Arguing that history writing is a dialectical process fusing ideological agenda and political developments with historical evidence, the author analyzes the two major transitions experienced by the Israeli historiography of the 1948 war: from the classical Zionist narrative to the "New History" of the late 1980s, and from the latter to the emergence of a "neo-Zionist" trend as of 2000. While describing the characteristics of these trends, the author shows how they are linked to concurrent political developments. Most of the article is devoted to an examination of the neo-Zionist historians who have emerged in recent years, based on their previously untranslated Hebrew works.

This article, excerpted and adapted from the early chapters of a new book, emphasizes the systematic preparations that laid the ground for the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians from what became Israel in 1948. While sketching the context and diplomatic and political developments of the period, the article highlights in particular a multi-year ““Village Files”” project (1940––47) involving the systematic compilation of maps and intelligence for each Arab village and the elaboration——under the direction of an inner ““caucus”” of fewer than a dozen men led by David Ben-Gurion——of a series of military plans culminating in Plan Dalet, according to which the 1948 war was fought. The article ends with a statement of one of the author's underlying goals in writing the book: to make the case for a paradigm of ethnic cleansing to replace the paradigm of war as the basis for the scholarly research of, and the public debate about, 1948.