I do ask you to be very elementary in your writing, assuming that I and my audience know nothing. Even if I do know some words or details, I will not be offended by your making it elementary.

Thanks, Josh

What you’ve encountered here is the work of a small group of revisionist historians in Israel called the New Historians, begun by an Israeli historian named Benny Morris. As with any revisionist history, you have to ask why the new version is different from the old, and whether it is believable or its origins are suspect.

Among the useful criticisms of the New Historians is the observation that its sources are all from the Israeli archives, but none of them are from Arab sources. You would think that would make it a more trustworthy source for analyzing the actions of the Zionists, but in fact it distorts things. Israeli historian Anita Shapira wrote:

“To write the history of relations between Israel and the Arab world almost exclusively on the basis of Israeli documentation results in obvious distortions. Every Israeli contingency plan, every flicker of a far-fetched idea expressed by David Ben-Gurion and other Israeli planners, finds its way into history as conclusive evidence for the Zionist state’s plans for expansion. What we know about Nasser’s schemes regarding Israel, by contrast, derives solely from secondary and tertiary sources.”

It’s something like what happens when modern, American conspiracy theorists latch onto FEMA contingency plans for imagined disasters that involve the government herding vast crowds into stadiums, and represent those as the actual intentions of the American government.

Phil W.

Please do not take the contents of this film as factual. This is propaganda, and is a single shot in an ongoing, vicious war between Israel’s allies and its enemies. The details will be mostly factual, but carefully edited and with relevant facts omitted to shade the appearance in a particular direction.

I have not watched the whole thing. For your sake, I think I might, and then write a commentary about it. But please accept this from me: the aim of Zionism was not any sort of ethnic cleansing, and the tactics of the Zionists did not include any sort of ethnic cleansing. If there were some incidents along the way that can be amplified by a clever filmmaker into an appearance of ethnic cleansing, those are regrettable; sadly, there have been plenty of such incidents on both sides along the way, so that either can be made into a devil by its adversaries.

You will not be able to find non-partisan sources on the history of Zionism; they will all be either pro- or anti-. Still, you have to do a lot more reading before you’ll be ready to make an informed assessment of the situation.

Yours in Christ,

Phil Weingart