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Table of contents
1. Politics and Collective Memory: The Debate over the "New Historians" in Israel........................................ 1

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Politics and Collective Memory: The Debate over the "New Historians" in Israel
Author: Shapira, Anita Publication info: History and Memory 7.1 (Jun 30, 1995): 9. ProQuest document link Abstract (Abstract): Raz-Krakotzkin writes metahistory, as if the events of the last two centuries, with all their agonies and tribulations, did not happen. The alienation which -- according to most testimonies --- was the formative experience of Jewish life in the diaspora, especially in Eastern Europe, and which still exists to a certain extent even in today's open, assimilatory societies, takes in his writings the form of ethical-theoretical social criticism and loses the tragic, existential dimension that in fact characterized it. The Jew as victim becomes an ideal. The aspiration, according to him, is "to renew the sense of exile here in Israel, without forgetting those still in a state of real exile, the oppressed of the Third World, the inhabitants of the refugee camps."(32) In other words, galut existence as a metaphor of moral sensitivity and openness to the other is a positive attribute -- which is not the case of real exile, unless a different rule applies to the Jew than to other people...He presents the historiography of Yitzhak Baer and Ben Zion Dinur, which emphasizes historical continuity and Jewish history as national history, as "adopting the historical model of the victors." The concept of "negation of Exile," he contends, "prevented relating to the collective aspirations of the local Arab population and its viewpoint," and thus, "the Arab presence did not create openness to a dialogue that could serve as a formative basis for Jewish self-awareness, and no attempt was made to adapt Zionist ideals to the local population and its culture."(33) This assertion is truly ludicrous: how could Zionist ideals be adapted to the local population unless the Jewish newcomers relinquished their aspirations for a Jewish entity? And what possible connection was there between the obvious animosity between settlers and natives in Palestine and the "negation of Exile"? Raz-Krakotzkin presents the "negation of Exile" as the reason for the refusal to acknowledge the tragedy that the establishment of Israel brought upon the Palestinians. In his opinion, the question of "who is to blame" for the war is posed from the perspective of the victors, while the true question should be who the victim was. Hence, the question is not "what really happened?" but rather how the memory of the past molds the present. (7) See Ram, "Post-Zionist Debate" and "Post-Zionist Ideology." See also Yonah Hadari-Ramaj, "There Is No History, There Are Historians" (interview with [Ilan Pappe]), Yediot Aharonot, 27 Aug. 1993 (in Hebrew) (hereafter Pappe, "Interview"); Ilan Pappe: "The Influence of Zionist Ideology on Israeli Historiography," [Davar], 15 May 1994; "The Claim to Objectivity"; and "The New History of the 1948 War," Teoriyah u-Vikoret, no. 3 (1993): 99-112 (all in Hebrew). Links: Linking Service Full text: Politics and Collective Memory: The Debate over the "New Historians" in Israel The stormy debate surrounding the "new historians" that raged in the Israeli press this past year has left many question marks in its wake. Despite the plethora of articles and discussions, published and unpublished, concerning it, the issues of the debate, its boundaries, essence and purpose remain unclear. It was fascinatingly obtuse and astonishingly passionate. Is the debate about facts, methodology, interpretation? Is it limited to the guild of historians or has it also spread to other disciplines? Is it a debate between schools of thought, between generations, between individuals? Does it take issue with the past, or with the present and future? And finally, who initiated it, and where is it leading? Answers to these questions may well clarify the nature of this debate and integrate it into Israel's intellectual dialogue. The debate began in the late 1980s, when books by Simha Flapan, Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe

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appeared in quick succession.(1) Their publication was accompanied by proclamations in the press that a new school of Israeli historians had been born. Benny Morris, in an article in Tikkun, called them "the new historians," and the name was adopted. It was applied rather loosely to various historians, all of whom had written about the events that had taken place between 1947 and 1952 and related to the founding of the State of Israel, the War of Independence and the agreements following it.(2) Such intense involvement with these events comes as no surprise. Moments of historical breakthrough become the founding myth of the society in question and quite naturally arouse interest and curiosity. Even the timing of the appearance of this group of scholars dealing with the 1948 war was predictable: under the thirty-year secrecy law in Israel, it was only at the end of the 1970s that archival material from that period became declassified. Throughout the 1980s, relatively young scholars were occupied with examining these documents. The results of their investigations began to appear in the mid-1980s in Israeli academic journals, such as Cathedra, Ha-Tziyonut and Studies in Zionism. After their books were brought out by prominent British publishers, they began to claim that they were the first to have written the true history, of the establishment of Israel. Moreover, they proclaimed that everything previously written on the subject was no more than Zionist propaganda, intended to present the founding myth of the state in a positive light, whether for internal consumption or as explanation to the outside world. Thus the debate began. It soon became evident that it had ramifications extending beyond the events of 1948 and beyond the bounds of history as well. The dispute was taken up by sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and scholars of the Middle East. It was related to another controversy, parallel yet not unconnected to the first, concerning the interrelationship between the establishment of Israel and the Holocaust, between Zionism and diaspora Jewry. By association with another debate current in the Israeli press at that time, concerning postmodernism, those who adopted a critical attitude toward Israel and its policies were dubbed "post-Zionists." The concept has never been precisely defined and different writers emphasize different elements as "postZionism." Uri Ram, for example, demands recognition of the centrality of the national Jewish-Arab confrontation, of the changes in Palestine wrought by the Zionist movement and of the injustice inflicted on the Palestinians in its wake. He seeks to explain Israel's situation within the context of the Middle East, in conjunction to problems created by the Zionist movement in that region, rather than to the situation in Europe and its effects on world Jewry.(3) In contrast, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin sees a close connection between the behavior of the Zionist movement in the Middle East and its attitude toward Jewish history and the traditional Jew. In his view the concept of "negation of Exile" engendered the insensitivity and lack of openness shown by that movement toward the "other," whether Jew or Arab, and he proposes an alternative, positive approach to the notion of Exile to encourage tolerance in Israeli society toward types different from the "New Jew," to grant them legitimacy in contemporary Israeli society and to restore them to the Israeli collective memory. He makes the plea for legitimizing other "collective memories" as alternatives to the Zionist master narrative.(4) Baruch Kimmerling contends that the central issue in the history of the Yishuv (Jewish community in Palestine) and the State of Israel is the Arab-Israeli conflict, as the principal nation-building factor. He rejects the use of the "Jewish uniqueness" paradigm to explain events in Zionist history and the establishment of Israel. Instead, he proposes the paradigm of colonialism, according to which Israel is to be viewed as an immigrant-settler society, similar to many others. Kimmerling urges use of comparative methods to explain events which were formerly presented in sociological research as peculiar to Israeli society.(5) This comparative analysis includes not only the status of the Palestinian Arabs, but that of various kinds of immigrants such as Oriental Jews and Holocaust survivors -- a subject of central interest to sociologists such as Shlomo Swirski.(6) Indeed, the term "post-Zionism" has varied connotations, ranging from a critique of Israeli research on the Palestinians and their treatment by the Zionist movement and Israel, to the demand for a completely new approach to the history of Zionism and the history and sociology of Israel. This approach reflects a fundamental change of attitude toward the Zionist enterprise: from regarding it as a positive and even important phenomenon 27 December 2013 Page 2 of 18 ProQuest

