Israeli Historical Revisionism: From Left to Right

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The essays in this volume, by leading scholars from within and outside Israel, shed new light on the Israeli historians' controversy of the creation of the State of Israel, the 1948 War and its aftermath, Israel's attitude towards Holocaust survivors, the "melting pot" absorption policy and similar subjects. The attack on Zionist historiography, which initially came from what is dubbed the "post-Zionist" radical left, has recently broadened to include a critique from the right. These essays cover diverse aspects of the critique, exploring its historiographical, political, sociological and educational ramifications.

Israeli Historical Revisionism: From Left to Right Review

Generally, I like books that consist of several articles. The poor ones can serve to put into perspective the points made by the good ones, adding rather than subtracting from the work as a whole. But in this case, the majority of the articles are unimpressive.

The first article, by Daniel Guttwein, is about "post-Zionism," and it makes the surprisingly powerful point that post-Zionism strives to make Zionist history loathsome in order to delegitimize any Israeli collective memory. The second article is by Uri Ram, on the role of Zionist nationalism in Jewish thought. Anita Shapira then discusses strategies of historical revisionism from both right and left (in keeping with the title), in a surprisingly unconvincing essay, in which she attacks an equally unconvincing work by Hazony. Next comes another critique of Hazony, this time by Mark Lilla. The fifth article, by Derek Penslar, claims that Zionism was not colonial at all ... until after the 1967 war. I found this quite unimpressive.

Sixth is an essay by Avi Bareli about why Zionism isn't colonialism. It is well-written, but still, I think the issue of whether Zionism is colonial in nature is rather secondary. The seventh article, by Yoav Gelber, is the best. It is about the status of Zionist and Israeli history at Israeli universities, and it begins with the Tantura thesis scandal, in which a Master's thesis invented a war crime at Tantura in the 1948 war....only to have the accused Alexandroni brigade sue for libel.

By far the weakest of the contributions is the final one, by Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, on history textbooks and the limits of Israeli consciousness. It whitewashes all Arab anti-Israeli behavior. It falsely claims that Israeli schoolbooks on all grade levels avoid any mention of the history of the land. It makes a hypocritical plea for more accuracy in discussing Arabs. And it finishes by blaming Israel for the plight of Arab refugees, saying that Israel has refused to help Arab refugees in spite of United Nations demands when the opposite is more nearly the case.

I expected a work edited by a scholar like Anita Shapira to be much better than this.

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