There’s a phrase that appears constantly…CONSTANTLY in arguments about Israel, especially in the comment sections: “Even Israeli historians admit…” Then comes the name. Benny Morris. Avi Shlaim. Ilan Pappé. All the etceteras. The nationality is part of the argument. An Israeli historian saying something damning about Israel carries more weight than an outside critic saying exactly the same thing. It sounds less like criticism and more like a confession.
( Read the following in your best sniveling voice) Even Israeli historians admit Palestinians were expelled. Even Israeli historians say Zionism was colonialism. Israel’s own historians proved the Nakba was planned. These claims are repeated so often that they have almost become hater anthems. Morris said it. Pappé proved it. Shlaim admitted it. But the people grouped together as Israel’s “New Historians” didn’t produce one agreed history of 1948, and they certainly didn’t arrive at one political conclusion about Zionism.
Their story begins with something that is usually missing when their work is quoted today. The New Historians could only do what they did because Israel opened enormous portions of the files surrounding its founding while most corresponding Arab state archives remained closed or far less accessible. That shaped what historians could see, what they could write, and, eventually, what could be drawn from their work and used against Israel.
Benny Morris coined the term “New Historians” in 1988 to describe a loose group of scholars challenging aspects of Israel’s traditional history of 1948. Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé and Simha Flapan became the names most closely associated with it, although they were never a unified school and eventually disagreed sharply over both history and politics.
Their work appeared as archival material surrounding Israel’s founding became available to researchers. Israel had adopted declassification rules influenced by the British system, opening large quantities of government material after several decades. Israeli state, Zionist, military and political archives gave researchers access to cabinet discussions, military reports, diplomatic correspondence, intelligence assessments, diaries and internal arguments that earlier historians hadn’t been able to examine.
Avi Shlaim later wrote that the surge of new histories couldn’t have happened without the declassification of official Israeli documents. Benny Morris likewise identified access to archival evidence as central to the revision of 1948. These historians weren’t simply rereading books written by their predecessors. They were opening files those historians hadn’t seen.
The documents changed parts of the story. Historians documented expulsions, atrocities, discussions of population transfer, conflicting military decisions and disagreements among Zionist leaders. Morris’s research challenged the blanket explanation that the Palestinian refugee problem resulted from Arab leaders ordering Palestinians to leave. Palestinians left under different circumstances in different places. Some fled combat and fear, some communities emptied as the war moved through them, and some Palestinians were expelled by Israeli forces.
Those findings tell us more about what happened during the war. They don’t tell us that Israel never had a right to exist.
An Israeli unit committing an atrocity doesn’t make Jewish sovereignty illegitimate. An expulsion doesn’t erase Jewish self-determination. A terrible decision made by a leader during a war doesn’t retroactively invalidate the national movement that leader belonged to. Yet that leap has become routine in the way this history is used politically.
I’m American. I don’t need a sanitized version of American history to love my country. The United States has slavery, the dispossession and killing of Native Americans, broken treaties, segregation and plenty more written into its history. I can know all of that and still believe in America. Learning what Americans did doesn’t lead me to conclude that the United States should cease to exist or that Americans today are illegitimate inhabitants of their country.
Israel isn’t given the same grace. Evidence of wrongdoing by Israelis in 1948 gets turned into an argument against Israel’s existence. An expulsion becomes evidence against Zionism. A discussion of population transfer becomes proof that the Jewish national movement was always a project of removal. An atrocity committed during a war becomes evidence that Jewish sovereignty was illegitimate from the beginning.
There are two separate questions here: What happened during Israel’s founding, and did Israel have a right to be founded? The New Historians uncovered evidence that changed parts of our understanding of the first. The archives didn’t somehow answer the second. Jews didn’t lose their right to self-determination because their war for independence contained violence, failures, wrongdoing and decisions historians would spend decades arguing about. No other country’s legitimacy is measured by requiring its founding generation to have behaved perfectly. Israel shouldn’t have to pass that test either.
