Did Benny Morris Change His Views on Alleged Zionist Ethnic Cleansing Plan? - by Shlomi Ben-Meir

...Perhaps his detractors attack him precisely because he is a renowned historian who doesn’t hesitate to "correct a mistake" even if the correction is in favor of the Israeli side; who doesn’t wholeheartedly adopt the Palestinian narrative; and who dares to express views that deviate from what is customary in the radical left.

Shlomi Ben-Meir..
Camera Media Analysis..
09 August '17..

Benny Morris and Daniel Blatman are at it again. The two Israeli historians engaged in another round of intellectual blows regarding the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem.

The previous round took place in Haaretz last year. In a series of articles, the two professors presented their views on the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Arabs from what became the borders of the state of Israel during its war of independence in 1947 to 1949. The Palestinian "Nakba" (Arabic for catastrophe) is one of the main issues in the conflict until this day. Was it a result of a deliberate and systematic policy of ethnic cleansing, to empty Mandate Palestine of its Arab inhabitants (as per the argument of Prof. Blatman)? Or perhaps the Zionist Yishuv had no premeditated plan nor policy to drive out the Arabs, and most left the country without being forcefully evicted (as Prof. Morris argued)?

The debate resumed last weekend, again in Haaretz, with Blatman's piece ("For the Nakba, There's No Need of an 'Expulsion Policy"') criticizing Morris' review ("Israel Had No 'Expulsion Policy' Against the Palestinians in 1948") of Adel Manna's book Nakba and Survival. Morris wrote that during 1948 there was no policy of ethnic cleansing, and the vast majority of the Arabs who left their homes were not expelled. Blatman countered that Morris' current claims contradict the views he held in the past, and the findings of his earlier historical research.

Blatman's claim that today's Benny Morris contradicts and denies the positions that he himself expressed as a historian years ago is a common, albeit false, argument. In fact, while Morris changed his mind on several issues, he has for decades consistently argued that Israel's pre-state leadership did not advance or follow a policy of ethnic cleansing. Morris' argument from the beginning was that the majority of Arabs left the country as a result of a complex range of factors, and not because they were expelled.

The consistency of Benny Morris' views as a historian is an issue with implications far beyond a narrow academic debate. Many observers consider Morris to be one of the most, if not the most, knowledgeable expert on the 1948 war. His conclusion on the question as to whether or not there was a grand Zionist plan to ethnically cleanse Palestine of Arabs carries great weight. On the other hand, if he indeed changed his view for unclear reasons, and if his present claims contradict the findings of his own earlier work, serious questions regarding his credibility arise.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Paving the way for a future abandonment of the Jewish state.

Reasonable people can disagree about how we should deal with this dangerous trend. But the first step is to recognize that it exists: that we’ve seen this historical pattern before, and it has deadly real-world consequences.

Evelyn Gordon..
Commentary..
27 June '13..

When an acclaimed historian says he sees a terrifying historical pattern repeating itself, he deserves to be taken seriously. And Benny Morris is assuredly one of Israel’s most famous historians. Unfortunately, his warning is unlikely to be seen by many, since it’s buried at the end of a somewhat tedious book review. And it’s liable to be ignored by those who need to hear it most.

Morris reviewed Patrick Tyler’s Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run the Country—and Why They Can’t Make Peace for the summer issue of the Jewish Review of Books. Most of the almost 5,000-word review was devoted to detailing Tyler’s numerous egregious errors and showing how they undermine his conclusions. But by itself, Morris wrote, Tyler’s spurious history would be insignificant. What makes it noteworthy is that it’s part of a much larger trend:

Fortress Israel is just the latest in a spate of venomous perversions of the record that have appeared in the past few years in the United States and Britain, all clearly designed to subvert Israel’s standing in the world. Deliberately or not, such books and articles are paving the way for a future abandonment of the Jewish state.

I am reminded of the spate of books and articles that appeared in Western Europe in 1936 through 1938 repudiating the legitimacy of the newly formed Czechoslovakia before its sacrifice to the Nazi wolves. In 1934, the Conservative weekly Truth hailed Czechoslovakia as “the sole successful experiment in liberal democracy that has emerged from the post-War settlement.” By the end of 1936, The Observer was writing it off as “a diplomatic creation with no sufficient national basis either in geography or race.” By March 1938 The New Statesman, in the past a great friend to central Europe’s only democracy, was writing: “We should urge the Czechs to cede the German-speaking part of their territory to Hitler without more ado.” Of course, as all understood, this meant leaving Czechoslovakia defenseless. Hitler conquered the rump of the country a few months later without a shot. The appeasement of the Arab-Islamist world at Israel’s expense is in the air and Tyler is one of its (very, very) minor harbingers.

