Researching Israel's military history: archives, collections and sources

The history of Israel's wars rests on a fairly small set of collections: the archives of the Israeli state and its army, the archives of the pre-state Zionist institutions and undergrounds, the records of the British Mandate and of foreign governments, the documents of the United Nations, the press of the time, and the testimonies and memoirs of those who took part. Each holds a different piece of the picture, and each has its own gaps, rules of access and biases. Knowing where a document comes from, and what its author could and could not see, is the first step in using it well.

The state and the army: Israeli official archives

The two central collections for the period after 1948 are the Israel State Archives and the IDF and Defense Establishment Archives. The State Archives in Jerusalem hold the records of the government, the prime minister's office, the foreign ministry and the cabinet, including minutes of meetings that decided on war and peace. It has digitized a large part of its holdings and publishes thematic document collections online, and its English site is a practical starting point: the Israel State Archives (opens in a new tab). The State Archives also publish documents in their series on Israel's foreign policy, which reproduce key papers with editorial notes.

The IDF and Defense Establishment Archives, at Tel HaShomer near Ramat Gan, hold the operational records of the army: orders, war diaries, intelligence reports, after-action reviews and personnel files. Much of the documentation on the wars of 1948, 1956 and 1967 has been opened over the decades, and a smaller share of the 1973 material. Access is governed by Israel's Archives Law and by declassification rules that impose longer closure periods on defense and intelligence material than on ordinary government files. Researchers should expect some files to remain closed or to be released only in censored form.

A second filter sits between the archive and the public: the Military Censor, an office that reviews publications touching on security under rules dating back to the Mandate. Books, memoirs and news reports on military subjects can be submitted for review, and some passages are removed. For historians this means that a published account, even an official one, may be incomplete for reasons that the text itself does not show, and that a later edition or a newly opened file can fill in what an earlier version left out.

Declassification changes history. The release of minutes and testimony from the Agranat Commission, which investigated the opening of the Yom Kippur War, took place in stages, with the full report made public only in 1995 and further testimony decades later. Each release has led historians to revise accounts of who knew what before October 6, 1973.

Before 1948: Zionist, underground and community archives

For the Mandate period and the war of 1947 to 1949, the main Jewish collections are institutional:

• The Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, which hold the records of the Zionist Organization, the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund, including the political department that dealt with security matters.
• The Haganah Historical Archive in Tel Aviv, with the papers of the Haganah and the Palmach, thousands of recorded testimonies of members, and the documentation of arms acquisition and illegal immigration.
• The Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv, which holds the archives of the Revisionist movement and of the Irgun, and is a principal source for the Jewish insurgency of 1944 to 1947 from the Irgun's side.
• The archives of kibbutzim and moshavim, many of them small and run by volunteers, which preserve local records of attacks, defense and the experience of the war in individual communities.
• Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi in Jerusalem, a research institute and publisher with a long list of studies of the history of the Land of Israel.

The Palestinian side of the same history is documented differently. There is no single national archive comparable to the Israeli ones for the Mandate and 1948, and many records were lost or dispersed in the war. Historians use the Institute for Palestine Studies, collections of family papers, Arabic newspapers of the period, Arab League and Arab government records where available, oral history projects, and, increasingly, captured Arab documents held in Israeli archives.

Britain, the United States and the United Nations

For the period up to May 1948, the records of the Mandate government are indispensable. The UK National Archives at Kew hold the files of the Colonial Office, the War Office, the Foreign Office and the cabinet on Palestine, including police and military reports on the riots of the 1920s, the Arab Revolt and the Jewish undergrounds. British reports often describe events from a third point of view, neither Jewish nor Arab, though never a neutral one.

After 1948, foreign governments' documents offer a view from outside. The most accessible series is Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), published by the Office of the Historian of the US Department of State, which reproduces diplomatic cables and policy papers on every Arab-Israeli war. The UN's own records are the basic source for armistice agreements, Security Council resolutions, reports of observers and peacekeeping forces, and later fact-finding missions. Soviet, French and British diplomatic papers have also become available for many periods. The archives of the Arab states that fought Israel are, with few exceptions, still largely closed to researchers, which leaves an imbalance that every historian of these wars has to acknowledge: Israeli decision-making can often be traced document by document, while the decisions in Cairo, Damascus or Amman must frequently be reconstructed from memoirs, foreign diplomatic reports and captured papers.

The press, photographs and the record of the fallen

Newspapers are a source of their own, both for events and for what the public knew at the time. The National Library of Israel's Historical Jewish Press site gives free access to digitized Hebrew newspapers from the late Ottoman period onward, and to many Jewish newspapers in other languages. For the Mandate, The Palestine Post, the forerunner of The Jerusalem Post, is digitized there too. For recent wars, the archives of the major Israeli and international news organizations take over.

Photographs and film need particular care. The Government Press Office's National Photo Collection, the Central Zionist Archives and the Haganah archive hold large photographic collections, and many images are public domain or published under stated terms. Captions written at the time can be wrong about places, dates and people, and later reproductions are often cropped or misattributed. On this site, archival photographs are used only with a verified licence and source.

Commemoration has produced its own documentation. The Ministry of Defense's Izkor site records every fallen soldier of Israel's wars with biographical details, often written by families, and the National Insurance Institute maintains the record of civilian victims of hostile acts. These databases are the basis for the figures discussed in the guide on how to read casualty figures.

Testimony, memoirs and secondary works

Much of what is vivid in military history comes from people who were there: unit histories, oral history projects, memoirs of commanders and soldiers, and testimony given to inquiries. All of it is valuable and all of it needs checking. Memoirs are often written decades later, sometimes to defend a reputation, and recorded testimony reflects what an interviewer asked. Testimony is strongest when it can be compared with documents from the same day. The reverse is also true: a document can be precise about an order and silent about whether it was carried out, and only those who were present can sometimes say.

For most readers, the right starting point is the scholarship that has already worked through the archives. On the war of 1947 to 1949, the works of Benny Morris and Yoav Gelber are standard, read alongside Palestinian and Arab historians such as Walid Khalidi and Rashid Khalidi. On the IDF, Martin van Creveld's general history and the official histories of individual corps. On the wars of 1967 and 1973, the studies drawing on opened Israeli and foreign archives. Peer-reviewed journals, among them Israel Studies and the Journal of Palestine Studies, publish much of the new archival research.

A method for using sources well

The same few habits apply whether the source is a cabinet minute or a soldier's letter:

• Identify who wrote it, when, for whom and what they could have known.
• Separate what a document records from what it claims: an army's report of enemy losses is a claim, not a count.
• Look for a second, independent source for every important fact, ideally from another side.
• Note the gaps: what is missing from a file can matter as much as what is in it.
• Record the exact reference, file number and date, so others can check the same document.

These are the standards behind every record on Wars of Israel, from the war of 1947 to 1949 to the Israel-Hamas war. Where the archives are still closed, as they are for much of the recent past, the site says so, and treats the official and news sources it relies on as the first draft they are.