When I was a graduate student and the crust of the earth was still warm, we looked forward every week to an announcement by our professor of American history of some brilliant "revisionist" book demanding our immediate attention. If the topic of today's seminar was the establishment of the Constitution of the United States, then what we must read first was the work of Charles Beard, in which we would learn that not the disinterested patriotism of "the Fathers," but rather profit-making opportunities available to the insiders through the upcoming assumption of the debts of the States, was the driving force in the creation of that document. If our topic was America's entry into World War II, we should at once get familiar with the literature outlining the hidden history behind Pearl Harbor. As budding scholars, it was essential that we not be duped by the unexamined assumptions that informed popular history and the high school textbooks.

A lifetime later, nobody reads Charles Beard or has even heard of him. Meanwhile, most of the assumptions that Beard and all the other revisionists undertook to overthrow are back in place. George Washington still stands as the father of his country, his reputation, if anything, improved. Franklin Roosevelt—whose name, we were given to understand, would be forever blighted by the Truth about Pearl Harbor—stands higher than ever.

We should never regret or resent the exercise of revisionism. The honest and tenured scholars never tire of hearing about new evidence, and they welcome excuses to go back to the archives. When the latest revisionist spasm has passed, the result is usually reinstatement of the hoary generalities, more confidently stated because tested against the challenges of the revisionists.

The more passion is aroused by a subject, the more likely it is to attract revisionism, and few subjects generate as much passion as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to Neve Gordon (a Senior Lecturer in Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University, Beersheva, Israel), the full and sufficient explanation for why everything has gone wrong in what used to be the Palestine Mandate and became Occupied Palestine and Israel is Israeli contempt for human life. In Israel's Occupation, which will no doubt be cited to provide context for many accounts of the recent clash between Israeli forces and Hamas in Gaza, Gordon re-tells the history of Israel from this perspective.

The fundamental Israeli contempt for Palestinian life in particular was first demonstrated in 1947-1948 by Israel's "campaign of ethnic cleansing," effectively accomplished by the beginning of 1949. But the 1948-1949 war was just the opening stage of a "macabre" policy intended to accomplish the liquidation of the Palestinian people. After its victory in the Six Day War of 1967, Israel's game shifted. Henceforth, Israel pursued "a politics of life," allowing it to present its actions toward Palestinians as "moral." The scheme (quoting a 1970 report by Israel's military) was this: "The only way to avoid a potential outburst of social forces is to strive continuously for the improvement of the standard of living and the services of this underprivileged society." (How diabolical can you get? Thank God this did not occur to Hitler.)

In the 1990s, following the First Intifada, Rabin's government lured the Pollyanna Arafat and the PLO into the Oslo agreement, knowing that self-government among the Palestinians would fail. Having set up the Palestinian Authority and having given over to it full responsibility for the care and feeding of its people (another master-stroke of subterfuge—"outsourcing the occupation," as Gordon writes), it only remained for Israel to sabotage every project that the pa launched, so that chaos would result. The end game, Gordon suggests, should be called "the Somalia Plan," as it is meant to leave the Palestinians where we find the Somalis today—in a field of "warlordism." Understood in this way, Hamas is Israel's creation, notwithstanding that the leaders of Hamas imagine that it is their message and their good deeds that have won them the right to govern. In all its phases, Israel's regime has been marked by sadistic behavior toward Palestinians, extra attention being given to the slaughter of women and children. The Palestinian has been reduced to "homo sacer, people whose lives can be taken with impunity." The Israelis seek to persuade us that they are at risk of death because of suicide-bombers and the incessant rhetoric about the Muslim duty to annihilate the sons of pigs and monkeys. None of this is needed to explain Israel's conduct, however; that's simply the way Jews are. By contrast, Palestinian leaders, from the days of Yasir Arafat and the PLO down to the present Hamas leadership, have always dealt out life and promise. That's simply the way Arabs are. There is no denying this book's qualification as scholarly. Its conclusions are drawn from the reading of a considerable body of scholarly monographs, research papers, and government reports. To the interpretation of these sources, alas, Gordon brings a toxic, irrational, cynical spirit, contempt for Israel's politicians and a deaf ear to anything that Israel has to offer in defense of its own actions. The book has no claim to the honorable adjective "revisionist." It is sheer vilification.

