fifty' chance of
withstanding the imminent Arab attack. It is true that the sense of weakness
and vulnerability in the Jewish population was as acute as it was pervasive and
that some segments of this population were gripped by a feeling of gloom and
doom. And it is true that during three critical weeks, from the invasion of Palestine by the regular armies of the Arab states on 15 May
until the start of the first truce on 11 June, this community had to struggle
for its very survival.
But
the Yishuv also enjoyed a number of advantages which are commonly downplayed by
the old historians. The Yishuv was better prepared, better mobilized and better
organized when the struggle for Palestine reached its crucial stage than its local opponents. The Haganah, which
was renamed the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) on 31 May, could draw on a large
reserve of Western-trained and home-grown officers with military experience. It
had an effective centralized system of command and control. And, in contrast to
the armies of the Arab states, especially those of Iraq and Egypt, it had short, internal lines of communication which
enabled it to operate with greater speed and mobility.
During
the unofficial phase of the war, from December 1947 until 14 May 1948, the Yishuv gradually gained the upper hand in the
struggle against its Palestinian opponents. Its armed forces were larger,
better trained, and more technologically advanced. Despite some initial
setbacks, these advantages enabled it to win and win decisively the battle
against the Palestine Arabs. Even when the Arab states committed their regular
armies, marking the beginning of the official phase of the war, the Yishuv
retained its numerical superiority. In mid-May the total number of Arab troops,
both regular and irregular, operating in Palestine was between 20,000 and 25,000. IDF fielded 35,000
troops, not counting the second-line troops in the settlements. By mid-July IDF
fully mobilized 65,000 men under arms,by September the number rose to 90,000
and by December it reached a peak of 96,441. The Arab states also reinforced
their armies but they could not match this rate of increase. Thus, at each
stage of the war, IDF significantly outnumbered all the Arab forces ranged
against it and by the final stage of the war its superiority ratio was nearly
two to one.[26]
IDF's
gravest weakness during the first round of fighting in May-June was in
firepower. The Arab armies were much better equipped, especially with heavy
arms. But during the first truce,in violation of the UN arms embargo, Israel imported from all over Europe, and especially from Czechoslovakia, rifles, machine-guns, armoured cars, field guns,
tanks, airplanes and all kinds of ammunition in large quantities. These illicit
arms acquisitions enabled IDF to tip the scales decisively in its own favour.
In the second round of fighting IDF moved on to the offensive and in the third
round it picked off the Arab armies and defeated them one by one. The final
outcome of the war was thus not a miracle but a faithful reflection of the
underlying Arab-Israeli military balance. In this war, as in most wars, the
stronger side ultimately prevailed.
3. The Origins of
the Palestinian Refugee Problem
A
third bone of contention between the old and the new historians concerns the
origins of the Palestinian refugee problem. The question is: did they leave or
were they pushed out? Ever since 1948 Israeli spokesmen have maintained that
the Palestinians left the country on orders from their own leaders and in the
expectation of a triumphant return. Accounts written by old historians echo the
official line. Arab spokesmen have with equal consistency maintained that Israel forcibly expelled some 750,000 Palestinians from
their homes and that Israel, therefore, bears the full responsibility for the creation of the
Palestinian refugee problem. The question of origins is thus directly related
to the question of responsibility for solving the Palestinian refugee problem.
Arab claims that the notion of forcible 'transfer' is inherent in Zionism and
that in 1948 the Zionists simply seized the opportunity to displace and
dispossess the Arab inhabitants of the country rendered this controversy all
the more acrimonious.
