On Ethnic Cleansing: Israeli Zionist Historian Benny Morris Speaks Out!! — An Interview
Christians Against Zionism - January 2005
Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist. People were mistaken ... when they thought that his historical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem was intended to undercut the Zionist enterprise. Nonsense, Morris says ... So they came to the mistaken conclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that the Zionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually being condemnatory, that when he describes the large-scale [ethnic] expulsion operations [against the Palestinians by Israel's founders] he is being denunciatory. They did not conceive that the great documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with those sins.
[Morris'] book describes in chilling detail the atrocities of
the Nakba (Arabic for "The Catastrophe/Cataclysm"). [AS COLD AS ANY NAZI.] Isn't
Morris ever frightened at the present-day political implications of his
historical study? Isn't he fearful that he has contributed to Israel becoming
almost a pariah state? After a few moments of evasion, Morris admits that he is.
Sometimes he really is frightened. Sometimes he asks himself what he has
wrought.
...He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in
Be'er Sheva. ...He doesn't think twice before firing off the sharpest, most
shocking statements, which are anything but politically correct. He describes
horrific war crimes offhandedly, paints apocalyptic visions with a smile on his
lips. He gives the observer the feeling that this agitated individual, who with
his own hands opened the Zionist Pandora's box, is still having difficulty
coping with what he found in it..
[Interesting reading in regard to the psychological, colonial, and
Jewish-supremacist mindset of Zionism, whereby it was the *Palestinian Arabs* --
resisting the imperialist seizure of their land in Palestine and their brutal
subordination by Zionist Jews immigrating from Europe -- were somehow morphed by
Zionist Jews and European/white-American racism into the equivalent of the
Nazis! -- when it was the Zionists who were acting more like the Nazis many (but
certainly not even all) of them had fled (especially immigrant Zionist Jews from
American suburbs in latter times).]
LET'S PEER INTO ZIONSM'S TWISTED BUT VERY REVEALING MIND. TAKE 'THE RED PILL' --
AND SEE..., YOU'RE IN FOR QUITE A RIDE!!...:
Rape, Massacre, Transfer
Ari Shavit: Benny Morris, in the month ahead the new version of your book on the
birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be published. Who will be
less pleased with the book - the Israelis or the Palestinians?
Morris: "The revised book is a double-edged sword. It is based on many documents
that were not available to me when I wrote the original book, most of them from
the Israel Defense Forces Archives. What the new material shows is that there
were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought. To my
surprise, there were also many cases of rape. In the months of April-May 1948,
units of the Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor of the
IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to
uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves.
"At the same time, it turns out that there was a series of orders issued by the
Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinian intermediate levels to remove
children, women and the elderly from the villages. So that on the one hand, the
book reinforces the accusation against the Zionist side, but on the other hand
it also proves that many of those who left the villages did so with the
encouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself."
?: According to your new findings, how many cases of Israeli rape were there in
1948?
"About a dozen. In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered her and her
father. In Jaffa, soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped one girl and tried to
rape several more. At Hunin, which is in the Galilee, two girls were raped and
then murdered. There were one or two cases of rape at Tantura, south of Haifa.
There was one case of rape at Qula, in the center of the country. At the village
of Abu Shusha, near Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four female
prisoners, one of whom was raped a number of times. And there were other cases.
Usually more than one soldier was involved. Usually there were one or two
Palestinian girls. In a large proportion of the cases the event ended with
murder. Because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these
events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, which
I found, are not the whole story. THEY ARE JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG." [Caps,
mine.]
?: According to your findings, how many acts of Israeli massacre were
perpetrated in 1948?
"Twenty-four. In some cases four or five people were executed, in others the
numbers were 70, 80, 100. There was also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two
old men are spotted walking in a field - they are shot. A woman is found in an
abandoned village - she is shot. There are cases such as the village of Dawayima
[in the Hebron region], in which a column entered the village with all guns
blazing and killed anything that moved.
"The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir Yassin (100-110), Lod (250),
Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70). There is no unequivocal proof
of a large-scale massacre at Tantura, but war crimes were perpetrated there. At
Jaffa there was a massacre about which nothing had been known until now. The
same at Arab al Muwassi, in the north. About half of the acts of massacre were
part of Operation Hiram [in the north, in October 1948]: at Safsaf, Saliha, Jish,
Eilaboun, Arab al Muwasi, Deir al Asad, Majdal Krum, Sasa. In Operation Hiram
there was a unusually high concentration of executions of people against a wall
or next to a well in an orderly fashion.
