Hello and welcome to Almanack. The Oxford Middle East podcast. My name is built its focus.
And today I'm joined by Obvious Slome. I love the British Academy, an emeritus professor of international relations at the University of Oxford.
He's one of Israel's new historians. And we'll discuss what that means and how Israel's history has influenced the country's contemporary politics.
I have no other way to proceed. She's stoy juncture.
If you miss that acclaimed tragedy for future generations was not very much room for.
Putting any of the ideas on hold. So conditions are bad and like I said, we don't want to be passive victims of this.
We want to challenge, to intervene, to intrude, to participate and to present our own narrative, to speak for ourselves.
What I would do as prime minister is to do anything responsible within the
rule of law to stop nullify the dangers that emanate from the wider society.
We are the key to peace, a peace process, Palestinians. And you must realise that your facts of life.
You are one of the so-called news stories. You're one of four new historians writing revisionist history.
So could you go into what revisionist history is in the Israeli context?
Let us start with the general context of what is revisionist history.
Before we turn to the Israeli context, revisionist history, as the name suggests,
is history, which challenges the received wisdom, the conventional wisdom on the subject.
All national movements have rewritten the history.
I think that of certain common characteristic to all nationalist versions of history.
They tend to be simplistic, selective and self-serving.
And I remind myself of these qualities as the three S's simplistic, selective and self-serving.
Oxford Jewish philosopher Isiah Berlin used to say that the Jews are like any other people, only more so.
And by the same token, Zionist history is like any other nationalist version of history.
Only more so. In short, revisionist history, in the case of Israel challenges the standard Zionist version of the origins,
the development and the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
And what were then the core difference of spee origins to hit nature and history?
The core difference between old history and new history is that old history reflected and echoed and reinforced the official version about the past.
It was uncritical of the official version. And more than that of old history tended to glorify Israel.
And it painted a picture of the past which in which Israel most portrayed as heroic, just holding the moral high ground.
Where is new history looks at the conflicting versions of the Arab-Israeli conflict and subjects
them to critical analysis in the light of the available evidence and then dismisses any notion,
however deeply cherished, which doesn't stand up to historical scrutiny.
And this brings me to the outer core, the second core difference between old history and new history,
and that is that when old history was written, the documents were not available.
The primary sources were not available. In addition, a lot of the old history was written by participants,
by Zionist activists who took part in the struggle for independence or their homes for sale to be able to
struggle in 1948 or whether they like the struggle of independence also from the beginning of the 20th century,
from the beginning of the 20th century.
The debate is about the whole of Israel's past, and the new historians had the benefit of access to primary sources.
So Israel has adopted and used to apply very liberally.
The British 30 rule,
which governs the review and declassification of official documents after 30 years from the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.
The Israeli state archives began to release the documents when my colleagues and I began our research in the early 1980s.
We had access to the official record, to the documents of the Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Farm Defence and of the IDF, the Israeli army.
And that's a critical difference. And one Israeli scholar.
You shop around. Distinguish not between old history and new history, but prehistory,
which was written without access to the documents and history which was written with access to documents.
And I have to say to Israel's credit.
That it used to open up its records to critical scrutiny and thereby made possible critical studies of Israel's past,
such as the ones that my colleagues and I have written.
The so-called phoney historian says yourself. Ilan Papay and two more whose name I have just now forgotten that what all of you wrote the book each
on challenging one of the truths or one of the accepted truths of the formation of the Israeli state.
So in nineteen eighty eight. The fortieth anniversary of the state of Israel.
Four new books were published. The first one was by seeing half lap time, and it was called The Birth of Israel Myth and Reality.
Flaperon was not an academic. He was not a professional historian.
He was the head of the Arab department of my palm.
The left wing party.
He had a political agenda, which he stated at the beginning, which is to undermine the structure of Israeli propaganda about the conflict.
And instead of having chapters, he had missed each chapter try to demolish one of the myths about the birth of Israel.
