Multiple schools of thought

Rather than look for “facts” in historical sources, political scientists' first step when working with historical texts should be to identify the competing “schools” within the literatures under examination. Some historians are realists, some Marxists, some materialists, some constructivists, and so forth. The point here is not to identify the correct school of thought for a given historical problem, but rather but to identify as many as possible of the various worldviews that pertain to the issues. Embedded theoretical and normative commitments must be assumed, not ignored.

Disaggregating facts

Some scholars are interested in very specific problems involving names, dates, and locations of events, and so on. For very detail-oriented matters of historical fact, I recommend what Lustick refers to as quasi-triangulation. Once schools of historical interpretation have been identified, scholars may then focus on the details about which the competing schools agree. Not all facts are simple, however, and many historical problems are protracted and not agreed upon. In these instances, political scientists must triangulate what they can and synthesize distinct historical perspectives, while explicitly explaining their differences.

Historical revisionism as Lakatosian research programs

Many subjects have undergone extensive historical revision. One example is the Israeli literature on the Arab-Israeli conflict, where the basic understanding of the causes and character of the dispute have been revised almost beyond recognition by a new generation of historians, sociologists, and political scientists, known collectively as the “new historians.” But is the new literature “better” or more accurate than the old? There is no definitive answer. However, we can turn this problem into a useful tool itself by thinking of historical schools as Lakatosian research programs. Lakatos rightly observes that most schools of thought (“research programs”) have a “negative heuristic,” or “hard core” of underlying assumptions, which are never called into question. Research programs also have a “positive heuristic,” which is the set of research questions that are askable and soluble according to the terms of the program.¹³

We can conceive of historical schools of thought as Lakatosian research programs, each with its own negative heuristic of embedded assumptions and commitments. Adopting this perspective allows scholars to evaluate historical revisionist schools by asking to what extent the new research program resolves dilemmas of whatever it replaces by accounting for the problems that the latter left unanswered. If a school of revisionist literature can reasonably account for all of the historical problems that the old school did as well as those that the old school could not, then we can justify a preference for the revisionist school on pragmatic grounds. That is, the pragmatist approach to history stresses historical interpretation of the past as necessary to resolving problematic situations in the present. This is not to say that revisionist history is more or less objective than older historical narratives per se; revisionism may produce narratives that are less factually consistent that their predecessors and even introduce their own problems. However, insofar as new narratives can answer old questions, they may be useful. Below, I evaluate the Israeli new historians' “better” answers to old questions.

Zionism and Israel as state under siege

Who started the 1956 Arab-Israeli war, and why? The older Zionist Israeli literature provides clear answers to these questions: the Arabs started it, and the cause of the war was the stubborn refusal of the Arab states to coexist peacefully with Israel.

The conception of Israel as the victim of Arab belligerence—and therefore not an aggressive actor—is important because, while it is clear to many contemporary analysts, although not necessarily to the public, that Israel “initiated” the second Arab-Israeli war of 1956, the carefully stylized portrayal of Israel as the victim casts a substantial measure of doubt over the seemingly straightforward matter of who was attacked by whom. As David Ben-Gurion asserted in a speech delivered in August of that year, “The situation of the State of Israel is unique. It is doubtful whether there is another state in the world which, like Israel, is subject even in normal times to constant danger to its security.”¹⁷

By stressing Israel's victimization in the face of Arab aggression, Zionist history is able to portray the Sinai Campaign as part of a war that had already been going on for some time. Many Israeli leaders and official publications at the time made this point. According to Foreign Ministry Director General Walter Eytan: “This is the crux of the Arab-Israel conflict. The Arabs maintain that the war has never ended and that, so far from being under any obligation to end it, they are liberty to pursue it by any means they have at their disposal to choose to use.”¹⁹

Zionist history also goes to some lengths to suggest that Israel actively sought peace with the Arabs during the 1950s, but that the Arab world was not interested in reciprocating. Ben-Gurion recounts that during the year prior to the 1956, he “was prepared to meet [Gamal Abdel] Nasser or any other Arab ruler, without prior conditions, at the earliest possible moment” in order to achieve a peace agreement or arrangement. Ben-Gurion “offered the Arabs the chance to show the world what they really wanted: war or peace.”²⁴

