The following [brilliant] letter appeared in the September 18, 2009 edition of The Oberlin Review:
Oberlin Zionists’ Speaker Raises Questions of Racism
To the Editors:
Suppose that a patriotic pro-America group on campus invites a historian to Oberlin whose specialty is the genocide of the Native Americans. This historian accepts that such a genocide took place, duly acknowledges that it was a tragedy… and then goes on to say that it was a kind of noble evil vindicated by the foundation of American Democracy. Suppose further that this speaker is brought to the campus to advocate solutions to contemporary issues that are the fallout from that genocide, such as reparations or reservation rights.
No group will ever do this, obviously, because a person like that would have precisely zero moral credibility on those issues. So the next best thing would be to go see Israeli historian Benny Morris speak in King 106 next Wednesday at 4:30, when the Oberlin Zionists will have him discuss the one and two state solutions to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Benny Morris may be the most prominent member of the “New Historians,” a generation of Israeli academics who refuted the founding myth that Israel was created on “a land without a people” and argued that about 700,000 native Palestinians were driven from their homes at Israel’s founding. Morris, to his credit, is unequivocal about this: he states in a Ha’aretz interview that, “That can’t be chance. It’s a pattern. 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.”
Yet in the same interview, he says, “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.” And “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."
He goes on in the interview to claim that the early Zionists didn’t go far enough in their transfer program and argues for keeping ethnic cleansing on reserve as a potential solution to the Arab problem. And the Palestinians’ failure to disappear as per their historical role sends him into high ubermensch mode: “The Arab world as it is today is barbarian"; “that society is in the state of being a serial killer”; “something like a cage has to be built for them”; “there is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another.”
This doesn’t require a thorough historical background in the Israel-Palestine conflict to understand. These statements are manifestly racist, if the word is to have any meaning at all. And the Oberlin Zionists are hosting the man who said them, because he’s on their side.
That’s not to say that Benny Morris has nothing to say. He is a truly accomplished historian. Still, it’s instructive to imagine what would happen if the shoe was on the other foot. Namely: what would be the response if Oberlin Students for a Free Palestine brought a speaker who argued that suicide bombings in marketplaces were ethically justified as a means of creating a Palestinian state?
That the Oberlin Zionists can bring such a speaker virtually without protest while the reverse scenario is unimaginable is the only proof necessary of the pro-Israel bias that exists in Oberlin as well as in America. And it mocks the possibility of dialogue between Israel and Palestine solidarity groups that many Oberlin students have been hoping for. Would African-Americans and their allies dialogue with a historian who justifies slavery for building the American south? No? Than why would Arabs reach out to a man who regrets their ethnic cleansing only for not going far enough? There are other prominent Israeli advocates for the two state solution, such as Neve Gordon. Though articulate, Morris is rendered unnecessary for being so ethically compromised.
Still, Oberlin Students for a Free Palestine is willing to talk with a man who refers to an entire ethnic group as “wild animals,” “serial killers,” and “barbarians” in the space of a single interview, painstakingly documents their ethnic cleansing only to argue that it was their own fault, then steals the moral high ground by claiming that he’s sorry about it anyway. But to paraphrase Hunter Thompson: how long will it be before the “politically correct types” on campus start calling him a racist? How would Morris react? “No comment”? And how would Oberlin react if he just came right out and admitted it?
Oberlin Students for a Free Palestine
(PS: Read a longer version of this letter on our website.)
thanks for this My oldest daughter (now32) went to Oberlin. Great institution..surprising that Benny Morris is going to speak. Sure the students will speak out..hopefully
Wonder when Oberlin will have Former Jimmy Carter on campus to speak. If they do Daniel Pipe and his extremely biased team will go ballistic
So wonderful to watch these groups on campus grow in support of Justice in the I/P conflict. Organizations like Campus Watch (Daniel Pipes) sure kept the anti apartheid (Israel) movement tapped down for years.
the situation is changing
For a long time, the liberal criticism of Israel has focused on the occupation of the territories taken in the 1967 war, the settlements. For some people, aka Barack Obama, this is still the primary issue. If we can just fix the settlement issue, everything will be peachy fine.