Reasonable people can disagree about how we should deal with this dangerous trend. But the first step is to recognize that it exists: that we’ve seen this historical pattern before, and it has deadly real-world consequences.

Unable or unwilling, what’s wrong with the Israeli left.

Petra Marquadt-Bigman..
The Warped Mirror..
10 January '13..

In a post entitled “Confessions of a lapsed leftist,” I tried to explain more than a year ago why my lifelong allegiance to the left had begun to crumble. Of course, many Israelis who had supported “Peace Now” in the 1990s and who had hoped that the negotiations at Camp David and Taba would result in a peace agreement went through a similar experience in view of the fact that the Palestinians chose to respond to Israel’s offers with the long and bloody “Al Aqsa”-Intifada.

The historian Benny Morris has repeatedly described the unfortunate learning process that many of us went through, most recently last fall in a long interview with Ha’aretz. The problem is that Israel’s left – which represented the peace camp – has not been able or willing to go through the same learning process. As a result, there are lots of politically homeless people like me in Israel, and I think the dizzying proliferation of new parties over the past few years is at least in part a reflection of this widespread homelessness.

Personally, I can’t say that I find any of the new options attractive or politically convincing and sound, and it is perhaps for this reason that I felt particular frustration when I recently discovered that a new left-wing Israeli think tank that had been established a year ago is apparently resolved to continue the left’s head-in-the-sand-approach. The two posts I wrote about the new organization were first published in The Algemeiner and on my Jerusalem Post blog; they are cross-posted below with some minor changes.

Portraits of the Peace Process in Its 92nd Year

Rick Richman
Commentary/Contentions
20 January '11

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/richman/387179

In the National Interest, Benny Morris succinctly summarizes the peace process, writing that there can be disagreement about tactical mistakes made over the years, but that:

[T]here can be no serious argument about what transpired in July and December 2000, when Arafat sequentially rejected comprehensive Israeli and Israeli-American proposals for a two-state solution which would have given the Palestinians (”the Clinton Parameters”) sovereignty and independence in 95% of the West Bank, all of the Gaza Strip, and half of Jerusalem (including half or three-quarters of the Old City).

And further that:

[T]here can be no serious argument either about Abbas’s rejection of the similar, perhaps even slightly better deal, offered by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008. (Indeed, these rejections of a two-state solution were already a tradition set in stone: The Palestinians’ leaders had rejected two-state compromises in 1937 (the Peel proposals), 1947 (the UN General Assembly partition resolution) and (implicitly) in 1978 (when Arafat rejected the Sadat-Begin Camp David agreement, which provided for “autonomy” in the Palestinan territories).

That is six Palestinian rejections of a Palestinian state: 1937, 1947, 1978, 2000 (twice), 2008.

Actually, the correct number is seven, since Morris omitted the first one: in 1919, Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, and Emir Feisal Ibn al-Hussein al-Hashemi signed an agreement providing for Arab recognition of the Balfour Declaration, Arab retention of the Muslim holy sites, and WZO agreement to the establishment of an Arab state. Later that year, the Arabs repudiated the agreement.

We are now in the 92nd year of a peace process in which the Palestinians are the first people in history to be offered a state seven times, reject it seven times, and set preconditions for discussing an eighth offer.

In the February 10 issue of the New York Review of Books, Hussein Agha and Robert Malley also provide an interesting analysis of the peace process. They assert the Obama administration has badly damaged U.S. credibility:

[It] was repeatedly rebuffed—by Israel, from whom it had demanded a full halt in settlement construction; by Palestinians it pressed to engage in direct negotiations; by Arab states it hoped would take steps to normalize relations with Israel. An administration that never tires of saying it cannot want peace more than the parties routinely belies that claim by the desperation it exhibits in pursuing that goal. Today, there is little trust, no direct talks, no settlement freeze, and, one at times suspects, not much of a US policy.

