he Israeli
historian Benny Morris did it again. Morris is not only a historian with
impressive achievements but also an Israeli and international icon. One year
after the publication of his book The Birth of Palestinian Refugee Problem,
1947-1949, published in 1987, he proclaimed himself a “new historian.” He
became the great guru of a small imaginary group appointed by him and including
mainly Avi Shlaim, Uri Milstein and Ilan Pappe. Membership in this group varied
from time to time according to Morris’ sympathy or antipathy.
Morris
basically claimed that all the Israeli historiography that preceded his book
and several other writings was completely fabricated, a series of untrue myths
designed to serve the Zionist need for legitimacy. Morris, with his great
arrogance and unique talent for public relations provoked an immense furor
among the old Israeli academic and intellectual establishment and became the
hero of many Palestinians and a small group of younger Israeli academics who
perceived him as a “debunker” of Zionist lies.
On the other
hand he was accused by mainstream Israeli academics and intellectuals with
“post-Zionism” and subverting the very legitimacy of Israel’s existence. This
triggered endless nonsense and semi-professional and mainly political debates
in Israel and abroad about the meaning and extent of “post-Zionism” (frequently
labeled as “anti-Zionism” or even “post-modernism”) that included arbitrarily
any serious or less serious critical (or supposedly critical) study on Israeli
history, society and politics. Most of this debate caused great damage to
Israeli historical, social and cultural research. Books and papers were judged
not by their intrinsic values or shortcomings, but by their categorizations as
Zionist, post-Zionist or anti-Zionist. Instead of being preoccupied with
serious research, people devoted a lot of time and energy to polemics on this
futile issue. Younger academics were scared and chose their research projects
carefully in order to avoid being identified with one of the “camps.”
To Morris’
credit, it must be said, that he was very little involved in these debates,
even if he enjoyed being at the center of the storm. Morris in general loved to
leave his moral and ideological attitude toward the events he described
ambiguous, and this was a correct position from his positivistic historian’s
point of view, in which role he claims objectivity, even if a careful reading
of almost all of Morris’ writings reveals a very simplistic and one-dimensional
view on the Jewish-Arab conflict. Despite all his “discoveries” about moral
wrongs perpetrated by the Israelis, on the bottom line, he always tended to
adopt the official Israeli interpretation of the events (in The Refugee
Problem and Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict,
1881-2001, but less in Israel’s Border Wars). Another interesting
issue is Benny Morris’ compulsive dealings with the problems related to
“transfer” of the Arab population, which most of his readers wrongly
interpreted as anchored in a deep moral indignation.
As with most
of Morris’ other claims, the pretension to be the first and only Israeli who
dealt with the ethnic cleansing of the Arabs reflected a partial reality. His
book indeed touched a very central and painful nerve of the Israeli-Jewish
current past, the uprooting of about 700,000 Arab Palestinians from the
territories that would become the Jewish state, the refusal to allow them back
to homes after the war, and the formation of the refugee problem during the
period of the 1948 war and after. He also surveyed some atrocities committed by
Jews during the inter-communal war that played some role in the “voluntary”
flight of the Arabs from their villages and neighborhoods. Weirdly enough,
Morris devoted a very salient and extensive discussion to the centrality of
idea of “transfer” (i.e., ethnic cleansing) in Zionist thought, but concluded
that the Palestinians had not been expelled by the Israelis in compliance with
a master plan or following a consequential policy. This was not precise.
Plan
D and the Israelification of the Land
At the
beginning of the 1970s. I had begun to work on research at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, which, I hoped, would produce a Ph.D. thesis in
sociology. The subject was the Zionist ideology of land and its relationship to
other political doctrines. In the earlier stages of my research, I was shocked
to discover that a major “purification” of the land (the term “ethnic
cleansing” was unknown in that period) from its Arab Palestinian inhabitant was
done during the 1948 War by the Jewish military and para-military forces.
During this research I found, solely based on Israeli sources, that about 350
Arab villages were “abandoned” and their 3.25 million dunums of rural land,
were confiscated and became. in several stages, the property of the Israeli
state or the Jewish National Fund. I also found that Moshe Dayan, then Minister
of Agriculture, disclosed that about 700,000 Arabs who “left” the territories
had owned four million dunums of land.
