[2] Much of the primary source material used by the group comes from Israeli government papers that were newly available as a result of being declassified thirty years after the founding of Israel.
[3] The perception of a new historiographical current emerged with the publications of four scholars in the 1980s: Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim and Simha Flapan.
Subsequently, many other historians and historical sociologists, among them Tom Segev, Hillel Cohen, Baruch Kimmerling, Joel Migdal, Idith Zertal and Shlomo Sand have been identified with the movement.
[6] Benny Morris coined the phrase "new historians" in a 1988 paper to describe Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim, Simha Flapan, and himself.
He cites sociologists such as Baruch Kimmerling, Uri Ram, and Gershon Shafir as being "heavily influenced" by the 1970s–80s international academic climate which was a "high tide of postmodern theories and multi-narrative histories."
[citation needed] Efraim Karsh has accused them of ignoring questions which he says are critical: namely, who started the war, what their intentions were, who was forced to mount a defence and what Israel's casualties were.
[16] Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch argues that, prior to the advent of the New Historians, "Israelis held to a one-sided historical narrative of the circumstances leading to the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem, and that any other counter-narratives were taboo."
According to Ben-Josef Hirsch, the conclusions of the New Historians, and the wide-ranging debate that they provoked, ended that taboo and changed the way in which the Palestinian refugee problem and its causes were viewed in Israel.
[citation needed] Baruch Kimmerling criticised the focus on "post-Zionism", arguing that debates around the term were "nonsense and semi-professional and mainly political".
Kimmerling saw this discussion as damaging to research in these areas because it took the focus away from the quality and merit of scholarship and onto whether the work should be characterized as Zionist or post-Zionist.