Bad Tidings to Zion.(Review)

One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, by Tom Segev, translated by Haim Watzman (Henry Holt, 612 pp., $35)

One Palestine, Complete is the latest contribution to a growing body of anti-Zionist literature being produced by a group of prominent Israeli academics and journalists. According to these revisionist scholars, the State of Israel was born in sin at the expense of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine. Their purpose, however, is not scholarly but political: They seek (in the words of historian Anita Shapira) "to undermine the state's moral and philosophical foundations, to dismantle the Jewish identity of the state and reconfigure it as a state of 'all its citizens.'" The success of their attempt to create a moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians can be seen in the new Israeli high-school textbooks, which were recently changed to reflect the "original sins" of Israel at its birth.

The main target and villain of all post-Zionists is David Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion was to Israel what George Washington was to the United States: a founding father, victor of the war of independence, and first chief executive of an independent nation. In the view of post-Zionist historians like Benny Morris and Avi Shlaim (authors, respectively, of Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 and The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World), Ben-Gurion was not only a warmonger responsible for the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel but also a heartless ideologue criminally remiss in failing to rescue more Jews from Hitler's reign of terror.

This is comparable to the recent attacks by American revisionist historians on Washington, Jefferson, and other Founding Fathers as hypocritical slaveholding elitists who sought primarily to increase their own wealth and steal the rest of North America from the Indians. In their zeal to make their case, the anti-Zionists have similarly stretched and even falsified history. Indeed, according to Ben-Gurion biographer Shabtai Teveth, Morris has actually altered historical documents to make his outlandish claims seem more plausible.

Tom Segev is one of the leading authors in the post-Zionist movement. In The Seventh Million (1993), he attacked Ben-Gurion and the Zionist leadership for their failure to rescue more European Jews from the Holocaust. His main contention in that book was that the Zionist preference to rescue only committed Zionists left the rest of the Diaspora at the mercy of Hitler and Stalin. In One Palestine, Complete, Segev repeats this unsubstantiated argument, despite its having been refuted in Teveth's Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust (1996), which documented the relentless efforts of Zionist leaders to alert the international community to the plight of Jews in Europe.

Mingling personal stories of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs with historical narrative, One Palestine, Complete falls somewhere between a novel and a gossipy panorama of Jewish, British, and Arab personalities and events in Palestine under the British Mandate. Segev is a skillful writer and the book is an engaging read. Yet despite the fact that he has consulted nearly every book on his subject written in Hebrew or English, including unpublished diaries, none of this material adds an iota of new information. Instead, One Palestine, Complete reshuffles the facts under the guise of a new interpretation.

According to his publisher, Segev offers "a radical new thesis," namely that the British, far from being pro-Arab as commonly believed, "consistently favored the Zionist position, thereby ensuring the creation of the Jewish state." Segev argues further that they did so "out of the mistaken-and anti-Semitic-belief that the Jews turned the wheels of history." In the author's view, it was Chaim Weizmann, the cunning president of the World Zionist Organization, who manipulated British Biblical fundamentalists like Lord Arthur James Balfour into establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine. Furthermore, Segev claims it was only when the militant Zionist underground-Menachem Begin's Etzel and Yitzhak Shamir's Lehi-terrorized the British that they turned against the Zionists.