"That can't be chance. It's a pattern. Apparently, various officers who took
part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they received
permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the population to take to
the roads. The fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder.
Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. He covered up for the officers who did the
massacres."
?: What you are telling me here, as though by the way, is that in Operation
Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicit expulsion order. Is that right?
"Yes. One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31, 1948, the
commander of the Northern Front, Moshe Carmel, issued an order in writing to his
units to expedite the removal of the Arab population. Carmel took this action
immediately after a visit by Ben-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth.
There is no doubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion. Just as
the expulsion order for the city of Lod, which was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, was
issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited the headquarters of Operation Dani
[July 1948]."
?: Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for a deliberate
and systematic policy of mass expulsion?
"From April 1948, Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transfer. There is no
explicit order of his in writing, there is no orderly comprehensive policy, but
there is an atmosphere of [population] transfer. The transfer idea is in the
air. The entire leadership understands that this is the idea. The officer corps
understands what is required of them. Under Ben-Gurion, a consensus of transfer
is created."
?: Ben-Gurion was a "transferist"?
"Of course. Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no
Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be
no such state. It would not be able to exist."
?: I don't hear you condemning him.
"Ben-Gurion was right. 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."
When Ethnic Cleansing Is Justified
?: Benny Morris, for decades you have been researching the dark side of Zionism.
You are an expert on the atrocities of 1948. In the end, do you in effect
justify all this? Are you an advocate of the transfer of 1948?
"There is no justification for acts of rape. There is no justification for acts
of massacre. Those are war crimes. But 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. You have to dirty your hands."
?: We are talking about the killing of thousands of people, the destruction of
an entire society.
"A society that aims to kill you forces you to destroy it. When the choice is
between destroying or being destroyed, it's better to destroy."
?: There is something chilling about the quiet way in which you say that.
"If you expected me to burst into tears, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I will not
do that."
?: So when the commanders of Operation Dani are standing there and observing the
long and terrible column of the 50,000 people expelled from Lod walking
eastward, you stand there with them? You justify them?
"I definitely understand them. I understand their motives. I don't think they
felt any pangs of conscience, and in their place I wouldn't have felt pangs of
conscience. Without that act, they would not have won the war and the state
would not have come into being."
?: You do not condemn them morally?
"No."
?: They perpetrated ethnic cleansing.
"There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that
this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when
the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide - the annihilation of your
people - I prefer ethnic cleansing."
?: And that was the situation in 1948?
"That was the situation. That is what Zionism faced. 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.
It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and
cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our
convoys and our settlements were fired on."
?: The term `to cleanse' is terrible.
"I know it doesn't sound nice but that's the term they used at the time. I
adopted it from all the 1948 documents in which I am immersed."
?: What you are saying is hard to listen to and hard to digest. You sound
hard-hearted.
"I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which truly underwent a hard
tragedy. I feel sympathy for the refugees themselves. But if the desire to
establish a Jewish state here is legitimate, there was no other choice. It was
impossible to leave a large fifth column in the country. From the moment the
Yishuv [pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine] was attacked by the Palestinians
and afterward by the Arab states, there was no choice but to expel the
Palestinian population. To uproot it in the course of war.
"Remember another thing: the Arab people gained a large slice of the planet. Not
thanks to its skills or its great virtues, but because it conquered and murdered
and forced those it conquered to convert during many generations. But in the end
the Arabs have 22 states. The Jewish people did not have even one state. There
was no reason in the world why it should not have one state. Therefore, from my
point of view, the need to establish this state in this place overcame the
injustice that was done to the Palestinians by uprooting them."
?: And morally speaking, you have no problem with that deed?
"That is correct. 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 COMMITED IN THE COURSE OF
HISTORY." [Caps, mine. Do you suppose Hitler felt that way?]
?: And in our case it effectively justifies a population transfer.
"That's what emerges."
?: And you take that in stride? War crimes? Massacres? The burning fields and
the devastated villages of the Nakba?
"You have to put things in proportion. These are small war crimes. All told, if
we take all the massacres and all the executions of 1948, we come to about 800
who were killed. In comparison to the massacres that were perpetrated in Bosnia,
that's peanuts. In comparison to the massacres the Russians perpetrated against
the Germans at Stalingrad, that's chicken feed. When you take into account that
there was a bloody civil war here and that we lost an entire 1 percent of the
population, you find that we behaved very well."