in Jewish history and human history in general, despite the problems created by its implementation, to a view which, although accepting the fact that Israel exists, grants it no intrinsic value.(7) The old anti-Zionism of the Communist or Bundist variety or that of the New Left and "Matzpen" of the 1970s sought to terminate the Zionist enterprise. This, however, is not true of post-Zionism. Its proponents do not question the existence of Israel, but their attitude to it is, at best, indifferent and, in more extreme cases, a priori suspicious and critical. Their intent is to point out the shortcomings of Zionism and Israel, the injustice inflicted on others, and the historical alternatives whose realization may have been thwarted by the actualization of Zionism. For some among them criticism of the past and present is a starting point for an alternative political program. Its agenda calls for a change in the nature of the State of Israel: the relinquishing of its ideological, Zionist component to become a secular, democratic state without any predominant national character -- i.e. no more the "Jewish state." The annulment of the Law of Return, which grants automatic citizenship to Jews coming to Israel and underscores the difference between their status in the country and that of Arabs, would manifest that change. Post-Zionism and the 1948 War The "generational" elements in the controversy are particularly striking. The vast majority of the "revisionists" reached maturity as scholars in the 1980s, some of them even in the early 1990s, while a few were already active in research in the 1970s. Most of them were born after 1948.(8) The targets of their critique are for the most part writers and scholars who took part in the War of Independence, many in active military service. These scholars later served in the Israeli army's history branch, thus having access to material that was, at the time, unavailable to others. However, they imposed upon themselves censorship of sensitive issues such as the expulsion of Arab residents of Ramle-Lod and the treatment of the Palestinian problem in general.(9) Israeli researchers (before the advent of the "new historians") had generally regarded these works as preliminary and acknowledged that thorough research into the history of the War of Independence had yet to be done. After all, the IDF Archives have only recently begun to declassify material, and that process is far from completion. Thus, the "new historians" are challenging not so much historians or important historiographical works as the images and myth of the War of Independence that have become rooted in the Israeli public consciousness. Indeed, the debate is less about historiography than it is about collective memory. The current round exploded with renewed force in summer 1994 with the publication of an article by Aharon Megged in the newspaper Ha'Aretz that accused the post-Zionists of delegitimizing Zionism and Israel. Megged, a well-known Israeli author active on the left wing of the Labor movement, was responding more to the articles by the "new historians" published in the press than to their books. He took issue with them not as historians or sociologists, but as spokesmen for an attempt to shape collective memory, in a way he considered destructive. He sought to set his private memory in opposition to the historical version they were trying to imprint upon the Israeli public.(10) Megged represented the basic ethos of the Palmah generation(11) and the traumatic experiences that formed its world view: setting down roots in Palestine under the British Mandate, which was perceived as inimical and imperialistic; the Arab rebellion, which made the younger generation realize that the struggle between Arabs and Jews over the land was a matter of life and death; World War II, in which the world was divided between good and evil, with no shades of gray; the experience of Jewish weakness and impotent anger vis--vis the Holocaust; the War of Independence as the tragic and heroic climax of all that had preceded it. Deep anxieties and fears had accompanied at least the first stages of the war. Hence, the final victory had brought a sense of deliverance which endowed it, in the eyes of that generation, with transcendental meaning as an act of historical justice that was inexplicable in conventional terms. The "new historians," in contrast, were born after the establishment of Israel; for them, it was a state like any other, with virtues and faults -- and the latter had to be criticized and public opinion aroused against them. Against the metaphysical explanation of victory in the 1948 war, they stressed the prosaic fact that at most stages, the Lord had stood by the strongest troops.(12) This reduction of Israel's victory to the pragmatic factor of greater physical strength, along with disregard for the 27 December 2013 Page 3 of 18 ProQuest

sense of deliverance that came in its wake, characterizes the approach of the generation who did not experience that war. The Palmah generation had suffered the loss of friends and peers in what was the most difficult war, with the greatest number of casualties, in Israel's history. However, the new generation was less impressed by the 6,000 Jews who had fallen in that war than by the uprooting of approximately 700,000 Arabs from Israeli territory. A typical example of this change in emphasis is Benny Morris's book on the creation of the Arab refugee problem in 1948. His conclusion that the uprooting of the Arabs originated in a variety of factors -- acts of expulsion initiated by the Israeli government and army, spontaneous flight during the war, the disintegration of Palestinian society and the early departure of its leadership and elite -- is indeed a reasonable one. However, his attempt to create symmetry between the acts and omissions of Jews and Arabs appears artificial; his assessment that there was no Israeli plan or blanket order to expel Arabs (as the Palestinians claim), on the one hand, and that the Arab leadership did not give the Palestinians orders to leave the country (as is claimed in Israeli propaganda), on the other hand, is problematic:(13) the two sides of the equation are unequal in weight. The former is of seminal importance, while the latter is secondary and has never been given much attention in research. Due to difficulties in accessing the Arab sources, but no less to psychological obstacles hampering Palestinian scholars when dealing with the subject, the role of the Arab leadership in 1948 is an issue that has yet to receive serious investigation.(14) Its replacement by discussion of the question whether or not the Arab leadership issued evacuation orders by radio is hardly satisfactory. Nonetheless, the very publication of Morris's book raised Israeli awareness of the disaster visited upon the Palestinians in the 1948 war. The basic facts had been known previously, but there is immense importance to the careful documentation of village after village, incident after incident. The details published about Jews slaughtering Arabs increased Israeli sensitivity to the fact that the 1948 war had not been a war of the righteous against the wicked, a question of black and white, and paved the way for a more balanced view of the events. Morris's shift in emphasis from the suffering of Jews to that of Arabs, from the heroics of the Palmah literature to descriptions of acts of cruelty and atrocity, was an inseparable by-product of the transition from one generation to the next. The younger researchers' discussion of the Arab refugee problem or the issue of agreements made or not made between Israel and the Arab countries following the 1948 war was conducted in the context of the reality of the 1970s and 1980s. They perceived the existential question, which had been a formative experience for the generation of 1948, as manipulative, intended to provide a moral basis for use of force to dubious ends. The balance of power between Jews and Arabs, which had been rather vague in 1948, was for them selfevident: Israel was the strong and aggressive side, while the Palestinians were the weak and injured. The younger researchers dismissed the contention that it was the Palestinians who had rejected the partition plan and begun the war and must therefore bear the brunt of their failure: some chose to ignore the circumstances surrounding the war's outbreak, while others stressed the so-called Zionist-Hashemite "collusion" which, according to them, had frustrated the establishment of a Palestinian state (although they themselves recognize the inviability of such a state in 1948). The essence of their criticism focused on the contention that ever since it had won the war, Israel had rejected peace, refusing to give up territories it had conquered beyond the areas allocated to the Jewish state under the partition plan, not allowing refugees back to their villages and, to prevent their return, destroying villages.(15) While Megged and others of his generation primarily focus on war experiences, the post-Zionists deal mainly with what happened or did not happen after the war, with missed opportunities for peace and with the refugee problem. The analogy in their thinking that evolved, whether consciously or unconsciously, between the Israeli conquest in 1967 and Israel's behavior after it, and the events of 1948 and after, leads them to ignore the fragility of Israel's existence in the early years, before it was accepted in the international arena as an unalterable fact. Indeed, only a small minority of Israelis regretted the flight/expulsion of Arabs or were willing to seriously consider their return in massive numbers. The borders established in the war's wake were considered 27 December 2013 Page 4 of 18 ProQuest

