EDITOR'S NOTE: As the Jewish state approaches its 50th anniversary next spring, many "Israelis" are taking a second look at their nation's violent inception. An AP correspondent spoke to historians deep in disagreement over "Israel's" national myths.

TEL AVIV: For the Jewish refugees and pioneers who built "Israel" on the ashes of the Holocaust, theirs was a straight-forward tale of justice, heroism and redemption.

But half a century later, a maturing nation is reassessing its violent birth, with historians angrily debating a long-suppressed question with broad implications: Was "Israel" born in sin? For Ilan Pappe, among most outspoken of "Israel's" "new historians", the answer is a resounding yes.
"Jews came and took, by means of uprooting and expulsion, a land that was Arab," the Haifa University scholar said in an interview. "We wanted to be a colonialist occupier, and yet to come across as moral at the same time!" The "new historians" claim that in many cases their predecessors dishonestly perpetuated national myths, especially surrounding the 1948-49 war that established "Israel" and created the Palestinian refugee problem.

Among the claims made by the revisionists:

In "Israel", history and the present day mix constantly. Some fear revisionists' dismantling of "Israel's" heroic self-image could weaken its resolve as it prepares to negotiate final borders with the Palestinian.

The first salvo came in the late 1980s, when Benny Morris, now a professor at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, detailed the expulsions of the Arabs in a series of articles and a book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. The Arabs "left for a variety of reasons, the most prominent of which was "Israeli" attacks and fear of "Israeli" attacks - imminent, not imagined attacks," Morris said in an interview.

Morris could not say exactly bow many were directly driven out. In Lod and Ramle, about 60,000 were actually forced out by "Israeli" troops, while in Haifa, Jaffa and Safed, Arabs fled on or near the dates of Jewish attacks, he said.

And while Zionist leaders may not have planned the expulsions, Morris said, they toyed with the idea while strug-gling with a basic quandary: "They had to establish a Jewish state in a country where there was a majority of Arabs. Any way you divided the country there would be a large...poten-tial fifth column." After a British commission recom-mended the partition of Palestine and population exchanges in 1937, David Ben- Gurion and others who led "Israel" before statehood made numerous statements in support of transferring the Arab popula-tion out of Israel, Morris said.

    "There's never one quote that they oppose transfer," he noted.

Pappe has tried to prove that "Israel's" war of independence was not what it seemed for "Israelis" reared on the idea that a small army of Jewish refugees miraculously prevailed over powerful Arab invaders.

The Arab armies - primarily from Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Transjordan, now Jordan -totalled just over 20,000 men, he said. The Arab nations' core fighting forces remained behind, in part to ensure the internal stability of their own fledgling regimes.

The nascent "Israel" Defence Force - based on the pre-state Haganah militia - soon out-numbered the Arabs and the Jewish soldiers were far more motivated. The Arabs were also crippled by dependence on British military supplies, which were withheld, Pappe said.

Crucially, "Israel" had a quiet agreement with Transjordan that its Arab Legion, the strongest of the invading armies, would take over only the West Bank, which the UN partition plan had intended as the centre of a Palestinian Arab state, Pappe said.

Even so, the Arab Legion handily won a few battles, including the capture of east Jerusalem and the Etzion bloc of Jewish settlements near Bethlehem.

There are also new claims that in the months after the war, Arab leaders sent peace feelers that Ben-Gurion rejected and kept from the "Israeli" public because he wouldn't part with gains in the war compared to the skimpier UN partition plan.

The Arabs never publicized the offers, fearing their own public opinion, Pappe said.

Morris said these events were glossed over by Zionist histori-ans, who "propagated a wholly rosy view of "Israeli" thinking and actions and a wholly nega-tive view of Arab thinking and actions". The conclusion is that "Israelis" are normal", Morris said. "They look after their own interests, they're not very gen-erous and like most people they distort the truth and after revo-lutions tend to write official his-tories."

The post-Zionists who believe "Israel" should drop the "Jewish state" mantle would can-cel the Law of Return, which allows anyone with a Jewish grandparent to immigrate and receive automatic citizenship. They also want to change 'Hatikva', the anthem that speaks of Jews' longing for their land and ignores the Arab minority that accounts for almost a fifth of the population.

At the heart of the debate is a challenge to the fundamental idea justifying the Jews' return to "Israel" over the past 100 years- that they deserve a state because they are "a people".

"Jews are nothing more than a religion. To have a 'Jewish state' is like having a 'Catholic state' in France," said Pappe.