Another
finding was that from 1882 until 1948, all the Jewish companies (including the
Jewish National Fund, an organ of World Zionist Organization) and private
individuals in Palestine had succeeded in buying only about 7 percent of the
total lands in British Palestine. All the rest was taken by sword and
nationalized during the 1948 war and after. Today, only about 7 percent of
Israel land is privately owned, about half of it by Arabs. Israel is the only
“democracy” in the world that nationalized almost all if its land and
prohibited even the leasing of most of agricultural lands to non-Jews, a
situation made possible by a complex framework of legal arrangements with the
Jewish National Fund, including the Basic Law: Israel Lands (1960), the Israel
Lands Law and Israel Lands Administration Law (1960), as well as the Covenants
between the Government of the State of Israel and the WZO of 1954 and the JNF
of 1961.
Now the
remaining puzzle was if this depopulation was a “natural” consequence of the
war, which led the Arab populations to flee the country, as Israel officially
states all the time while simultaneously accusing the Arab leadership of
encouraging this flight, or if it was an intentional Jewish policy to acquire
the maximum amount of territory with minimum amount of Arab population. Further
research showed that the military blueprint for the 1948 war was the so-called
“Plan D” (Tochnit Daleth). General Yigael Yadin, Head of the Operations Branch
of the Israeli unified armed forces, launched it on March 10, 1948. The plan
expected military clashes between the state- making Jewish community of
colonial Palestine with the Arab community and the assumed intervention by
military forces of the Arab states. In the plan ‘s preamble, Yadin stated:
The aim of this plan is the control of the area of
the Jewish State and the defense of its borders [as determined by the UN
Partition Plan] and the clusters of [Jewish] settlements outside the
boundaries, against regular and irregular enemy forces operating from bases
outside and inside the Jewish State.
Furthermore,
the plan suggested the following actions, amongst others, in order to reach
these goals:
Actions against enemy settlements located in our,
or near our, defense systems [i.e., Jewish settlement and localities] with the
aim of preventing their use as bases for active armed forces. These actions
should be divided into the following types: The destruction of villages (by
fire, blowing up and mining) – especially of those villages over which we
cannot gain [permanent] control. Gaining of control will be accomplished in
accordance with the following instructions: The encircling of the village and
the search of it. In the event of resistance - the destruction of the resisting
forces and the expulsion of the population beyond the boundaries of the State.
The conclusion
was that, as in many other cases, what seemed at first glance a pure and
limited military doctrine, proved itself in the case of “Plan D” to comprise
far-reaching measures that lead to a complete demographic, ethnic, social and
political transformation of Palestine. Implementing the spirit of this
doctrine, the Jewish military forces conquered about 20,000 square kilometers
of territory (compared with the 14,000 square kilometers granted them by the UN
Partition Resolution) and purified them almost completely from their Arab
inhabitants. About 800,000 Arab inhabitants lived on the territories before
they fell under Jewish control following the 1948 war. Fewer than 100,000 Arabs
remained there under Jewish control after the cease fire. An additional 50,000
were included within the Israeli state ‘s territory following the
Israeli-Jordan’s armistice agreements that transferred several villages to
Israeli rule.
The military
doctrine, the base of Plan D, clearly reflected the local Zionist ideological
aspirations to acquire a maximal Jewish territorial continuum, cleansed from
Arab presence, as a necessary condition for establishing an exclusive Jewish
nation-state.
The British
colonial regime—between 1921 to 1948—provided a political and military umbrella
under which the Zionist enterprise was able to develop its basic institutional,
economic and social framework, but also secured the essential interests of the
Arab collectivity. As the British umbrella was removed, the Arab and the Jewish
communities found themselves face-to-face in a zero-sum-like situation. By
rejecting the partition plan the Arab community and leadership were confident
not only in their absolute right to control the whole country that then had an
Arab majority comprising two-thirds of the population, but also in their
ability to do so. The Jewish community and leadership appreciated, on the one
hand, that they did not have enough power and population to control the entire
territory of Palestine and to expel or to rule its Arab majority. Thus, on the
other hand, they officially accepted the partition plan, but invested all their
efforts towards improving its terms and maximally expanding their boundaries
while reducing the number of Arabs in them.