the absolute minimum for the existence of a viable state. The justification for this policy was pragmatic, with the national, existential interest as the decisive factor. Forty years after the events, though, in the light of Israel's political and military strength and evidence of brutality against Palestinians in the occupied territories, those pragmatic contentions are rejected in the name of absolute moral principles. Accordingly, they claim that the expulsion of the Arabs and prevention of their return were unjustifiable under any conditions, even if they had been the ones to start the war.(16) The "new historians" are not waging a campaign against the Israeli Right and its stances. The fact that for fifteen years the Likud Party, committed to a "Greater Israel" ideology, was at the helm finds no expression in the debate. Their lances are pointed against the Labor movement and its positions; the bad guys in the story are David Ben-Gurion and the old Mapai (Labor) Party, and not Menahem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. This fact is puzzling, as we would expect the Israeli Right, which does not acknowledge any of the Palestinians' contentions, to be the ideological enemy of the "new historians." It seems, however, that their choice of the Zionist Left as the main target of their attack stems from the issue of ethics.(17) The stance taken by the Zionist Left on the Arab question was always ambivalent: aware of the difficulty in striking a balance between the socialist and nationalist components of its ideology, it did not conceal the fact that, at the crucial moment, it would favor the nationalist component over the socialist one. The idea of "Jewish labor," meaning the creation of a protectionist Jewish economy closed to Arab workers, was justified on various grounds. It was viewed as a moral necessity in order to educate Jews to toil the land, in the hope of avoiding the development of a colonialist-settler model in Palestine, and as protection from the competition between cheap local labor and more expensive new-immigrant labor. The ineluctable fact remained, though, that Jewish socialist workers in Palestine did not uphold the principle of class solidarity, or even the principle of the fraternity of nations.(18) That fact was a source of considerable distress and soul-searching that came to characterize the Labor movement. Indeed, the movement was not innocent of self-righteousness, although this fact actually testifies to its sensitivity both toward what, from its point of view, was perceived as the "Arab problem" and toward the issue of justice. Its leadership was aware that the very arrival of Jews in Palestine and the initiation of demographic and political changes there were detrimental to the status of the Arab population. It did not consider that injury to be equal to the catastrophe that would befall the Jewish people if it failed to establish a territorial and political hold in Palestine. However, it did recognize that in Palestine there existed a conflict between two "rights."(19) These historical circumstances are utterly rejected by most of the "new historians." They are not concerned with the processes that occurred in Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which led to the emergence of Zionism and the desire to create a Jewish state. In their eyes, the problem of Palestine is isolated from the wider European-Jewish context and stands on a different plane, that of the Middle East.(20) As such, this approach undermines the moral basis for the foundation of a Jewish state and explains its existence in terms of power alone. For that reason they have no grounds for disagreement with the Israeli Right, who lay claim to the whole of Palestine, because it vindicates their own thesis. Rather, it is the Israeli Left's complex, tortured view, riven with internal contradictions, which accepts some of the Arab claims yet at the same time bases its justification of a Jewish presence in the country on moral grounds, that draws their fire. They reject out of hand the claim that Zionism had not set out to usurp the Arabs, but was instead a movement built on certain ethical criteria that strove for a spiritual, social and moral renewal of the Jewish people, and that the trends toward use of force increased within it only over the years, as a result of historical developments. According to their perspective, everything began in 1948. And what happened in 1948 was merely the inevitable result of Zionist policy from its very inception. They do not see two nations caught in a tragic situation which led to an unavoidable clash between them, but one completely innocent side and one completely guilty. The past is not discussed in and of itself, to be explained on the basis of the data and evaluations of the contemporaries of that period, but rather in accordance with the considerations and political agendas of the present. 27 December 2013 Page 5 of 18 ProQuest

Zionism and the Holocaust It is in the context of "justice" and "ethics" that the Palestinian question is linked to the issue of the Holocaust. On the face of it, there would seem to be no connection between Mapai's attitude to the Palestinians, on the one hand, and to the destruction of European Jewry, on the other. But it turns out that numerous threads connect the two subjects. Dan Diner has defined the Holocaust as the true founding myth of the State of Israel.(21) In my view, the Holocaust is but one of its components. However, it is certainly true that the Holocaust has often been presented as the decisive argument in favor of the establishment of Israel, and the latter -- as some compensation for the iniquities of the Holocaust, an expression, as it were, of a system of cosmic justice. This contention is reflected in loaded expressions such as "Holocaust and rebirth" or "destruction and redemption," which made the establishment of Israel in 1948 part of a metahistorical process, consistent with Jewish traditions that drew a connection between havlei mashiah -- the suffering preceding the advent of the Messiah -- and the apocalyptic resolution of the final redemption. This tendency emerged even before the end of World War II. In the struggle for world public opinion on the eve of Israel's birth, the problem of Jewish displaced persons in the wake of the Holocaust played a central role. The helmsmen of the state-in-the-making, when presenting the Jewish case to non-Jews, often cited the destruction of European Jewry as proof of the need for the creation of a Jewish state. The Holocaust was seen as vindicating Zionism in its "catastrophic," Herzlian version, which had perceived anti-Semitism as a dynamic entity and had predicted the collapse of emancipation in Europe -- not the Holocaust as physical annihilation, but rather as a pessimistic vision of the future of the Jews in European society. By the end of World War II the ideologies held by European Jews, based on various versions of Jewish integration within European society, whether through full acculturization or through the recognized status of a national minority with its own Jewish cultural system, had become meaningless, for the societies that had been meant to absorb the Jews had rejected them instead. The Zionists' reaction was a sort of "we told you so," as if the Holocaust had not only put the non-Jewish world in debt to the Jews, but had proved the Zionists' diagnosis of, and prognosis for, the Jewish people. Not all Jews accepted this historical interpretation: those who chose to resettle in Europe after the war (as well as many American Jews) stressed other elements in the collective Jewish experience of the last two hundred years. They saw the integration of Jews within the surrounding society as the predominant process, assessing the events of 1933-1945 as an exceptional phenomenon, a kind of earthquake, which could not be used to prove anything. The Zionist interpretation prevailed. Yet, as the first and tragic half of the twentieth century receded into the past, the alternative perception gained strength and credibility. The decline in anti-Semitism and the enhanced status of Jews, particularly in the United States, gave renewed relevance to the Ahad Ha-Amite approach which envisioned Israel as the spiritual center of the Jewish world.(22) It fitted in with a moderate nationalist approach vis--vis the Arabs and granted renewed legitimacy to the concept of "everlasting exile," namely the parallel existence of other Jewish centers in the diaspora. At the same time, the Holocaust became one of the "official" identity symbols of Israel. The practice that began in the 1960s of taking important guests of state on a mandatory visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, for instance, underscored the causal connection between the Holocaust and Israel, on the one hand, and the lessons to be learned from it, on the other: the disastrous result of weakness, the loneliness of the victim, and Israel's commitment to prevent similar situations in the future. The use of the Holocaust to strengthen nationalistic trends and stress the alienation between Israel and other nations, and the use of images from World War II in the national struggle with the Palestinians (such as comparing Arafat to Hitler, or responding to a picture of an Arab girl killed in the 1982 Lebanon war with that of a boy from the Warsaw ghetto) turned the Holocaust into a weapon in the political battle between the Israeli Left and Right over the preferable settlement with the Palestinians. This subject infiltrated post-Zionist research along two apparently contradictory paths: the demand to separate discussion of the Holocaust from that of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and the charge that the Zionist 27 December 2013 Page 6 of 18 ProQuest

