Israel and the Arab Coalition in 1948

Session  6: 

Conclusion

This survey of Israel's strategy and tactics in dealing with the Arab coalition in 1948 is not intended to belittle Israel's victory but to place it in its proper political and military context. And when one probes the politics of the war and not merely the military operations, the picture that emerges is not the familiar one of Israel standing alone against the combined might of the entire Arab world but rather one of a remarkable convergence between the interests of Israel and those of Transjordan against the other members of the Arab coalition, and especially against the Palestinians. 

My purpose in writing this survey was not to pass moral judgment on Israel's conduct in 1948 or to delegitimize Zionism but to suggest that the traditional Zionist narrative of the birth of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war is deeply flawed. The Zionist narrative, like all nationalist versions of history, is a curious mixture of fact and fiction. The new historiography has been denounced by its critics for being driven not by the scholarly search for truth about the past but by an anti-Israeli political agenda. Despite these criticisms, which are themselves politically inspired, the new historiography is essentially a cool attempt to use official documents in order to expose some of the fictions that have come to surround the birth of Israel. It offers a different perspective, an alternative way of looking at the momentous events of 1948. History is a process of demystification and the new historiography helps to demystify the birth of Israel, to give a fuller, more nuanced, and more complex picture of what is undoubtedly one of the great success stories of the twentieth century. That the debate between the traditional, pro-Zionist and the "new historians" should be so heated is hardly surprising. For the debate about the 1948 war cuts to the very core of Israel's image of itself.

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