124
Avi Shlaim
The Debate about 1948
“Conquerors, my son, consider as true history only what they themselves
have fabricated.”1 Thus remarked the old Arab headmaster to
young Saeed on his return to Haifa in the summer of 1948 in Emile
Habiby’s tragicomic novel The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist.
The headmaster spoke about the Israelis more in sorrow than in
anger:“It is true they did demolish those villages . . . and did evict their
inhabitants. But, my son, they are far more merciful than the conquerors
our forefathers had years before.”2
Most Israelis would be outraged by the suggestion that they are
conquerors,yet this is how they are perceived by the Palestinians.But the
point of the quote is that there can be no agreement on what actually
happened in 1948; each side subscribes to a different version of events.
The Palestinians regard Israelis as the conquerors and themselves as the
true victims of the ﬁrst Arab Israeli War, which they call al-Nakba, (The
Disaster). Palestinian historiography reﬂects these perceptions. The Israelis,
on the other hand, whether conquerors or not, were the indisputable
victors in the 1948 war, which they call the War of Independence.
Because they were the victors, among other reasons, they were
able to propagate more effectively than their opponents their version of
this fateful war. History, in a sense, is the propaganda of the victors.
The conventional Zionist account of the 1948 war goes roughly as
follows.The conﬂict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine came to a head
following the passage,on 29 November 1947,of the United Nations partition
resolution, which called for the establishment of two states, one
Jewish and one Arab.The Jews accepted the UN plan despite the painful
sacriﬁces it entailed,but the Palestinians,the neighboring Arab states,and
the Arab League rejected it.Great Britain did everything in its power toward
the end of the Palestine Mandate to frustrate the establishment of
the Jewish state envisaged in the UN plan.With the expiry of the Mandate
and the proclamation of the State of Israel, ﬁve Arab states sent their
The Debate about 1948 125
armies into Palestine with the ﬁrm intention of strangling the Jewish
state at birth. The subsequent struggle was an unequal one between a
Jewish David and an Arab Goliath.The infant Jewish state fought a desperate,
heroic, and ultimately successful battle for survival against overwhelming
odds. During the war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians
ﬂed to the neighboring Arab states, mainly in response to orders from
their leaders and despite Jewish pleas to stay and demonstrate that peaceful
coexistence was possible. After the war, the story continues, Israeli
leaders sought peace with all their heart and all their might, but there
was no one to talk to on the other side.Arab intransigence was alone responsible
for the political deadlock, which was not broken until President
Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem thirty years later.
This conventional Zionist account or Old History of the 1948 war
displays a number of features. In the ﬁrst place, it is not history in the
proper sense of the word. Most of the voluminous literature on the war
was written not by professional historians but by participants, by politicians,
soldiers, ofﬁcial historians, and a large host of sympathetic chroniclers,
journalists, biographers, and hagiographers. Second, this literature
is very short on political analysis of the war and long on chronicles of
the military operations, especially the heroic feats of the Israeli ﬁghters.
Third, this literature maintains that Israel’s conduct during the war was
governed by higher moral standards than those of its enemies. Of particular
relevance here is the precept of tohar haneshek, or the “purity of
arms,” which posits that weapons remain pure as long as they are used
only for defensive purposes. This popular-heroic-moralistic version of
the 1948 war is the one that is taught in Israeli schools and used extensively
in the quest for legitimacy abroad. It is a prime example of the use
of a nationalist version of history in the process of nation building.
Until recently, this standard Zionist version of the events surrounding
the birth of the State of Israel remained largely unchallenged outside
the Arab world.The fortieth anniversary of the birth of the state, however,
witnessed the publication of a number of books that challenged
various aspects of the standard Zionist version. First in the ﬁeld, most
polemical in its tone, and most comprehensive in its scope was Simha
Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. A former director of the
Arab Affairs Department of the left-wing Mapam Party and editor of the
Middle East monthly New Outlook, Flapan wrote his book with an explicit
political rather than academic aim in mind: to expose the myths
that he claimed served as the basis of Israeli propaganda and policy.“The
myths that Israel forged during the formation of the state,”writes Flapan,
126 Making Israel
“have hardened into this impenetrable and dangerous ideological
shield.”3 After listing seven myths, to each of which a chapter in the
book is devoted, Flapan frankly admits the political purpose of the
whole exercise: “It is the purpose of this book to debunk these myths,
not as an academic exercise but as a contribution to a better understanding
of the Palestinian problem and to a more constructive approach to
its solution.”4
Other books that were critical in their treatment of the Zionist rendition
of events, though without an explicit political agenda, included
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949;5
Ilan Pappé,Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conﬂict,1948–51;6 and my own Collusion
across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition
of Palestine.7 Collectively we came to be called the Israeli revisionists
or the New Historians. Neither term is entirely satisfactory.The term revisionists
in the Zionist lexicon refers to the right-wing followers of Ze’ev
Jabotinsky, who broke away from mainstream Zionism in 1925, whereas
the New Historians are located on the political map somewhere to the
left of the mainstream. On the other hand the term New Historians is
rather self-congratulatory and dismissive, by implication, of everything
written before they appeared on the scene as old and worthless. Professor
Yehoshua Porath of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has suggested
as alternative terms prehistory and history. But this is only slightly
less offensive toward the ﬁrst category of historians. So, for lack of a better
word, I shall use the label Old to refer to the proponents of the standard
Zionist version on the 1948 war and the label New to the recent
left-wing critics of this version, including myself.