The second book was by Ilan Papay.
It was called Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1948 to nineteen fifty one.
This book was based on a deep field thesis that Ilan Papay had written that the Middle East centre at St Antony's College.
In nineteen eighty four, I was the external examiner for the physics.
I was a trading university at the time, and all the ideas of the new history are in that thesis.
And in that book in one form or another. So Ilan Papay was the real pioneer of far new history.
And although I'm older than him, he had a profound influence on my trajectory as a historian.
The third new historian was Benny Morris, whose book was called The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem.
1947 to nineteen forty nine.
This book was based on meticulous research in all the Israeli archives.
And it showed that Israel was largely responsible for creating the Palestinian refugee problem.
In other words, that the Palestinians in 1948 didn't just leave of their own accord or on orders from above from their leaders,
but that they were expelled because the old history before that argued that the Palestinians had left on their own accord, correct?
Yes. And that they they left on orders from the leaders in the expectation of a triumphal return.
And this was a very important claim because it had political consequences,
because if Israel was not responsible for making the Palestinian refugees three quarters of a million refugees,
then Israel was not responsible for resolving the problem.
The last year historian was I felt and I my book was called Collusion Across the Jordan King Abdullah,
the Zionist Movement and the Partition of Palestine.
In this book, I advance the thesis that by 1947,
a tacit agreement had been reached between King Abdullah of Jordan and the Zionist movement
to divide up mandatory Palestine between themselves at the expense of the Palestinians.
And this is what happened in the 48 in the 1948 war.
The losers were the Palestinians. More than half of the Palestinian population became refugees in the name Palestine was wiped off the map.
The winners were the state of Israel,
which extended its borders way beyond the borders suggested by the UN partition resolution and the other we with King Abdullah of Jordan,
who captured the West Bank and later annexed it to his kingdom.
So these are the four new historians. That also brings back to another question.
Another thing I wanted to raise,
because central to the founding myth of Israel is the fact that the Israelis fought off the United Arab armies in 1948 when they an unstated.
But as you say, there was already a deal between the Jordanians and the Zionists before that.
So both of these cannot be true. So would you go a bit more into the idea of the unity of the Arab armies and what Israel had to the Zionists,
rather, how to fight when they wanted to create take state?
Well, let me go back to your earlier question about was the debate about the whole of science history or only an hour, about 1948.
And my answer to that is that the debate between the Israeli stories revolved very much round the nineteen forty eight war.
And there were five bones of contention, five main bones of contention in this debate.
The first one was Britain's aims towards the end of the Palestine mandate.
The old historians say that Britain's aim at the end of the mandate were to prevent the birth of a Jewish state by
arming and inciting and encouraging Britain's Arab clients to invade Palestine and strangle the Jewish state at birth.
The new historians, particularly Ilan Pappe and I, argue that Britain was resigned to the emergence of a Jewish state,
but that it was opposed to the birth of a Palestinian state because in British eyes,
a Palestinian state was synonymous with a mufti state and the mufti was a renegade who had thrown his his lot in with Hitler.
So Britain's real policy was to encourage its client, King Abdullah,
to invade Palestine upon end of the mandate and to conquer the heartland of
Palestine and succeeded in avoiding appointing the birth of a Palestinian state.
The second issue I've already touched on, what was the cause of the Palestinian exodus in 1948?
Did they go? Or where? They pushed the all the soil, say the Palestinians just left.
It had nothing to do with Israel. The new historians say they were pushed.
And the real authority on this is Benny Morris. And his book treated this question as thoroughly and accurately as it's ever likely to be.
And the third bone of contention concerns the military balance in nineteen forty
eight and its crucial element of the collective Israeli memory about 1948,
that we were the few against the many.
That we were a tiny little community surrounded by a huge Arab force and that it was a battle between a Jewish David against an Arab Goliath.
But our empirical research has demonstrated that Israel always had.
The edge over the Arab and adversaries in the Palestine Theatre.
