Yes, Hillel, Morris did move to the right
HHW
No More Tears: Benny Morris and the Road Back from Liberal Zionism
Joel Beinin
(Joel Beinin, an editor of this magazine, teaches Middle East history
at Stanford University.)
Books Reviewed
Benny Morris, 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1990, second edition, 1994).
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Haganah militiamen expel Palestinian Arabs from Haifa, April 1948.
(Agence France Presse)
On July 11, 1948, Aharon Cohen, director of the Arab Affairs
Department of the socialist-Zionist Mapam party in Israel, received a
carbon copy of a military intelligence report. Israel, a state less
than two months old, was embroiled in a war with neighboring Arab
states that would last until 1949. The document in Cohen's hands
analyzed the reasons for the flight of 240,000 Palestinian Arabs from
areas which had been allocated to the Jewish state by the November
1947 UN partition plan and another 150,000 from the Jerusalem region
and areas allocated to the Arab state. Cohen was upset to read the
report's conclusion that 70 percent of these Arabs had fled due to
"direct, hostile Jewish operations against Arab settlements" by
Zionist militias, or the "effect of our hostile operations on nearby
(Arab) settlements."[1] One month before Cohen received this report,
Mapam's political committee had issued a resolution opposing "the
tendency to expel the Arabs from the Jewish state," in response to
Cohen's warnings that such operations were taking place.
Over the course of Arab-Jewish fighting between 1947 and 1949, well
over 700,000 Palestinians were made refugees, the majority of them by
direct expulsion or the fear of expulsion or massacre. The largest
single expulsion occurred after Israeli conquest of the towns of Lydda
and Ramla in the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv corridor during July 9-18, 1948.
Some 50,000 Palestinians were driven out of their homes in these towns
by Israeli forces whose deputy commander was Yitzhak Rabin, prime
minister of Israel from 1974-1977 and 1992-1995. Some two dozen
massacres of Palestinians were perpetrated by pre-state Zionist
militias and Israeli forces, the most infamous of them on April 9-10,
1948, at the village of Deir Yassin.
Yet after the war, it was Mapam's prescription for the conduct of
Israeli forces--rather than the reality of expulsion--that became
official Israeli history, and eventually, came to define the Jewish
Israeli collective memory of what happened in 1948. For decades, the
state of Israel, and traditional Zionist historians, argued that the
Palestinian Arabs fled on orders from Arab military commanders and
governments intending to return behind the guns of victorious Arab
armies which would "drive the Jews into the sea." Consequently, the
Zionist authorities would admit little or no responsibility for the
fate of the Palestinian refugees and their descendants. This was not
due to lack of adequate information. Ample evidence from Zionist
sources from the period of the 1948 war and immediately afterwards
indicates that members of the military and political elite, secondary
leaders and intellectuals close to them knew very well what happened
to the Palestinian Arabs in 1948, to say nothing of rank-and-file
soldiers and kibbutz members who actually expelled Palestinians,
expropriated their lands and destroyed their homes. But soon after the
fighting, Zionist and Israeli state officials began to consolidate an
official discourse that enabled most Israeli Jews to "forget" what
they once "knew"--that during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war a large number
of Palestinian Arabs were ethnically cleansed from the territories
that became the state of Israel.
"Shooting and Crying"
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a group of Israeli "new historians"
began to publish findings from research in previously classified
archives that reminded Israelis of what they had forgotten. The most
celebrated, if not the most radical, of these "new historians" is
Benny Morris. His signature work, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee
Problem, 1947-1949, is arguably the single most significant revision
of the previously prevailing Israeli historical consensus on the 1948
war. In addition to his influential book, Morris found and explicated
the unpublished diaries of Yosef Nahmani, a leader of the Zionist
institutions in the eastern Galilee, who offered a clear description
of the expulsion of Arabs, the confiscation of their lands and his
concerns about these issues during the 1948 war. Summarizing his
analysis of Nahmani's diaries, Morris notes that Nahmani's regrets
about the expulsions mark one of the first instances of the
distinctive Israeli syndrome known as "shooting and crying."[2]
The point of departure for The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee
Problem is that, traditionally, two contending explanations sought to
account for the flight of the Palestinian refugees from their homeland
in 1948. The Palestinian and Arab version argued that "transfer" was
always an element of Zionist thought and that the war of 1948 provided
the opportunity to implement the transfer plan. Hence, the Zionists
expelled the Palestinian Arabs by conscious design. In contrast, the
Zionist version blamed the orders of Arab leaders. Based on his
archival research, Morris contends that neither the traditional Arab
nor the Zionist version can be empirically substantiated, and "that
war and not design, Jewish or Arab, gave birth to the Palestinian
refugee problem."[3] This formulation presents itself as a golden
mean, with all the moral and philosophical legitimacy that accrues to
such a position in the Western cultural tradition. There is absolutely
no epistemological warrant for the claim that "the truth" of any
matter lies midway between two opposing claims. But Morris' appeal to
this apparently reasonable, if fallacious, notion has contributed to
positioning The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem as the
standard work on the topic in Europe and North America. His later
works have solidified his reputation as the voice of reason--and, for
some, an embodiment of hope for a more liberal Israel that can come to
terms with its past.
Stereotypical image of Jewish construction upon "the land without a
people." (Agence France Press)
This reputation was definitively shattered by Morris's interview in
the Friday supplement of Haaretz, Israel's "intellectual" daily, a
month before publication of an expanded second edition of his
principal work, retitled The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem
Revisited.[4] Relentlessly pursuing his empirical research, Morris
documents even more Israeli massacres of Palestinians--some two dozen--
than were chronicled in the original text, as well about a dozen cases
of rape by Israeli soldiers. But "balance" is maintained by his
discovery "that there were a series of orders issued by the Arab
Higher Committee and by the Palestinian intermediate levels to remove
children, women and the elderly from the villages."[5] Nonetheless,
Morris coldly concludes, "There is no justification for acts of rape.
There is no justification for acts of massacre. Those are war crimes.
