Yesterday’s Times printed a shockingly belligerent Op-Ed by the Israeli historian Benny Morris arguing for devastating strikes now against Iran so as to forestall an Israeli nuke strike, or better yet, nuclear war in the Middle East. Datelined Li-On, Israel, the fearful piece feels a little like being crammed inside a Cairo ministry in 1963 as Israel was weaponizing. Should the Times run such feverish stuff? Compare to Haaretz, which runs a truly-noble piece called “These Enemies Have Faces,” jointly bylined by an Iranian-American and an Israeli, and seeking to introduced Israelis to Iranians and vice versa. The Iranian-American is the estimable Trita Parsi. Why isn’t Parsi in the Times?
Morris’s mainstream legitimacy springs in part from the glowing reviews he got in The New Yorker and the Times this spring for his book 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War. I am halfway thru the book now and must report, sadly, that it is chiefly a military history. Political and social history interest Morris far less than nighttime raids and salients and mortars. The work is consumed, as Morris was even in his failed effort to debunk Walt and Mearsheimer, with talk of armies and guns. He is faintly reminiscent of one of the most comical characters in literature, Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy: “hobbyhorsical” about fortifications and the like. I wonder if Morris had a huge toy soldier collection as a child.
1948 also commits a great error: it is written almost entirely from an Israeli point of view. It is guilty of the same hermeticism that pervades the piece in the Times. It is stunning to me that Yale University Press gave its imprimatur to a historical account that so completely is told from the winners’ standpoint and scarcely offers the victims’ accounts, even when the issue is rape.
But let me be precise. In recounting such key events of the Zionist-Palestinian war as the capture of Deir Yassin in early April 1948 and the capture of Jaffa later that month, Morris relies almost exclusively on Israeli sources. Documents from the Haganah Archive, the Israeli State archive, the Central Zionist Archive, and so on. The same pattern is evident when he describes the taking of Jerusalem,
or the capture of the most modern Arab city, Haifa, or the expulsion of
Arabs from the Lydda-Ramle area near what is now Tel Aviv airport. Almost all the works he cites about these events are authored by Israelis. I think I have encountered two books with Arab authors, and a few Brits. The “Primary Sources” list that opens Morris’s Bibliography lists 16 documentary archives. One is the U.N., one is American, two are Brit. The rest are Israeli. None Arab–though there are ample oral archives.
This is inexcusable because Deir Yassin and Jaffa are monuments of the Nakba–the Palestinian telling of 1948. At Deir Yassin 100 or more Palestinians were massacred, including 30 children, according to The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Israeli Ilan Pappe, which relies on Dan McGowan and Matthew Hogan’s Deir Yassin Remembered, comprising Palestinian narratives. Reports of the massacre caused wide flight from other Palestinian villages. As for Jaffa, this biblical city–Joppa–was the pride of Palestinian society pre-48 and was set aside by the United Nations as an Arab enclave under the Partition plan of 1947. Nonetheless, following hostilities between Arabs and Jews in Jaffa and Tel Aviv in early ’48, Menachem Begin’s Irgun set about to destroy Arab Jaffa so as to obliterate the lines of Partition. And the maximalists succeeded. A city of 70,000 was emptied over a few days in April 1948; Partition was later overrun by the Israelis.
Both these landmarks of the Nakba are amply documented today by Arab voices. In fact this spring I did a lot of reporting on Arab memories of Jaffa, including Columbia anthropologist Leila Abu-Lughod’s 2007 book, her father the Arab-American intellectual Ibrahim Abu-Lughod’s 2003 book, and several on-line accounts of the destruction of Jaffa. I also quoted Rima Bordcosh on the camel-borne terrorist bomb that sent her family running from Jaffa. At the same party at which I met Bordcosh, I met a couple of Palestinian women who told me that accounts of rapes at Deir Yassin have only come to light in recent years because of shame surrounding the event.
Morris refers to allegations of rape at Deir Yassin. He quotes a Hebrew Intelligence Service commander reporting allegations that the Irgun raped “a number of girls and murdered them afterwards (we don’t know if this is true)”. End of discussion. When dealing with rape charges, shouldn’t Morris have quoted, and maybe even credited, the victims’ accounts? Would Yale University Press tolerate such a male-only rendering in any other situation involving violence against women?
