Editing 1948 Arab–Israeli War (section)

==Historiography==
Since the war, different [[Historiography|historiographical]] traditions have interpreted the events of 1948 differently; in the words of the [[New Historians|New Historian]] [[Avi Shlaim]], "each side subscribes to a different version of events."<ref name="Shlaim-1995">{{Cite journal |last=Shlaim |first=Avi |author-link=Avi Shlaim |date=1995 |title=The Debate about 1948 |journal=International Journal of Middle East Studies |volume=27 |issue=3 |pages=287–304 |doi=10.1017/S0020743800062097 |issn=0020-7438 |jstor=176252 |s2cid=55258863}}</ref> In the Israeli narrative, the war is Israel's War of Independence.<ref name="Shlaim-1995" /> In the Palestinian narrative, the War of 1948 is inextricable from the [[Nakba]], the Zionist movement is one of [[Zionism as settler colonialism|settler colonialism]],<ref>{{Cite book |last=Khalidi |first=Rashid |title=The Hundred Years' War on Palestine : A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 |date=2020 |publisher=Henry Holt and Company |isbn=978-1-62779-855-6 |edition=First |location=New York |oclc=1090697006}}</ref> and the Israelis are seen as [[Conquest|conquerors]] and the Palestinians as victims.<ref name="Shlaim-1995" /> The different narratives of 1948 reflect these different perceptions.<ref name="Shlaim-1995" />

An issue affecting the historiography of 1948 is access to sources and archives, which may have been destroyed, appropriated, censored, or otherwise made unavailable to some or all researchers.<ref name="Shlaim-1995" /><ref name="Indiana University Press-2016">{{Cite book |title=The war of 1948 : representations of Israeli and Palestinian memories and narratives |date=2016 |editor1=Avraham Sela |editor2=Alon Kadish |isbn=978-0-253-02341-4 |location=Bloomington |oclc=957554870 |publisher= Indiana University Press}}</ref> Linguistic barriers represent another hurdle, as most research is published exclusively in the author's native language and is not translated.<ref name="Indiana University Press-2016" />

The historiography of 1948 is tied to political [[Legitimacy (political)|legitimacy]] in the present and has implications for the [[Israeli–Palestinian conflict]].<ref name="Sela-2016">{{Cite book |last1=Sela |first1=Avraham |title=The war of 1948 : representations of Israeli and Palestinian memories and narratives |last2=Caplan |first2=Neil |date=2016 |editor1=Avraham Sela |editor2=Alon Kadish |isbn=978-0-253-02341-4 |location=Bloomington |chapter=Epilogue: Reflections on Post-Oslo Israeli and Palestinian History and Memory of 1948 |oclc=957554870 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=FVGSDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA204 |publisher= Indiana University Press}}</ref> According to [[Avraham Sela]] and Neil Caplan:<blockquote>A major reason for this grip of the past over the present is the unfulfilled quest of both Israelis and Palestinians for legitimacy, in one or more of the following three senses: (a) each party's sense of its own legitimacy as a national community entitled to its own sovereign state; (b) each party's willingness to grant legitimacy to at least part of the competing national narrative of the other; and (c) the international community's extension of legitimacy to the competing rights and claims of Israelis and Palestinians.<ref name="Sela-2016" /></blockquote>The narratives of 1948 have also had implications for [[Palestinian refugees]].<ref name="Indiana University Press-2016" />{{Rp|page=211}}

=== Israeli narratives ===
The Israelis, whether or not they were conquerors, were irrefutably the victors of the war, and for this reason among others, "they were able to propagate more effectively than their opponents their version of this fateful war."<ref name="Shlaim-1995" /> Only in 1987 was that narrative effectively challenged outside the Arab world.<ref name="Shlaim-1995" />

