Benny Morris, Again

Today is Nakba Day. So I thought I'd reflect on the latest emission by Israeli 'historian' Benny Morris, author of the 1988 book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, written at a time when he could have passed muster as an historian, albeit relying exclusively on Israeli archival material for his tome. Whatever Morris' worth as a historian back then, he has unfortunately undergone a precipitous decline to the point where, today, he is little more than a peddler of pro-Zionist hasbara. Indeed, one could say that the scholarly worth of an historian of the Palestine problem is in inverse proportion to his Zionism, and that there is no better example of the applicability of this axiom than Benny Morris.

What follows is his attack in the current issue of The Atlantic on the views of Palestinian-American legislator, Rashida Tlaib. I have reproduced here only the historical component of Morris' hatchet job on Tlaib, and interpolated my own comments in his text (in italics in square brackets), as well as the wonderfully acid, tweeted commentary of Asad Abukhalil (aka The Angry Arab) (in bold in square brackets) on same. Morris' distortions of the Palestinian past are enough to discredit what he has to say on the more recent history of the Palestine problem:

"On Friday, Representative Rashida Tlaib was attacked by President Donald Trump for a 'horrible and highly insensitive statement on the Holocaust' and for having 'tremendous hatred of... the Jewish people.' Trump's off-base attack distracted from the actual problems with Tlaib's account of the Arab-Israeli conflict, in which she deployed deliberately imprecise language, misleading her listeners about the early history of the conflict in Palestine and misrepresenting its present and future.

"Tlaib told the hosts of the Yahoo News podcast Skullduggery that when she remembers the Holocaust, it has a 'calming' effect on her to think that it was my ancestors, Palestinians, who lost their land, and some their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity; their existence in some ways had been wiped out... all of it in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post the Holocaust, post the tragedy and terrific persecution of Jews across the world [sic] at that time.' She was, she said, 'humbled by the fact that it was [my Palestinian] ancestors that had to suffer for that to happen.'

"But the historical reality was quite different from what Tlaib described: The Palestinians indirectly, and in some ways directly, aided in the destruction of European Jewry.

"After Hitler's accession to power in Germany in 1933, German and then European Jews sought escape and safe havens. But all the Western countries, including the United States and Britain and its dominions, closed their doors to significant Jewish immigration. [In large part because the Zionist movement wanted them only in Palestine.] Palestine emerged as the only potential safe haven. In 1932, the British allowed 9,500 Jews to immigrate to Palestine. In 1933, the number shot up to 30,000, and in 1935, it peaked at 62,000.

"But from 1933 onward, Palestine's Arabs - led by the cleric Muhammad Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem - mounted a strident campaign to pressure the British, who governed Palestine, to bar all Jews from entering the country. [You are telling me that the Palestinians were opposed to the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Jews who wanted to create a Jewish state on Palestinian lands and who wanted to displace the natives? And they were opposed to that? That is certainly anti-Semitic. If the Palestinians wanted to prove they were not anti-Semitic they should have given up their homeland, and told the Jewish immigrants to take it over, and they should even have welcomed the bullets and bombs directed against them. Anything less would indeed be anti-Semitic. Just think of it this way, if millions of Muslims wanted to come to America against the wishes of the American population and create a Muslim state over all the US, and if the Americans were to oppose their plan, would that not be outright anti-Islam bigotry? Think about it. Benny Morris may have a point here. Not only that, as Morris tells us, those impudent Palestinians revolted against those who occupied their homeland.] To press home their demand, in 1936 they launched an anti-British and anti-Zionist rebellion that lasted three years. [How dare they!] Apart from throwing out the British, the rebellion's aim was to coerce London into halting all Jewish entry into Palestine.

"Moreover, the anti-Jewish violence [Well, the Zionists were indeed Jewish and they wanted to create a state atop Palestine. So Palestinians should have fought Buddhists and Hindus just to prove they were not anti-Semitic?], which claimed the lives of hundreds of Jews and wounded many more, itself served to deter would-be emigrants from seeking to move to Palestine. [And Palestinians should have been mindful of this and abandoned their opposition to mass immigration? Seriously?] British entry certificates for Jews to Palestine declined to 30,000 in 1936, 10,000 in 1937, and 15,000 in 1938. Those who couldn't get in were left stranded in Germany, Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere. Almost all died in the Holocaust, which the Germans unleashed in 1941.

