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PARTISAN REVIEW
have given their views much credence. The writings of the New
Historians, to the contrary, have attracted considerable attention from seri–
ous scholars, because they appear to conform to the requirements of
genuine scholarship and, perhaps, because their political purpose is not
nearly as blatant and sinister.
In this easy-to-read and thoroughly convincing volume of historical
detective work, Efraim Karsh strips away the academic cloak in which the
New Historians have wrapped themselves. He demonstrates not only that
they have reached baseless (even ludicrous) conclusions, but also that their
historiography is downright dishonest. Karsh, a noted Middle East expert
and editor of the professional journal
Israel Affairs,
specifically takes to task
the two most prominent New Historians: Benny Morris, who has
researched the origins of the Palestinian Arab refugee problem, and Avi
Shlaim, who has looked into Zionist-Transjordanian-British relations in
the 1947-49 period. By painstakingly sifting and evaluating the evidence
that Morris and Shlaim used to make their respective cases-and by ci ting
additional evidence that they either overlooked or ignored-Karsh shows
that, far from being undermined by their "discoveries," the traditional,
non-revisionist version of Israeli history is essentially complete and accurate.
Morris's most sensational charge is that, throughout the 1930s and
1940s, the Zionist leadership in general, and David Ben-Gurion in partic–
ular, zealously entertained the idea of "transfer"-that is, the idea that at
least a part of the Palestinian Arab population should be resettled outside
of Palestine, by force if necessary, to make room for a Jewish state. But this
conclusion, Karsh explains, rests entirely on the unethical use of evidence,
such as deliberate (and clever) editing of documents to get them to say
more or less the opposi te of what they really say. When the original doc–
uments are examined in their proper historical context, he shows, it
immediately becomes apparent that neither the Zionist leadership nor
David Ben-Gurion ever took the transfer idea to heart. Rather, they con–
sidered it only briefly, during the debate over the 1937 Peel Partition
Plan-a plan that envisaged the creation of separate Jewish and Arab states
in Palestine-as possible compensation for the Zionist movement's agree–
ment to surrender its claims to most of Palestine's territory. Moreover, the
documents reveal that, for the Zionist leadership to approve of a popula–
tion transfer, very specific conditions first had to be met: the surrounding
Arab states and the Palestinian Arabs had to consent to the transfer; the
Zionist movement had to have no hand in actually carrying out the trans–
fer; and the British had to take full responsibility for resettling the
uprooted Palestinian Arabs. In the event, the Peel Partition Plan died a
quick death, and so did the transfer idea in the mind of the Zionist leadership.
