Small Wars, Big Wars: Security Debates During Israel's First Decade

Abstract

DESPITE CONSIDERABLE CRITICISM LEVELED AT Benny Morris's book about the inception of the Palestinian refugee problem during the War of Independence, the impression remains that the work was a breakthrough in the fundamental reorientation of all facets of this subject.' The general, factual, detailed picture that Morris expansively relates had been previously outlined by a number of earlier historians.2 Morris's book, however, signaled a turning-point, because it was the first time an Israeli historian attacked the standard denial version and presented a balanced portrait of the conflicting views surrounding the refugee problem and the question of forced expulsion. Morris devoted his second work to the state's first years after the War of Independence, when Israel struggled to stabilize the borders and extend its authority over vacated areas seized in the course of the 1948 fighting. This work, like his earlier one, contained a detailed and comprehensive description of the facts and their analysis that provides the reader with valuable insights. In his astute and precise manner, Morris presents a broad, in-depth survey of Arab infiltration into Israeli territory, the violent activity along the borders and in peripheral areas, and Israel's efforts to counter these incursions. At the same, time he furnishes the reader with important observations for understanding the dynamics of the continuous foundering of Israel's relations with her neighbors that eventually led to the Sinai Campaign in the autumn of 1956. However, in contrast to Israel's denial and silence over its role in creating the refugee problem, which were treated in his first study, most of the issues that Morris raises in his second book were publicly challenged at the time by policy-makers and became part of the contemporary political discourse.