Israel’s “New Historians” Taking Down the Myths of Zionism

Israel’s “New Historians” Now Refute Myths of the Founding of the State
“Since the 1980s,...Israeli scholars [have] concurred with their Palestinian counterparts that Zionism was...carried out as a pure colonialist act against the local population: a mixture of exploitation and expropriation...

“They were motivated to present a revisionist point of view to a large extent by the declassification of relevant archival material in Israel, Britain and the United States. [For example,]...

Challenging the Myth of Annihilation
“The new historiographical picture is a fundamental challenge to the official history that says the Jewish community faced possible annihilation on the eve of the 1948 war. Archival documents expose a fragmented Arab world wrought by dismay and confusion and a Palestinian community that possessed no military ability with which to frighten the Jews...

Israel’s Responsibility for Refugees
“The Jewish military advantage was translated into an act of mass expulsion of more than half of the Palestinian population. The Israeli forces, apart from rare exceptions, expelled the Palestinians from every village and town they occupied. In some cases, this expulsion was accompanied by massacres [of civilians] as was the case in Lydda, Ramleh, Dawimiyya, Sa’sa, Ein Zietun, and other places. Expulsion also was accompanied by rape, looting, and confiscation [of Palestinian land and property]...

The Myth of Arab Intransigence
“[The U.N.] convened a peace conference in Lausanne, Switzerland in the spring of 1949. Before the conference, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution that in effect replaced the November 1947 partition resolution. This new resolution, Resolution 194 of December 11, 1948, accepted [U.N. Mediator, Count] Bernadotte’s triangular basis for a comprehensive peace: an unconditional return of all the refugees to their homes, the internationalization of Jerusalem, and the partitioning of Palestine into two states. [Just over two months earlier, in Jerusalem on September 17, 1948, the Zionist terror group LeHI assassinated Count Folke Bernadotte for his initiating this plan.] This time, several Arab states and various representatives of the Palestinians accepted this [Resolution 194] as a basis for negotiations, as did the United States, which was running the show at Lausanne...Prime Minister David Ben Gurion strongly opposed any peace negotiations along these lines...The only reason he was willing to allow Israel to participate in the peace conference was his fear of an angry American reaction...The road to peace was not taken due to Israeli, not Arab, intransigence.

Conclusions
“The new Israeli historians...wish to rectify what their research reveals as past evils...There was a high price exacted in creating a Jewish state in Palestine. And there were victims, the plight of whom still fuels the fire of conflict in Palestine.”
– Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe in “The Link,” January, 1998.

Rabbi Mayer Schiller on ‘Victimology’
“Jewish proponents of the ‘victim’ card are aware, not only of its social effectiveness, but of its usefulness as a means of insuring Jewish solidarity and, hence, survival. If we were forever hated by all, and are doomed to be forever hated by all, then we’d best stick together and make the best of it...Personally, I have never found this view of the eternally-hating Gentile to have any resemblance with reality. It seems a myth, pure and simple, and an ugly one at that.

“Is it a good means of social control? Perhaps, but at what cost? It strips the faith and history of Jew and Gentile alike of all but their months of antagonism. It wallows in evil imagery and postulates a forever morally superior Jew, victimized by the forever morally inferior ‘Goy’...I have spent most of my adult life among Hasidic Jews, almost all of whom were Holocaust survivors, and I’ve heard almost nothing of the relentless harping on victimology and our need to forever memorialize it...(Victimology) allows Jews to bypass their own faith and offers the national allegiance of Holocaust/Israel in its place.”
– Rabbi Mayer Schiller, quoted in “Issues of the American Council for Judaism,” Summer 1998.