The Next Transfer
?: You went through an interesting process. You went to research Ben-Gurion and
the Zionist establishment critically, but in the end you actually identify with
them. You are as tough in your words as they were in their deeds.
"You may be right. Because I investigated the conflict in depth, I was forced to
cope with the in-depth questions that those people coped with. I understood the
problematic character of the situation they faced and maybe I adopted part of
their universe of concepts. But I do not identify with Ben-Gurion. I think he
made a serious historical mistake in 1948. 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."
?: I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying that Ben-Gurion erred in expelling
too few Arabs?
"If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete
job. I know that this stuns the Arabs and the liberals and the politically
correct types. But my feeling is that this place would be quieter and know less
suffering if the matter had been resolved once and for all. If Ben-Gurion had
carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country - the whole Land of
Israel, as far as 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 stabilized the State of Israel for generations."
?: I find it hard to believe what I am hearing.
"If the end of the story turns out to be a gloomy one for the Jews, it will be
because Ben-Gurion did not complete the transfer in 1948. Because he left a
large and volatile demographic reserve in the West Bank and Gaza and within
Israel itself."
?: In his place, would you have expelled them all? All the Arabs in the country?
"But I am not a statesman. I do not put myself in his place. But as an
historian, I assert that a mistake was made here. Yes. The non-completion of the
transfer was a mistake."
?: And today? Do you advocate a transfer today?
"If you are asking me whether I support the transfer and expulsion of the Arabs
from the West Bank, Gaza and perhaps even from Galilee and the Triangle, I say
not at this moment. I am not willing to be a partner to that act. In the present
circumstances it is neither moral nor realistic. The world would not allow it,
the Arab world would not allow it, it would destroy the Jewish society from
within. But I am ready to tell you that in other circumstances, apocalyptic
ones, which are liable to be realized in five or ten years, I can see
expulsions. If we find ourselves with atomic weapons around us, or if there is a
general Arab attack on us and a situation of warfare on the front with Arabs in
the rear shooting at convoys on their way to the front, acts of expulsion will
be entirely reasonable. They may even be essential."
?: Including the expulsion of Israeli Arabs?
"The Israeli Arabs are a time bomb. Their slide into complete Palestinization
has made them an emissary of the enemy that is among us. They are a potential
fifth column. In both demographic and security terms they are liable to
undermine the state. So that if Israel again finds itself in a situation of
existential threat, as in 1948, it may be forced to act as it did then. If we
are attacked by Egypt (after an Islamist revolution in Cairo) and by Syria, and
chemical and biological missiles slam into our cities, and at the same time
Israeli Palestinians attack us from behind, I can see an expulsion situation. It
could happen. If the threat to Israel is existential, expulsion will be
justified."
Cultural Dementia
?: Besides being tough, you are also very gloomy. You weren't always like that,
were you?
"My turning point began after 2000. I wasn't a great optimist even before that.
True, I always voted Labor or Meretz or Sheli [a dovish party of the late
1970s], and in 1988 I refused to serve in the territories and was jailed for it,
but I always doubted the intentions of the Palestinians. The events of Camp
David and what followed in their wake turned the doubt into certainty. When the
Palestinians rejected the proposal of [prime minister Ehud] Barak in July 2000
and the Clinton proposal in December 2000, I understood that they are unwilling
to accept the two-state solution. They want it all. Lod and Acre and Jaffa."
?: If that's so, then the whole Oslo process was mistaken and there is a basic
flaw in the entire worldview of the Israeli peace movement.
"Oslo had to be tried. But today it has to be clear that from the Palestinian
point of view, Oslo was a deception. [Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat did not
change for the worse, Arafat simply defrauded us. He was never sincere in his
readiness for compromise and conciliation."
?: Do you really believe Arafat wants to throw us into the sea?
"He wants to send us back to Europe, to the sea we came from. He truly sees us
as a Crusader state and he thinks about the Crusader precedent and wishes us a
Crusader end. I'm certain that Israeli intelligence has unequivocal information
proving that in internal conversations Arafat talks seriously about the phased
plan [which would eliminate Israel in stages]. But the problem is not just
Arafat. The entire Palestinian national elite is prone to see us as Crusaders
and is driven by the phased plan. That's why the Palestinians are not honestly
ready to forgo the right of return. They are preserving it as an instrument with
which they will destroy the Jewish state when the time comes. They can't
tolerate the existence of a Jewish state - not in 80 percent of the country and
not in 30 percent. From their point of view, the Palestinian state must cover
the whole Land of Israel."