The ﬁrst thing to note about the New Historiography is that much
of it is not new. Many of the arguments that are central to the New Historiography
were advanced long ago by Israeli writers, not to mention
Palestinian, Arab, and Western writers. To list all these Israeli writers is
beyond the scope of this essay, but a few examples might sufﬁce. One
common thread that runs through the New Historiography is a critical
stance toward David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the State of Israel and
its ﬁrst prime minister. Many of the recent criticisms of Ben-Gurion are
foreshadowed in a book written by a former Israeli Defense Forces
(IDF) ofﬁcial historian, Lt. Col. Israel Baer, in prison after he was convicted
of spying for the Soviet Union.8
A signiﬁcant start in revising the conventional Zionist view of
British policy toward the end of the Palestine Mandate was made by
Gabriel Cohen in a volume with a characteristically old-fashioned title:
The Debate about 1948 127
Hayinu Ke-Holmim [We Were as Dreamers].9 Ya‘acov Shim‘oni, deputy
director of the Middle East Department of the Foreign Ministry in 1948,
published a highly perceptive article on the hesitations, doubts, reservations,
and differences of opinion that attended the Arab decision to intervene
in Palestine in May 1948.10 This article,which is at odds with the
dominant Zionist narrative, is all the more noteworthy for having been
written by an insider. Col. Meir Pa‘il wrote another corrective to the
notion of a monolithic Arab world, focusing in particular on the conﬂict
between King Abdullah of Jordan and the Palestinians.11 The Zionist
version of the causes of the Palestinian refugee problem was called into
question by a number of Israeli writers and most convincingly by Rony
Gabbay.12 Finally, the argument that Israel’s commitment to peace with
the Arabs did not match the ofﬁcial rhetoric can be traced to a book
published under a pseudonym by two members of the Israeli Communist
Party.13
Although many of the arguments of the New Historiography are
not new, there is a qualitative difference between this historiography and
the bulk of the earlier studies,whether they accepted or contradicted the
ofﬁcial Zionist line.The difference, in a nutshell, is that the New Historiography
is written with access to the ofﬁcial Israeli and Western documents
whereas the earlier writers had no access, or only partial access,
to the ofﬁcial documents.This is not a hard and fast rule; there are many
exceptions, and there are also degrees of access. Nevertheless, it is generally
true to say that the new historians, with the exception of the late
Simha Flapan, have carried out extensive archival research in Israel,
Britain, and America and that their arguments are backed by hard documentary
evidence and a Western-style scholarly apparatus.
Indeed, the upsurge of new histories would not have been possible
without the declassiﬁcation of the ofﬁcial government documents. Israel
adopted the British thirty-year rule for the review and declassiﬁcation of
foreign policy documents. If this rule is not applied by Israel as systematically
as it is in Britain, it is applied rather more liberally. Both Britain
and Israel have also started to follow the American example of publishing
volumes of documents, which are professionally selected and edited.
The ﬁrst four volumes in the series Documents on the Foreign Policy
of Israel are an invaluable and indispensable aid to research on the 1948
war and the armistice negotiations that ended it.14
On the Arab side, no government allows open access to its documents,
and this restriction does pose a serious problem to the researcher.
It is sometimes argued that no deﬁnitive account of the 1948 war, least
128 Making Israel
of all an account of what happened behind the scenes on the Arab side,
is possible without access to the Arab state archives. But difﬁculty should
not be construed as impossibility. In the ﬁrst place, some ofﬁcial Arab
documents are available.A prime example is the report of the Iraqi parliamentary
committee of inquiry into the Palestine question, which is
packed with high-level documents.15 Another example is the collection
of ofﬁcial, semiofﬁcial, and private papers gathered by the Institute for
Palestine Studies.16 In addition, there is a far from negligible literature in
Arabic that consists of ﬁrsthand accounts of the disaster, including the
diaries and memoirs of prominent politicians and soldiers.17 But even if
none of these Arabic sources existed the other available sources would
provide a basis for an informed analysis of the 1948 war.A military historian
of the Middle Ages would be green with envy at the sight of the
sources available to his contemporary Middle Eastern counterpart. Historians
of the 1948 war would do much better to explore in depth the
manifold sources that are available to them than to lament the denial of
access to the Arab state archives.
If the release of rich new sources of information was one important
reason behind the advent of historical revisionism, a change in the general
political climate was another.18 For many Israelis, especially liberalminded
ones, the Likud’s ill-conceived and ill-fated invasion of Lebanon
in 1982 marked a watershed. Until then, Zionist leaders had been careful
to cultivate the image of peace lovers who would stand up and ﬁght only
if war was forced on them. Until then, the notion of ein breira,“no alternative,”
was central to the explanation of why Israel went to war and a
means of legitimizing its involvement in wars. But while the ﬁerce debate
between supporters and opponents of the Lebanon War was still
raging, Prime Minister Menachem Begin gave a lecture to the IDF Staff
College on wars of choice and wars of no choice. He argued that the
Lebanon War, like the Sinai War of 1956, was a war of choice designed
to achieve national objectives.With this admission, unprecedented in the
history of the Zionist movement, the national consensus around the notion
of ein breira began to crumble, creating political space for a critical
reexamination of the country’s earlier history.19
The appearance of the new books on the 1948 war excited a great
deal of interest and controversy in Israeli academic and political circles.
A two-day conference on the end of theWar of Independence organized
by the Dayan Center and the Institute for Zionist Research at Tel Aviv
University in April 1989 turned into a confrontation between the old
Zionist version represented by historians, journalists, and veterans of that
The Debate about 1948 129
war and the new version represented by Benny Morris and myself. Several
of the speakers argued, with good reason, that the New Historians
did not develop a new school or new methodology of historical writing
but used conventional historical methods to advance new interpretations
of the events of 1948. On the merits of the new interpretations, opinions
were sharply divided. Members of the old guard, especially the Mapai
old guard, bristled with hostility and roundly condemned the new interpretations.
The response of the Israeli academic community, both at the
conference and in subsequent reviews and discussions, was more measured.
Some of the ﬁndings of the New Historiography, and especially
the ﬁndings reported in Benny Morris’s book, became widely accepted
in the Israeli academic community and found their way into university
reading lists and high school textbooks.
Among the critics of the New Historians, the most strident and vitriolic
was Shabtai Teveth, David Ben-Gurion’s biographer. Teveth’s attack,
entitled “The New Historians,” appeared in four successive, fullpage
installments in the Israeli daily HaAretz on 7, 14, and 21 April and
19 May 1989. Teveth subsequently published an abridged and revised
version of this series in an article entitled “Charging Israel with Original
Sin” in the American Jewish monthly, Commentary. In this article,Teveth
describes the New History as a “farrago of distortions, omissions, tendentious
readings, and outright falsiﬁcations.”20 Teveth pursues two lines
of attack. One is that the New Historiography “rests in part on defective
evidence, and is characterized by serious professional ﬂaws.”21 The other
is that the New Historiography is pro-Palestinian, politically motivated,
and aimed at delegitimizing Zionism and the State of Israel.
In support of this last claim, Teveth quotes a passage from Benny
Morris’s article“The New Historiography,”a passage that states that“how
one perceives 1948 bears heavily on how one perceives the whole
Zionist/Israeli experience. . . . If Israel was born tarnished, besmirched by
original sin then it was no more deserving of that [Western] grace and
assistance than were its neighbours.” Teveth goes on to say that the original
sin Shlaim charges Israel with consists of “the denial to the Palestinian
Arabs of a country” while Morris charges Israel with “creating the
refugee problem,” and both charges “are false.”22
Teveth must have gone through the two books in question with a
ﬁne-tooth comb to discover evidence of the political motive that he attributes
to their authors, but he came up with nothing.This is why he
was reduced to quoting from the Tikkun article, which he builds up in
a farrago of distortions of his own into the political manifesto of what
130 Making Israel
he calls “the new historical club.” But even the quote from the article
does not demonstrate any political purpose;all it does is to point out that
Western attitudes toward Israel are inﬂuenced by perceptions of how Israel
came into the world.This is surely undeniable.Benny Morris replied
in HaAretz and in a second article in Tikkun that, as far as he is concerned,
the New Historiography has no political purposes whatsoever.