But...I do not think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You
can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your
hands." Not only does Morris refrain from morally condemning the
ethnic cleansing of 1948, he explicitly endorses it because "[a]
Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of
700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There
was no choice but to expel that population."[6]
Morris now provides a moral justification for ethnic cleansing that he
did not offer before the second intifada, arguing that "[e]ven the
great American democracy could not have been created without the
annihilation of the Indians." Native Americans and those with a
sounder knowledge of North American history may demur. But in Israel,
appeal to the authority of the US is the ultimate clincher in any
argument. Yearning for the success of the American example, Morris now
criticizes Israel's first prime minister and defense minister, David
Ben-Gurion, for failing to do "a complete job" because "this place
would be quieter and know less suffering if the matter had been
resolved once and for all. If Ben-Gurion had carried out a large
expulsion and cleansed the whole country.... It may yet turn out that
this was his fatal mistake." Palestine-Israel might also be quieter
today if Hitler had completed his planned genocide of world Jewry. It
does not occur to Morris that there might be a parallel between these
two historical counterfactuals. The first is in the realm of
acceptable speculation; the second is too obviously outrageous to
consider.
Morris now embraces the common American post-September 11 view of the
Muslim world, arguing that, "There is a deep problem in Islam. It's a
world whose values are different. A world in which human life doesn't
have the same value as it does in the West, in which freedom,
democracy, openness and creativity are alien.... Therefore, the people
we are fighting have no moral inhibitions." The Palestinians are
"serial killers" and "barbarians." What follows from Morris' logic is
that the Palestinian refugees of 1948 were simply precursors of al-
Qaeda who deserved their fate. Further, "if Israel again finds itself
in a situation of existential threat, as in 1948...expulsion [of
Palestinian-Israelis and West Bankers and Gazans] will be justified."
Excluding Arab Testimony
The racism Morris has openly expressed during the second intifada is
prefigured by his historical method, beginning with his earliest
publications during the first intifada. All his work is characterized
by the near total exclusion of Arab testimony. Because of the
destruction of the fabric of Arab society and the flight of most of
the population in 1948, few intellectuals remained who could offer a
coherent counter-narrative capable of contesting the Zionist
narrative. Most efforts of those Palestinians who became citizens of
the Israeli state to organize independent political and cultural
institutions after 1948 were repressed. Mapam did criticize, even if
for the most part ineffectually, the most extreme injustices of the
Zionist project. But the activities of Arab party members were
typically supervised by their Jewish comrades. Only the Communist
Party offered Palestinian-Israelis a relatively free framework for
cultural expression and political action.[7]
The delegitimization of Palestinian-Israeli voices, most clearly
expressed at the institutional level by the military government
imposed on most Arab citizens from 1949 to 1966, was one of the
principal tools deployed to dig a labyrinthine memory hole in which
things once known were deposited and rendered unknowable for the vast
majority of Israeli Jews. Morris is uninterested in excavating this
hole. He never asks how and why unsupported and demonstrably false
assertions could become so widely accepted among Israeli Jews, among
world Jewry and by Western public opinion, although he acknowledges
that this did occur. The answers to these questions might, at least in
part, explain why Morris' own work, and that of the other new
historians, has had relatively little impact in transforming popular
Israeli understandings of the events of 1948 and after.
A Dubious Distinction
In the narrative of Morris and the early work of the other new
historians, just as in that of the old historians, Jews are the
subjects of history. Arabs are objects of Jewish action. This is
particularly salient in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem
Revisited. The focus on Jewish actions is partly, but not entirely,
due to the availability of copious Israeli literary and archival
materials and the paucity of comparable Arab sources.
The early new historians, like their predecessors, tend to emphasize
what Jews thought, not what they did. For Benny Morris, the critical
question is the existence of a document which would constitute a
"smoking gun"--a blanket order to expel Arabs in 1948. The non-
existence of such a document (or at least Morris' inability to find
it) looms far larger in his understanding of the Palestinian refugee
question than the fact, which he readily acknowledges, that the great
majority of the Palestinian Arabs who lived on the lands which became
the state of Israel fled or were expelled due to actions of the
Israeli armed forces. The preoccupation with what Jews thought or
intended to do rather than the actual consequences of Jewish actions,
is a continuation of the dominant idealist approach in Israeli
historical writing on the history of Zionism and the Arab-Zionist
conflict.[8]
Morris' empiricist and positivist historical method excludes
Palestinian Arab voices from his narratives to nearly the same extent
as the old historians and the political leadership with which they
were organically connected. Explaining that he was "brought up
believing in the value of documents," Morris claims to distrust oral
evidence.[9] Moreover, he asserts that, "There is simply no Arab
documentation of the sort historians must rely on. What exists in
Arabic or translated from Arabic into Hebrew or English are some Arab
political and military memoirs, newspaper clippings, chronicles and
histories. Much of this material...is slight, unreliable, tendentious,
imaginative and occasionally fantastical."[10]
Despite this contempt for the existing Arabic sources, Morris'
position has a respectable professional pedigree derived from the work
of Leopold von Ranke. Like many positivist historians, Morris does not
consider the intellectual or political implications of his choice of
historical method. Indeed, like most traditional Israeli historians he
rejects the view that proper scholarly practices have political
implications. Despite the sympathy it might arouse for their plight,
Morris' historical method contributes to the historical and political
marginalization of the Palestinians. Moreover, his positivist and
literalist approach to reading archival evidence results in a
historical incoherence which renders the experiences of the
Palestinians and other Arabs obscure if not incomprehensible.