The old Israeli history, then, asserts that the 1956 war was inevitable: As Eban puts it, “As one looks back, it seems that there was not a wide area of choice … In the absence of some sharp change of fortune, Israel's eruption from siege could at most have been postponed. By October 1956 the policies of Israel's foes and Israel's friends converged to destroy all other possibilities.”²⁷

The preceding account answers basic, important questions regarding Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict. It suggests that the Arab states, rather than Israel, are to be blamed for conflict generally and the 1956 war specifically. While Israel's initiation of the Sinai Campaign is never explicitly denied, the campaign is presented as merely a response to the violence of ongoing war rather than as the start of war. Regarding the causes of the war, almost every author cites the violent fedayeen raids into Israel along with the blockade of the Straits of Tiran, both of which had been ongoing since 1950. The fedayeen raids are presented solely as the waging of interstate war by the Arab states, Egypt in particular. The possibility that Arab “incursions” into Israel are explainable as a function of the Palestinian refugee crisis is completely absent from the narrative. Nor is the Israeli collusion to devise the campaign mentioned in the literature. In sum, in depicting the Sinai Campaign as a responsive act in the context of interstate war, the Israeli history decidedly does not view the conflict as a function of a long-planned “second round” war with the Arabs.

While most contemporary Israeli historians take serious issue with the Zionist account of the 1956, a minority of scholars, such as Michael Oren, are sympathetic to it. As a professionally trained historian, Oren's idiom is not as polemical as that of Ben-Gurion, Eytan, or Dayan. Yet like the earlier authors, he sees the Arab-Israel conflict generally and the 1956 War specifically through a Zionist perspective. “The process of rising Arab belligerency,” writes Oren, “expedited by Israel and the Powers and unimpeded by secret contacts,” ultimately led to the second Arab-Israeli war.³⁰

Zionism and political science

What does this story tell us about political science? Scholars from the international relations (IR) subfield would likely conclude that the Zionist story of the Arab-Israeli conflict affirms the claims of the realist paradigm. This is precisely what we find in Randall Schweller's “Domestic Structure and Preventive War,” which relies exclusively on the older, Zionist narrative to assess the conflict.³²

Israel paradoxically responded to systemic threats within the self-help systemic context in a fashion similar to that of other states, despite the fact that its position within the international system is said to be strategically and geopolitically unique. As a result of the uniquely intense pressures that it faced, Israel launched the 1956 war as a “responsive” rather than a preventive war. While Schweller concedes that Israel's unique strategic and geopolitical position make it a likely candidate to initiate a preventive war in the future, he asserts that, with the exception of the 1981 preventive strike against the Osiraq nuclear facility, “Israel has not launched a preventive war.”³⁶

Clearly Schweller's representation of Israel accords with the old Israeli history. Israel is depicted as a “state under siege,” surrounded by implacably hostile enemies “who possess far greater demographic and material resources,” belonging to no “formal military alliance.” In the context of Ben-Gurion's claim that “the State of Israel … is subject even in normal times to constant danger to its security,” Schweller's characterization makes sense. Furthermore, such an interpretation of Israel during the 1950s lends itself to a systemic IR orientation according to which strategic factors are weighted much more heavily than domestic ones in explaining the causes of events.

This Zionist narrative is reflected in another oft-cited political science study of the Middle East, Stephen Walt's Origins of Alliances, which argues that Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal Company in 1956 “brought his principal adversaries together against him.” Israel joined the Anglo-French coalition in light of the events of the two years prior to 1956: “Britain's withdrawal from Suez, the expanded Arab blockade, the rising level of fedayeen activity, the Soviet-Egyptian arms deal, and the tripartite alliance of Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia,” which “had already led the Israelis to begin planning for offensive action on their own.”³⁷

The new historians and 1956 as a “war of choice”

In contrast to the Zionist narrative, the new history has concerned itself to a much greater extent with Israeli internal political competition and the importance of Israeli militarism in understanding Israel's relationship with the Arabs during the 1940s and 1950s. The Israeli new historians see 1956 as an aggressive “war of choice,” which had been long in the planning and was anything but a response to Arab hostility.