The fourth bone of contention. Is Arab War AIDS in 1948?
And this brings me to your question of what was the situation on the Arab side?
The conventional wisdom in Israel is that the seven Arab armies we invaded Palestine upon expiry of the mandate were united by two aims.
One was genocide. To throw the Jews into the sea.
And two was polities side. Political side is the destruction of a polity.
You will find this word in the dictionary,
but it's appropriate to the Israeli perception of our boys that their aim was to strangle the Jewish state at birth.
But our research has shown that the Arab coalition facing Israel in 1948 was one of the most disorganised,
bitterly divided and ramshackle coalitions in the history of warfare.
So although there was an Arab League, there was an Arab invasion plan.
Each of the invading armies served a national agenda or a dynastic agenda,
rather than operating within an overall plan of innovation and in particular the
dynastic rivalries between King Farouk of Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan.
And it was the inability of the Arabs to coordinate the diplomatic and military strategy, which was a very important factor in the Arab defeat.
My book fits very much into this issue in the debate because the conventional view of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the
first half of the 20th century is that there was Arabs and Palestinians on one side and the Jews on the other side.
Whereas what I have argued is that below the surface,
the real line up was Hashemite rulers of Jordan and Zionists on one side against Palestinian nationalists and Arabs on the other side.
That Abdullah is whole policy was based on the emergence of a Jewish state.
So he most certainly did not set out to destroy the new Israeli polity.
But on the contrary,
he came to a tacit and agreement agreement with with the Zionist leaders that they will keep out of each other's way as much as possible.
The fifth and final bone of contention is why did the conflict persist for decades after the guns fell silent?
The Zionist version can be summed up in two words Arab intransigence.
According to this view, the Zionist leaders strove for peace with the Arabs,
with all their heart and all their minds mind that there was no one to talk to on the Arab side.
Whereas I argue that Arab leaders were pragmatic.
And after the end of the war, King Abdullah went all out to reach a settlement.
And he didn't succeed. He was eventually assassinated by a Palestinian nationalist.
Horsely. Zain, the Syrian leader in 1949, after capturing power in a coup, offered Israel complete peace and normalisation.
The immediate exchange of farm ambassadors and the absorption of a quarter of a million Palestinian refugees in Syria.
But Israel did not take him up on his offer.
What's with Israel to give in return for that? Israel would have had to agree that the border between Israel and Syria would go
down the middle of the Jordan River and down the middle of the Sea of Galilee.
So Zain had his territorial demands and Israel was not prepared to meet them.
Abdullah had historic territorial demands as well from Israel.
He wanted a passage to the Gaza Strip into the Mediterranean Sea, which he didn't have because Jordan was landlocked.
So each Arab leader had his demands.
Ben-Gurion refused to meet these demands.
You can pass a judgement on whether it was a wise decision or not, wise decision by bank or you're not to make any territorial concessions for peace.
But what I think I have proved is that the Jewish Israeli claim that there was no one to talk to is false because the purpose of the old history,
as you as you've made clear, is to develop a kind of national history for for Israel based on certain myths and for seamer flop.
And there was a very clear political motivation behind writing this book about the myths of Israel's birth.
But for the three others of it was it was also a purpose.
Was it mostly driven by curiosity and a new access to the archives, which would be opened in the late 70s?
Suka flap on was a politician with a stated and explicit political agenda, an anti Zionist agenda?
Where is Ilan Papay, Benny Morris and myself?
Our Western educated scholars or all three of us use traditional Western methods of historical scholarship,
of relying very heavily on archival research.
The question of what are the intentions of each historian is much more difficult to answer.
And I can only speak for myself. I would say I did have an agenda in writing collusion across the Jordan, but it wasn't a political agenda.
My critics have not been able to produce any evidence of a political agenda.
I did have an agenda, which is that of a historian.
I wanted to write a good history book and I wanted to write about the Arab-Israeli conflict in that period in as much detail as possible,
as accurately as possible, and to make it as interesting as possible.