Responding to Nur Masalha's critique of The Birth of the Palestinian
Refugee Problem,[11] which argues that the Zionists did carry out a
planned expulsion of Palestinian Arabs in 1948, Morris characterizes
the objectives of Plan D--the military strategy adopted by the Haganah
militia in early March and implemented in early April 1948--as follows:
"The Plan called for the securing of the future country's border areas
(to close off the expected invasion routes) and of its internal lines
of communication (to guard against the threat of fifth column activity
by the country's Arab minority) while the Haganah was engaged along
the borders."[12]
Morris insists on the distinction between military and political
policy, arguing that, "Plan D was not a political blueprint for the
expulsion of Palestine's Arabs: It was governed by military
considerations and was geared to achieving military ends. But, given
the nature of the war and the admixture of the two populations,
securing the interior of the Jewish state and its borders in practice
meant the depopulation and destruction of villages that hosted hostile
local militia and irregular forces.... Plan D provided for the conquest
and permanent occupation, or leveling, of villages and towns."[13]
Nonetheless, Morris is unequivocal about the consequences of the
implementation of Plan D: "...a vital strategic change occurred in the
first half of April: Clear traces of an expulsion policy on both
national and local levels with respect to certain key districts and
localities and a general atmosphere of transfer are detectable in
statements made by Zionist officials and officers.... During April 4-9,
Ben-Gurion and the [Haganah General Staff] under the impact of the
dire situation of Jewish Jerusalem and the [Arab] attack on Mishmar
Ha'emek...decided, in conformity with the general guidelines of Plan D,
to clear out and destroy the clusters of hostile or potentially
hostile villages dominating vital axes."[14]
Is the line between military policy and political policy as sharp as
Morris insists? Did Ben-Gurion participate in making this decision in
his capacity as the future prime minister of Israel or in his capacity
as its future minister of defense? Did he make a decision in his
capacity as a military leader that he could not have made in his
capacity as a political leader because he feared it would arouse
opposition from Mapam and international criticism of the Jewish state
before it was even established? If only villages which "hosted hostile
local militia and irregular forces" were to be destroyed, why did the
Haganah approve the Etzel/Lehi attack on Deir Yassin--a village that
had signed and observed a peace agreement with its Jewish neighbors?
[15]
According to Morris' periodization, the second and largest wave of
Palestinian refugees--some 200,000-300,000--fled between April and June
1948. This flight/expulsion corresponds to the period when Plan D was
implemented and can largely be explained by it. But Morris refrains
from making this direct connection. Did these refugees think there was
a substantial distinction between Zionist military and political
policy? Is their understanding of their experience relevant to
consider for the historical record?
Slightly Reliable
Some Arab voices do make their way into The Birth of the Palestinian
Refugee Problem, although they are unimpressive and tend to support
Zionist claims. Despite his proclaimed distrust of oral evidence
Morris uses a relatively weak source--an interview with Anwar Nusseibeh
in the Jerusalem Post Magazine in 1986--as evidence for his claim that
fear of internecine strife similar to that which occurred during the
Arab revolt of 1936-1939 caused the flight of Jerusalem's upper and
middle classes during the first wave of Palestinian flight from
December 1947 to March 1948.[16] Morris also relies on fourth-hand
oral evidence--an English sergeant quoting an American newsman
discussing Arab fears on the day of Jaffa's surrender to the Zionist
armed forces as reported in an article by Aharon Cohen to explain that
the Arabs fled Jaffa because they feared that the Jews would do to
them what the Arabs would have done to the Jews had they been
victorious.[17] Morris also refers to an interview with an Arab from
Haifa who said that the Arabs considered themselves less civilized
than the Jews in the same article by Cohen.[18] Hence, when negatively
portraying Palestinians, Morris is willing to rely on Arab oral
evidence.
Morris also abandoned his historiographical principles in accepting,
for the first edition of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem,
the oral testimony of Maj. Gen. Moshe Carmel, the commander of
Operation Hiram in which Israel conquered the areas of the Galilee
allotted to the Arab state during October 28-31, 1948. In an interview
with Morris in 1985, Carmel claimed that he never adopted a policy of
expelling Palestinians from these territories. Morris endorsed this
version of the events in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem.
[19] At this juncture, Morris declined to interview his colleague,
'Adil Manna', a native of Majd al-Krum, who told him after the
publication of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem that there
had been a massacre and expulsion in his village and in neighboring
villages during Operation Hiram.[20] When Morris was able to examine
the Israel Defense Forces archive, which was not open to him when he
researched the first edition of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee
Problem, he found an order from Maj. Gen. Carmel to all the division
and district officers under his command to "do all you can to
immediately and quickly purge the conquered territories of all hostile
elements....The residents should be helped to leave the areas that
have been conquered."[21] Carmel's forces proceeded to carry out
massacres in ten villages they had occupied. To his credit, Morris
corrected himself and unequivocally reported, "Carmel had not told me
the truth."[22]
"Truth, Not Justice"
The trajectory of Morris' historical work expresses a certain
radicalization in both its conclusions and their political
implications that corresponded roughly to the period of the first
Palestinian intifada (1987-91) and the ensuing willingness of liberal
Zionists to negotiate with Palestinians, culminating in the Oslo
"peace process" of 1993-2000. Thus, even though his conceptual
categories do not exceed the limits of liberal Zionist discourse, they
contributed to expanding the boundaries of that discourse in a
favorable conjuncture when liberal, middle-class, Israeli Jews eagerly
looked forward to the end of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
The conclusion of the Hebrew version of The Birth of the Palestinian
Refugee Problem, which appeared in 1991, contains a harsher assessment
of Israeli responsibility for the flight of the refugees than the
English version of 1988. There Morris added that, in addition to Arab
and Jewish fears and fighting, the refugee problem was "in part...the
result of deliberate, not to say malevolent, actions of Jewish
commanders and politicians; in smaller part Arab commanders and
politicians were responsible for its creation through acts of
commission and omission."[23] In articles that appeared after the
publication of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, in
addition to acknowledging that Moshe Carmel lied about the expulsion
policies implemented by forces under his command, Morris maintained
that even if there was no national political decision to expel
Palestinians in 1948, the number of regional expulsions and their
extent was greater than either the first English or the Hebrew edition
of the book acknowledged.[24] They are fully described in the second
English edition. By 1997, Morris argued that although he still could
find no document ordering a blanket expulsion of the Palestinian
Arabs, the concept of transfer developed from a haphazard idea to a
near Jewish consensus from 1937 to 1948. Hence, the Zionist political
and military leaders "arrived at 1948 with a mindset which was open to
the idea and implementation of transfer and expulsion" and that almost
all of them understood "that transfer was what the Jewish state's
survival and well-being demanded."[25]
If the interview in Haaretz marks Morris' arrival at the center-right
of the Israeli Jewish consensus, his road to that position began with
an interview in the Friday supplement of the daily Yediot Aharonot in
late 2001. There he eschewed evaluation and moral judgment and
divorced them from the proper professional preoccupations of the
historian in the strongest possible terms: "I do not look [at history]
from a moral perspective. I look for truth, not justice."[26] But the
same interview is replete with moral and political judgments:
What happened in 1948 was inevitable (bilti nimna'). If the Jews
wanted to establish a state in Eretz Yisrael that would be located on
an area a little larger than Tel Aviv, it was necessary to move
people.... I do not see this as inadmissible (pasul) from a moral
standpoint. Without a population expulsion a Jewish state would not
have been established here, and I am morally in favor of the
establishment of a Jewish state. Without the expulsion a state with a
large Arab minority would have been established here, with a large
fifth column.... I revealed to Israelis what happened in 1948, the
historical facts. But the Arabs are the ones who began the fighting.