It was
impossible, at that stage, to find hard evidence that, despite its far-reaching
political consequences and meaning, “Plan D” was ever adopted by the “political
level,” or even discussed by it. My intuition said that many political and
national leaders knew very well that there were some kind of orders and plans
that were better not to discuss or present officially. Later Morris’ findings
supported the correctness this intuition. In any case, though, the way that the
military operations of 1948 were conducted does not leave any room for doubts
that Plan D was indeed the doctrine used by the Jewish military forces during
this war, or about the “spirit” and perceptions behind it.
In the Winter
of 1974, I submitted my Ph. D. thesis and it was approved by the relevant
committee of experts in the Spring of 1975. For many years, I tried to publish
it, without success. My senior colleagues at the Hebrew University explained to
me with a strain of pity, “well everybody who lived in this country in that
period knows precisely what happened, but it is not publishable yet. Perhaps it
will be after a hundred years or so….” Some others kindly advised me to find
more interesting topics for research. However, I insisted and finally I found
the Institute of International Studies of the University of California at
Berkeley ready to publish it. The book was published in 1983 under the title Zionism
and Territory: The Socio-Territorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics. Being
a “dry” professional text, it did now draw public attention and achieved
limited circulation but became well known and widely quoted by a small circle
of experts.
The Israeli Demographic Discourse
Morris’
latest controversy involves the public position he has taken on the possibility
of a second act of ethnic cleansing. It is impossible to understand this
controversy without understanding the demographic background to it. The issue
is a complex one, but stated briefly, if current demographic trends continue,
Jews will cease to be the majority population even within pre-1967 Israel
within the next 40 to 50 years. A younger Arab population with a far higher
birthrate makes this almost inevitable, even if there is continued immigration
from the Diaspora. This fact creates a great deal of anxiety among all segments
of the Israeli polity.
The radical
solution to this dilemma is “transfer” of the Arab populations. “Moderate”
versions of these proposals call for exchanges of territories with their
populations. In these scenarios, areas in Israel with large Arab populations
like the lower Galilee would be given to a Palestinian state in exchange for
Jewish settlements in the territories being incorporated into Israel. More
extreme solutions to this dilemma call for forcible expulsions of Palestinians,
not only from the occupied territories, but even from Israel itself. This
fringe opinion, in the last years has become somewhat respectable.
Formerly,
solutions involving transfer were voiced openly only by followers of Meir
Kahane. Yet by 1990, another party endorsing “voluntary transfer,” General
Rehavam Ze ‘evi’s Moledet Party, had become part of the Israeli government
coalition. The “voluntarily” was added only to preserve the party from being
accused of inciting a crime. Presently, Moledet (as part of a parliamentary
bloc headed by Benny Elon, another supporter of “transfer”) is again part of
the government. In 2002, the National Religious Party chose a new leader,
General Effie Eitam, who has called for transfer of hostile Arabs to other
countries if a major war presented an opportunity. Indeed, most transfer
scenarios, including that newly proposed by Benny Morris, are based on a “War
of Armageddon.” which would provide the cover for massive ethnic cleansing. The
recent American assault on Iraq heightened this atmosphere of “anticipation.”
No wonder that under those circumstances, in which the Israeli government was
the most enthusiastic foreign supporter of the war, that a group of Israeli
academics published in the Guardian (October 2, 2002) a “hysterical
warning” about the possible intention to commit such an act under the cover of
a regional war.
As the
Palestinian armed resistance and terror continued, public opinion polls
consistently indicate a perpetual increase in the number of Israelis wishing to
expel Palestinians from the occupied territories and even Israeli Arab
citizens. For example, according surveys conducted by Asher Arian for Jaffe
Center of Strategic Studies of Tel Aviv University, in 1991, 38 percent of the
Jewish population supported the “transferring” of the Palestinians out of the
occupied territories through force while 24 percent favored expelling also the
Israeli Arabs. In 2002, the percentages rose to 46 and 31 consecutively.
The alternative
solution is to use the remaining time to withdrawal from the occupied
territories and to achieve a major reconciliation between the Jews and the Arab
citizens of Israel and their full integration as individual and ethnic group
within the Israeli state on a complete equalitarian basis. Proponents of this
solution argue that the vast majority of the Arab citizens of Israel is
committed to the Israeli state, its values and culture, and appreciates its
potential democracy. Furthermore, this alternative solution is necessary to
save Israel from being another pariah-state (like South Africa under Apartheid
regime). Benny Morris’ recent contribution to this controversy is to adopt a
solution on the more radical end of a continuum of possible strategies for dealing
with the so-called “demographic problem.”