Agha and Malley do not recommend a policy of their own. They suggest Mahmoud Abbas is the “last Palestinian” able to end the conflict, but it is an unconvincing conclusion. He has already missed multiple moments: in 2005, he received all of Gaza and presided over its conversion into Hamastan; in 2006, he could not win an election against a terrorist group; in 2007, he got thrown out of Gaza altogether; in 2008, he received the seventh offer of a state and turned it down; in 2009, he arrived in Washington D.C. and told the Washington Post he would do nothing but wait; in 2010, he is turning to the UN rather than negotiate. His term of office ended more than two years ago.

Rather than being the key to peace, he is a reflection of the fact that on the Palestinian side, in the 92nd year, there is no one there to make it.

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Will Israel's New Archive Policy Set Back a Generation of Scholarship?

Evan R. Goldstein
The Chronicle of Higher Education
30 July '10

Earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu extended the classification of certain national-security related state archives for an additional 20 years. Netanyahu's decision came on the heels of a three-year legal battle waged by two Israeli journalists, Ronen Bergman and Yossi Melman. In an editorial, the liberal newspaper Haaretz warned that Israel "can and must confront the less than heroic chapters in its past and reveal them to the public and for historical study. The public has a right to know about the decisions made by the state's founders, even if they involved violations of human rights, covering up crimes or harassing political opponents by security means."

For more on the potential implications of Netanyahu's decision, I turned to Benny Morris, a professor of history at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Morris is the author of numerous books, including The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (Cambridge University Press) and, most recently, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (Yale University Press). Morris answered questions by e-mail from Washington, D.C., where he is currently visiting.

Q: What do you make of the decision to keep security-related documents classified?
A: Every closure of documents, every extension of periods of classification, is against the spirit of an open society. But Israel does live in a particularly difficult environment—and is at war with its surroundings, so more than most societies, there is justification for a tight archival policy. But the truth is that Israel's archives remain among the most open in the world—far more open than Britain's and France's, and, in some respects, the United State's (for example, the Israeli Cabinet maintains verbatim transcripts of its meetings, and opens them—97 % of the material—to public scrutiny after 40 years. The US doesn't).

Q: Among the information that will remain classified are documents relating to Israel's treatment of Arabs during the 1948 War, a focus of your scholarship. Might this cache of classified files deepen or alter our understanding of that event? Or do you feel like the picture is already very clear?
A: Most of the material on 1948 is open, including treatment of Arabs\Arab communities. That's how I was able to write my books. Here and there, the officials managed to close material on atrocities and some expulsions. But other materials were opened and remain open—so it won't really affect scholarship on the subject. (Often one finds a specific document closed in one file and open in another—even in the IDF archive itself.)

(Read full article)

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The Nakba Obsession

Sol Stern
City Journal
Vol. 20 No. 3
Summer '10

A specter is haunting the prospective Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations—the specter of the Nakba. The literal meaning of the Arabic word is “disaster”; but in its current, expansive usage, it connotes a historical catastrophe inflicted on an innocent and blameless people (in this case, the Palestinians) by an overpowering outside force (international Zionism). The Nakba is the heart of the Palestinians’ backward-looking national narrative, which depicts the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 as the original sin that dispossessed the land’s native people. Every year, on the anniversary of Israel’s independence, more and more Palestinians (including Arab citizens of Israel) commemorate the Nakba with pageants that express longing for a lost paradise. Every year, the legend grows of the crimes committed against the Palestinians in 1948, crimes now routinely equated with the Holocaust. Echoing the Nakba narrative is an international coalition of leftists that celebrates the Palestinians as the quintessential Other, the last victims of Western racism and colonialism.

There is only one just compensation for the long history of suffering, say the Palestinians and their allies: turning the clock back to 1948. This would entail ending the “Zionist hegemony” and replacing it with a single, secular, democratic state shared by Arabs and Jews. All Palestinian refugees—not just those still alive of the hundreds of thousands who fled in 1948, but their millions of descendants as well—would be allowed to return to Jaffa, Haifa, the Galilee, and all the villages that Palestinian Arabs once occupied.

Such a step would mean suicide for Israel as a Jewish state, which is why Israel would never countenance it. At the very least, then, the Nakba narrative precludes Middle East peace. But it’s also, as it happens, a myth—a radical distortion of history.

(Read full story)

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Benny Morris: Banned at Cambridge University Out of Fear. Who’s Next?

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
08 February '10

Jake Witzenfeld, president of Cambridge University's Israel Society, canceled a talk by Benny Morris, an Israeli scholar, apologizing for any "unintended offense." "I decided to cancel for fear of the Israel Society being portrayed as a mouthpiece of Islamophobia," he said. "We understand that whilst Professor Benny Morris' contribution to history is highly respectable and significant, his personal views are, regrettably, deeply offensive to many....”

