Historians writing about Israel's 1948 fight for independence generally place heavy responsibility for the Palestinian Arab refugee problem on the Arab leaders who urged their people to flee Palestine temporarily until the Zionists were driven into the sea. But not all historians: in the late 1980's, a revisionist school of scholars, benefiting from fresh access to Israeli archival material and politicized by their opposition to Israeli settlement policies, advanced the thesis that blame for the refugees' flight was shared heavily by the country's founders. In their self-criticism and often ostentatious soul-searching, these "New Historians" exemplified what seems to be an immutable characteristic of the Jewish psyche.
For Ilan Pappé, a prominent New Historian, soul-searching is beside the point. Best known for his inflammatory The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), Pappé, Haifa-born, self-exiled to Britain, invests his energies in promoting the Arab cause in general and the academic boycott of his former university in particular. Now he is out with a new book, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel. It elaborates on his view that the Jewish state was born in sin and that this moral deformity is ineradicable.
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