Benny Morris was one of the earliest and most important Israeli “new historians” whose scholarship and courageous truth-telling refuted a number of mythologies about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, among other things by demonstrating that the Palestinian refugee problem was deliberately created by the Zionists, who engaged in what we today call “ethnic cleansing.” Morris and others proved beyond reasonable doubt that in 1947-48 the Zionist military forces and political leadership drove a large part of the Palestinian population out of the lands under Zionist control, often by means of massacres and other acts of terrorism against the Arab civilian population.
“Transfer”-- the preferred Zionist euphemism for driving Palestinians from their homes, farmland, property, and villages—sometimes was motivated by revenge for resistance to the expanding Jewish control of Palestine, but more importantly it was deliberate state policy, designed to seize Palestinian land and property for distribution to the new wave of Jewish immigration from postwar Europe, and even more importantly, to ensure that Jews would be a large majority within the borders of what became Israel.
Today Benny Morris can no longer be regarded as a scholar and historian, but merely a propagandist, indeed a particularly shameful one, for he has traded on his former status and reputation as a fearless truth-teller in order to lend credibility to his ongoing series of disingenuous comments on current issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The latest example is a Morris essay in the September 29 issue of Haaretz, “No Love For Muslims, Unless They’re Palestinians.” Morris begins by discussing a metaphor for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as recently employed by Jeffrey Goldberg and Christopher Hitchens; it is worth quoting at some length:
“Hitchens approvingly cites (and expands) a metaphor coined (I think) by Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for The Atlantic: A man (the Zionist Jew), to save himself, leaps from a burning building (anti-Semitic and Holocaust Europe) and lands on an innocent bystander (a Palestinian), crushing him. To which Hitchens adds - and the falling man lands on the Palestinian again and again (the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza, the suppression of the intifadas, the construction of settlements in the territories, etc).”
“But the metaphor is disingenuous, and it requires amplification to conform to the facts of history. In fact, as the leaping man nears the ground he offers the bystander a compromise - let's share the pavement, some for you, some for me. The bystander responds with a firm "no," and tries, again and again (1920, 1921, 1929, the Arab Revolt of 1936-39 and the 1947-48 War of Independence), to stab the falling man as he descends to the pavement. So the leaping man lands on the bystander, crushing him. Later, again and again, the leaping man, now firmly ensconced on the pavement, offers the crushed bystander a compromise ("autonomy" in 1978, a "two-state solution" in 2000 and in 2008), and again and again the bystander says "no." The falling man may have somewhat wronged the bystander, but the bystander was never an innocent one; he was an active agent in and a party to his own demise.”
To begin, this is laughably bad writing, a consequence of Morris’ lame and increasingly absurd effort to make an extended argument within the confines of a forced metaphor. The far more important point, of course, is that Morris’s three main arguments in the essay are all bad ones. It is not that what he says is flatly false so much as that what he omits—and surely deliberately so, since he knows better—effectively makes the argument a dishonest one.
First, the “leaping man,” the Zionists, never truly offered the Palestinians a fair compromise before Israel was created, despite Morris’s argument, which refers to the several partition plans suggested in the 1930s and 1940s as the best practical compromise to solve the conflict between the Zionists and the overwhelming Palestinian majority, particularly the 1947 UN partition plan that formed the basis for the creation of Israel in 1948. The UN compromise partition plan was rejected by the Palestinians, but supposedly accepted by David Ben-Gurion and the Zionist leadership.
However, that is another part of the Israeli/Zionist mythology that has been decisively and repeatedly shown to be essentially false: the evidence is irrefutable that Ben-Gurion “accepted” the plan and sold it to his reluctant co-leadership, solely as a temporary tactic to allow the Zionists to gain a foothold, from which they would build a state and powerful military forces that could later expand and take over all of historical Palestine—the West Bank, all of Jerusalem, and even parts of Lebanon, Syria, and Transjordan.
Here, in Ben-Gurion’s own words, was his plan. In a 1937 letter to his son, he wrote:
“A partial Jewish state is not the end, but only the beginning. The establishment of such a Jewish State will serve as a means in our historical efforts to redeem the country in its entirety….We shall organize a modern defense force…and then I am certain that we will not be prevented from settling in other parts of the country, either by mutual agreement with our Arab neighbors or by some other means….We will expel the Arabs and take their places…with the force at our disposal.”
And in early 1949 Ben-Gurion told his aides: “Before the founding of the state, on the eve of its creation, our main interest was self-defense….But now the issue at hand is conquest, not self-defense. As for setting the borders—it’s an open-ended matter. In the Bible as well as in history there are all kinds of definitions of the country’s borders, so there’s no real limit.”