Mr. Witzenfeld should resign his position immediately since by leading a pro-Israel group he will no doubt be portrayed as all sorts of slanderous things and give offense to people. After all, the existence of Israel itself is “offensive” to many Muslims and others, which is not a reason for wiping it out, presumably. As Witzenfeld might know, pro-Israel groups have been banned on British campuses before and perhaps this is what he fears.

As for giving offense, his cowardice offends me, if that's his criterion for making decisions. Hopefully, someone less fearful can be found to head the society.

I have known Benny Morris for many years, including at a time when he was on the far left and we disagreed on just about everything, through the time that he has shifted position as a result of the trauma—felt by all Israelis—over the failure of the 1990s peace process. These experiences underlined the fact that certain more self-blaming and optimistic ideas about politics in Arabic-speaking and Muslim-majority societies didn’t work. Professor Morris adjusted to that reality, as did many other Israelis and others. Come to think of it, that was Israel's equivalent of September 11.

(Read full post)
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Benny Morris talk stirs uproar at Cambridge

Jonny Paul
Jewish World/JPost
07 February '10

LONDON – The Israel Society at Cambridge University has succumbed to pressure and canceled a talk by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev historian Benny Morris after protesters accused him of “Islamophobia” and “racism.”

Morris was scheduled to speak to students at the university on Thursday, but following a campaign led by anti-Israel activist Ben White the Israel Society canceled the talk. Instead Morris was invited to speak at an event hosted by the university’s Department of Political and International Studies.

White, who graduated from the university in 2005 and authored the book Israeli Apartheid: A Beginners Guide, set up a protest page on Facebook in which he claimed that “on different occasions, Morris has expressed Islamophobic and racist sentiments towards Arabs and Muslims.”

He added: “We find it offensive and appalling that an official student society would want to invite such an individual.”

Following the Facebook protest, a letter was sent to the student union by the university’s Islamic Society, other students and two staff members from the English Department asking it to take a stand and show it is serious “in opposing bigotry and Islamophobia.” The 15 signatories said Morris’s views were “abhorrent and offensive.

“The issue is hate speech, and the impact of a visit by this individual on the campus’ atmosphere for the student body’s minority groups... His visit is insulting, threatening to Arab and Muslim students in particular and also goes against the spirit of the student union’s stated anti-Islamophobia policy,” the letter read.

Last year, Cambridge’s Palestine Society hosted Abd al-Bari Atwan, editor-in-chief of the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper. In 2008, Atwan said the terrorist attack on Jerusalem’s Mercaz Harav yeshiva, in which eight students were killed and 15 were wounded, was “justified” as the school was responsible for “hatching Israeli extremists and fundamentalists.”

(Read full article)
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A Sense of Purpose

Emmanuel Navon
For the Sake of Zion
31 December 09

To end the Year 2009 on an upbeat note, I would recommend the reading of two recently published books: One State, Two States by Benny Morris, and Start-Up Nation by Dan Senor and Saul Singer –provided you read them in that order.

Morris has gone a long way since his self-appointment as a "new historian" poised to question Israel's historical narrative and "myths." In January 2004, he surprised –and shocked- many by declaring to Ari Shavit that "when the choice is between destroying or being destroyed, it's better to destroy;" that "there are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing;" that it was necessary to uproot the Palestinians in 1948; that Ben-Gurion "had carried out a full expulsion –rather than a partial one- he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations;" that "the non-completion of the transfer was a mistake;" that in circumstances which "are liable to be realized in five or ten years … acts of expulsion will be entirely reasonable. They may even be essential;" that "there is not going to be peace in the present generation;" that "we are doomed to live by the sword;" that "something like a cage has to be built" for the Palestinians; that all Israelis can do at this point is "to be vigilant, to defend the country;" and that "the Arab world as it is today is barbarian" ("Survival of the Fittest," Haaretz, 9 January 2004).

In One State, Two States, Morris shows that the Zionist movement accepted the principle of partition out of political realism from the time it was first proposed by the Peel Commission in 1937. The Palestinians, on the other hand, have systematically rejected the idea, and Arafat only deceived Israel with the Oslo Agreements to implement the "phased strategy." With the steady radicalization and islamization of Palestinian society today, Morris argues, chances of implementing the two-state solution are null.

