Isaiah Friedman'sPalestine, A Twice Promised Land?

Abstract

IN THE COURSE OF A LONG CAREER, Professor Isaiah Friedman has worked, confidently, comfortably and energetically within the confines of diplomatic history. This is his third book on the First World War and the Middle East. His methodology, devotedly orthodox, rests on textual analysis of primary sources, manuscript and printed, preserved primarily in government archive and supplemented by holdings in private collections. The rate of cumulation in history is, in his view, determined by the availability of primary sources, and thus by the opening of archives, domestic and foreign. The challenge of archival research places, therefore, a premium on language skills. Friedman, true to his vocation as a diplomatic historian, writes thorough, dense, analytical narratives, scrupulously documented. He is, above all else, an empiricist, enjoying the role of detective. He is driven, he claims, purely by intellectual curiosity. He asks to be judged simply in terms of honest, by which he means his knowledge of, devotion to, and interpretation of the sources. These are, after all, the tests of the master craftsman. these are the standards to which the journeyman, George Antonius, for example, can never aspire, ill-motivate, thoroughly untrustworthy as he was. Friedman sees no reason, therefore, to disguise in any way his joy, his greatest satisfaction, in his ability to revise stereotypes and to destroy myths. His alternative narrative, his script, shreds the existing narrative and displaces the old script. Revisionism triumphs; a new orthodoxy rules. No longer need the record of British officials, political and military, be an embarrassing and demoralizing one. Friedman's debate with the late Arnold Toynbee, carried in the Journal of Contemporary History some thirty years