Among the most prominent themes of the Israeli new history of the 1950s is the seemingly forgotten but fierce political clash between two opposing camps within the ruling Mapai party during that period. Ben-Gurion headed one camp, while Israel's second prime minister, Moshe Sharett, led the other. The political struggle was not merely between individual adversaries, but was rather a broader, ideational conflict between strongly opposing worldviews about Israeli grand strategy and the trajectory of Israeli state-society relations: “Israel's behavior in the conflict was the product of an internal struggle between two schools of thought: one hawkish, the other dovish; one activist, the other moderate; one favoring retaliation. These two schools were epitomized by David Ben-Gurion and Sharett.”⁴⁰

Ben-Gurion and his followers advocated a hard-line approach on retaliation against Arab incursions, violent or otherwise, into Israel territory. As Dayan asserted in 1955, the IDF “had the power to set a [high] price on our blood, [a price] that no Arab village, army, or government would feel was worth paying.”⁴³

On the other hand, Sharett and his supporters, including Abba Eban and, at times, future Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, were averse to military conflict with the Arab states and the Palestinians and preferred diplomacy and negotiation as the means to address Israel's security problems. According to the Sharett line, international legitimacy and diplomatic prestige were long-term means towards the end of a secure existence and a just society. Sharett was “[p]rofoundly appalled by Ben-Gurion's strategic conclusions and recommendations,” and searched for “political solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict that would avert the possibility of another war. He felt an overriding need to ‘consider dealing with this danger [of a new war] through non-military means.’” In this way, “Sharett proved that it was possible to conduct a moderate foreign policy without harming essential Israeli interests.” Thus was he able to keep “the conflict manageable if not comfortable—certainly below the level where a pre-emptive war was necessary.”⁴⁴

On no issue was the clash between Sharett and Ben-Gurion more bitter than with regard to Israeli policy of retaliation against Arab incursions, both violent and nonviolent, into Israeli territory. Sharett “had never been enthusiastic about retaliation, doubting its political and military efficacy either as a punishment or deterrence.”⁴⁵

In response to calls for retaliation against an Arab raid during January 1955, Sharett wrote: “The [Israeli public's and army's] rage must be defused. That alone is the logic, none other [e.g., launching retaliatory strikes]. I do not believe that the reprisal will help in any way in terms of [improving] security. On the contrary …” Haunted years later by the murder of five Bedouin boys by IDF troops in the aftermath of the 1955 Gaza Raid, Sharett wrote:

Even while out of government for most of 1954, Ben-Gurion was able to thwart Sharett's more moderate line through his proxies in the government, particularly, Dayan. “Dayan's ideas on the paramount role of force in regulating relations between Israel and the Arabs were intimately connected to his conception of the nature of the conflict. He perceived the Arab-Israel conflict as a struggle for survival between two communities whose interests were irreconcilable … Israel's only hope lay in vigilance, strength, and determination.”⁴⁸

By 1955, relations between Sharett and Ben-Gurion further deteriorated, and it soon became clear that the Sharett line in Israeli politics was steadily losing support among both elites and the public. Cognizant of the realities surrounding him, Sharett wrote in his diary in April 1955:

Ben-Gurion's response was straightforward: “Contrary to Moshe [Sharett]'s opinion … reprisals are imperative. There is no relying for our security on UN observers and foreign states. If we do not put an end to these murders now—the situation will get worse.”⁵¹

Woven into the new history narrative is the claim that the victory of the Ben-Gurion line led to the ultimate institutionalization of Israeli militarism. Thus “during the two decades beginning in 1936 the idea of a military solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict was gradually legitimated first within the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, then within the new state and crystallized into a value, a formula, and an ideology.”⁵³

New historical sociologists, such as Yagil Levy, explain Israeli militarism as a function of the benefits it afforded to the Ashkenazi elite.⁵⁵