But Israeli historiography has been alive with honorable revisionism for many years. The back-cover blurb of Benny Morris' new book accurately describes him as "the leading figure among Israel's New Historians, who over the past two decades have reshaped our understanding of the Israeli-Arab conflict." In Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (published in 1999) and in earlier monographs Morris challenged the popular historians and the controversialists who plunder the history books for one-liners. In 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, Morris has reviewed all the revisionist literature, re-worked the shelves of the archives to make sure that nothing has been overlooked, and given us a meticulously researched day-by-day narrative of the first Arab-Israeli war.

After the first two chapters, which review the history down to the Partition Decision of November 29, 1947, the account becomes almost exclusively military, although the political and diplomatic context is brought into place whenever needed. Morris' recital is always deliberate and thorough. While the landscape of what was then Mandate Palestine is incredibly varied, its geographical scope is compact (when compared, that is, to the setting of the great wars of past and present). Readers who do not know the ground from personal experience will find Morris' descriptions of all the battles perfectly lucid. There is a generous allotment of maps, all conveniently located in the text.

Morris addresses every issue that has engaged the revisionists, marshalling the relevant documents and setting out the defensible facts. He has calmly weighed the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two sides in 1948 and, not surprisingly, has concluded that the Israelis had advantages in some categories (for example, in access to weapons, to supplies and to funds) where popular pro-Israel historians notice only disadvantages, so as to underscore the David vs. Goliath theme. He has examined thoroughly the role of the British, the Americans, and the Russians; the lobbying at the UN in the days before the Partition vote; the tug-of-war within the Truman Administration; the facts about Deir Yassin and Kfar Etzion; the Haifa campaign of 1947 and the Mount Scopus ambush; the actual makeup of the several invading Arab armies, their strengths, their different war aims, and their differences of behavior; the facts about diplomacy between Abdullah of Jordan and the Zionists; the facts about what the Zionist leaders hoped to gain and what they wanted the local Arabs to do; their expectations about the eventual boundaries, the motives behind their strategic decisions—and, most contentious of all, the facts about refugees.

Typical of Morris' candor is his conclusion that, "in truth … the Jews committed far more atrocities than the Arabs and killed far more civilians and pows in deliberate acts of brutality in the course of 1948. This was probably due to the circumstance that the victorious Israelis captured some four hundred Arab villages and towns during April-November 1948, whereas the Palestinian Arabs and ala [Arab Liberation Army] failed to take any settlements and the Arab armies that invaded in mid-May [those of Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon—not to mention several contingents of 'volunteers' from other Muslim nations] overran fewer than a dozen Jewish settlements."

We can now see more clearly than ever that the most effective way to answer the anti-Israel polemicists (the Norman Finkelsteins and the Noam Chomkys here in our part of the world, and the entire legion of Muslim and Arab polemicists) is also the most honorable: with fully documented truth. Ultimately, the Jews won because of their vastly superior morale—which was an outcome of their better-developed civil sense and (paradoxically) of their realization that, should they fail to win their battles, they would face the completion of the Holocaust.

Those, like myself, who have a declared bias in favor of Israel but have also read enough history to know that it is never about angels of light and angels of darkness will leave these pages more confident, not less, about celebrating the decision of Harry Truman to support the Partition in 1947 and to recognize the State of Israel on its first day, now more than sixty years ago.

Hillel Cohen's Army of Shadows is written in the same honorable revisionist spirit. Cohen's interest in the theme of Palestinian collaboration with Zionists in the days of the Mandate derives from his youthful experience of sitting in on lengthy, informal recitals about those years carried out in Arab villages neighboring his own home. He has added to those testimonies the many volumes of oral history and archival documentation that are to be found in the holdings of the Central Zionist Archives.

Cohen has assembled proof that general accounts of the Arab-Israeli conflict have taken far too monochromatic a view of Arab attitudes toward Zionism and the prospects of a Jewish state. Where the textbook account of Palestinian history during the British Mandate goes wrong is that it "generally focuses on the national movement led by the mufti of Jerusalem [Hajj Amin al-Husseini]." In fact, as we are told already on the front dust-jacket, "Many residents of the region cooperated with the Zionist: Bedouins, weapons dealers, pro-Zionist propagandists, informers, local leaders and many others."

