ABSTRACT
The major contribution of the new historians lay in bringing the 1948 war historiography to its archival stage, which allowed them to deepen our understanding of the war in a way that had previously been impossible. The emergence of the New History signaled above all the entry of the historiography of the 1948 war into its archival phase. There is some irony in the statement that the missing dimension in the historiography of the 1948 war is precisely the study of its military history. At first sight the Israeli-Jordanian fighting seems to have been superfluous–not because of the collusion theory, according to which Jordan’s King Abdullah and the Zionist leaders conspired to divide Palestine among them, at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs, but because the two sides had nothing to fight about. The one point of friction was the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City, but even that could not be counted as a reason for fighting.