movement had not made sufficient efforts to rescue European Jewry. Viewing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a purely Middle Eastern context means removing the Holocaust from the web of reasons and explanations for Israel's behavior. The proposed new, local Israeli identity, detached from Jewish history, leaves no room for considerations stemming from the Holocaust. Similarly, the attempt to place the Arab-Israeli conflict at the focus of Israeli sociology serves to efface the impact of the Holocaust on Israeli identity. The issue of the Holocaust confounds any attempt to draw simple analogies between the situation in Palestine and other colonization countries. Thus, the desire to neutralize that issue is part of the effort to create a seemingly autonomous IsraeliPalestinian narrative, independent of history, circumstances and the biographies of the players. This stance may be summed up in the words of Ilan Pappe: "The State of Israel was created with the aid of Western colonialism. It intentionally uprooted the Palestinian population and justified this retroactively on the basis of Jewish `uniqueness' resulting from the Holocaust."(23) The second route of infiltration is more complex. The starting point is the claim that the Zionist concept of "negation of Exile" led the leaders of the Yishuv to close their eyes and hearts during World War II to the catastrophe befalling European Jewry. As a result, they were unwilling to take desperate rescue measures if these might harm the progress of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine. At an earlier stage, the critics claim, the Mapai leaders did not fully exploit opportunities to rescue Jews by bringing them to other countries. Certain statements by Ben-Gurion and other Zionist activists are repeatedly cited in support of these arguments. The most famous of them was made by Ben-Gurion in 1938 during a discussion on the British refusal to allow the immigration to Palestine of 10,000 Jewish children from Germany. Ben-Gurion remarked that if he could save all the Jewish children in Germany by transferring them to Britain, or only half of them by bringing them to Palestine, he would choose the second option, because Zionism was a political, and not a philanthropic, movement.(24) Similar statements to these, which emphasize the national role of the Zionist enterprise rather than its role of saving Jews, were often made during the dispute that took place in 1937 with respect to the recommendations of the Peel Commission, which proposed the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. They were voiced by Zionist-religious leaders, Zionist leaders from Poland, the United States, and others -- not necessarily by the Mapai leadership or the leaders of the Yishuv.(25) Ben-Gurion's remark was made in the context of the Jewish-British dispute and reflected the priority given to the fight to raise immigration quotas as the central Zionist objective. Undoubtedly, in this fight Nazi persecution of the Jews was made use of to strengthen the Zionist position in Palestine. But was there really a contradiction between the interests of Jews and that of Zionism? It seems not, for the battle for larger immigration quotas to Palestine did not prevent Jews from finding other asylums. The history of European Jewry of the late 1930s is a succession of desperate attempts to escape from Europe. As a result of these efforts, Jews reached Britain in numbers similar to those reaching Palestine; even more of them reached North and South America. Some even went as far as Shanghai. The failure of the Jews to take advantage of the San Domingo government's offer in 1937 to grant refuge to some tens of thousands of Jews did not stem from the fact that the Zionists did not support the plan (a contention voiced by the post-Zionists) but rather from local factors.(26) The Zionists at that time (like today) were not the government of world Jewry. Jews were free to go to any place that was willing to receive them. The problem was that such places were few. The identification that evolved between the Zionist goal and the Jewish existential problem in the 1930s did not result from European Jews' adoption of the Zionist ideal, but from the fact that they had no other refuge.(27) It is worth remembering that most Zionist activity in the diaspora between the two world wars, and particularly in Poland, the largest Zionist enclave, was concerned with local organizational, political, social and cultural activity. Only a minority of pioneer youth groups adopted the ideology of "negation of Exile." Zionists were a seminal influence in the political struggles for the rights of Polish Jewry as a national minority in Poland. Zionist ideology that opposed a renewal of Jewish life in Poland appeared only after, and as a result of, the war. The claim that 27 December 2013 Page 7 of 18 ProQuest

more Jews would have been saved if there had been more propaganda in favor of emigration from Poland and immigration to Palestine is no more valid than its opposite, that more were not saved because of "negation of Exile": both arguments are wisdom in hindsight, based on our knowledge of subsequent events. But in the late 1930s the Arab revolt in Palestine deterred Jews from using the British certificates they had obtained to immigrate to Palestine. Right up to summer 1939 there were Jews who chose to return from Palestine to Poland.(28) The causality between an abstract concept such as "negation of Exile" and the actual reactions of people who accept it is complex. Whenever an ideology does not correspond with existential needs, people tend to ignore it. It is sufficient to recall how many people believed in socialism and how many saw themselves as obliged to live by it; how many swore allegiance to Zionism, and how many were willing to risk seasickness (to paraphrase Plekhanov's ironic saying that "A Bundist is a Zionist who fears seasickness"). "Negation of Exile" was an abstract concept which defined the Jew's place in the world according to the Zionist perception, in opposition to diaspora reality, aspiring to make the Jews a nation with a territory of its own. It expressed the desire to bring about a revolution in Jewish lifestyle and mentality. It said nothing about the concrete problems encountered by the Zionist Organization. These were dealt with pragmatically, according to a reading of the situation at any given time. The slowness to understand the meaning of the information concerning the Holocaust that began to seep out in 1942 was not caused by the theory of "negation of Exile," but by the fact that normal people have difficulty believing in monstrous things. Even non-Zionists, adamant believers in the perpetuity of the diaspora, such as American Jews, were no quicker to understand the meaning of that information than the Zionists. The same "epidemic of inability," as the Zionist journalist Hayim Greenberg in the United States called it, afflicted the entire Jewish people. The reaction of people to information they received was determined more by their individual nature than by their political affiliation: Hillel Kook, a Zionist Revisionist activist in the United States, reacted in one way, and Menahem Begin, at the time leader of the radical Etzel group in Palestine (affiliated with the Revisionist Party), in another; Ben-Gurion in one way, and Golda Meir in another (both members of the Mapai Party).(29) I do not intend to examine the various rescue plans and the Zionist leadership's reaction to them. Most recent research shows that the leadership did the best it could under the circumstances of the time.(30) Even Tom Segev, in his critical book The Seventh Million, concludes that apparently little could have been done. Thus the question diverges from the issue of actual rescue possibilities to that of attitudes. The central question is not why the Zionist leaders did not save European Jewry, but rather why they did not show more concern, more empathy, why they did not try "to move heaven and earth," why they were not more attentive to the distress of the survivors, why they used the survivors in the DP camps and on the ships bringing illegal immigrants to Palestine as a spearhead in the struggle for the establishment of the state. These questions are linked to the national ethic, the self-image, the spirit of the times, and are much more entangled and complex than the answers proposed by the post-Zionists. One minor example: in all the descriptions by the post-Zionists, the survivors appear as clay in the Zionists' hands, with no will of their own. This is but a new version of the Yishuv's patronizing attitude to the survivors at that time. The attempt to portray the past as being governed by the same rules of the game as the present creates a distorted perspective: the Zionist leadership was not a government. It had no secret service at its disposal, no air force and no tanks. Its ability to influence the Allied governments was minimal. During a life-and-death struggle no one had patience for "poor relations," as the Zionists were treated by the British and American governments. Zionists today bear the burden of guilt for the claim they made from the outset to represent the dominant element in the Jewish people, which they did not. The establishment of the State of Israel made them, a posteriori, responsible for the fate of Jews during World War II. That, though, was a role completely beyond their capacities at the time. Post-Zionism and Postmodernism 27 December 2013 Page 8 of 18 ProQuest