In Morris’s second argument, he criticizes Christopher Hitchens for “seeming to accept the Palestinians’ definition of themselves as ‘natives’ struggling against an ‘imperialist foreign enemy.’” Actually, he strongly implies, it is the Jews who are the true natives of Palestine, not the Palestinians: “What of Jewish residence in the Land of Israel between the 1th century BCE and the late Byzantine period (5th and 6th centuries C.E? And what of Jewish residence and ‘nativeness’ in Palestine since 1882, nearly 130 years ago? If residence grants rights, surely Jewish residence counterbalances Arab residence in Palestine since 636 C.E.”
In effect, in an only slightly qualified manner, Morris is repeating the standard Zionist argument that Jewish rights in Palestine are greater than those of the Palestinians because the Jews were there first. It is emblematic of the poverty of thought on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that this argument is not immediately recognized as simply preposterous, outside the realm of even minimal intellectual respectability.
What’s Right and What’s Wrong with the Zionist Argument?
In evaluating the case for Zionism, the first step must be to separate the original Zionist argument for the necessity of a Jewish state from the arguments that such a state must be in Palestine. When Jewish nationalism or the Zionist political movement emerged in Europe in the early 20th century, its core belief was that the Jewish people had both an overwhelming need for and a moral right to a nation-state of their own. In light of the often murderous persecution of the Jewish people throughout history, it is hard to imagine any other people who have had a more powerful case for possession of a state of their own.
Where that state should be located, however, was a very different matter. The terrible paradox of Zionism is that while the arguments for the right and need of the Jews to have a state of their own were so strong as to be nearly self-evident, most of the arguments for the right to create that state in Palestine were quite weak.
The founder of the Zionist political movement, Theodore Herzl, initially considered the question of where the Jewish state should be located as an open one, a practical issue rather than an ideological or religious one. Thus, for awhile the Zionists canvassed a number of possibilities. However, the search for alternatives to Palestine was quickly abandoned. The turning point—and the origin of the Palestinian-Israeli and the larger Arab-Israeli conflict—came at the Zionist Congress of 1903, which decisively rejected any effort to create the Jewish state in any place but Biblical Palestine.
From the 19th century to the present, Zionists have made a number of arguments for exclusive Jewish political rights in Palestine. The first is the religious or Biblical argument: God promised the Jews that Palestine would be theirs forever, following which they established a Jewish Kingdom throughout the land, ruling for centuries until they were conquered and later expelled from the land by the Roman Empire. That is not an impressive argument, in the first instance because religious arguments convince only those for whom religious arguments are convincing. In any case, Christianity and Islam have their own religious claims to Palestine.
Moreover, a growing number of Israeli archaeologists, anthropologists and Biblical scholars have concluded that the Zionist argument that purports to rest on the actual history of the land is tendentious and largely mythological, lacking serious historical evidence to support it. Still, for the sake of argument let us assume that those modern scholars who challenge the mythology—the stories of Abraham, Moses, the Exodus from Egypt, the Jewish conquest of Palestine, and the later expulsion of the Jews by Rome--are in error. Assume further that the historical evidence supports the Zionist argument that Jews lived primarily in the ancient land of Palestine for many centuries, over which they established political sovereignty, losing this Jewish homeland only because they were forcibly conquered. Would all these presumed facts establish a modern Jewish claim to the land of Palestine?
Hardly. In no other place in the world is it accepted—in law, moral reasoning, or in plain common sense--that an ancient claim to a land has precedence over two thousand years of a different reality: eight centuries of Christianity, followed by thirteen centuries of an overwhelming Islamic majority. Indeed, nowhere else in the world does it even occur to anyone to make such a manifestly absurd argument.
To elaborate, Palestine has been repeatedly conquered by outside invaders since ancient history: by Assyria, Babylon, Alexander the Great, the Roman empire, the Crusaders, the Arabs, the Ottoman Empire—indeed, if the Old Testament is to be the historical source, in the Biblical era by the Jews themselves! On each occasion, many or most of the previous inhabitants of the land were killed, driven into exile, or subjugated by new rulers, who then held sway for centuries. Who, then, are the “rightful” claimants?
Put differently, by what objective criteria are the claims of one set of victims—the Jews supposedly driven out by the Romans over two thousand years ago—privileged over all other such claims? If ancient victimization is the criterion, then the descendants of the Canaanites (for example, the Syrians!), who lived on the land until the Jews conquered them, must have priority over the descendants of the Jews. On the other hand, if recent victimization is the criterion, then all victims of conquest after the Roman expulsion have priority over the Jews.
There is scarcely any place in the world that has not at one time been conquered, subjugated and populated by previously external forces. Consequently, absent a religious basis (“the Promised Land”) accepted by everyone, including those of different nationalities and religions, the stopping of the clock as it marches backward in time to 20 centuries ago, neither earlier nor later, must be completely arbitrary and self-serving. Thus, a kind of common sense statute of limitations on land claims by right of previous inhabitance has evolved. Of course, there can be no precision in ascertaining the point at which the passage of time has nullified the moral or legal validity of previous land claims, and certainly there are hard cases.