They began shooting. So why should I take responsibility? The Arabs
began the war, they are responsible.
Moreover, Morris explains that the Palestinian Arabs were not expelled
but "were driven out," in the passive voice. The initiative came
primarily from commanders in the field (like Moshe Carmel) who
understood that it is better to clear out (lefanot) the Arabs.
Once again, Morris draws a sharp line between political and military
policy. How did these commanders come to this understanding? Did
anyone in a position of political leadership rebuke them for their
actions? Today, Morris is even less interested in these questions than
he was in the 1990s. The positivist assertion that whoever began to
shoot is the aggressor and bears moral responsibility for all the
consequences of the war resembles the question of the existence or non-
existence of a "smoking gun." Absent such an order Morris will not
conclude that there was an intention to expel Arabs even though the
Zionist political and military leaders "arrived at 1948 with a mindset
which was open to the idea and implementation of transfer and
expulsion."
Morris' willingness to entertain only certain moral judgments stems
from his perception that the Palestinians rejected a "generous offer"
by Israel and the United States at the July 2000 Camp David summit and
afterwards. He admits, "I have accumulated a lot of anger towards the
Palestinians in the last two years. Because they rejected Clinton's
proposal." Although he agrees that then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Barak also made mistakes, Morris considers them insignificant when
compared to those of Yasser Arafat. "For their [i.e., Palestinian]
mistakes we pay in human lives, ours and theirs." Israeli mistakes
apparently do not cost human lives.
All Cried Out
The bottom line of Morris' reassessment represents the Israeli
national consensus: "What happened in 1948 is irreversible."[27] That
is to say, there can be no consideration of a Palestinian right to
return in any form. The entire historical project of demonstrating
Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948 is emptied of
its obvious current political implications and reduced to an
antiquarian curiosity. For Morris and the broad center of the Israeli
consensus, even if they are prepared to acknowledge that it happened,
to one degree or another, it is irrelevant to the political questions
that can legitimately be addressed.
Benny Morris and the liberal Zionist intelligentsia of which he is (or
was) a part limited a priori the conclusions that might be drawn from
the historical reassessment of 1948 and related matters. Among the new
historians, only Ilan Pappé speaks openly in favor of recognizing the
right of return of Palestinian refugees--the red line dividing those
who adhere to the Israeli-Jewish national consensus from those who do
not. Because Morris avoided the conclusions toward which his research
gestured, even in his most radical phase, most Israelis enmeshed in
the traditional Zionist discourse could simply ignore his work rather
than engage in a serious effort to dispute its empirical evidence.
Many knew very well what had happened in 1948 and were not embarrassed
by it in front of Jewish audiences, although they knew it was best to
be discreet in front of non-Jews. After the initial shock, only
guardians of the flame of Ben-Gurion and the heritage of labor
Zionism, like Shabtai Teveth and Anita Shapira, felt the necessity to
dispute Morris and the "new historians."[28] Hence the new historians
have not, as Zachary Lockman predicted,[29] substantially changed the
terms of political debate in Israel.
Morris once believed that the new historians might have a significant
impact on Israeli political discourse. But the political and cultural
orientation of the liberal Zionist intelligentsia of which he was a
part in the late 1980s and 1990s was an integral part of the project
of forgetting what was once known about the events of 1948. The Oslo
era's exclusion of issues that were on the Palestinian and Arab
political agenda--Jerusalem and refugees--is structurally parallel to
the historian's exclusion of Arab sources of evidence. Morris'
historical approach is deeply embedded in the categories of knowledge
of the Zionist project and not as incompatible with the methods of the
old history as he would like us to think. Both his liberal political
position until 2001 and his historical method continue the well-
respected, if ineffectual, labor Zionist tradition of self-critical
reassessment from within, or in the less generous colloquial Israeli
terminology previously introduced, shooting and crying.
The indefatigable research of Benny Morris was crucial in recovering
the voices of those Israeli Jewish participants in the expulsions of
Palestinians in 1948, like Yosef Nahmani, who shot and cried. But of
course, after the dispossession of the Palestinians at the hands of
Zionist militias and then Israeli soldiers, there were some in the
infant state of Israel who did not cry after shooting. The Israeli
historian Tom Segev cites a debate in the Knesset during August 1949
in which a member of the right-wing Herut party, which was led by
former Prime Minister Menachem Begin and which had emerged from the
Etzel military organization he had commanded, claimed that "thanks to
Deir Yassin, we won the war, sir." When challenged by Knesset members
from the dominant labor Zionist party, Mapai, he responded: "If you
don't know [about the Deir Yassin-type massacres that you yourselves
performed] you can ask the minister of defense [i.e., David Ben-
Gurion]."[30] Morris's latest investigation of the expulsions,
massacres and rapes committed by Israeli forces in 1948, combined with
his regret that Ben-Gurion did not go far enough, indicates that he
has joined the ranks of those who shed no tears.
Endnotes
[1] Benny Morris, 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 83-102.
[2] Morris, 1948 and After, pp. 159-211. Hebrew version in Tikun
ta'ut: yehudim ve-'aravim be-eretz yisra'el (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2000).
The quote is from the introduction to Tikun ta'ut, p. 17.
[3] Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem
Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 588.
[4] Ari Shavit, "Survival of the Fittest," Haaretz, January 9, 2004.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] For details, see Joel Beinin, Was the Red Flag Flying There?
Marxist Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in Egypt and Israel,
1948-1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
[8] Prominent examples of this idealist approach are Yosef Gorny,
Zionism and the Arabs, 1882-1948: A Study of Ideology (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987) and Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist
Resort to Force, 1881-1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
[9] Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem [first
edition] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 2.
[10] Morris, 1948 and After, pp. 42-43.
