Will Israel's New Archive Policy Set Back a Generation of Scholarship?

Evan R. Goldstein
The Chronicle of Higher Education
30 July '10

Earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu extended the classification of certain national-security related state archives for an additional 20 years. Netanyahu's decision came on the heels of a three-year legal battle waged by two Israeli journalists, Ronen Bergman and Yossi Melman. In an editorial, the liberal newspaper Haaretz warned that Israel "can and must confront the less than heroic chapters in its past and reveal them to the public and for historical study. The public has a right to know about the decisions made by the state's founders, even if they involved violations of human rights, covering up crimes or harassing political opponents by security means."

For more on the potential implications of Netanyahu's decision, I turned to Benny Morris, a professor of history at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Morris is the author of numerous books, including The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (Cambridge University Press) and, most recently, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (Yale University Press). Morris answered questions by e-mail from Washington, D.C., where he is currently visiting.

Q: What do you make of the decision to keep security-related documents classified?
A: Every closure of documents, every extension of periods of classification, is against the spirit of an open society. But Israel does live in a particularly difficult environment—and is at war with its surroundings, so more than most societies, there is justification for a tight archival policy. But the truth is that Israel's archives remain among the most open in the world—far more open than Britain's and France's, and, in some respects, the United State's (for example, the Israeli Cabinet maintains verbatim transcripts of its meetings, and opens them—97 % of the material—to public scrutiny after 40 years. The US doesn't).

Q: Among the information that will remain classified are documents relating to Israel's treatment of Arabs during the 1948 War, a focus of your scholarship. Might this cache of classified files deepen or alter our understanding of that event? Or do you feel like the picture is already very clear?
A: Most of the material on 1948 is open, including treatment of Arabs\Arab communities. That's how I was able to write my books. Here and there, the officials managed to close material on atrocities and some expulsions. But other materials were opened and remain open—so it won't really affect scholarship on the subject. (Often one finds a specific document closed in one file and open in another—even in the IDF archive itself.)

(Read full article)

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.