Philadelphia — The study of history in our day has become another form of warfare. No conflict better exemplifies this observation 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 Jewish people’s ancient homeland. Arab writers and an international brigade of Jew-haters strive to depict Israel’s creation as a crime.
But the historical writing that has done the most damage to Israel’s image has not been the hatred-filled screeds coming out of the Arab world. It has been the work of Jews who have come to doubt the justice of Israel’s cause.
In the last 20 years, a group of Israeli historians, known as “revisionists,” has engendered bitter debate about Israel’s origins and policies. No one is as closely identified with this group as Benny Morris, a one-time journalist, author and currently a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University.
In books 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 on their own the territory that would become the Jewish state, and that the conduct of Israel’s soldiers and leaders was spotless. His 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 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.
Ben-Gurion’s error
But since the Palestinian Authority rejected Israel’s peace offer at the July 2000 Camp David summit and answered it with a terrorist war of attrition, Morris has begun to make statements that have lost him 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 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 said that all the bad deeds he is prepared to blame on Israelis do not amount to much when compared to the atrocities carried out elsewhere, and 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 said.
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.
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 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.”
As for the Oslo process, Morris is now as cynical about it as he is about the War of Independence: “Oslo was a deception. Arafat did not change for the worse. Arafat simply defrauded us,” he said. “He wants to send us back to Europe, to the sea we came from…. They can’t tolerate the existence of a Jewish state.”
Concerning the Palestinians themselves, whatever wrongs they may have suffered, Morris doesn’t sugarcoat their motives, likening their widespread support for terror and Israel’s destruction to the actions of a “serial killer.”
“Zionism was not a mistake. The desire to establish a Jewish state here was a legitimate one, a positive one. But given the character of Islam and given the character of the Arab nation, it was a mistake to think it would be possible to establish a tranquil state here,” Morris said.
Unfortunately, the trouble with being so clear-eyed about the past and present is that it can leave you with little hope for the future. Morris sees no chance for peace in our generation against a foe he doesn’t hesitate to describe as “barbaric.” Israel and the West have no choice, he said, but to fight back in a clash of civilizations.
Israelis have no alternative but “to be vigilant, to defend the country as far as is possible,” he said. “In the end, what will decide their readiness to accept us will be force alone.”
The same chilling conclusion applies to America’s struggle against Islamic terror.
If the study of history can teach us anything, it must be to be honest with ourselves. From the sound of it, ex-peacenik Morris has learned his lesson.
Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia.
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