http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2000/12/25/Opinion/Opinion.17891.html
jerusalem post 25/12/2000

          Revising revisionists
               By Yosef Goell

               (December 25) - The far-from-objective, and at times
               dishonest, revisionist historians go to incredible lengths
               to undermine Zionist myths. It is essential that these
               tendentious would-be myth-busters be "busted" as
               often as the historic truths allow. 

               Last Thursday, Tel Aviv District Court Judge Drora
               Pilpel gave her judicial imprimatur to a compromise in
               which a Haifa University historian, Theodor Katz,
               admitted that the charges in his M.A. thesis - that an
               IDF unit had massacred over 200 Arab residents of the
               village of Tantura in the 1948 War of Independence -
               were totally unfounded. In exchange, the plaintiffs,
               surviving officers and soldiers of the Alexandroni unit,
               dropped their suit against Katz. 

               The historian claimed in his research that units of the
               Alexandroni brigade, which had conquered Tantura on
               the Mount Carmel coast on the night between May
               22-23 of 1948, killed 200 Arab prisoners in cold blood
               after they and the village had surrendered. 

               The judge found that Katz quoted only testimony of
               surviving Arab villagers that support his thesis of a
               massacre. He failed to seek the response of the
               surviving officers of that unit. 

               Haifa University, a co-respondent in the suit, awarded
               him a mark of 97 for the study. 

               His research was reported at length earlier this year in
               Ma'ariv, and a few months ago in Ha'aretz. 

               When I read the reports of this decision last week, I
               was reminded of a similar dramatic confrontation two
               years ago in the context of Israel's Jubilee celebrations.

               A Channel 1 panel host was discussing a book by
               "revisionist" historian Idit Zertal. Zertal claimed that
               Holocaust survivors who had been intercepted by the
               British aboard the "illegal aliya" ship the Exodus had
               been coerced by nefarious Hagana operatives into
               refusing to leave the ship in Marseilles. 

               The drama of the Exodus and its heroic DPs, and the
               British insistence on dumping thousands of survivors
               back in Germany, was a turning point in the
               propaganda war for American public opinion. 

               Subsequently, the British were compelled to give up
               the Mandate and leave Palestine. 

               The story itself is one of the pillars of the Israeli
               "narrative" surrounding the struggle for independence.

               The revisionist historians on the TV panel were egging
               each other on in their insistence on shattering this
               Israeli myth, when there was a commotion in the back
               of the audience. 

               Several men came forward and identified themselves
               as having been on the Exodus. Not only were the
               claims of the book a lie, they screamed in disgust, but
               passengers competed ferociously for the honor of
               remaining aboard in the face of the British
               blandishments. 

               I had two main impressions from that altercation on
               TV. First, the revisionist historians were guilty of their
               own distortion of the truth to support their own "myth"
               of Israel's being born in "original sin." Second, they
               were incredulous that the men and women who
               survived the Holocaust and another year in DP camps
               were willing to endanger their lives for the cause of
               Jewish independence in Palestine without brutal
               Zionist coercion. 

               Why do I bring this up in the midst of today's
               dramatic times? 

               Because these revisionist historians weaken our
               negotiating position with the Palestinians. 

               The worst aspect of the case of Tantura is that a
               respected university saw fit to accord a top grade to a
               spurious piece of research because its conclusions
               seemed to fit the ideological prejudices of some of its
               leading academics. 

               The media which jump with such gusto on such
               anti-Zionist propaganda must also be faulted. 

               All of this, of course, is of a piece with the recent
               flurry over the Ministry of Education's attempt to
               introduce a new history text in which the Zionist
               "narrative" is intentionally placed in doubt and is
               replaced by ungrounded sympathy for the Palestinian
               cause. 

               In my view, the Palestinians are today as much - if
               not more - self-declared enemies of Israel as they were
               in 1948. The time for Israeli sympathy for their
               self-inflicted tragedy will come when peace has been
               agreed on and is in place for a generation. Insh'allah.