The new history and political science

The Israeli new history provides a totally different political science interpretation of the Arab-Israeli conflict—seriously at odds with the IR realist interpretation. Contrary to the assumptions of structural realism, Israeli strategic decisions were taken not in response to systemic stimuli per se. On the contrary, “agents did not rationally calculate several alternatives in terms of losses and gains; at least in the long term they could have partly satisfied their interests even had the state selected a more pacifist policy. Rather, agents reconciled their interests to the newly created reality that satisfied them relative to a past reality, not necessarily to a tentative one.”⁵⁸

Looking more carefully at Schweller's claim that the second Arab-Israeli war was an Israeli response to Arab aggression, we see a number of serious problems, as a Lakatosian strategy would suggest. First, a significant number of Israeli new historians argue that Israel intentionally provoked fedayeen activity along its borders in several key ways: (1) refusing to alleviate the fundamental problem of the Palestinian refugees of the 1948–49 war; (2) encouraging settlement in strategically prone border areas; and (3) maintaining a policy of intentionally belligerent and escalating reprisal raids aimed at provoking a war.⁶⁰

Second, the new history suggests that the 1956 war was a war of choice long in the planning and not a response to specific Arab hostilities, as Schweller argues. Gabriel Sheffer points out that as early as October–November 1953 Ben-Gurion sought to reorganize the Israeli military “based on the assumption that the ‘second round’ would occur in 1956 when … the Arab armies would be ready to launch a new war against Israel. This assessment dictated Ben-Gurion's future political and military actions and moves and would contribute to the decision to launch a ‘war of choice’ in 1956.”⁶¹

Third, Schweller essentially recapitulates the traditional Zionist rhetorical position regarding Israel's strategic situation. That is, Israel was a weak and benign David in the face of the vastly superior and aggressive Arab Goliath. However, Israel in fact fielded comparable or superior battlefield forces, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in both the 1948 and 1956 wars.⁶³

Perhaps most importantly, the validation Schweller seeks for realist claims that anarchic pressures guide strategic decisions is seriously undermined by the Israeli new historians. According to the new history, the principal motivation for Israeli military engagement with the Arab world was the victory of the Ben-Gurion line over the more moderate Sharett line and the accompanying institutionalization of Israeli militarism, which had been ongoing since the 1930s. If the 1956 war is viewed in this light, it could hardly be interpreted as a self-help response under severely constrained systemic pressures produced by anarchy. Rather, as the new historians Shlaim, Morris, Ben-Eliezer, Levy, and Golani agree, the war was the product of a choice of strategy among viable alternatives.⁶⁵

Walt asserts that “[f]ailure to understand the origins of alliances can be fatal.” Alliances typically form in order to engage in balancing, “which is defined as allying with others against the prevailing threat.”⁶⁶

While this is a significant finding in itself, it is all the more important if the Israeli case fits a paradigm shared with other countries that have adopted similar state-building strategies. It is possible, in other words, that some of the states Walt codes as balancing against threat may have in fact been “bandwagoning for profit.” This calls into question the premise of Walt's argument insofar as it suggests that the predominance or lack of balancing in international politics might have more to do with the way “balancing” is defined and operationalized than it does with state behavior. After all, most states work hard to characterize their aggressive adventures as defensive, or security-based, after the fact.⁶⁸

Zionism and 1967 as a war of survival

What if the history of 1956 is merely an anomalous case with regard to the degree to which its narrative has been revised? In order to demonstrate that paying careful attention to historical narratives really does suggest different normative and empirical results, I argue in this section that the same points of tension between the Zionist and new historical narratives discussed above also resonate clearly in the debate over the 1967, or Six-Day, War.⁶⁹

In spite of Israel's breathtaking military victory in 1967, Ben-Gurion continued to interpret Israel as the victim of acute strategic insecurity: “Despite the brilliant victories … peace is still far away, and behind the Arab leaders who have not ceased threatening to destroy Israel stand two mighty powers, the Soviet Union and Red China, and their satellites in Europe and Asia.” The Six-Day War thus not only failed to resolve the question of Israel's survival, but even perpetuated the problem: “The great problem raised by the Six-Day War is how we will survive in the future … not one Arab leader in the Middle East is prepared to discuss peace with us. The main question is how we can safeguard our security and avoid ending up as a minority.”⁷¹

