ABSTRACT
Some twenty years ago, the Israeli academic establishment was shaken by
the publications of a small group of historians who claimed to shatter
conventional Zionist myths regarding the birth of the Israeli state, the
Palestinian refugee problem, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.1 This body of
scholarship, interchangeably called ‘‘new’’ or ‘‘Revisionist’’ Israeli historio-
graphy, was, by and large, critical of Israeli policy, seeing Israel as militarily
aggressive and in good measure responsible for its conflict with its Arab
neighbors. For over a decade, furious debates between practitioners of the ‘‘new history’’ and defenders of traditional historical views filled the halls of
Israeli universities and the columns of the Israeli press.2 The Revisionists
claimed to be objective scholars, their vision unclouded by Zionist ideology
and the resulting impulse to apologize for Israel’s actions and exculpate its
leaders. Benny Morris, the most prominent of the Revisionists, went so far
as to argue, in a manifesto of 1988, that the new history was, in fact, Israel’s
first serious professional historiography. The literature produced to date, he
claimed, had been official history, produced by governmental or quasigovernmental bodies, or the representation of private memory presented in
memoirs. In both cases previous historiography had been produced without
access to Israeli archives, which normally grant access to documents only
after the passage of thirty years.3