?: If so, the two-state solution is not viable; even if a peace treaty is
signed, it will soon collapse.
"Ideologically, I support the two-state solution. It's the only alternative to
the expulsion of the Jews or the expulsion of the Palestinians or total
destruction. But in practice, in this generation, a settlement of that kind will
not hold water. At least 30 to 40 percent of the Palestinian public and at least
30 to 40 percent of the heart of every Palestinian will not accept it. After a
short break, terrorism will erupt again and the war will resume."
?: Your prognosis doesn't leave much room for hope, does it?
"It's hard for me, too. There is not going to be peace in the present
generation. There will not be a solution. We are doomed to live by the sword.
I'm already fairly old, but for my children that is especially bleak. I don't
know if they will want to go on living in a place where there is no hope. Even
if Israel is not destroyed, we won't see a good, normal life here in the decades
ahead."
?: Aren't your harsh words an over-reaction to three hard years of terrorism?
"The bombing of the buses and restaurants really shook me. They made me
understand the depth of the hatred for us. They made me understand that the
Palestinian, Arab and Muslim hostility toward 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."
?: Yet we, too, bear responsibility for the violence and the hatred: the
occupation, the roadblocks, the closures, maybe even the Nakba itself.
"You don't have to tell me that. I have researched Palestinian history. I
understand the reasons for the hatred very well. The Palestinians are
retaliating now not only for yesterday's closure but for the Nakba as well. But
that is not a sufficient explanation. The peoples of Africa were oppressed by
the European powers no less than the Palestinians were oppressed by us, but
nevertheless I don't see African terrorism in London, Paris or Brussels. The
Germans killed far more of us than we killed the Palestinians, but we aren't
blowing up buses in Munich and Nuremberg. So there is something else here,
something deeper, that has to do with Islam and Arab culture."
?: Are you trying to argue that Palestinian terrorism derives from some sort of
deep cultural problem?
"There is a deep problem in Islam. 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. Therefore, the
people we are fighting and the society that sends them have no moral
inhibitions. If it obtains chemical or biological or atomic weapons, it will use
them. If it is able, it will also commit genocide."
?: I want to insist on my point: A large part of the responsibility for the
hatred of the Palestinians rests with us. After all, you yourself showed us that
the Palestinians experienced a historical catastrophe.
"True. But when one has to deal with a serial killer, it's not so important to
discover why he became a serial killer. What's important is to imprison the
murderer or to execute him."
?: Explain the image: Who is the serial killer in the analogy?
"The barbarians who want to take our lives. 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."
?: What does that mean? What should we do tomorrow morning?
"We have to try to heal the Palestinians. Maybe over the years the establishment
of a Palestinian state will help in the healing process. But in the meantime,
until the medicine is found, they have to be contained so that they will not
succeed in murdering us."
?: To fence them in? To place them under closure?
"Something like a cage has to be built for them. I know that sounds terrible. It
is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has
to be locked up in one way or another."
War of Barbarians
?: Benny Morris, have you joined the right wing?
"No, no. I still think of myself as left-wing. I still support in principle two
states for two peoples."
?: But you don't believe that this solution will last. You don't believe in
peace.
"In my opinion, we will not have peace, no."
?: Then what is your solution?
"In this generation there is apparently no solution. To be vigilant, to defend
the country as far as is possible."
?: The iron wall approach?
"Yes. An iron wall is a good image. An iron wall is the most reasonable policy
for the coming generation. My colleague Avi Shlein described this well: What
Jabotinsky proposed is what Ben-Gurion adopted. In the 1950s, there was a
dispute between Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett. Ben-Gurion argued that the Arabs
understand only force and that ultimate force is the one thing that will
persuade them to accept our presence here. He was right. That's not to say that
we don't need diplomacy. Both toward the West and for our own conscience, it's
important that we strive for a political solution. But in the end, what will
decide their readiness to accept us will be force alone. Only the recognition
that they are not capable of defeating us."
?: For a left-winger, you sound very much like a right-winger, wouldn't you say?
