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.
Session 5
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