Discussion of the attitude toward diaspora Jewry takes place on two levels: that of acts and omissions, and that of mental makeup. Its role is to undermine the Israeli self-image as the savior of the "surviving remnant" of Jewry. The Arab refugee and the Jewish refugee-both become victims of Zionism. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has developed a cultural-political concept which attributes to the theory of "negation of Exile" a dual role: on the one hand, the repression of Jewish diaspora experience as a positive and creative phenomenon in Jewish history and, on the other, the laying of the ideological foundation for removing any memory of the Palestinian story from Israeli collective memory. In its place, he proposes perceiving Jewish diaspora experience not only as a legitimate way of life, but, in effect, as a form of existence derived from Jewish uniqueness, which he defines as a position of constant symbiotic opposition to actual reality. That, in his eyes, is the special moral position typical of Jews. Thus, the diaspora way of life is not one forced upon the Jews, but rather an experience they chose of their own accord. "To choose to be a Jew is to choose galut [exile], and it means nothing else," he states.(31) Zionism, in contrast, which seeks to recreate for Jews a territorial national reality, to enable them a "total Jewish experience," by its very nature causes the rejection and repression of other options of Jewish existence. Raz-Krakotzkin writes metahistory, as if the events of the last two centuries, with all their agonies and tribulations, did not happen. The alienation which -- according to most testimonies --- was the formative experience of Jewish life in the diaspora, especially in Eastern Europe, and which still exists to a certain extent even in today's open, assimilatory societies, takes in his writings the form of ethical-theoretical social criticism and loses the tragic, existential dimension that in fact characterized it. The Jew as victim becomes an ideal. The aspiration, according to him, is "to renew the sense of exile here in Israel, without forgetting those still in a state of real exile, the oppressed of the Third World, the inhabitants of the refugee camps."(32) In other words, galut existence as a metaphor of moral sensitivity and openness to the other is a positive attribute -- which is not the case of real exile, unless a different rule applies to the Jew than to other people...He presents the historiography of Yitzhak Baer and Ben Zion Dinur, which emphasizes historical continuity and Jewish history as national history, as "adopting the historical model of the victors." The concept of "negation of Exile," he contends, "prevented relating to the collective aspirations of the local Arab population and its viewpoint," and thus, "the Arab presence did not create openness to a dialogue that could serve as a formative basis for Jewish selfawareness, and no attempt was made to adapt Zionist ideals to the local population and its culture."(33) This assertion is truly ludicrous: how could Zionist ideals be adapted to the local population unless the Jewish newcomers relinquished their aspirations for a Jewish entity? And what possible connection was there between the obvious animosity between settlers and natives in Palestine and the "negation of Exile"? Raz-Krakotzkin presents the "negation of Exile" as the reason for the refusal to acknowledge the tragedy that the establishment of Israel brought upon the Palestinians. In his opinion, the question of "who is to blame" for the war is posed from the perspective of the victors, while the true question should be who the victim was. Hence, the question is not "what really happened?" but rather how the memory of the past molds the present. Raz-Krakotzkin's thesis reflects erudition and intellectual daring, as well as total detachment from history as it occurred. He clearly demonstrates the postmodernist influence on history: there are no events, people, reality, but only texts and their interpretation. Thus, every text is equal in value to every other, and each construct is equally legitimate. As we have said, the concept "post-Zionism" was created in an associative context with the debate in the Israeli press on the issue of postmodernism. Some of the post-Zionists like to present themselves as postmodernists. But are they really an Israeli branch of that trend? The link between the "new historians" and postmodernism is not self-evident. The attack on Zionism or "old" Zionist historiography is launched in the name of modern values such as humanism, equality and democracy and is far from any cultural nihilism, which dismisses absolute values in favor of a relativist approach to culture, politics and ethics.(34) This distinction, though, was blurred in the heat of the debate, which quickly became a discussion on questions of historical methodology, relativism versus objectivism, and the meaning of historical 27 December 2013 Page 9 of 18 ProQuest

truth. The standard bearer of deconstructionism among the "new historians" is Ilan Pappe. His approach does not seem to be rooted in a crystallized postmodernist world view, but stems more from the question of what role ideology should have in historical representation. Israeli historiography of the last thirty years has striven to free itself from ideological approaches to history and analysis: academic historiography flourished along with a process of liberating itself from political perspectives. It sought to relieve young Zionist historiography of the burden of hagiography that had marked political literature of the 1930s-1950s. There was, of course, general awareness that all historians are products of their time and place, burdened with the preconceptions inculcated in them by their education, society and personal biography. Nonetheless, the aspiration was that the historian should make a conscious effort to transcend human limitations and allow the source material to speak for itself. The goal was to come as close as possible to a reconstruction of historical reality as it was perceived in that period, and according to its own norms. Placing oneself in the shoes of history makers necessitated understanding their spiritual world, listening to the slightest nuances in their words, comparing their public stances with what they said in private, following the dynamics of social and political relations, distinguishing between central and marginal issues, between slips of the tongue and actual intent, between what had an impact and what remained empty talk and, in effect, setting their words against their deeds. Some of the "revisionists" have sought to give renewed legitimacy to the politicization of research, justifying this move by means of a vulgarized version of postmodernism: there is no reality but in the eyes of the beholder. Thus, one cannot speak of objective facts, and even less so of historical truth. As a result, interpretation need not be limited by accepted "facts," for such facts are but a vain illusion invented by historians, whose approaches were conditioned by their a-priori positions. There are no "objective" or "non-objective" historians: there are only historians who recognize the relativity of their data and those who refute it. This view is meant to serve as the basis for the return of ideology to historiography: every historian has a political agenda, whether overt or covert. Thus, the ideological approach is legitimate when analyzing historical material. History, according to this version, is a "narrative," that is, a story invented by historians out of their own ideological needs. The conclusion to be drawn is that no story is more authentic than any other; each is meant to further the political or social ends of its author or the interest group he or she represents.(35) This view, accepted in certain circles of literary criticism, is valuable to a certain degree: it requires the historian to be exceedingly aware of the infiltration of external views into research. But this is precisely where the connection between post-Zionists and the postmodernist school is most clearly seen to be artificial. According to the internal logic of deconstructionism, every narrative is equal in value to every other. Thus, there is the Zionist narrative and there is the Palestinian narrative. Truth to tell, there are several Zionist narratives -- the one told by the Right and the one told by the Left, for example; there is probably more than one Palestinian narrative as well; and there is the narrative of the post-Zionists. The verity and value of one narrative are no greater than those of another: all of them stem from the subjective vision of an interest group at a certain moment. Pappe, though, believes that the relativism of history stops with himself, and that he and other post-Zionists promote the definitive narrative, the one that will put an end to all narratives. He claims that there exists no absolute truth, yet at the same time insists that it is the historian's duty to "determine what happened in the past, decide who was the villain and who was responsible for the failure."(36) As long as the "new" history or sociology focuses on illuminating issues that were previously marginal in historical research or have not yet been thoroughly investigated, such as the plight of the Palestinian refugees or the negotiations between Israel and the Arab countries in the first years after 1948, their efforts have an important contribution to make. Alternative methodological approaches, like that of Baruch Kimmerling and his colleagues, which place the national struggle in Palestine at the center of Israeli research, are legitimate and enrich the discussion. Unfortunately, though, some of the "new historians" do not stop there. They claim a farreaching methodological innovation: when the documents do not yield his desired picture of reality, Pappe 27 December 2013 Page 10 of 18 ProQuest

considers himself free to supplement those pieces of reality required by the historical narrative he relates, even if they have no basis in the documentation. In a newspaper interview, he compared history to archaeology and stated, "There are pieces of your own that you add, because you don't have all the evidence. You supplement what is missing from the point of view of the present."(37) An additional methodological issue arises as a result of the research subjects selected by the post-Zionists. History has ceased to relate to what actually happened because even facts are an illusion. Thus, a depiction of what did not happen has equal weight: Why did Israel fail to reach a peace agreement with its neighbors in the early 1950s? Why was the War of Independence not prevented? Why was a Palestinian state not established in 1948? Why did the Zionist leadership not save European Jewry? The very formulation of the questions is accusatory: from the advantage of hindsight and from the standpoint of the present, the heroes of the past are forced to account for their deeds -- not only for what they did but for what they did not do -- before a selfrighteous tribunal whose members have no doubt they would have acted more wisely and certainly more ethically. History is portrayed as a series of mistakes and lost opportunities. We are no longer presented with the human comedy, progressing in a slow process of trial and error, with pinnacles of human achievement and abysses of abomination, yet, when all is said and done, a process guided by reason; nor with a mysterious process, external to human deeds and wishes, that directs history toward some sort of goal, national or messianic. We are presented instead with a history of dead-end streets. This is in effect a trivialization of history: the Arab-Israeli conflict, among the most complex of the twentieth century, which arose from the existential interests of those two nations and struck roots in their cultures, which has to a considerable extent molded their way of thinking and which has been an important factor in the formation of their national identity, is presented almost as a historical accident, the result of Israel's stubborn refusal in 1949 to come to terms with the Palestinians, who had lost the war. The question "what would have happened if...?" is only valuable as an intellectual exercise, which cannot replace a description of what actually did occur. What failed to occur is not history because we do not know how it would have affected subsequent events. Who could say what would have happened if Israel had allowed the Arab refugees back in 1949? Would such an act have brought conciliation between Israel and its neighbors, or would it have led to its destruction? What would have happened had Ben-Gurion hastened to agree to a meeting with Syrian leader Husni al-Za'im? Would a peace treaty between Israel and Syria have been made? Would al-Za'im still have been assassinated? What would have happened had the Jewish Agency enthusiastically accepted at the Evian Conference San Domingo's offer to take in tens of thousands of Jews? Would Jewish history during World War II have been any different? Questions of this sort are infinite; though they whet our curiosity, the historian's role nonetheless remains to document, analyze and evaluate what happened and not what failed to happen.(38) Pappe relates his and his colleagues' "new history" to the French Annales school and to the neo-Annalists. He explains how that school of thought brought under discussion domains of research which, until then, had been marginal, such as social history, the history of mentalities, cultural history.(39) History is no longer an account of the political achievements of leaders or other elites, but now focuses on the investigation of social and cultural processes whose heroes are simple folk, women, marginal groups. However, there is, as yet, no connection between the work of the "new historians" and that of the Annales school. The works by Morris, Pappe and Shlaim deal with diplomatic history and are for the most part based on Foreign Ministry documents. Indeed, other historians of Zionism and the Yishuv have dealt with social and economic history, using statistics and other tools of social scientists; some have dealt with cultural history, using sources from the fields of education and literature; others, with the history of myths in relation to the changing Zionist ethic; still others with "generational" history, with reference to the social sciences, and so forth. It was not the "new historians" who applied modern historiography to the research of Zionism. Their works are in the domain of classical diplomatic history, on the border between history and political science. 27 December 2013 Page 11 of 18 ProQuest

