This Special Document File examines the closure of documents on the Nakba in the Israeli archives and argues that this closure must be juxtaposed with recent intensified U.S. and Israeli attempts to depoliticize the Palestine question and to delegitimize the Palestinian narrative in general, and that of 1948 in particular. The documents are important because they expose the systematic nature of the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine, both in planning and execution. Many of these documents have been copied and scanned by scholars over the years, but they are now no longer accessible to the public or to researchers. Collating, digitizing, and archiving these documents is the best response to the attempt to cover up the crimes against the Palestinian people in 1948.

Mainstream Zionism (now comprising both Labor and Likud) is increasingly being challenged by the Right and Left. Post-Zionism has exposed the intellectual fallacies underlying traditional Zionism's attempt to combine ethnic segregation with an open society, but it is the moral and ideological substitute offered by neo-Zionism, opting for ethnic segregation as an ultimate goal, that is mounting the real political challenge. This article argues that while mainstream Zionists will delineate the space of a future Israel (by drawing the borders in a settlement with the Palestinians), the neo-Zionists will cast the ideological content into this space (by defining the identity and orientation of Israeli society).

This third and final part of a summary of post-Zionist critique follows the manifestations of new ways of looking at Israeli history and the "other" in film, theater, novels, music, and poetry. Cinema has the greatest potential for influencing the public and has gone further than the other media in challenging traditional views. The author concludes that the cultural products that have seriously transcended the Zionist narrative and its negative portrayal of the Arabs remain outside the Israeli canon and have limited impact, though the groundwork has been laid for what is clearly a growing trend.

The academic debate in Israel on Zionism and its implications for the way the society views itself and the "other" were discussed in part one of this article. This part examines the press, which with partial privatization and the cumulative impact of the Lebanon war and the intifada has undergone a transformation since the late 1980s. While a wider diversity of views and bold reporting on events are now current, the article concludes that the representation of the Palestinians and Arabs in the news columns is fundamentally unchanged. The last part will follow the manifestations of the academic debate in film, theater, novels, music, and poems and will assess the significance of these changes in the culture and worldview of Israeli society as a whole.

This three-part article describes changes in how Israelis-scholars, writers, poets, film makers, and others on Israel's cultural scene-view themselves and the "Other." Part I presents the scholarly debate on Israel's past and present that laid the groundwork for the transformation of the cultural discourse described in the second and third parts. The debate, launched by new findings in the Israeli archives and encouraged by an ideology critical of Zionism, also was influenced by sociopolitical and economic changes in Israeli society in the wake of the October 1973 war. The various aspects of the post-Zionist critique-the challenge by the "new historians" and "critical sociologists" not only of the Zionist interpretation but also of the role of Israeli academia in providing the scholarly underpinnings of this interpretation-are examined.