[11] Nur Masalha, "A Critique of Benny Morris," Journal of Palestine
Studies 21/1 (Autumn 1991).
[12] Benny Morris, "Response to Finkelstein and Masalha," Journal of
Palestine Studies 21/1 (Autumn 1991).
[13] Morris, Birth, second edition, p. 164.
[14] Ibid., p. 166.
[15] For accounts of the Deir Yassin massacre and the roles of the
various Jewish parties, see Morris, Birth, second edition, pp. 236-40
and Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy
Land Since 1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp.
114-16.
[16] Morris, Birth, first edition, p. 51.
[17] Ibid., p. 288.
[18] Ibid., pp. 363-364, fn. 2.
[19] Ibid., pp. 218-219.
[20] Conversation with 'Adil Manna', Jerusalem, December 31, 2002.
Manna' published his family's recollections of the events in "Majd al-
Krum, 1948: 'Amaliyyat tamshit 'adiyya," Karmil 55-56 (Spring/Summer
1998).
[21] Quoted in Morris, "Gerush mivtza' hiram: tikun ta'ut" in Tikun
ta'ut, p. 143.
[22] Benny Morris, "Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of 1948," in
Rogan and Shlaim, The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 51.
[23] Morris himself makes much of this change in his rejoinder to
Norman Finkelstein and Nur Masalha, "Response to Finkelstein and
Masalha," op cit.
[24] The first two articles appear in 1948 and After. The
reassessments of Operation Hiram appear in "Gerush Mivtza' hiram:
tikun ta'ut," in Tikun ta'ut and in "Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus
of 1948" in Rogan and Shlaim.
[25] Morris, "Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of 1948," p. 48.
[26] Yediot Aharonot, November 23, 2001.
[27] Tikkun, March-April 2001.
[28] Shabtai Teveth, "The Palestinian Refugee Problem and its
Origins," Middle Eastern Studies 26/2 (April 1990) and Anita Shapira,
"Politics and Collective Memory: The Debate over the 'New Historians'
in Israel," History and Memory 7/1 (Spring/Summer 1995).
[29] Zachary Lockman, "Original Sin," in Zachary Lockman and Joel
Beinin, eds. Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli
Occupation (Boston: South End Press, 1989).
[30] Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis (New York: Free Press, 1986),
p. 89.
Ben H. Cramer
That should stir up shoveari no end.
"HHW" <coaste...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:91448c71-3726-49a9...@u10g2000prn.googlegroups.com...
dsha...@gmail.com
A bit late with your posts on Benny, aren't you? Evidently you missed
this:
On Feb 29, 3:59 pm, HHW <coaster132...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Benny Morris was one of the early New Historians who told parts of the
> truth about Al Nakba.
Indeed, he did.
"I revealed to the Israelis the truth of what happened in 1948,
the historic facts. But the Arabs are the ones who started the
fighting, they started the shootings. So why should I take
responsibility? The Arabs started the war, they are responsible."
Benny Morris, Yediot Ahronot, November 23, 2001
"Arab officers ordered the complete evacuation of specific villages
in certain areas, lest their inhabitants 'treacherously' acquiesce
in Israeli rule or hamper Arab military deployments...There can be
no exaggerating the importance of these arly Arab-initiated
evacuations in the demoralization, and eventual exodus, of the
remaining rural and urban populations."
"In general, Haganah and IDF commanders were not forced to
confront the moral dilemma posed by expulsion; most Arabs
fled before and during the battle, before the Israeli troops
reached their homes and before the Israeli commanders were
forced to confront the dilema."
Benny Morris, Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem
Revisited, pp 590, 592
"It is clear from the new documentation that the Palestinian
leadership in principle opposed the Arab flight from December
1947 to April 1948, while at the same time encouraging or
ordering a great many villages to send away their women,
children and old folk, to be out of harm's way. Whole villages,
especially in the Jewish-dominated coastal plain, were also
ordered to evacuate. There is no doubt that, throughout, the
departure of dependents lowered the morale of the
remaining males and paved the way for their eventual
departure as well."
Benny Morris
For the Record
The Guardian, Wednesday January 14, 2004
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1122425,00.html
Message-ID:
<66739be1-3b37-4d21...@s8g2000prg.googlegroups.com>
> In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a group of Israeli "new historians"
> began to publish findings from research in previously classified
> archives that reminded Israelis of what they had forgotten.
Which had already been published in the 1970s and 1960s by American
and British scholars.
> In addition to his influential book, Morris found and explicated
> the unpublished diaries of Yosef Nahmani, a leader of the Zionist
> institutions in the eastern Galilee, who offered a clear description
> of the expulsion of Arabs, the confiscation of their lands and his
> concerns about these issues during the 1948 war.
Morris never "found" or "explicated" Nahmani's diaries. He produced
snippets which supported his thesis.
> Stereotypical image of Jewish construction upon "the land without a
> people." (Agence France Press)
Actually, the phrase was coined by Israel Zangwill of the Territorial
Zionists, and referred to British East Africa and the so-called
"Uganda Scheme".
> What follows from Morris' logic is
> that the Palestinian refugees of 1948 were simply precursors of al-
> Qaeda who deserved their fate.
Bosh.
> All his work is characterized
> by the near total exclusion of Arab testimony. ...
The so-called New Historians' lack of reference to Arab sources has
been noted. OTOH, American and British scholars made extensive use of
what the so-called "New Historians" ignored.
And "testimony", as used above, should always be in quotes, since it's
not testimony.
FOR THE RECORD
In 1948, thousands of Palestinians fled their homes in what is now
Israel, and became refugees. Both sides have blamed each other ever
since. But new documents show neither is entirely innocent, argues
Benny Morris
Benny Morris The Guardian, Wednesday January 14 2004
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1122425,00.html
Peace? No chance
Benny Morris
The Guardian, Thursday February 21 2002
The rumour that I have undergone a brain transplant is (as far as I
can remember) unfounded - or at least premature. But my thinking about
the current Middle East crisis and its protagonists has in fact
radically changed during the past two years. I imagine that I feel a
bit like one of those western fellow travellers rudely awakened by the
trundle of Russian tanks crashing through Budapest in 1956.