"I'm trying to be realistic. I know it doesn't always sound politically correct,
but I think that political correctness poisons history in any case. It impedes
our ability to see the truth. And I also identify with Albert Camus. He was
considered a left-winger and a person of high morals, but when he referred to
the Algerian problem he placed his mother ahead of morality. Preserving my
people is more important than universal moral concepts."
?: Are you a neo-conservative? Do you read the current historical reality in the
terms of Samuel Huntington?
"I think there is a clash between civilizations here [as Huntington argues]. I
think the West today resembles the Roman Empire of the fourth, fifth and sixth
centuries: The barbarians are attacking it and they may also destroy it."
?: The Muslims are barbarians, then?
"I think the values I mentioned earlier are values of barbarians - the attitude
toward democracy, freedom, openness; the attitude toward human life. In that
sense they are barbarians. The Arab world as it is today is barbarian."
?: And in your view these new barbarians are truly threatening the Rome of our
time?
"Yes. The West is stronger but it's not clear whether it knows how to repulse
this wave of hatred. The phenomenon of the mass Muslim penetration into the West
and their settlement there is creating a dangerous internal threat. A similar
process took place in Rome. They let the barbarians in and they toppled the
empire from within."
?: Is it really all that dramatic? Is the West truly in danger?
"Yes. I think that the war between the civilizations is the main characteristic
of the 21st century. I think President Bush is wrong when he denies the very
existence of that war. It's not only a matter of bin Laden. This is a struggle
against a whole world that espouses different values. And we are on the front
line. Exactly like the Crusaders, we are the vulnerable branch of Europe in this
place."
?: The situation as you describe it is extremely harsh. You are not entirely
convinced that we can survive here, are you?
"The possibility of annihilation exists."
?: Would you describe yourself as an apocalyptic person?
"The whole Zionist project is apocalyptic. It exists within hostile surroundings
and in a certain sense its existence is unreasonable. It wasn't reasonable for
it to succeed in 1881 and it wasn't reasonable for it to succeed in 1948 and
it's not reasonable that it will succeed now. Nevertheless, it has come this
far. In a certain way it is miraculous. I live the events of 1948, and 1948
projects itself on what could happen here. Yes, I think of Armageddon. It's
possible. Within the next 20 years there could be an atomic war here."
?: If Zionism is so dangerous for the Jews and if Zionism makes the Arabs so
wretched, maybe it's a mistake?
"No, 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 that it would be
possible to establish a tranquil state here that lives in harmony with its
surroundings."
?: Which leaves us, nevertheless, with two possibilities: either a cruel, tragic
Zionism, or the forgoing of Zionism.
"Yes. That's so. You have pared it down, but that's correct."
?: Would you agree that this historical reality is intolerable, that there is
something inhuman about it?
"Yes. But that's so for the Jewish people, not the Palestinians. A people that
suffered for 2,000 years, that went through the Holocaust, arrives at its
patrimony but is thrust into a renewed round of bloodshed, that is perhaps the
road to annihilation. In terms of cosmic justice, that's terrible. It's far more
shocking than what happened in 1948 to a small part of the Arab nation that was
then in Palestine."
?: So what you are telling me is that you live the Palestinian Nakba of the past
less than you live the possible Jewish Nakba of the future?
"Yes. Destruction could be the end of this process. It could be the end of the
Zionist experiment. And that's what really depresses and scares me."
?: The title of the book you are now publishing in Hebrew is "Victims." In the
end, then, your argument is that of the two victims of this conflict, we are the
bigger one.
"Yes. Exactly. We are the greater victims in the course of history and we are
also the greater potential victim. EVEN THOUGH WE *ARE* OPPRESSING THE
PALESTINIANS, we are the weaker side here. We are a small minority in a large
sea of hostile Arabs who want to eliminate us. So it's possible than when their
desire is realized, everyone will understand what I am saying to you now.
Everyone will understand we are the true victims. But by then it will be too
late."
[Furthermore, the extent and scope of this deliberate expulsion, and the
violence associated with it, remain the source of much consternation, see, for
example, Nur Masalha's recent book about the Palestinian refugees, "The Politics
of Denial", wherein he reads the historical record even more harshly than
Morris, especially in regard to the extent that the expulsion can be laid in any
way at the feet of the Palestinians, the way many Zionists still claim. When the
Nazis did this, we called it "blaming the victim"; now Zionist Jews do this, in
turn, against the Palestinians. Now, Zionist Jews call that "God's will."]