Like Ireland, Israel has its revisionist historians who look at the past in a new way, with new and sometimes controversial interpretations. Perhaps the chief among them is Dr Benny Morris, Professor of Middle East History at Israel's Ben-Gurion University. The author of six books, he presents the establishment of the Israeli state in a new light, drawing on the vast riches of documentation revealed under Israel's admirably liberal archives legislation.
Prof Morris has an Irish connection: his father, Yaakov, was born in Belfast in 1920. Morris senior went on to become an Israeli diplomat and served as ambassador to New Zealand. As a child in the 1950s Benny Morris used to visit his grandparents in Belfast. He spoke to The Irish Times during a recent conference on partition in Ireland, India and Palestine, convened by the Keough Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. Morris was born in Israel in 1948, the year of its foundation. He took a Ph.D in English history at Cambridge. He worked as a journalist on the Jerusalem Post for 13 years. When the Post, as he puts it, "changed hands and became a right-wing newspaper", Morris got a golden handshake and left.
He took up writing history again, with the Middle East as his focus. It was the early 1980s and "swathes of documents" on Israeli and Zionist history were emerging from a variety of sources. His first book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-49 (Cambridge University Press, 1988) aroused hostile reaction among the academic and media establishment in Israel. He was accused of being a sympathiser of the PLO, which was a particularly severe charge in the period before dialogues began: "At the time it meant some form of traitor." But his analysis gained greater acceptance and now the book is on course-lists throughout the Israeli education system.
Although his thesis on the events leading up to Israel's foundation is complex, he is prepared to venture a generalisation: "There was a desire in the Jewish community by and large in Palestine, as it was moving towards statehood and because of violent Arab resistance, to have as few Arabs as possible because they would destabilise the emerging Jewish state."
The United Nations had set state boundaries for Israel with a large Arab minority and from November 1947 to March 1948 the official policy was to abide by what Morris calls "normal humane rules of behaviour towards that minority".
But with the departure of the British, who governed Palestine from the end of the first World War to 1948, and in the light of Arab successes on the battlefield, "the gloves were taken off and then there was a sort of laissez-faire, a sort of openness to allowing the \ generals to have their head and do what is necessary for security, which meant, usually, clearing out Arab villages, which were the bases for the Arab guerrilla attacks on the Jewish settlements.
"But on the other hand, it was never turned into an official policy and there was no formal order: 'Expel the Arabs'. It never came down to that. And that's why you find that, in various places, different people did different things. Usually generals took care to clear out Arab villages from their rear lines, from their front lines and so on, but in certain cases, generals left them behind. That's why we have a large Arab community inside Israel today.
"I foresee a terrible calamity occurring as a result of this, down the road, because they have gradually become more and more identified with Palestinians in the territories, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and identified in terms of the political ambition of basically disrupting and dismantling the Jewish state."
He believes there are three choices facing Israel: "A more or less totally Jewish state, or an Arab state, or it will be a nuclear wasteland. There are Arab and Muslim states who are arming with nuclear weapons today, and in the future it is conceivable that they may use those weapons." For a period between 1988 and 1993, the Palestinians seemed to accept the principle of a two-state solution but then gradually moved away from it. He understands their viewpoint: "They were the majority in Palestine. Suddenly they are down to 22 per cent of the land mass of Palestine, that's what they are going to be given now. Why should they accept 22 per cent?
"What I am saying is, I think they have basically recanted, they have reneged on what appeared to be a promise from '88 until '93 that they would accept this partition. Now most Arabs ... have decided to reopen the whole package and to shun the idea of territorial partition and to try and get the whole country."
A bleak scenario perhaps, but as a good revisionist, Morris believes that facts are facts. "My function as an historian is to seek and write the truth."