The Outing of Benny Morris
At the
beginning of 2004, Benny Morris industriously prepared a “revised” version of
his The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem and a Hebrew version of
the Righteous Victims, and toward their publication he published two
articles in the Guardian (October 3, 2003 and January 13, 2004) and gave
an extensive interview to
Haaretz
Magazine (January 8, 2004). Basically the three pieces reflected the
same ideas; however the Hebrew interview is less subtle and more directed to
Morris’ internal political audience, therefore it is more interesting and calls
for a critical reading.
First and
foremost, the historian underlined the new findings that justify the new
version of Refugee Problem: “What the new material shows [says Morris]
is that there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously
thought. To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape.” After some
detailed description of the rape and murder of Palestinian girls, Morris
concluded that “because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report
these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were
reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the
iceberg.” Additionally he found that in twenty-four cases, about 800
Palestinians were massacred under different circumstances. And he added:
That can ‘t be accidental. 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. The fact is that no one was
punished for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. He covered
up for the officers who did the massacres.
However, one
of the most interesting conclusions of Morris—what brings him closer to my
findings—is that
from April 1948, Ben-Gurion is projecting a
message of transfer. There is no explicit order of his in writing, there is no
orderly comprehensive policy, but there is an atmosphere of [population]
transfer. The transfer idea is in the air. The entire leadership understands
that this is the idea. The officer corps understands what is required of them.
Under Ben-Gurion, a consensus of transfer is created.
It is not yet
ethnic cleansing as a pre-planned part of a military doctrine as I found in the
initial research, but just “projected message.” However, in another way this is
worse then my conclusions because it is openly referred to Ben Gurion himself.
So far it is
the “old good” and expected Morris. The restless debunker of Israel’s sins.
However, suddenly the interview took a sharp turn from historiography to
philosophy: “Under some circumstances 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. You have to dirty your hands.” Moreover,
if he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he
should have done a complete job. I know that this stuns the Arabs and the
liberals and the politically correct types. But my feeling is that this place
would be quieter and know less suffering if the matter had been resolved once
and for all. If Ben-Gurion had carried out a large expulsion and cleaned the
whole country— the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River. It may yet
turn out that this was his fatal mistake. If he had carried out a full
expulsion - rather than a partial one—he would have stabilized the State of Israel
for generations.
Leave apart
for a moment the moral implications of this statement and ask about its factual
basis. All previous research by Morris shows that the refugee problem was and
still is the core issue in the Jewish-Arab conflict. A “full expulsion”—presuming
that was possible from a military and international point of view (a very
dubious presumption)—would only triple the number of refugees. Morris has no
answer about how such a cleansing should reduce the suffering and by whom. He
knows very well that the absorption of even the “limited number” of 700,000
refugees caused famine and epidemics in the “host” countries.
Another
crucial point that Morris should know very well was that the conquest of the
West Bank would have pulled the only well-trained Arab army into the conflict,
the Trans-Jordan Legion. Such a conquest would have violated the tacit
agreement between Ms. Golda Meirson and King Abdullah about the partition of
the land of Palestine between the Jewish state and the Kingdom. In such a case,
the balance of power in the 1948 war would have been different and would have
resulted in the same outcome of the war. Ben Gurion was very anxious on this
point, and the only battles between the Arab Legion and the Jewish forces were
local and took places in the Jerusalem area, the only disputed territory
between the sides.
But Morris has
abandoned his historian’s mantle and donned the armor of a Jewish chauvinist
who wants the Land of Israel completely cleansed from Arabs. Never has any
secular public Jewish figure expressed these feelings so clearly and blatantly
as Professor Morris did. And in order to be completely lucid on this point he
drew an analogy between Israel and North America: “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.” I do not know today any American
historian or social scientist that agrees that the annihilation of the
indigenous population of the continent was a necessary condition for the
American nation or the constitution of American democracy. And these are facts
and not “political correctness” as Morris loves to call any arguments he cannot
deny.