The Issue of Uniqueness One of the contentions most often made by the post-Zionists is that traditional historiography tended to see the history of the Jews, Zionism and the State of Israel as a unique phenomenon and thus developed a particular conceptual system that stemmed from the self-perception of the Zionist state-builders and does not answer to universal criteria: instead of analyzing Israel as a society of immigrant-settlers in the context of colonialism, it developed a unique concept of a nation returning to its ancient birthplace and employed a system of loaded concepts such as "aliyah" (immigration to the "Land of Israel"), settlement, pioneering, redemption, etc. As a result, the "old" historiography and sociology were unable to apply comparative concepts in their understanding of the processes of Zionist settlement in Palestine. It goes without saying that it is legitimate to analyze a society from the outside; the Jewish Yishuv could be examined within the framework of colonialist movements that existed in the Western world from the sixteenth century. The situation of a nation of immigrants settling in a land with "natives" who wish to preserve their exclusive right to that strip of land makes Palestine comparable to North America or Australia, or to the Russian colonization of Central Asia. Use of that model is both legitimate and desirable, just as an understanding of the problems of new immigrants to Israel would be furthered by applying a conceptual framework developed in relation to immigrants to the United States, for instance. Reluctance to use such concepts stemmed from the fact that they were part of the propaganda that stigmatized Zionism and Israel as belonging to the camp of the forces of evil as opposed to the progressive, anti-colonial world. Today, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which made colonialism the white bogey of the Third World, and with the liberation of that world from the patronage of the West, there is room for dispassionate thought, free of ideologies, on the subject of colonialism. Not every colonization movement is to be dismissed out of hand, and not every national-liberation movement is, by definition, sacred. The use of the colonial model must be examined within an open academic discussion and not from positions that a priori reject or blame: will the white settlement of North America, Australia and New Zealand be remembered with lasting opprobrium because of its treatment of the autochthonous inhabitants? On the other hand, is every Central Asian tribe with a self-styled nationalist regime that oppresses national minorities, women or simply foreigners worthy of our admiration? Defining a movement as settlement-colonialism may well help to clarify the relations between the settling nation and the native one. Nonetheless, it does not say much about other aspects of the settler nation. To complete the picture we need the perspective "from within" as well: how and in what conceptual framework did the society see itself and explain its situation? That explanation is peculiar to each society and stems from the cultural traditions it brings with it, from the spiritual and ideological makeup of its members and from their expectations. Thus, use of the "internal" conceptual system in that context is legitimate and accepted regarding any culture. When Edward Said made his critique of orientalism, he criticized the tendency of orientalists from the West to analyze Eastern culture using a conceptual framework external to it and rooted in a different mentality, alien to Eastern society. He assumed that orientalists originating from that Eastern society would describe it differently -more fairly -- that those of Western extraction. This was, essentially, a legitimization of cultural particularism and implied that there is some advantage in describing and analyzing a society from an "internal" perspective and with empathy. The same post-Zionists who support Said's views change direction when it comes to the history of Zionism: there they seek to apply universal models, avoid loaded "internal" concepts and, most importantly, they utterly invalidate scholars who do not declare their hostility to Zionism or at least define themselves as aZionist.(40) Post-Zionism and Politics Ideas and arguments that originated in the political margins are now seeping through into academic discussion. Thus, for example, the criticism of the Mapai leadership's conduct during the Holocaust began in the 1950s in the fierce dispute over the agreement with Germany on reparations to Holocaust survivors. Prime Minister Ben27 December 2013 Page 12 of 18 ProQuest

Gurion wholeheartedly supported the agreement, and both the right- and left-wing opposition did their utmost to discredit him in the name of national honor and blood. The next stage was the 1955 Kasztner trial in which Kasztner was identified with Mapai, while the defendant, charged with his slander, was identified with the antiMapai opposition.(41) Although Kasztner's name was eventually cleared, the accusations raised during the trial that he had collaborated with the Nazis in German-occupied Hungary did not die away. According to S. B. BeitZvi's book Post-Ugandian Zionism in the Crucible of the Holocaust, which appeared in 1977, the Zionist movement was to blame both for inadequate rescue efforts before and during the war and for the misrepresentation of the Holocaust in the national memory. He was the first to promote the thesis of the link between the concept of "negation of Exile" and the inaction of the Zionist leadership during the Holocaust. At the time the book was received as a thought-provoking thesis, despite reservations about its documentation. In subsequent years, however, the book was accorded the status of a fully legitimate historical study. The same theses that in the 1950s were considered to be no more than a political attack on the Israeli leadership have today become the basis for scholarly discussions. A similar process has taken place with regard to the Palestinian issue as well: the notions that were common currency in the Radical Left of the late 1960s and 1970s -- that the State of Israel was born in sin; that Zionism had sought from the outset to usurp the Palestinian Arabs and expel them; that this was realized in 1948; that Zionism is, by its very nature, a colonialist movement -- have ceased to be identified with the political margins and have become a legitimate subject of academic discussion. Two simultaneous processes can be discerned here. One is the process I call "the iron law of devaluation of the past": if something negative about the past can be conceived, be sure it will gain credence.(42) The harsh critique of the past aims at changing today's politics. The assault on heroes of the past contributes to undermining national identity and to reopening discussion on what its nature should be. Political goals are aided by the power of the press: collective memory is no longer molded by the traditional agents of memory, but rather by journalists, publicists and television interviewers. A shared memory of the past no longer exists. Instead, we witness fragments of memory promoted by the new agents of memory. It is no accident that the "new historians" are featured so prominently in the media: polemics obviously make more interesting material than moderate and balanced analyses of the past. Thus, any kind of far-fetched critical conjecture voiced today is certain to reappear sooner or later as a central issue in academic research. The second process is no less important, though it is less visible. I call it "the consensus drift."(43) The fact that ideas that seemed marginal twenty years ago have now become partly legitimate reflects a slow shift in patterns of what is accepted and in patterns of collective memory. Like the change on the political level, from denial of the existence of a Palestinian people to recognition of it and willingness to come to a historical accommodation with it, so on the level of collective memory there is today a greater readiness to accept the notion that the establishment of Israel brought a disaster upon the Palestinians. The current peace process and the concomitant changes in perceiving reality have made Israeli society more willing than ever before to reassess the historical events that gave birth to the state. The new openness to understanding the point of view on the other side of the barricade does not necessarily mean developing a guilt complex and flagellating oneself for the sins of the past, as some of the "new historians" prescribe and as those of the Palmah generation fear. Rather, it mandates a more sober, mature outlook on the past. Just as in the 1980s, when the palpable shift to the right in the Israeli consensus meant that people who had previously placed themselves at the center of the political spectrum suddenly found themselves on the left, so today people who previously considered themselves on the left of the spectrum now find themselves at the center. This process is reflected in the debate surrounding the "new historians." Historiography becomes an arm of collective memory: instead of aspiring to historical truth, as we previously assumed, it now represents the political interests of groups that battle for positions in the national identity. The tendency to turn history into an ideological construction serving particular interests, to transform it into a series 27 December 2013 Page 13 of 18 ProQuest