The Zionist claim, however, is not one of them. While the metaphorical statute of limitations is vague, we can at least establish a morally plausible range:
*The passage of a few months or years is not enough to wipe out past rights. Thus, no unbiased observer challenged the moral right of the Bosnians, the Croatians, and the Kosovar Albanians to reverse Serbian ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia—even though force was often necessary and it required the dispossession of Serbs who had recently taken over the abandoned homes and villages.
*The passage of some decades creates a complex problem. Thus, the question of whether the Palestinians have the right to return to their homes and villages in what is now Israel is one of the most vexing issues in the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not easily resolvable, either in practice or in moral principle—except by some kind of fair compromise.
*Two hundred years or so is too long. For example, while there is no doubt that in the 19th century Americans illegitimately and forcibly conquered much of what became the United States from the Native Americans and from Mexico, it does not follow that today’s Native Americans have even the theoretical moral right to reconquer the West, or that Mexico could legitimately drive out the Texans today.
This is not to deny that the Native Americans still have some persuasive legal and moral claims for some forms of restitution. After a century and a half, however, the use of force to assert previous territorial rights would be an entirely different matter. For example, there seems to be no doubt that a couple of centuries ago my home in Buffalo was once on land inhabited by the Seneca Indian Nation—but I don’t think that would give the modern Senecans the right to demand I return it to them, or to violently drive me out if I refuse.
*If this line is reasoning is persuasive, then a territorial claim based on previous inhabitance two thousand years ago is beneath serious consideration. To be sure, even after the Roman conquest there continued to be a substantial Jewish community in Palestine. However, over time most became Christians or Moslems as a result of the consecutive foreign conquests and occupation of Palestine, leaving only a small minority that preserved its Jewish identity.
As a result, by the end of the 19th century, prior to the beginning of the Zionist immigration, only some 15,000-30,000 Jews remained in Palestine, about 3-7% of the Arab population. Different studies have come to somewhat different estimates, but none remotely support Morris’s claim that “Jewish residence counterbalances Arab residence in Palestine since 636 C.E.” (emphasis added)
There is only one good argument for the Zionist claim to have a Jewish state in some part of the land of Palestine, but it is a sufficient one. Unlike the other arguments I have discussed, the fact of centuries of murderous Jewish persecution, culminating in the Holocaust, cannot be dismissed as irrelevant in legitimizing the creation of Israel. To be sure, the matter is complex: the conflict between the Jews and Palestinians long preceded Nazi Germany, and in any case the Palestinians were in no way responsible for the Holocaust or, for that matter, for the earlier history of murderous European anti-Semitism that produced Zionism. As the Palestinians always ask: Why should we be made to pay for evils we did not commit?
On the other hand, the Holocaust made the case for the creation of a Jewish state and a haven for the victims of anti-Semitism not only irrefutable but urgent. And by the late 1930s the die was cast; it was far too late to consider alternatives other than Palestine. In that context, the Palestinian plea of innocence lost much—though not all—of its force. The answer to the “why should we pay” question was this: it had become a tragic necessity, for the alternative, in terms of the human consequences, was worse.
In that case, could the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been averted, or at least settled long ago? Perhaps it might have, if two things had been done by Israel at the time of its creation, or at least since. First, Israel should have jettisoned its untrue, infuriating, and irrelevant “narrative” and simply rested its case for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine on historical necessity in general, the Holocaust in particular, and the absence of a practical alternative to the land of Palestine. And since 1948 the only argument necessary to the Zionist case is that Israel exists, new moral as well as factual realities have been created, and Israelis have the right to live.
At the same time, however, Israel should have publicly and repeatedly acknowledged that the creation of Israel had created a grave injustice to the Palestinian people, that the subsequent Israeli expulsion, occupation, and repression of the Palestinians had compounded the injustice and the pain it has long inflicted on the Palestinian people, and that as a result Israel would do everything in its economic and political power to remedy those injustices and alleviate the pain-- short of abandoning its state.
Even today, it is probably not too late for Israel to do this, and it may very well be the case that such an acknowledgement—accompanied by major Israeli economic assistance to the Palestinians—is the necessary psychological prerequisite if there is ever to be a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But first the Israelis (and their allies in the American Jewish community) must go through a painful demythologizing process; sadly, they will get no help from Benny Morris, despite his earlier work.
Morris and the Two-State Solution
Morris’s last argument is based on a serious distortion of the fistory of the two-state solution, especially in 2000 and in 2008. Morris simply reasserts the standard mythology: that in 2000 Ehud Barak offered Arafat a genuine two-state solution but that Arafat flatly rejected it, made no counteroffers, walked away from the negotiations, and began the violent intifada. No part of this mythology has survived serious examination. The issue is far too complex to be examined here, but it has been refuted in great detail by a number of scholars, journalists, and former policy makers—most of them Israeli. (For my own analysis, see here)
Here are the most salient points:
*Even as the negotiations were proceeding, Barak was continuing to expand the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, continuing the Israeli practice of creating “facts on the ground” that precluded their return to the Palestinians.