Like Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, despite being the most confident military commander in Israel's history, ironically still saw Israel as vulnerable, even in a war that by his own assessment he expected to win with ease. “Nasser's aggressive moves came upon Israel like thunder out of the blue. It may be that the immediate prompting was Syria's call for help against an Israel that was stronger than she, but after May 15 the picture was reversed.” After that time, the threat of impending war was initiated “by Egypt against Israel.”⁷²

Like the early Zionist authors, contemporary Zionists such as Michael Oren allude to Arab factors leading to the Six-Day War. Thus Oren begins the first chapter of his widely cited Six Days of War by describing in melodramatic detail the first al-Fatah guerilla operation launched from Lebanon into northern Israel and led by Yasser Arafat. Included in Oren's list of contextual factors leading to the Six-Day War are the “Palestinian dimension,” “terror and Syrian support for it,” “Soviet support for Syria,” and water.⁷⁴

Like Oren, “new-old” historian Avraham Sela sees the Six-Day War as a function of Arab belligerence. Tension between Syria and Israel in the months preceding the war “was sparked by a series of guerilla sabotage raids by Syrian-backed Palestinian groups led by Fatah, and exacerbated by artillery battles along the border.” Egyptian provocations “set in motion a rapid escalation to the brink of war and beyond, culminating in a total Arab-Israeli confrontation.” This fostered a united Arab front against Israel, entailing the deployment of Egyptian and Iraqi forces into Jordan, which “tightened an all-Arab siege on Israel … and posed a threat to Israel's very existence.”⁷⁶

The new historians and 1967 as Israeli provocation

In contrast to Ben-Gurion and Dayan, new historian Benny Morris describes the Six-Day War as the “product of error and mutual miscalculation.” Morris sees Zionist Israelis seeking to portray themselves as the “righteous victims” of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He notes that IDF Chief-of-Staff Yitzhak Rabin “assumed—probably correctly—that the Egyptian” troop concentrations were “deterrent and political, meant to persuade Israel not to attack Syria, and to demonstrate Egypt's fraternity, resolve, and strength to the Arab world.” Moreover, Morris argues that “IDF intelligence had concluded only a few weeks before … that war was highly unlikely in the near future.” He stresses that the IDF knew that Egypt was preoccupied militarily in the Yemeni civil war and “would probably not seek war with Israel; and without the Egyptians, the other Arab states were not likely to march.”⁷⁷

While it may indeed be the case that Nasser did not want war, he crossed the Israeli line in the sand on May 23, 1967 by closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. The Egyptian leader's need to appear strong in challenging Israel directly clashed with Israel's interest in defending its right to open waterways. “In retrospect, this can be seen as the decisive act that made war inevitable—though apparently Nasser did not realize it.”⁷⁹

Even more than does Morris, fellow new historian Shlaim sees the war as an indirect and perhaps unintended product of aggressive Israeli relations with the Arabs. While Israel may not have sought a “war of choice” in the manner it had in 1956, its actions ultimately produced that outcome. Shlaim emphasizes the role of “Israel's strategy of escalation on the Syrian front” as “probably the single most important factor in dragging the Middle East to war in June 1967, despite the conventional wisdom on the subject that singles out Syrian aggression as the principal cause of war.”⁸⁰

Shlaim appears to agree with the Zionist narrative that the Six-Day War precipitated significant uncertainties for Israel, but he disagrees completely with the Zionist view that Israel's survival was the crux of that uncertainty: “[T]he victory reopened the old question about the territorial aims of Zionism…. The question was what to do with” all of the newly acquired Syrian, Egyptian, and Jordanian territory Israel had acquired, “and to this question, there was no simple answer.”⁸³

History in political debates

The 1967 war provides a good example of the way in which historical debates and “real” politics are intertwined. In Israel the two continuously reinvent each other in ways that can be actively observed. For example, the largest overhaul of public school history texts in Israeli history, initiated by then-Education Minister Yossi Sarid, was widely covered internationally for its use of the new historians' scholarship.⁸⁵