of myths intended to establish or reinforce group identities, is becoming more and more pronounced.(44) History as a chronicle of injustice and misery -- that is the post-Zionist message. History becomes a sentimental description, in which we are always supposed to identify with the vanquished and criticize the victors. Thus, the very fact that Zionism turned out to be a victorious movement makes it amoral. According to that principle, the history of World War II may be reformulated as well. There may very well appear a historian who will describe events from the perspective of the Germans expelled from Danzig or Silesia. And indeed, from the point of view of the inhabitants of eastern Prussia, there is no doubting the hardship endured by those who were expelled. It may also be claimed that their memory has been obliterated from German history. But could it not be argued that partial truth on this subject is also partial falsehood? It is still too early to answer the question whether all this is a "new wave" in Israeli historiography or but a passing ripple. If the debate with the "new historians" turns out, in the end, to be a debate on research emphases, subjects and paradigms or, alternatively, an expression of normal youthful enthusiasm for the sensational, it will turn out to have been a limited and transient phenomenon, with the positive contribution of revitalizing scholarly research. However, if the deconstructionist trends followed by some of the "new historians" gain strength, then it will become clear we are facing a total crisis in all that concerns the human sciences and the domain of history in particular. For if no historical reality exists to be uncovered, if there are no agreed-upon research principles of what is permitted and forbidden, accepted and unaccepted, if there are no methodological rules, then there can be no common language between historians. This problem is unrelated to which subjects are considered legitimate objects of investigation -- for every subject is legitimate -- but concerns, rather, treatment of sources, rules of historical evidence, the principles guiding the historian when he sits down at his desk. In the final reckoning, history has no content if the ideal guiding the historian is not the quest for truth. Notes (1) Avi Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (Oxford, 1988); Ilan Pappe, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-1951 (New York, 1988); Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (New York, 1987); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (Cambridge, 1987). (2) Benny Morris, "The New Historiography: Israel Confronts Its Past," Tikkun (Nov. -- Dec. 1988): 19-23, 99102. According to Morris's definition, the term included works by Uri Milstein, author of a monumental and controversial version of the War of Independence, and Tom Segev, author of 1949: The First Israelis (New York, 1992) and The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York, 1993). See also Morris, "History Comes of Age," Yediot Aharonot, 30 June 1989 (in Hebrew). But according to Ilan Pappe, "The Claim to Objectivity and Its Failure," Ha'Aretz, 18 May 1989 (in Hebrew), journalists who dabble in historical writing do not deserve to be considered members of the guild; a university education alone ensures serious historiographical work (unlike the works of Simha Flapan and Shabtai Teveth). (3) Uri Ram, "The Post-Zionist Debate: Five Notes of Clarification," Davar, 8 July 1994, and "Post-Zionist Ideology," Ha'Aretz, 8 Apr. 1994 (both in Hebrew). (4) Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, "Exile within Sovereignty: Toward a Critique of the `Negation of Exile' in Israeli Culture," Teoriyah u-Vikoret, no. 4 (1993): 23-55 (in Hebrew); idem, "The Emptying of the Empty Land," Davar, 28 June 1991 (in Hebrew); Lior Zeltin, "Nostalgia for Exile," Davar, 18 Feb. 1994 (in Hebrew). (5) Baruch Kimmerling: "On the Terrible Sins of the Critical Sociologists," Davar, 1 Apr. 1994; "A Compulsive Need to Justify," Ha'Aretz, 3 Apr. 1993; and "The Merchants of Anxieties," ibid., 24 June 1994 (all in Hebrew). (6) See Yagil Levi and Yoav Peled, "The Rupture That Never Was: Israeli Sociology in the Mirror of the Six-Day War," Teoriyah u-Vikoret, no. 3 (1993): 115-28 (in Hebrew). (7) See Ram, "Post-Zionist Debate" and "Post-Zionist Ideology." See also Yonah Hadari-Ramaj, "There Is No History, There Are Historians" (interview with Ilan Pappe), Yediot Aharonot, 27 Aug. 1993 (in Hebrew) (hereafter Pappe, "Interview"); Ilan Pappe: "The Influence of Zionist Ideology on Israeli Historiography," Davar, 15 May 27 December 2013 Page 14 of 18 ProQuest

1994; "The Claim to Objectivity"; and "The New History of the 1948 War," Teoriyah u-Vikoret, no. 3 (1993): 99112 (all in Hebrew). (8) An exception is Simha Flapan, who was a member of the left-wing Mapam Party, an active politician, an ideologue and educated publicist with no academic pretensions, a Zionist of the old school. (9) Historians such as Netanel Lorch, Elhanan Oren and Meir Pa'il have been extensively criticized. See Morris, "History Comes of Age" and "The New Historiography," 19-21; Uri Milstein, "Netanel Lorch, History of the War of Independence," Be'ayot Beinle'umiyot 30, no. 56 (1991): 63-65 (in Hebrew). (10) Aharon Megged, "The Israeli Impulse for Suicide," Ha'Aretz, 10 June 1994 (in Hebrew). The debate lasted some weeks in the press and culminated in a symposium held at Tel Aviv University in early July 1994. Most of the discussion was published in Ha'Aretz, 17 and 24 June, 1, 8, 15 and 22 July 1994. (11) The Palmah was an elite military unit consisting of the best of Jewish youth in Palestine. It took the brunt of the fighting during the early, crucial stages of the War of Independence, suffering heavy casualties. (12) Morris, "The New Historiography," 23; Pappe, "Interview." Except for the period Feb. -- Mar. 1948 and the first three weeks after 15 May 1948 (the invasion of the Arab states' armies following the declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel), Israeli forces were numerically stronger than the Palestinian and even the invading forces. This fact was already known to historians such as Gavriel Cohen and Mordekhai Bar-On in the 1950s and was even absorbed into studies by the IDF history division. It has been accepted for years by leading researchers in the field, such as Avraham Sela, and there is nothing new about it. (This information was verified in discussions with Prof. Cohen and Dr. Sela.) (13) Morris, Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 385-96; idem, "New Historiography," 99. As for challenges to Morris from the Palestinian side, see Norman Finkelstein, "Myths, Old and New," Nur Masalha, "A Critique of Benny Morris," and Benny Morris, "Response to Finkelstein and Masalha," all in Journal of Palestine Studies 21, no. 1 (Autumn 1991): 66-114; and Norman Finkelstein, "Rejoinder to Benny Morris," ibid. 21, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 61-71. (14) Morris is aware of this and relates to the point in his "Response to Finkelstein," 113. See also Shabtai Teveth, "Charging Israel with Original Sin," Commentary 88, no. 3 (Sept. 1989): 24-33; idem, "The Arab Refugee Problem and Its Origins," Middle Eastern Studies 26, no. 2 (1990): 214-49; and Morris, "The Eel and History: A Reply to Shabtai Teveth," Tikkun (Jan. -- Feb. 1990): 19-22, 79-86. (15) The story of the Israeli-Hashemite plot is the basis for Shlaim's book, Collusion across the Jordan. He and Pappe attribute less significance to the circumstances leading to the war than to its results. On this issue, see two articles by Pappe, "Moshe Sharett, David Ben-Gurion and the `Palestinian Option', 1948-1956," HaTziyonut 11 (1986): 361-79; and "The Lausanne Conference and the First Signs of Disagreement on Israeli Foreign Policy," Iyunim be-Tekumat Israel 1 (1991): 241-61 (both in Hebrew). See also Pappe, "The New History of the 1948 War." Raz-Krakotzkin, "The Emptying of the Empty Land," adopts a similar approach. For a different approach to Israel-Abdullah relations, see Avraham Sela, "Transjordan, Israel, and the 1948 War: Myth, Historiography and Reality," Middle Eastern Studies 28, no. 4 (1992): 623-58. (16) Raz-Krakotzkin speaks of ensuring justice for the vanquished. Shlaim and Pappe question Morris's conclusions and charge Israel with a plan for total expulsion, following the claims by Halid Walidi that Plan D, the military plan to gain control of territories in anticipation of May 15, was in effect an order for total expulsion. Pappe even declared that the establishment of Israel was not worth the expulsion of 750,000 Arabs. See RazKrakotzkin, "The Emptying of the Empty land" and "Exile within Sovereignty," 44ff.; Zeltin, "Nostalgia for Exile." For more on the dispute between Morris and those who blame Israel for planning and carrying out the expulsion, see the articles by Masalha and Finkelstein (n. 13 above). (17) Statements to this effect recur in articles by Pappe, Raz-Krakotzkin and Peled, and were voiced openly in the many meetings on the debate -- hence also the sensitivity to Megged's critique, since he again used concepts of the classical Zionist Left. 27 December 2013 Page 15 of 18 ProQuest