Benny
Morris in his book The Birth of the
Palestinian Refugee Problem investigated this subject as carefully,
dispassionately and objectively as it is ever likely to be. Morris found no
evidence of Arab leaders issuing calls to Palestine's Arabs to leave their homes and villages nor any
trace of a radio or press campaign urging them to flee. On the Israeli side, he
found no blanket orders handed down from above for the systematic expulsion of
the Palestinians. He therefore rejected both the Arab order and the Jewish
robber state explanations. His much-quoted conclusion is that 'The Palestinian
refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab. It was largely
a by-product of Arab and Jewish fears and of the protracted, bitter fighting
that characterized the first Arab-Israeli war; in smaller part, it was the
deliberate creation of Jewish and Arab military commanders and politicians.'[27] Benny Morris has already replied in detail to
Teveth's criticisms and it would serve no useful purpose for me to give a blow
by blow account of the battle between them.[28] But it seems to me that
Teveth's position on the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem is about as
sophisticated as the old saying haya ness
vehem nassu - there was a miracle and they ran away. Anyone who believes
that will believe anything.
Another
category of critics of Benny Morris' book consists of Israeli orientalists.
Some orientalists, like Yehoshua Porath, have been highly supportive. Others,
like Asher Susser, Emmanuel Sivan and Avraham Sela, have written in a more
critical vein while giving credit where credit is due. The recurrent criticism
from this professional quarter is that Morris has made very little use in his
book of Arabic sources. In response to this criticism, Morris posed a question:
would the consulting of the Arabic materials mentioned by the critics have
resulted in a fundamental revision of the analysis of the Palestinian exodus or
added significantly to the description of this exodus given in his book?[29] Avraham Sela concedes that the use of the
Arabic sources would have probably not changed the main conclusions of Morris's
study on the causes of the Palestinian exodus. But he goes on to argue that
neglect of the available Arabic sources and heavy reliance on the Israeli
documents is liable to produce an unbalanced picture.[30]
While
a number of Israeli Orientalists consider that Morris attached too much weight
to Israeli actions, compared with other factors, in the creation of the
Palestinian refugee problem, many other reviewers felt that in his conclusion
Morris lets Israel off rather lightly. An observation which is frequently made, by Western
as well as Palestinian reviewers, is that the evidence presented in the body of
the book suggests a far higher degree of Israeli responsibility than that
implied by Morris in his conclusion.[31] But despite the shortcomings of Morris's
conclusion, his book remains an outstandingly original, scholarly and important
contribution to the study of a problem which lies at the heart of the
Arab-Israeli conflict.
4. Israeli -
Jordanian Relations
A
fourth issue which gave rise to a lively controversy in Israel is the nature of Israeli-Jordanian relations and,
more specifically, the contention that there was collusion or tacit
understanding between King Abdullah and the Jewish Agency in 1947-49. That
there was traffic between these two parties has been widely known for some time
and the two meetings between Golda Meir and King Abdullah in November 1947 and
May 1948 have even featured in popular films. Nor is the charge of collusion a
new one. It was made in a book published by Colonel Abdullah al-Tall who had
served as a messenger between King Abdullah and the Jews, following Tall's
abortive coup and defection to Egypt.[32] A similar charge was
levelled against Ben-Gurion by Lieutenant-Colonel Israel Baer in the book he
wrote in his prison cell, following his conviction of spying for the Soviet Union.[33] Tall condemned king Abdullah for betraying his fellow Arabs and selling the
Palestinians down the river. Baer condemned Ben-Gurion for forming an unholy
alliance with Arab reaction and British imperialism. A number of books and
articles on Zionist-Hashemite relations have also been written by Israeli
scholars, the most recent of which are by Dan Schueftan and by Uri Bar-Joseph.[34] But out of the recent
crop of books on this rather unusual bilateral relationship, it is my own book Collusion Across the Jordan which
achieved real notoriety on both sides of the Jordan and has been singled out for attack by the old
historians.
The
central thesis advanced in my book is that in November 1947 an unwritten
agreement was reached between King Abdullah and the Jewish Agency to divide
Palestine between themselves following the termination of the British mandate
and that this agreement laid the foundation for mutual restraint during the
first Arab-Israeli war and for continuing collaboration in the aftermath of
this war. A subsidiary thesis is that Britain knew and approved of this secret Hashemite-Zionist
agreement to divide up Palestine between themselves rather than along the lines of the UN partition
plan.
