The Struggle for Israel's Memory: The New Historians and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Since they began their work in the mid-1980s, the New Historians have sparked a great deal of social and political debate in Israel, but outside Israel – and certainly in Belgium and the Netherlands – they have remained virtually unknown.
Lander Corluy analyses the works of these New Historians in depth and illuminates the core issues surrounding them. Central to their work is the unmasking and rectification of a nationalist historiography, as a legitimizing and also producing actor in a context of identity construction and conflict. The power fluctuations in the Middle East region in 1948 following the establishment of the state of Israel, the emergence of the Palestinian refugee problem and the motives and mechanisms at work in Israel's policy are all the subject of research. This study thus explores the interrelationship between identity, the production of historical knowledge and the discursive hegemony of a political project.