The writing of any history is an art and not a science. History is not stagnant because there are always new materials discovered and new means used to analyze data. There is the bias and purpose of the writer. Israeli historiography is particularly complex and controversial because the many variables that contributed to its establishment and maintenance force rethinking and revision. When I published a history of the Arab-Israeli negotiating process in the 1970s, dominated by Sadat, Begin and Carter, I lacked access to primary source materials about what happened in those 13 days at Camp David in 1978. Only in 2015 did the full texts of all the Israeli-U.S. delegation meetings become available, and then only in Hebrew. There were no full renditions of these meetings in English, only summaries of them, with some of the sources closed for 100 years at the request of President Carter.
Another case in point: The history of Israel’s origins predating the 19thcentury is constantly being revised; before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s, evidence was scant about Jewish presence in ancient times, except for archeological inscriptions. Reading the Hebrew in Jerusalem’s Shrine of the Book, where the Scrolls are housed, adds enormous credibility to Jewish presence in Eretz Yisrael from the third century B.C.E. There is nothing illegitimate about Jewish presence in late Second Temple Jerusalem. Those materials in both cases remind one of the consistent need to clarify history and the historiography written about a place or event.
Israel’s modern territorial nationalist evolution over the last 200 years had a dramatic impact on Jews living in and coming to the Jewish state, on Jews living in the Diaspora, and on Arabs living in the Middle East. With a vast array of documents in Hebrew, Turkish, Arabic, German and other languages, we learn how modern Jewish presence grew from the 1820s forward. How the histories of those events are told and by whom continually establishes and refines Israel’s identity and how it is viewed externally by others. We also understand, because episodic immigrations to Eretz Yisrael occurred over that period, that many tell their history of Israel based upon their personal or familial stories rather than the collective welded together into an Israeli identity that is still in various phases of formation.
In addition to the presence of multiple inputs, sources, diaries, personal experiences and odysseys of survival that go into the writing of Israel’s history, multiple choices are available for those who teach Israel’s history when deciding where to be begin Israel’s story or the story of the Palestinians, Diaspora Jewish relations with Israel, and more.
No doubt that the writing of any history is subjective, no matter how objective the historian wishes to be. Choosing which historical renditions one should read or articles to include in teaching about an event dramatically influences one’s attitude about its unfolding. What one omits from the reading or the telling of history, in this case Israel’s story, says volumes about the educator’s biases, or what they do not know and perhaps refuse to learn, because particular content may not comport with a particular political outlook. Historians sometimes choose to tell a story that helps to substantiate their viewpoint or follows a preferred ideology. They write histories that are broad or narrow in the period covered.
Today when one reads a slice of modern Israeli history or finds a monograph of Israel reviewed in a journal, it is simple to detect a reviewer’s biases by the terms used. A history of Israel written in 1960 would never have used the phrase “the Zionist project,” as if it were a classroom assignment designed by a woodworking teacher. Nor would one find a 1970s description of Israel as a “colonial-settler enterprise.” On another continuum, if one writes Israel’s history by connecting it to biblical times, one tells a different history than if one begins with advent of 19th century Zionism, as compared with beginning the story of modern Israel at the Holocaust. Starting before 1939 and going back to the origins of Jewish peoplehood covers the Jewish expulsions from Eretz Yisrael and Spain in 67 C.E. and 1492, respectively; the two centuries of Zionism’s bubbling before Herzl in the 1890s, as detailed in a 1906 entry on Zionism’s historical origins and definitional varieties; and the period of the New Yishuv from the 1880s to 1948, showing unmistakably that Jews were engaged in substantial nation-building well before the rise of Nazi Germany. One then recognizes an evolutionary historical process. Showing that Jewish nation-building was slow and methodical and characterized by ebbs and flows, progress and multiple shortcomings and failures, predicates the Zionist-Israel story as a movement and a move to change the Jewish tomorrow. Forming a nucleus for the Jewish state was a decades-long process.
Choosing instead to recount Israel’s story by beginning after World War II and the end of the Holocaust perpetuates the assumption that Israel came into being only on account of worldwide guilt after a massive tragedy in Europe, as if to claim that Zionism’s attachment to renewing Jewish presence in an ancient homeland virtually did not exist. That assumption is debunked by the Dead Sea Scrolls and dozens of other archeological and written sources.