This
thesis challenges the conventional view of the Arab-Israeli conflict as a
simple bipolar affair in which a monolithic and implacably hostile Arab world
is pitted against the Jews. It suggests that the Arab rulers were deeply
divided among themselves on how to deal with the Zionist challenge and that one
of these rulers favoured accommodation rather than confrontation and had indeed
cut a deal with the Jewish Agency to partition Palestine at the expense of the Palestinians. The thesis also
detracts from the heroic version which pictures Israel as ringed by an unbroken circle of Arab hostility and
having to repel a concerted all-out attack on all fronts. Not surprisingly, the
official history of the War of Independence fails to even mention the unwritten
agreement with King Abdullah.[35] Even when this agreement is acknowledged, the
official line is that Abdullah went back on it at the critical moment and that
it consequently had no influence, or only a marginal influence, on the conduct
of the war.[36]
Regurgitating
the official line, Shabtai Teveth hotly denies that the Jewish leaders were
involved in collusion or had an ally on the Arab side. He coyly admits that
'Israel and Jordan did maintain a dialogue' but goes on to argue that 'at most
theirs was an understanding of convenience ... There was nothing in such an
understanding to suggest collusion designed to deceive a third party, in this
case the Palestinian Arabs.'[37] Again, anyone who believes this, will believe
anything. If all that transpired between Israel and Jordan was a dialogue, then it was a rather curious kind of
a dialogue because it lasted thirty years, because it was clandestine, because
it was directed against a common rival, and because money changed hands. That
the dialogue broke down between May and August 1948 is not in doubt. But
surely, if one takes a long-term view of this relationship, a strategic
partnership, if not an unholy alliance, would be a more appropriate term than a
dialogue.
Teveth
is evidently so wedded to the doctrine of Israel's immaculate conception that he is totally impervious
to any evidence that contradicts it. He has made up his mind and he does not
want to be confused by the facts. His article provides a fine example of the
absurd lengths to which the old historians are capable of going to suppress
unpalatable truths about the way in which Israel came into the world. Judged by the rough standards of
the game of nations, the dalliance between the Zionists and the Hashemite king
was neither extraordinary nor particularly reprehensible. Both sides acted in a
pragmatic fashion to advance their own interest. A problem arises only as a
result of the claim that Israel's conduct was based on morality rather than
self-interest.
The
relations between Jordan and Israel in the 1948 War were reviewed recently by Avraham Sela in a 66-page
long article in Middle Eastern Studies.
Sela's use of archival sources and comprehensive examination of the literature
on this subject, especially in Arabic, make this a valuable contribution to the
historiography of the 1948 War. It does not lead me, however, to revise any of
the arguments I advanced in Collusion
Across the Jordan. Sela's thesis is that 'the conditions and basic
assumptions that had constituted the foundations of the unwritten agreement between
Abdullah and the Jewish Agency regarding the partition of Palestine as early as
the summer of 1946 were altered so substantially during the unofficial war
(December 1947 - May 1948) as to render that agreement antiquated and
impracticable.'[38]
I
believe that despite all the changes, the earlier accord and the long history
of co-operation going back to the foundation of the Amirate of Transjordan in
1921, continued to exert some influence over the conduct of the two sides. Sela
maintains that in the early part of the war, the two sides, and especially the
Israeli side, behaved according to the old adage 'à la guerre comme à la
guerre'. Even if this is a valid conclusion regarding Israel, it is emphatically not valid, in my view, in
relation to Jordan. Although the accord was no longer binding and contact was severed,
each side, and especially Jordan, continued to pursue limited objectives and
acted with restraint towards the other until the war ended. Though they became
enemies at the height of the war, they remained in Uri Bar-Joseph's apt phrase,
the best of enemies.
