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NEW INTERPRETATIONS?
As for new interpretations, some are indeed new, but only because they are flat wrong. Ilan Pappé has gone so far as to argue that the outcome of the 1947-49 war had been predetermined in the political and diplomatic corridors of power "long before even one shot had been fired."20 To which, one can only say that the State of Israel paid a high price indeed to effect this predetermined outcome: the war's six thousand fatalities represented 1 percent of Israel's total Jewish population, a higher human toll than that suffered by Great Britain in World War II.21 Further, Israel's battlefield losses during the war were about the same as those of the Palestinians; and given that its population was roughly half the latter's size, Israel lost proportionately twice the percentage of the Palestinians.22
Other interpretations ring truer, but only because they are old and familiar. Shlaim concedes that his charge of Jordanian-Israeli collusion is not a new one but was made decades before him.23 In fact, this conspiracy theory has been quite pervasive. In Arab historiography of an anti-Hashemite caste, "the collusion myth became the crux of an historical indictment against the king for betraying the Arab national cause in Palestine."24 On the Israeli side, both left- and right-wingers have levelled this same criticism at the government's conduct of the 1947-49 war. Shlaim has hardly broken new ground.
Shlaim's main claim to novelty lies in his challenging "the conventional view of the Arab-Israeli conflict as a simple bipolar affair in which a monolithic and implacably hostile Arab world is pitted against the Jews."25 But this "conventional view" does not exist. Even such passionately pro-Israel feature films on the 1947-49 war as Exodus and Cast a Giant Shadow do not portray "a monolithic and implacably hostile Arab world pitted against the Jews," but show divided Arab communities in which some leaders would rather not fight the Jews and others would cooperate with the Jews against their Arab "brothers." And what applies to popular movies applies all the more to scholarly writings. Not one of the studies by the "old historians" subscribes to the stereotypical approach attached to them by Shlaim.
The same applies to Morris. His claim that "what happened in Palestine/Israel over 1947-9 was so complex and varied . . . that a single-cause explanation of the exodus from most sites is untenable"26 echoes not only Aharon Cohen's and Rony Gabbay's conclusions of thirty years earlier27 but also the standard explanation of the Palestinian exodus by such "official Zionist" writers as Joseph Schechtman: "This mass flight of the Palestinian Arabs is a phenomenon for which no single explanation suffices. Behind it lies a complex of apparently contradictory factors."28
Even the claim to novelty is not new! Aharon Klieman, the quintessential "old historian," wrote in his study of Hashemite-Zionist relations, published just two years before Shlaim's book, that "it has been a commonplace to present the Palestine or the Arab-Israeli conflict in all its historical stages as a simple bilateral conflict. . . . It is a mistake to present the Arab side to the equation as a monolithic bloc. The `Arab camp' has always been divided and at war with itself."29
At times, the new historians themselves realize they are recycling old ideas. For example, Shlaim acknowledged that their arguments were foreshadowed by such writers as Gabbay, Israel Baer, Gabriel Cohen, and Meir Pail.30 In all, the new historians have neither ventured to territory unknown to earlier generations of scholars, nor made major factual discoveries, nor provided truly original interpretations, let alone developed novel historical methodologies or approaches. They have used precisely the same research methods and source-material as those whose work they disdain -- the only difference between these two groups being the interpretation given to their findings. Let us now turn to the accuracy of those interpretations.
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