THE DEMONS OF THE NAKBAH

As a Jewish child born in Haifa in the early 1950s, I did not encounter the Arabic term Nakbah (catastrophe), nor was I aware of its significance. Only in my high school days did the word make its first appearance. There were two Palestinian Israeli pupils in my class, and we all participated in joint guided-tours around Haifa and its vicinity. In those days there was still evidence of Arab Haifa in the Old City: beautiful buildings, remnants of a covered market that had been destroyed by Israel during the 1948 war, mosques and churches.

These relics testified to the city's more glorious past. Many of them are now gone, demolished by the bulldozers of an ambitious city mayor who sought to erase any urban features that pointed to the city's Arab past. But, in those days, there were quite a few Arab houses squeezed between the modern concrete buildings. Guides on the school tours used to refer to them as hirbet al-shaykh, a vague reference to an Arab house from an unidentified period. My two Palestinian classmates muttered that these were houses left from the 1948 Nakbah, but they did not dare to challenge their teachers, nor did they expand on what they meant.

I did not deal much with history in my youth. I learned literary Arabic in school, in the 'orientalist' class, as it was called, which prepared pupils for a career in the intelligence corps in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). My three compulsory years in the army, including the 1973 war, were spent in that corps, and were not a bad workshop for polishing my Arabic, but quite poisonous if you believed what you were told about the 'enemy'.

During my army days and BA studies in Jerusalem, in the department of Middle Eastern history, I was what one could call a left-wing Zionist, working in the Knesset as a voluntary adviser to the left-wing Zionist party, Mapam. I co-ordinated the party's activities on university campuses and advised its parliamentary representatives on 'Arab Affairs'. I viewed the reality around me through a leftist Zionist prism, which allowed a liberal pluralist critique of the ideology of the state of Israel, but inevitably vindicated its major precepts. Indeed, the logic was that this was a healthy and constructive criticism, as it would ensure a more morally valid and ideologically sound version of Zionism. How wrong I was, I learned only after I left the country in 1979 to embark upon my doctoral studies in Oxford.

But just before I departed some cracks appeared in the Zionist wall around me. The last seminar I attended as a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was given by Professor Yehoshua Porath, Israel's leading historian on the Palestinian national movement at the time. He was then an ardent supporter of the Jordanian option and showed us how close the ties were between the Zionist movement and the Hashemite dynasty in Jordan. He argued, and I substantiated this in a modest essay I prepared, that the British Empire viewed favourably (as did Porath) the idea of a Zionist-Hashemite Palestine. Porath hoped that this triangular relationship would continue in the future. It was in that course that I decided to devote my advanced studies to the issue of 1948 – without realising what I would find out, and without grasping its wider implications for investigating the foundational mythology of the state.

I began working on the 1948 war in 1980 as a DPhil student at St Antony's College, Oxford, under the supervision of Albert Hourani and Roger Owen. Hourani was near the end of his formal academic career, and would begin his magnificent and popular A History of the Arab Peoples soon after my arrival. But I was his last student in Oxford. Roger Owen was in mid-career, already a renowned and established scholar who was working, among other things, on the economic and social history of mandatory Palestine. I could not have asked for more in terms of supervision. Albert was someone who had already, in 1946, represented the Palestinian cause in front of the Anglo-American commission of inquiry and he remained a keen observer of the Palestine conflict, and Roger was transforming the conventional orientalist historiography of the Ottoman Empire, as well as the political and economic history of the area as a whole. Both were familiar with the Palestinian narrative of 1948. This meant not only recognising the version of the side that until then had been the 'enemy' for me, but also exposing the mythology and fabrication of the version to which I had subscribed since childhood. They both guided me into the archives. They, as much as I, were unsure of what I would find, or of how my own leftist Zionist politics at the time would affect my reaction to the newly-declassified documents on the 1948 war.

It was my hunch that I should first choose the British angle in my new journey into 1948. My proposition was that the overall British policy in 1948 was neutral in the sense that London's principal policymakers detested both sides. Methodologically, it meant a research unrestrained by any theoretical premises, a straightforward work of deciphering diplomatic documents and organising them into a coherent description of policy. As Roger Owen reminded me every now and then, the academic account of a policy is always far clearer than the policy itself, which is full of contradictions and paradoxes. After a few months in the archives I realised that British policy in the 1948 war was less neutral than I had originally thought: it was first and foremost anti-Palestinian. His Majesty King George VI's government viewed a division of historical and mandatory Palestine into two political entities, a future Jewish state and a future Jordanian state, as the best solution for the conflict and the best means of safeguarding the British Empire's interests in the area. This was an anti-Palestinian policy, and – as Avi Shlaim, my colleague, chose to call it – a collusion between Israel, Jordan and Britain that almost wiped out Palestine and the Palestinians.

Armed with a thesis that was wholly based on archives, most of which had not been declassified before, and a simple narrative, I was still convinced, when I finished my dissertation in 1984, that my work was purely academic and had very little relevance to contemporary issues or to politics. I toiled for several years searching for an academic job, while at the same time turning my thesis into a book that appeared in 1988 as Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948–1951. In it, I debunked one Israeli foundational myth: that in 1948 Britain was the enemy of Zionism and Israel. Based on my research I went further, saying that Britain played a major role in allowing the Zionist movement to found a state in Palestine through the ethnic cleansing of its indigenous people.

Around that time, two more books by...