The Arab School of Thought

Although Isacoff calls for the inclusion of multiple schools, he does not include Arab or other non-Israeli schools in his article. At first, Isacoff's calls on scholars “to identify as many as possible of the various worldviews that pertain to the issues.”²

Yet he only notes the existence of non-Israeli historical schools in an endnote in which he also cites several “important Arabic sources.”³ This is especially puzzling given that Arab authors and other scholars who have written so-called pro-Arab accounts are addressing exactly the same questions as the old and new Israeli sources. They too place blame for events and, more specifically, answer the question of who started the 1956 and 1967 wars. I demonstrate this by comparing Isacoff's new historians to two well-known non-Israeli histories, Fred Khouri's Arab-Israeli Dilemma and David Hirst's The Gun and the Olive Branch.⁴

On the 1956 war, the new Israeli historians echoed previous claims by “Arab” historians. For example, Khouri too rejected the argument that Israel faced an imminent Egyptian attack in 1956.⁵

Hirst was more direct: “In early 1955 Bengurion [sic] put war with Egypt on his agenda. This was a deliberate act of policy.”⁶ One can also see examples in the secondary aspects of the 1956 war. For instance, before the 1956 war, Israel, Isacoff writes, “intentionally provoked fedayeen activity … [by] encouraging settlement in strategically prone border areas.” He supports this contention in an endnote by quoting a new Israeli historian.⁷ Khouri explained the border tension in a similar fashion: “Certain policies and actions of the Arab and Israeli authorities also produced frontier strife. For instance, Israel established a number of ‘fortified’ settlements right along the borders instead of a little distance away.”⁸

With regard to Israel and the 1967 war, many of Khouri's arguments paralleled those Isacoff attributed to new historians: “grave miscalculations” helped lead to war; “most reports indicated [Nasser] really wished to avoid” war; the Egyptian closure of the Straits of Tiran “did not justify starting a war”; and “Israel's security and existence were not as greatly or immediately menaced as it was made to appear.”⁹

In general, Khouri argues that all sides shared blame for what happened in 1967.¹⁰ Hirst places even more responsibility on Israel. Egypt's moves in May 1967 were “[a]ll that was needed for the unleashing of the Israeli war machine.” One Hirst subsection is entitled “Nasser Falls into the Trap.” Hirst added that some Israeli generals knew that Israel was in a superior military position rather than under the threat of annihilation.¹¹

The overlap between Arab historians and new historians is also apparent in what may be the most important debate in the conflict—the creation of Palestinian refugees in the 1948 war. The debate has two parts: Why did Palestinians leave, and why didn't they return during and after the war? On the first question, Benny Morris, seen as a key new Israeli historian, offers a highly nuanced conclusion, adding that “a single-cause explanation of the exodus from most sites is untenable.”¹²

But the weight of evidence for the flight of Palestinian refugees lies with Israel: “In general, throughout the war, the final and decisive precipitant to flight in most places was Haganah, IZL, LHI or IDF attack or the inhabitants' fear of imminent attack.”¹³

Much earlier, Walid Khalidi posited that Israeli “psychological and terroristic warfare” caused the Palestinian flight.¹⁴

Khouri embraced a multicausal explanation that included almost exactly the same causes and emphases as Morris's later work.¹⁵ Noting the initial flight of 30,000 upper- and middle-class Arab merchants and leaders as well as the many more Arabs who then left to escape combat areas and seek food, he continued: “After April 1, 1948, the Arab exodus accelerated as a result of several successful Jewish military offensives into Arab-inhabited territories and terroristic attacks by the Irgun [IZL] and the Stern Gang [LHI] against Arab civilians … to spread panic among the Arabs and to cause them to flee whenever Jewish forces approached.” As Yitzhak Rabin later admitted, 50,000 Palestinians were intentionally driven out from Lod and Ramle during an Israeli offensive after a consultation with David Ben Gurion.¹⁶ Israeli offensives often played a role in causing Arab flight, according to Khouri.¹⁷

On the second question, the return of Palestinian residents, Israel adopted an official policy of blocking the return and, when necessary, forcibly expelling Palestinians who nonetheless tried to return to their homes inside Israel. New historians like Morris and Arab historians like Khouri agree on this point.¹⁸

This bears on Sari Nusseibeh's preference for assessing the veracity of the claims rather than stopping with Isacoff's pragmatic metric.¹⁹

For decades, the writing on the wars looked like a conflict between two narratives, one Arab and one Israeli; their historical supporters in Europe and the United States lined up behind them. But by considering the Arab side along with the old and new Israeli perspectives, the symmetry begins to evaporate. It is not a definitive refutation of the old Israeli views to note that both old Arab and new Israeli scholars share many similarities on 1956 and 1967, but it is certainly not irrelevant either.²⁰

My point is not that the Arab historians deserve more credit than the new Israeli historians. They both have added to the debate in different ways, and the richness of documentary support in the new Israeli history is enlightening. Rather, my point is that the Arab scholars are asking and answering many of the same questions as the new Israeli historians and deserve a seat at any table that seeks to present the schools of thought on issues like the 1956 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars. Their absence in Isacoff's account illustrates one of the challenges of implementing a multiple schools approach: deciding which schools merit inclusion.

