"The Arabs are after our blood"

Israeli historian and onetime peacenik Benny Morris now says Palestinians don't want peace -- and that all the Arabs should have been driven out of Israel in 1948.

By Christopher Farah

Jan 23, 2004 | In 1988, historian Benny Morris sent shock waves through Israeli society with a book called "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem," which, through a careful inspection of previously classified Israeli archives, revealed that Israel bore significant blame for the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians during the war of 1948 that created the modern state of Israel -- blame that the establishment had always denied. That same year Morris, an outspoken opponent of Israel's occupation of the territories it captured in the 1967 war, refused his mandatory military service in the West Bank as the Palestinian intifada began. He landed in prison.

A decade and a half has gone by, and once again Morris is scandalizing Israel -- but this time in a totally different way. Now, even as he releases an updated version of his book, he is defending what with brutal honesty he describes as the "ethnic cleansing" that brought the Jewish state into existence. In a recent interview with the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Morris not only justified the 1948 expulsion of the Palestinians from Israel, but also said that then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion failed in his task by not expelling all Arabs from the nascent Jewish state: "If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job."

Morris went on to say that renewed expulsions of the Palestinians -- those in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and even those who are Israeli citizens -- could be "entirely reasonable" in circumstances that are "liable to be realized in five or 10 years." Unwavering Arab hatred of Israel, he argued, meant that the best way to deal with the Palestinians for now is to "build something like a cage" for them (some would argue this is already happening with the ongoing construction of the so-called "separation wall.") The Arab and Muslim world, in his eyes, consists of barbarians who don't appreciate the value of human life, barbarians knocking on the gates of the civilized West.

Of course, anyone can make bold and inflammatory statements, and when it comes to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, many people do. What makes Morris' statements seem so outrageous is that they are apparently not the words of a fanatic. They are the words of someone who has thought a great deal about his beliefs, someone who seems to be logical and rational, someone who was not only raised as a liberal, but who also still claims to hold leftist ideals and to vote for progressive Israeli politicians.

Morris does not retract anything he wrote in the original 1988 book. Indeed, the updated edition, "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited" (just published by Cambridge University Press) proves the Israelis to be even more culpable. Drawing on 300 pages of new material from recently declassified documents, Morris has found evidence of no less than 24 Israeli massacres of Palestinians, with the numbers of victims ranging from four or five to 70 to 100. The infamous massacre at Deir Yassein, Morris reports, was just one of many. He also reports a dozen cases of rape.

More crucially, Morris concludes that these atrocities did not occur in a vacuum: they were the result of a clearly understood policy, coming from Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion, to expel or "transfer" Palestinians out of their ancestral land, land that was to become Israel. Explicit military orders were given in some cases to expel the populations of Palestinian villages. It's true that Morris also finds documentation in Israeli archives of Arab orders to evacuate women and children, and at times men, from some villages, offering some support for the long-held Israeli position that the Palestinians simply left because Arab leaders told them to before the fighting began, promising that they would soon return after a great Arab victory. But if the book places some blame for the flight of the refugees on the Arab leadership, that blame is far outweighed by that born by the Israelis.

But despite these harrowing findings, Moris says he remains an unapologetic Zionist -- indeed, he says he was always one, even in his first book, popular belief to the contrary. He never questioned the legitimacy of the founding of the state, blood-drenched and founded on ethnic cleansing though he acknowledged it was. Morris can be harshly critical of Israel, particularly its role as occupying power. In "Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001," one of the best histories of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he wrote, "Israelis liked to believe, and tell the world, that they were running an 'enlightened' or 'benign' occupation, qualitatively different from other military occupations the world had seen. The truth was radically different. Like all occupations, Israel's was founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers, and daily intimidation, humiliation, and manipulation." Yet even as Morris challenges the Israeli establishment, he never questions its right to exist.

Do Morris' extreme views reflect mainstream Israeli beliefs? Yes and no. Like many other Israeli liberals, Morris' optimism about peace, and whether the Palestinians really wanted it, was shaken by the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000 -- after the Oslo peace accords and the Camp David talks had convinced many that a resolution was at hand. With the collapse of the Camp David talks amid mutual acrimony and the escalation of violence, in particular the rise of suicide bombings within Israel, many Israeli peaceniks became disillusioned, feeling that they had found no true "partner for peace" in the Palestinians. Many Palestinians, on the other hand, argue that they wanted peace and a two-state solution, but that the terms offered by Israeli negotiators -- and the expansion of settlements on Palestinian land that continued unabated throughout the Oslo period -- showed that Israelis were the ones who weren't ready for a just peace.

"You go to have coffee with your equally liberal friends, you talk peace and human rights and Palestinian independence, and if you are lucky the place blows up only after you leave," says Tom Segev, an Israeli author who like Morris was dubbed a "new historian" for writing books that challenged the traditional Israeli version of history. "So you are frustrated and angry and, worst of all, you feel stupid. This is what terrorism does to free people and to free countries as well."

Morris' hawkish views started to come to light after the Al-Aqsa Intifada broke out in 2000. In columns in the British paper the Guardian, Morris lambasted the Palestinian leaders, particularly Yasser Arafat, for their failure to sign a final-status agreement with Israel, and blaming the increasingly violent intifada (and Israel's increasingly violent reprisals) on the Palestinian desire to destroy the Jewish state. Then came an interview between Morris and former Prime Minister Ehud Barak -- whose offer Arafat rejected -- in which Barak stated that culturally, Arabs just didn't understand the principle of honesty. Conservative Jewish publications like Commentary began running stories about Morris' apparent conversion to their side.

"Benny has always attracted controversy," says Ian Black, the Guardian's former Middle East correspondent, who also coauthored a book with Morris about the history of Israeli intelligence agencies. "He's a controversialist and to some extent relishes it."

Morris's conversion may be more dramatic, and more agonizingly paradoxical because of his willingness to admit the bloodshed at the heart of the Zionist project, but it is representative of the change many Israelis have gone through in the last three years.

"Although his case is high-profile and very visible, the phenomenon is a broader one," Black says. "It's clear that Benny's own revision of his views, a much more conservative twist in his own intellectual odyssey, is born of the disappointment, the disillusionment that there isn't a viable partner on the Palestinian side. He's fairly representative of a wider trend."

Until the Haaretz interview two weeks ago, anyway. Although Morris had in other publications mentioned the idea of transfer (the euphemism generally used to mean the deportation of the Palestinian population out of the occupied territories), broaching such a taboo subject in one of Israel's most popular newspapers set off a new wave of controversy. This time, it seemed, his comments went beyond the pale. Soon afterward, Haaretz printed dozens of letters from Jews and Arabs alike, almost universally condemning his comments.

When I tell Black, who hadn't read the interview, about Morris' comments, he exclaims, "I didn't realize he had gone that far." After reading the interview, Black e-mailed me this about his old friend: "I disagree strongly with the views expressed."

"Basically I think Benny Morris flipped out as result of three years of terrorism," says Segev. He added sympathetically, "Happens to many of us."

Next Page: "This intifada has opened people's eyes to the depths of Arab hatred for Israel"

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