Two People, Two Enemies.(World Affairs)(Arab-Israeli conflic)

An Israeli historian sees no hope for settlement with the Palestinians.

I remember the moment when the Palestinian Diaspora began to interest me, professionally. it was in Rashidiye Camp, outside Tyre, Lebanon, in June 1982--just after the Israel Defense Forces had scythed through on their way north to oust the Palestine Liberation Organization from the country. A journalist at the time, I picked my way through the devastated buildings. Most of the men had fled or been detained or killed by the Israelis, but I was struck by a group of old women hunched over a tabun, an outdoor oven, making pita bread far from their homeland. A few weeks later, a stash of documents produced in 1948 by the Palmach--the strike force of the Haganah, the main Zionist underground in Palestine--was opened for me, revealing why and how many of these people had been displaced as Israel was born.

My historical account of that event, published a few years later, was greeted with some acclaim by many Palestinians and by their sympathizers--and with much shock by Israelis, who had been brought up to believe, or to pretend to believe, that the Palestinians had fled their homes four decades earlier because of orders or advice from their leaders. In certain places, at certain times, there had been such advice and orders, of course. But there had also been outright Israeli expulsions, as well as the chaos of British withdrawal and economic hardship and anxiety about an uncharted future under Jewish rule. In most places it was the flail and fear of onrushing hostilities that had set some 700,000 Arabs on the roads.

I and several other young Israeli historians were dubbed "revisionists" and commonly assumed to be doves. But what brought me to my conclusions about 1948 were the facts, not my political views. Contrary to current historiographic discourse, I believe there is such a thing as the truth--what, why and how things happened--and I've always sought it in my research. If I've since come to a much bleaker opinion about the possibility of reconciliation between Jews and Palestinians--many would now call me a hawk--it is also because of that research.

During the 1990s, as the Oslo peace process gained momentum, I was cautiously optimistic about the prospects for peace. But at the same time I was scouring the just-opened archives of the Haganah and the IDF. Studying the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict--in particular the pronouncements and positions of the Palestinian leadership from the 1920s on--left me chilled. Their rejection of any compromise, whether a partition of Palestine between its Jewish and Arab inhabitants or the creation of a binational state with political parity between the two communities, was deep-seated, consensual and consistent. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem and leader of the Palestinian national movement during the 1930s and 1940s, insisted throughout this period on a single, Muslim Arab state in all of Palestine. The Palestinian Arab Street chanted "Idbah al-Yahud" ("slaughter the Jews") both during the 1936-1939 revolt against the British rulers and in 1947, when Arab militias launched a campaign ...