So I consciously set out to write not just for other scholars, but to try and to reach a broader public.
You mentioned that you faced some resistance from some courage and also subtitled.
But on the other hand, how were your books, the books, something you as certain as received them in Israel more broadly like?
Did it create new political openings for discussion or is the reaction very negative because it basically challenged the
very fundamental issues on which people had based much of their life and much of their relationship with the government.
How did people approach the idea or approach to new information which you and the three others had had published?
So all four books appeared in 1948, not nineteen ninety eight in the reaction in Israel was one of shock, horror and utter surprise.
Israelis were completely stunned by the state, richer by these revelations.
And it went completely against the collective memory of far Israelis.
So the initial reaction was one of surprise, and that was followed by a very negative reaction to the new history.
The first critique was shut-Eye to read the biography of Ben-Gurion, and he published four full pages,
full articles, one page each in Haaretz under the heading, the new historians.
And it was an attack, a direct attack on all of France.
And he had two main charges in his charges.
The two chargesheet against the new historians. The two main items.
One was that we had a political axe to grind and for work was suspect and tendentious and serve a political agenda,
a leftwing political agenda, an anti Israeli political agenda.
But he wasn't able to produce evidence for this. And his second charge was that our work was professionally flawed, that we distorted the evidence.
We misused evidence. We deliberately.
We're delivery daily,
pretty selective in picking out just bits out of the historical record that supported our arguments and went on to say that in any case,
one cannot trade with authority on the Arab-Israeli conflict because only Israel releases its records for inspection.
The Arab countries don't release the records and therefore there is in a symmetry in the sources that are available.
And my answer to that is indeed, there is a symmetry, but a historian can only write history on the basis of the sources that are available.
We can't write history on the basis of the sources that are not available.
So we have to make do with what was available.
And as I say to my doctoral students, when they reach a dark corner in their research and get demoralised,
I say to them, it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
Was the new history eventually also, for example, taught in schools, or has it has remained fairly fringe amongst them, Israel or Israeli historians?
History is not written in a vacuum. Historians are part of the society.
And. We were lucky in that we were doing our research in the aftermath of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
This was the first war in Israel's history which provoked political dissent even while the war was going on.
And it was a very controversial war, a war of deception,
which opened up a debate which opened up a space of looking critically back at Israel's history.
And we were the beneficiaries. We moved into this political space and put forward our findings.
The initial reaction was very, very hostile. But gradually, people began to engage with our findings.
And the fact that they engage with the new history is a sign of maturity of Israeli society that the Israelis were prepared.
Some Israelis were prepared to look at their history, warts and all, and not to cling to the heroic regime of Israel's history.
And then there was the Labour Party came back into power under its haack Rabin in 1992.
And in 1993, Israel signed the Oslo Peace Accord.
And the Oslo decade was very supportive of the new history.
And the education minister and Rabin ordered rewriting history textbooks for secondary schools.
And they incorporated some of the findings of the new history, particularly the findings of Benny Morris,
that Israel was in part responsible for the Palestinian refugee problem.
This I don't want to exaggerate. It's not that the old history was jettisoned in our version was used to replace it.
It just that there was more openness about the past.
And the new textbooks invited the Israeli school kids to think what would have been like for them to have been children during that war.
So it opened up the space for debate. The theme in.
Then the recruit came back to power. So that's another in 1996.
Oh, yeah. Because because I was there was something I wanted to raise as well,
because he said Israel had matured and I was wondering, do you still believe that is the case,
that, you know, Netanyahu has been in power for a very long time and has been in charge of a drift to the right politically in the country?
Is it still the case that then there is political acceptance for the new hestia?
Has. Has there been much more resistance from the top?
And related to that, as well as the fact that Netanyahu is the first Israeli prime minister?
If I recall correctly, who was born in Israel as a state?
And do you think that his political opponents might be informed by the fact that he grew up with this very nationalist history?