But lately the platform has changed. It is the foundation myth of Israel that is now increasingly being challenged, the crimes of 1948.
In another piece posted here today, Jack Ross makes the following astonishing statement: What you and the hard left completely fail to appreciate is that South Africa, to say nothing and Rhodesia, were rogues to the international system right from the beginning; whereas Israel, that is, the Jewish restoration, is its greatest triumph.
No other country so openly rests its “right to exist” on the authority of international law, and indeed it was willed into being by the UN at a time when it honestly thought it could govern the world. As for America, so also for the UN, Israel is the ultimate symbol of itself as a force for good in the world, representing the salvation of the Jews as the heroic outcome of “the good war” that defines their whole existence and purpose. To indict Israel, in other words, is to indict the whole world order, the whole 20th century.
This is profound blindness to historical reality. When the UN recognized Israel, its acceptance was conditional on the return of the 3/4 million refugees created by the war. Israel adamantly refused to allow in even the smallest fraction of these displaced persons, beginning its long career of defying every UN resolution concerning it. Israel indeed proved itself a rogue state from the moment of its founding and has never turned back to the course of justice. Israel was born in sin and has only compounded its sins throughout its history.
To call the founding of Israel a “triumph” of any system is certainly to indict that system, and only the most Zionist-central mind could conceive otherwise. Ironically, it is the work of the historian Benny Morris that has done the most to expose the crime of Israel’s founding. And I believe that the pronouncements of the racist Benny Morris serve to expose as clearly as possible that Israel is in essence a racist state, from its beginning.
I had to pick my jaw up off the floor, after reading Jack Ross’ total misrepresentation of the circumstances surrounding the establishment of the State of Israel. I would just like to point out a few articles of UN Resolution 181 (on which Israel bases its claim to international legitimacy), violated by Israel from the very beginning and up to the present day:
“No discrimination of any kind shall be made between the inhabitants on the ground of race, religion, language or sex.” (ch.2, art.1)
“All persons within the jurisdiction of the State shall be entitled to equal protection of the laws.” (ibid. art.2)
“No expropriation of land owned by an Arab in the Jewish State (by a Jew in the Arab State)(4) shall be allowed except for public purposes. In all cases of expropriation full compensation as fixed by the Supreme Court shall be said previous to dispossession.” (ibid. art.8)
For all the blathering on about how Israel should be ‘recognised’ (even though it doesn’t appear to have any borders) the fact 181 was never actually applied (nor later was 273 which admitted Israel to the UN on the proviso that they abide by 181) is something fundamentally and blatantly obvious yet is never pointed out in the media. Gruen and his terrorist friends Begin, Stern et al just took the bits that suited them and threw the rest away.
The seminal Balfour Declaration also contained language promising essentially that the local Arabs
would not be abused anywhere in the Mandate. That also is rarely brought up.
Good point, citizen.
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes.
Yes, they were. War crimes are defined in the Geneva Conventions. Anyone with a shred of cognitive capability who reads the Geneva Conventions and the Israeli new historians can see that this is clearly so. The Israel government did not sign the treaty until after the war in 1948, and the Knesset did not ratify it until 1951, so one can argue that it did not apply. However, that did not stop us from hanging German and Japanese war criminals after WW 2.
I believe it is important to look reality squarely in the face and call people when they lie about such important past events, because lack of acknowledgment greatly hamstrings efforts to find a stable peaceful solution in the present. However, I think the Holocaust provided moral justification, and it seems to me that much of the West clearly agreed at the time.
I expect that most Arabs disagree, especially Palestinians, but for my own assessment I must use the litmus test of ‘walking in another man’s shoes’. If I were a Jew in the late 1940′s, I would have supported the 1948 war, too. They had just had one half of their number murdered in Europe. Would you have hung around? I wouldn’t have. Morality becomes less clear cut when it becomes a matter of physical survival.