That historians have an influence in politics does not suggest a unity of historical interpretation in political debates. To the contrary, different historical interpretations lend themselves more readily to different current politics. On the subject of the Six-Day War, for example, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon himself recently remarked that the war “really started in 1964 when Arabs started to divert the sources of the Jordan.” That diversion was, in Sharon's view, “a matter of life and death to us.”⁸⁷

Sharon's predecessor, Ehud Barak, draws a very different inference from 1967 as revealed, not by coincidence, in his interview with Morris. As Morris characterizes the issue: “Barak pointed to 1967 as the crucial mistake, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza (and Sinai and the Golan Heights) … Barak recalled seeing David Ben-Gurion … on television in June 1967 arguing for the immediate withdrawal from all the territories occupied in the Six-Day War in exchange for peace, save for East Jerusalem.”⁸⁸

Political debates over history

Another wrinkle to the politics of history is the fact that, in principle, revisionists may “revise themselves.” Perhaps no contemporary historian has generated more headlines for his political views than Benny Morris, who is widely regarded as the “founding father” of the new historians. Though he remained politically silent on the matter, Morris was for years assumed to be an ardent left-wing critic of Zionist policies toward the Arabs. During the past few years, however, Morris has surprised both supporters and critics alike with his blunt remarks in a series of increasingly controversial interviews. Conservative Zionist critics of the new history have been quick to assert that Morris had “recanted” his historical understandings. The right-wing Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) writes, “[I]n a surprising recent interview, Morris now argues that others have misconstrued his thesis. He argues that the Palestinians, not Israel, are to blame for the ongoing conflict and for the current state of affairs.”⁹⁰

Morris created a substantially larger stir in 2004 with his disclosure that he sympathized with many of the early Zionist policies that others had assumed him to condemn. Asked if Ben-Gurion was a “transferist” (i.e., advocate of expelling Palestinians), Morris responded, “Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst.” Morris added, “Because I investigated the conflict in depth, I was forced to cope with the in-depth questions that those people coped with. I understood the problematic character of the situation they faced…. But I do not identify with Ben-Gurion. I think he made a serious historical mistake in 1948.” The real shock of the interview, however, came next:

These words sparked tremendous controversy, and they demonstrate how clearly history is a politicized phenomenon; however, they do not represent a retraction or recanting of his research or his scholarship. To the contrary, Morris states plainly that the 2004 revised edition of his 1987 The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem “shows that there were far more Israel acts of massacre than I had previously thought. To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape … I believe this revised edition adds substantially to our understanding of what happened in 1948 and of the deep roots of the Israeli-Arab enmity in our time.”⁹⁴

History as arbitrator for political science

The older, Zionist school answers important questions: (1) Why is there an Arab-Israeli conflict? (2) Who started the conflict? (3) What are the causes of the Arab-Israeli wars? According the Zionist program, the main reason for the Arab-Israeli conflict is the unwillingness of the Arab states and leaders to accept the partition of Palestine and the existence of a Jewish state in the region. That intransigence produced a systemic condition of acute strategic insecurity under which Israel was forced to exist as a state under siege, constantly fearful of and preparing to defend against imminent war and even total annihilation. The Zionist program thus clearly depicts the Arab-Israeli conflict as having been started and continued by the Arabs. Focusing for illustrative purposes on 1956 war, the causes of the war are clear: increasing fedayeen terrorist raids; the blockade of the Straights of Tiran; and the Czech arms deal—all of which perpetuated the ongoing state of war between Israel and the Arabs and further increased Israel's strategic vulnerability. This in turn supports a structural realist political science analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict. That is, Israel's wars with the Arabs can be seen as a small and insecure state's response to an unfavorable balance of power in the subsystemic context of the Middle East.

However, problems are left unresolved in this narrative. First, if Israel was in fact strategically insecure, how was it capable of defeating the Arab armies convincingly in 1948 and devastatingly in 1956 and 1967? Did the same Israeli leaders who were writing the history of that time not know the “real” military balance between themselves and the Arabs? Clearly, there is a piece to this puzzle that is missing in the old accounts: barring miracles of a biblical nature, Israel could not be both David and Goliath at the same time.