The claims of Arab and other histories are also crucial for understanding the choices that Schweller and Walt made in works published in 1992 and 1987, respectively. I agree with Isacoff that both works accept the old Israeli way of writing the about the 1956 war, but that is not because they rejected the new Israeli historians. Walt researched and wrote his work before the new historians emerged. Schweller wrote in the transitional period, but much of the early attention of new historians was on the 1948 war and the Palestinian refugees, not 1956. One can see this reflected in Isacoff's sources for his discussion of the 1956 war: all but Moshe Sharett's diaries were published in 1993 or later (Isacoff, endnotes 40–57). Later, Isacoff argues that the new historians see 1956 as “the product of a choice of strategy among viable alternatives.” In the supporting endnote (n. 65), he cites Shlaim 2000, Morris 1999, Ben-Eliezer 1998, Levy 1997, and Golani 1998. Morris's own work on the run-up to the 1956 war, Israel's Border Wars, 1949–1956, was published in 1993.

Schweller and Walt did have a choice, but it was between (old) Israeli and Arab histories, not two different Israeli narratives. While one could speculate about why they viewed the Arab school as less convincing, the bottom line is that they accepted the old Israeli versions and used them to bolster their larger IR arguments.²¹

Arab and other histories are not perfect and may contain their own distortions or misleading statements. Both Isacoff and Nusseibeh note that Palestinian and Arab histories of the Arab-Israeli conflict have not been subject to a revisionist movement. While some Arab historical revisionism has occurred, it has tended to focus on earlier periods of history than Isacoff addresses. Arab scholars, for example, have reassessed the development of modern Arab and Palestinian nationalism.²²

Some Arab policy makers have also tried to revise ancient history, arguing that the Jewish temple never stood in Jerusalem or that Palestinians are really descended from the Canaanites, the people who preceded the Israelites. These latter examples serve as a reminder that revision may not always serve the causes of peace and reconciliation.

Arab revisionism does not, however, constitute a school in any sense analogous to Israeli revisionism. First, most Arab countries are not democratic and have tightly guarded archival material and other information on major events since Israel's founding in 1948. Second, the Palestinians in particular do not have an established state apparatus with efficient record-keeping institutions and resources to facilitate historical scholarship. They also live under Israeli occupation, introducing another party who pays attention to any messages with political implications that emanate from academia. Third, the Israeli academic establishment is more deeply enmeshed in English-language academic discourse in the United States and Europe. For an example close to home, Israeli political scientists are frequent panelists at the APSA convention and publish in top U.S. political science journals. This integration means that changes in Israeli politics and history quickly appear in English—as was the case with the new Israeli historical revisionists. Thus scholars who speak neither Hebrew nor Arabic can readily integrate new Israeli scholarship into their own work in IR or other fields.

Reification of Schools

I agree with Isacoff that presenting the range of historical schools of thought on a given issue is an important way to be true to history. At the same time, highlighting broad categories may obscure the differences and cross-cutting nature of much scholarship. What should we do with authors who hold the new view on some issues and the old one on others? What if a member of the old school provides evidence for the new school? I do not reject a schools-based approach in favor of a facts-based approach, but rather simply note that both have drawbacks.

Ben Gurion appears as the embodiment of the old school in Isacoff's discussion of the 1967 war, but as he notes in another context, Ben Gurion was one of the few Israeli leaders who argued for “the immediate withdrawal from all the territories occupied” in 1967 because he foresaw the corrosive consequences of holding onto them.²³

Moshe Dayan's writings are also part of the old school in Isacoff's article, but his 1976 comment that 80 percent of the pre-1967 Israeli-Syrian border confrontations were intentionally provoked by Israel is one of the single-best facts that undermines the Israel-as-David and Syria-as-Goliath narrative.²⁴

Isacoff also rightly draws attention to Morris's more recent views. Morris's analysis of a different historical issue nicely illustrates how scholars cross paradigmatic lines. Morris the new historian, as in the interview with Ehud Barak cited by Isacoff, adopts a view of the Camp David summit that is entirely consistent with the old school of Israeli history. In Morris's eyes, the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is to blame for the summit's failure. Interestingly, in a major exchange in the New York Review of Books, Morris and Barak took that position against Robert Malley and Hussein Agha's argument that attributed the summit's failure to multiple causes.²⁵

In contrast with Nusseibeh's use of Camp David as an example of a case where “the truth is elusive,”²⁶ I have argued that the Barak/Morris view of the failed summit and the second Palestinian intifada (uprising) is much farther from the evidentiary record than a corresponding Palestinian version.²⁷