Back in 1993, when I began work on Righteous Victims, a revisionist
history of the Zionist-Arab conflict from 1881 until the present, I
was cautiously optimistic about the prospects for Middle East peace. I
was never a wild optimist; and my gradual study during the mid-1990s
of the pre-1948 history of Palestinian-Zionist relations brought home
to me the depth and breadth of the problems and antagonisms. But at
least the Israelis and Palestinians were talking peace; had agreed to
mutual recognition; and had signed the Oslo agreement, a first step
that promised gradual Israeli withdrawal from the occupied
territories, the emergence of a Palestinian state, and a peace treaty
between the two peoples. The Palestinians appeared to have given up
their decades-old dream and objective of destroying and supplanting
the Jewish state, and the Israelis had given up their dream of a
"Greater Israel", stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan
river. And, given the centrality of Palestinian-Israeli relations in
the Arab-Israeli conflict, a final, comprehensive peace settlement
between Israel and all of its Arab neighbours seemed within reach.
But by the time I had completed the book, my restrained optimism had
given way to grave doubts - and within a year had crumbled into a
cosmic pessimism. One reason was the Syrians' rejection of the deal
offered by the prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in
1993-96 and Ehud Barak in 1999-2000, involving Israeli withdrawal from
the Golan Heights in exchange for a full-fledged bilateral peace
treaty. What appears to have stayed the hands of President Hafez Assad
and subsequently his son and successor, Bashar Assad, was not quibbles
about a few hundred yards here or there but a basic refusal to make
peace with the Jewish state. What counted, in the end, was the
presence, on a wall in the Assads' office, of a portrait of Saladin,
the legendary 12th-century Kurdish Muslim warrior who had beaten the
crusaders, to whom the Arabs often compared the Zionists. I can see
the father, on his deathbed, telling his son: "Whatever you do, don't
make peace with the Jews; like the crusaders, they too will vanish."
But my main reason, around which my pessimism gathered and
crystallised, was the figure of Yasser Arafat, who has led the
Palestinian national movement since the late 1960s and, by virtue of
the Oslo accords, governs the cities of the West Bank (Hebron,
Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarm and Qalqilya) and their
environs, and the bulk of the Gaza Strip. Arafat is the symbol of the
movement, accurately reflecting his people's miseries and collective
aspirations. Unfortunately, he has proven himself a worthy successor
to Haj Muhammad Amin al Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, who led the
Palestinians during the 1930s into their (abortive) rebellion against
the British mandate government and during the 1940s into their (again
abortive) attempt to prevent the emergence of the Jewish state in
1948, resulting in their catastrophic defeat and the creation of the
Palestinian refugee problem. Husseini had been implacable and
incompetent (a dangerous mix) - but also a trickster and liar. Nobody
had trusted him, neither his Arab colleagues nor the British nor the
Zionists. Above all, Husseini had embodied rejectionism - a rejection
of any compromise with the Zionist movement. He had rejected two
international proposals to partition the country into Jewish and Arab
polities, by the British Peel commission in 1937 and by the UN general
assembly in November 1947. In between, he spent the war years
(1941-45) in Berlin, working for the Nazi foreign ministry and
recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the Wehrmacht.
Abba Eban, Israel's legendary foreign minister, once quipped that the
Palestinians had never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
But no one can fault them for consistency. After Husseini came Arafat,
another implacable nationalist and inveterate liar, trusted by no
Arab, Israeli or American leader (though there appear to be many
Europeans who are taken in). In 1978-79, he failed to join the Israeli-
Egyptian Camp David framework, which might have led to Palestinian
statehood a decade ago. In 2000, turning his back on the Oslo process,
Arafat rejected yet another historic compromise, that offered by Barak
at Camp David in July and subsequently improved upon in President Bill
Clinton's proposals (endorsed by Barak) in December. Instead, the
Palestinians, in September, resorted to arms and launched the current
mini-war or intifada, which has so far resulted in some 790 Arab and
270 Israeli deaths, and a deepening of hatred on both sides to the
point that the idea of a territorial-political compromise seems to be
a pipe dream.
Palestinians and their sympathisers have blamed the Israelis and
Clinton for what happened: the daily humiliations and restrictions of
the continuing Israeli semi-occupation; the wily but transparent
Binyamin Netanyahu's foot-dragging during 1996-99; Barak's continued
expansion of the settlements in the occupied territories and his
standoffish manner toward Arafat; and Clinton's insistence on
summoning the Camp David meeting despite Palestinian protestations
that they were not quite ready. But all this is really and truly
beside the point: Barak, a sincere and courageous leader, offered
Arafat a reasonable peace agreement that included Israeli withdrawal
from 85-91% of the West Bank and 100% of the Gaza Strip; the uprooting
of most of the settlements; Palestinian sovereignty over the Arab
neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem; and the establishment of a
Palestinian state. As to the Temple Mount (Haram ash-Sharif) in
Jerusalem's Old City, Barak proposed Israeli-Palestinian condominium
or UN security council control or "divine sovereignty" with actual
Arab control. Regarding the Palestinian refugees, Barak offered a
token return to Israel and massive financial compensation to
facilitate their rehabilitation in the Arab states and the Palestinian
state-to-be.
Arafat rejected the offer, insisting on 100% Israeli withdrawal from
the territories, sole Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount,
and the refugees' "right of return" to Israel proper. Instead of
continuing to negotiate, the Palestinians - with the agile Arafat both
riding the tiger and pulling the strings behind the scenes - launched
the intifada. Clinton (and Barak) responded by upping the ante to
94-96% of the West Bank (with some territorial compensation from
Israel proper) and sovereignty over the surface area of the Temple
Mount, with some sort of Israeli control regarding the area below
ground, where the Palestinians have recently carried out excavation
work without proper archaeological supervision. Again, the
Palestinians rejected the proposals, insisting on sole Palestinian
sovereignty over the Temple Mount (surely an unjust demand: after all,
the Temple Mount and the temples' remains at its core are the most
important historical and religious symbol and site of the Jewish
people. It is worth mentioning that "Jerusalem" or its Arab variants
do not even appear once in the Koran).
