My new essay on 1948, Benny Morris, and how the presents shapes our view of the past is up at The New York Review of Books:
In 1963 the young Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua published Facing the Forests, a novella destined to become a classic of Hebrew literature. It is a nightmarish story, the kind of dread-filled dream from which you awake shuddering, about a student who takes a job as a watchman in one of Israel’s newly planted forests. His task is to watch day and night for fire; his only company is an old Arab whose tongue was cut out in “the war”—meaning Israel’s war of independence in 1948—and the Arab’s young daughter. The forest, as the watchman learns, hides the ruins of an Arab village, the remains of an erased past: once other people lived here, members of a different nation. Their departure has to do with vague, unrecorded violence.
At the end, the mute Arab ignites the forest. The watchman-scholar does not participate in the arson, but welcomes the climax of fire and what it reveals: “And there, from within the smoke, from within the mist, the little village rises before him, reborn in its most basic outlines, as in an abstract painting, like every submerged past.” As a watchman, the Israeli has failed. Perhaps as a scholar he has succeeded: he has uncovered history, as if in a hidden archive.
A quarter of a century later Benny Morris published The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949. There was nothing dreamlike about Morris’s scholarship, though some of his precise descriptions of battles and expulsions could provoke nightmares. In a way, Morris was reenacting Yehoshua’s story—but with the brash Israeli historian himself burning away obfuscations and revealing the stark past. At the book’s beginning is a map of hundreds of Arab villages whose residents fled or were expelled in the course of what Palestinians call the Nakba, the Catastrophe. After that comes a map of Jewish settlements established after the war, completing the metamorphosis of the countryside. “In its most basic outlines,” a portion of the “submerged past” emerged from the smoke and fire of Morris’s account.
Just as the war and exodus transformed the landscape and Middle East politics, Morris’s book altered discussion of Israeli and Palestinian history. In Israel, it ignited a long-running debate. Shortly after the publication of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, Morris fed the fire with an essay in the American journal Tikkun, “The New Historiography,” published in 1988, in which he anointed himself and several other Israeli scholars as the New Historians. The Old Historians, he argued, felt compelled to offer a propagandistic, “consciously pro-Israel interpretation of the past” and were shackled by their own biographies, having lived through the war. The new generation was more impartial, he claimed. That programmatic essay is republished in Making Israel, a recent anthology edited by Morris that surveys the argument over writing the country’s past.
Since then, Morris has returned again and again to writing about 1948, as if he wakes up every morning anew in that year, inside the impossible trauma of Israel coming into existence as the Palestinians go into exile, rewriting it, dissatisfied, still seeking to get the story right…
Read the rest here, and come back to South Jerusalem to comment.
Wonderful piece, Gershom. You possess an enviable philosophic composure, a glaring deficiency in so many writers on Israel.
Doesn’t the rationale, described by Saeb Erekat recently on television, for Arafat’s rejection of the Clinton/Barak offer essentially validate Morris’s current contention that Islam was a motivating force in his decision? As Erekat tells it, ostensibly with a measure of pride, Arafat refused to accept the historic Jewish claim in Jerusalem, going so far as to deny its existence, a denial evidently reiterated by his successor, Abbas.
Did Arafat, whom I always assumed was shaped more by vague and voguish Marxist thought, assume the mantle of religion for greater political purposes? Maybe, but that is how he chose to clothe his response.
Secondly, the currency of the Hadith prophesying the very stones to speak out against Jews, really just seems to coincide with the return of Jews as an independent political presence in Israel, doesn’t it? It may not have had a central place in theology, but it was unhesitatingly invoked by Palestinian partisans as soon as it became clear that Jews were a force that demanded reckoning, and not merely a passive minority scattered throughout the Arab states.
And finally, don’t we owe those Jewish refugees from Arab states, exiled after 1948, some acknowledgment? Having some Egyptian-Jewish heritage, I think their history deserves more of an airing than it seems to receive.
You are a pleasure to read for the way you carefully make your way along the precipice of reason, placing each step upon a solid foundation before taking another above a foaming, burning sea of passions. Such writing is difficult to respond to with rage because it would defeat itself.
But humans are nothing if not passionate and who can step back from it when one’s house has been destroyed, a relative has been killed by a bomber or one feels the contempt of others?
Anguish and pain seem so personal but there is no pain that is so great it cannot be experienced by another to the same degree since we are all equally human.
I think only when those who have been hurt speak up against the continuation of hurt originating from their own side – casting aside concern for their own personal safety to speak with a voice legitimized by pain to oppose a future of pain to the other – might there be a change.
This shared anguish is, it appears to me, about the only thing that could be called a link between the two peoples.
I haven’t read Morris’ recent book but I have read his prior work and some of his recent polemics. I think your thoughtful analysis is right on target. Morris seems to be torn between sincere pursuit of a rigorous standard of historical truth and his commitment to a Jewish state.
I’m sure Morris doesn’t see a sincere pursuit of rigorous standards of historical truth as being incompatible with commitment to the Jewish State. Nor would any reasonable person.
I enjoyed reading this essay. It’s refreshing to read fair-minded, honest writing on this topic, even when I don’t always agree with all the conclusions. This essay was better than most I’ve read in the NYRB on this topic.
Speaking of NYRB articles: since I’m not familiar with Israeli historiography, New or otherwise, I just have a comment on your tangential remark that Malley and Agha’s analysis in the NYRB was more “nuanced” than Morris and Barak’s. Since your remark wasn’t supported, its only function seemed to be to irritate readers who see things differently. (In my view, Malley and Agha threw in lots of clutter to distract from the essential facts, and Morris and Barak in their rejoinder tried to restore a sense of proportion.) Your essay was interesting and fair-minded but I’m not sure it ‘s well served by that kind of casual shot against Morris.
Very powerful. The insights on how the present informs the view of the past, flips on its head the old adage that we must remember the past so we don’t repeat it. What does it mean to repeat the past when our view of the past is so often understood only through the lense of the present?
I have already sent this article onto a dozen friends and colleagues and expect to do more.
Lest there be any doubt: I believe that maintaining rigorous standards of historical truth is absolutely compatible with commitment to Israel. I also believe that a commitment to one’s country is compatible with a critical and complex view of its past.
As for the debate about Camp David, I explained why Malley and Agha’s version is preferable in this article.
Thanks for the link to your article on Camp David. I wasn’t aware of it. Just to clarify, I don’t accept Barak’s self-serving account, and I assume that Malley and Agha were right on many of their points. Their account may be more accurate overall, I don’t know. But Morris and Barak, in their rejoinder (I’m speaking from memory here) distinguished between the important and the secondary issues.
My comments on the review essay:
http://myrightword.blogspot.com/2009/05/on-forest-fires-and-writing-of-history.html
I had read the Malley and Agha article at the time it was published and it rang true and matched other accounts of the talks that I have read.
Thank you for the link to your article which I had not read.
It’s a full time job trying to straighten out the burgeoning and stubborn myths that contribute to this narrative that takes hold as history, that is so destructive, that takes the place of the more nuanced truth, that adds another roadblock to further peace efforts. ( “we offered them…. and they refused”).