One can also see the difficulty in drawing lines by looking at the first major Arab reaction to Israel's victory—the Arab summit at Khartoum, Sudan, in August–September 1967. To Morris, the Arab leaders at Khartoum “hammered out a defiant, rejectionist platform that was to bedevil all peace moves in the region for a decade.”²⁸

Morris writes of the resulting impact that “Arab rejectionism [at Khartoum] was thus, in part at least, responsible for the gradual emergence of Israeli rejectionism and expansionism.”²⁹ In contrast, Khouri argued that the summit resolutions “reflected the views of the Arab moderates.” For instance, he wrote, “No references were made to military action or to the need to destroy Israel.”³⁰ This serves as a reminder that the Israeli debate is largely over revision of Israeli, not Arab, actions. Thus the view of Israel's role in the 1967 war changes but not the view of Arab postwar summitry and rhetoric.

Emphasizing the schools of thought rather than the historical episodes and facts may also lead to a second problem, an excessive focus on the schools per se rather than the historical substance. This already may be an issue in the subfield of IR, for instance. One sometimes hears off-the-cuff remarks about international relations from graduate students or non-IR political scientists who wonder whether the divisions between liberals, realists, constructivists, neoliberals, neorealists, Marxists, and so on are especially helpful, or whether after a certain point these interschool fights drain energy away from the real issues of international affairs. In a sense, then, what has happened in IR may serve as a cautionary note. Relying on schools of thought can be useful, but overreliance and the resulting reification should be avoided.

The Failure of Realism?

Isacoff offers several possible answers to the question of why Israel went to war in 1956 and 1967, but settles on an explanation that he says undermines realist thinking. He rejects the “system-strategic perspective” that is a reflection of both the old Israeli history and realism.³¹

Instead, he embraces “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.”³² While I agree that Israeli disunity (for example, Sharett versus Ben Gurion) undermines the claim that the international system constrains state choice regardless of the party or leader in power, the evidence that military or strategic factors shaped important Israeli thinkers is much stronger than Isacoff allows. Realism is still breathing.

Is the new Israeli history really at odds with realism? I think the answer is ambiguous. Yagil Levy's claim that Israeli militarism was an Ashkenazi power play is a sharp (liberal) contrast with realist thinking, but most other new historians as presented by Isacoff do not make similar claims. Instead, they accept the importance of strategic factors in Israel's thinking, but reject two narrower claims of the old school. First, the new historians accept that Israel had other, nonmilitary options for securing its existence. Second, Israel was relatively strong and not in a constant quest for survival. In other words, a devastating Arab attack was not imminent, especially before 1956.

This subtle difference in assessing realism comes out clearly in Isacoff's quotation from Gabriel Sheffer, a new historian: “[A]s 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 ‘war of choice’ in 1956.’”³³

Isacoff is correct that Sheffer rejects the idea that Israel was suddenly compelled in 1956 to balance against the Egyptian threat—but note that Sheffer's alternative explanation is still based on strategic factors.

Similarly, according to Motti Golani's Israel in Search of War, a prominent new history of Israel's role in the 1956 war, all of Israel's short- and long-term objectives before the war were strategic. In the short term, Israel wanted “to strengthen its alliance with France, neutralize the British threat, see Nasser's regime in Egypt removed, and open the Straits of Tiran.” In the long term, “it sought to reduce the level of military threat and change conditions in the Middle East in its favour.”³⁴

To do so Prime Minister Ben Gurion was willing to initiate a war against Egypt. He and his henchmen believed a war with Egypt was inevitable, though Golani argues that there was no evidence of Egyptian military preparations for an attack on Israel.³⁵ Ben Gurion decided Israeli war policy out of sight of the cabinet and the public and forced out his strongest opponent, Moshe Sharett.³⁶

Thus the critique of realism should be more nuanced. Isacoff needs to differentiate between a neorealist commitment to the system constraining states (and thus a state should react within the same range of choices regardless of which faction is in power) and decisions that are driven by strategic factors. Isacoff uses the two ideas interchangeably when much of the new history he cites really only undermines the former, neorealist idea.³⁷

If it turns out that Levy's argument about the sources of Israeli militarism is correct, Isacoff's initial, broader claims that all of realism is undermined will stand. But even if not, an amended version of his critique of realism is still significant. Israeli strategic thinking, whether one talks about Prime Ministers Ben Gurion and Sharett in the 1950s or Yitzhak Rabin and Benjamin Netanyahu in the 1990s, demonstrates the limitations of the unitary actor assumption. One does have to know something about who leads Israel to predict and understand fundamental issues such as Israel's grand strategy. Systemic dictates are not sufficient, but that is not the same as ruling out the influence on Israeli policy of all military or strategic factors.