Posted on 01/26/2004 5:35:50 AM PST by SJackson
Benny Morris' transformation highlights chilling truths about the conflict
http://www.jewishworldreview.com | If war is the "continuation of politics ... by other means," as German strategist Karl von Clausewitz famously wrote, then it must be said with equal certainty that the study of history in our day has become another form of warfare. No conflict better exemplifies this maxim than that between Arabs and Israelis. For the last 55 years and more, Zionist and anti-Zionist historians have waged war in the pages of their books.
Pro-Israel writers look to the past to justify by legal, historic and moral grounds the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty over the ancient homeland of the Jewish people.
At the same time, Arab writers as well as an international brigade of Jew-haters have done their best to depict the creation of the State of Israel as a crime.
But the genre of historical writing that has done the most damage to Israel's image has not been the hatred-filled screeds coming out of the dubious academic institutions of Cairo and Damascus. It has been the work of Jews who have come to doubt the justice of Israel's cause that has emboldened its enemies the most. In the last 20 years, the rise of a new group of Israeli historians, known as "revisionists," has engendered a bitter debate about Israel's origins and policies.
NO TO THE STAINED-GLASS IMAGE
No person is as closely identified with this term as Benny Morris, a one-time journalist, prolific author and currently a professor of history at B en-Gurion University. In a number of works on the origin of the Palestinian refugee issue and Israel's War of Independence, Morris has earned a reputation as someone with little patience for the stained-glass version of the Zionist narrative. His research attempted to debunk the notion that all Arab refugees fled the territory that would become the Jewish state on their own, and that the conduct of Israel's soldiers and leaders was spotless.
Morris' work was greeted with dismay by many friends of Israel, who rightly worried that his version of history portrays the Jewish state as being born in sin.
The author reinforced his image as an icon of the Israeli left with his own anti-establishment behavior. In the late 1980s, Morris was briefly jailed when he refused to do his Israeli army reserve duty in the territories because he opposed Israel's presence there.
But ever since the Palestinian Authority rejected Israel's peace offer at the July 2000 Camp David summit and answered it with a terrorist war of attriti on, Morris has begun to make statements that have lost him his fans on the left.
The culmination of this process came when the Israeli daily Ha'aretz published a lengthy interview with the writer on Jan. 9. In it, Morris told journalist Ari Shavit — himself a highly partisan star of the Israeli left — that while his work uncovering Israeli wrongdoing would continue, he was no longer a supporter of peace efforts with the Palestinians.
Indeed, Morris shocked Shavit by asserting that Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion — whom Morris has roundly criticized as responsible for some of the suffering of Palestinian Arabs — probably made a mistake by not completely expelling all of them from the West Bank during the fighting in 1948 and 1949.
"A society that aims to kill you forces you to destroy it," Morris said. Even more significantly, Morris pointed that all of the bad deeds which he is prepared to blame on Israelis do not amount to much when compared to the atrocities carried out elsewhere, as well as to the attempts of the Arabs to destroy Israel.
"When you take into account that there was a bloody civil war here and that we lost 1 percent of the population, you find that we [Israel] behaved very well," Morris told a dumfounded Shavit.
Morris is, of course, right. While we can debate some of the conclusions he draws from his research — and historians such as the redoubtable Efraim Karsh have placed many of them in doubt — the notion of the 1948 Israelis as morally perfect was always absurd. Wars are not moral events. Terrible things are sometimes done even in the name of righteous causes.
Much as Americans were once raised on such tame historical fare as Parson Weems' life of George Washington that portrayed the first president as a secular saint, Jews were fed much of the same about Israel's founders. But just as it does not undermine the legitimacy of the American republic to learn that Washington wasn't perfect, it won't kill us to learn the same about Ben-Gurion. Even more importantly, Morris' statements highlight the fact that Israel's democratic leaders did not act in a vacuum. They were locked in a war of survival that they'd tried to avoid via compromise against a foe whose purpose was the annihilation of the Jewish population.
‘THEY WANT IT ALL ’
Unlike many of his revisionist colleagues, Morris's hard look at Israelis of the past has not blinded him to the crimes of the Arabs during Israel's wars or to their current intentions. And that last point is what has so infuriated Morris' old friends. He is very clear in saying that Arafat has rejected peace with Israel on any terms.
"They want it all," Morris said. "Lod and Acre and Jaffa."
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
Benny Morris transformation highlights the fact known to us on the Right who supports Israel, and that which makes at least me personally exasperated in this continuing debate: if one honestly applies logic to the Mideast conflict, and honestly examines the facts, motivations of the sides, their actions and inactions and consequences of both, it must leave only one logically consistent conclusion: despite the fact that Israel not always acted wearing "white gloves" and Israel herself is not a model of perfection, the facts are that Jews want peace and are ready to compromise to achieve it, Arabs don't want peace and are ready to sacrifice their own to destroy Israel in one way or another. We can split hair indefinitely identifying degree of Israel's fault for this or that, and in what exactly level of imperfection it is now. Its all irrelevant. If Arabs wanted peace, they would already have it. They can have it anytime even now. Jews will probably compromise more than expected to achieve it. But without Arabs desiring the peace, all the debate is pointless.
Those who don't see it are lacking in logic or are willfully blind.
A "gentleman" with whom I occasionally debate the the middle-east conflict, will, after he has no other answer, falls back on this statement:
"Well, if I lived somewhere where I wasn't wanted, I would just leave."
We've debated a number of times over the years, always coming at the argument from a different angle than the previos argument. But invariably he will fall back on "then they should just leave".
It is to me a source of deep frustration. After each "discussion, I vow "never again". But, inexoribly I'm drawn to try and "break through" his closed-minded ignorance.
Pray for me brothers 8^)
Regards,
"Well, if I lived somewhere where I wasn't wanted, I would just leave."
1. Has he said this to the Arabs?
2 Has he considered that over a million Mizrachi Jews are in Israel because they did leave their "death-to-the-Jews" chanting Arab neighbors?
Right of Reply / I do not support expulsion
Ha'aretz (Israel) ^ | 1/23/2004 | Benny Morris
Posted on 01/23/2004 1:22:20 PM EST by liberallarry
Wonder what woke him up, who innoculated him with a good dose of common sense? I'd like to know so we can have some hope for the muslim rear kissers in D.C.
That's essentially how Israel was, and is being, populated in the first place.
Out of curiosity though, you might as if he's proposing moving 5 million or so to his neighborhood.
Only took, what, 40 years for him to wake up. If he had been reading the bible instead of self-righteously straining at the specks in the eyes of his countrymen, he might have noticed the logs in his own...and also the eyes of the so-called 'palestinians' 40+ years ago.
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