In
conclusion, Sela tells us that war is a complex and intricate phenomenon. This
is indisputable. One reason for this complexity is that war involves both
politics and the use of force. The old historiography deals mostly with the
military side of the war. I tried to redress the balance by looking at the
political side of the war and more particularly at the interplay between
politics and strategy. Sela goes on to state that 'The collusion myth
implicitly assumes the possibility for both Zionist and Palestinian acceptance
of the partition plan and its peaceful implementation.[39] I assume nothing of the
kind. On the contrary, precisely because the Palestinians rejected partition, I
consider collaboration between Abdullah and the Jewish Agency to have been a
reasonable and realistic strategy for both sides. In other words, I accept that
in the period 1947-49 Israel had no Palestinian option or any other Arab option, save the Jordanian
option. King Abdullah was the only Arab head of state who was willing to accept
the principle of partition and to co-exist peacefully with a Jewish state after
the dust had settled. From March-April 1948 this understanding was subjected to
severe strain as the Jews went on the offensive. In the period May-July 1948,
the two sides came to blows. From Abdullah's post-war vantage point, this was
merely a fitna, a family quarrel, and
the Jews had started it. And after the initial outburst of violence, both sides
began to pull their punches, as one does in a family quarrel.
There
remains the question of whether the term collusion is appropriate for
describing the relations between Abdullah and the Jewish Agency and later the
State of Israel. Some of the criticisms of the book were directed at its title
rather than its substance. It was for this reason that for the abridged and
revised paperback version of the book I opted for the more neutral title The Politics of Partition.[40] In the preface to the new edition I explained
that although I had dropped the offensive word from the title, I was still of
the opinion that the Israel-Jordan link-up involved at least some of the
elements associated with collusion: 'it was held behind a thick veil of
secrecy; its existence was hotly denied by the participants; it was directed
against a third party; it involved more than a modicum of underhand scheming
and plotting; and it was consciously and deliberately intended to frustrate the
will of the international community, as expressed through the United Nations
General Assembly, in favour of creating an independent Arab state in part of
Palestine.'[41] On reflection, I rather regret that I changed
the title of my book. The original title was an apt one. Collusion is as good a
word as any to describe the traffic between the Hashemite king and the Zionist
movement during the period 1921-1951, despite the violent interlude in the hot
summer of 1948.
5. Arab War Aims
Closely
related to Israeli-Jordanian relations is the question of Arab war aims in
1948, a fifth bone of contention between the old and the new historians. The
question is why did the Arab states invade Palestine with their regular armies on the day that the British
mandate expired and the State of Israel was proclaimed? The conventional
Zionist answer is that the motive behind the invasion was to destroy the
newly-born Jewish state and to throw the Jews into the sea. The reality was
more complex.
It
is true that all the Arab states, with the exception of Jordan,
rejected the UN partition plan. It is true that seven Arab armies invaded Palestine the
morning after the State of Israel was proclaimed. It is true that the invasion
was accompanied by blood-curdling rhetoric and threats to throw the Jews into
the sea. It is true that in addition to the regular Arab armies and the Mufti's
Holy War army, various groups of volunteers arrived in Palestine,the most
important of which was the Arab Liberation Army, sponsored by the Arab League
and led by the Syrian adventurer Fawzi al-Qawukji. More importantly, it is true
that the military experts of the Arab League had worked out a unified plan for
the invasion and that this plan was all the more dangerous for having had more
limited and realistic objectives than those implied by the wild pan-Arab rhetoric.
But
King Abdullah, who was given nominal command over all the Arab forces in Palestine, wrecked this plan by making last minute changes. His
objective in sending his army into Palestine was not to prevent the establishment of a Jewish
state, but to make himself master of the Arab part of Palestine which meant preventing the establishment of an
independent Palestinian state. Since the Palestinians had done next to nothing
to create an independent state, the Arab part of Palestine would have probably gone to Abdullah without all the
scheming and plotting, but that is another matter. What is clear is that, under
the command of Glubb Pasha, the Arab League made every effort to avert a
head-on collision and, with the exception of one of two minor incidents, made
no attempt to encroach on the territory allocated to the Jewish state by the UN
cartographers.
