15.10.2015 The Limits of Revisionist Imagination, by Rebecca Luna Stein http://desip.igc.org/Imagination.html 1/4 Demographic, Environmental, and Security Issues Project The Limits of Revisionist Imagination by Rebecca Luna Stein MERIP , Jan/March ɨɰɰ6. No. ɨɰɯ, Vol. ɩ6, No. ɨ. Books Under Review: Labor and the Political Economy in Israel By Michael Shalev. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. 400 pages. Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 18811948 By Anita Shapira. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 446 pages. Israel's Border Wars, 19491956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War By Benny Morris. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. 451 pages. Reviewed by Rebecca Luna Stein In early March, 1995, the minutes of Knesset cabinet meetings from May 1948 through April 1949 were opened for public inspection, ten years ahead of schedule. They document BenGurion's reluctant acceptance of the UN partition plan and his intention to defy its temporary borders through territorial expansion. This early declassification has a political resonance, suggesting a new willingness to subject Israeli history to critical inspection. Yet, for reasons of "security," significant portions of the documentsaddressing Israel's 1948 expulsion of over 50,000 from Ramle and Lodremain classified.[1] Like the act of the declassification itself, revisionist scholarship has a clear political geneology. The brutalities of Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, coupled with Israel's continuing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, gave rise to a new mode of scholarship committed to reevaluating national myths. These new histories demonstrated unprecedented interest in Israel's treatment of the Palestinians of both Israel and the occupied territories and the legacy of Zionist state violence. But Israeli revisionism is heterogeneous, and much of it treads ambivalently on the borders of Zionist ideology, such that even radical critiques of state building often return to conventional apologies for state formation, couched in the myths of an original socialist vision.[2] Israeli sociologist Michael Shalev critiques these myths of socialist origin. Labor and the Political Economy in Israel offers a comprehensive history of the Histadrut (the General