Equally objectionable are Morris’s descriptions of Arab states of mind during the Nakba. Remember that the battle was one-sided. John Mearsheimer, a former Air Force officer and no slouch at military history, has said that the Arab resistance was on a scale of a mass riot. Lo the Zionists smote the Palestinians hip and thigh (as Menachem Begin used to say), and hundreds of thousands of Arabs were soon fleeing the country. From time to time, Morris treats us to characterizations of these Arabs’ feelings and thoughts. He tells us about their “morale,” their “fear,” their panic, their apprehension that they were being expelled, and so forth. And almost invariably, these descriptions come from Israeli or English writings of the time, chiefly the military documents whose ferreting out from archives Morris is so stoneheadedly proud, in a way that only a newspaper reporter turned scholar could be, of having done. He is document-proud. (I know; as a reporter turned quasi-scholar I’ve been guilty of same.) And so all these Arab experiences must be based on Israeli documents.
I am not saying that these documents are inaccurate. They may well be accurate. But it is impossible for a reader to reach that conclusion, especially when Morris simply ignores varying accounts of “sexual atrocites.” Morris has stubbornly relied upon only one half of the record, the winners’ half. And if the result is not inaccurate, it is certainly partial, and biased. Notably, Morris repeatedly excuses the “cleansing” operations by the Zionist fighters (and cleansing is their word) with the suggestion (maybe it’s an assertion, haven’t got that far) that they were militarily necessary, to empty the reservoir of support and supplies and so forth for the Arab armies that were about to invade Israel once it became a state on May 15, 1948. Or that the capture of Deir Yassin was essential to maintaining the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Or that in July 1948 the expulsion of all the residents from villages near Lydda is again a military necessity. Should we at least hear from the Arabs who were expelled? I believe I’ve quoted more Arab voices on this blog than he does in his entire fat book. For instance, I have quoted the haunting description by the late Ismail Shammout, a Palestinian artist, of his family’s expulsion from Lydda in July ’48. His oral history was created with a grant from the Ford Foundation, a project now shared by Harvard, Oxford and Bir-Zeit University. Morris offers a dry military rendering of the expulsion that while consistent with Shammout’s conveys nothing of the terror and humiliation that it involved. As for the social history of 1948–for instance, the success of the Baha’i in hanging on in Haifa, or the mixed Jewish-Arab businesses in Haifa (both documented in Fay Afaf Kanafani’s fine memoir), or the apprehension that Arab women had of modern Israeli women as sexually available, a reputation that at times preoccupied Ibrahim Abu-Lughod’s thoughts as a boy hanging around the binational ice cream parlor in Jaffa (also documented in Kanafani’s work), Morris has nothing to say.
I know how he justifies this elision. His is a war book, it says so in the subtitle. War, not memory. There were no Arab archives available to him, evidently, and few Arab memoirs. In fairness, he has obviously relied on Walid Khalidi’s many books. The memoirs by Europeans who fought for the Palestinians he has made some use of. And he has that hogheaded insistence on using contemporary documents. At one point he goes out of his way to deride Arab oral histories of a massacre near Haifa as fabrication. The Nakba Archive that was funded by the Ford Foundation actually accepts Morris’s view that there is a different level of reliability in oral history many years after the fact compared to contemporary documentation. But contemporary sources can lie too: In his account of the Irgun published first 3 years after 1948, Menachem Begin denied there had been a massacre at Deir Yassin! It is the historian’s job to sort the facts out. Begin’s book is in Morris’s bibliography. Revealingly, Nur Masalha’s work on Zionist ideas of expulsion is not there, ignored too are Rashid Khalidi’s book on the period, Ilan Pappe’s book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, and Tom Segev’s book, One Palestine Complete. Also left out is McGowan/Hogan. They are all obviously too far left for Morris, too pro-Palestinian; and he is dissing them by simply denying their significance. I don’t think a writer can maintain credibility if he completely ignores so much evidence while producing a history that purports (Yale Press I remind you, I’ll save you from the blurbs) to be definitive.
I lack the patience to go thru every instance of Morris’s one-sidedness, his use of Israeli documents to convey Arab experience that Arabs are perfectly capable of reprising themselves. Norman Finkelstein is the man for that job. If his mind opens up any in the next 150 pages, I’ll let you know. As it is, Morris’s insistence on Israeli accounts is, if not racist,
then fiendishly narrowminded in an ethnocentric toy-soldierish way. Anyone tempted to heed his advice on Iran and nuclear war should keep that mindset in mind.
P.S. This spring Leila Abu-Lughod, who does not offer her Nakba book
as a definitive history of ’48 but as “a labor of love,” said that it
had been all but completely ignored by the Establishment
press then regretfully ascribed Nakba denial to “power politics.” I agree, and recommend her sincerity about her motivation as a model for literary historians.
