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What Really Happened Fifty Years Ago?
Since the 1980s, Israel’s academia has been engaged in and torn by a debate on Zionist history in general and on the chronicles of the 1948 war in particular. Recently these issues have reached a wider public through mainstream newspapers, television and radio.
The debate is generated by Israeli scholars who challenge the official Israeli historical version of Zionism’s origins and the birth of Israel. Theirs is a non-Zionist narrative of history and this is its main importance.
It is not that alternatives to the Zionist history are new. Ever since the state of Israel was created the official Zionist account of events has been challenged by competing historical narratives. First and foremost, there is the Palestinian version—a version manifested in scholarly works, novels and poetry and expressed through the years in various political declarations and resolutions by the Palestine Liberation Organization. But there also were challenges from the Jewish community in Palestine and later from within Israeli society. The challengers within Israel itself were mainly supporters of the Israeli Communist Party or of small radical and leftist anti-Zionist political groups. In these political circles, history was taught very differently from the official version learned by most Israelis. The historical version of the non- and anti-Zionist left is closer to the Palestinian version than the official Zionist narrative. The official and mainstream Zionist version of events concerning the birth of Israel was also challenged by right-wingers in Israel who attributed the 1948 Jewish success solely to the Stern Gang and other Jewish terrorist organizations that fought against the British and clashed with Palestinians throughout the 1940s. Not only was the 1948 story challenged. The prevailing myths about the treatment of minority groups in Israel received new scrutiny. After the 1967 war, Israel’s Black Panther movement questioned the conduct of the young state towards the Jewish immigrants it brought from the Arab countries. Similarly, the Palestinian community in Israel, the Israeli Arabs as they are known today, began to demand a re-reading of one of the ugliest chapters in the state’s history. In the wake of the 1948 war, the Palestinian population that remained under Israeli rule was placed under a severe and brutal military regime for nearly two decades (1948-1966). This minority was robbed of every human and civil right and maltreated by local military governors. Awareness of this has cast a shadow over the collective memory of the Israeli left, which was accustomed to reminiscing about the little and beautiful state of pre-1967 Israel. Israelis who challenged the official version of Israel’s birth and its early years as a young state shared a common experience—their accounts were excluded from the historical Zionist narrative or distorted in the way Israeli history was taught in high schools and universities. They maintain that their history has been at best obfuscated or at worst totally erased from the Israeli national ethos, an ethos reflected in official state ceremonies, canonical literature, poetry and the media. Until the 1970s, their cries of exclusion surfaced only in local novels and poetry or within political grassroots movements representing their particular interests. Their historical accounts were not presented as “facts” or as part of a scholarly attempt to reconstruct the past. And here lies the novelty of the phenomenon that emerged in the early 1980s. These challenges began to be heard not only by Palestinians and in parochial political and social movements, but were addressed within the Israeli academic community as well. The research of young Israeli scholars provided legitimization and validation to the challenging social and political voices crying out against the misconduct and evils inflicted first by the Zionist movement and later by the state of Israel. In other words, from the very heart of the Israeli intellectual elite came a position adopting many of the political and ideological claims made by movements that represented the victims of official Zionism. One result of this academic inquiry into the past was the emergence of an historiographical picture that undermined some of the principal myths surrounding the creation of the Jewish state and the origins of the Zionist movement. In a country where the government frequently calls upon history to justify actions of the present day, this challenge can have far-reaching effects. I cannot overemphasize the fact that it is professional Israeli historians, recognized as such in their own society, who are offering an alternative way of looking at the history of Israel and Zionism. They are accepted as qualified to judge what is true and what is false in order to provide an accurate and reliable picture of the past. The new historians have concentrated their scholarly scrutiny on three issues. The first is the origins of Zionist ideology and practice in the late 19th century; the second is an attempt to write the history of the 1948 war using newly available archival documentation; and the third is an analysis of the state’s attitude towards the Palestinian minority and Jewish immigrants from Arab countries. Other issues are beginning to attract the attention of the more radical scholars in Israel. These include Zionism and the Holocaust, militarism in Israeli society, and analyzing Zionism from a feminist perspective to evaluate its effects on women. These issues, however, have not yet formed a substantial body of research.
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