*No one knows for sure what Barak “offered” to Arafat in 2000, since he refused to put anything in writing and even refused to talk directly to Arafat at what was supposed to be a “summit” meeting at Camp David in July 2000. As for what Barak seemed to be hinting he might finally offer, at most it would have left the largest and most important Jewish settlements beyond Israel’s pre-1967 borders under Israeli sovereignty—not least because they had been deliberately placed there to ensure Israeli control over some of the best agricultural land and largest West Bank water aquifers.
*On the crucial issue of Jerusalem, Barak not only continued to insist on full Israeli sovereignty over the entire city, including over the Muslim mosques in the Old City, he actually hardened the Israeli position over Jerusalem by demanding for the first time that Jews be allowed to pray on the Temple Mount plateau, adjacent to the mosques. As many Israelis and others have noted, Barak’s position on Jerusalem alone doomed the negotiations to failure.
*On another crucial issue, the Palestinian refugee “right of return” to Israel, Barak was also completely uncompromising, later stating that no Israeli prime minister would ever accept “even one refugee on the basis of the right of return.”
*Barak continued to demand a demilitarized Palestinian state, Israeli control over Palestinian borders and air space, and even a long-term Israeli military presence and settlements deep within the projected Palestinian state, especially in the Jordan river valley and adjacent mountain tops.
In short, if the Palestinians had accepted Barak’s apparent proposals—assuming that in the end Barak would have formally offered them--they would have gained only a tiny, economically nonviable and water-starved Palestinian “state”—or perhaps, better said, Bantustans--divided into a number of noncontiguous parcels separated by Israeli armed forces, roads, and Jewish settlements, denied a capital in East Jerusalem or even sovereignty over the Muslim religious sites on the Temple Mount.
No wonder that Shlomo Ben-Ami, Barak’s foreign minister, later said that “Camp David was not a missed opportunity for the Palestinians, and if I were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp David, as well,” and that Barak himself later boasted that he had given the Palestinians “not a thing.” And even then, the overall conclusion of investigations by European, U.S and even Israeli intelligence organizations is that Arafat did not make a policy decision to abandon negotiations and turn to violence; rather he was unable to contain the Palestinian intifada, which at least initially was a revolution from below.
What Happened in 2008?
Morris writes that the Palestinians again rejected a compromise two-state solution in 2008, supposedly offered by Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert. The facts are murky, but there have been some indications of what happened. Olmert, who had a long history as a hardline rightist before his election, was prime minister from May 2006 until he was defeated for reelection by Benjamin Netanyahu in February 2009. Throughout his term in office he not only continued but stepped up the expansion of Jewish settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank, and two months before his term expired he instituted the infamous Israeli attack on Gaza and resisted efforts by members of his own Cabinet to cut short the attack before even more Gazan civilians were slaughtered.
Still, it is true that in the last few months of his time in office—and when there was no longer any doubt that he was about to be decisively defeated by Netanyahu—Olmert made some surprisingly strong public statements about the need for a genuine and fair two-statement settlement with the Palestinians, perhaps including some form of shared Israeli-Palestinian sovereignty over the Old City and other sites within Jerusalem of religious importance to both Jews and Muslims.
There were some preliminary talks between Olmert and high-level Palestinian leaders on the basis of these promising Olmert statements, but there were no official Israeli proposals, no formal negotiations, no public documentary record, and in any case the process was quickly aborted when Olmert authorized the Israeli attack on Gaza and Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister.
And because Morris knows all this, today he is nothing more than a propagandist for the indefensible, and a particularly dangerous one at that, precisely because before he betrayed his calling he had gained great credibility as a fearless teller of the truth. Put differently, while once Morris told truth to power—often described as the highest calling of intellectuals-- now he tells the lies that power wants to hear. So it is hardly surprising that Morris, once a pariah in his country, today is a thriving and celebrated defender of Israeli policies and a close adviser to top Israeli political leaders.
This post originally appeared on Jerome Slater's blog On the US and Israel.
This post originally appeared on Jerome Slater’s blog
A week ago.
Read the comments there, including mine.
“And because Morris knows all this, today he is nothing more than a propagandist for the indefensible, and a particularly dangerous one at that, precisely because before he betrayed his calling he had gained great credibility as a fearless teller of the truth.”
Noone is a fearless teller of the truth. EVERYONE acts, chooses what to emphasize, chooses how to interpret, chooses what true story to listen to.
Morris believes that Zionism was necessary for Jews, and relative to that unequivocal need, he regards some ends that us skeptics wouldn’t do, as also necessary.
He is a Zionist certainly, currently, unashamedly.
