Benny Morris

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Benny Morris (born 1948) is a prominent Israeli historian. He is considered the most influential and prolific member of the New Historians, a controversial group of scholars who have challenged much of the received wisdom of the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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[edit] Life

The son of Jewish immigrants from England, Morris was born in Kibbutz Ein HaHoresh. In 1988, he was imprisoned for refusing military service in the West Bank town Nablus.

Morris received his doctorate from Cambridge. For a number of years, he was the diplomatic correspondent of the Jerusalem Post.

Morris is currently professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be'er Sheva. In 2005, he also taught at the University of Maryland in College Park.

[edit] Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem

In his 1988 book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, Morris argues that the approximately 700,000 Palestinians who fled from their homes in 1947 left mostly due to fear of being caught in the crossfire, Israeli actions, or fear of Israeli actions, but not as the result of a preexisting expulsion plan. This was at the time a controversial position, as the official position in Israel had been that the Palestinians left voluntarily or after pressure and encouragement from Palestinian or outside Arab leaders.

At the same time Morris documented atrocities on the part of the Israeli armed forces, including suspected cases of rape, torture, and ethnic cleansing.

In the beginning of the book Morris shows a map over empty Palestinian villages, and explains why the villagers left. 228 villages were evacuated due to attack from Jewish forces. In 41 villages the inhabitants were expelled by military forces. In 90 villages the inhabitants were stricken with panic due to attack on other villages, and fled. In only 6 villages the inhabitants left because the local Palestinian authorities told them. He was not able to find out why another 46 villages were emptied.

In the 2004 book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, he changes his perspective, and place the major responsibility for the creation of Palestinian refugees on Jewish military groups. According to Morris, these groups massacred far more Palestinians than has been known earlier. He also writes that expelling Palestinians was a goal that was shared with main Jewish leaders at the time. Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, gave orders to destroy Palestinian villages in 1948, according to the Israeli politician Aharon Cohen. In this 2004 version, Morris underlines that Jewish leaders, also before Israel was created, wanted as few Arabs/Palestinian in the areas they were conquering as possible. They wanted for demographic reasons as many Palestinians to flee as possible. Palestinians were also a politicized, armed community which was committed to fighting against Israel.

Morris was once considered a representative of the radical left; he was accused of being an "Israel hater" and was boycotted by the Israeli academic establishment. But his disillusionment with the peace process has caused him to increasingly make statements commonly associated with the right-wing, while still claiming to belong to the left.

[edit] Criticism of Morris

Along with the rest of the New Historians, and especially in view of his role as their most important figure, Morris has been attacked by establishment historians.

Efraim Karsh, Professor of War Studies at King's College London has repeatedly claimed that Morris fabricated his data about atrocities, stating that other historians who examined the same documents did not arrive at the same conclusions. Karsh wrote a book with a full exposition of his claims, "Fabricating Israeli History: The New Historians; since then Karsh and Morris have engaged in a lengthy and heated dialogue on these issues, which has often involved personal insults, and has sometimes been characterised as a feud.

Morris has also been attacked from the opposite pole, by Norman Finkelstein in chapter three of his Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (2001), where he argues that Morris repeatedly bent his interpretation of evidence to find Israeli government officials and the IDF innocent of crimes against Palestinians, by juxtaposing quotes from Morris' book, with full quotations from the source Morris cited.[1]

[edit] Morris quotes

All of the following quotes are excerpts from an interview with him by Ari Shavit that appeared in Haaretz in January, 2004 (part one, part two):

Regarding the evolution of his ideas based upon events since the signing of the Oslo Accords and the consequent creation of the Palestinian Authority, he writes:

The bombing of the buses and restaurants really shook me. They made me understand the depth of the hatred for us. They made me understand that the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim hostility toward Jewish existence here is taking us to the brink of destruction. I don't see the suicide bombings as isolated acts. They express the deep will of the Palestinian people. That is what the majority of the Palestinians want. They want what happened to the bus to happen to all of us.

For a critique which casts doubt on the honesty of Morris' supposed conversion, see Benny Morris: The Kiss That Kills

Regarding the rise of Islamic Terrorism, he writes:

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. A world that makes those who are not part of the camp of Islam fair game. Revenge is also important here. Revenge plays a central part in the Arab tribal culture. Therefore, the people we are fighting and the society that sends them have no moral inhibitions. If it obtains chemical or biological or atomic weapons, it will use them. If it is able, it will also commit genocide.

Regarding the contacts between Western Civilization and Islam, he writes:

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.

He denounced the atrocities committed against Palestinians but supported the policy of expelling them:

There is no justification for acts of rape [...] or 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.

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.

That was the situation. That is what Zionism faced. 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. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.

In contrast to his earlier conclusions (and see below), Morris believes the atrocities were part of a conscious strategy:

Apparently, various officers who took part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they received permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the population to take to the roads. The fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. He covered up for the officers who did the massacres."

According to Morris, the leader of the Yishuv (and later first prime minister of Israel) David Ben-Gurion was an ardent supporter of population transfer (the removal of Arabs):

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.

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. [...] If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. [...] Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.

Morris takes Ben-Gurion to task for not doing the job more thoroughly:

I think he made a serious historical mistake in 1948. Even though he understood the demographic issue and the need to establish a Jewish state without a large Arab minority, he got cold feet during the war. In the end, he faltered. If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job. [...] my feeling is that 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 -- the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River. If he had carried out a full expulsion -- rather than a partial one -- he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations."

There is no question in his mind of the legitimacy of the Zionist project:

The desire to establish a Jewish state here is legitimate, there was no other choice. It was impossible to leave a large fifth column in the country. [...] Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.

You have to put things in proportion. These are small war crimes. All told, if we take all the massacres and all the executions of 1948, we come to about 800 who were killed. In comparison to the massacres that were perpetrated in Bosnia, that’s peanuts. In comparison to the massacres the Russians perpetrated against the Germans at Stalingrad, that’s chicken feed. When you take into account that there was a bloody civil war here and that we lost an entire 1 percent of the population, you find that we behaved very well. [1]

Regarding the suffering and condition of the Palestinians, he writes:

I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which truly underwent a hard tragedy. I feel sympathy for the refugees themselves. But if the desire to establish a Jewish state here is legitimate, there was no other choice. It was impossible to leave a large fifth column in the country. From the moment the Yishuv [pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine] was attacked by the Palestinians and afterward by the Arab states, there was no choice but to expel the Palestinian population. To uproot it in the course of war.

Remember another thing: the Arab people gained a large slice of the planet. Not thanks to its skills or its great virtues, but because it conquered and murdered and forced those it conquered to convert during many generations. But in the end the Arabs have 22 states. The Jewish people did not have even one state. There was no reason in the world why it should not have one state. Therefore, from my point of view, the need to establish this state in this place overcame the injustice that was done to the Palestinians by uprooting them.

Morris' willingness to reverse his earlier opinion he bases on his access to newly released military documents, as he described in an article that appeared in the Guardian, in accordance with the law that government archives release their records after 50 years. Thus the cabinet deliberations, Haganah and IDF archives in the run up to and during the 1948-1949 Arab-Israeli war came into the public sphere at the end of the 1990s.

[edit] Books by Morris

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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