Since these rejections - which led directly to Barak's defeat and
hardliner Ariel Sharon's election as prime minister - the Israelis and
Palestinians have been at each other's throats, and the semi-
occupation has continued. The intifada is a strange, sad sort of war,
with the underdog, who rejected peace, simultaneously in the role of
aggressor and, when the western TV cameras are on, victim. The semi-
occupier, with his giant but largely useless army, merely responds,
usually with great restraint, given the moral and international
political shackles under which he labours. And he loses on CNN because
F-16s bombing empty police buildings appear far more savage than
Palestinian suicide bombers who take out 10 or 20 Israeli civilians at
a go.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) has emerged as a virtual kingdom of
mendacity, where every official, from President Arafat down, spends
his days lying to a succession of western journalists. The reporters
routinely give the lies credence equal to or greater than what they
hear from straight, or far less mendacious, Israeli officials. One day
Arafat charges that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) uses uranium-
tipped shells against Palestinian civilians. The next day it's poison
gas. Then, for lack of independent corroboration, the charges simply
vanish - and the Palestinians go on to the next lie, again garnering
headlines in western and Arab newspapers.
Daily, Palestinian officials bewail Israeli "massacres" and "bombings"
of Palestinian civilians - when in fact there have been no massacres
and the bombings have invariably been directed at empty PA buildings.
The only civilians deliberately targeted and killed in large numbers,
indeed massacred, are Israeli - by Palestinian suicide bombers. In
response, the army and Shin Bet (the Israeli security service) have
tried to hit the guilty with "targeted killings" of bomb-makers,
terrorists and their dispatchers, to me an eminently moral form of
reprisal, deterrence and prevention: these are (barbaric) "soldiers"
in a mini-war and, as such, legitimate military targets. Would the
critics prefer Israel to respond in kind to a suicide bombing in Tel
Aviv? Palestinian leaders routinely laud the suicide bombers as
national heroes. In a recent spate of articles, Palestinian
journalists, politicians and clerics praised Wafa Idris, a female
suicide bomber who detonated her device in Jerusalem's main Jaffa
Street, killing an 81-year-old man and injuring about 100. A
controversy ensued - not over the morality or political efficacy of
the deed but about whether Islam allows women to play such a role.
Instead of being informed, accurately, about the Israeli peace offers,
the Palestinians have been subjected to a nonstop barrage of anti-
Israeli incitement and lies in the PA-controlled media. Arafat has
honed the practice of saying one thing to western audiences and quite
another to his own Palestinian constituency to a fine art. Lately,
with Arab audiences, he has begun to use the term "the Zionist
army" (for the IDF), a throwback to the 1950s and 1960s when Arab
leaders routinely spoke of "the Zionist entity" instead of saying
"Israel", which, they felt, implied some form of recognition of the
Jewish state and its legitimacy.
At the end of the day, this question of legitimacy - seemingly put to
rest by the Israeli-Egyptian and Israeli-Jordanian peace treaties - is
at the root of current Israeli despair and my own "conversion". For
decades, Israeli leaders - notably Golda Meir in 1969 - denied the
existence of a "Palestinian people" and the legitimacy of Palestinian
aspirations for sovereignty. But during the 1930s and 1940s, the
Zionist movement agreed to give up its dream of a "Greater Israel" and
to divide Palestine with the Arabs. During the 1990s, the movement
went further - agreeing to partition and recognising the existence of
the Pales tinian people as its partner in partition.
Unfortunately, the Palestinian national movement, from its inception,
has denied the Zionist movement any legitimacy and stuck fast to the
vision of a "Greater Palestine", meaning a Muslim-Arab-populated and
Arab-controlled state in all of Palestine, perhaps with some Jews
being allowed to stay on as a religious minority. In 1988-93, in a
brief flicker on the graph, Arafat and the Palestine Liberation
Organisation seemed to have acquiesced in the idea of a compromise.
But since 2000 the dominant vision of a "Greater Palestine" has surged
back to the fore (and one wonders whether the pacific asseverations of
1988-1993 were not merely diplomatic camouflage).
The Palestinian leadership, and with them most Palestinians, deny
Israel's right to exist, deny that Zionism was/is a just enterprise.
(I have yet to see even a peace-minded Palestinian leader, as Sari
Nusseibeh seems to be, stand up and say: "Zionism is a legitimate
national liberation movement, like our own. And the Jews have a just
claim to Palestine, like we do.") Israel may exist, and be too
powerful, at present, to destroy; one may recognise its reality. But
this is not to endow it with legitimacy. Hence Arafat's repeated
denial in recent months of any connection between the Jewish people
and the Temple Mount, and, by extension, between the Jewish people and
the land of Israel/Palestine. "What Temple?" he asks. The Jews are
simply robbers who came from Europe and decided, for some unfathomable
reason, to steal Palestine and displace the Palestinians. He refuses
to recognise the history and reality of the 3,000-year-old Jewish
connection to the land of Israel.
On some symbolic plane, the Temple Mount is a crucial issue. But more
practically, the real issue, the real litmus test of Palestinian
intentions, is the fate of the refugees, some 3.5-4m strong,
encompassing those who fled or were driven out during the 1948 war and
were never allowed back to their homes in Is rael, as well as their
descendants.
I spent the mid-1980s investigating what led to the creation of the
refugee problem, publishing The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee
Problem, 1947-1949 in 1988. My conclusion, which angered many Israelis
and undermined Zionist historiography, was that most of the refugees
were a product of Zionist military action and, in smaller measure, of
Israeli expulsion orders and Arab local leaders' urgings or orders to
move out. Critics of Israel subsequently latched on to those findings
that highlighted Israeli responsibility while ignoring the fact that
the problem was a direct consequence of the war that the Palestinians
- and, in their wake, the surrounding Arab states - had launched. And
few noted that, in my concluding remarks, I had explained that the
creation of the problem was "almost inevitable", given the Zionist aim
of creating a Jewish state in a land largely populated by Arabs and
given Arab resistance to the Zionist enterprise. The refugees were the
inevitable by-product of an attempt to fit an ungainly square peg into
an inhospitable round hole.
But whatever my findings, we are now 50 years on - and Israel exists.
Like every people, the Jews deserve a state, and justice will not be
served by throwing them into the sea. And if the refugees are allowed
back, there will be godawful chaos and, in the end, no Israel. Israel
is currently populated by 5m Jews and more than 1m Arabs (an
increasingly vociferous, pro-Palestinian irredentist time bomb). If
the refugees return, an unviable binational entity will emerge and,
given the Arabs' far higher birth rates, Israel will quickly cease to
be a Jewish state. Add to that the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip and you have, almost instantly, an Arab state between the
Mediterranean and the Jordan river with a Jewish minority.