Let me be clear: I am not making excuses for Israeli behavior today. Jews were justified in creating Israel in 1948. They are not justified in further expansion in the present because in spite of protestations of self defeating fools and criminal expansionists, most of the threat that remains to Israeli physical defensive security remains in large part simply because their political establishment prefers colonization over peace and security for its citizens. The validity of the justification for expansion ended in either 1956 or 1967, and Israeli refusal to make amends in any way to Palestinians, or even to acknowledge that they have legitimate grievances, is inexcusable.
Any regular reader knows that I am staunchly opposed to Israeli ethnic cleansing and colonization, especially because the activities of pro-colonization American Zionists who currently control leadership of the Lobby are a serious security threat to my country. Common ground can only be found with those who support Israel’s defensive security and the maintenance of a safe haven for Jews. It cannot be found with those who betray America, not to provide for the defensive security of Israeli, but for the express purpose of aiding foreign colonists. These criminals, if one is honest enough to apply standard dictionary definitions, are thieves, murderers, and terrorists whose enterprise has already ensured that there will not be a Jewish state without another Nakba vastly more heinous than the first.
“If I were a Jew in the late 1940’s, I would have supported the 1948 war, too. They had just had one half of their number murdered in Europe. Would you have hung around? I wouldn’t have. Morality becomes less clear cut when it becomes a matter of physical survival… Jews were justified in creating Israel in 1948.”
I disagree, Colin. It was wrong and short-sighted to think that forcing a religious-ethnic Jewish state on the indigenous population of Palestine would provide any kind of physical security and/or emotional rehabilitation for the survivors of the Holocaust. There were other, better solutions, but the Zionist movement was well-organised, and took advantage of the situation. The Zionist leadership in Palestine was far more interested in furthering its pre-war ideological goals than in caring for the broken masses from Europe or the refugees they themselves had made of Jews from Arab lands.
It undoubtedly seemed like a good idea at the time. The world certainly believed so. Hindsight puts the matter in a different light, although there were plenty of people with the foresight to predict the catastrophe that materialized.
The original sin of Israel didn’t consist in the founding of the state. It consisted in the refusal of that state to abide by the conditions of its recognition and allow the return of the refugees. UN diplomats, the US among them, argued for months with the Israelis, attempting to convince them to allow back even a small number of the refugees, with Israel stubbornly refusing. This is the point at which the UN ought to have, in justice, rescinded its recognition. And it was certainly the lingering clouds of genocide that prevented this. Israel was given a pass, and it was the Palestinians who paid for it.
But Israel’s refusal is also proof that, from the beginning, Israel intended the violation of the UN conditions, intended the ethnic cleansing. To create a Jewish state, the Arab population first had to be cleared away. Without the ethnic cleansing, Israel-as-Jewish-state would not have been possible. Which suggests that, even before the actual sin, the seeds of it were always present in intent, from the moment the Zionists began to settle in a land where another people already lived.
The UN partition plan, it must be realized, was based on the Jewish population, not the Arab. That is, the area intended for the Jewish state contained almost all the Jews in Mandate Palestine, and about half the Arabs, whereas the area intended for the Arab state contained almost no Jews. The Jewish population, in other words, would have been safeguarded from ethnic cleansing, while half the Arab population would have been vulnerable to it. If, as Israel’s subsequent actions suggest, ethnic cleansing was always their intention in the Jewish partition, there was scant Jewish population in the Arab population to be subject to retaliatory expulsion. From the beginning, the UN had given the Zionists the advantage.
It consisted in the refusal of that state to abide by the conditions of its recognition and allow the return of the refugees. Actually I think the actual ethnic cleansing was pretty nasty too. But it’s possible to point out that the state of Israel never did that.
The problem was, of course, largely one of timing – as those who demand their “turn” at wiping out a native population have expressed so eloquently. From its inception, political Zionism had put all its eggs in the colonial basket. Its aspirations would be realised at the point of European bayonets. By the mid-late 1940s that was an anachronism. The Zionists bet on colonialism just as it was beginning to disappear. From the fall of the Raj to the withdrawal from Algeria, to the defeat of Apartheid, overt colonialism was going out of fashion – except in Palestine. With all due respect to the state of mind of those – Jewish and non-Jewish – who went along with it after the war, some must have had some very serious doubts about the whole idea. Ahad Ha’am put his finger on it in the 1890s, for God’s sake. Creating a drastic new political, economic and cultural reality without so much as a by your leave from a large indigenous population. How could that have seemed like a good idea? How could that have seemed like a solution to the problem of Jewish persecution, of a people reeling from the horrors of the ghettos and the camps?
