Myths, Old and New

Abstract

In recent years, a more or less cohesive body of work has emerged which challenges the received wisdom on the origins of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Variously labelled history, revisionist history, or simply (as against the pre history of an earlier generation), this scholarship severely qualifies-without, however, roundly dismissing-the standard interpretation of the eve, unfolding, and aftermath of the 1948 war. Its authors, mostly Israeli, argue five major points: 1) the Zionist movement did not enthusiastically embrace the partition of Palestine; 2) the surrounding Arab states did not unite as one to destroy the nascent Jewish state; 3) the war did not pit a relatively defenseless and weak Jewish David against a relatively strong Arab Goliath; 4) Palestine's Arabs did not take flight at the behest of Arab orders; and 5) Israel was not earnestly seeking peace at the war's end. In this essay I want to focus on the work of Benny Morris, a former diplomatic correspondent of the Jerusalem Post who received his doctorate from Cambridge University. Morris is the most influential and prolific of the new historians.' The central concern of his research is the most passionately disputed chapter of the 1948 war: the flight into exile of Palestine's indigenous Arab population. Morris's first study, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949,2 was near-universally acclaimed as a classic, a model of scholarly rigor and detachment. The recent publication of Birth's companion volume, 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians,3 is an espe-