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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In 1988, a left-wing Israeli historian and journalist named Benny Morris published "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949," which challenged the traditional Zionist view that the problems of the Palestinian Arabs were entirely of their own making. The book demonstrated that the Palestinians had neither ordered themselves off their land wholesale nor abandoned it voluntarily in hopes of a triumphant and bloody return; on the contrary, they had left their homes in Jaffa and Tiberias, West Jerusalem and Haifa in the hundreds of thousands mostly because they were driven out of them in wartime. The founding of Israel, like that of the United States, was a historical victory but it had not been without its original sin.
Morris does not deny that the Palestinians, first in 1937 and again in 1947, adamantly and foolishly rejected internationally sponsored partition plans and then went to war against the Israelis. But his scholarly deconstruction of a founding myth of the state -- a myth enshrined in popular history, high-school textbooks,...
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