The task and function of the historian, in his view, is to illuminate the
past.23 My own view is that the historian’s most fundamental task is not
to chronicle but to evaluate.The historian’s task is to subject the claims
of all the protagonists to rigorous scrutiny and to reject all the claims,
however deeply cherished, that do not stand up to such scrutiny. In my
view, many of the claims advanced by the Old Historians do not stand
up to serious scrutiny. But that does not mean that everything they say
is untrue or that Israel is the sole villain of the piece. In fact, neither
Benny Morris nor I have charged Israel with original sin. It is Shabtai
Teveth who,in face of all the evidence to the contrary,continues to cling
to the doctrine of Israel’s immaculate conception.24
It is Teveth’s counterattack that is politically motivated. Like so
many other members of the Mapai old guard, he is unable to distinguish
between history and propaganda.Any attempt to revise the conventional
wisdom with the help of new evidence that has come to light is therefore
immediately suspect as unpatriotic and calculated to harm the reputation
of the leader and party that led the struggle for independence.
For Teveth and other members of the Mapai old guard, the events in
question do not yet fully belong to history but represent their party’s and
country’s ﬁnest hour.They are too wedded, personally and politically, to
the heroic version of the creation of the State of Israel to be able to treat
the new historiography with an open mind.
Interestingly, individuals on the political Right in Israel, whether
scholars or not, respond to the ﬁndings of the New Historiography with
far greater equanimity. They readily admit, for example, that Israel did
expel Palestinians and even express regret that it did not expel more of
them since it was they who launched the war.Right-wingers tend to treat
the 1948 war from a realpolitik point of view rather than a moralistic one.
They are therefore spared the anguish of trying to reconcile the practices
of Zionism with the precepts of liberalism.It is perhaps for this reason that
they are generally less self-righteous and more receptive to new evidence
and new analyses of the 1948 war than are members of the Mapai old
guard.The latter put so much store by Israel’s claim to moral rectitude that
they cannot face up to the evidence of cynical Israeli double-dealings or
The Debate about 1948 131
the brutal expulsion and dispossession of the Palestinians. It is an axiom
of their narrative that Israel is the innocent victim. Not content with the
thirty pieces of silver, these people insist on retaining for Israel the crown
of thorns.
Although politics and history have gotten mixed up in the debate
about 1948, and this debate often resembles a dialogue of the deaf, the
very fact that a debate is taking place is a welcome change from the stiﬂing
conformity of the past. A. J. P. Taylor once remarked that history
does not repeat itself, it is historians who repeat one another.The Old
Historiography on the emergence of Israel is a striking example of this
general phenomenon.As for the New Historiography,whatever its faults,
it at least has the merit of stimulating a reexamination of time-hallowed
conventions.
Six major bones of contention can be identiﬁed in the ongoing debate
between the New and the Old Historians: Britain’s policy at the
end of the Palestine Mandate, the Arab-Israeli military balance in 1948,
the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem, the nature of Israeli-Jordanian
relations during the war, Arab war aims, and the reasons for the
continuing political deadlock after the guns fell silent. Let me now review
brieﬂy the main arguments and counterarguments on these six key
issues in the debate, bearing in mind that I am not a detached or neutral
observer but one of the protagonists in the debate.
British Policy
The ﬁrst bone of contention concerns British policy in Palestine between
29 November 1947 and 14 May 1948. Zionist historiography, reﬂecting
the suspicions of Zionist leaders at that time, is laden with
charges of hostile plots that are alleged to have been hatched against the
Yishuv during the twilight of British rule in Palestine. The central
charge is that Britain armed and secretly encouraged its Arab allies, and
especially its client, King Abdullah of Jordan, to invade Palestine upon
expiry of the British Mandate and do battle with the Jewish state as soon
as it came into the world. For Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary in the
Labor government headed by Clement Attlee, is reserved the role of
chief villain in this alleged conspiracy.
Ilan Pappé, using English,Arabic, and Hebrew sources, has driven a
coach and horses through the traditional Zionist rendition of British
policy toward the end of the Mandate, and I tried to follow along the
132 Making Israel
trail that he had blazed.25 The key to British policy during this period is
summed up by Pappé in two words: Greater Transjordan. Bevin felt that
if Palestine had to be partitioned the Arab area could not be left to stand
on its own but should be united withTransjordan.A GreaterTransjordan
would compensate Britain for the loss of bases in Palestine. Hostility to
Hajj Amin al-Husseini,who had cast his lot with the Nazis duringWorld
War II,and hostility toward a Palestinian Arab state,which in British eyes
was always equated with a mufti state, were important and constant features
of British policy after the war. By February 1948, Bevin and his
Foreign Ofﬁce advisers were pragmatically reconciled to the inevitable
emergence of the Jewish state.What they were not reconciled to was the
emergence of a Palestinian Arab state.
The policy of GreaterTransjordan implied discreet support for a bid
by Abdullah, nicknamed “Mr Bevin’s little king” by the ofﬁcials at the
Foreign Ofﬁce, to enlarge his kingdom by taking over theWest Bank.At
a secret meeting in London on 7 February 1948, Bevin gaveTawﬁq Abul
Huda, Jordan’s prime minister, the green light to send the Arab Legion
into Palestine immediately following the departure of the British forces.
But Bevin also warned Jordan not to invade the area allocated by the
UN to the Jews.An attack on Jewish state territory, he said, would compel
Britain to withdraw its subsidy and ofﬁcers from the Arab Legion.
Far from being driven by blind anti-Semitic prejudice to unleash the
Arab Legion against the Jews, Bevin in fact urged restraint on the Arabs
in general and on Jordan in particular.Whatever sins were committed by
the British foreign secretary as the British Mandate approached its inglorious
end, inciting King Abdullah to use force to prevent the emergence
of a Jewish state was not one of them.
If Bevin was guilty of conspiring to unleash the Arab Legion, his
target was not the Jews but the Palestinians.The prospect of a Palestinian
state was pretty remote in any case because the Palestinians themselves
had done so little to build it. But by supporting Abdullah’s bid to capture
the Arab part of Palestine adjacent to his kingdom Bevin indirectly
helped to ensure that the Palestinian state envisaged in the UN partition
plan would be stillborn. In short, if there is a case to be made against
Bevin,it is not that he tried to abort the birth of the Jewish state but that
he endorsed the understanding between King Abdullah and the Jewish
Agency to partition Palestine between themselves and leave the Palestinians
out in the cold.