Like other secular historians, Cohen prefers to redefine religious motivation in political terms. As result, he is not very helpful to those who want to understand better the reality to which these "collaborators" were believed to be "traitors." Arab Nationalism was clearly a driving ideology for many, from beginning to end; but co-existing with Arab nationalism (a variant on the phenomenon which stirred up masses everywhere in the world in the late 19th century), and ultimately incompatible with it, was Muslim loyalty to the umma—the community of Islam. The Grand Mufti and the Arab High committee fought under the banner of "the Holy national jihad movement."

What is clear is that Palestinian nationalism was not the magnet. Cohen would clearly not endorse PLO propaganda and PA textbooks that speak of the "Palestinian nation" that has populated the Land since the time of Christ (or, in some texts, since the time of the Canaanites). Cohen suggests that "the conduct of Palestinian society might lead to the conclusion that, during the period under discussion [1917-1948], Palestinian society's national spirit was not sufficient to the task at hand … . The limited willingness to sacrifice their lives (or personal comfort) for the nation can be seen, not only in the low level of mobilization for the decisive war [1947-1948], but also in their activity and involvement in selling land to the Zionists." If, as theorists tell us, "nationalism [requires] a shared tie to a homeland that constitutes a single territorial unit," then, says Cohen, this tie "was not strong among Palestinian Arabs … . The tie to the land focused on personal holdings or on the lands of a village or region, but not on Palestine as a whole."

There were always people who could see that the hope of driving the Jews into the sea was insane and who preferred to draw attention to the prospects for mutual benefit for Arabs and Jews in rational cooperation. By 1947, however, hatred triumphed over reason: as the newly minted Arab states closed ranks with the indigenous despisers of the Jews and rallied under the spell of what we today call militant Islam, voices of accommodation were all shouted down or were removed by generally-applauded violence from the land of the living.

In early pages we are told that "Israeli historiography has ignored [evidence for Arab collaboration] … because [these actions] called into question the Zionist claim that the Palestinians had fought with all their might to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state in part of Palestine after the UN resolution of 29 November 1947 … [and because] it served to justify Israel's refusal to allow Palestinian war refugees to return to their homes." My own impression is that Israeli historiography has not in fact ignored this theme, only understated it. At the same time, Cohen maintains that "even less attention [is] given to treason in the Palestinian historiography of 1948," the motive here being the mirror image of Israel's for underplaying this theme. The present custodians of the Palestinian narrative imagine that their cause requires a portrait of overwhelming popular support for a cause that suffered because of Israel's crushing advantages, but which will yet rise up again and triumph.

As Benny Morris observes in 1948, "One day, when Palestinians face up to their past and produce serious historiography, they will probe these parameters of weakness and responsibility to the full." In the meantime, alas, those in our own midst who have embraced the "Arab narrative" or the "Palestinian narrative" never seem interested in opening up the archives out of which that narrative could be reviewed and re-written as Israeli historiography has been. The enthusiasm of many of our own intellectuals for the bad news about Israel's past and present is so unquenchable precisely because there is at the moment no possibility of similar bad news emerging from the walled-up intellectual world on the other side.

Having spent half a lifetime as the official biographer of Winston Churchill, turning out six massive volumes of narrative biography and editing the massive corpus of companion volumes, Martin Gilbert took virtual ownership of academic scholarship on Churchill's life and work. Subsequently, Gilbert produced three equally huge books narrating a history of the 20th century and several other weighty volumes which, taken together, offer a full-gauged history of the Jews in the 20th century, including the story of Zionism and the history of the State of Israel. Now, buzzing industriously back and forth between and among these massive depositories of fact and conclusion, Gilbert has produced a stand-alone volume on Churchill and the Jews, a definitive summary of everything that illustrates Churchill's thoughts and feelings about the Jews, and that went into making him a champion of the Jewish people and of Zionism.