So integral to the philosophy Zionism is the realization that sometimes you have to kill a few thousand people and steal their land, because you can?
Jeremiah (Jerry) Haber of The Magnes Zionist tells this story:
link to jeremiahhaber.com
>> Morris believes that Zionism was necessary for Jews, and relative to that unequivocal need, he regards some ends that us skeptics wouldn’t do, as also necessary.
His belief that Zionism was necessary for Jews doesn’t mean that Zionism actually *was* necessary for Jews, and it doesn’t absolve Jews / Zionists / Israelis of responsibility for the crimes they committed – and continue to commit – in pursuit of their goals.
I’m no “humanist”, so it’s no wonder I can’t get behind aggression, oppression, ethnic cleansing, land theft, colonisation and murder in the 20th and 21st centuries as “a good in the world”.
This was the comment I left on Jerry Slater’s blog, and I agree with Richard Witty about looking at the other comments there:
Jerry, your analysis is always well worth reading, and there is much I agree with. Benny Morris’s contribution to the new wave of Israeli historians remains invaluable, notwithstanding his dramatic political shift to the lunatic right over the past decade. His recent cartoonish efforts cannot erase his earlier scholarship on the 1948 era, from which he has only modestly budged to accommodate his new outlook. You also offer a masterful take-down of the historical justification for Jewish supremacy in Palestine; as you demonstrate, the history itself is questionable, but even if fully credited, the argument is “simply preposterous, outside the realm of even minimal intellectual respectability,” and “beneath serious consideration.”
You offer a very interesting analysis of the “metaphorical statute of limitations” regarding return of displaced populations. I can only add my belief that Israeli leaders agree with you, and they have been very successfully stringing along the status quo for decades, knowing that each passing year makes the crimes of 1948 and 1967 just a little more distant and a little more immune to rectification. In 25 years, there will be virtually no Palestinians left who personally remember the Naqba.
We differ on our analysis of “what’s right” about Zionism. You give rather short shrift to the “self-evident” need for a Jewish State, based upon centuries of persecution. I think the issue requires more analysis than that. There world has always been an intensely bloody place, and I’m not sure that Jewish victimhood outstrips all others’. Of course, today’s sensibilities insist that all enlightened states grant complete religious freedom and equality for all minorities, and Jewish populations all over the globe are entitled to no less. But the very idea of a Jewish State would seem to preclude that kind of equality that we in the U.S. take for granted. Certainly Israel has never come close to providing equality for its Palestinian civilians, who will be mired in some sort of second-class citizenship as long as they live in a Jewish State, even in the unlikely event of significant liberalization.
To me, the original sins of Zionism, which you aptly describe in the opening paragraphs of your essay, render the entire enterprise immoral from the start. The Zionists said to the indigenous population of Palestine, “We want your homes, your land, your communities for our state.” No external events could camouflage the audacity and unfairness of this territorial claim.
The mass murder of Jews in Europe provided no retrospective justification for the obvious injustice of Zionism. It was the Nazis who committed genocide, and the Palestinians played no role in this catastrophe, notwithstanding the idiotic claims of people like Dershowitz and Oren to the contrary. The people of Palestine were no more obligated to yield to the claims of a foreign people than were the people of Madagascar or Iceland. The lack of escape routes for European Jews surely contributed to the number of deaths, but countries much better suited to absorb large numbers of immigrants, like the U.S., became quite stingy. For instance, my father and his family were forced to temporarily settle in Cuba before they finally were admitted here, and his cousins spent 10 years in Shanghai before finally making it to the U.S. in 1949. The Palestinians, whose very way of life had been targeted for decades by Zionists, cannot be blamed for failing to shoulder any of the responsibility for saving Jews, when the U.S. and other nations were so much more culpable.
Your analysis of how the Zionists of the 1930′s and 1940′s could have softened the blow of the necessity of a Jewish State in Palestine strikes me as unreasonable fantasy. These were the same people who had been trying for decades to supplant the Palestinians in their own lands for illegitimate reasons. It would have been preposterous for them to argue in the pre-War years that events in Europe had given new justification for their cause, and they were truly sorry about all of the inconvenience that would be suffered by the Palestinians as a result of this exigent situation. No one tries to create a state while apologizing; the construction of founding myths of glory is an indispensable part of the enterprise.
I’m with you again when you say it is not too late for Israel to acknowledge what really happened. Just as the U.S. has done so, at least partially, with respect to Native Americans, it is an essential step in reconciliation between the two peoples. But again, we disagree on one-state versus two-state.
As for the various compromises “offered” to the Palestinians, all of them involved unacceptable dispossession of various large numbers of Palestinians from their property. Whether I demand all of the money in your wallet, or just 10 or 20 dollars, your answer would be the same: “no.” The only reason the two-state solution is now deemed agreeable to large segments of the Palestinian population is that they have lived in such misery – a foreign military dictatorship – for so long, that any relief, even unjust relief, would be welcome. I think that even if the two-state solution were realized, there would be continuing moral pressures on Israel to grant full equality to its non-Jewish population. While Israel obviously has an enormous capacity to resist such pressures, it is not unlimited, and I foresee the Jewish State eventually being compelled to yield to the flow of history.
