Fabricating Israeli History: The `New Historians (Cass Series--Israeli History, Politics, and Society)

Rating:
Summary: A very revealing book
Review: This is a classic book. I read it when it first came out. It had a big effect on me. It may have changed me as a person more than any other book I have ever read.

When I read it, I was a little surprised by the fact that Benny Morris had made an error that wound up with him saying that in 1938, David Ben-Gurion had said "We must expel Arabs and take their places." In fact, as Karsh pointed out, using the actual source would have confirmed a typo here: Ben-Gurion actually wrote, "We do not wish and do not need to expel Arabs and take their places."

Yes, that was a big mistake on Morris' part, not checking the original source. And it was a big mistake to get something like this wrong. But I still pondered about how Morris could write something so unusual without checking it. After all, wasn't he aware of Ben-Gurion's other statements in the previous and following years? Wasn't he aware of how far this would have been from the statements of most of Ben-Gurion's political allies and supporters? Wasn't Morris aware of how insane it would have seemed to most Jews to prescribe a policy of war towards the much more numerous Arabs?

What Karsh appeared to be telling me was that some extremely unlikely speculations had been presented as history. It would be as if some historian quoted John Kennedy as President claiming that the Earth was flat in an important speech, after proposing that we send a person to the Moon.

Karsh did a careful job of coming up with the actual history here. And he then demolished Avi Shlaim's claim of "collusion across the Jordan." Here again, Karsh showed a situation in which a supposedly serious historian made a highly dubious claim and supported it with a single piece of highly disputable evidence. And the story continues in the next chapter when we see Shlaim and Ilan Pappe's claims about Britain going along with this non-existent collusion, and saying that Bevin warned the Jordanians not to invade territory belonging to the Jews. Here was another surprise: I had read Glubb's original claim that Bevin had said not to invade those areas. Glubb said that Bevin said it twice! And it seemed possible to me that Bevin could have said such a thing. But was Glubb telling the truth? Karsh, after carefully examining several records of what happened at that meeting, shows that Glubb was basically not telling the truth here.

Another good job of investigation!

But the biggest shock was saved for last. I had not realized that Shlaim had said "Far from being 'the great ogre who unleashed Arab armies to strangle the Jewish state at birth,' Bevin 'emerges from the documents as the guardianangel of the infant state.'"

I had read quite a bit about Bevin, and I immediately recognized Shlaim's claim as completely and transparently false. It was like saying that the United States had fought in World War 2, but not telling the truth about which side we fought on: Germany's or the Soviet Union's.

Had Shlaim really said something this bizarre? He had. And that was a huge revelation for me. That we were not talking about a few mistakes by some "new historians." Nor even some very biased reading of a few documents to support some dubious ideas.

As Karsh had said in his title, this was indeed "fabricating Israeli history." We were discussing outright violations of acceptable academic behavior.

This book made me realize just how much some academics have opposed (not just abandoned) truth. And I think this issue is far bigger than just the Arab-Israeli conflict. At some point, for human society to function, there must be some respect for truth by our educational institutions. In my opinion, that is what this book is all about.

After reading this book, I no longer assumed that academic people would necessarily strive for truth. And recently, I have read and reviewed quite a few books about the Arab-Israeli conflict. I have given positive reviews to most of those which made serious attempts to tell the truth. And I've given negative ones to books which simply attempted to mislead their readers. I hope that in so doing, I am contributing, in my own small way, to improving human society.