| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Israel's "New History" has itself become history. What in the late 1980s and 1990s appeared to be shocking revelations about Israeli policy in 1948 have become anodyne. In Israeli academia, many of the New Historians' arguments have become mainstream, as they have been debated, examined, and found to be by and large accurate. What is more, the New Historians' findings now spur little controversy in Israeli society as a whole. Some Israelis outside of academia have developed a more critical approach to their country's past, but many more have responded to the nearly constant Israeli-Arab strife of the past decade by forming a jaundiced view of the country's historical record and justifying Israeli aggression and brutality as unfortunate but necessary measures in an endless war against an unappeasable foe. Thus recent revisionist accounts of the 1967 war have received far less press and been far less controversial than their predecessors on 1948 and 1956. So what, Israelis may ask, if, as Tom Segev's massive tome on 1967 argues, Israel hankered for war in order to pull the country out of the funk induced by the 1966 recession?1
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