Professor Avi Shlaim

Israel is a natural candidate for inclusion in the series of College seminars on �Conflict, Justice, and Collective Memories: How Countries Deal with Difficult Pasts�. Debates about the past are common to most democratic states but they vary in intensity and in the extent of public involvement. As a young nation which is still engaged in an existential conflict with its Arab neighbours, Israel is anxious to demonstrate the justice and morality of its position. Consequently, the past is very active, it is of immense interest to the general public, and it is directly relevant to the country�s politics in the present.

In this talk I propose to focus on only one aspect of Israel�s difficult past: the conflict with its Arab neighbours. My comments are organised around four main headings: the traditional Zionist narrative of the Arab-Israeli confict, the challenge to this narrative in the form of the �new history�, the reaction to the new history, and the impact of the new history on the way that Israel copes with its past. But I must make it clear at the outset that I am not a detached observer but an active participant in the war of the Israeli historians.

The focal point in the debate between the old and the new historians is the birth of Israel in 1948 and the first Arab-Israeli war. Traditional Zionist historians tend to reflect the collective memory of their compatriots about this formative period. They depict the war as a desperately unequal and heroic struggle between a Jewish David and an Arab Goliath. They share the common belief that in 1948 Israelis fought for a just cause, to realise their right to national self-determination, and to provide a haven for the survivors of the Holocaust. And they also put the responsibility for the creation of the refugee problem on the Palestinians themselves, thus blaming the victims for their own misfortunes.

The late 1980s witnessed the emergence of the new history with the publication of books by Simha Flapan, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, and myself. In our books we drew heavily and with gratitude on the official documents that had recently been declassified by Israel under the 30-year rule. The end result was to demolish or correct many of the myths that had come to surround the birth of the state of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war. Flapan roundly attacked all the myths, especially the one on the military balance. Morris demonstrated that Israel bore a large share of the reponsibility for the Palestinian exodus. Pappe showed that Britain�s real aim in the twilight of the Palestine mandate was not to abort the birth of a Jewish state but rather that of a Palestinian state. I argued that the Jewish Agency colluded with King Abdullah of Transjordan to partition Palestine at the expense of the Palestinians. I further argued that the principal cause for the political deadlock that persisted for thirty years after the guns fell silent was Israeli intransigence rather than Arab intransigence.

The appearance of the first wave of revisionist studies excited a great deal of interest and contoversy in the media and more than a flutter in the academic dovecote. Some of the keepers of the flame of Zionist orthodoxy felt personally slighted and went on the offensive. The new books reflected badly on their own work and, in some cases, even questioned their integrity. So they had a stake in defending the official line and in discrediting the critics of this line. We were accused of serious professional flaws in our use of evidence, and of being driven by a political agenda of seeking to delegitimise Israel and to generate sympathy for the Palestinian cause. A third line of attack is that the new history deprives young Israelis of pride in the achievements of their country and confidence in the justice of their cause. The novelist Aharon Meged went even further in claiming that the new historians are leadind their country towards collective suicide.

While the new history is not propelled by political motives, it has already had significant political consequences on at least three levels. First, it has acted as a spur to a quiet revolution in the teaching of history in Israeli high schools. Second, it enables ordinary members of the Israeli public to understand how the Arabs perceive Isrsel and how they view the past. Third, it presents to the Arabs an account of the conflict which they recognise as honest and genuine, and in line with their own experience, instead of the usual propaganda of the victors. In all these different ways, the new history helps to create a climate, on both sides of the Arab-Israeli divide, which is conducive to reconciliation, and to the continuation of the peace process. As Bishop Tutu pointed out in the South African context, it is difficult to know what to forgive unless we know what happened. In the Middle East, as in South Africa, it is cecessary to confront the past in order to be able to go forward.