And do you think those two are related?
And do you also don't think that under his rule that the questions which are allowed to raise about Israeli nationalism,
they are not allowed to be raised anymore? Benjamin Netanyahu was the first Israeli prime minister to be born in Israel.
But more important than that, he grew up in the hardline revisionist Zionist home.
And his whole upbringing was very, very nationalistic, very dogmatic.
And he wrote a book about Israel's place in the world, a very long book.
It gives an undiluted, unreconstructed version of events.
And he there isn't a single ref positive reference to Arab history, Arab culture or Arab society.
So Netanyahu is an ultra nationalist.
An Arab hater. And he was elected first elected in nineteen ninety six after the murder of Itzhak Rabin by an Israeli fanatic.
And he spent his first term in office from 96 to 99 in a very successful attempt to freeze, to subvert and undermine the Oslo Accords.
And in 2000, the second intifada broke out.
And those that return to violence very depolarisation again between Israelis and Palestinians.
And in this new political context, the new history was dismissed.
It was no longer taken seriously. And it was no longer an influence on the educational system.
New record education ministers removed the more liberal textbooks and replaced them with old history.
So just as the political climate after the first Israeli invasion of Lebanon was conducive to the growth and success and influence of the new history.
So the second intifada worked to undermine the new history and to undermine the credibility or file the new historians.
And earlier on,
you also mentioned that Israel used the words he used to apply liberally the British rule on their archives and he used the term used to a few times.
It was that on purpose or was that just speaking? Is it the case now that there's less access to the Israeli archives?
Absolutely, because Netanyahu doesn't only have his version of history, which is a very nationalistic,
but he doesn't have an open mind and he wouldn't listen to any other points of view if he had just had a closed mind.
That wouldn't matter. What matters is that he's the prime minister and has been prime minister for the last more than a decade.
The state archive falls under the prime minister's office.
So the state archivist is accountable. Reports to him in Israel under Labour.
Israel had a Liberal policy on information. The 30 year old used to be applied very liberally.
But it seems to be under Netanyahu. Netanyahu actually closed the reading room in the state archives.
So whereas my colleagues and I used to go to the reading room in the state archives,
read the catalogues and all the files that used to be brought to us physically.
And we would read the files. Now, Netanyahu gave the order to close the reading room in the state archives.
Now there are no longer catalogues.
So you don't know where to look for things that you can order place orders on the Internet by email for certain files.
So you have to know the catalogue numbers for the funnel.
And then you may or may not get them. But this is not the same as free access, but it's even worse than that.
It's not just the access to the archives has been drastically reduced.
An official from the defence ministry goes round all the archives and tries to locate documents that are not to Israel's liking,
not to the government's liking,
to take them out altogether so as to permanently destroy the mines or to hide a minute you a deeper cellar that I don't know,
but to actually remove them from the files.
So the Benny Morris, you couldn't argue with him because he would quote a specific document.
Now, if the document isn't there physically, then you can't really rely on it.
So Netanyahu isn't just a nationalist, but he's a.
Scholarship anti liberal historians.
The notion of new history as a group no longer exists in Israel.
No one talks about the new historians or about new history.
But others still sort of descendants of that train of thought are still people who don't necessarily have an antigovernment perspective on history,
but rather like government critical perspective on history. Is that still possible to do the research in this context as it completely?
Has it become impossible? It is possible to do research and a lot of young Israeli stories, very, very good.
Israeli historians and many of them now are Backwell as well.
They are doing a great deal of original research on the history of the British mandate and on the history of the state of Israel.
That brings me to another question which I had, which you alluded to earlier, because we had the Oslo peace sorry, the Oslo Accords in 1993.
But then when Netanyahu camp's apparent 1996, he did his best to undermine them as much as he could.
But in 1994, Yasser Arafat's Yitzhak Rabin. And one more again, whose name I have forgotten they research.