==== Zionist narrative ====
Avi Shlaim gives the conventional Zionist narrative or the "old history" of the 1948 war as follows:<blockquote>The conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine came to a head following the passage, on 29 November 1947, of the United Nations partition resolution that called for the establishment of two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jews accepted the U.N. plan despite the painful sacrifices it entailed, but the Palestinians, the neighboring Arab states, and the Arab League rejected it. Great Britain did everything in its power toward the end of the Palestine Mandate to frustrate the establishment of the Jewish state envisaged in the UN plan. With the expiry of the Mandate and the proclamation of the State of Israel, seven Arab states sent their armies into Palestine with the firm intention of strangling the Jewish state at birth. The subsequent struggle was an unequal one between a Jewish David and an Arab Goliath. The infant Jewish state fought a desperate, heroic, and ultimately successful battle for survival against overwhelming odds. During the war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled to the neighboring Arab states, mainly in response to orders from their leaders and despite Jewish pleas to stay and demonstrate that peaceful coexistence was possible. After the war, the story continues, Israeli leaders sought peace with all their heart and all their might but there was no one to talk to on the other side. Arab intransigence was alone responsible for the political deadlock, which was not broken until President Anwar Sadat's visit to Jerusalem thirty years later.<ref name="Shlaim-1995" /></blockquote>According to Shlaim, this narrative is "not history in the proper sense of the word," as most of the literature on the war was produced{{snd}}not by professional academic historians{{snd}}but rather by participants in the war, politicians, soldiers, and state-sponsored historians, as well as by sympathetic journalists, chroniclers, and biographers.<ref name="Shlaim-1995" /> It also portrays Israelis as morally superior, lacks political analysis, and gives undue weight to "the heroic feats of the Israeli fighters."<ref name="Shlaim-1995" /> This [[Nationalist historiography|nationalist narrative]] was taught in Israeli schools and used for gaining legitimacy internationally.<ref name="Shlaim-1995" />

==== New Historians ====
{{Further|New Historians}}The standard Zionist narrative of the war remained unchallenged outside the Arab world until the war's fortieth anniversary, when a number of critical books came out, including [[Simha Flapan]]'s ''The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities'' (1987), [[Benny Morris]]'s ''The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem'' (1987), [[Ilan Pappé]]'s ''Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948–51'' (1988), and Shlaim's ''Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement and the Partition of Palestine'' (1988).<ref name="Shlaim-1995" /> These writers came to be known as [[New Historians]] or "post-Zionists."''<ref name="Pappe-2009">{{Cite journal |last=Pappé |first=Ilan |date=2009-10-01 |title=The Vicissitudes of the 1948 Historiography of Israel |journal=Journal of Palestine Studies |volume=39 |issue=1 |pages=6–23 |doi=10.1525/jps.2010.XXXIX.1.6 |hdl=10871/15209 |issn=0377-919X|hdl-access=free }}</ref>''

According to Shlaim, the new historians disagreed with the Zionist narrative on six main points: British policy with regard to the Yishuv at the end of the Palestine Mandate, the military balance in 1948, the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem, the nature of relations between Israelis and Jordanians during the war, Arab aims in the war, and the reasons peace remained elusive after the war.<ref name="Shlaim-1995" />

Among their most vitriolic critics was [[Shabtai Teveth]], biographer of [[David Ben-Gurion]], who published "The New Historians," a series of four weekly full-page articles attacking the new historians, in [[Haaretz]] May 1989.<ref name="Shlaim-1995" /> Teveth claimed that the new historiography was flawed in its practice and that it was politically motived, that it was pro-Palestinian and aimed to [[Delegitimisation of Israel|delegitimize]] the State of Israel.<ref name="Shlaim-1995" />

==== Neo-Zionist narratives ====
[[Ilan Pappé]] identifies a turn in predominant Israeli narratives about 1948 in September 2000. In the climate of the [[Second Intifada]] and in the [[Post-9/11]] period, "not only were Israel's brutal military operations against the Palestinians during the new intifada seen as justified, but so was their systematic expulsion in 1948."<ref name="Pappe-2009" /> Evidence of the expulsions, massacres, and war crimes of 1948 brought to light by the New Historians could no longer be ignored, but writers of what Pappé calls a "neo-Zionist" narrative justified these as necessary or unavoidable.<ref name="Pappe-2009" />

In this period, the focus of Israeli historical writing on 1948 shifted largely from its human impact back to its military aspects.<ref name="Pappe-2009" /> Neo-Zionist writers were given selective access to top-secret material, to which writers critical of Zionism would not have been given access, and much of their work was published by the [[Israeli Ministry of Defense]].<ref name="Pappe-2009" />

Among those Pappé associated with the neo-Zionist perspective were [[Benny Morris]] (who had become more outspokenly defensive of Zionism by this time), {{Ill|Daniel Gutwein|he|דניאל גוטוויין}}, [[Mordechai Bar-On]], [[Yoav Gelber]], Tamir Goren, {{Ill|Arnon Golan|he|ארנון גולן}}, Alon Kadish, and {{Ill|Yoav Peleg|he|יואב פלג}}, as well as the journal [[Azure (magazine)|''Techelet'']] .<ref name="Pappe-2009" />

