WAR STORIES

In April 1989 at the Dayan Centre of Tel Aviv University, a two-day conference on the war of 1948 – known as the war of independence by most Israelis and as al-Nakba [the catastrophe] by Palestinians – provided the setting for a skirmish in another war. This was the ‘war’ for Israel’s history and, to some extent, for the identity of the nation state. In an engagement joined by historians and social scientists who nevertheless observed the usual conventions of academic propriety, it revealed the bitterness of the divide between different interpretations not simply of the events of 1948 but also of Israeli history itself. Broadly speaking, on one side there were those who defended the commonly accepted and often heroically presented story of Israel’s establishment and conduct as a state. Confronting them were those who challenged this version of the state’s beginnings, turning a critical light on the behaviour of its political leaders and of its armed forces in 1948 and in the years that followed.

Nor was the battle fought out only within the confines of the university campus or of academic journals. It was a matter of public debate as well, filling newspaper columns and becoming the subject of media interest and interpretation. Writers such as Shabtai Teveth (the official biographer of Ben Gurion, seen as a champion of the ‘authorized version’ of Israel’s past) used the occasion of the conference to publish a series of four long articles in the daily paper, Haaretz. In these, he vehemently accused the revisionists of traducing not only the memory of the former prime minister, but also the very foundation and raison d’être of the state of Israel.