Bad Tidings to Zion.

One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, by Tom Segev, translated by Haim Watzman (Henry Holt, 612 pp., $35)

One Palestine, Complete is the latest contribution to a growing body of anti-Zionist literature being produced by a group of prominent Israeli academics and journalists. According to these revisionist scholars, the State of Israel was born in sin at the expense of the Arab inhabitants  of Palestine. Their purpose, however, is not scholarly but political: They seek (in the words of historian Anita Shapira) "to undermine the state's moral and philosophical foundations, to dismantle the Jewish identity of the state and reconfigure it as a state of 'all its citizens.'" The success of their attempt to create a moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians can be seen in the new Israeli high-school textbooks, which were recently changed to reflect the "original sins" of Israel at its birth.

The main target and villain of all post-Zionists is David Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion was to Israel what George Washington was to the United States: a founding father, victor of the war of independence, and first chief executive of an independent nation. In the view of post-Zionist historians like Benny Morris and Avi Shlaim (authors, respectively, of Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 and The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World), Ben-Gurion was not only a warmonger responsible for the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel but also a heartless ideologue criminally remiss in failing to rescue more Jews from Hitler's reign of terror.

This is comparable to the recent attacks by American revisionist historians on Washington, Jefferson, and other Founding Fathers as hypocritical slaveholding elitists who sought primarily to increase their own wealth and steal the rest of North America from the Indians. In their zeal to make their case, the anti-Zionists have similarly stretched and even falsified history. Indeed, according to Ben-Gurion biographer Shabtai Teveth, Morris has actually altered historical documents to make his outlandish claims seem more plausible.

Tom Segev is one of the leading authors in the post-Zionist movement. In The Seventh Million (1993), he attacked Ben-Gurion and the Zionist leadership for their failure to rescue more European Jews from the Holocaust. His main contention in that book was that the Zionist preference to rescue only committed Zionists left the rest of the Diaspora at the mercy of Hitler and Stalin. In One Palestine, Complete, Segev repeats this unsubstantiated argument, despite its having been refuted in Teveth's Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust (1996), which documented the relentless efforts of Zionist leaders to alert the international community to the plight of Jews in Europe.

Mingling personal stories of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs with historical narrative, One Palestine, Complete falls somewhere between a novel and a gossipy panorama of Jewish, British, and Arab personalities and events in Palestine under the British Mandate. Segev is a skillful writer and the book is an engaging read. Yet despite the fact that he has consulted nearly every book on his subject written in Hebrew or English, including unpublished diaries, none of this material adds an iota of new information. Instead, One Palestine, Complete reshuffles the facts under the guise of a new interpretation.

According to his publisher, Segev offers "a radical new thesis," namely that the British, far from being pro-Arab as commonly believed, "consistently favored the Zionist position, thereby ensuring the creation of the Jewish state." Segev argues further that they did so "out of the mistaken-and anti-Semitic-belief that the Jews turned the wheels of history." In the author's view, it was Chaim Weizmann, the cunning president of the World Zionist Organization, who manipulated British Biblical fundamentalists like Lord Arthur James Balfour into establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine. Furthermore, Segev claims it was only when the militant Zionist underground-Menachem Begin's Etzel and Yitzhak Shamir's Lehi-terrorized the British that they turned against the Zionists.

Segev's argument turns history upside down. In fact, from its inception in 1918 the British Mandate was only partially accommodating to the Zionists. British civil and military administrators were uniformly hostile to them, refusing even to publish the Balfour Declaration (affirming the right of Jews to a national homeland) in Palestine. The sole exception was under the brief tenure (1920-1925) of high commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel, a Liberal Party lord, a Jew, and a Zionist who placed other Jewish Zionists in prominent positions throughout the government. And even Sir Herbert acted contrary to Zionist interests when, with the support of the British government, he appointed Haj Amin al-Husseini as grand mufti of Jerusalem in 1921.

Haj Amin, the most radical Palestinian nationalist, had already called for the ouster of Zionists from Palestine, and later organized the failed Arab Revolt in 1936-1939, declaring war on both the Mandate and the Zionists. After the revolt was suppressed and Haj Amin was exiled, he continued his anti-British activities from his new headquarters in Baghdad, where he helped foment a fascist coup in May 1941-which also was foiled by the British. In October 1941, he discussed with Mussolini the establishment of Arab fascist units who were to be responsible for atrocities against tens of thousands of Serbs and Jews in fascist Croatia. In November 1941, Haj Amin negotiated directly with Hitler, who was reluctant to support Arab independence. After the war he was declared a war criminal by the Allies, but escaped to Egypt where- despite everything-he lived under the protection of the British government and was never tried.