Finally, you deal expertly with the events of 2000 and 2008, as well as Morris’s ideologically-based lies. I can only add a personal anecdote. In 2004, I heard Barak interviewed by Sean Hannity on the radio. Hannity asked Barak why he had offered the Palestinians a state at all in 2000 – wasn’t that a reward for terrorism? Barak replied that he had made an offer he knew would be refused, because it contained some unacceptable elements. The offer was made for show only. I wish I knew where to find a recording or transcript of this exchange, but I distinctly recall Barak’s “honesty” to be quite surprising and significant.
A transcript of that would certainly drive a nail into the “generous offer” lie.
I’ll say! If anyone locates the transcript, I’d be grateful for the reference.
I have it, but (1) I forgot what I named it, and (2) it may have been on a drive that died. I think I also had a podcast of it, too. :-(
When all the Palestinians are dead or dispersed to the four winds, when there is no more chance that they will actually return to sully the Jewish purity of the state with their Arabic presence, then Israel might find it convenient to acknowledge its crimes, although continuing to declare them necessary, as Morris does.
Potsherd
Your comment assumes that “When all the Palestinians are dead or dispersed to the four winds…” Israel will be content to exist with the borders of historical Palestine. What makes one think they will stop there? I don’t believe that one should make that assumption.
You make a good point, Howard. I don’t think anyone should place trust in Israeli nonexpansionism. But what I think is more likely that they will implement by force the old “Jordan is Palestine” dream with another wave of ethnic cleansing.
dsamel sums it up nearly perfectly. ‘yeah. what he said.’
Morris’s performance during his debate with Norman Finkelstein on RT television a few weeks ago was infuriating. He had a constant smirk on his face as he made the most outrageous statements.
I thought Finkelstein’s was the one that was deficient.
of course you did. here’s the interview. could you tell me which part of the interview you found norm ‘deficient’. because norm wipes the floor w/him.
“Here’s the interview”.
You must be joking. Only Norman’s comments?
The original was posted in its entirety on Norman’s website.
I find your presentation of such a blatently edited video to be wierd.
Hitchens approvingly cites (and expands) a metaphor coined (I think) by Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for The Atlantic: A man (the Zionist Jew), to save himself, leaps from a burning building (anti-Semitic and Holocaust Europe) and lands on an innocent bystander (a Palestinian), crushing him.
The metaphor is a famous one, and was coined by Isaac Deutscher in a collection of his short works – The non-Jewish Jew and other essays – published posthumously in 1968.
I’m not sure what exactly it says about Benny Morris the historian, that he doesn’t know a rather famous Polish leftist historian from Jeffrey Goldberg.
and it doesn’t explain why anyone who is ostensibly engaged in a serious debate on this point would choose to use goldberg as the starting point for that debate.
diane, he probably knew and didn’t want his thoughts dated circa ’68 when the fables about israel were in full swing. goldberg’s more ‘current’.
it’s really sad morris is now wallowing in the same myths he helped destroy.
I just glanced briefly at an earlier article by Jerome Slater, in which he asks “will someone explain Obama to me”?
It occurred to me that a limiting factor to his more assertive involvement in the region beyond the “Israel Lobby” is the left.
The left, and left-right, oppose additional US involvement in foreign lands. Unless the left were to ignore its own principles and come to support US military presence in Israel and Palestine as a replacement occupation, Obama HAS to urge persuasion as the basis of justice and peace.
There is no possibility of expensive, extended, distracting, politically dangerous, new US military involvement in the middle east.
Noone is willing.
The Jewish claim to Palestine is not limited to the Bible and the 1947 Partition Plan. The League of Nations created Palestine out of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire specifically as a Jewish Homeland. Jews were assigned national rights and the Arabs of Palestine were to be granted full civil and religious rights.
The League endorsed the Palestine Mandate and the San Remo Convention of 1920, this is black-letter international law that stands today. They have been ignored by many, including many in the Israeli Government, but they yet stand.
This means, among other things, that the “Settlements” are quite legal.
The Holocaust is only one part of recent history that requires a Jewish State. The experience of the Jews under Muslim rule was another great force. Treated dhimmis, about half of present-day Israeli Jews are Sefardic or Mizrachi in origin. That is, their families did not come from Europe but escaped or were evicted from Muslim states.
It is still true that Arafat made no counter-proposal to Barak, but went back and started the Intifada, instead.
