An old man treks his way up the side of a hill. Unbeknownst to the audience, he is making his way towards his home: a leveled village marked solely by a pile of rubble. 1948: Creation & Catastrophe follows this man as he, as well as several other Palestinians and Israelis, recount the events of the 1948 war.
The filmmakers relied on a range of perspectives to create their recount of history: the New Historian school of histography, presented by historians like Benny Morris; Palestinian survivors of mass expulsion; and records pulled directly from Israeli archives.
In a conversation with the producers, Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb and Andy Trimlett relayed the difficulties they encountered when piecing together the story of the Zionist conquest. While many Palestinians were open to talk about their experience, Israelis held their tongues. The difference is telling in itself.
Also holding its tongue, the Israeli state has consistently rebuffed journalists’ and historians’ efforts to access the full breadth of records from the Nakba—another trial faced by the filmmakers. As we hit 75 years since the conquest of Palestine, Israel’s 30-year classification period has long passed. The recent government decision to ignore its custom and extend this period until 2038 slights more than just Dr. Muhtaseb and Trimlett.
The New Historians and Palestine
It was a revisionist movement within Israeli academia that first breeched these elusive records and turned Zionist histography on its head. The group made new claims that what was originally espoused about the 1948 war was far different than what was led on by older Israeli historians. This is precisely the narrative that the film gleans from this ‘New History’: a view of Israeli history that peels back the uglier layers masked behind rally-around-the-flag antics espoused by Ben-Gurion and early Zionists. But even beyond these critiques, the film also pokes major holes in the arguments championed by these purportedly liberal revisionists.
Benny Morris became a prominent figure in the new revisionist movement, known as the New Historians, publishing seminal works on early Israeli history that would make many in the West re-think this past. For Morris and his contemporaries, this dubbed ‘old history’ replays the war of 1948 through a David and Goliath parable: a triumphant little Israel up against all odds of the bestial Arab powers. But where old history was romantic and valiant, a war between hero and villain—Morris’s history was hailed as balanced and rooted in stone-cold fact.
There is, however, a caveat to his perspective: this liberal-Zionist histography— in fact echoed by many of the Israelis interviewed in the documentary—has still fallen flat in presenting history through a balanced lens. While lauded for its inclusion of newly revealed records, Morris’s own analysis is nothing more than a debauched attempt at historical revisionism. He and his defenders assume a common trope that seems to appeal many in the West: that there is wrong on both sides—admittedly Israel, and then on the Palestinians. This denouncement of both ‘sides’ places both on a similar moral playing field—absolving the West from having to make moral judgements against either group, which, of course, placates the West’s delicate sensibilities but hides historical truth under a façade of palatability.
The added irony of this ‘New History’ is that it still lacks the crucial element of Palestinian perspectives. New Historians did not collect oral data from al-Nakba survivors; liberal Israeli historians did not try to find avenues of collecting records from Palestinian sources. Israeli intelligentsia, behind their veneer of progressiveness, still only reflect a Zionist perspective in their analysis of history. It seems that the ‘New’ Historians presented histography that was far more compatible with old history than they would like to think.
And this is precisely what the film critiques: the way that the so-hailed ‘balanced’ and ‘evidence-based’ New Historians ultimately belie their own work. The producers juxtapose the revisionist histography that follow Morris’s school with the reality of Palestinian voices—whose experience, even though lost to researchers in records, still holds weight in constructing narratives. What the film gets right, and what New Historian get wrong, is their ability to see the gravity of balanced histography, whereby Palestinian perspectives aren’t simply pushed to the wayside.
Constricting the Palestinian Narrative
But by engaging with a wealth of Palestinian oral history alongside the testimony of Israeli soldiers, historians, and documents, 1948: Creation and Catastrophe ushers the question: Why should the Palestinian narrative require validation from the settler?
It must first be recognized that the Israeli state archive is an imperial archive—selectively controlled and deployed as a tool of propaganda and protection. Within the depths of the state’s repositories, Israel holds Palestinian and Arab documents captive, unwilling to distinguish personal papers from military records; the Zionist state considers all Palestinian bodies as enemy combatants. And when one’s existence is villainized and reduced to such a status by a state that controls all facets of life, the contents of their national patrimony will inherently differ from traditional ethnic entities.
With official written records of Palestinian history scarce and dispersed across numerous states and private archives, oral histories compose a critical portion of Palestinian historical memory. As long as Palestine remains a stateless national identity where one-third of its people live in refugee camps—inherent sites of liminality and instability—a permanent archive of textual records will persist as a fleeting dream.
Israeli archives thus remain the only state-orchestrated witness to Zionist atrocities since the Nakba, with Western historians placing outsized value on these Jewish voices. But the authority levied on Israeli ledgers is not solely the consequence of their singularity. Rather, the prioritization of state-produced documents stems from a long Western tradition of foregrounding their own and rejecting indigenous forms of historical methodology. Rebutting the colonial-rooted notion that oral histories lack the validity of textual records, those seeking to share the history of 1948 and its enduring consequences must embrace the dispersed nature of Palestinian archives and its strong tradition of oral history—a task the filmmakers only partially realized.
Only then will history be told free from the propaganda of the oppressor, as Palestinians have long espoused.
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This article was written by Mica Maltzman, Miryam Onstot, and Galila Ibrahim, who are interns at The Jerusalem Fund. The views in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Jerusalem Fund.
