'Cage them'
An Israeli historian who once defended the Palestinians now says they deserve what they got, and worse. Emad Gad assesses the transformation
The Israeli media witnessed sharp controversies this week on various domestic and foreign issues. The debate continued to rage around the economy, the decline in the rate of Jewish immigration to Israel, the continued construction of the separation wall and its changing course and the impending proceedings at The Hague where the International Court of Justice will examine the issue of the barrier based on a request by the UN General Assembly. In addition, a possible investigation of the Israeli prime minister came to light, as previous accusations of corruption and receiving illegal funds from businessmen gained new life. The accusations are part of the growing file on Ariel Sharon and his sons but the issue took on new dimensions last week after it threatened Sharon's political future, especially given the ambitions many have to succeed him, most importantly former prime minister and current Minister of Finance Binyamin Netanyahu.
The issues though were eclipsed by the ideological shift of the founder of post-Zionism and one of Israel's most prominent revisionist historians, Benny Morris. Morris' seeming turnaround came to light in an interview with him published by Ha'aretz on 9 January. After publishing The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, Morris became one of the most prominent theorists of post-Zionism; indeed, many consider him its founder. In the book, he shocked the Israeli public by proving that Jewish organisations and the incipient state committed war crimes and ethnic cleansing during the 1948 war. He also exposed the responsibility borne by Israel's historical leadership for these crimes, explicitly mentioning David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Rabin and others. Morris documented cases of rape and the murder of civilians and said he had found documents proving these crimes were committed by the Israeli military and political leadership.
The Ha'aretz interview with Morris, however, revealed fundamental changes in his politics and his world view. Now, he explicitly states that he understands why Israel had to undertake ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, adding that the problem is that Ben-Gurion did not complete the job of cleansing "the whole land of Israel" of Arabs and Palestinians.
"Ben-Gurion was right," he said. "If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here."
Morris states that the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 was not actually a war crime. "In certain conditions, 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."
Morris goes on to state that "a Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore, it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population." He adds: "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."
It is clear from the interview that Morris' transformation is monumental, to the degree that his interviewer, Ari Shavit, is shocked, particularly when he hears Morris saying that Ben-Gurion's fundamental mistake was that he did not complete the job of expulsion and ethnic cleansing. Morris uses the term "ethnic cleansing" with seemingly no moral pangs of conscious.
"I think [Ben-Gurion] made a serious historical mistake in 1948," Morris says. "Even though he understood the demographic issue and the need to establish a Jewish state without a large Arab minority, he got cold feet during the war. In the end, he faltered." He later explains: "But my feeling is that this place would be quieter and know less suffering if the matter had been resolved once and for all [and] if Ben-Gurion had carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country -- the whole land of Israel, as far 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 stabilised the state of Israel for generations."
Benny Morris still defines himself as a leftist, which raises questions about how to differentiate between the Israeli left and right, particularly when it comes to peace with the Arabs. Morris says he belongs to the heart of the Israeli left, as expressed by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, saying that his transformation came about after the failure of the Camp David II Summit and Yasser Arafat's rejection of Barak's "unprecedented concessions". Morris also sees the Intifada and acts of what he called Palestinian violence as a systematic policy aimed at destroying Israel.
"The bombing of the buses and restaurants really shook me," he says. "They made me understand the depth of the hatred for us. They made me understand that Palestinian, Arab and Muslim hostility towards Jewish existence here is taking us to the brink of destruction. I don't see the suicide bombings as isolated acts. They express the deep will of the Palestinian people. That is what the majority of the Palestinians want. They want what happened to the bus to happen to all of us."
The interview and the ensuing controversy in the Israeli media show that Morris has entered the camp of those who believe in the "clash of civilisations". Indeed, Morris says that that problem lies with Arabism and Islam and their anti-Western values. "There is a deep problem in Islam," he says. "It's a world whose values are different, a world in which human life doesn't have the same value as it does in the West, in which freedom, democracy, openness and creativity are alien. A world that makes those who are not part of the camp of Islam fair game. Revenge is also important here. Revenge plays a central part in the Arab tribal culture."
In the interview, Morris uses non-human attributes to define the Palestinian people, dehumanising them completely. "The barbarians who want to take our lives," he says, and "the people the Palestinian society sends to carry out the terrorist attacks, and in some way the Palestinian society itself as well. 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."
The entire Benny Morris interview is available in Arabic, French and English on the Web site of Arabs Against Discrimination (www.aad-online.org).