However the
issue is less about what happened in past and more about Morris’ wishful
thinking and prophecy about the future: To the interviewer’s question if Morris
advocates a new ethnic cleansing today he replies: “If you are asking me
whether I support the transfer and expulsion of the Arabs from the West Bank,
Gaza and perhaps even from Galilee and the Triangle [Israel], I say not at this
moment. I am not willing to be a partner to that act. In the present
circumstances, it is neither moral nor realistic. The world would not allow it,
the Arab world would not allow it, it would destroy the Jewish society from
within. But I am ready to tell you that under other circumstances, apocalyptic
ones, which are liable to be realized in five or ten years, I can see
expulsions. If we find ourselves with atomic weapons around us, or if there is
a general Arab attack on us and a situation of warfare on the front with Arabs
in the rear shooting at convoys on their way to the front, acts of expulsion
will be entirely reasonable. They may even be essential.”
This doomsday
scenario drawn by Morris is so fantastical not only because the Palestinian
citizens of Israel proved, despite very harsh conditions and generational
discrimination their “loyalty” to the state, but also because the existence of
dense Arab population within the narrow strip of the Holy Land is the best
insurance Israel has against being attacked by strategic nuclear or other WMDs.
Otherwise, Morris is unable to understand that the moment that nuclear, biological
and chemical weapons were used in the context of the Middle East by any side,
it is already too late to save anything in the region.
But hatred
toward the Arabs, their society and culture crush any logic in Morris’ thought.
The Palestinians are “the barbarians who want to take our lives. The people the
Palestinian society sends to carry out the terrorist attacks… At the moment,
that society is in the state of being a serial killer. It is a very sick
society. It should be treated the way we treat individuals who are serial
killers.” After thirty five years of oppression, colonization of their land,
expropriation of their water, ignoring almost all of their freedoms,
administrative detention of tens of thousands of Palestinians, systematic
destruction of their social and material infrastructure, it is more than ironic
to talk about the Palestinians as barbarians and a sick society. If the
Palestinian society is sick, who is responsible for this sickness and which
society is sicker and an institutionalized serial killer?
Morris’ mind
is full of contradictions: Before he described the Palestinian “barbarism” he
described the whole conflict as “in comparison to the massacres that were
perpetrated in Bosnia, that’s peanuts. In comparison to the massacres the
Russians perpetrated against the Germans at Stalingrad, that’s chicken feed.”
To these one may add the American bombardment of Dresden into rubble and other
innumerable atrocious acts committed by the “Westerner” and other non-Arabs to
conclude who are the “barbarians.” Or after describing the rapes and the
massacres committed by the Jews he comments that “it turns out that there was a
series of orders issued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinian
intermediate levels to remove children, women, and the elderly from the
villages. Morris interprets that as proof that many of those who fled the
villages did so with the encouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself,
which proves that the Jews were not so much responsible for the cleansing. Morris
cannot understand the obvious: what could be more human, in the face of rapes
and massacres, than evacuation of women and children from a war zone? So, again
the non-human Palestinian victims are responsible for the consequences. To say
that he applies a double standard is a serious understatement.
By the same
token, Morris fails to ask the right questions about the failed Camp David
summit. If the Palestinian strategy is to destroy Israel in phases, why didn't
they accept the “most generous offers” of Ehud Barak Camp David summit, as was
described in the famous interview of Morris with Barak in the New York
Review of Books (June 13, 2002)? But one cannot ask for much logic in an
emotional outburst by an archivist, when he tries to compose a generalized and
coherent picture from his thousands of details. Then he turns to his own
prejudices and stereotypes of the Islamic and Arabic culture that happen to be
fashionable and well fit the present moods of the Israeli-Jewish and some parts
of Western political culture since the September 11 calamity. But the historian
is not just a part of the collective mood and expresses it, he also provide
historical and intellectual legitimacy to the most primitive and
self-destructive impulse of a very troubled society. Perhaps it is indicative
that to the interviewer’s question—“if Zionism is so dangerous for the Jews and
if Zionism makes the Arabs so wretched, maybe it was [from the start] a
mistake?”—Morris lacks any meaningful answers.
Baruch Kimmerling is George S. Wise Professor of Sociology at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His latest English book (co-authored with Joel
S. Migdal) is The
Palestinian People: A History (Harvard University Press, 2003).
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