The Zionist charge that Bevin deliberately instigated hostilities in
Palestine and gave encouragement and arms to the Arabs to crush the
The Debate about 1948 133
infant Jewish state thus represents almost the exact opposite of the historical
truth as it emerges from the British,Arab, and Israeli documents.
The charge is without substance and may be safely discarded as the ﬁrst
in the series of myths that have come to surround the founding of the
State of Israel.
The Military Balance
A second myth, fostered by ofﬁcial and semiofﬁcial accounts of the 1948
war, is that the Israeli victory was achieved in the face of insurmountable
military odds. Israel is pictured in these accounts as a little Jewish David
confronting a giant Arab Goliath. The war is portrayed as a desperate,
costly, and heroic struggle for survival with plucky little Israel ﬁghting
off marauding armies from ﬁve Arab states. Israel’s ultimate victory in
this war is treated as nothing short of a miracle.
The heroism of the Jewish ﬁghters is not in question. Nor is there
any doubt about the heavy price that the Yishuv paid for its victory. It
suffered 6,000 dead, 4,000 soldiers and 2,000 civilians, or about 1 percent
of the entire population. Nevertheless, the Yishuv was not as hopelessly
outnumbered and outgunned as the ofﬁcial history would have us believe.
It is true that theYishuv numbered merely 650,000 souls, compared with
1.2 million PalestineArabs and nearly 30 millionArabs in the surrounding
states. It is true that the senior military advisers told the political leadership
on 12 May 1948 that the Haganah had only a ﬁfty-ﬁfty chance of
withstanding the imminent Arab attack. It is true that the sense of weakness
and vulnerability in the Jewish population was as acute as it was pervasive
and that some segments of this population were gripped by feelings
of gloom and doom.And it is true that during four critical weeks, from
the invasion of Palestine by the regular armies of the Arab states on 15
May until the First Truce on 11 June, this community had to struggle for
its very survival.
But theYishuv also enjoyed a number of advantages,which are commonly
downplayed by the Old Historians. The Yishuv was better prepared,
mobilized, and organized when the struggle for Palestine reached
its crucial stage than its local opponents were.The Haganah, which was
renamed the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on 31 May, could draw on a
large reserve of Western-trained and homegrown ofﬁcers with military
experience. It had an effective centralized system of command and control.
And, in contrast to the armies of the Arab states, especially those of
134 Making Israel
Iraq and Egypt, it had short, internal lines of communication, which enabled
it to operate with greater speed and mobility.
During the unofﬁcial phase of the war, from December 1947 to 14
May 1948, theYishuv had a decisive edge over its Palestinian opponents.
Its armed forces were larger, better trained, better equipped and technologically
more advanced. Despite some initial setbacks, these advantages
enabled it to win and win decisively the battle against the Palestine
Arabs. Even when the Arab states committed their regular armies, marking
the beginning of the ofﬁcial phase of the war, theYishuv retained its
numerical superiority. In mid-May, the total number of Arab troops operating
in Palestine, both regular and irregular, was between 20,000 and
25,000.The IDF ﬁelded 35,000 ﬁrst-line troops, not counting the second-line
troops in the settlements. By mid-July, the IDF fully mobilized
65,000 men under arms, by September the number rose to 90,000, and
by December it reached a peak of 96,441. The Arab states could not
match this rate of increase.Thus, at each stage of the war the IDF signiﬁcantly
outnumbered all the Arab forces ranged against it and by the
ﬁnal stage of the war its superiority was in the region of two to one.26
The IDF’s gravest weakness during the ﬁrst round of ﬁghting in May
and June was in ﬁrepower.The Arab armies were much better equipped,
especially with heavy arms. But during the FirstTruce, in violation of the
UN arms embargo, Israel imported from all over Europe, and especially
from Czechoslovakia, riﬂes, machine guns, armored cars, ﬁeld guns, tanks,
airplanes, and all kinds of ammunition in large quantities. These illicit
arms acquisitions enabled the IDF to tip the scales decisively in its own
favor. In the second round of ﬁghting, the IDF took the offensive, and in
the third round it picked off the Arab armies and defeated them one by
one.The ﬁnal outcome of the war was thus not a miracle but a faithful
reﬂection of the underlying Arab-Israeli military balance. In this war, as
in most wars, the stronger side ultimately prevailed.
The Origins of the Palestinian Refugee Problem
A third bone of contention between the Old and New Historians concerns
the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem.The question is: did
they leave or were they pushed out? Ever since 1948, Israeli spokesmen
have maintained that the Palestinians left the country on orders from
their own leaders and in the expectation of a triumphant return. Accounts
written by Old Historians echo the ofﬁcial line.Arab spokesmen
The Debate about 1948 135
have with equal consistency maintained that Israel forcibly expelled
some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and that Israel therefore
bears the full responsibility for the creation of the Palestinian refugee
problem.The question of origins is thus directly related to the question
of responsibility for solving the problem.Arab claims that the notion of
forcible “transfer” is inherent in Zionism and that in 1948 the Zionists
simply seized the opportunity to displace and dispossess the Arab inhabitants
of the country rendered this controversy all the more acrimonious.
Benny Morris, in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, investigated
this subject as carefully, dispassionately, and objectively as it is ever
likely to be. Morris found no evidence of Arab leaders issuing calls to
Palestine’s Arabs to leave their homes and villages nor any trace of a radio
or press campaign urging them to ﬂee. On the Israeli side, he found no
blanket orders handed down from above for the systematic expulsion of
the Palestinians. Morris’s conclusion is that “The Palestinian refugee
problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab. It was largely a
by-product of Arab and Jewish fears and of the protracted, bitter ﬁghting
that characterized the ﬁrst Arab-Israeli war; in smaller part, it was the deliberate
creation of Jewish and Arab military commanders and politicians.”27
Benny Morris has already replied in detail to Teveth’s criticisms,
and it would serve no useful purpose for me to give a blow-by-blow account
of the battle between them.28 But it seems to me that Teveth’s position
on the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem is about as sophisticated
as the old saying“Haya ness vehem nassu”(there was a miracle,
and they ran away).Anyone who believes that will believe anything.
