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Making History: Israeli Law and Historical Reconstruction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Eben Moglen
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Extract

As Asher Maoz insightfully points out, governmental involvement in the ascertainment of historical truth—whether in court, by commission of inquiry, or in other ways—is directed at securing approval of a particular historical narrative, as a step toward imposing that narrative, to a greater or lesser extent, on those who disagree with it. This “official version” exists not only for the sorts of questions presented by the cases Maoz discusses, but also with respect to auto accidents, crimes of passion, and all the other historical reconstructions that form the substrate of “facts” upon which legal conclusions and enforceable judgments are predicated.

Type
Forum: Comment
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , Fall 2000 , pp. 613 - 617
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2000

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References

1. See Sharon v. Time, Inc., 599 F.Supp. 538 (S.D.N.Y. 1984).

2. As readers of Maoz's footnotes will have noted, the standard pro-Revisionist historian of the affair, Hanoch Ben-Yeroham, republished his book, originally entitled “The Sacrifice,” during the controversy leading to the appointment of the Arlosoroff commission. The title on republication was, significantly, “The Great Libel.” See Maoz, Asher, “Historical Adjudication: Courts of Law, Commissions of Inquiry, and ‘Historical Truth,’” Law and History Review 18 (2000): 561–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar, n. 6, 574–75, n. 48. An interesting and valuable essay remains to be written on the image of the blood libel, the inverted sacrifice, in the rhetoric of Israeli law.

3. I am particularly grateful, in this regard, to Daphna Barak-Erez for the opportunity to read her fascinating and as-yet-unpublished work on the construction of historical narratives in Israeli judicial opinions.