Morris and the Road Back from Liberal Zionism
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_._.__-~--_._-- ' Middle East Report 230:No More Tears: Benny Morris and the Road Back from Liberal Z... Page 1 of 14 No More Tears: Benny M!;B-~30 ;I...P~9f Content!! Morris and the Road Searc Back from Liberal Zionism Joel Beinin (Joel Beinin, an editor of this magazine, teaches Middle MERIP East history at Stanford University.) ItK.~r!'YWi Chan e in U Books Reviewed By Chris Daily Star (8 Subscribe Online to Benny Morris, 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, second edition, 1994). Middle East Report The victory of Benny Morris The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-1949 Democratic Part , 1988). Super Tuesday t Order a (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press observation. To a subscription and the urgent desire Benny Morris The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited Bush a second back issues to the House has pape award-winning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). in the broad Dem enticing many m magazine Middle sects bac East Report. Click 1"",. here for the order page. On July 11 1948 Special MERIP Publications Aharon White Hous Uprising in Cohen By Cath Palestine director of Topeka Ca New version the Arab (Ka coming soon. Clj~J~ Affairs January here fortimeline Department of the In a bid to gain Primer on Palestine war, George W. socialist- end of Saddam H Israel and the Arab- enhance prospe Israeli Conflict Zionist Israeli-Palestini Mapam months after the c:1i~kl1fo!rfo! clear that topplin party in did not bring M Israel closer. It is equa gears up for the received a Bush administ Haganah militiamen expel Palestinian Arabs from trying to brok carbon Haifa, April 1948. (Agence France Presse) copy of a Full military intelligence report. Israel, a state less than two months old, was embroiled in a war with neighboring Arab states that IoPeny s hands analyzed would last until 1949. The document in Cohen We_~RQ.11 http://www.merip.org/mer/mer230/23 0- beinin.html 3/8/2004 Middle East Report 230:No More Tears: Benny Morris and the Road Back from Liberal Zoo. Page 2 of 14 Nucl~_~r:: the reasons for the flight of 240 000 Palestinian Arabs from areas By Chris which had been allocated to the Jewish state by the November Daily Star (Be 1947 UN partition plan and another 150 000 from the Jerusalem region and areas allocated to the Arab state. Cohen was upset to The 12-year read the report' s conclusion that 70 percent of these Arabs had Saddam Hussein the US displayed fled due to "direct, hostile Jewish operations against Arab Iraqi refusal to settlements" by Zionist militias, or the "effect of our hostile possibly non-e simultaneously operations on nearby (Arab) settlements. I1J One month before Washington s b Cohen received this report, Mapam s political committee had Iraq. With m denouement ofth issued a resolution opposing "the tendency to expel the Arabs something sim from the Jewish state " in response to Cohen s warnings that such between Washi the apparent nuc operations were taking place. Islamic !J II Over the course of Arab-Jewish fighting between 1947 and 1949 well over 700 000 Palestinians were made refugees, the majority of them by direct expulsion or the fear of expulsion or massacre. Whylh~I~ Pal The largest single expulsion occurred after Israeli conquest of the By Cath towns of Lydda and Ramla in the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv corridor Traverse Cit during July 9- , 1948. Some 50 000 Palestinians were driven out (Michigan), of their homes in these towns by Israeli forces whose deputy commander was Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister of Israel from 1977 and 1992- On September 13 1974- 1995. Some two dozen massacres of Minister Vitzhak R Palestinians were perpetrated by pre-state Zionist militias and Liberation Organi Vasser Arafat sig Israeli forces, the most infamous of them on April 9- , 1948, at Principles on the the village ofDeir Yassin. heralding the beg peace process. T process is comple Israel has decide Yet after the war, it was Mapam s prescription for the conduct of and many outside Israeli forces-rather than the reality of expulsion-that became wondering what w answer lies in the official Israeli history, and eventually, came to define the Jewish of the Oslo proce Israeli collective memory of what happened in 1948. For decades root causes of the the state of Israel, and traditional Zionist historians, argued that conflict. IJ.II...