To the Editor:
Benny Morris does himself a grave disservice in "The New Historiography: Israel Confronts Its Past" (Tikkun, Nov./Dec. 1988) by lumping himself with Avi Shlaim (author of Collusion Across the Jordan) and Simha Flapan (The Birth of Israel). Simply put, there is no comparison between Morris and these authors.
In his own book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, Morris docs a valuable service by painstakingly going through the archives and reconstructing hundreds of incidents. His tone is impartial, his conclusions arc well-rounded and his goal is to determine historical truth. But the same can hardly be said of the other two the author discusses.
Shlaim's book suffers from an anti-Israel animus. He makes it his task to discredit those he calls "Zionist historians." In the process, he adopts some dubious positions. To take just one: Shlaim holds that David Bcn-Gurion, even as he declared a Jewish-Arab alliance to be one of his main objectives, "deep in his heart, rejoiced at the flight of the Arabs." This is calumny, not serious history.
As for Flapan, the less said the better. His screed is an embarrassment, filled with inaccuracies and anti-Zionist venom. Again, one example: Flapan argues that the Arab states invaded Israel in 1948 not to destroy Israel hut to stop King Abdullah of Jordan from achieving his dream of a greater Syria. This argument is about as preposterous as claiming that Hitler invaded Poland to prevent it from falling into Stalin's hands. Flapan's book may be the worst book on Israel ever issued by a reputable publisher.
Having distinguished so sharply between Morris, and Shlaim and Flapan, I should like to point out one discouraging feature they share in common: all three are very familiar with Israel but have little knowledge and even less interest in the Arab countries. This imbalance leads, almost inevitably, to distortion. The authors see Israel in a vacuum. Like a host of American critics of Israel (Bernard Avishai comes first to mind), they focus so intently on the Israeli polity that they lose sight of the larger context in which Israeli actions take place.
In doing so, they closely resemble those many American historians interested only in the United States. Whoever looks at the cold war only from the American side is almost certain to blame its occurrence on Washington. The same goes for these people's analysis of every other foreign policy issue from the Berlin blockade to the INF treaty. Only with a larger perspective is it possible to understand such an issue in its entirety and judge its rights and wrongs.
Daniel Pipes
Director, Foreign Policy Research Institute
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