Israel’s historiography is not about the post-June 1967 war period, Israel’s acquisition of the territories taken in that war, and the building of settlements that knocked heads with the desire by some to use the territories for a Palestinian entity or state. Israel’s story is about a long past. Indeed, Arabs living in Palestine, like the Ottoman Empire and British Mandate regimes that ruled there, had a direct impact on how the state evolved. If learners claim that Israel is only a result of European antisemitism, little or no validity is placed on the biblical connection of Jews to the Land of Israel or to the concept that Diaspora Jewish peoplehood connected itself to Eretz Yisrael centuries before modern Zionism. The kind of historiography that limits itself to the last half-century is nothing more than delegitimization of the Jewish connection to the land.
Moreover, the evidence and sources available are critical in shaping the kind of history written. The way a historian collects evidence and fashions it into a nuanced story matters. Some historians might intentionally or unintentionally omit facts or inaccurately explain an event because they failed to use available sources. Historians have also been known to invent or embellish sources. What if one is writing about the events between 1947 and 1949 and has access to Hebrew and English sources but no Arabic sources to recount how Arab governments functioned at the time? Omitting sources skews history. Why have so few histories of Palestine, Zionism and Arabs living in Palestine used Arabic newspapers of the period, which reveal so much about Palestinian Arab society and its dysfunctional situation from the early 1940s forward? Is it only because few researchers read Arabic, or is it perhaps because of a desire to perpetuate the myth that “Europeans created Israel,” not the Zionists, and certainly not with Arab collaboration? (See Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows, University of California Press, 2008).
If one writes a history only based on the historical memory of one person, then it is a narrow recollection. Sometimes writers of history will choose to quote people who are dead. If that is the case, and sources cannot be verified as accurate, then this history is one-sided because no documentary evidence is laced into the story. Dead people cannot refute assertions or assumptions. Memoirs contribute wonderfully to our knowledge of events, but rarely are they self-critical, certainly not self-deprecating. If all we read were memoirs, our historiography of a topic or issue would be narrow, biased and not very nuanced. Furthermore, it is critical to explore multiple sources from multiple perspectives. It is impossible to understand a complex history if only one side is represented.
Finally, it matters when a particular history is crafted. A history of Israel’s establishment written in the 1950s would certainly be different from a history of its founding — whatever date is used for its founding, 1948 or earlier — if written in the 1990s. The first version would not include sources that might be confidential or secret, housed in archives that would not be open for use by the historian until a quarter- or half-century after an event took place, say in the mid-1970s or end of the century. The first hypothetical version published in the 1950s would not have had a historian influenced by subsequent events, like the 1967 and 1973 wars, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, or Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, or the dramatic influence of Israel’s building of settlements in the territories after the June 1967 war.
Challenging yesterday’s interpretation, layering it with added information, taking previously used sources and reworking them with new methodologies, even integrating them with different disciplines such as sociology or political science or artificial intelligence, permit arriving at dramatically different outcomes that remain in the realm of history writing. Too often contemporary issues are viewed through a particular, narrow political prism. That in turn determines how an event of yesterday is portrayed and included in a history aimed at comporting a desired conclusion.
Newly written histories about Israel have often dealt with contentious issues. These have included the degree of responsibility for the emergence of the Palestinian refugee issue of 1947 to 1949, which certainly began with Arab peasant displacement through landowner greed and Arab sales to Jews that began from before World War I. Should Arab leaders be held accountable for the consequences of not having an Arab state by 1949 because they did not accept the partition of Palestine into two states in 1947 and the presence of any Jewish entity west of the Jordan River? Some histories today still question whether Jews constitute a people or nation or only a religion. Likewise, do Palestinians constitute a distinct people deserving of a territory? Does it matter when they crystallized a national identity?
Israel remains a relatively young country but a relatively old nation. Many of Israel’s policy matters remain to be defined: borders; relationships with neighbors; being Jewish and democratic, if those two concepts can exist side by side; the interaction of religion and state; what to do with some of the territories taken in June 1967; and how and if to unfold a permanent political outcome with the Palestinians and all of Israel’s geographic neighbors.
Unanswered questions in Israel’s history mean that Israel’s historiography remains open to new interpretations of how the state unfolded and continues to evolve. They also mean that with the use of the internet and social media, the historiography of Israel remains similarly open to abuse, exaggeration and myth-making. If the myths are told often enough, they will appear as truths without substantiation. With accurate clarification as new materials and methods are used, there will be terrific new histories written, along with bountiful examples of derision in Israel’s historiography.
— Ken Stein, July 2023
