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)]

Bob Carr's 'Run for Your Life' 1

In my post, Kevin Rudd's 'The PM Years' (3/1/19), I mentioned several recent Australian memoirs that shed light on the tactics used by the Israel lobby to keep our politicians and journalists in line. One of these, Run for Your Life (2018), by former Labor Party foreign minister Bob Carr, has its own chapter on the subject - Me and 'The Lobby'.

These days, Carr is known for his efforts to push Labor in a pro-Palestinian state direction. This position, however, developed relatively late in his political career.

A mindset of blind support for Israel seems to have characterised most of the Labor Party since the creation of Israel in 1948, through to at least the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada in 2000. (It should be noted that NSW state MP George Petersen (1921-2000), and Bill Hartley (1930-2006), state secretary of the Victorian ALP from 1965 to 1970, were honourable exceptions to this tendency.) In fact, during this period, dogmatic support for Israel could almost be said to have become one of Labor's much-trumpeted 'values'.

I will examine the process of Carr's move from received to actual wisdom on the subject of Palestine/Israel, and the Israel lobby's response to same, in follow up posts. For now, here are excerpts from Carr's account of his early days, shilling for Israel:

"I had been a long-term supporter of Israel. In 1977, as a young trade union official, I had rented a room in the Trades Hall, bought some cask wine and invited Bob Hawke to come along and launch Labor Friends of Israel. I had remained its token president ever since and was always on hand to greet delegations and troop along to the [Israel] Independence Day celebrations... In 1983 I had visited Israel with a delegation of NSW Labor people... and had found it congenial enough, if not a revelation, admirable for its strong labour institutions. We met no Palestinians and were not driven around the occupied West Bank. At that time no Israeli historians had explored what had really happened in 1948. That would occur only when Benny Morris and others uncovered the story of massacres and expulsions that had forced the Arab population to flee. We just accepted the prevailing wisdom. It had been 'a land without a people for a people without a land': this was the Exodus narrative." (pp 174-5)

If Begin and Sharon's bloody invasion of Lebanon in 1982 registered with Carr, he doesn't mention it.

"I and my Labor crowd were in the Zionist camp. I remember joking with John Wheeldon, a former Labor senator and a minister in the Whitlam government, about our special closeness to Israel - with its craggy old Labour Party in permanent power, its collectivised agriculture, kibbutzniks who were Holocaust survivors... I entertained the notion that in retirement I might sign up as a volunteer to talk about the Holocaust to counter Holocaust denial. It seemed to me self-evident that the Jews were in fact an exceptional people who - and I said this in many speeches at their community events - had made a contribution to civilisation well above their numbers. I didn't dream that in feeding this self-image I might be encouraging a strand of thinking that, among other things, had Jews enjoying a view of themselves as the 'Chosen People' and therefore entitled to uncontestable rights to the land God gave them. (ibid)

As an example of collective delusion, the ALP's historical love affair with Israel is reminiscent of many Western leftists' unquestioning support for Stalinist Russia. To be sure, at the time, the lobby will have lapped up the kind of adulation of Israel expressed by Carr and others in the party - to the point of taking Labor's support for its cause for granted. But, as the old adage goes, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. My next post will look at Carr's gradual awakening to the reality of Palestine/Israel.

To be continued...

Bob Carr Responds to Norrington:

"For the record, your feature article (Carr alarms pro-Israelis, 6/7) implies extreme language from me out of my recent speech making the case for recognition of Palestine and an end to the occupation.

"In my speech I was doing no more than advocating what every former head of Shin Bet and Mossad has advocated, although in more pungent language than mine. Paragraph 4 of the article has this dastardly Carr accusing Israel Israel of implementing a 'looting bill' and condoning 'war crimes'. Let's make it clear: this was Carr quoting Labor leader Isaac Herzog and Likud Knesset member Benny Begin. They were not Carr formulations. Two other Israeli prime ministers have used the word 'apartheid' - Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert. The assassinated Yitzhak Rabin is reported to have used the same language.

"'Massacres' in 1948 was a conclusion of Benny Morris, an Israeli historian, who detailed this from Israeli army archives. As I said in an op-ed published in The Australian on November 8, 2014, Morris's revelations were a tribute to openness in Israeli society. And I began my speech by paying tribute to Jews who opposed the occupation - a number in attendance at the meeting - and said they were the best allies of the cause for Palestinian recognition. It would have been nice if that had been included." (Letter to The Australian, 7/7/17)

The irony here is that "Benny Morris' revelations," far from being "a tribute to openness in Israeli society," as Carr says, reveal only the extreme pressure brought to bear on any academic who departs from the Zionist narrative. Rather than stand and defend his revelations, let alone draw universal moral conclusions from them, Benny Morris long ago effectively reverted to the role of a shill for Israel. (My May 2008 posts on the subject make for harrowing reading, Bob. Just click on the Benny Morris label below.)

