The Futility of the Historian

Benny Morris has written a very detailed, almost brutal take-down of Ilan Pappe, at The New Republic. Remember, back in the 1980s Morris and Pappe were close colleagues in launching the "New [Israeli] Historians. Now there's a chasm between them, and it's depressing to see.

The first reason it's depressing is that it's so necessary. Pappe, as Morris writes, is a quack. He doesn't know history, he's overtly dishonest, he's a low-life propagandist garnering attention and importance by pretending to be a scholar, and he's also a hypocrite. Yet he's listened to by many people, he has an influential voice, his teachings of hate are lapped up by people who have the inclination to listen, but who need him to ground their animosities in a cloak of respectability and historical fact.

The second reason it's depressing is that it's so nit-picking. Morris spends page after page disputing minutiae that Pappe has published. Here's he's got a date wrong. There he's spelled a name wrong. Over here he confused two men with similar names. Over there he has dropped two crucial words from a sentence, and also maliciously slightly mistranslated a Hebrew term. Who would know all these things except Morris and a small handful of specialists? No normal reader of Pappe's books would ever see any of this.

The third reason it's so depressing is that it's so rarefied. If he got the dates wrong, the chronology of the story can't be true. If he spelled the name wrong, it proves he never saw the document, only read about it in a known tendentious rendering of it. By mistranslating, even ever so slightly, he creates an intention which never existed. If he cites oral evidence for a case that probably didn't happen, while overlooking the documentary evidence that supports the skepticism, he maligns a group of soldiers and through them the entire IDF without indicating there isn't much of a case against them. My point being that the art and profession of historical research aren't mere mumbo jumbo and copious citing of arcane footnotes. Historical research is the professional attempt to peer backwards in time, to collate as much information as possible from as many varied sources as possible, and to evaluate the findings in a plausible way. Pappe doesn't do that, on the contrary, by pretending he does he acquires the gravitas without having the substance; but the only way to refute him is to do the job correctly, and that takes time, and discipline, professionalism. And lots of patience, first from the researcher, then from the reader. It would be so easy, and acceptable in our age of tweets, to brush aside the objections as tiresome pedantry.

Defending the truth from intentional liars is hard work; even then, it will succeed only when people are willing to take the time to listen to the defense.