These young academics were harshly criticized, or enthusiastically supported. The questions raised by the “New Historians” provoked a major intellectual debate in Israeli media.
The book written by Morris and published in 1988 was the first revolutionary event in this national controversy. The main debate was initiated by Benny Morris and dealt with the exodus of the Palestinian Arab population during the War of Independence (1948-49). In particular, these young and brilliant academics undertook to review various chapters of contemporary Israeli history, in order to check if these events were true or were “political myths” created by the Zionist establishment to support the national aim. Young social scientists, working in the fields of history, sociology, anthropology and economics, began to put into question fundamental ideas which, until then, had been considered by the Israeli society as perfect “truth”. At the end of the 1980’s, appeared in Israel a remarkable and fascinating intellectual phenomenon: the “New Historians”.
0 kommentar(er)
