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One important reason for the waning of the Israeli historians’ controversy is the rapid attenuation of traditional Zionist ideology in Israeli academia and, to an only slightly lesser extent, among the members of Israel’s secular and professional elite who dominate the mass media. The New history’s counter-narrative was coherent and powerful because it challenged a well-established master narrative. Traditional Zionist proclamations about the Jews’ historic and moral right to a homeland in the ancient Land of Israel, the obligation to undergo a physical and psychic transformation from a people of peddlers into a nation of warriors and laborers, and a mission to ‘‘ingather the exiles’’ from throughout the diaspora have lost relevance as Israel has matured into a highly industrialized, urbanized, materialistic society with an economy based in high-technology manufacturing and services.

30 Writing Israeli history The Revisionist strain in Israeli historiography may also be compared with a somewhat different type of historical inquiry, not of dominating states but rather of the peoples they have historically dominated. The Israeli Revisionist controversy of the late 1980s and 1990s was similar in many ways to developments in the field of Irish historiography some twenty years earlier. In both cases, the passage of about two generations after statehood and the transformation from an impoverished into a First World national economy moderated feelings of historic victimization.

Unfortunately, the search for a new paradigm, admirable in itself, can lead to a determinist monism. Gershon Shafir’s application of this sort of framework on a monographic level in his highly influential 1989 book on land and labor markets in Ottoman Palestine was not completely successful. 46 Problematic though it may be, this line of sociological thinking is promising and welcome, as it has pushed the new history beyond controversies surrounding the birth of the state of Israel. Most students of the new history see its purview moving inexorably forward; thanks to the ongoing declassification of Israeli documents, particularly after thirty years, we have a growing Revisionist literature of the 1956 and 1967 Wars.