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38

A Distorted View
From The New
Historians

7100 Orchard Lake Road (at 14 1/2 Mile) ■ West Bloomfield
Open: Mon. & Thurs. till 9 pm ■ Tues., Wed., Fri., till 6 pm

,vpecialize in elreetiliw eilesiomerr expectationev.

t has become the vogue among
left-leaning Israeli academics to
publish books and essays ques-
tioning the accuracy of generally
accepted history
books dealing
with Israel and
its Zionist
antecedents.
It seems
clear that the
motives of the
new historians
are not merely
to "set the
record straight"
by alluding to
EZEKIEL LEIKIN official Zionist
Special to
history as
the Jewish News
"romanticized
Zionist propa-
ganda," but to
cast aspersions upon the moral under-
pinnings of the Jewish state. One of
the new historians went so far as to
accuse Zionism having been
"besmirched by original sin."
As expected, the new historians
evoked angry denunciations by main-
stream historians and men of letters,
many of whom have been the actual
players in the drama preceding Israel's
birth. Heading the list of the new revi-
sionist historians are Benny Morris,
Avi Shlaim and Tom Segev, whose
books allege that Israel dispossessed
the native Palestinian Arabs, that its
wars were not defensive but premedi-
tated acts of aggression committed by
superior forces and aimed at driving
the Arabs from strategically important
areas.
What is glaringly missing in these
ideologically tainted volumes is a
meticulous adherence to the truth.
Thus, while Avi Shlaim rejects the
thesis referring to the 1948 War of
Independence as a "simple struggle
between a monolithic Arab adversary
and a tiny Israel," he subsequently
concedes that "the desperate plight
and heroism of the Jewish fighters are
not in question." In another miscue,
Shlaim asserts that a confrontation
between Israel and Transjordan's Arab
Legion in the 1948 war was a ruse

Ezekiel Leikin is a Zionist writer and
lecturer who lives in Southfield.