Another category of critics of Benny Morris’s book consists of Israeli
orientalists. Some orientalists, such asYehoshua Porath, have been highly
supportive. Others, such as Asher Susser, Emmanuel Sivan, and Avraham
Sela, have written in a more critical vein while giving credit where credit
is due.The recurrent criticism from this professional quarter is that Morris
has made very little use in his book of Arabic sources. In response
to this criticism, Morris posed a question.Would consulting the Arabic
materials mentioned by the critics have resulted in a fundamental revision
of the analysis of the Palestinian exodus or added signiﬁcantly to the description
of this exodus given in his book?29 Avraham Sela concedes that
the use of the Arabic sources would probably not have changed the main
conclusions of Morris’s study on the causes of the Palestinian exodus.But
he goes on to argue that neglect of the available Arabic sources and heavy
reliance on the Israeli documents are liable to produce an unbalanced
picture.30 I agree with Sela.
136 Making Israel
While a number of Israeli orientalists believe that Morris attached
too much weight to Israeli actions,compared to other factors,in the creation
of the Palestinian refugee problem, many other reviewers feel that
in his conclusion Morris lets Israel off rather lightly.An observation that
is frequently made, byWestern as well as Palestinian reviewers, is that the
evidence presented in the body of the book suggests a far higher degree
of Israeli responsibility than that implied by Morris in his conclusion.31
I agree with this observation. Having said that, I still consider Morris’s
book to be an outstandingly original, scholarly, and important contribution
to the study of a problem that lies at the heart of the Arab-Israeli
conﬂict.
Israeli-Jordanian Relations
A fourth issue that gave rise to a lively controversy in Israel is the nature
of Israeli-Jordanian relations and, more speciﬁcally, the contention that
there was collusion or tacit understanding between King Abdullah and
the Jewish Agency in 1947–49.That there was trafﬁc between these two
parties has been widely known for some time, and the two meetings between
Golda Meir and King Abdullah in November 1947 and May 1948
have even been featured in popular ﬁlms. Nor is the charge of collusion
a new one. It was made in a book published by Col.Abdullah Tall, who
had served as a messenger between King Abdullah and the Jews, following
Tall’s abortive coup and defection to Egypt.32 A similar charge was
leveled against Ben-Gurion by Lt. Col. Israel Baer in the book he wrote
in his prison cell following his conviction of spying for the Soviet
Union.33 Tall condemned King Abdullah for betraying his fellow Arabs
and selling the Palestinians down the river. Baer condemned BenGurion
for forming an unholy alliance with Arab reaction and British
imperialism. A number of books and articles on Zionist-Hashemite relations
have also been written by Israeli scholars, the most recent of
which are by Dan Schueftan and Uri Bar-Joseph.34 But out of the recent
crop of books on this rather unusual bilateral relationship, it is my own
Collusion across the Jordan that achieved real notoriety on both sides of the
Jordan and has been singled out for attack by the Old Historians.
The central thesis advanced in my book is that in November 1947
an unwritten agreement was reached between King Abdullah and the
Jewish Agency to divide Palestine between themselves following the termination
of the British Mandate and that this agreement laid the foun-
The Debate about 1948 137
dation for mutual restraint during the ﬁrst Arab Israeli War and for continuing
collaboration in its aftermath. A subsidiary thesis is that Britain
knew and approved of this secret Hashemite-Zionist agreement to divide
up Palestine between themselves rather than along the lines of the
UN partition plan.
This thesis challenges the conventional view of the Arab-Israeli
conﬂict as a simple bipolar affair in which a monolithic and implacably
hostile Arab world is pitted against the Jews. It suggests that the Arab
rulers were deeply divided among themselves on how to deal with the
Zionist challenge and that one of these rulers favored accommodation
rather than confrontation and had indeed cut a deal with the Jewish
Agency to partition Palestine at the expense of the Palestinians.The thesis
also detracts from the heroic version, which pictures Israel as ringed
by an unbroken circle of Arab hostility and having to repel a concerted,
all-out attack on all fronts. Not surprisingly, the ofﬁcial history of the
War of Independence fails to even mention the unwritten agreement
with King Abdullah.35 Even when this agreement is acknowledged, the
ofﬁcial line is that Abdullah went back on it at the critical moment and
consequently it had no inﬂuence, or only a marginal inﬂuence, on the
conduct of the war.36
Regurgitating the ofﬁcial line, Shabtai Teveth hotly denies that the
Jewish leaders were involved in collusion or had an ally on the Arab side.
He coyly admits that “Israel and Jordan did maintain a dialogue” but
goes on to argue that “at most theirs was an understanding of convenience.
. . .There was nothing in such an understanding to suggest collusion
designed to deceive a third party, in this case the Palestinian
Arabs.”37 Again, anyone who believes this will believe anything. If all that
transpired between Israel and Jordan was a dialogue, then it was a rather
curious kind of a dialogue because it lasted thirty years, because it was
clandestine, because it was directed against a common rival, and because
money changed hands.That the dialogue broke down between May and
August 1948 is not in doubt. But surely, if one takes a long-term view of
this relationship, a strategic partnership, if not an unholy alliance, would
be a more appropriate term than a dialogue.
Teveth is evidently so wedded to the doctrine of Israel’s immaculate
conception that he is impervious to any evidence that contradicts it. He
has made up his mind, and he does not want to be confused by the facts.
His article provides a ﬁne example of the absurd lengths to which the Old
Historians are capable of going to suppress unpalatable truths about the
way in which Israel came into the world. Judged by the rough standards
138 Making Israel
of the game of nations,the dalliance between the Zionists and the Hashemite
king was neither extraordinary nor particularly reprehensible. Both
sides acted in a pragmatic fashion to advance their own interests.A problem
arises only as a result of the claim that Israel’s conduct was based on
morality rather than self-interest.
The relations between Jordan and Israel in the 1948 war were reviewed
recently by Avraham Sela in a long article in Middle Eastern
Studies. A careful examination of the secondary literature on this subject
and close study of the Arabic sources make this a valuable contribution
to the historiography of the 1948 war. It does not lead me, however, to
revise any of the arguments I advanced in Collusion across the Jordan.
Sela’s thesis is that “the conditions and basic assumptions that had constituted
the foundations of the unwritten agreement between Abdullah
and the Jewish Agency regarding the partition of Palestine as early as
the summer of 1946 were altered so substantially during the unofﬁcial
war (December 1947–May 1948) as to render that agreement antiquated
and impracticable.”38
I believe that, despite all the changes, the earlier accord and the long
history of cooperation going back to the foundation of the Amirate of
Transjordan in 1921 continued to exert some inﬂuence over the conduct
of the two sides. Sela maintains that in the early part of the war the two
sides, and especially the Israeli side, behaved according to the old adage
“à la guerre comme à la guerre.”Even if this is a valid conclusion regarding
Israel, it is emphatically not valid, in my view, in relation to Jordan.