Gilbert shows that Churchill's confidence in the Zionist experiment was based ultimately on his deep appreciation for the character and the historical accomplishments of the Jews. Not a devout Christian, he was always struggling to find poetical and mystical but non-theological language with which to express his conviction that the contribution of the Jews to the history of civilization was unique—a circumstance, he admitted, that points our thoughts towards the transcendent. While in Jerusalem in 1921, he said, "We owe to the Jews in the Christian revelation a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all other wisdom and learning put together. On that system and by that faith there has been built out of the wreck of the Roman Empire the whole of our existing civilization." Churchill never wavered from his conviction that however one defined or described the purpose that governs history (the purpose that had governed every step of his own life so that he could fulfill his own unique historical role), the establishment of a Jewish state had a conspicuous part in it.

During the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, when "pragmatic" politicians began wondering out loud whether the intent of the Balfour Declaration really had been to lay the groundwork for a Jewish State, Churchill settled the matter authoritatively: I was there, he said, in effect, and I can tell you that "Lloyd George and Balfour [and I] agreed … that they had always meant an eventual Jewish State." In the face of massive anti-Semitism and pro-Arabism in the highest circles of the British government and military, Churchill promoted consistently the argument that the Middle East needed the presence of Jews as much as the Jews needed a state. Pointing to increases in Arab-speaking population that for most of this period kept pace with increases in Jewish population in Mandate Palestine, he insisted that "to Jewish enterprise, the Arab owes nearly everything he has." Jewish presence in Palestine had brought "nothing but good gifts." Before the several Royal Commissions which British governments set up during these decades to give breathing-room for arguments against fulfilling the Balfour pledge, Churchill said,

Why is there harsh injustice done [as all the Arab politicians were claiming already in the 1930s] if people come in and make a livelihood for more and make the desert into palm groves and orange groves? Why is it injustice because there is more work and more wealth for everybody? … The injustice is when those who live in the country leave it to be a desert for thousands of years … . I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time.

Nonetheless, Martin Gilbert did not write this book for the purpose of defending Zionism and the world's eventual implementation of the Balfour Declaration. He has done that elsewhere. His purpose here is to lay out for fellow historians of the present and the future the documentation that they will need to describe Churchill's role.

Among countless anecdotes that Gilbert has brought to light is the one about the day in 1932 that Hitler skipped out of a meeting in Munich that was to be arranged by his English-speaking crony, Putzi Hanfstaengel, between himself and Churchill. Hitler, unaccustomed to exchanging ideas, simply did not want to confront the notoriously strong-minded English politician. Churchill was hoping to give him some advice: "Tell your boss [he said to Hanfstaengel] from me that anti-Semitism may be a good starter, but it is a bad sticker."

Gilbert has brought to light much previously unreleased official documentation which he uses to clarify substantial matters that are glossed over or simply misrepresented in the general accounts, and indeed in many expert accounts. Readers of Gilbert's previous books will recognize his characteristic single-minded approach to his task: head down, keep the document in view at all times, summarize it, and get on with the next. An alert reader will recognize, however, that to fully appreciate the significance of Gilbert's narrative he needs more context than Gilbert takes time to give. What he needs, to be more precise, is Michael Makovsky's Churchill's Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft. [1] Makovsky is less rigorously chronological, but he does look up regularly to reflect upon the story before him, which he bases, as all the scholars must do, upon Gilbert's lifelong labors in the archives. Makovsky offers thoughtful review of Churchill's intellectual commitments, his entire political philosophy, and his strategic thinking.

These two books need each other. From Makovsky's study we learn that Churchill's dedication to Zionism was more nuanced than Gilbert lets on. Determined to prove the solidity and durability of Churchill's Zionism, Gilbert piles up all the weighty statements of support he can find, many of them discovered in Churchill's personal correspondence, but the bulk of them in public statements. Makovsky, pausing to explore the many inconsistencies that occur in this weighty corpus, finds Churchill to be less constant in his devotion to Zionism than does Gilbert. Historians will understand that both sets of arguments are necessary for a full appreciation of this complex story.

Paul C. Merkley is the author of American Presidents, Religion and Israel (Praeger).

1. Michael Makovsky, Churchill's Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft (Yale Univ. Press, 2007). Reviewed in Books & Culture, November/December 2007, www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/novdec/13.27.html.

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