The Arab Israeli conflict: The new wave of historians
In the words of James Joyce, “History is a nightmare from which I am constantly trying to awaken”. I place this quote alongside another, attributed to Churchill: “History is told by the victors”. Both allude to the power of emotion and subjectivity attaching to any effort at recording historical events. The irreconcilable narratives of the conflict which has been raging between Jews and Arabs around the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 illustrate this perfectly.
Recently, a group of academics, collectively known as the ‘New Historians’, have drawn a line beneath what the see as the biased accounts of ‘traditional’ historians and their own more recent understanding of the conflict based on research into evidence which has so far been ignored. However, these writers, positioning themselves in an anti-Zionist stance, come across more as polemicists than historians. If anything, they seem more liable to distortion than their predecessors, whom they have consigned to the dustbin of history.
Politically, the New Historians are far from dispassionate in their analysis. They have set themselves firmly against what they refer to as the Zionist narrative, a story told by pioneers of the Zionist movement such as Chaim Weizmann, Ben Gurion, Golda Meir and Shmaryahu Levin. In effect they argue the case for a Palestinian claim to have been driven from a land which is rightfully theirs and suffered untold injustice in the process. Zionists emerge from this interpretation as an alien, expansionist, colonialist entity, out to displace and subjugate the indigenous Arab people.
Evidence can readily be adduced to support either side in this bipolar conflict, whether dressed in academic garb or arising from the streets. The one-sided picture of the New Historians, which they present with the fervor of a prosecuting counsel in a court of law, takes us no further forward. If anything, by denying the importance of the Zionist mission, it brings the whole peace process to a jarring standstill.
By aligning themselves fairly and squarely with the Palestinian cause, the New Historians have set about trying to prise Zionism away from its Jewish roots. They represent Zionism as an aggressively nationalistic ideology, tendentiously contrasting it with Judaism, which they see as a spiritual force transcending national boundaries.
Ironically, some of these historians lay claim to a Jewish identity while failing to see that their high-minded stance plays into the hands of those who are implacably and murderously hostile towards the Jewish people.
The main problem, largely ignored by the New Historians, is the need to curb the cycle of violence now raging out of control like a forest fire. We are witnessing a spectrum of violence encompassing hate speech, criminal acts and warfare but it is important to differentiate between these and not assume a spurious equivalence between one side and the other. There is an abysmal failure to distinguish between Israel’s existential war of survival and the calculated, murderous hatred of the country’s intransigent enemies.
Islamist terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah have made no secret of their intention to murder Jews wherever they encounter them and they have no compunction about sacrificing their own people in the process, while in the wider arena, leaders of Islamic states watch and wait for their moment to play their part in the extinction of the Jewish state, believing that time and demography are on their side.
The New Historians would do well to revisit the writings of the ‘old’ Zionists. There they would read of the Jewish determination to survive as a people, of the modest Jewish aspirations to nationhood, of unceasing acts of violence being perpetrated against them and their peace overtures to the Arabs ritualistically being spurned.
Whatever their failings, the early Zionists were essentially motivated by humane considerations. Their one desire was to build a national home for the Jewish people in which they could live peacefully alongside their Arab neighbors. The Palestinian case has enough advocates in Islam and the rest of the non-Jewish world. The Jewish case, however, is being hampered by historians who proclaim their Jewishness yet dissociate themselves from Zionism.
The story is destined to run on interminably, like the lawsuit of Jarndyce versus Jarndyce in Dickens’s ‘Bleak House’, a case which wore out out the litigants on both sides of the dispute. The cycle of violence will continue unabated unless a way can be found to reconcile Islam to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. Vilifying Zionism is not the answer.
