Morris, Benny; 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. Yale University Press, 2008. RRP $32.50. ISBN 9780300126969
Benny Morris is Israel's best-known revisionist historian. His history of the Palestinian refugee problem, first published in the late 1980s, became widely accepted as the definitive account of the Palestinian refugee tragedy.
He demolished both the traditional Israeli and Palestinian versions of the exodus; the former suggesting that the Palestinians left voluntarily at the behest of their leaders, and the latter that the Palestinians were forcibly driven from their homes by organised and premeditated Israeli violence.
Instead, Morris substituted a middle-ground explanation which defined the Palestinian refugee exodus as a by-product of war, rather than of 'design, Jewish or Arab'.
His findings significantly influenced both Israeli historiography and education, and public attitudes to Palestinian national claims. As a result, more and more Israelis and Diaspora Jews began to accept the legitimacy of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
However, more recently, Morris has changed his spots. The failure of the Camp David negotiations in July 2000, Palestinian demands for a right of return to Green Line Israel, and the violence of the second Palestinian intifada have convinced him that the Palestinians have returned to what he considers the impractical extremism and rejectionism of the 1947/48 period.
Morris now believes it is unlikely that the Palestinians will ever accept a two-state compromise with Israel.
Morris's new book returns us to the foundational war of the Israeli-Arab conflict. He divides his narrative into five discrete chronological periods: the historical background from the 1880s to the 1940s, the United Nations debate and vote for partition in 1947, the civil war between the Jews and Arabs inside Palestine from November 1947 to May 1948, the conventional war between the Jews and the invading Arab states from May 1948 to January 1949, and the armistice agreements negotiated from January to July 1949.
Morris argues from the beginning that the 1948 war was the inevitable outcome of the long-term Jewish-Arab conflict. He discusses the early Zionist settlers of the 1880s and their belief in the legitimacy and morality of a Jewish return to the ancient land. He cites their negative attitudes to the native Arabs, and their determination to take control of the country.
In response, he notes the quick emergence of Arab hostility including recurring outbreaks of violence which would eventually culminate in the full-scale uprising