"But the Palestinians' contribution to the Holocaust was also more direct. Husseini, having fled Palestine during the revolt, helped pro-Nazi [but only because they were against the British occupation of their homeland] generals launch an anti-British rebellion in Iraq in 1941 (which itself engendered a large-scale pogrom against Baghdad's Jews, the Farhoud). [As Orit Bashkin, a genuine historian, cautions in her nuanced account of the Farhud ('New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq' (2012)) "a distinction should be made between an analysis of the Farhud and the Farhudization of Jewish Iraqi history - viewing the Farhud as typifying the overall history of the relationship between Jews and greater Iraqi society." As a Zionist, of course, Morris indulges simplistically in the latter. As Bashkin points out: "The Jewish community strived for integration in Iraq before and after the Farhud. In fact, the attachment of the community to Iraq was so tenacious that even after such a horrible event, most Jews continued to believe that Iraq was their homeland. The vision was shattered only by the realities created following the 1948 war in Palestine." (pp 138-39) That Zionism was the undoing of Iraq's Jews (among other Jewish communities in the Arab world) is made abundantly clear by Bashkin: "Equating Judaism and Zionism imperiled Jewish communities in Arab countries. Rather than thinking about the ways in which Arab regimes served colonialism, Arabs began worrying about whether the Jews living among them were serving the interests of Zionism. In this sense British colonialism created a Jewish problem in countries where there had not been one before. There were no conflicts between Arabs and Jews in countries where there had not been one before. There were no conflicts between Arabs and Jews in Ottoman Palestine prior to the arrival of British colonialism and Zionism." (p 160)]

"When that rebellion failed, he fled to Berlin, where he was given a villa and a generous monthly salary, and lived in comfort until the end of the world war. During the war, he helped recruit Muslims from the Balkans for the German army and the SS, and in radio broadcasts exhorted Middle Eastern and North African Arabs to launch jihad against the British and 'kill the Jews.' (The texts of Husseini's broadcasts appear in the historian Jeffrey Herf's book The Jewish Enemy.) [Herf btw, although a Zionist historian, is at pains in a 2014 essay, 'Haj Amin, al-Husseini, the Nazis & the Holocaust', to point out that Husseini "did not have an impact on Hitler's decision to murder the Jews of Europe." He also makes no distinction in his essay between Judaism, the faith and Zionism, the political ideology, yet hypocritically critiques Husseini, a Muslim cleric, for failing to make the same distinction. Incredibly, Herf also writes thus of the Nakba: "While acknowledging pressure from other groups that made war in 1948 seem inevitable, the war of 1948 and the Arab-Israeli conflict may not have taken place without al-Husseini... " IOW, Ben-Gurion's Zionists would have taken their cue from a Jewish state-accepting/collaborating Husseini, and Zionists and Palestinians would have lived happily ever after together in the same land. Some fairy tale that!]

"Subsequently, Hussein fled Germany and, with the Allies reluctant to trigger Arab anger by trying him for collaboration [seeing the British were responsible for driving Husseini into Hitler's arms in the first place], settled down in Cairo. In 1947, he rejected the UN partition plan to settle the Palestine conflict and helped launch the first Palestinian and pan-Arab war against the Zionist enterprise. He spent his last years in Lebanon, embittered by the loss of Palestine and the pan-Arab failure to effectively support the Palestinians, and published a series of anti-Semitic articles before his death in 1974.

"The most prominent Palestinian American intellectual, Edward Said, toward the end of his life enjoined the Palestinians to study the Holocaust and empathize with what had happened to the Jews, if only to properly understand the deep-seated fears and aspirations of the Israelis. It would seem that Tlaib has forsworn such an effort. [I have no idea here just what Morris is referring to here when he paraphrases Edward Said - propagandists generally don't do footnotes - but let me conclude this post with the following eminently commonsense reflection of Said's on the Holocaust and the fate of the Palestinians, written in 2002 during Israel's cruel West Bank rampage, Operation Defensive Shield: "Every human calamity is different, so there is no point in trying to look for equivalence between one and the other. But it is certainly true that one universal truth about the Holocaust is not only that it should never again happen to Jews, but that as a cruel and collective punishment, it should not happen to any people at all. But if there is no point in looking for equivalence, there is a value in seeing analogies and perhaps hidden similarities, even as we preserve a sense of proportion. Quite apart from his actual history of mistakes, Yasir Arafat is now being made to feel like a hunted Jew by the state of the Jews. There is no gainsaying the fact that the greatest irony of his siege by the Israeli army in his ruined Ramallah compound is that his ordeal has been planned and carried out by a psychopathic leader (Ariel Sharon) who claims to represent the Jewish people. I do not want to press the analogy too far, but it is true to say that Palestinians under Israeli occupation today are as powerless as Jews were in the 1940s. Israel's army, airforce, and navy, heavily subsidized by the United States, have been wreaking havoc on the totally defenseless civilian population of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. For the past half century the Palestinians have been a dispossessed people, millions of them refugees, most of the rest under a 35-year-old military occupation, at the mercy of armed settlers who systematically have been stealing their land and an army that has killed them by the thousands. Thousands more have been imprisoned, thousands have lost their livelihoods, made refugees for the second or third time, all of them without civil or human rights." (From the essay Low point of powerlessness in Said's 2004 book From Oslo to Iraq and the Roadmap,  pp 206-07)]