Although the accord was no longer binding and contact was severed,
each side, and especially Jordan, continued to pursue limited objectives
and acted with restraint toward the other until the war ended.Although
they became enemies at the height of the war, they remained, in Uri
Bar-Joseph’s apt phrase, the best of enemies.
In conclusion, Sela tells us that war is a complex and intricate phenomenon.
I could not agree more. One reason for this complexity is that
war involves both politics and the use of force.The Old Historiography
deals mostly with the military side of the war. I tried to redress the balance
by looking at the political side of the war and more particularly at
the interplay between politics and strategy. Sela goes on to state: “The
collusion myth implicitly assumes the possibility for both Zionist and
Palestinian acceptance of the partition plan and its peaceful implementation.”39
I assume nothing of the kind. On the contrary, precisely because
the Palestinians rejected partition I consider collaboration between Abdullah
and the Jewish Agency to have been a reasonable and realistic strat-
The Debate about 1948 139
egy for both sides. In other words, I accept that in the period 1947–49
Israel had no Palestinian option or any other Arab option save the Jordanian
one.King Abdullah was the only Arab head of state who was willing
to accept the principle of partition and to coexist peacefully with a
Jewish state after the dust had settled. Between May and July of 1948, the
two sides came to blows. From Abdullah’s postwar vantage point, this was
merely a ﬁtna, a“family quarrel,”and the Jews had started it.And after the
initial outburst of violence both sides began to pull their punches, as one
does in a family quarrel.
There remains the question of whether the term collusion is appropriate
for describing the relations between Abdullah and the Jewish
Agency and later the State of Israel. Some of the criticisms of my book
were directed at its title rather than its substance. It was for this reason
that for the abridged and revised paperback version of my book I opted
for the more neutral title The Politics of Partition.40 In the preface to the
new edition,I explained that,although I had dropped the offensive word
from the title, I was still of the opinion that the Israel-Jordan link involved
at least some of the elements associated with collusion, as “it was
held behind a thick veil of secrecy; its existence was hotly denied by the
participants; it was directed against a third party; it involved more than a
modicum of underhand scheming and plotting; and it was consciously
and deliberately intended to frustrate the will of the international community,
as expressed through the United Nations General Assembly, in
favour of creating an independent Arab state in part of Palestine.”41 On
reﬂection, I rather regret that I changed the title of my book.The original
title was an apt one. Collusion is as good a word as any to describe
the trafﬁc between the Hashemite king and the Zionist movement during
the period 1921–51, despite the violent interlude in the hot summer
of 1948.
Arab War Aims
Closely related to Israeli-Jordanian relations is the question of Arab war
aims in 1948, a ﬁfth bone of contention between the Old and New Historians.
The question is: why did the Arab states invade Palestine with
their regular armies the day the British Mandate expired and the State of
Israel was proclaimed?The conventional Zionist answer is that the motive
behind the invasion was to destroy the newly born Jewish state and throw
the Jews into the sea.The reality was more complex.
140 Making Israel
It is true that all the Arab states, with the exception of Jordan, rejected
the UN partition plan. It is true that the declared aim of the invasion
was the liberation of Palestine. It is true that the invasion was accompanied
by bloodcurdling rhetoric and threats to throw the Jews into
the sea. It is true that in addition to the regular Arab armies and the
mufti’s HolyWar Army various groups of volunteers arrived in Palestine,
the most important of which was the Arab Liberation Army, sponsored
by the Arab League and led by the Syrian adventurer Fawzi al-Qawuqji.
More important, it is true that the military experts of the Arab League
had worked out a uniﬁed plan for the invasion and that this plan was all
the more dangerous for having had more limited and realistic objectives
than those implied by the wild pan-Arab rhetoric.
But King Abdullah, who was given nominal command over all the
Arab forces in Palestine, wrecked this plan by making last-minute
changes. His objective in sending his army into Palestine was not to prevent
the establishment of a Jewish state but to make himself master of
the Arab part of Palestine, which meant preventing the establishment of
an independent Palestinian state. Since the Palestinians had done next to
nothing to create an independent state, the Arab part of Palestine would
have probably gone to Abdullah without all the scheming and plotting,
but that is another matter.What is clear is that, under the command of
Glubb Pasha, the Arab Legion made every effort to avert a head-on collision
and, with the exception of one of two minor incidents, made no
attempt to encroach on the territory allocated to the Jewish state by the
UN cartographers.
There was no love lost between Abdullah and the other Arab rulers,
who suspected him of being in cahoots with the enemy. Abdullah had
always been something of a pariah in the rest of the Arab world, not least
because of his friendship with the Jews. Syria and Lebanon felt threatened
by his long-standing ambition to make himself master of Greater
Syria. Egypt, the leader of the anti-Hashemite bloc within the Arab
League, also felt threatened by Abdullah’s plans for territorial aggrandizement
in Palestine. King Farouk made his decision to intervene in
Palestine at the last moment, and against the advice of his civilian and
military advisers, at least in part in order to check the growth of his
rival’s power.There were thus rather mixed motives behind the invasion
of Palestine.And there was no single Arab plan of action during the 1948
war. On the contrary, it was the inability of the Arabs to coordinate their
diplomatic and military plans that was in large measure responsible for
the disaster that overwhelmed them.
The Debate about 1948 141
The one purpose that the Arab invasion did not serve was the ostensible
one of coming to the rescue of the embattled Palestinians.
Nowhere was the disparity between pan-Arab rhetoric and the reality
greater than in relation to the Palestinian Arabs.42 The reality was one of
national selﬁshness, with each Arab state trying to carve out chunks of
Palestine for itself.What was supposed to be a holy war against the Jews
quickly turned into a general land grab. Division and discord within the
ranks of the ramshackle Arab coalition deepened with every successive
defeat. Israel’s leaders knew about these divisions and exploited them to
the full.Thus, they launched an offensive against the Egyptian army in
October and again in December 1948 in the conﬁdent expectation that
their old friend in Amman would keep out.The Old Historians, by concentrating
almost exclusively on the military operations of 1948, ended
up with the familiar picture of an Arab-Israeli war in which all the Arabs
were united by a single purpose and all were bent on the defeat and destruction
of Israel.The political lineup during the war was slightly more
complicated.
The Elusive Peace
Last but not least of the contentious questions in the debate between the
Old and New Historians is the question of why peace proved unattainable
in the aftermath of the ﬁrst Arab Israeli War.At the core of the old
version lies the notion of Arab intransigence. According to this version,
Israel strove indefatigably toward a peaceful settlement of the conﬂict,but
all its efforts foundered on the rocks of Arab intransigence.The New Historians
believe that postwar Israel was more intransigent than the Arab
states and that it consequently bears a larger share of the responsibility for
the political deadlock that followed the formal end of hostilities.43
Evidence to back the new interpretation comes mainly from the
ﬁles of the Israeli Foreign Ministry.These ﬁles burst at the seams with
evidence of Arab peace feelers and Arab readiness to negotiate with Israel
from September 1948 onward.The two key issues in dispute were
refugees and borders. Each of the neighboring Arab states was prepared
to negotiate with Israel directly and to bargain about both refugees and
borders.
