Making Israel »

Benny Morris is the founding father of the New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars who have challenged long-established perceptions about the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Their research rigorously documented crimes and atrocities committed by the Israeli armed forces, including rape, torture, and ethnic cleansing. With Making Israel, Morris brings together the first collection of translated articles on the New History by leading Zionist and revisionist Israeli historians, providing Americans with a firsthand view of this important debate and enabling a better understanding of how the New Historians have influenced Israelis' awareness of their own past.

 

"The study of Israeli history, society, politics, and economics over the past two decades has been marked by a fierce and sometimes highly personal debate between 'traditionalists'---scholars who generally interpreted Israeli history and society within the Zionist ethos---and 'revisionists'---scholars who challenged conventional Zionist narratives of Israeli history and society. Making Israel brings together traditionalists and revisionists who openly and directly lay out their key insights about Israel's origins. It also introduces multidisciplinary perspectives on Israel by historians and sociologists, each bringing into the debate its own jargon, its own epistemology and methodology, and its own array of substantive issues. This is essential reading for anybody who wants to understand the different interpretations of Israeli society and perhaps the central debate among students of modern Israel."
---Zeev Maoz, Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis, and Distinguished Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya

 

"Israel's 'new historians' have done a great service to their country, and to all who care about the Arab-Israeli conflict. By challenging myths, reexamining evidence, and asking truly important questions about the past they help to confront the present with honesty and realism. This book provides a sampling of the best of what these courageous voices have to offer."
---William B. Quandt, University of Virginia

 

Benny Morris is Professor of Middle East history at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel, and is the author of Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999.

Abbreviations     vii
Hebrew Journal Titles Translated     ix
Introduction     1
The New Historiography: Israel Confronts Its Past     11
Remembering 1948: Personal Recollections, Collective Memory, and the Search for "What Really Happened"     29
The History of Zionist Historiography: From Apologetics to Denial     47
Hirbet Hizah: Between Remembering and Forgetting     81
The Debate about 1948     124
The Contribution of Historical Geography to the Historiography of the Establishment of Israel     147
"Critical" and "Establishment" Sociology in Israel's Academic Community: Ideological Clashes or Academic Discourse?     178
The Future of the Past in Israel: A Sociology of Knowledge Approach     202
Israeli Historiography and the Ethnic Problem     231
Dialectical versus Unequivocal: Israeli Historiography's Treatment of the Yishuv and Zionist Movement Attitudes toward the Holocaust     278
A Palestinian Look at the New Historians and Post-Zionism in Israel     299
Bibliography     319
Contributors     355
Index     357