Historian Benny Morris performs a public service both for Israel’s friends as well as its foes today in a column in the Guardian. Morris’s immediate task is to take down an earlier piece in the newspaper by Max Hastings that recycled all the usual evil-Israelis-have-been-corrupted-by-power stuff. Morris points out that Hastings, who poses as a disillusioned admirer of Israel, fundamentally misunderstands the history of the country.

Morris takes down the hackneyed claim of “disproportionate” Israeli military actions and rightly dismisses it as “moral relativism.” But his broader point is about the whole idea of a good country that went bad. However great or small Israel’s shortcomings might be, they have been bred by a war that preceded its birth and which has never ended:

The simple truth is that since before its inception, the Arab world has laid siege to the Zionist enterprise and tried to destroy or badly weaken it, in war after war and terrorist campaign after terrorist campaign, by continuous political delegitimisation, assault and boycott. And that much that is bad about Israel today – insensitivity toward Palestinian suffering, declining school standards, even the growing power of religious parties – is, directly and indirectly a result of this Arab belligerence.

The point Morris makes is one that many Israelis, who similarly mythologize the generation of 1948 while decrying the current state of their nation, ought to take to heart. It is a commonly heard criticism that the Jewish State was ruined by its victory in the Six Day War. But such reasoning ignores the intransigent Palestinians and the rest of the Arab and Muslim world who have dictated the history of conflict not only for the last forty years, but during the two wars that preceded that period.