King Abdullah proposed an overall political settlement with Israel in
return for certain territorial concessions, particularly a land corridor to
link Jordan with the Mediterranean, which would have enabled him to
142 Making Israel
counter Arab criticisms of a separate peace with Israel. Col. Husni Za‘im,
who took power in Syria in March 1949 and was overthrown four
months later, offered Israel full peace with an exchange of ambassadors,
normal economic relations, and the resettlement of three hundred thousand
Palestinian refugees in Syria in return for an adjustment of the
boundary between the two countries through the middle of Lake Tiberias.44
King Farouk of Egypt demanded the cession of Gaza and a substantial
strip of desert bordering on Sinai as his price for a de facto recognition
of Israel.All three Arab rulers displayed remarkable pragmatism in
their approach to negotiations with the Jewish state.They were even anxious
to preempt one another because they assumed that whoever settled
up with Israel ﬁrst would get the best terms. Zaim openly declared his
ambition to be the ﬁrst Arab leader to make peace with Israel.
In each case, though for slightly different reasons, David BenGurion
considered the price being asked for peace too high. He was
ready to conclude peace on the basis of the status quo; he was unwilling
to proceed to a peace that involved more than minuscule Israeli concessions
on refugees or borders.Ben-Gurion,as his diary reveals,considered
that the armistice agreements with the neighboring Arab states met Israel’s
essential needs for recognition, security, and stability.45 He knew
that for formal peace agreements Israel would have to pay by yielding
substantial tracts of territory and by permitting the return of a substantial
number of Palestinian refugees, and he did not consider this a price
worth paying.Whether Ben-Gurion made the right choice is a matter
of opinion.That he had a choice is now undeniable.
The controversy surrounding the elusive peace is examined in a recent
book by Itamar Rabinovich, the former rector of Tel Aviv University
and one of Israel’s leading experts on modern Arab politics. His account
of the early talks between Israel and its neighbors is informative,
scholarly, and fair-minded.The title of the book implies that the failure
of these talks was not inevitable and that there was another road leading
to peace—the road not taken. But the book does not advance any thesis,
nor does it engage directly in the debate between the Old and the New
Historians. Rabinovich prefers to remain above the battle. So reluctant is
he to impute shame or assign blame that his book ends without an explicit
conclusion. All he would say is that “the choices of 1948–49 were
made by Arabs, Israelis,Americans and others.The credit and responsibility
for them belong to all.”46You cannot get much blander than that. Rabinovich’s
implicit conclusion, however, is that because of the instability
of the Arab regimes Ben-Gurion was justiﬁed in his refusal to assume any
The Debate about 1948 143
political risks for the sake of peace.Yet in every crucial respect Rabinovich’s
account undermines the claim of the Old Historians that Israel
encountered total Arab intransigence and conﬁrms the revisionist argument
that Israeli intransigence was a much more serious obstacle on the
road to peace.
Conclusion
This essay is concerned with the old Zionist version of the ﬁrst Arab Israeli
War and with the challenge to this version posed by the New Historiography.
My conclusion is that this version is deeply ﬂawed and
needs to be radically revised in light of the new information that is now
available.To put it bluntly, this version is little more than the propaganda
of the victors.The debate between the Old and the New Historiography,
moreover, is not one of merely historical interest. It cuts to the very core
of Israel’s image of itself. It is for this reason that the battle of the historians
has excited such intense popular interest and stirred such strong
political passions.
The debate about 1948 between the Old and New Historians resembles
the American debate on the origins of the Cold War.That debate
evolved in stages. During the 1950s, the so-called traditionalist
view held sway. According to this view, Soviet expansionism was responsible
for the outbreak of the Cold War while American policy was
essentially reactive and defensive.Then, in the context of the Vietnam
War and the crisis of American self-conﬁdence that accompanied it, a
new school of thought emerged, a revisionist school of mostly younger,
left-wing scholars.According to this school, the ColdWar was the result
of the onward march of American capitalism, and it was the Soviet
Union that reacted defensively. Following the opening of the archives,
a third school of thought emerged, the postrevisionist school.A reexamination
of the assumptions and arguments of both traditionalists and revisionists
in the light of new evidence gradually yielded a postrevisionist
synthesis.The hallmark of postrevisionism is not to allocate blame to this
or that party but to try to understand the dynamics of the conﬂict that
we call the Cold War.
The debate about the origins of the Arab-Israeli conﬂict seems to
be following a similar pattern.A traditionalist school, consisting of policymakers
and historians close to the political establishment, laid the entire
blame for the 1948 war and its consequences at the door of the
144 Making Israel
Arabs. Then, following the opening of the archives, a new school of
mostly left-wing historians began to reinterpret many of the events surrounding
the creation of the State of Israel.These historians take a much
more critical view of Israel’s conduct in the years 1947–49 and place on
her a larger share of the blame for the creation of the Palestinian refugee
problem and for the continuing political impasse in the Middle East.The
debate between the Old and New Historians is bitter and acrimonious,
and it is conducted in a highly charged political atmosphere. It is melancholy
to have to add that there is no sign yet of the emergence of a
postrevisionist synthesis. Battles between historians, like real battles, evidently
have to run their course.
NOTES
This essay appeared originally in International Journal of Middle East Studies 27, no. 3
(1995): 287–304. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
1. Emile Habiby, Al-Waqa’ic al-Ghariba ﬁ Ikhtifa’ Sa‘id Abi al-Nahs al-Mutasha’il
[The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist] (Beirut, 1974), 37.
2. Ibid., 35.
3. Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (NewYork, 1987), 8.
4. Ibid., 10.
5. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge,
1988).
6. Ilan Pappé, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conﬂict, 1948–51 (London, 1988).
7. Avi Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and
the Partition of Palestine (Oxford, 1988).
8. Israel Baer, Bitahˆon Israel: Etmol, Hayom, Mahˆar [Israel’s Security:Yesterday,
Today,Tomorrow] (Tel Aviv, 1966).
9. Gavriel Cohen, “Ha-mediniyut ha-Britit erev milhˆemet ha-’atzma’ut”
[British Policy on the Eve of the War of Independence], in Hayinu Ke-Hˆolmim [We
Were as Dreamers], ed.Yehuda Wallach (Givatayim, 1985).
