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BENNY MORRIS JUSTIFIES ETHNIC CLEANSINGSaturday 05 Oct 2002
author: Nizar Sakhnini
BENNY MORRIS JUSTIFIES ETHNIC CLEANSING
Nizar Sakhnini, 4 October 2002
When Benny Morris published his two books about the Arab-Israeli conflict (The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947 – 1949. Cambridge, 1987 and 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990), many people considered him as an honest and courageous historian whose aim was to depict the truth by presenting an objective and factual narrative.
In hindsight, Morris was after giving a justification to what happened rather than depicting the truth. The facts presented in his books had already been a public knowledge through the British, American, Israeli and UN archives that became accessible as of the mid-eighties. These facts became also publicly known through credible authors. (For an example see: Readings in Zionism and Palestine Problem until 1948 that was edited with an introduction by Walid Khalidi, in From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem until 1948, published in 1971 and Michael Palumbo's: The Palestinian Catastrophe: The 1948 Expulsion of a People from their Homeland, published in 1987). Ignoring the facts presented in his books that clearly pointed out the systematic and pre-meditated plans aiming at ethnic cleansing, Morris had the audacity to conclude that the Palestinian Refugees problem was an unfortunate outcome of the war and not part of a pre-meditated and pre-planned strategy for ethnic cleansing.
In a similar subjective manner, Morris is trying to justify a new wave of mass expulsions that Sharon is planning to bring about under the cover of the War against Iraq in order to complete the job that Ben-Gurion started and was unable to finish in 1948.
A new article by Benny Morris gives another evidence of his efforts to justify the war crimes committed against the Palestinian people. (The article, "Two Years of the Intifada: A New Exodus for the Middle East?" was published in the Guardian on 3 October 2002 and is available online at:
http://search.guardian.co.uk/search97cgi/s97networkr_cgi?QueryText=Benny+Morris&Action=Search&Collection=archive_artifact&ResultTemplate=Archive_Artifact.hts&SortSpec=VdkPublicationDate+Desc )
In this article, Morris argues, "The Middle East might now be at peace if Israel's first leader [Ben-Gurion] had driven out all the Palestinians in 1948." The new war on "terrorism" that the American-Israeli strategic alliance launched after 9/11 is used to justify the ethnic cleansing plans that had been in place all along and way before 9/11. According to Benny Morris, "The Palestinian Arab strategy of suicide bombings and the tone of rejectionism that characterises much Palestinian rhetoric, from Arafat and the Palestinian Authority radio and TV stations downwards during the past two years fuels such thinking. Israel's extreme right, which wants the 'whole Land of Israel' for the Jews, ultimately posits transfer as a counterweight to this mainstream rejectionism - which, in effect, endorses a transfer of the Jews out of Palestine, or 'throwing the Jews into the sea', as the phrase goes…"
Commenting on the article, Dr Nur Masalha, University of Surrey, the Palestinian academic, who was born and brought up in Israel, stated," I have debated the issue of 'transfer' in Zionism with Benny Morris many times. In Morris's book on the Palestinian refugees there are only a couple of pages on the 'idea of transfer in Zionism'. Only after the publication of my book, Expulsion of the Palestinians, in 1992 (based on Hebrew archives) did Morris begin to accept that 'the idea of transfer is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century' (Could this happen again, G2, October 3).
But, contrary to the headline on your news story, (Radical Israeli in u-turn on Palestinians), I have always detected in Morris a deeply rooted, though subtle, streak of justification for the actual expulsion of the Palestinians that took place in 1948. This is not about a one-man conversion to the cause of the Israeli extreme right. The repackaging of 'demographic racism' by Morris into scholarship is an alarming symptom of a wider phenomenon in Israel. This phenomenon involves the brutalisation of mainstream Israeli culture, which is unable to think beyond the two racist options it currently offers the Palestinians: institutionalised inequality and racist apartheid, or ethnic cleansing and a new Palestinian holocaust." (Masalha's comment was also published in the Guardian)