Shmuel – actually, partitioning was the great craze of the post-WWII world. Simultaneously with the partition of Palestine was the murderous partition of India on 1947, creating Pakistan. 12 million people were displaced and as many as a million died in the process. This is perhaps one reason why so little attention was given to the plight of the Palestinian refugees, as a minor problem in comparison.
Of course most of the refugees in the partition of India had a state to go to where they could obtain citizenship, of which the Palestinians have been deprived.
There is a fundamental difference between partitioning two native populations and partitioning a colonial (minority) and a native (majority) population. There were people both inside and outside the Yishuv who understood this at the time. The UN (and the Yishuv) had its reasons to ignore this difference. Interestingly, the example of India and Pakistan is often cited by Zionists, not as justification for partition, God forbid, but as justification for population exchange – either past (Arab countries took Palestinians, Israel took Jews from Arab contries – let’s call it quits), or present/future (various permutations of “tranfer” in exchange for Jews from Arab countries already in Israel).
Shmuel – your remarks about the problems with partitioning are quite true and, unfortunately, still apt in the situation. Some of the Israeli plans for creating the Palestinian state involve repartitioning Israel to carve out bits with high Arab populations and turn them over to Palestine in exchange for settlement blocks. This, in total disregard for the rights or interests of the current population, many of whom prefer to remain Israelis.
It is not likely that Avigdor Lieberman plans to allow them to retain their citizenship and move to some other location within Israel.
Morris makes liberal use of the justification, “our backs were to the wall,” to salve the zionist conscience of its sins of the unjust taking of life of Arabs that Morris acknowledges.
The number of Arabs slaughtered or tortured by Jews is wildly disproportionate to the number of Jews killed by Arabs in 1948-49; Morris justifies this by saying that the Arabs were not successful warriors.
Doesn’t it occur to Jews that at some point, the outrage is going to boil over?
Their backs were to the wall because it was the wall of someone else’s house, and someone else reasonably didn’t want them to take it away from them.
All the excuses and rationalizations in the world can’t obliterate this basic fact.
shortly after Morris wound up a US speaking tour promoting his new rendition of his history of the 1948 war, Barack Obama was winding up his campaign, and spoke to a gathering in Davenport, Iowa.
At that point in his campaign, Obama was under pressure from US Jews to pledge his fealty. He told the Davenport crowd:
… because all Israel needs to commit mayhem on a global scale is the perception, in its own fevered mind, that “its back is to the wall.”
the Palestinians did not murder Jews in Europe
It’s a good thing that Oberlin values intellectual freedom enough to welcome Benny Morris in spite of his abhorrent values.
I wonder if they would extend the same courtesy to David Irving?
Tuyzen – the actual ethnic cleansing at least happened in the middle of the fighting, in which “shit happens.” The UN wasn’t directly involved. The same can’t be said for the aftermath when they were debating Israel’s recognition.
No, Potsherd, if you read Ilan Pappe it’s clear the ethnic cleansing started in November ’47– right after the passage of the partition resolution but before the end of the Mandate; and that it included ethnic cleansing actions in areas the partition resn designated for the Arab state in Palestine. It was deliberate from the get-go and from long before the ‘war’ actually started at all.
I haven’t read Pappe and for that matter haven’t read Morris’s most recent book, but he and Meron Benvenisti (in Sacred Landscapes) claim that the earlier expulsions were done from “military necessity” and that the later expulsions (beginning sometime in the middle of 1948, I think) were deliberate attempts at getting rid of Arab residents permanently. That’s the claim, anyway.
I haven’t, of course, seen the documents, but Pappe’s version just seems more plausible. You’d have to think that the people doing the earlier cleansing just never thought for one second about whether or not the refugees would ever return, and that they never thought how convenient it would be if they didn’t. It’s hard to imagine.
