"The Arabs are after our blood"

Now, you're saying they might have continued the war afterwards, and maybe they would have. I'm not saying that there wouldn't be a Hamas and an Islamic Jihad, to continue from the other side of the Jordan. But it's still an easier and morally clearer war, for both sides, if the population were separated this way -- on the one side there were Jews, and on the one side there were Arabs. What the war left behind is a large Arab minority [in Israel], which is potentially a fifth column, a large Arab population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which we ended up taking over in 1967, which we can't take over and we can't throw up.

That would have required an enormous number of people to give up their rights to the land where they had been living for generations, to people who were coming in as outsiders--

They said that anyhow. I don't know what would have happened. This is just speculation. I may be wrong, but as a historian, it looks to me as if Israel would have been a better place and the Palestinians would have lived better on the other side in their own state. The future would have looked better for everybody.

You speak of looking at things as a historian. But I was struck by your tendency in the Haaretz interview to make broad and sweeping generalizations. For example, you compared the Arab and Muslim world to the barbarians knocking at the gates of Rome, or the West. Why did you move from looking at things in a more complex way, case by case, to these broad declarations?

I think historians work on both levels. I think I've looked at things on a detailed, case-by-case, local level, with my work on the refugees, for example. But historians are also called upon occasionally to stop looking at the details on the map and start looking at the whole map. My take is that the world is entering a period that will be characterized by nonconventional warfare between the West, the Christian-Jewish West, and the Islamic world. I think there will be a lot of casualties in this world war. I think it will be a large-scale war in terms of casualties and in terms of the space that it covers.

I don't know if it's all of Islam, or all of the Arab states. In this sense you may be right, the generalization may not be in place. I think there is some sort of subtle struggle in the Muslim and Arab world between moderates and radicals, but I think that basically the radicals are setting the tone. And Islam in a sense is different from Western religions, in that it occupies people's souls and translates into their politics. In the West, perhaps it was like that in the Middle Ages, and in Judaism, perhaps it was like that 2,000 years ago. But the Jews and Christians have thrown off religion as dictating their lives and their political and social beings. In Islam it's not that way. It's a major component of their identity, and their political identity. That's why I'm not sure if the difference between radical Muslims and moderate Muslims is a realistic one.

It seems like when discussing 1948 and Israel's creation -- the displacement of the Palestinians, the massacres that took place by Israelis -- that you're able to rationalize these acts ultimately as being necessary, or excusable, for the sake of creating the nation. Yet when Arabs or Muslims today commit atrocities for a cause, you write them off as barbarians. Do you see any inconsistency there?

I don't necessarily think so. Well, of course, if you're talking about people who are trying to kill me, when someone is bombing you and your family at the present, it's much more difficult for me to rationalize that than something that happened 50 years ago that was also done on behalf of my side. That's on one level.

On another level, I believe transfer was necessary for the creation of the state of Israel, but there's never any excuse for the massacres, the rapes -- those were just war crimes. The transfer is what I think there was a necessity for. And, to put it into context, the massacres that were committed were relatively small. Only about 800 people killed -- compared to what the Russians did to the Germans at Stalingrad, compared to what took place in Bosnia, that's not that much.

At one time, you actually refused to serve in the territories. Why?

Because my feeling at the time was that the first intifada, the Arab rebellion in the West Bank, was a non-lethal rebellion. They used rocks and so on, but they didn't shoot and they didn't kill Israeli civilians in buses in Tel Aviv. They basically threw stones at soldiers, trying to shake off these soldiers that were occupying them. My sympathies were with the rebels. I thought the Arabs really meant what they said and they were out to liberate the West Bank and Gaza from military occupation. I thought that was just. And therefore, I refused to fight them.

What do you think of today's refuseniks [Israelis who refuse to serve in the territories for ideological purposes]?

I don't agree with them. I'm not going to march and shout [at them] and so on, but I think they are mistaken. I think they are projecting backwards to the thinking and motives of the Arabs which existed in 1988, which don't exist today. I think the Arabs are after our state, and they are after our blood. I think anyone who doesn't serve now is doing something wrong.

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