Forgetfulness for memory: The limits of the new Israeli history

Journal of Palestine Studies

Volumn 34, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 6-23

  Beinin, Joel ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

POLITICAL HISTORY; WAR;

ASIA; EASTERN HEMISPHERE; EURASIA; ISRAEL; MIDDLE EAST; PALESTINE; WORLD;

EID: 18844439635     PISSN: 0377919X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/jps.2005.34.2.006     Document Type: Article

References (80)

1. Benny Morris, Tikun ta'ut: yehudim ve-'aravim be-eretz yisra'el, 1936-1956 [Correction of an Error: Jews and Arabs in the Land of Israel, 1936-1956] (Tel Aviv: 'Am 'Oved, 2000), p. 11.
2. Benny Morris, "The New Historigraphy: Israel Meets its Past," Tikkun (Nov.-Dec. 1988), pp. 19-23, 99-102. The revised Hebrew version was published as "Historiografiah hadasha: yisra'el pogeshet et 'avarah," in Tikun ta'ut, pp. 23-41.
3. A very prominent expression of this realignment was Morris's collaboration with Ehud Barak in an extended debate with Robert Malley and Hussein Agha over who was responsible for the failure of the July 2000 summit. See Benny Morris, "An Interview with Ehud Barak" New York Review of Books, 13 June 2002
4. Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, "A Reply to Ehud Barak; New York Review of Books, 13 June 2002
5. Benny Morris and Ehud Barak, reply by Robert Malley and Hussein Agha "Camp David and After - Continued," New York Review of Books, 27 June 2002.
6. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988;
7. second edition, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2004). Citations are to the first edition unless otherwise noted.
8. Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000) presents a more comprehensive reconsideration of Israel's relations with its Arab neighbors from 1948 to the 1990s and may ultimately be more significant. Published close to the outbreak of the second intifada when there was little Jewish receptiveness to critical assessments of Israel's history, the book has not received the attention it deserves.
9. Ilan Pappé has written one major book in Hebrew, Atzulat ha-aretz: mishpahat al-Husayni, biografiah politit [Aristocracy of the Land: The Husayni Family, a Political Biography] (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 2002), while a Hebrew translation of Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall is underway.
10. Morris, Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, p. 206.
11. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
12. For example, Elias Shoufani, "The Fall of a Village," JPS 1, no. 4 (Summer 1972), pp. 109-21;
13. Nafez Nazzal, The Palestinian Exodus from Galilee, 1948 (Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1978).
14. Much later and directed to a very different audience is 'Adil Manna', "Majd al-Krum 1948: 'amaliyyat tamshit 'adiyya" [Majd al-Krum 1948: An Ordinary Combing Operation], al-Karmil no. 55-56 (Spring-Summer 1998), pp. 184-200.
15. Walid Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israeli in 1948 (Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992);
16. Salim Tamari, ed., Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighborhoods and Their Fate in the War (Jerusalem: Institute of Jerusalem Studies, 1999).
17. Constantine Zurayk coined the term nakba in Ma'na al-nakba (Beirut, 1948) translated as The Meaning of the Disaster (Beirut: Khayat's College Book Cooperative, 1956);
18. 'Arif al-'Arif, al-Nakba: Nakbat bayt al-maqdis wa'l-firdaws al-mafqud, 1947-1952 [The catastrophe: The Catastrophe of Jerusalem and the Lost Paradise, 1947-1952], 6 vols. (Sidon and Beirut: al-Maktaba al-'asriya lil-tiba'a wal-nashr, 1956-61);
19. Walid Khalidi, "Why did the Palestinians Leave?" Middle East Forum 35, no. 7 (July 1959), pp. 21-24, 35;
20. Walid Khalidi, "The Fall of Haifa," Middle East Forum 35, no. 10 (December 1959), pp. 22-32;
21. Walid Khalidi, "Plan Dalet: The Zionist Blueprint for the Conquest of Palestine," Middle East Forum 37, no. 12 (November 1961), pp. 22-28.
22. Among its early publications was the Arabic edition of Sabri Jiryis's The Arabs in Israel, first published in Hebrew in 1966. It was published in English by IPS in 1968.
23. For example, Sami Hadawi, Village Statistics, 1945: A Classification of Land and Area Ownership in Palestine, with Explanatory Notes (Beirut: Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center, 1970).
24. For example, Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Thought, 1882-1948 (Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992)
25. Nur Masalha, A Land Without a People: Israel, Transfer and the Palestinians, 1949-1996 (London: Faber and Faber, 1997).
26. Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 36.
27. For more details see Joel Beinin, Was the Red Flag Flying There? Marxist Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in Egypt and Israel, 1948-1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
28. Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis (New York: Free Press, 1986), p. 89.
29. Benny Morris, 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 159-211. Quote is from the Hebrew version, Tikun ta'ut, p. 17.
30. Aharon Cohen, "Mediniutenu ha-'aravit be-tokh ha-milhamah: ptihah le-berur be-va'adah ha-politit" [Our Arab Policy during the War: Introduction to a Discussion of the Political Committee], Aharon Cohen Papers, Merkaz te'ud ve-heker shel Ha-shomer Ha-Tza'ir, Giv'at Haviva, 90.10.10(4);
31. "Mediniutenu klapei ha-'aravim: hakhlatot ha-va'adah ha-politit me 15.6.48" [Our Policy toward the Arabs: Decisions of the Political Committee of 15 June 1948], Miyoman ha-mazkirut [From the Diary of the Secretariat] (23 June 1948),
32. Ibid., 90.31 (2 gimel).
