Shabtai Teveth—Israeli journalist, prolific historian, and biographer of David Ben-Gurion—passed away last November. Martin Kramer writes that Teveth “knew the flaws of Israel’s founders perfectly well, but never let that overshadow the nobility of their cause.” He was also a fierce critic of Israel’s “new historians,” who sought to prove that the state was founded through a series of crimes and atrocities.
Teveth [dismissed] the “new historians,” since “history, thank goodness, is made of sterner and more intractable stuff than even their wholesale efforts of free interpretation can dissimulate.” This proved to be overly optimistic. Demolishing Israel’s “myths” and creating new ones turned into a popular pastime for younger academics and activists. Benny Morris’s book on the Palestinian refugee problem has become the most-read and most-cited book on the 1948 war. One hardly need wonder what Teveth would say about the latest iteration of “free interpretation” (pioneered by Morris in the revised edition of his book), accusing Israel of various massacres that somehow escaped notice until just now. Nothing good, I imagine.
Unfortunately, concludes Kramer, Teveth’s truths are still not secure:
I wish I could announce that Teveth’s legacy will be ever-enduring, but a younger generation of readers will have to discover him first, and that hasn’t happened yet. He wrote mostly in the era before the Internet, so his most important writings aren’t accessible at a click. He disappeared from the scene years before he died, so the obituaries were few and perfunctory. And he wrote big books that almost no one has read cover-to-cover. Teveth not only told truths about Israel, he told whole truths, and that required a minute retrieval and examination of all the evidence.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/2015/01/20/shabtai-teveth-whole-truth/