POST-POST-ZIONISM:

Politically Incorrect Historian: Benny Morris' transformation highlights chilling truths about the conflict (Jonathan Tobin, Jan. 26, 2004, Jewish World Review)

[E]ver since the Palestinian Authority rejected Israel's peace offer at the July 2000 Camp David summit and answered it with a terrorist war of attriti on, [Benny] Morris has begun to make statements that have lost him his fans on the left.

The culmination of this process came when the Israeli daily Ha'aretz published a lengthy interview with the writer on Jan. 9. In it, Morris told journalist Ari Shavit — himself a highly partisan star of the Israeli left — that while his work uncovering Israeli wrongdoing would continue, he was no longer a supporter of peace efforts with the Palestinians.

Indeed, Morris shocked Shavit by asserting that Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion — whom Morris has roundly criticized as responsible for some of the suffering of Palestinian Arabs — probably made a mistake by not completely expelling all of them from the West Bank during the fighting in 1948 and 1949.

"A society that aims to kill you forces you to destroy it," Morris said. Even more significantly, Morris pointed that all of the bad deeds which he is prepared to blame on Israelis do not amount to much when compared to the atrocities carried out elsewhere, as well as to the attempts of the Arabs to destroy Israel.

"When you take into account that there was a bloody civil war here and that we lost 1 percent of the population, you find that we [Israel] behaved very well," Morris told a dumfounded Shavit.

We've more by and about Mr. Morris here.

Meanwhile, though it's slightly dated, here's a great essay on the post-Zionist movement from which Mr. Morris came and the threat that progressive transnationalism poses to Western nations, The End of Zionism?: The ideology that built the State of Israel has given way to a Post-Zionism that sanctifies Jewish disempowerment. (Yoram Hazony, Summer 1996, Azure)

Zionism is Jewish nationalism--the belief that there should be a Jewish nation-state in the land of Israel. Few people today recognize what an abomination this idea was to Jewish intellectuals when it was formally constituted as a political organization in 1897. Of the great Jewish thinkers of all denominations, virtually none could stomach the idea: Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Haim Soloveitchik, the Hasidic rebbes of both Lubavitch and Satmar, all rejected the Jewish state for much the same reason: They believed the Jewish people was essentially a thing of the spirit, and that the creation of the state--which perforce meant a Judaism of tanks and explosives, of politics and intrigue, of bureaucracy and capital, in short the empowerment of Judaism--would mean the end of Judaism as a philosophy, an ideal, a faith.

What took the teeth out of the anti-Zionism of the Jewish left and right was the Holocaust. In the wake of the most fearsome possible demonstration of the evil of Jewish powerlessness, the anti-Zionism of all camps became an embarrassment. The pugnacious little fighters of Palestine lashing out at the British enemy and Arab marauders became the heroes of the Jewish people. By the time Jewish toughs such as David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin had managed to bomb the British off their backs, their state, Israel, had really become the state of virtually the entire Jewish people. After the gas chambers, almost every Jew everywhere had become a Zionist, a believer in the necessity and obligation of Jewish power.

Yet Jewish and even Israeli intellectuals never became reconciled to the empowerment entailed in the creation of a Jewish nation-state. The very desirability of the Israeli War of Independence in 1948 was caustically challenged in the writings of S. Yizhar, perhaps the most prominent writer of the postwar years. And by the 1960s, Israeli academia, itself founded by anti-nationalists such as Buber and Yehuda Magnes, had begun to spawn an entire generation of literary figures whose point of departure was the rejection of Jewish nationalism. Thus Amos Ozís most famous novel, My Michael, portrays Jerusalem, the very symbol of the Jewish national revival as a city of brooding insanity and illness. Similarly, A.B. Yehoshua's story, "Before the Forest," has the young Jew joining forces with an Arab to burn down the "Zionist" forest planted on the ruins of an Arab village. In Yehoshua's best-known novel, The Lover, the hero deserts his unit in mid-battle, and a high-school girl from a well-to-do family finds comfort in the arms of an Arab.

Other common themes of Israeli literature are much the same: the escape from Israel; the destruction of Israel; death (by decay, rather than struggle); the Israel Defense Forces as concentration camp, pigsty, whorehouse; and the ideal of disempowerment represented by the Holocaust--which, as novelist Moshe Shamir has observed, "is becoming the common homeland of the Jews, their promised land."