(18) On the issue of "Jewish labor," see Anita Shapira, Futile Struggle: The Jewish Labor Controversy, 19291939 (Tel Aviv, 1977) (in Hebrew). (19) See Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 (New York, 1992). (20) See, for example, Ram, "Post-Zionist Ideology." (21) Dan Diner, "The Yishuv Confronting the Destruction of European Jewry," Ha-Tziyonut 13 (Mar. 1988): 301 (in Hebrew). (22) Ahad Ha-Am was a Russian Jew, the originator of "spiritual Zionism," a contemporary and adversary of Herzl and his politics. He emphasized the cultural role of Zionism, hoping that the Jewish center in Palestine would serve as a bulwark against assimilation. (23) Ilan Pappe, "A Lesson in New History," Ha'Aretz, 24 June 1994 (in Hebrew); see also Ram, "Post-Zionist Debate." (24) The basic thesis on the subject was first presented in S. B. Beit-Zvi's book Post-Ugandian Zionism in the Crucible of the Holocaust (Tel Aviv, 1977) (in Hebrew). Ben-Gurion is quoted from the discussion in the Mapai Central Committee, 7 Dec. 1938, Labor Party Archive, Beit Berl, 23/38. (25) See Anita Shapira, "The Concept of Time in the Partition Controversy, 1937," in idem, Visions in Conflict (Tel Aviv, 1988), 307-24 (in Hebrew). (26) The Joint Distribution Committee backed the plan and even gave it generous funding; thus the failure was not caused by a lack of Jewish support. See Yehuda Bauer, American Jewry and the Holocaust: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1939-1945 (Detroit, 1981), 200-201. (27) The harsh policy of countries such as Canada, Australia, the United States and others toward Jews seeking refuge in the second half of the 1930s has been extensively documented. For statistics comparing the numbers of Jews who emigrated to Britain, the United States and Palestine before 1939, see Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe (London and Oxford, 1979), 14-19. See also Henry L. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938-1945 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1970); David S. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis 1938-1941 (Boston, 1968). (28) On Zionist policy in Poland between the two World Wars, see Ezra Mendelsohn, Zionism in Poland: The Formative Years, 1915-1926 (New Haven, 1982); Emmanuel Melzer, Political Strife in a Blind Alley: The Jews in Poland, 1935-1939 (Tel Aviv, 1982) (in Hebrew); Shlomo Netzer, The Struggle of Polish Jewry for Civil and National Minority Rights (1918-1922) (Tel Aviv, 1980) (in Hebrew). Regarding the use of certificates in the late 1930s, in 1936 the number of "well-off" immigrants to Palestine was only half of that in 1935. This trend continued in 1937; see reports of the Zionist Executive to the 20th and 21st Zionist Congresses (Protocols of these congresses, pp. 266 and 235 respectively). In 1939 300 certificates were not utilized; see letter of Dov Yosef, 10 Jan. 1939, Central Zionist Archive, Jerusalem S25/2512. In June 1939 only 30 "well-off" Polish Jews submitted requests for permission to immigrate to Palestine; see report to meeting of Jewish Agency Executive, 11 June 1939, Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem. Evidence regarding many people who returned to Poland in summer 1939 has been provided by their relatives. I am gratetul to Mrs. Aviva Halamish for supplying me with these data. (29) The subject of the Yishuv leaderships's reaction to the Holocaust has been treated extensively. See, for example, S. B. Beit-Zei, "What the Leadership Knew about the Destruction of Polish Jewry," Yizkor 10 (1989): 118-34 (in Hebrew); idem, Post-Ugandian Zionism; Dina Porat, The Blue and Yellow Stars of David: The Zionist Leadership in Palestine and the Holocaust, 1939-1945 (Cambridge, MA, 1990); Yehiam Weitz, Awareness and Helplessness: Mapai Confronting the Shoah, 1943-1945 (Jerusalem, 1994) (in Hebrew). On the issue of American Jews, see David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York, 1984). The quotation from Hayim Greenberg appears in his article "Bankrupt," Der Yidisher Kempfer (in Yiddish, date not found), reprinted in Hebrew in Yizkor 10 (1989): 135. (30) See, for example, Tuvyah Frieling, "The Seventh Million as the Zionist Movement's March of Folly and 27 December 2013 Page 16 of 18 ProQuest

Iniquity," Iyunim be-Tekumat Israel 2 (1992): 317-67 (in Hebrew). (31) Raz-Krakotzkin, "Exile within Sovereignty," 29. (32) Ibid., 35. (33) Ibid., 44, 45. (34) This point is stressed by Ram, "Post-Zionist Debate." (35) Such statements appear very frequently. See esp. Pappe, "The Claim to Objectivity"; "The Influence of Zionist Ideology; "The New History of the 1948 War"; and "Interview." (36) Pappe, "The New History of the 1948 War," 101. (37) Pappe, "Interview." (38) For a balanced treatment of these issues, see Mordekhai Bar-On, "The Peace That Was Not Possible," in Iyunim be-Tekumat Israel 2 (1992): 455-63 (in Hebrew). (39) Pappe, "The New History of the 1948 War," 101-102. (40) Ibid., 104-10; idem, "The Influence of Zionist Ideology"; Kimmerling, "The Merchants of Anxieties." See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London, 1978). (41) Rudolf Rezs Kasztner, a Zionist leader of Hungarian Jewry under the Nazi occupation, was affiliated with Mapai. His close relations with Nazi officials had led to the lives of thousands of Jews being saved but gave rise to accusations of collaboration. The verdict in the trial stated that he had "sold his soul to the devil." He was murdered by right-wing extremists after the trial and was posthumously vindicated. (42) See Anita Shapira, "Historiography and Collective Memory: The Latrun Case," Alpayim (Oct. 1994): 9-41 (in Hebrew). (43) Anita Shapira, "Characteristics of Processes of Shifts to the Left," in Visions in Conflict, 245-47 (in Hebrew). (44) See Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York, 1994). Subject: Crime; Culture; Foreign policy; Holocaust; International relations; Jews; Minority & ethnic groups; Philosophy; Politics; War; Location: Israel People: Flapan, Simha, Morris, Benny, Shlaim, Avi, Pappe, Ilan Ethnicity: Jewish Publication title: History and Memory Volume: 7 Issue: 1 Pages: 9 Number of pages: 0 Publication year: 1995 Publication date: Jun 30, 1995 Year: 1995 Publisher: Indiana University Press Place of publication: Bloomington Country of publication: United States Publication subject: Jewish, History

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ISSN: 0935560X Source type: Scholarly Journals Language of publication: English Document type: Feature Accession number: SFLNSHTAM0499HMDZ183000013 ProQuest document ID: 195115920 Document URL: http://search.proquest.com/docview/195115920?accountid=159230 Copyright: Copyright Indiana University Press Jun 30, 1995 Last updated: 2010-06-05 Database: ProQuest Central

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