10. Ya‘acov Shim‘oni, “Ha-‘Aravim likrat milhˆemet Israel-‘Arav, 1945–1948”
[The Arabs and the Approaching War with Israel, 1945–1948], HaMizrahˆ HeHˆadash
47, no. 3 (1962).
11. Meir Pa‘il,“Hafqa‘at ha-ribonut ha-medinit shel Filastin mi-yedei ha-Falestinim”
[The Expropriation of the Political Sovereignty over Palestine from the
Palestinians], Tziyonut 3 (1973).
12. Rony E. Gabbay, A Political Study of the Arab-Jewish Conﬂict:The Arab Refugee
Problem (Geneva and Paris, 1959).
13. A.Yisra’eli [Moshe Machover and Akiva Orr],Shalom,Shalom—ve-ein Shalom:
Yisra’el-‘Arav, 1948–1961 [Peace, Peace—and There Is No Peace: Israel and the Arabs,
1948–1961] ( Jerusalem, 1961).
14. Israel State Archives and Central Zionist Archives,Political and Diplomatic Documents,
December 1947–May 1948, ed. Gedalia Yogev ( Jerusalem, 1980); Israel State
The Debate about 1948 145
Archives, Documents on the Foreign Policy of Israel, May–September 1948, vol. 1, ed.
Yehoshua Freundlich ( Jerusalem, 1981); Documents on the Foreign Policy of Israel, October
1948–April 1949, vol. 2, ed.Yehoshua Freundlich ( Jerusalem, 1984); Documents on
the Foreign Policy of Israel,Armistice Negotiations with the Arab States, December 1948–July
1949, vol. 3, ed.Yemima Rosenthal ( Jerusalem, 1983).
15. Parliament of Iraq, Taqrir Lajnat al-Tahqiq al-Niyabiya ﬁ Qadiyat Filastin [Report
of the Iraqi Parliamentary Committee Investigations of the Palestine Affair]
(Baghdad, 1949).
16. See the references in Walid Khalidi,“The Arab Perspective,” in The End of
the Palestine Mandate, ed.William Roger Louis and Robert W. Stookey (London,
1986).
17. For a review of this literature, see Avraham Sela,“Arab Historiography of the
1948 War:The Quest for Legitimacy,” in New Perspectives on Israeli History:The Early
Years of the State, ed. Laurence J. Silberstein (NewYork, 1991).
18. Benny Morris,“The New Historiography: Israel Confronts Its Past,” Tikkun
3 (November–December 1988), 19–23, 99–102.
19. One historian of Zionism, Anita Shapira, was prompted by Menachem
Begin’s claim to embark on a reexamination of the defensive ethos of Zionism
throughout the prestate period. See Tom Segev, “The Anguish of Poor Samson,”
HaAretz, 16 October 1992; and Anita Shapira, Land and Power:The Zionist Resort to
Force, 1881–1948 (Oxford, 1992), vii.
20. Shabtai Teveth,“Charging Israel with Original Sin,” Commentary, September
1989.
21. Ibid., 25.
22. Ibid.
23. Benny Morris, HaAretz, 9 May 1989; “The Eel and History: A Reply to
Shabtai Teveth,” Tikkun, 5, no. 1 ( January–February 1990); 1948 and After, 27–29.
24. See my letters to the editor, Commentary, February and July 1990.
25. Pappé, Britain; Shlaim, Collusion; Avi Shlaim, “Britain and the Arab-Israeli
War of 1948,” JPS 16, no. 4 (summer 1987).
26. See Flapan, Birth, myth 6, especially the table with three different estimates
of troop numbers on page 196; and Morris, 1948 and After, 13–16.
27. Morris, Birth, 286.
28. In addition to the articles in HaAretz and Commentary,Teveth published“The
Palestine Arab Refugee Problem and Its Origins,” Middle Eastern Studies, 26, no. 2
(April 1990): 214–49.
29. Benny Morris, HaAretz, 23 April and 1 May 1992.
30. Avraham Sela, HaAretz, 4 and 11 October 1991.
31. See, for example, Michael Palumbo,“What Happened to Palestine? The Revisionists
Revisited,” Link, 23, no. 4, (September–October 1990); Rashid Khalidi,
“RevisionistViews of the Modern History of Palestine, 1948,” Arab Studies Quarterly
10,no.4 (autumn 1988);and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod,“TheWar of 1948:Disputed Perspectives
and Outcomes,” JPS 18, no. 2 (winter 1989).
32. Abdullah al-Tall,Karithat Filastin:Mudhakkirat Abdullah al-Tall,Qa‘id Ma‘arakat
al-Quds [The Palestine Catastrophe:The Memoirs of Abdullah al-Tal, Leader of the
Battle for Jerusalem] (Cairo, 1959).
33. Baer, Israel’s Security.
146 Making Israel
34. Dan Schueftan, Optzya Yardenit: Israel,Yarden,Vehapalestinim [ Jordanian Option:
Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians] (Tel Aviv, 1986); Uri Bar-Joseph, The Best of
Enemies: Israel and Transjordan in the War of 1948 (London, 1987).
35. Israel Defense Forces,Toldot Milhˆemet Hakomemiyut [History of theWar of Independence]
(Tel Aviv, 1959).
36. See, for example, the author’s interview withYigaelYadin, acting chief of staff
in 1948, in Shlaim, Collusion, 236.
37. Teveth,“Charging,” 28.
38. Avraham Sela,“Transjordan, Israel, and the 1948 War: Myth, Historiography,
and Reality,” Middle Eastern Studies 28, no. 4 (October 1992): 627.
39. Ibid., 680.
40. Avi Shlaim, The Politics of Partition: King Abdullah, the Zionists, and Palestine,
1921–1951 (Oxford, 1990).
41. Ibid., viii.
42. See, for example, Avi Shlaim, “The Rise and Fall of the All-Palestine Government
in Gaza,” JPS 20, no. 1, (autumn 1990).
43. Flapan, Birth, myth 7; Shlaim, Collusion; Morris, 1948 and After, 22–27; Ilan
Pappé, The Making of the Arab-Israel Conﬂict, 1947–1951 (London, 1992), chaps. 8–10.
44. Avi Shlaim, “Husni Zaim and the Plan to Resettle Palestinian Refugees in
Syria,” JPS 15, no. 4, (summer 1986).
45. David Ben-Gurion, Yoman ha-Milhˆama [War Diary], vol. 3, ed. Gershon
Rivlin and Elhanan Orren (Tel Aviv, 1982), 993.
46. Itamar Rabinovich, The Road Not Taken: Early Arab-Israeli Negotiations (Oxford,
1991), viii.