A Miraculous Victory, An Open Wound

Along the way, Morris seeks to separate fact from legend. It's true, Morris notes, that the Arab states had a combined population of 40 million, while the Jewish community, known in Hebrew as the Yishuv, numbered a mere 650,000. But the Yishuv, led by the indomitable David Ben-Gurion, "had organized for war. The Arabs hadn't." Arab Palestine, lacking a great leader or unifying principle, amounted to a series of disparate towns, villages and clans rather than a coherent nation, and it succumbed readily to a spirit of powerlessness and fatalism.

As for the war that followed, the combined Arab militaries were far stronger than the Haganah, Morris argues, if not in manpower then certainly in equipment and firepower. But Israeli forces had some "home court advantages" over the four invading armies, such as a unified command, internal lines of communication, familiarity with the terrain and a commitment to protect their homes and families. By the end of the war, they outnumbered the Arab soldiers almost 2 to 1 and produced smashing victories on virtually every front.

Morris is remarkably even-handed when he sifts through the evidence of atrocities. During the civil-war phase, he says, neither side paid much heed to the possible injury or death of civilians, and both sides executed prisoners. In the more conventional fighting that followed, the killing of civilians and prisoners of war mostly stopped -- except for a series of atrocities committed by Israeli troops in the Palestinian town of Lydda in central Israel and in the Galilee. "In truth," writes Morris, "the Jews committed far more atrocities than the Arabs and killed far more civilians and POWs in deliberate acts of brutality in the course of 1948."

Morris doesn't attribute this to any greater morality on the Arab side but rather to the fact that the victorious Israelis captured some 400 Arab villages and towns, while the Arabs overran fewer than a dozen Jewish settlements. By his tally, Palestinians slaughtered some 190 Israelis in two large-scale massacres, while Israeli troops probably murdered some 800 Arab civilians and prisoners of war. But in comparison to modern slaughterhouses like Bosnia or the Congo, the atrocities were relatively limited. The 1948 war "is actually noteworthy for the relatively small number of civilian casualties," Morris concludes.

As for the 700,000 Palestinian refugees, he rejects the claims of other revisionist historians -- most notably Ilan Pappe in his 2006 book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine-- that the expulsions were part of Plan D, drawn up by Zionist leaders and military officers in Tel Aviv in March 1948 and carried out with relentless precision. Morris contends that the plan called for the destruction only of villages that resisted conquest, not those that were quiescent. "Nowhere does the document speak of a policy or desire to expel 'the Arab inhabitants' of Palestine," he writes, adding that "nowhere is any brigade instructed to clear out 'the Arabs.' "

Why is all of this worth re-adjudicating six decades after the event? Because none of it has been resolved. For Israelis, 1948 is central to the legitimacy of the Jewish state. For Palestinians, it is an open wound; if the refugees were unfairly expelled, then they should be allowed to return.

One weakness of Morris's book is that he can offer little documentation of the Arab side. Most of the archives of countries like Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Syria remain off-limits. Too often Morris ends up speculating about the perceptions and motives of Arab leaders because he lacks the documentation that enriches his treatment of the Israeli side.

Morris himself is a controversial figure in the conflict over the conflict. As an army reservist in 1988, he protested Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip by refusing to report for duty during the first Palestinian uprising; he spent three weeks in jail as a consequence. But after the second intifada broke out in 2000, he condemned Palestinian suicide bombers as "barbarians" and said the early Israelis were right to have expelled their Arab neighbors. "When the choice is between destroying or being destroyed, it's better to destroy," he told the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz.

Despite his personal views, Morris strives to give a balanced view of the conflict. The collapse of the Arab military effort caused a chain reaction of coups and assassinations that brought down many of the old regimes. Leaders were killed or discarded in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Jordan. "But 1948 has haunted, and still haunts, the Arab world on the deepest levels of collective identity, ego, and pride," Morris writes. "The war was a humiliation from which that world has yet to recover." ·

Glenn Frankel, who teaches journalism at Stanford University, is a former Jerusalem bureau chief for The Washington Post.