=== Palestinian narratives ===
Unlike Israeli narratives that shifted over the decades, Palestinian narratives of 1948 have been more or less constant, focusing on Palestinians' indigenous rights to Palestine, Palestinian victimhood, dispossession, displacement, exile, statelessness, and more "unrequited grievances against colonialism and Zionism."<ref name="Indiana University Press-2016" />{{Rp|page=|pages=209–211}} The term '[[Nakba]]' to describe the Palestinian catastrophe in the war of 1948 was coined in [[Constantin Zureiq|Constantin Zureiq's]] 1948 book ''[[Ma'na an-Nakba]]''.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Khalidi |first=Rashid |title=The war for Palestine : rewriting the history of 1948 |date=2007 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |editor1=Eugene L. Rogan |editor2=Avi Shlaim |isbn=978-0-511-37135-6 |edition=2nd |location=Cambridge |chapter=1 The Palestinians and 1948: the underlying causes of failure |oclc=192047956}}</ref> [[Aref al-Aref]] wrote a six volume work titled {{Ill|an-Nakba (book)|lt=an-Nakba|ar|النكبة (كتاب)|italic=y}} that was published in Arabic in the 1950s.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Gelber |first=Yoav |title=Making Israel |date=2010-04-23 |publisher=University of Michigan Press |others=Benny Morris |isbn=978-0-472-02652-4 |language=en |chapter=The History of Zionist Historiography: From Apologetics to Denial |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=0pVFDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA47}}</ref>

Palestinian narratives have focused on countering the dominant Zionist narrative; the preeminent Palestinian historian of 1948 [[Walid Khalidi]] has dedicated much of his career to disproving the official Israeli narrative that the [[1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight]] was voluntary.<ref name="Indiana University Press-2016" />{{Rp|page=211}}

[[Rashid Khalidi]] and other historians hold that "there is no established, authoritative Palestinian master narrative."<ref name="Indiana University Press-2016" />{{Rp|page=212}} They attribute this to, among other reasons, the dispersed and fragmented state of the Palestinian community and the loss, destruction, or appropriation by Israel of relevant documents and libraries.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Khalidi |first=Rashid |url=http://worldcat.org/oclc/1050548811 |title=The Iron Cage : The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood |year=2006 |publisher=Oneworld Publications |isbn=978-1-78074-808-5 |oclc=1050548811}}</ref><ref name="Indiana University Press-2016" />{{Rp|page=212}} Without access to much in the way of archival materials, Palestinian historians have made use of [[oral history]].<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Khalidi |first=Rashid R. |date=1988 |title=Revisionist Views of the Modern History of Palestine: 1948 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/41857981 |url-status=live |journal=Arab Studies Quarterly |volume=10 |issue=4 |pages=425–432 |issn=0271-3519 |jstor=41857981 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230304193807/https://www.jstor.org/stable/41857981 |archive-date=2023-03-04 |access-date=2023-03-04}}</ref><ref name="Indiana University Press-2016" />{{Rp|page=214}}

=== Arab narratives ===
In the narratives of the wider Arab-Muslim world, 1948 is seen as an "Arab debacle," representative of the region's social and political decline from its "glorious distant past."<ref name="Indiana University Press-2016" />{{Rp|page=210}} The official narratives of Arab states on 1948 tended to be [[Apologia|apologetic]] with the goal of defending their political legitimacy, while the [[Arab nationalism|Arab nationalists]] wrote with a focus on distilling and extracting historical lessons to galvanize Arab society, politics, and ideology in preparation for the next conflict with Israel{{snd}}neither approach bridled itself too much with historical accuracy.<ref>{{Cite book |title=The war for Palestine : rewriting the history of 1948 |date=2007 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |editor1=Eugene L. Rogan |editor2=Avi Shlaim |isbn=978-0-511-37135-6 |edition=2nd |location=Cambridge |oclc=192047956}}</ref>{{Rp|page=6}}

=== Western narratives ===

==== In the United States ====
The American journalist [[Joan Peters|Joan Peters']] 1984 book ''[[From Time Immemorial]]'' had a massive impact on how 1948 was understood in popular and political narratives in the United States.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Said |first=Edward W. |date=1986-01-01 |title=The Joan Peters Case*: From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, by Joan Peters |journal=Journal of Palestine Studies |volume=15 |issue=2 |pages=144–150 |doi=10.2307/2536835 |issn=0377-919X |jstor=2536835}}</ref><ref>[[Norman Finkelstein|Finkelstein, N. G.]] 1988. "Disinformation and the Palestine Question: The Not-So-Strange Case of Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial". In ''Blaming the Victims, Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question'', ed. E. W. Said and C. Hitchens, pp. 33–69. London: [[Verso Books|Verso]].</ref>

[[Ilan Pappé]] asserts the neo-Zionist narrative was pushed in the United States most passionately by [[Michael Walzer]], and by [[Anita Shapira]] and [[Derek Penslar]] with their 2003 ''Israeli Historical Revisionism: From Left to Right.<ref name="Pappe-2009" />''