There
was no love lost between Abdullah and the other Arab rulers who suspected him
of being in cahoots with the enemy. Abdullah had always been something of a
pariah in the rest of the Arab world, not least because of his friendship with
the Jews. Syria and Lebanon felt threatened by his long-standing ambition to make himself master of
Greater Syria. Egypt, the leader of the anti-Hashemite bloc within the Arab League, also
felt threatened by Abdullah's plans for territorial aggrandizement in Palestine. King Farouk made his decision to intervene in Palestine at the last moment, and against the advice of his
civilian and military experts, at least in part in order to check the growth of
his rival's power. There were thus rather mixed motives behind the invasion of Palestine. And there was no single Arab plan of action during
the 1948 war. On the contrary, it was the inability of the Arabs to co-ordinate
their diplomatic and military plans that was in large measure responsible for
the disaster that overwhelmed them.
The
one purpose which the Arab invasion did not serve was the ostensible one of
coming to the rescue of the embattled Palestinians. Nowhere was the disparity
between pan-Arab rhetoric and the reality greater than in relation to the
Palestinian Arabs.[42] The reality was one of national selfishness
with each Arab state looking after its own interests. What was supposed to be a
holy war against the Jews, quickly turned into a general land grab. Division
and discord within the ranks of the ramshackle Arab coalition deepened with
every successive defeat. Israel's leaders knew about these divisions and exploited
them to the full. Thus they launched an offensive against the Egyptian army in
October and again in December 1948 in the confident expectation that their old
friend in Amman would keep out. The old historians by concentrating
almost exclusively on the military operations of 1948 ended up with the
familiar picture of an Arab-Israeli war in which all the Arabs were united by a
single purpose, all were bent on the defeat and destruction of Israel. In retrospect, however, the political line-up on the
Arab side in 1948 appears much more complicated and the motives behind the
invasion of Palestine much more mixed.
6. The Elusive
Peace
Last
but not least of the contentious questions in the debate between the old and
the new historians is the question of why peace proved unattainable in the
aftermath of the first Arab-Israeli War. At the core of the old version lies
the notion of Arab intransigence. According to this version, Israel strove indefatigably towards a peaceful settlement of
the conflict but all her efforts foundered on the rocks of Arab intransigence.
The new historians believe that postwar Israel was more intransigent than the Arab states and that
she consequently bears a larger share of the responsibility for the political
deadlock which followed the formal ending of hostilities.[43]
Evidence
to back the new interpretation comes mainly from the files of the Israeli
Foreign Ministry. These files burst at the seams with evidence of Arab peace
feelers and Arab readiness to negotiate with Israel from September 1948 onwards. The two key issues in
dispute were refugees and borders. Each of the neighbouring Arab states was
prepared to negotiate with Israel directly and prepared to bargain about both refugees
and borders.
King
Abdullah proposed an overall political settlement with Israel in return for certain territorial concessions,
particularly a land corridor to link Jordan with the Mediterranean, which would
have enabled him to counter Arab criticisms of a separate peace with Israel. Colonel Husni Zaim, who captured power in Syria in
March 1949 and was overthrown four months later, offered Israel full peace with
an exchange of ambassadors, normal economic relations and the resettlement of
300,000 Palestinian refugees in Syria in return for an adjustment of the
boundary between the two countries through the middle of Lake Tiberias.[44] King Farouk of Egypt demanded the cession of Gaza and a substantial strip of desert bordering on Sinai as his price for a
de facto recognition of Israel. All three Arab rulers displayed remarkable
pragmatism in their approach to negotiations with the Jewish state. They were
even anxious to pre-empt one another because they assumed that whoever settled
up with Israel first would also get the best terms. Zaim openly declared his ambition
to be the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel.
In
each case, though for slightly different reasons, David Ben-Gurion considered
the price being asked for peace as too high. He was ready to conclude peace on
the basis of the status quo; he was unwilling to proceed to a peace which
involved more than minuscule Israeli concessions on refugees or on borders.
Ben-Gurion, as his diary reveals, considered that the armistice agreements with
the neighbouring Arab states met Israel's essential needs for recognition, security and
stability.[45] He knew that for formal peace agreements Israel would have to pay by yielding substantial tracts of
territory and by permitting the return of a substantial number of Palestinian
refugees and he did not consider this a price worth paying. Whether Ben-Gurion
made the right choice is a matter of opinion. That he had a choice is now
undeniable.
