Two months ago an "Israeli" journalist decided to publish an account of an interview with celebrated "Israeli" general and defense minister Moshe Dayan that had lain untouched in a drawer for more than 20 years. In June, 1967, in the middle of the Six-Day War, Gen. Dayan ordered his troops to attack Syria and take the Golan Heights. For 30 years the Western world has considered Gen. Dayan's motives for storming the Golan Heights rather obvious. Syrian artillery on the high ground of the Heights had been mercilessly shelling "Israeli" settlements down below. But in the interview Gen. Dayan offered a far less self-flattering explanation for "Israel's" attack. It hadn't been essentially defensive after all. Gen. Dayan said "Israeli" farmers had been pressuring him to take the Heights because they coveted its fertile soil.

From a modern American viewpoint, the most peculiar thing about Gen. Dayan's bombshell was that it never exploded. But in Israel for perhaps a decade now historical revisionism has arrived with all its trappings. Arousing controversy at every turn, of course, an increasingly influential group of "Israeli" historians, sociologists, and journalists have dedicated their careers to attacking the behavior of the Jewish state from its "mythic" founding right down to today. Like our own revisionist historians, who in the 1 960s rewrote the Cold War and the rest of American history, "Israel's" "New Historians," as they call themselves, take a highly skeptical view of virtually everything in "Israel" from its origins on down. "Israel" being a new, small country, these broadsides are having a tremendous political impact.

According to an excellent account in Lingua Franca by Jonathan Mahler, the New Historians hold that "Israel's" established view of itself is so saturated with myth that it can only be considered state propaganda. In response, the "Israeli" establishment charges the New Historians with attempting nothing less than the undermining of the Jewish claim to "Israel". A question with which "Israel" still lives, for example, is what happened to the Arabs who once inhabited so much of the country's territory. According to the orthodox canon, as found in "Israeli" schoolbooks, when the 1948 War of Independence broke out leaders of the surrounding Arab states encouraged local Arabs to flee their villages, promising them that Arab armies would be victorious and that they'd soon be able to return to their homes.

The New Historians take the opposing view -- long held by Arab leaders -- that soldiers of what is called "pre-state" "Israel" practiced what is now known as ethnic cleansing, driving local Arabs from the lands assigned to them under the United Nations peace plan. For the New Historians even the Holocaust isn't sacred, and they've charged Zionist leaders of the pre-state period with not doing their part to save European Jews from even Hitler, giving priority to the establishment of the state of "Israel".

The "Israeli" dispute is to a degree generational, the traditional historians having been active participants in the 1948 War of Independence and the creation of the new Jewish state -- their defining experiences. The new historians, younger, have grown up in a free and increasingly secure "Israel" and can permit themselves the luxury of self-criticism. "Israeli" historian.

Benny Morris introduced the name "New Historians" in a 1988 article in the Leftist American Jewish magazine Tikkun. But what opened the gates for historians of all sorts was the recent declassification of "Israeli" documents kept secret under a 30-year rule. And the 1982 invasion of Lebanon ("Israel's" Vietnam) seems to have played a major part.

I confess that irreverently I've been faintly amused by the often repeated Zionist dictum that Jews would not have a real homeland until they had a society where everyone was Jewish down to the street prostitutes. For my part, I'm forced to admit that a free society must also be prepared to see forming within it an adversary culture. Thus modern "Israel": a complete Jewish nation, fully equipped with its own adversary culture and prostitutes. Recently there's been a major flap in "Israel" over the government's refusal to release full documentation on the deaths of 49 Egyptian prisoners of war in the 1956 war. Even more recently, a Jerusalem high school teacher refused to take his students to visit Masada, an "Israeli" national shrine and ancient Hebrew fortress whose inhabitants all died rather than surrender to the Romans.

According to another New Historian, Ilan Pappe, it's naive to claim there's no connection between history and ideology, and he calls on "Israeli" historians to state clearly their political affiliation. He himself is a member of "Israel's" Communist Party.