BEATING A PLOUGHSHARE INTO A SWORD:

Survival of the fittest (Ari Shavit, 1/09/04, Ha'aretz)

Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist. People were mistaken when they labeled him a post-Zionist, when they thought that his historical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem was intended to undercut the Zionist enterprise. Nonsense, Morris says, that's completely unfounded. Some readers simply misread the book. They didn't read it with the same detachment, the same moral neutrality, with which it was written. So they came to the mistaken conclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that the Zionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually being condemnatory, that when he describes the large-scale expulsion operations he is being denunciatory. They did not conceive that the great documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with those sins. That he thinks some of them, at least, were unavoidable.

Two years ago, different voices began to be heard. The historian who was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israel had no one to talk to. The researcher who was accused of being an Israel hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academic establishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in the British paper The Guardian.

Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove, historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrew translation of his massive work "Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001," which was written in the old, peace-pursuing style. And at the same time historian Morris completed the new version of his book on the refugee problem, which is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominate Israel. So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historian Morris worked as though there is no connection between them, as though one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating. [...]

What you are telling me here, as though by the way, is that in Operation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicit expulsion order. Is that right?

"Yes. One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31, 1948, the commander of the Northern Front, Moshe Carmel, issued an order in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arab population. Carmel took this action immediately after a visit by Ben-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth. There is no doubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion. Just as the expulsion order for the city of Lod, which was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited the headquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]."

Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for a deliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion?

"From April 1948, Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transfer. There is no explicit order of his in writing, there is no orderly comprehensive policy, but there is an atmosphere of [population] transfer. The transfer idea is in the air. The entire leadership understands that this is the idea.
The officer corps understands what is required of them. Under Ben-Gurion, a consensus of transfer is created."

Ben-Gurion was a "transferist"?

"Of course. Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist."

I don't hear you condemning him.

"Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here."

-Survival of the fittest (cont.): When ethnic cleansing is justified

Benny Morris, for decades you have been researching the dark side of Zionism. You are an expert on the atrocities of 1948. In the end, do you in effect justify all this? Are you an advocate of the transfer of 1948?

"There is no justification for acts of rape. There is no justification for acts of massacre. Those are war crimes. But in certain conditions, expulsion is not a war crime. I don't think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands."

We are talking about the killing of thousands of people, the destruction of an entire society.

"A society that aims to kill you forces you to destroy it. When the choice is between destroying or being destroyed, it's better to destroy."

There is something chilling about the quiet way in which you say that.

"If you expected me to burst into tears, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I will not do that."

So when the commanders of Operation Dani are standing there and observing the long and terrible column of the 50,000 people expelled from Lod walking eastward, you stand there with them? You justify them?

"I definitely understand them. I understand their motives. I don't think they felt any pangs of conscience, and in their place I wouldn't have felt pangs of conscience. Without that act, they would not have won the war and the state would not have come into being."

You do not condemn them morally?

"No."

They perpetrated ethnic cleansing.

"There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide - the annihilation of your people - I prefer ethnic cleansing." [...]

Are you a neo-conservative? Do you read the current historical reality in the terms of Samuel Huntington?

"I think there is a clash between civilizations here [as Huntington argues].
I think the West today resembles the Roman Empire of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries: The barbarians are attacking it and they may also destroy it."

The Muslims are barbarians, then?

"I think the values I mentioned earlier are values of barbarians - the attitude toward democracy, freedom, openness; the attitude toward human life. In that sense they are barbarians. The Arab world as it is today is barbarian."

And in your view these new barbarians are truly threatening the Rome of our time?

"Yes. The West is stronger but it's not clear whether it knows how to repulse this wave of hatred. The phenomenon of the mass Muslim penetration into the West and their settlement there is creating a dangerous internal threat. A similar process took place in Rome. They let the barbarians in and they toppled the empire from within."

Is it really all that dramatic? Is the West truly in danger?

"Yes. I think that the war between the civilizations is the main characteristic of the 21st century. I think President Bush is wrong when he denies the very existence of that war. It's not only a matter of bin Laden. This is a struggle against a whole world that espouses different values. And we are on the front line. Exactly like the Crusaders, we are the vulnerable branch of Europe in this place."

Being neither Israeli nor Jewish, it's hard to think of a precise parallel to Mr. Morris's conversion from what at least bordered on anti-Zionism (he certainly provided ammunition to such folk) to genuine hawkishness. Our neocons here in America were not central figures in the culture when they switched during the Cold War, the way Mr. Morris is in Israel. Someone like Christopher Hitchens isn't even American and is probably almost unknown off-line, so his switch after 9-11 isn't comparable. Perhaps we could think of it this way--suppose that in 1972, Norman Mailer had come out forcefully for total war against North Vietnam and China and the USSR if they continued aiding the North.

You'd need someone that prominent and that much associated with the opponents of the nation--then imagine how shocking it would be for him to become a muscular nationalist.