And it continues today
Helena – I consider the events of 1947 part of the “war,” the war between the Zionist Yishuv and the Palestinians. Morris’s work makes clear that the greater part of the ethnic cleansing took place before the expiration of the Mandate, as part of the armed struggle between the two groups to expel each other from their territory.
In fact, I think it’s pretty clear that one reason the neighboring Arab states joined in the war already underway was that their territory had been filled with Palestinian refugees and the only way to get them to leave was to retake Palestine from the Zionist forces.
I conclude that the disagreements are only in appearance.
Devinette: guess the maximum percentage of expellable Palestinians that at any given time were actually expelled-ran for their life(or as someone once replied to me “or were called away”).
I could make some mistakes here, don’t have time to look things up now. The estimate can easily be improved.
UNRWA numbers in 1950 talk of 150.000 palestinians inside Israel, of which 50.000 were internally displaced.
So 100.000 were at home. Should we subtract the druze because there was no intention to expel them? 15.000 or so. Subtract the Christians around Nazareth, because it was politically too sensitive to chase them away? I don’t recall the number. Say it’s 10.000. Subtract part of the 30.000 that had just been added with the little triangle after the armistice with Jordan? I don’t know how many of those 30.000 had been expelled by 1950, but in all I thought in the 3 years after the war the same number 30.000 were expelled from several areas. By 52 the situation was more or less frozen by giving identity cards to the Palestinians inside. Let’s take half, 15.000.
Subtract a small number that had been expelled but had managed to deviously sneak in back to their homes? That’ll be negligeable, probably most ended up as present absentees.
But a guess of 60.000 ‘non-expelled expellables’ inside Israel proper at some point before the armistice, is easily over 90% expelled expellables. That’s pretty thorough for ‘shit happening’.
The question you have to ask yourself when you look at the fighting, right after the partition was rejected – why did the Zionists immediately attack the areas that were supposed to be for the Palestinians? The only answer you can come up with is that they also rejected the partition plan (you can also see this in official documents), and that they had no intention of accepting the partition in earnest and it was Eretz Yisrael all the way from the beginning. They wanted to make sure that they established the facts on the ground immediately during the fighting, and the message it sends is that there was no intention of sharing anything. Otherwise they would have just maintained their proposed territory.
So, the next time you hear from these hasbara freaks tell you that the Palestinians should have not chose to fight, and that they would have been satisfied with the partition – their immediate actions showed nothing of the sort but their intentions to swallow everything. The entire deck was stacked against the Palestinians from the beginning of the Mandate forward, and who ever heard of a majority getting less of the territory with the only recognized rule being that of the Zionists? Only an insane person or people would have accepted such a proposal.
There were approximately 100,000 Jews living in Jerusalem which was to be an international city according to the partition plan. In the immediate aftermath of the partition vote there was extensive violence all over the “country” and certainly a siege of Jerusalem was put into effect. The Zionists could not be expected to allow the Jewish population of Jerusalem to be starved. A path from the Jewish coast to Jerusalem was necessary to save the Jewish population of Jerusalem.
The partition plan map was designed with the hope for a peaceful coexistence. The violence which erupted immediately after the partition vote made the lines of the partition plan impractical.
In April of 1948 the representative of the Palestinians (AHC- the Arab Higher Committee) stated that the Arabs had started the violence. I paraphrase: Yesterday the representative of the Jewish Agency asserted that the Arabs started the violence. We do not deny this. We promised that the partition plan would be met with violence.
The Partition Plan would still have had a population of 40% Arabs (300,000) in the proposed Jewish State. There was no other way to divide up the land, as there were just too many of those pesky Arabs. This proportion was unacceptable to the Zionists and was the reason for the violence. (The whole idea, after all, is to live in purity apart from gentiles.)
Even today’s 25% percent proportion (i.e., those who weren’t cleansed) is considered unacceptable.
The fighting had already begun, WJ. I would think that the representative was simply acknowledging that the Arabs would not accept the partition as well. Well, no shit.
You can’t just list a quote, and imply the rest. That’s weak and unconvincing. In fact, it’s a common tactic in this debate.
