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The Philadelphia Inquirer 's negative spotlight on Israel's 50th anniversary continued on February 1, with a Sunday Magazine feature story that sought to rewrite Israel's history to make Israel look like the real villain in the Israeli-Arab conflict.
"Rewriting History" was the title of the article, which focused on a small group of leftwing Israeli journalists and historians who claim to have discovered the "real history" of Israel, in which Israel is the oppressor and the Arabs are the oppressed. Unfortunately, the author of the article, Michael Kennedy --a Los Angeles Times correspondent on leave-- used much of his essay to promote, not analyze, the blame-Israel perspective.
Of the 50 paragraphs in Kennedy's article that quoted or paraphrased one side or the other in the debate, 42 were devoted to the views of the Israel-bashers. By contrast, historians who have criticized the Israel-bashers were given just 8 paragraphs to explain their perspective.
To make matters worse, 4 of those 8 'pro-Israel' paragraphs consisted of a summary of the traditional historians' view, which Kennedy presented in extreme and exaggerated language, making the traditionalist view seem unreasonable. Kennedy claimed, for example, that in the traditionalists' verson of history, "the new [Jewish] immigrants [to Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s] were paragons of fairness to the Arabs." In fact, mainstream Israeli historians do not say the Jewish settlers were "paragons of fairness." They merely point out, correctly, that the Jewish settlers' development projects increased the Arabs' standard of living; that the Jews shared their advances in medicine and education with the Arabs; and that the Arabs violently rejected the idea of ever compromising or coexisting with the Jews.
The bulk of Kennedy's Inquirer Magazine article featured the views of three of the more prominent "new historians": Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, and Tom Segev. Kennedy told his readers virtually nothing about the personal or political backgrounds of Morris, Pappe, and Segev. He described them as "Jewish scholars using documents from the national archives." There was only one passing reference, halfway through the article, to the fact that they are "left-leaning." The truth is that they are not merely "left-leaning," but devoted partisans of an extreme political viewpoint:
That Morris sees his "research" as serving a political agenda is evident from his declared hope that his work will "serve the purposes of peace and reconciliation between the warring tribes of that land." A noble goal, to be sure--but to what extent has Morris's work been influenced by a search for "peace" defined along extreme-leftwing lines? Anyone can go into an archive and find a document or two that seem to suit his political agenda. Documents can be mistranslated or misrepresented. Documents that reveal unwelcome facts can be ignored. The controversial new histories of Israel must be weighed alongside critiques by other, established historians. What Michael Kennedy and the Inquirer did was to swallow the Morris-Pappe-Segev view, and give short shrift to the opposing view.
Kennedy was so bent on blaming Israel for Mideast troubles that in some instances, he went even further than the "new historians" whom he champions. For example, Kennedy repeatedly mocked the traditionalist historians for saying that Arab leaders ordered some of the Palestinian Arabs to temporarily leave Palestine in 1948. According to Kennedy, there were no such orders, and he quoted a statement by Morris in which Morris said he found no evidence of "a blanket call" or "a campaign." Maybe not a blanket call or a campaign, but Morris's own book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, acknowledged numerous instances of Arab leaders telling Palestinian Arabs to leave. For example, on pages 66-67, Morris cites many cases of Arab leaders ordering the evacuation of women and children from Arab villages. And it wasn't always just women and children; on page 67, Morris reports that during April-May 1948, "more than 20 Arab villages were largely or completely evacuated by local Arab commanders, by Arab governments, or by the Arab Higher Committee, mostly for pre-invasion military reasons." He describes (pp.84-85) how Arab leaders ordered the approximately 70,000 Arabs of Haifa to leave in April 1948, and how their exodus was "a major direct precipitant" in the subsequent flight of some 50,000 Arabs from Jaffa and many from other areas of the country. Didn't Kennedy read those pages?
Morris, and journalists who sympathize with him, have preferred to emphasize the few cases he discovered in which local Israeli Army commanders ordered the evacuation of Arabs from a particular town for reasons of military necessity, during the 1948 Arab invasion of newborn Israel. Michael Kennedy makes much of Morris's discovery that young Yitzhak Rabin, then a lieutenant-colonel, ordered the departure of the Arab residents of Lydda, who proceeded to walk 10 miles down the road to the Arab town of Ramallah. There was nothing pleasant about the incident, but such things happen in all wars, and in this case the emigres were able to relocate to a nearby town among their kinsmen. Many Jews suffered far worse hardships, including the 800,000 who were stripped of their property and expelled from their homes in Arab countries, forced to relocate hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles away with only the shirts on their backs.
Now that would make an interesting "Israel at 50" story--how a tiny, financially-strapped new country successfully absorbed hundreds of thousands of penniless refugees. Why aren't those kinds of stories considered "news" by the editors of the Inquirer ...?