Since the Arabs had rejected the 1947 Partition Plan, Israel was not bound by it, and in fact, the Arabs began preparations for the 1948 war to eliminate Israel. If Israel had not conquered territory in 1948, it would be the Jews of Israel who would be scattered. This was obvious at the time and the Israeli leaders made the only decision they could. There was no option to live side-by-side in peace with the Arabs in 1948.
There are about 20 Arab countries on the earth. If they really cared about the descendants of the Arabs who left Palestine in 1948, they would absorb them. In the intervening period, the Arabs have received trillions of dollars in unearned oil money that would enable this.
AreaMan, you are so wrong historically, you are laughable.
link to avalon.law.yale.edu
In the intervening period, the Arabs have received trillions of dollars in unearned oil money that would enable this.
I surprised you didn’t use “gazillions.” What’s unearned about it if the money bought a natural resource they own and extracted, their oil?
“When Jewish nationalism or the Zionist political movement emerged in Europe in the early 20th century, its core belief was that the Jewish people had both an overwhelming need for and a moral right to a nation-state of their own. In light of the often murderous persecution of the Jewish people throughout history, it is hard to imagine any other people who have had a more powerful case for possession of a state of their own.”
Folks, this is a liberal Jewish Zionist spewing forth Zionist propaganda. While he does a good job of Skewering Benny Morris, who richly deserves it, a lot of what he says is questionable. For starters, political Zionism got started at the end of the 19th century, not the early part of the 20th century. This is a misstatement of fact to give emphasis to his bogus argument concerning the nature of Zionism as an attempt to rescue the Jews.
Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, President of the Zionist Organization of America, addressing a meeting of the membership in 1946 said: “But I ask … are we again, in moments of desperation, going to confuse Zionism with refugeeism, which is likely to defeat Zionism? … Zionism is not a refugee movement. It is not a product of the second World War, nor of the first. Were there no displaced Jews in Europe, and were there free opportunities for Jewish immigration in other parts of the world at this time, Zionism would still be an imperative necessity.”
Zionism was intended to “rescue” the Jews from the Diaspora and the dangers of assimilation. It was intended to “save” the “Jewish people”, not people who happened to be Jews, whose fate was considered inconsequential in the long run. The emphasis has always been on the ideologically defined collective. Time and space preclude a meaningful discussion of Slater’s unwarranted conflating of historical anti-Semitism with modern anti-Semitism, and particularly with the Holocaust.
Slater has a propensity to bend the facts to suit a conclusion. “The passage of a few months or years is not enough to wipe out past rights. Thus, no unbiased observer challenged the moral right of the Bosnians, the Croatians, and the Kosovar Albanians to reverse Serbian ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia—even though force was often necessary and it required the dispossession of Serbs who had recently taken over the abandoned homes and villages.”
He has shifted from Zionist boilerplate to US State Department boilerplate. The US/German dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia for geo-strategic reasons was sold as a “humanitarian” intervention to stop/prevent the ethnic cleansing of the evil Serbs, even as NATO bombing exacerbated the situation, which was caused by US/German interventionism to begin with. This isn’t the place to go into all of this, but suffice to say that the first people “cleansed” were the Serbs of the province of Croatia, with considerable US support. Both the Albanian Muslims and the Ustashi Croats were allies of Nazi Germany during World War II. The Croats ran the Jasenovac death camp where hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma were exterminated. Yet, organized American Jewry was instrumental in helping sell this massive NATO aggression, and liberal Zionists like Jerome Slater continue to misrepresent and justify it.
“Both the Albanian Muslims and the Ustashi Croats were allies of Nazi Germany during World War II.”
‘unwarranted conflating’ , I’d say
ANTIDOTE- When Nazi Germany invaded Yugoslavia at the start of World War II, Hitler created a greater Croatia and a greater Albania (including parts of Bosnia and Kosovo), both of which were Germany’s allies during the war. The Bosnian Muslim leader which the US supported during the Balkan intervention, Alija Izetbegovic, was a member of the Young Muslims during World War II, who actively assisted the Nazis during the war, helping to guard the railway link between Auschwitz and the Balkans. The Nazi 21st SS division was manned by Kosovo Albanian volunteers. (Michael Parenti)
“…Croatia provided more volunteers for the German army than any other nation in Nazi dominated Europe: five full strength divisions, three Wehrmacht and two Waffen SS ….” The Croatian leader during the US/German intervention, Franjo Tudjman, had appointed former Nazi-collaborating Ustashe leaders to Croatian government posts. He wrote a book in 1989 which claimed that “the establishment of Hitler’s new European order can be justified by the need to be rid of the Jews….” (Michael Parenti)
Prior to the breakup of Yugoslavia, Croatia coordinated their activities with the German BND (CIA equivalent). The first head of the BND was former General Reinhard Gehlen, who was in charge of intelligence on the Eastern Front for Nazi Germany, and who was surreptitiously removed from the list of Nazi war criminals by US intelligence who thought that the General’s vast experience in murder and mayhem could be useful to the expanding US Empire.