Second, if Israel wanted to make peace with the Arabs continually since 1948, why was it unable to do so during the late 1950s and early 1960s? After all, it had won not just one, but two smashing military victories and enjoyed a preponderance of military power relative to the Arabs. The Middle East generally and Israel's borders specifically were in a phase of relative calm. The old Israel narrative can not really respond to this question other than to reiterate the ongoing theme of Arab intransigence. But in light of the conditions just listed, this explanation is at best unfulfilling.

I believe that the Israeli new history can explain all that is accounted for in the old history as well as the questions just raised. The Israeli new history is quite clear that the Arab states refused to accept the UN partition plan. But it also shows that Israel valued territory and power at least as much as, if not more than, peace with the Arabs. The Israeli strategy toward territorial consolidation and strategic advantage manifested itself in the struggle between the Ben-Gurionists and the followers of Moshe Sharett within the ruling Mapai Party. Ben-Gurion believed that the choice between his approach and Sharett's was one of raising Israeli “cowards” versus “warriors.” Closely associated with this struggle was the institutionalization of a distinct militarism within the Israeli state and society. As a result, military solutions to political problems were preferred over diplomatic ones. Thus, the Arab-Israeli conflict generally and the 1956 and 1967 wars specifically were the result of multiple causation: Arab intransigence and the Israeli desire for strategic gain both played critical roles. The Israeli new history also takes serious issue with the Zionist narrative over the question of who started the second and third Arab-Israeli wars. Whereas the latter view the wars as iterations of a war already in progress, the new historians believe that Israel started it.

In terms of political science paradigms, the newer interpretation of the conflict reveals a “second-image,” or liberal, analysis of conflict, in which the role of domestic political actors and institutions is crucial to understanding the decisions that states make in international relations. Indeed, Israeli new history scholars make a point of arguing that Israeli policy was decidedly not a response to systemic threats and that the policy-making process proceeded according to its own internal logic of militarism and the language of force. In sum, then, I suggest that the Israeli new history is “better” than the Zionist history, but not because the older account is objectively false. Rather, I argue that the Israeli new history can answer the same questions as does the Zionist narrative plus those that the latter can not, and that it can do so in ways that are logical and compelling, if not definitive.

Nevertheless, the new history is not the final word on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Questions remain for the new interpretations. Why would a generation of Israeli historians now write texts that are so unflattering to Israel? Many nasty things have been said about this on Zionist Web sites and in chat rooms, though no one has presented a compelling answer to that question.

Historical interpretation and solving “real” political problems

Finally, the historical narrative one chooses plays an important role in “real” politics; new historians have had a significant influence on Israeli politics and society. In pragmatist terms, the way we write the past can have important effects on the politics of the present and future. Internalization of the Zionist program shows Israel as a weak, insecure state, surrounded by hostile enemies and continuously struggling for survival, despite its critical victories. This view informs the policies of most Likud Party leaders. Consider, for instance, former Prime Minister and current Finance Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, for whom the Palestinian-Israeli peace process is a strategic military problem rather than a domestic political problem. “Given the specifics of the West Bank,” Netanyahu contends, “the slogan ‘land for peace’ is singularly inappropriate: To achieve a sustainable peace, Israel must maintain a credible deterrent long enough to effect a lasting change in Arab attitudes. It is precisely Israel's control of this strategic territory that has deterred all-out war and has made eventual peace more likely.”⁹⁷

The Israeli new history yields a totally different form of politics, encapsulated in the political platforms of the Left wing of the Labor Party and the Leftist Meretz Party. Like the new historians, some leaders—for example, current Labor Party Chair Shimon Peres—have concluded that military power and strategic considerations will ultimately fail to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict: “To achieve peace, the basic problems of the Middle East need to be approached realistically. First and foremost, we must all acknowledge the futility of war: the Arabs cannot defeat Israel on the battlefield; Israel cannot dictate the conditions of peace to the Arabs.”⁹⁸

While we should not overstate the case that history drives politics, it is nonetheless important to acknowledge that all historical inquiry is initiated in response to contemporary stimuli.¹⁰⁰