The
controversy surrounding the elusive peace is examined in a book by Itamar
Rabinovich, former Rector of Tel Aviv University and one of Israel's leading experts on modern Arab politics. The title
of the book, inspired by a poem by Robert Frost, is The Road Not Taken: Early Arab-Israeli Negotiations. This title
implies that the failure of these talks was not inevitable, that there was
another road leading to peace - the road not taken. But the book does not
advance any thesis nor does it engage directly in the debate between the old
and the new historians. Rabinovich prefers to remain above the battle. So
reluctant is he to assign blame, that his book ends without an explicit
conclusion. All he would say is that 'the choices of 1948-49 were made by
Arabs, Israelis, Americans and others. The credit and responsibility for them
belong to all.[46] 'Rabinovich's implicit conclusion, however, is that because of the instability
of the Arab regimes, Ben-Gurion was justified in his refusal to assume any
political risks for the sake of peace. Yet in every crucial respect
Rabinovich's account undermines the claim of the old historians that Israel encountered total Arab intransigence and confirms the
revisionist argument that Israeli intransigence was the much more serious
obstacle on the road to peace,[47]
Conclusion
This
article is concerned with the old Zionist version of the first Arab-Israeli war
and with the challenge to this version posed by the new historiography. My
conclusion is that this version is deeply flawed and needs to be radically
revised in the light of the new information that is now available. To put it
bluntly, this version is little more than the propaganda of the victors. The
debate between the old and the new historiography, moreover, is not of merely
historical interest. It cuts to the very core of Israel's
image of herself. It is for this reason that the battle of the historians has
excited such intense popular interest and stirred such strong political
passions.
The
debate about 1948 between the old and the new historians resembles the American
debate on the origins of the Cold War. That debate evolved in stages. During
the 1950s the so-called traditionalist view held sway. According to this view,
Soviet expansionism was responsible for the outbreak of the Cold War while
American policy was essentially reactive and defensive. Then, in the context of
the Vietnam war and the crisis of American self-confidence that accompanied it,
a new school of thought emerged, a revisionist school of mostly younger,
left-wing scholars. According to this school, the Cold War was the result of
the onward march of American capitalism, and it was the Soviet Union that reacted defensively. Following the opening up of the archives, a
third school of thought emerged, the post-revisionist school. A re-examination
of the assumptions and arguments of both traditionalists and revisionists in
the light of new evidence gradually yielded a post-revisionist synthesis. The
hallmark of post-revisionism is not to allocate blame to this party or the
other but to try and understand the dynamics of the conflict that we call the
Cold War.
The debate about the origins of the
Arab-Israeli conflict seems to be following a similar pattern. A traditionalist
school, consisting of participants and propagandists as well as historians
close to the political establishment, laid the entire blame for the 1948 War
and its consequences at the door of the Arabs. Then, following the opening of
the archives, a new school of mostly left-wing historians began to reinterpret
many of the events surrounding the creation of the State of Israel. These
historians take a much more critical view of Israel's conduct in the years 1947-49 and place on her
a larger share of the blame for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem
and for the continuing political impasse in the Middle East. The debate between the old and the new
historians is bitter and acrimonious and it is conducted in a highly charged
political atmosphere. It is melancholy to have to add that there is no sign yet
of the emergence of a post-revisionist synthesis. Battles between historians,
like real battles, evidently have to run their course.
Notes:
[1] Emile Habiby, Al-Waqa'ic al-Ghariba fi Ikhtifa'
Sacid Abi al-Nahs al-Mutasha'il, [The Secret Life of Saeed, the
Ill-Fated Pessoptimist] (Beirut: Dar Ibn Khaldun, 1974), p.37.
[2] Ibid., p.35.
[3] Simha Flapan, The Birth of
Israel: Myths and Realities (New York: Pantheon, 1987), p.8.
[4] Ibid., p.10.
[5] Benny Morris, The Birth of the
Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988).
[6] Ilan Pappe, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict,
1948-51 (London, Macmillan, 1988).
