The Seventh Day.

In June, 2003, President Bush tried to discredit any critics who dared dispute his artfully twisted intelligence assessments of Iraq by slinging the worst name he could think of: "Revisionist historians is what I like to call them." This was intended as something more than a schoolyard taunt or an allusion to the sort of pseudo scholars who would deny, under a blizzard of footnotes, the existence of the Turkish massacre of Armenians. In the political context of the moment, it seemed a warning to all who would dispute the monarch's version of reality.

Rigorous revisionism is, of course, at the heart of historical practice, and to practice it in the face of a state-endorsed orthodoxy can require a considerable measure of gall, as well as craft. No country easily accepts a figure like Charles Beard, who, as the avatar of the Progressive School of historians, informed Americans that the founders were wealthy landholders employing ideological trappings to garland their self-interest. But, without revision, what? Without Marcel Ophuls, who practices a filmmaker's version of revisionist history in "The Sorrow and the Pity," it would have been far easier for the French to go on ignoring their complicity in the deportation of Jews to the death camps. The assault on the American Indians; the ruthlessness of European colonialism in Africa; the decision-making process that led to Hiroshima; the reevaluation of Presidential reputations--these are all, unendingly, fodder for "revisionists" who go on challenging accepted truths and complicating the story of the past.

Nowhere has revisionist history played a more crucial role in the political and moral consciousness of a nation than in Israel. The state came into being in 1948, and, almost immediately, its prehistory––the origins of Zionist ideology, the behavior of the British during the Mandate period, and, critically, the relationship with the Other, the Palestinian Arabs--became matter for schoolbooks, journalism, military indoctrination, scholarship, and public rhetoric. The founding generation that had come to Palestine and then fought what it called its war of independence against Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and other hostile neighbors was now in charge of its own story. To the victor goes the narrative. As in any fledgling state, that narrative tended to be set down in the most glorious terms--history as if written by a Hebrew-speaking Parson Weems. For a while, it was as if even the most basic facts could be wished out of existence. An entire group could be made invisible. "There was no such thing as Palestinians," Golda Meir said in 1969.

It was not until the nineteen-eighties, after the opening of various state archives and the coming of age of a generation more disillusioned and less beholden to the old myths than the founders, that Israeli scholars began to confront some inconvenient facts. The most important of the Israeli New Historians was Benny Morris, a leftist (at the time) who had taken part in the disastrous Lebanon war both as a soldier and as a reporter, and who then went to jail rather than complete reserve duty in the West Bank during the first Palestinian intifada. In 1987, the year the intifada erupted, Morris published "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949," in which he demolished a cherished Israeli notion: that the three-quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs who fled their villages during and after the war did so voluntarily and at the behest of their own leaders, who promised they could soon return. Instead, Morris made clear, a large number of the Palestinians were expelled by Israeli military leaders (including the young Yitzhak Rabin), and many others fled out of fear after hearing about the killings and the destruction of homes in nearby villages.

Most of the New Historians did their doctoral work abroad, which gave them a chance to question the narrative they had grown up with. And, though they were never a cohesive school, personally or ideologically, their work did come in a kind of wave that challenged traditional Israeli historiography. After Morris came Ilan Pappe's "Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict," Avi Shlaim's "Collusion Across the Jordan," and work by the sociologist Baruch Kimmerling, which described the ideology of Zionism in colonial terms. Critics accused the New Historians of politically tendentious readings of the archives, of slandering a people that had barely escaped extermination, and of trying to ...