33. Shabtai Teveth, "The Palestinian Refugee Problem and Its Origins," Middle Eastern Studies 26, no. 2 (April 1990), p. 221.
34. Khalidi, "Why did the Palestinians Leave?" demonstrated in 1959 that there were no such orders on the basis of a review of the contemporary Arab press, news agency reports, and Arab radio broadcasts (recorded and archived by the BBC). This Arab orders issue was exhaustively debated in the British Spectator by Jon Kimche, Erskine Childers, and Khalidi from May to August 1961, which may explain why Ben-Gurion raised it in the Knesset that October.
35. Ari Shavit, "Survival of the Fittest," ha-Aretz Friday supplement 9 January 2004, p. 15. Reprinted in Document C2, JPS 33, no. 3 (Spring 2004), pp. 166-73. Citations are from the Hebrew original (my translations when quoted).
36. Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, p. 136. Thanks to Eric Hooglund for assistance on this point.
37. One important expression of the counter-narrative of Israeli radicals, originally members of the Communist Party and subsequently founders of Matzpen, is A. Yisraeli [i.e., Akiva Orr and Moshe Machover], Shalom, shalom, ve-ayn shalom: yisra'el-'arav, 1948-1961 [Peace, Peace, and There Is No Peace: Israel and the Arabs, 1948-1961] (Jerusalem: Weinfeld, 1961).
38. For details see Beinin, Was the Red Flag Flying There?
39. Ha-Aretz, 4 April 1969.
40. Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (New York: Pantheon, 1987), p. 5.
41. Ibid., p. 11.
42. Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari, Milhemet sholal (Jerusalem: Domino Press, 1984). Translated into English as Israel's Lebanon War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984).
43. Ibid., p. 10.
44. Yehoshafat Harkabi, Hakhra'ot goraliot (Tel Aviv: 'Am 'Oved, 1986). Translated into English as Israel's Fateful Hour (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).
45. For a critique of Harkabi's argument in his Arab Attitudes toward Israel (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972),
46. see Joel Beinin, "Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the Jewish Community in Egypt, 1939 to the Present," Hagar: International Social Science Review 3, no. 1 (2002), pp. 62-63.
47. Zachary Lockman, "Original Sin," in Zachary Lockman and Joel Beinin, eds., Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation (Boston: South End Press, 1989), pp. 185-203.
48. Morris, Tikun ta'ut, p. 11.
49. Morris himself makes much of this change in his "Response to Finkelstein and Masalha," JPS 21, no. 1 (Autumn 1991), p. 114.
50. "On the Expulsion of the Remaining Arabs of Majdal to Gaza, 1950" in 1948 and After.
51. and "Yosef Nahmani and the Arab Question in 1948," in 1948 and After .
52. Reassessments of Operation Hiram appear in "Gerush mivtza' hiram: tikun ta'ut" [The Expulsion of Operation Hiram: Correction of an Error], in Tikun ta'ut
53. and in "Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of 1948" in Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim, eds., The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 48-56.
54. Morris, "Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of 1948," p. 48.
55. Benny Morris, Israel's Border Wars, 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
56. Benny Morris, "Ha-'itonut ha-yisra'elit be-parashat kibya, October-November 1953" [The Israeli Press in the Kibya Affair, October- November 1953], in Tikun ta'ut, pp. 184-85.
57. Morris, 1948 and After, pp. 42-43.
58. Prominent examples of this idealist approach are Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 1882-1948: A Study of Ideology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)
59. and Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
60. Yedi'ot Aharonot, 23 November 2001, pp. 15, 16.
61. Morris, "Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of 1948," p. 48.
62. Yedi'ot Aharonot, 23 November 2001, p. 15.
63. "The Right of Return (I): An Interview with Benny Morris," Tikkun , March-April 2001, online at www.tikkun.org.
64. Shavit, "Survival of the Fittest."
65. I b i d.
66. I b i d.
67. I b i d.
68. See, for example, Teveth, "The Palestinian Refugee Problem and Its Origins";
69. and Anita Shapira, "Politics and Collective Memory: The Debate over the 'New Historians' in Israel," History & Memory 7, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 1995), pp. 9-40.
70. For example, Yoav Gelber, Palestine 1948: War, Escape, and the Emergence of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2001)
71. and the Journal of Israeli History 20, no. 2/3 (2001) whose entire issue is devoted to the new historians.
72. Efraim Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History: The New Historians (London: Frank Cass, 1997) is a tendentious polemic (see my review in Middle East Journal 52, no. 3 [Summer 1998], pp. 448-50).
73. Itamar Rabinovich, The Road Not Taken: Early Arab-Israeli Negotiations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) is primarily an attempt to refute the early work of Avi Shlaim on post-1948 Arab-Israeli relations and says relatively little about the Palestinians.
74. Meron Benvenisti, The West Bank Data Project: A Survey of Israel's Policies (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy, 1984).
75. Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
76. Interview with Ari Shavit, ha-Aretz Friday supplement, 8 August 2003.
77. Lockman, Comrades and Enemies;
78. see also, Beinin, Was the Red Flag Flying There?
79. and Susan Slyomovics, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).
80. The term "relational history" was coined by Perry Anderson in a different context in "Agendas for Radical History", Radical Histiory Review, no. 36 (September 1986), pp. 32-37.