[7] Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the
Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist
Movement and the Partition of Palestine (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988)
[8] Israel Baer, Bitahon Israel: Etmol, Hayom, Mahar [Israel's Security: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow] (Tel Aviv:
Amikam, 1966).
[9] Gavriel Cohen, 'Hamediniyut Habritit Erev Milhemet Ha'atzma'ut', in
Yehuda Wallach, ed., Hayinu Keholmim
[We were as Dreamers] (Givatayim: Massada, 1985).
[10] Yaacov Shimoni, 'Ha'aravim Likrat Milhemet
Israel-'Arav, 1945-1948' (The Arabs and the Approaching War with Israel,
1945-1948), Hamizrah Hehadash, 47:3,
1962.
[11] Meir Pail, 'Hafqa'at Haribonut Hamedinit shel
Filastin miyedei Hafalestinim' (The Expropriation of the Political Sovereignty
over Palestine from the Palestinians), Ziyonut, 3, 1973.
[12] Rony E. Gabbay, A
Political Study of the Arab-Jewish Conflict: The Arab Refugee Problem
(Geneva: Librairie E. Droz, 1959).
[13] A. Yisra'eli [Moshe Machover and Akiva Orr], Shalom, Shalom - ve'ein Shalom:
Yisra'el-Arav, 1948-61 [Peace, Peace - and there is No Peace: Israel and the Arabs, 1948-61] (Jerusalem, 1961).
[14] Israel State Archives and Central Zionist Archives, Political and Diplomatic Documents, December
1947-May 1948, edited by Gedalia Yogev (Jerusalem: Israel Government Press,
1980); Israel State Archives, Documents
on the Foreign Policy of the State of Israel, May - September 1948, vol. I,
edited by Yehoshua Freundlich (Jerusalem: Israel Government Press, 1981); Documents on the Foreign Policy of the State
of Israel: October 1948 - April 1949, Vol. II, edited by Yehoshua
Freundlich, (Jerusalem: Israel Government Press, 1984); and Documents on the Foreign Policy of the State
of Israel: Armistice Negotiations with the Arab States, December 1948- July
1949, vol. III, edited by Yemima Rosenthal (Jerusalem: Israel Government
Press, 1986).
[15] Iraq, Taqrir Lajnat
al-Tahqiq al-Niyabiya fi Qadiyat Filastin (Baghdad, 1949).
[16] See the references in Walid Khalidi, 'The Arab
Perspective', in Wm. Roger Louis and Robert W. Stookey, eds., The End of the Palestine Mandate
(London: I.B. Tauris, 1986.
[17] For a review of this literature, see Avraham Sela,
'Arab Historiography of the 1948 War: The Quest for Legitimacy', in Lawrence J.
Silberstein, ed., New Perspectives on
Israeli History: The Early Years of the State (New York: New York
University Press, 1991).
[18] Benny Morris, 'The New Historiography: Israel Confronts its Past', Tikkun, 3:6, November-December 1988. This much-discussed article is
reprinted in Benny Morris, 1948 and
After: Israel and the Palestinians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
[19] One historian of Zionism, Anita Shapira, was
prompted by Menachem Begin's claim to embark upon a re-examination of the
defensive ethos of Zionism throughout the pre-state period. Tom Segev, 'The
Anguish of Poor Samson', Ha'aretz, 16 October 1992. Anita Shapira, Land
and Power: the Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992), p. vii.
[20] Shabtai Teveth, 'Charging Israel with Original Sin', Commentary, September 1989, p. 33.
[21] Ibid., p. 25.
[22] Ibid., p. 25.
[23] Benny Morris, Ha'aretz,
9 May 1989; 'The Eel and History: A reply
to Shabtai Teveth', Tikkun, 5:1,
January-February 1990; and 1948 and After,
pp. 27-29.
[24] See my letters to the Editor, Commentary, February and July 1990.
[25] Pappé, Britain and the Arab-Israeli-Conflict; Shlaim, Collusion
Across the Jordan; and Avi Shlaim, 'Britain and the Arab-Israeli War of 1948', Journal of Palestine Studies, 16:4, Summer 1987. On the theory that the British
wanted to reduce the Jewish part of Palestine to a `rump state' see Wm. Roger Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945-1951:
Arab Nationalism, the United States, and Postwar Imperialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 372-79.