Segev admits that the Arabs turned to Germany and that they were ready to take support against the British from any quarter. But he excuses Haj Amin's actions as the natural behavior of an Arab nationalist and claims to see a moral equivalence between the mufti and his militant Zionist counterparts. In a footnote Segev writes, "At the same time that the Mufti was asking for the Nazis' help, Avraham Stern, the Lehi commander, suggested establishing a Jewish alliance with Nazi Germany to end British rule in Palestine. He was guided by the same principle: my enemy's enemy is my friend."

Comparing the mufti's role (and that of other leading Arab politicians, such as Iraqi prime minister Nuri a-Said and King Farouk of Egypt) with that of the marginal, renegade Zionist Stern Gang is simply outrageous. Lehi negotiated (unsuccessfully) with the Vichy regime-not the Nazis-in an attempt to help rescue Jews from Europe. Nor did they recruit for the SS, as the mufti did. Indeed, Palestinian Arab leaders lost little time in making known their approval of events in Germany since 1933, and actively supported Nazi anti-Jewish policy.

Segev reprises the old argument that the Mandate helped the Jews by providing roads, railways, communication, and an administrative infrastructure that would not have existed otherwise; But he only summarily mentions the most important damage the British government inflicted on the Jews during World War II. This was the infamous White Paper of March 13, 1939, which decreed the end of Jewish immigration to Palestine in an attempt to appease the Arabs, who nevertheless continued to support Nazi and fascist regimes. Therefore it was the British government itself (and not the Zionist leadership) that was most directly responsible for the failure to rescue European Jews. Despite the objections of Churchill, British colonial administrators continued the White Paper policy to the end of the war and beyond; indeed, it became the cornerstone of British policy in the Arab world, designed to protect British military bases in the Middle East. There could be no greater indictment of any Allied government, yet Segev seems to have no qualms about this policy.

Segev's whole argument crumbles through his failure to fix the blame for this great crime against the Jews on the British, who did their best to prevent any immigration of Jews during the war. Rather than explore this moral failure, which would mitigate his condemnation of the Zionists, Segev devotes many pages to a love affair between the wife of Arab nationalist ideologue Anwar Nusseibeh and Evelyn Barker, the British general responsible for the war against the Zionist underground. Segev mentions only parenthetically that Gen. Barker was in charge of Operation Agatha, in which more than 100,000 British soldiers and policemen surrounded Jewish settlements and confiscated weapons from the Haganah-the mainstream Zionist underground, which the British had recognized as a legitimate force during World War II.

It is hardly surprising that the highest praise for Segev's books has come from other revisionists like Morris and Shlaim. More disturbing is the New York Times Book Review's front-page review of One Palestine, Complete by Omer Bartov. Bartov is not known to be sympathetic to the "new historians," yet he praises the book highly and writes that Morris, Shlaim, and others have presented a "more balanced and detached" analysis of the origins of the Arab-Jewish conflict after reviewing previously classified documents, and "provoked fierce resistance from conservative scholars." This is a backhanded reference to Yoram Hazony, author of a provocative and hard-hitting attack on the post-Zionist intellectual movement, and his conservative think tank, the Shalem Institute. Hazony's The Jewish State is a brilliant demolition of post-Zionist ideological claims, and the Israeli left- liberal establishment attacked it without exception.

What Vietnam did for the American Left, the Israeli war in Lebanon and the Oslo peace process have done for the new Israeli revisionists, lifting them from academic obscurity to become a force in public life. However, they are best seen, not as serious historians, but as ideologues who must finally be judged by their political purposes. Like Holocaust denier David Irving, the Israeli post-Zionists are producing a falsified version of history that is designed for political ends. If this school succeeds in delegitimizing Israel in the eyes of the Israelis themselves, it will sap their will to resist Palestinian pressure, and for that reason constitutes a serious threat to the survival of the Jewish state. That so many American intellectuals appear not to understand this is profoundly disturbing.