A few days ago, in the south Lebanese village of Shabriqa, a crusty 85-year-old Arab told me he was the only survivor of a massacre of 70 Arabs by Jewish forces in 1948. He rolled up his left trouser-leg to show me a hideous scar that still disfigured his flesh. He had survived, he said, because the bodies of his friends all lay on top of him, their blood flowing over his face and clothes. He couldn't remember the exact date - but he remembered the name of his village: Salha.
Until a decade or so ago, we journalists would report the memories of these old men and women without any corroborating evidence from the Israelis. Our accounts were almost inevitably met with outrage by Israeli governments and vicious letters - I still have them in my files - from readers claiming that anyone who took these Arab lies seriously was "anti-Semitic".
But of course, they were not lies. In 1992, a 636-page volume called All That Remains was published by the Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington, recounting the often murderous fate of hundreds of Palestinian villages. And in more than half the entries, the stories of slaughter were cross-referenced to a young Israeli historian called Benny Morris.
So after talking to old Nimr Aoun, I went back to All that Remains and sure enough, on page 491, there was the village of Salha. Yes, there had been a massacre by Israeli troops. In total, 90 Arabs had been killed - 20 more than Nimr Aoun remembered - during an Israeli attack code-named `Operation Hiram'. And it gave the date: October 30th, 1948. The research was credited to Benny Morris. Nimr Aoun had told me the truth.
Morris was among the first of what have become known as Israel's "new historians". Ignoring the Israeli textbook accounts of the 1948 war - which, like the novel and film Exodus, portrayed the Jewish struggle as one between men of honour and wily, cowardly Arabs - Morris and his colleagues went back to the original Israeli military documents, interviewed the now elderly Israelis who fought - and killed - in the war.
Morris's investigations produced a terrible indictment of the moral and military behaviour of some of those early soldiers in the state of Israel: house-burning, murder, the wholesale ethnic cleansing of Arab villages on a vast scale. Morris was denounced by right-wing Israelis. He was regarded as a revelation by Arab intellectuals who understood that Israel could at last produce a historian who would tell the truth about the Palestinian dispossession.
Now Morris has produced an immense tome on the history of modern Zionism and its struggle with the Arabs, especially with those Palestinian Arabs upon whose land - as well as Jewish property in Palestine - Israel intended to build its state. His research into Arab accounts of the wars is prodigious if sadly truncated by the number of Arab archives which he will never be able to penetrate until a real peace exists (if ever) in the Middle East. Large sections of his history - as Morris freely admits - are from secondary sources, so that much of the six-day war in 1967 and the 1973 conflict is familiar to anyone who has read through the literature of the period.
But his ferocious criticism of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon (albeit scarcely angrier than the earlier work of Zeev Schiff and Ehud Yaari in Israel's Lebanon War) and his understanding of the Palestinian "Intifada" that was partly inspired by guerrilla resistance in Lebanon, is as impressive as it is courageous. His work stands as a monument, for example, beside the recent lamentable history by Martin Gilbert.
The savage work of Israel's own intelligence services in the south Lebanon war is recounted in terrifying, undeniable detail; "the IDF (Israel Defence Forces) and GSS (Israeli General Security Service - Shin Bet) retaliated after each major incident with mass arrests, wholesale torture, and the occasional assassination of suspected Shia militants," Morris states bluntly. He credits the murder of a leading cleric in the village of Jibshit to Israel's killer squads, as the Israeli military tried and failed to find an answer to Hizbullah's suicide attacks.
There are some odd lapses. Morris repeatedly refers to the Israeli "Security Zone" in southern Lebanon, even though it is clearly an occupation zone in violation of all international law and also one of the most insecure places in the entire world - as I write these words in Beirut, Hizbullah are attacking an Israeli position at Sojud on the edge of the so-called "Security Zone" and an Israeli helicopter gun-ship has just attacked a car on a road a few miles away near Jouaya. And the massacre at Qana - in which more than 100 Lebanese refugees (more than half of them children) were massacred by Israeli gunners in 1996 simply does not merit a line in the book.
But it is his continued account of the bloody 1948 war - its details so thorough that the narrative has an unstoppable power to convince - that gives this history its power. During Operation Hiram, for example, Morris lists eight other village massacres perpetrated by Israeli troops. While pointing out that Arab propaganda itself often persuaded Palestinians to flee their homes - "villagers and townspeople usually abandoned hearth and home at the first whiff of grapeshot," he uncharitably remarks - Morris recognises that the "official" history of both Arabs and Israelis is deeply flawed. The Israelis said that the Palestinians left their homes "voluntarily" (all 750,000 of them) and the Arabs said that every Palestinian had been physically evicted. But the facts are there. As Morris writes:
Recently declassified Zionist documents demonstrate that a virtual consensus emerged among the Zionist leadership, in the wake of the publication in July 1937 of the Peel Commission recommendations (on Palestine's future), in favour of the transfer of at least several hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs - if not all of them - out of the areas of the Jewish-state-to-be. The tone was set by Ben Gurion himself in June 1938: "I support compulsory transfer. I do not see in it anything immoral."
For "transfer" - a word still used by ex-General Ariel Sharon and others - read eviction, dispossession, ethnic cleansing.
Morris is not exactly hopeful about the future, although I was a bit taken aback by his pedestrian conclusions. "Islamic fundamentalism" is less of a threat than the corruption and satrap values of the Arab states in which such "fundamentalism " emerges. "Great power rivalries" are unlikely to engender peace when the only surviving superpower has adopted Israel's policies and values as its own foreign policy in the Middle East. In reality, it all comes down to whether a peace is just or not. The Palestinian "peace" clearly is not. And therefore, however many pieces of paper Yassir Arafat will sign (probably all that are put in front of him), there is still no "peace" on the West Bank or in Gaza. Now the Syrians are demanding a real Israeli withdrawal on Golan, not a retreat in stages preceded by a peace treaty (the trap Arafat fell into in his little Bantustan). And of course, it all goes back to the same fact: two groups of people, both of whom want to live on the same bit of real estate.
All in all, this is an impressive achievement. But when, oh when, are we going to see Arab historians produce a book of such breadth and honesty?
Robert Fisk is Middle East Correspondent of the London Independent, based in Beirut