In the UN report, the team acknowledges a article in which some Hamas spokesman was quoted as saying that the Palestinians have become good at being human shields or something. The guy is a moron, and what he said was moronic. This rhetoric is comically idiotic. However, there was no evidence of human shields.
Anyways, I can see that quote mattering if you build some context around it. Provide some evidence toward making your point. Thus, that quote would be a compelling side-note, contributing to an already substantiated argument.
Here are some excerpts from various books, on the Nakba:
(All found, in the foot-note section of ‘Understanding Power’ by Chomsky.)
Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities, New York: Pantheon, 1987, pp. 81-118. An excerpt (pp. 42, 83-84, 132):
See also, Avi Shlaim’s The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, New York: Norton, 2000. An excerpt (p. 31):
On the extent of the Zionist-controlled territory and the number of Palestinian refugees through May 1948, see for example, David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, London: Faber and Faber, 1977, pp. 123-143. An excerpt (pp. 136, 138-139, 142):
There are lots more where that came from.
Not to pile on unnecessarily here, wj, but the violence was ongoing well before April of 1948, and even before November 1947.
Lawrence of Cyberia has a comprehensive post which lists a large number of attacks on Arab civilians in Jaffa by Jewish terrorist groups starting from January 1948 through April 1948 as reported by the British.
There is a book available online called the Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem by Issa Nakhleh. In that book he cites British records on Zionist violence and terrorism in Palestine from 1946 onward, much of which was directed at the British, but a significant portion of which was directed at Arab civilians. Its clear from the British records that violence started long before the UN Partition Plan, and that the Zionist terror groups bear the brunt of the blame for that violence.
The claim that “we accepted partition, but the Arabs chose to fight” is most hypocritical when asserted by Revisionists who had themselves opposed partition. It’s a bit like the “greater Israel” crowd taking credit for Peace Now (“where is the Arab Peace Now?”). You are right however , v…, that even Ben Gurion’s acceptance of the plan was not exactly a decision to share.
“While the Yishuv’s leadership formally accepted the 1947 Partition Resolution, large sections of Israel’s society — including…Ben-Gurion — were opposed to or extremely unhappy with partition and from early on viewed the war as an ideal opportunity to expand the new state’s borders beyond the UN earmarked partition boundaries and at the expense of the Palestinians.” Israeli historian, Benny Morris, in “Tikkun”, March/April 1998.
“In internal discussion in 1938 [David Ben-Gurion] stated that ‘after we become a strong force, as a result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand into the whole of Palestine’…In 1948, Menachem Begin declared that: ‘The partition of the Homeland is illegal. It will never be recognized. The signature of institutions and individuals of the partition agreement is invalid. It will not bind the Jewish people. Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital. Eretz Israel (the land of Israel) will be restored to the people of Israel, All of it. And forever.” Noam Chomsky, “The Fateful Triangle.”
“Before the end of the mandate and, therefore before any possible intervention by Arab states, the Jews, taking advantage of their superior military preparation and organization, had occupied…most of the Arab cities in Palestine before May 15, 1948. Tiberias was occupied on April 19, 1948, Haifa on April 22, Jaffa on April 28, the Arab quarters in the New City of Jerusalem on April 30, Beisan on May 8, Safad on May 10 and Acre on May 14, 1948…In contrast, the Palestine Arabs did not seize any of the territories reserved for the Jewish state under the partition resolution.” British author, Henry Cattan, “Palestine, The Arabs and Israel.”
Oh, and one other matter Wondering, the attack of these cities above have nothing to do with a “path to Jerusalem,” you need to take geography lessons.
Oh, while I am at it Wondering, 400 plus villages do not beat a path to Jerusalem either.
Here are the facts, echoing what many have said or implied above–you will see at a glance just how unfair the UN partition plan was to the Arabs in the Mandate, and
that the Jews saw the partition as just a way of getting their foot in the door solidly to take the whole house–establishing facts on the ground by sheer force has been a
modus operandi from the start, and this is going on as you read this now and Obama
is having his tea party at the Waldorf Astoria: link to representativepress.org