Can Israel survive as a Jewish state?

New history textbooks introduced into mainstream secular elementary schools in 1999 paint a more nuanced picture of the Arab-Jewish struggle for the country, in order, these pedagogues hope, to develop a new generation of more tolerant and pluralistic Israelis. The new books state, for instance, that during the 1948 War of Independence the Jewish armies engaged in ethnic cleansing and expulsions of Arabs in order to build a majority Jewish state. This all seems part and parcel of a revisionist deconstruction of what is now perceived to have been an overly simplistic Zionist nationalist myth. Indeed, there has arisen a so-called 'post- Zionist' school of Israeli academics and intellectuals, who want to separate Zionism and Israel altogether. They include the 'new historians' Benny Morris of Ben-Gurion University, author of Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999; Avi Shlaim of St. Antony's College, Oxford, author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World; and Ze'ev Sternhell of the Hebrew University, who published The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State.