MORE:
-ESSAY: Expulsion or flight?: Israel's changing view of the 1948 Arab exodus (Benny Morris, January 16 2001, The Guardian)
-ESSAY: Peace? No chance: Benny Morris was the radical Israeli historian who forced his country to confront its role in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Later he was jailed for refusing to do military service in the West Bank. But now he has changed his tune. As the cycle of violence in the Middle East intensifies, he launches a vicious attack on the 'inveterate liar' Yasser Arafat - and explains why he believes a peaceful coexistence is impossible (Benny Morris, February 21, 2002, The Guardian)
-ESSAY: Arafat didn't negotiate - he just kept saying no (Benny Morris, May 23 2002, The Guardian)
-ESSAY: A new exodus for the Middle East? (Benny Morris, October 03 2002, The Guardian)

-INTERVIEW: The Right of Return (Tikkun, March, 2001)
-INTERVIEW: The "New Historian" Benny Morris: "The Arabs Are The Same Arabs" (An Interview by Meron Rappaport, December 2001, Between the Lines)

-ESSAY: Revisiting Israel's "original sin": the strange case of Benny Morris (Efraim Karsh, Sept, 2003, Commentary Magazine)

THE LATE 1980's saw the rise in Israel of a school of "new historians"--younger, Left-leaning academics whose aim was to place under severe question the accepted history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Basing themselves ostensibly on recently declassified documents from the Mandate period and the early days of the state, they systematically redrew the history of Zionism, turning upside down the saga of Israel's struggle for survival.

Scanted in these revisionist accounts were the Arabs' outspoken commitment to the destruction of the Jewish national cause; the sustained and repeated Arab efforts to achieve that end from the early 1920's onward; and the no less sustained efforts of the Jews at peaceful coexistence. Zionism emerged, instead, as an aggressive and expansionist movement, an offshoot of European imperialism at its most rapacious. And if Israel was to be seen as an "aggressive and overbearing military superpower" (in the representative words of one new historian), then the Palestinian Arabs, "by any reckoning, [could] only be seen as the victims."

Although never exactly reaching mainstream stares themselves, the new historians nevertheless exercised a profound impact on mainstream Israeli opinion in the years just prior to the 1993 Oslo peace accords and thereafter. Fatigued by decades of struggle, yearning for normalcy, despairing of any resolution of the conflict with the Arabs, and abashed by the growing anti-Israel mood among "progressive" opinion-makers worldwide, many educated Israelis found themselves receptive to the notion that a large portion of the fault for the conflict lay with their own country's actions, and might therefore be rectified by a radical change in behavior. If a historic reconciliation with the Arabs could not be achieved through a policy of military deterrence, might not a new start be made by taking positive steps to accommodate Arab demands, by acknowledging Israeli guilt for Arab suffering, and by striving through political and territorial concessions to mitigate the "original sin" of the Jewish state's very existence?

This mindset helps explain, at least in part, the headlong embrace by so many educated Israelis of the Oslo peace process, and the readiness to see in it the long-sought solution to the problem of Arab intransigence. Once having committed themselves to the idea that peace had broken out, moreover, many Israelis proved unable to relinquish it, even in the face of Yasir Arafat's brazen flouting of the solemn obligations he undertook on behalf of the Palestinian people at the September 1993 ceremonies on the White House lawn.

Paradoxically, for these true believers in Oslo, Palestinian violence and bad faith made it more necessary than ever to cling to the idea of Jewish culpability. Arab grievance, the thinking seemed to go, being rooted in Israeli aggression, could be overcome only by still further acts of appeasement and concession. As the 90's wore on, the new historians' interpretation of the conflict thus became even more deeply entrenched in Israeli thinking, disseminated widely by the media and making its way into the educational curriculum at every level. Not until Ararat launched his all-out intifada in September 2000 did reality at last begin to intrude, and a serious process of reconsideration begin.

AMONG THE new historians, none has been more visible, or more influential, than Benny Morris, a professor at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba. [...]

Morris himself would subsequently trace his "serious reexamination" of his political assumptions to "Palestinian behavior during the past three years"--i.e., to the intifada. But he also went further, claiming that his "decades" of studying the conflict had instilled in him "a sense of the instinctive rejectionism that runs like a dark thread through Palestinian history--a rejection, to the point of absurdity, of the history of the Jewish link to the land of Israel; a rejection of the legitimacy of Jewish claims to Palestine; a rejection of the right of the Jewish state to exist."

But why, then, had it taken him so long to acknowledge a truth he was now claiming to have "known for decades? This is a question Morris has yet to address frankly. And it is not the only question that might be asked of him. Without for a moment discounting the significance of his public turnabout, which, given his prominence, is certainly a very welcome development, one is bound to point out that it has not led him seriously to reassess, let alone to retract, any of his previous writings on the sources of the conflict or its main events. He may have discovered an "instinctive rejectionism" among the Palestinians; he has yet to rethink what this means for the conclusions of his own books and essays.

-PROFILE: Radical Israeli in u-turn on Palestinians (Ian Katz, October 03 2002, The Guardian)
-ESSAY: A betrayal of history: Yesterday in G2, Benny Morris said there was no chance of peace in the Middle East, and laid the blame at the door of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians. Rubbish, says fellow historian Avi Shlaim - Morris's views have more to do with propaganda than with proper research (Avi Shlaim, February 22, 2002, The Guardian)
-ESSAY: Benny Morris and the Reign of Error (Efraim Karsh, March 1999, Middle East Quarterly)

-ARCHIVES: "Benny Morris" (Find Articles)
-ARCHIVES: Benny Morris (NY Review of Books)

-REVIEW: of The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, Palestine and the Jews by Benny Morris (Geoffrey Alderman, The Guardian)

GENERAL:
-ESSAY: Was Zionism Unjust? (Hillel Halkin, November 1999, Commentary)
-ESSAY: THE 1948 MASSACRE AT DEIR YASSIN REVISITED (Matthew Hogan, Winter 2001, Historian)

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 11, 2004 10:03 AM