Israel Revisited

The refugee crisis was "largely a by-product of Arab and Jewish fears and of the protracted, bitter fighting that characterized the first Israeli-Arab war; in smaller part, it was the deliberate creation of Jewish and Arab military commanders and politicians," Morris wrote.

His conclusion that the Palestinian exodus was not entirely voluntary pricked the Israeli national conscience and gave moral weight to the claims of about 700,000 original refugees demanding to return to their homes. For decades, Israel has fiercely resisted this claim for a right of return, fearing an influx of Arab Palestinians that would threaten Israel's Jewish majority.

"There comes a stage in any revolutionary process when the movement relaxes its hold on the official narrative," Morris says. "The difference is that when that moment came in Israel, our long struggle with the Arabs remained an existential threat, as it still does today."

The 'New Historians'

Morris's book appeared as the first Palestinian uprising burst from the Jabaliya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, focusing Israeli attention on a subject rarely mentioned in preceding years when the Israeli and Palestinian economies and cultures were growing together.

Several other critical accounts of Israel's founding, among them Ilan Pappe's "Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict" and Shlaim's "Collusion Across the Jordan," were published at the same time. In a 1988 magazine article, Morris labeled the scholars "new historians," as the public outcry inside Israel grew against them.

"I suppose I viewed it as a self-defense mechanism," Morris says of his coining of the term. "I realized I had written the most radical of the books . . . in terms of revisionist thinking. I felt very exposed -- here was this guy thrusting against the weight of Israeli academia and historical correctness. I felt more comfort being part of a group."

Until then, much of Israel's wartime history had been written by participants, whose narratives centered on the Jewish people fighting to secure a haven from persecution following the Holocaust. One of them was Shabtai Teveth, a prize-winning Israeli journalist and biographer of the state's founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. Teveth, a Palmach veteran, mounted a campaign to discredit the new historians. In Israeli newspapers, he called their work "a farrago of distortions, omissions, tendentious readings and outright falsifications" whose intent was to undermine the Zionist project to secure a Jewish state.

Amid the controversy, Morris's artillery unit was called up in 1988 for reserve duty in the restive West Bank city of Nablus. He viewed the Palestinian demonstrations, mostly stone-throwing crowds and strikes, as legitimate protest against the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which Israel had controlled since the 1967 Middle East war.

He refused to serve, spending three weeks in jail instead.

Despite his book's critical success, which came mostly outside the country, Morris could not secure a university post in Israel after its publication. He announced in a 1996 newspaper interview his intention to leave for the United States.

Ezer Weizman, a hero of the 1948 war and Israel's president at the time, summoned Morris to his office that afternoon. He asked him if he supported Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. After receiving Morris's word that he did, the president arranged a post for him at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, where he lectures today.

Through the hopeful years following the 1993 Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestinians, Morris wrote his highly acclaimed history of the Zionist movement, "Righteous Victims." The title suggested the conflicting Israeli and Palestinian views of their roles in history. "The claim to be the true victim," new historian Shlaim said in a lecture at Georgetown University a few years later, "is a major component of both national narratives."