Jews lived as a minority in Muslim countries from the 7th century -
and, contrary to Arab propaganda, never much enjoyed the experience.
They were always second-class citizens and always discriminated-
against infidels; they were often persecuted and not infrequently
murdered. Giant pogroms occurred over the centuries. And as late as
the 1940s Arab mobs murdered hundreds of Jews in Baghdad, and hundreds
more in Libya, Egypt and Morocco. The Jews were expelled from or fled
the Arab world during the 1950s and 60s. There is no reason to believe
that Jews will want to live (again) as a minority in a (Palestinian)
Arab state, especially given the tragic history of Jewish-Palestinian
relations. They will either be expelled or emigrate to the west.
It is the Palestinian leadership's rejection of the Barak-Clinton
peace proposals of July-December 2000, the launching of the intifada,
and the demand ever since that Israel accept the "right of return"
that has persuaded me that the Palestinians, at least in this
generation, do not intend peace: they do not want, merely, an end to
the occupation - that is what was offered back in July-December 2000,
and they rejected the deal. They want all of Palestine and as few Jews
in it as possible. The right of return is the wedge with which to
prise open the Jewish state. Demography - the far higher Arab birth
rate - will, over time, do the rest, if Iranian or Iraqi nuclear
weapons don't do the trick first.
And don't get me wrong. I favour an Israeli withdrawal from the
territories - the semi-occupation is corrupting and immoral, and
alienates Israel's friends abroad - as part of a bilateral peace
agreement; or, if an agreement is unobtainable, a unilateral
withdrawal to strategically defensible borders. In fact in 1988 I
served time in a military prison for refusing to serve in the West
Bank town of Nablus. But I don't believe that the resultant status quo
will survive for long. The Palestinians - either the PA itself or
various armed factions, with the PA looking on - will continue to
harry Israel, with Katyusha rockets and suicide bombers, across the
new lines, be they agreed or self-imposed. Ultimately, they will force
Israel to reconquer the West Bank and Gaza Strip, probably plunging
the Middle East into a new, wide conflagration.
I don't believe that Arafat and his colleagues mean or want peace -
only a staggered chipping away at the Jewish state - and I don't
believe that a permanent two-state solution will emerge. I don't
believe that Arafat is constitutionally capable of agreeing, really
agreeing, to a solution in which the Palestinians get 22-25% of the
land (a West Bank-Gaza state) and Israel the remaining 75-78%, or of
signing away the "right of return". He is incapable of looking his
refugee constituencies in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Gaza in the eye
and telling them: "I have signed away your birthright, your hope, your
dream."
And he probably doesn't want to. Ultimately, I believe, the balance of
military force or the demography of Palestine, meaning the discrepant
national birth rates, will determine the country's future, and either
Palestine will become a Jewish state, without a substantial Arab
minority, or it will become an Arab state, with a gradually
diminishing Jewish minority. Or it will become a nuclear wasteland, a
home to neither people.
· Professor Benny Morris teaches Middle East history at Ben-Gurion
University, Beersheba, Israel. His next book, The Road to Jerusalem:
Glubb Pasha, the Jews and Palestine, is published by IB Tauris.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/feb/21/israel2
Deborah
hille...@yahoo.com
[Morris]
> Back in 1993, when I began work on Righteous Victims, a revisionist
> history of the Zionist-Arab conflict from 1881 until the present,
The big dream in 1993 was that there will finally be a real
peace and we will be done with those wars. Since the facts
did not fit our theory we ignored some of them. I did it and
IMO Morris did it too. The big break came in 2000 when
reality did not fit our theory. Such an event means that
either your facts are wrong, or your logic is wrong, probably
both. I admit that I was wrong and it seems like Morris
does the same.
> It is the Palestinian leadership's rejection of the Barak-Clinton
> peace proposals of July-December 2000, the launching of the intifada,
> and the demand ever since that Israel accept the "right of return"
> that has persuaded me that the Palestinians, at least in this
> generation, do not intend peace: they do not want, merely, an end to
> the occupation - that is what was offered back in July-December 2000,
> and they rejected the deal. They want all of Palestine and as few Jews
> in it as possible. The right of return is the wedge with which to
> prise open the Jewish state.
That was the point that the elders of Israel saw the 2000 Intifada
and realized that it was "back to 1948"; same Arab rhetoric and
same Arab goals. the first hand experience of "like 1948"
Arab attitude helped us *understand* the "why?" of 1948.
dsha...@gmail.com
> [Morris]
> > Back in 1993, when I began work on Righteous Victims, a revisionist
> > history of the Zionist-Arab conflict from 1881 until the present,
On Mar 26, 8:42 am, hillelg...@yahoo.com wrote:
> The big dream in 1993 was that there will finally be a real
> peace and we will be done with those wars. Since the facts
> did not fit our theory we ignored some of them. I did it and
> IMO Morris did it too.
So did I. Oslo, Madrid, and that handshake on the White House lawn
raised great hopes.
> The big break came in 2000 when
> reality did not fit our theory. Such an event means that
> either your facts are wrong, or your logic is wrong, probably
> both. I admit that I was wrong and it seems like Morris
> does the same.
He was no more immune to hope than anyone else.
> > It is the Palestinian leadership's rejection of the Barak-Clinton
> > peace proposals of July-December 2000, the launching of the intifada,
> > and the demand ever since that Israel accept the "right of return"
> > that has persuaded me that the Palestinians, at least in this
> > generation, do not intend peace: they do not want, merely, an end to
> > the occupation - that is what was offered back in July-December 2000,
> > and they rejected the deal. They want all of Palestine and as few Jews
> > in it as possible. The right of return is the wedge with which to
> > prise open the Jewish state.
> That was the point that the elders of Israel saw the 2000 Intifada
> and realized that it was "back to 1948"; same Arab rhetoric and
> same Arab goals. the first hand experience of "like 1948"
> Arab attitude helped us *understand* the "why?" of 1948.
Apparently it sent Benny back to the books--the Arab books he and his
fellow so-called "New Historians" ignored the first time around.
Deborah