Morris also shows, no less convincingly, that the alternatives to the two-state solution (including an Arab-dominated bi-national state) are unrealistic and undesirable (as far as Israel is concerned, at least). So there is no alternative to a solution that doesn't work. Great.

Morris is a realist. He realizes that Israel is in a catch-22 type of situation. Probably because he didn't want to end his book on a bleak note, he does suggest a way out by proposing the revival of the "Jordanian option." Nice try, but it doesn't wash. Jordan doesn't want it and, as Morris himself explains at length, the Palestinians will never sign a deal that leaves a sovereign Jewish state in the equation.

Despite his unconvincing attempt to sound optimistic in the last two pages of his book, Morris makes a compelling case: There is no solution.

(Continue reading article)
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Derisionist History

Benny Morris
The New Republic
28 November 09

(This review of Avi Shlaim's book by Benny Morris, is loaded with insights into the distorted world of Post-Zionist historians, their judgments, and their conclusions. While not for everyone, if you follow Benny Morris, this is a good piece.)

Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations

By Avi Shlaim

(Verso, 392 pp., $34.95)

Avi Shlaim burst upon the scene of Middle Eastern history in 1988, with the publication of Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine. Before that, as a young lecturer at Reading University in England, he had produced two books, British Foreign Secretaries Since 1945 (1977) and The United States and the Berlin Blockade, 1948–1949 (1983), and several revealing essays on modern Middle Eastern historical issues in academic journals. But it was Collusion Across the Jordan, with its 676 pages of solid and well-written research, that thrust him into the academic limelight.

Shlaim’s book traced the thirty-year relationship between the Jewish Agency for Palestine and, later, the government of Israel and Prince Abdullah (later King) of Transjordan (later Jordan), focusing on their secret friendly ties and mutual interests--the “collusion” of the title--during the 1948 war, and their unsuccessful secret peace negotiations, which were suspended just before Abdullah’s assassination by a Palestinian gunman in July 1951. Shlaim argued that Abdullah and the leadership of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine/Israel, were united in their fear and their hatred of Haj Amin Al Husseini, the leader of the Palestinian national movement, and also in coveting the territory of Palestine; and so they agreed, in the run-up to the 1948 war, to “collude” to prevent the Palestinians from establishing a state.

Bowing to the realities of power, Shlaim contended, the Hashemite king and the Zionists agreed to divide the territory between themselves. As it turned out, and despite fierce Israeli-Jordanian clashes in and around Jerusalem, this is exactly what happened in the course of the war, the Jordanians occupying and eventually annexing the West Bank--the core of the area allotted by the United Nations partition resolution of November 1947 for a Palestinian Arab state--and the Jews establishing the state of Israel on the remainder (minus the Gaza Strip, also allotted to the Palestinians, which Egypt occupied in the course of the war and held until 1967). And following the war, the two countries embarked on peace negotiations, but failed to conclude a deal. Shlaim argues that it was an unconciliatory Israel that was largely responsible for the diplomatic failure--as it was, also, for the failure to explore properly the options for peace with Syria and Egypt that opened up, in his view, in those immediate postwar years.

Much of Shlaim’s spadework, especially relating to Zionist-Arab diplomacy before, during, and after the war, was original, but his thesis itself, about the nature of Jordanian-Israeli relations before and during 1948, was not. Israel Ber--who had served as an important officer on the General Staff of the Haganah, the Yishuv’s main pre-state militia that changed its name later to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and on the General Staff of the IDF in 1949–1950 (before his resignation, he headed its Planning and Operations Department)--had suggested the “collusion” thesis in his book Israel’s Security: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, published posthumously in 1966. And Dan Schueftan and Uri Bar-Joseph had presented and analyzed it in their learned and well-argued works, A Jordanian Option (1986) and The Best of Enemies (1987).

But Ber’s was an unannotated political essay by a discredited man--he was jailed in 1961 as a Soviet spy--and it appeared only in Hebrew. Schueftan’s work also appeared only in Hebrew, and Bar-Joseph’s drew little attention. Shlaim certainly did his work more thoroughly, and he wrote with verve and elegance. Though one or two critics suggested that Shlaim had given too much weight to oral testimony elicited decades after the events described, Collusion Across the Jordan enjoyed wide acclaim. Some of that, without a doubt, was owed to what was seen as the book’s anti-Israeli slant.

(Read full article)

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