A quiet revolt began to take shape in certain academic circles in India, Pakistan and Israel in the 1980s. The revolt was a severe critique of historical claims present in textbooks and in nationalist narratives. These critiques resulted in evidence which brought to light serious discrepancies in the many claims and narratives present in textbooks. Some of these were even dismissed as being sheer myths. 

But why did this occur in the 1980s? All three countries were by then over thirty years old and had already passed the stage of fragility and anxiety that nation-states often experience during the early decades of their existence. So the historians believed that their iconoclastic critiques would not threaten their once fragile nation-states.

India’s case in this respect is slightly more complex, though. The nationalist narrative there was the work of multiple Congress Party regimes. It saw India as a ‘natural secular’ entity whose national ethos was rooted in ‘tolerant’ ancient Hindu rulers such as Asoka.

In the late 1960s, various ‘Marxist historians’ in India began to expand this narrative by augmenting it with the exploration of the histories of India’s common peoples, instead of just ancient dynasties. They understood the caste system as an ancient expression of the modern class system.

Concocted nationalist narratives that had been proliferated by the state for decades in India, Pakistan and Israel received a reality check in the 1980s

The Congress was quick to co-opt many of these ideas. But when Congress lost power for the first time in 1977, the fringe Hindu nationalist groups, which had joined an anti-Congress coalition government, attempted to use state institutions to undermine the ‘secular’ nationalist narratives of the Congress and the ‘Marxists’ and replace them with a history of India shaped by right-wing Hindu nationalists. These groups lobbied to ban textbooks written before 1977, but failed.

However, by the late 1990s, this (failed) revolt against an established nationalist history would begin to succeed with the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Nevertheless, it was different from the revolt that took place in Pakistan and Israel. In these countries, an increasing number of historians began to severely critique nationalist narratives that they saw as tools to strengthen right-wing authoritarian forces. 

In 1985, the book Murder of History by the Pakistani historian K.K. Aziz was published. It sought to demolish the many histories that were ‘invented’ and then stitched together in textbooks to present Pakistan as a homogenous ‘Islamic’ whole, instead of as a society with a diverse ethnic, sectarian and sub-sectarian polity. 

Aziz was most perturbed by the manner in which errors, misquotes, half-truths and outright lies were present in textbooks, whose purpose was to shape uncritical minds divorced from the realities that actually gave birth to Pakistan. The book appeared during the height of the ‘Islamist’ Ziaul Haq dictatorship and when the formation of a so-called ‘Pakistan Ideology’ was said to have reached completion.

Aziz faced serious hurdles in getting the book published. It only appeared when Najam Sethi’s Vanguard Books agreed to publish it. The same year, 1985, also saw the publication of the historian Ayesha Jalal’s The Sole Spokesman. The book explores the politics of Pakistan’s liberal-pragmatic founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Jalal’s book can also be understood as a negation of the ‘Islamic Jinnah’ that the Zia dictatorship was busy shaping. 

In 1986, The Battle of Ideas by the Marxist intellectual Sibte Hasan was published. In it, Hasan tried to exhibit that the nationalism that gave birth to Pakistan was inherently secular. He severely critiqued forces that were battling this ‘fact’ by adding to the original/‘progressive’ idea of Pakistan elements of Political Islam in a bid to enact a theocracy. 

These books succeeded in opening a window from which similar studies and critiques began to appear. Some have further expanded the research and ideas present in these books, and some have explored the ‘foundational myths’ of the country with newer angles. This has transformed the study of history in Pakistan from being a strictly ideological project into becoming a more open and insightful field. 

Something similar happened in Israel as well. In the late 1980s, a group of historians began to emerge in Israel. They were called ‘The New Historians.’ This was because they started to challenge the nationalist narratives shaped by the state of Israel. The New Historians began to question certain beliefs held by the majority of Israelis and proliferated by the state. According to the French political scientist Ilan Greilsammer, this was something ‘unimaginable’ before the 1980s. 

The New Historians were led by Benny Morris and also included scholars such as Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé and Simha Flapan. In 1987, Flapan published The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. This was followed, in 1988, by Pappé’s Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, and The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem by Benny Morris. 

The books rigorously investigated claims of the Israeli state regarding the 1948 creation of Israel. In doing so, the New Historians discovered that the majority of these claims were largely myths shaped to justify the existence of an occupying power and the subjugation of the occupied. Morris wrote that the purpose of the New Historians was not ideological but it was just curiosity to find out what really happened in 1948. 

According to Greilsammer, the involvement of Israeli forces in the brutal violence against Palestinian refugees in Lebanon in 1982 had shocked a lot of Israelis, who began to wonder whether violent means were still necessary to ‘protect Israel’ even decades after the country’s creation. The New Historians were a product of this sentiment. They were pacifists who believed that a more objective reading of Israel’s history could greatly mitigate Arab-Israel animosity. 

Textbook history in Israel insists that, after the creation of Israel, the thousands of Palestinians that left a land on which they had been living for hundreds of years did so of their own accord and on the insistence of Arab countries. The New Historians demonstrated this to be a myth and that most of the Palestinians were actually expelled and their lands forcibly occupied. 

These revelations by established historians pulled the rug from underneath the image of nobility, heroism and victimhood that had shaped Israel’s ‘foundational myth.’ The historians were attacked for being ‘pro-Arab’ and, of course, ‘anti-Semites.’ But these accusations just could not stick — not only because the evidence that they provided was irrefutable, but also because the historians were all declared Zionists. 

It is due to the initial critiques of the New Historians that today’s far-right regime in Israel is facing some of the most informed criticism of its genocidal actions against the Palestinians.

Published in Dawn, EOS, December 10th, 2023