[26] Flapan, The
Birth of Israel, Myth Six, especially the table with three different
estimates of troop numbers on p. 196; and Morris, 1948 and After, pp. 13-16. A study based on privileged access to
IDF sources supports the revisionist line by showing that the United Nations
arms embargo hurt the Arabs much more than it hurt IDF: Amitzur Ilan, The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Arms Race
(forthcoming).
[27] Morris, The
Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, p. 286.
[28] In addition to the articles in Ha'aretz and Commentary, Teveth published 'The Palestine Arab Refugee Problem
and its Origins', Middle Eastern
Studies, 26:2, April 1990.
[29] Benny Morris, Ha'aretz,
23 April and 1 May 1992.
[30] Avraham Sela, Ha'aretz,
4 and 11 October 1991.
[31] See, for example, Michael Palumbo, 'What Happened to
Palestine? The Revisionists Revisited', The Link, 23:4, September - October 1990; Rashid Khalidi,
'Revisionist Views of the Modern History of Palestine: 1948', Arab Studies Quarterly, 10:4, Autumn
1988; Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, 'The War of 1948: Disputed Perspectives and
Outcomes', Journal of Palestine Studies,
18:2, Winter 1989; and Nur Masalha, Expulsion
of the Palestinians: the Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political
Thought, 1882-1948 (Washington D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies,
1992).
[32] Abdullah al-Tall, Karithat Filastin: Mudhakkirat Abdullah al-Tall, Qa'id Macrakat
al-Quds [The Palestine Catastrophe: the Memoirs of Abdullah al-Tal, Leader
of the Battle for Jerusalem] (Cairo: Dar al-Qalam, 1959).
[33] Baer,
Bitahon Israel.
[34] Dan Schueftan, Optzya
Yardenit: Israel, Yarden Vehapalestinim [Jordanian Option: Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians] (Yad Tabenkin: Hakkibutz
Hame'uhad, 1986); and Uri Bar-Joseph, The
Best of Enemies: Israel and Transjordan in the War of 1948 (London: Frank Cass, 1987).
[35] Israel Defence Forces, Toldot
Milhemet Hakomemiyut [History of the War of Independence](Tel Aviv: Ma'arachot, 1959).
[36] See, for example, the author's interview with Yigael
Yadin, acting chief of staff in 1948, in Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan, p. 236.
[37] Teveth, 'Charging Israel with Original Sin', p.28.
[38] Avraham Sela, 'Transjordan, Israel and the 1948 War: Myth, Historiography and Reality', Middle Eastern Studies, 28:4, October
1992, p. 627.
[39] Ibid., p. 680.
[40] Avi Shlaim, The
Politics of Partition: King Abdullah, the Zionists and Palestine, 1921-1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
[41] Ibid., p. viii.
[42] See, for example, Avi Shlaim, 'The Rise and Fall of
the All-Palestine Government in Gaza', Journal of Palestine Studies, 20:1,
Autumn 1990.
[43] Flapan, The
Birth of Israel, Myth Seven; Shlaim, Collusion
Across the Jordan; Morris, 1948 and
After, pp. 22-27; and Ilan Pappé, The
Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1992),
chapters 8-10.
[44] Avi Shlaim, 'Husni Zaim and the Plan to Resettle
Palestinian Refugees in Syria', Journal of Palestine Studies, 15:4, Summer 1986.
[45] David Ben-Gurion,
Yoman Hamilhama [War Diary], edited by Gershon Rivlin and Elhanan
Orren (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defence, 1982), vol. III, p. 993.
[46] Itamar Rabinovich, The Road Not Taken: Early Arab-Israeli Negotiations (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991), p.viii.
[47] For a detailed critique of Rabinovich see Benny Morris, `A
Second Look at the "Missed Opportunity," or Smoothing out History: A
Review Essay', Journal of Palestine
Studies, 24:1, Autumn 1994.