$to!'Y~) the Palestinian Arabs fled on orders from Arab military commanders and governments intending to return behind the guns of victorious Arab armies which would "drive the Jews into the HOld. sea." Consequently, the Zionist authorities would admit little or AccolJnt!'1 no responsibility for the fate ofthe Palestinian refugees and their $~Je By Chris descendants. This was not due to lack of adequate information. Daily St Ample evidence from Zionist sources from the period of the 1948 Septemb war and immediately afterwards indicates that members of the military and political elite, secondary leaders and intellectuals With George W. B close to them knew very well what happened to the Palestinian insisting that the progress" in the Arabs in 1948 , to say nothing of rank- and-file soldiers and war on terror" in I Democrats and R kibbutz members who actually expelled Palestinians, expropriated Congress figure i their lands and destroyed their homes. But soon after the fighting, three. Some think train Washington Zionist and Israeli state officials began to consolidate an official but next week Co discourse that enabled most Israeli Jews to "forget" what they reconsider a mea once "knew that during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war a large FuJI Sto!'Y)) number of Palestinian Arabs were ethnically cleansed from the territories that became the state of Israel. , andill"o http://www.merip. org/mer/mer230/23 0- beinin.html 3/8/2004 Middle East Report 230:No More Tears: Benny Morris and the Road Back from Liberal Z... Page 3 of 14 Shooting and Crying By Chris Daily Star ( In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a group of Israeli "new historians" began to publish findings from research in previously classified archives that reminded Israelis of what they had As America s stan public continues t forgotten. The most celebrated, if not the most radical, of these Americans askju new historians" is Benny Morris. His signature work The Birth greatest democra improve its image of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947- 1949, is arguably the venture in public monthly called Hi single most significant revision of the previously prevailing American earnes Israeli historical consensus on the 1948 war. In addition to his answer precisely influential book, Morris found and explicated the unpublished EYlLStoryJ diaries of Yosef N ahmani, a leader of the Zionist institutions in the eastern Galilee, who offered a clear description of the expulsion of Arabs, the confiscation of their lands and his Israel' concerns about these issues during the 1948 war. Summarizing AbQ!Jt By Cath his analysis ofNahmani' s diaries, Morris notes that Nahmani' Duluth Ne regrets about the expulsions mark one of the first instances of the (Augus distinctive Israeli syndrome known as "shooting and crying. "(21 As President Bus Israeli and Palest The point of departure for The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee continues, so doe construction of th Problem is that, traditionally, two contending explanations sought separation wall in to account for the flight of the Palestinian refugees from their Israeli public view necessary protec homeland in 1948. The Palestinian and Arab version argued that civilians by Pales transfer" was always an element of Zionist thought and that the groups. But is this security? And wh war of 1948 provided the opportunity to implement the transfer on the US-backed plan. Hence, the Zionists expelled the Palestinian Arabs by toward resolution Palestinian state? conscious design. In contrast, the Zionist version blamed the 1"!!.IJ$tory~) orders of Arab leaders. Based on his archival research, Morris contends that neither the traditional Arab nor the Zionist version can be empirically substantiated, and "that war and not design Imp~ri~J Jewish or Arab, gave birth to the Palestinian refugee problem. 1Jl ~C!~h By Chris This formulation presents itself as a golden mean, with all the Daily Star (B moral and philosophical legitimacy that accrues to such a position in the Western cultural tradition. There is absolutely no epistemological warrant for the claim that "the truth" of any On a sweltering W on July 17 , a han matter lies midway between two opposing claims. But Morris berated the strea appeal to this apparently reasonable, if fallacious, notion has wonks entering th as the American contributed to positioning The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee (AEI) - famous w Problem as the standard work on the topic in Europe and North home of former P Richard Perle and America. His later works have solidified his reputation as the Speaker Newt Gi voice of reason-and, for some, an embodiment of hope for a conditioned comf strains of "Rule B more liberal Israel that can come to terms with its past. capacity crowd to summertime idyll assembled to hea This thinkers of the ne debate the propo reputation , and should be was Fyl $tory~) definitively shattered .,Jordan sTro by Morris By Toujan http://www.merip. org/mer/mer230/23 0- beinin.html 3/8/2004 Middle East Report 230:No More Tears: Benny Morris and the Road Back from Liberal Zoo. Page 4 of 14 interview Los Angeles in the Friday supplement When Washingto of Haaretz the potential for r democracy in the Israel' is one of the first intellectual" For the first time Jordanians went daily, a month to vote for most accounts th month smoothly.