BOOKS
669
Debunking the Debunkers
F ABRICATING I SRAELI HISTORY:
THE " NEW
HISTORIANS."
By Efraim
Karsh. Frank Cass and Co. $17.50
In
What Is History?
the famous English historian E . H . Carr said that "the
facts of history never come to us 'pure,' since they do not and cannot exist
in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder.
It
follows that when we take up a work of history, our first concern should
be not with the facts that it contains but with the historian who wrote it."
Carr was right to point out that the ideal of "objective history," or his–
torical truth, can never really be attained because the historian's product
will always reflect his or her biases. Still, some historians come much clos–
er to the ideal than others. The best historians collect all of the available
facts and then make reasonable judgments about the past on the basis of
these facts. Less scrupulous historians, on the other hand, neither collect all
of the available facts nor make reasonable judgments. Rather, they gener–
ally emphasize carefully selected subsets of the available facts and interpret
them in ways that serve their ideological agendas. Carr's advice to know
the historian applies with special cogency to these "political" historians.
Israel's "New Historians," who emerged in the middle of the 1980s
anlidst a tremendous amount of self-congratulatory fanfare, are quintes–
sential political historians. Their mission, as they candidly adnllt, is to
debunk the "myths" of what they call "official Zionist history," as well as
to unmask the alleged academic propagandists who have produced this
history over the last five decades, all in order to help pave the way for a
"just" (read: pro-Arab) solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. To justify
major Israeli concessions, primarily to the Palestinian Arabs, they have
rewritten the history surrounding the birth of the Jewish state, asserting
that putatively untapped sources of information-mainly official
documents-prove that Israel is largely, if not solely, responsible for caus–
ing and perpetuating the Arab-Israeli conflict.
In placing the blame squarely on the Jewish state, the New Historians
have not broken any new ground. Envenomed critics of Zionism and
Israel-men like Edward Said and Noam Chomsky-have routinely
hurled the same charges over the years. But because the scribblings of the
Saids and Chornskys of this world have been so mendacious-and because
their desire to see the Jewish state destroyed has been so obvious-their
views on the Arab-Israeli conflict have not become very fashionable
among serious scholars. Indeed, only like-minded anti-Zionist extremists
