Comment; in a dark time.(Israeli/Palestinian conflict)(The Talk of the Town)

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, and standard patriotic rhetoric -- met with tremendous resistance. After his book appeared, Morris was eventually fired from his job at the Jerusalem Post. He had trouble getting work in the academy. And yet, with time, the "new historiography" that he helped to cultivate was one of many currents, political and moral, as well as intellectual, that led an increasing number of Israelis to question not the Zionist idea of a Jewish homeland but the blinkered, orthodox version of Zionist history. The French philosopher and historian Ernest Renan once wrote that a nation "is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of its neighbors." Perhaps, but such unity is not immutable. Most Israelis, weary of the onus of occupation, proved ready to rethink the past and live with, if not adore, the Palestinians. Part of what masked the practical perils of the Oslo Accords of 1993 was the seductive notion that for the first time both sides were prepared to recognize each other and live peacefully as neighbors.

As it turned out, while even most conservative Israelis (including Ariel Sharon) conceded that there would, in the end, be a Palestinian state, the Palestinians had not necessarily altered their own founding myths and intentions. Forget Hamas and Islamic Jihad and their culture of martyrdom and absolute victory. Last year, Faisal Husseini, a decided moderate among Yasir Arafat's leadership ranks, gave an interview not long before he died in which he compared Oslo to a Trojan horse, an intermediate, tactical step leading to the elimination of Israel. He said, "If you are asking me as a Pan-Arab nationalist what are the Palestinian borders according to the higher strategy, I will immediately reply: 'From the river to the sea' " -- that is, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.

Right-wingers in Israel have long argued that such remarks reflect the true faith of the Palestinian mainstream. Hope was the reserve of the left. Now, it seems, there is not much hope left, and not much of a left, either -- not in the short term, anyway. What is the evidence? A fairly indicative event was the publication in the London Guardian, a few weeks ago, of "Peace? No Chance," an essay by the same Benny Morris, in which he sheepishly concedes that Arafat's rejection of the Israeli and American peace plans in ...