Yes, they they received the Nobel Peace prise. Do you think it was justified for them to receive the Nobel Peace prise?
Because I think, you know, looking at it in a very teleological way now, the Oslo Accords have failed.
Considering the current situation in Palestine. But at the time, was it a significant enough breakthrough which then was undermined?
I believe that the granting the Nobel Peace prise to Rabin,
Paris and Arafat on the strength of the Oslo Peace Accords was justified at the time because for all its shortcomings,
the Oslo Accord was a historic breakthrough in the history of the conflict because
it was the first agreement ever between the two principal parties to the conflict.
Israel and the Palestinians, the deep flaws in Oslo laws, the accord, was that it put to one side all the most fundamental issues in this conflict.
It put them to one side the status of Jerusalem, the right of return of the 1948 Palestinian refugees,
the status of the Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land and the borders of the future Palestinian entity.
All these issues were not addressed. They were left for negotiation towards the end of the five year transition period.
But before the end of the transition period, the whole of the Oslo peace process collapsed.
And in the end, Israel did not use the Oslo Accord in order to end the occupation,
but to repackage the occupation and the Israeli version of why the Oslo peace process collapsed.
Is that it was the Palestinian return to violence.
My. And Ilan Puppis view is that Israel was responsible for the collapse of the Oslo peace process because under the Rickwood and under Netanyahu,
Israel reneged on its part of the bargain.
And if you press me to explain the reason for the breakdown of the Oslo peace process, in one word, I can do it.
And the word is settlements. Israeli settlements on the West Bank because Israeli settlements on the West Bank,
which keep expanding even as we speak, are not about making peace with the Palestinians.
It's about stealing more and more land from the Palestinians.
Land grabbing and peace making. Don't go together.
It's one, either one or the other. And by its behaviour under the Likud, under the Israeli right,
Israel has shown very clearly that it is more interested in land grabbing than it is in making peace with the Palestinians.
Then I have one final question, which will premise bring us back to where we began, because I know you have to leave soon.
Do you think that the nationalist history which Israel has created for itself played a role in the ending of the peace accords
because they had created a history of themselves being fair actors and Arabs and the Palestinians being intransigent actors,
did that then allow them to act in, you know, what's outside?
It seems like a very unjustifiable and very in a way which seemed to break the promises,
but they could justify to themselves because of the discourse they had created of their relationship between themselves and the Palestinians.
To understand the question. Yes, I think I do.
And I think that you have a point that official history is not the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
It's politically motivated. Again, as I said at the beginning, Israel is not unique in this respect.
All states be build a mythology around them, all states.
I have a version of the past which is self-serving and usually sanctimonious as well.
Indeed, nationalist versions of history have two distinct political objectives.
One objective is to unite the whole of society behind the regime,
behind the government, by projecting a notion of them and asked that they threaten us.
They are the enemy. And the other purpose of nationalist versions of history, and particularly Zionist history,
is to project a positive image of the country to the outside world.
And so Zionist official history. Has had this polarising effect in the Middle East of dividing the region into them and arms,
the Rabin years were just the exception rather than the rule.
It was the only period Rabin was the only prime minister in Israel's history, went forward towards the Palestinians on the political front.
But he didn't go very far and he didn't achieve enough.
And we don't know what would have happened if Rabin had not been assassinated.
But it was the only period in Israel's history which was an attempt to get away from the burden of history,
not to continue to be in thrall to the past, but to try something new.
An experiment in Peller Justinian self-government leading to reconciliation after the assassination of Rabin.
There was a return to fundamentalist Israeli positions of us.
And then we are in the right there in the wrong. And the only end.
There is no Palestinian partner for peace,
and the only way forward is for Israel to acquire more and more military power and to oppress the Palestinians.
So my conclusion is that Israel, under the present leadership, nationalist leadership, is going nowhere.
Thank you. Listening to this episode of yours.
Join us for the next episode where we will discuss the history, the culture of sexual questions raised by vegetables, dancing stuff.
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