As a result of all of this, Yugoslavia was destroyed and the Serbs demonized, a united Germany achieved a de facto Mitteleuropa, and the US got Camp Bondsteel (power projection) and an interventionist US controlled NATO strike force. I referred only to Michael Parenti out of convenience, however, similar information can be found in Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Diana Johnstone, Michel Collon, Bill Blum, John Pilger, and others. Unwarranted conflating? More like an essential historical perspective, I’d say.
BRAVO, Keith! Finally someone with a real grasp of what happened with Yugoslavia, past and present, and knows their history.
I would also add Carla del Ponti’s book (Jan 2009, I think) that she admitted would put an end to her diplomatic career. She had the balls while heading one of the international courts to have the supposed 100K to 125K grave investigated in 1999. The result? It was 2050 men and they were soldiers killed in battle.
The horrid propaganda of the 1999 war was repellent. We backed Thaci “The Snake” whose org was a direct descendant of the Ustashi.
What the Albanian Muslims and the Ustashi Croats did to the Greeks in WWII, the massacres in the villages, was horrifying. And…and…and they arrived with Nazi officers. My friend’s mother was one of the children found alive under the pile of slaughtered village children in the village monastery. She was nine. But she remembers every word the Albanians and Croats said to the villagers before they herded the children into the monastery.
If you’ll remember a fact from the Kosovo War, the tunnels under Serbia and Kosovo that NATO could not control, they were built during WWII to shepherd Jews out of Poland to the Adriatic Sea. That’s why they were built originally. There are people in Israel who remember that, which is why Israel sided with Serbia in 1999.
The Croats ran the Jasenovac death camp where hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma were exterminated.
I have a copy of the Foreign Service Manual that describes what they did at the Jasenovac death camp. The real sadist there was a Catholic priest, who escaped to the Vatican when the war ended. He liked to position Serbs, Jews, and Roma with just their heads on an orphan train track, and roll a caboose he kept for the purpose back and forth as slowly as possible over their heads.
Izetbegovic and Tudjman were even worse than you imply. Three million Serbs died (for the record they protected some American servicemen who landed there, and refused to give them up even when it meant death to themselves and their children, and it often did). When Tito died in May 1980, the bands that held the hatred and revenge came off, but our uneducated news anchors and producers knew none of this history when the trouble started in 1990 and praised the wrong side. I am the only person I know who read every single one of David Binder’s reports from the region in the NYT. Had anyone bothered, there is no way they could have supported the barbaric Izetbegovic and Tudjman, or the Kosovo War.
Correction: I am the only person I know who read every single one of David Binder’s reports from the region during the 80s in the NYT.
recall that the whole dismantling of the FY was initiated through Germany’s recognition of Slovenia. This was in pre-Euro days, when I was living in Europe, and I seem to remember some reports suggestive of German fiddling with the Franc, and French acquiescence to Germany’s interference in FY thereafter.
The whole dismantling of the FY was initiated by Tito’s death, which unleashed the old forces of nationalism and inter-ethnic hostilities his anti-nationalist, communist government had suppressed. Including the ‘Greater Serbia’ dream.
Hitchens-Goldberg-Morris citing each other is known as circular reasoning.
If residence grants rights, surely Jewish residence counterbalances Arab residence in Palestine since 636 C.E.
What is this? Since when does the residence of a few individuals grant national rights? Palestinian claims are based on far more than individual residence (although they have that as well – both recent and documented), but on the fact that prior to the intentional transformation of Palestine by European Zionists with the active collusion of Britain and other western powers, Palestinians (of all faiths) were indeed the native population of Palestine, determining the national character of the country. To claim that the fact that some co-religionist (or even member of the same ethnicity, for argument’s sake) may have lived in Palestine at some point in time grants national rights (or even individual rights) to all Jews in all places at all times is beyond preposterous. Former historian indeed.
“Hitchens approvingly cites (and expands) a metaphor coined (I think) by Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for The Atlantic: A man (the Zionist Jew), to save himself, leaps from a burning building (anti-Semitic and Holocaust Europe) and lands on an innocent bystander (a Palestinian), crushing him…”
I wish I had thought of this response yesterday when I first read it and this thread was new but I am not as quick as I would like to be. When it rolled over in my mind the shortcomings of this analogy became so obvious that I am amazed that any educated person would use it as a defense of Israel.
Let me expand upon it to conform with historical facts:
The man who was fallen upon gets ups and says “Perhaps I was being too protective of my rights and maybe I could have been more understanding of your predicament, but be that as it may, the fire is now out so why don’t you go back to where you came from and let’s both recover and get on with the the rest of our lives.”
To which the other man replies: “The hell with you. Not only am I staying but I am taking over the entire sidewalk. Now get the hell out of here and don’t ever come back. And most important, don’t think for a second if someone else is jumping from a burning building that I am ever going to share it with them.”