While literary figures have long led the effort to create a post-Zionist consciousness in Israel, recent years have seen an even more pronounced effort on the part of academics. The 1967 Six Day War immediately inspired attacks by opponents of nationalism such as Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who claimed that Israel was undergoing nazification, that Israelís soldiers had become "Judeo-Nazis," and that Israel would soon be setting up concentration camps4óa leitmotif soon mimicked and elaborated upon by other prominent intellectuals such as Amos Funkenstein (winner of the Israel prize) and the historian Moshe Zimmermann. In the last two decades, these seemingly far-out expressions of hatred for Zionist power have paved the way for a more "scientific" delegitimization of the Jewish state by historians, sociologists and journalists offering more acceptable versions of the same themes: Zionism was a colonialist movement, said Ilan Papo. It forcibly expelled the Arab refugees from their homes in 1948, said Benny Morris. It fabricated a false connection between the Jews and the land, said Boas Evron. It used the Holocaust to advance its political ends, said Tom Segev. And so on.

There are certainly elements of truth in some of the allegations raised. The reality of power--and especially power wielded in desperation, as Zionist power was--is that it inevitably has its seamier side. But instead of contributing to a new balance in Israeli historiography, the new academics have waged what amounts to a scorched earth campaign against the past, joining authors and artists in a wholesale effort to wreck the basic faith of the Israeli public in its own history. As the novelist Aharon Meged, a veteran member of the Labor movement, described the rise of post-Zionism among Israeli intellectuals: "For two or three decades now, several hundred of our society's 'best,' men of the pen and of the spirit have been working single-mindedly and without respite to preach and prove that our cause is not just: Not only that it has been unjust since the Six Day War and the 'occupation' and not only since the founding of the state in 1948 but since the beginnings of Zionist settlement at the end of the last century."

In light of this assault, every value invoked in building the Jewish state--the ingathering of the exiles, the redemption of a neglected land, the purity of arms used in self-defenseóis repainted as the product of ignorance, hypocrisy and cynicism, as is the Jewish state itself. "Post-Zionism" becomes the only belief acceptable to an "enlightened" individual.

By now post-Zionist truths have become so self-evident as to constitute an Israeli "political correctness"...

The important point to take away from this is that folk on the Left less sensible than Mr. Morris will court even the destruction of their own nations in societies in pursuit of their ideology.

MORE:
and here Benny Morris clarifies a few points for his old friends, now critics:
Right of Reply / I do not support expulsion (Benny Morris, 1/23/04, Ha'aretz)

The war being waged against us since September 2000 is three-dimensional: On one level, which is the one highlighted by Palestinian spokespersons, a struggle is being waged for liberation from Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip; on the second level, the Palestinians - according to spokesmen for Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah militants - are waging a war to eradicate the Zionist state and to restore their "rights" over all of Palestine; on the third level, the Palestinians' struggle is part of the global struggle being waged by jihadist Islam against the "Western Satan," with Israel being a vulnerable extension of Western culture in our region.

For jihadist Islam, Israel represents the embodiment of all the values it abhors - democracy and freedom, openness, tolerance and pluralism, individualism and secularism, criticality (including the value of expressing self-criticism, which is absent from their culture), women's rights, liberalism and progress, sexual freedom - while the proponents of jihad aspire to return to the days in which the sword of Islam ruled from India to the Atlantic Ocean and minorities quaked under its shadow. These jihadists - and the societies that support them and dispatch them - who rejoice in the streets whenever a building is brought crashing down upon hundreds or thousands of occupants or a bus is reduced to a smoldering hulk, deserve the name "barbarians." It's unfortunate that many in the West and in the extreme Israeli left prefer to ignore the second and third dimensions and to view the Palestinian struggle solely through the prism of the first dimension, resistance to occupation.

A central accusation in the letters to Haaretz Magazine ("The judgment of history," January 16) concerned the issue of "ethnic cleansing." I will repeat my words, which apparently did not register (perhaps because of the misleading title on the cover): I do not support the expulsion of Arabs from the territories or from the State of Israel! Such an expulsion would be immoral, and is also unrealistic. What I said was, that if in the future, these communities were to launch massive violence against the State of Israel in combination with a broad assault on Israel by its neighbors, and endanger its survival, expulsions would certainly be in the cards. As for Israeli Arabs, my comments may be seen to represent a minatory road sign pointing in two possible directions: They could, as a whole, choose the path of loyalty to the Jewish state and integration within it as equal citizens, and thus enjoy quiet, prosperous lives; or they could choose the path of disloyalty to the state and of active and violent support for those who seek its demise. The latter path - with which many Israeli Arabs identified in October 2000 and with which many in its leadership seem to identify today, in one convoluted way or another - will help lead to either the destruction of the Jewish state or to their being uprooted.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 26, 2004 09:47 AM