In today's Australian, there's more from Norrington on how Carr has been instrumental in "rolling" the NSW ALP's foreign affairs committee [dominated by Mike Kelly MP], which had recently assured Bill Shorten that the current "soft language" of its Palestine/Israel policy - "committing Labor in government only to 'discussing' recognition [of Palestine] with like-minded nations if there was no progress in peace talks," would be retained at the upcoming NSW Labor Conference. This Carr has done by coming up with an alternative policy, resolution 23 on the party's agenda, reportedly agreed to by shadow foreign minister Penny Wong, Jason Clare MP, and state secretary Karla Murnain, which the foreign affairs committee has to accept. "Carr's supporters," says Norrington, "wanted an even stronger resolution, but accept the revised Murnain wording," which they are "confident the federal conference will adopt next year." (How Carr turned ALP from Israel to Palestine)

Oh, and an op-ed by ALP political has-been-turned-defender-of-Israel, Peter Baldwin, in which, despite Zionism's age-old stranglehold over the ALP, he contends that "the Labor Party risks becoming a vehicle for sectional interests."

Age Shall Not Weary Him

Nice to see that former foreign minister Bob Carr's advocacy on behalf of occupied Palestinians now includes a reference to the Nakba. Carr's remarks came in the context of a policy forum on Palestine hosted by Anthony Albanese and Tony Burke on 27/6/17:

"[Carr] says Palestinians had stories to tell that had been 'blotted out' until Israeli historian Danny [sic: Benny] Morris checked defence archives and found Palestinians were expelled when Israel was set up as a Jewish state in 1948. 'There were massacres,' Mr Carr says in his speech. 'And that feeds into the stories you're familiar with; of Palestinians having to flee their houses, leave their houses behind, and flee for the borders.' He says the people of Gaza are refugees with links not to that area but with the homes, real or imagined, inside Israel's borders of 1948. Mr Carr berates Israel's continued occupation of territories as a 'cruel' and 'hateful thing' that forces more suffering on Palestinian people." (Carr attacks Israel's 'foul' occupation, Brad Norington, The Australian,  5/7/17)

Bob Carr is yet another example of the phenomenon of the ex-politician who uses his retirement to inform himself and weigh in constructively on important issues such as Palestine/Israel. Malcolm Fraser was another such.

Lifting the Lid on the Zionist Daleks of 1948

Let us recall Salman Abu Sitta's words to Uri Avnery about the Palestinian Nakba of 1948:

"Some would say of them [Holocaust survivors] that, if they were brave and not cowards, they would have fought the Nazis who pulled them out of their homes and killed them, not attack, at battalion-strength, a small village in faraway Palestine... and then butcher and expel its people. If they were brave and had a conscience, they would not call ethnic cleansing a 'war' of anything, let alone 'independence'." (See my 16/5/17 post You Can Run, But You Can't Hide 3)

Of course, nothing about this genocidal war against the Palestinian people ever makes its way into the Australian msm, even though Palestinians, both in exile and under occupation, mark it annually. It goes without saying that Nakba rallies in Melbourne and Sydney this year were scrupulously ignored by the msm.

Most curiously, however, the Sydney Morning Herald just happened to feature the year 1948 on its Timelines/Obituary page -  and, lo and behold, one of the three selections turned out to be, you guessed it, as follows:

"The Birth of Israel: The birth of the Jewish State of Israel had been proclaimed in a 'solemn assembly' of the Jewish National Council in Tel Aviv. 'The State would be open to all Jewish immigrants. It would develop the country for all inhabitants and would operate on the basis of precepts of liberty, justice and peace. it would uphold full social and political equality without distinction... and safeguard religious places of all religions." (1948: In the Herald, Brian Yatman, 16/5/17, p 31)

Perhaps Mr Yatman could explain the who, the what and the reason why.

Quite coincidentally, The Weekend Australian of 13-14 May referenced one of the Holocaust survivors alluded to by Abu Sitta above, although the context had nothing whatever to do with the Nakba. It appeared in an opinion piece on the anti-Semitism of the 19th century German composer Richard Wagner, written by the CEO of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, Vic Alhadaff, and read as follows:

"About to perform an encore in 1981, Zubin Mehta invited those who wish to do so to leave the hall and conducted an extract from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. Holocaust survivor Ben-Zion Leitner, who had fought in Israel's wars, strode to the front, exposed his battle scars and shouted 'Play Wagner over my body!" (Wagner's chorus of racial hatred)

And thereby hangs our tale, because, in the person of Mr Leitner, we have an example of the kind of individual (apart, of course, from Uri Avnery himself) that Abu Sitta had in mind when he penned his words.

To begin with, was Leitner a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp? Apparently not. His obituary at the Israeli Arutz Sheva website tells us that he was "a native of Odessa [who] fought with the partisans against Germany in World War II." (25/3/12)

As to to his military exploits in 1948 Palestine, Wikipedia informs us that he received Israel's "highest military decoration, the Hero of Israel citation for heroism during the War of Independence," specifically for leading "an assault that resulted in the blowing up of a bunker at a police position in [the Palestinian village of] Iraq Suweidan which resulted in half of his face becoming paralyzed."

At last, with the mention of the now obliterated Palestinian village of Iraq Suweidan (located in the Gaza district of southern Palestine), we draw closer to Leitner (and Avnery's) dark side, the substance of Abu Sitta's paragraph above, and a matter Alhadeff, as we have seen, nimbly glosses over.

The strategically important, British-built bunker/police station referred to had been heroically held by Egyptian troops against increasingly fierce Zionist attacks until their eventual surrender following the most sustained Zionist artillery barrage of the 1948 war. As for the village of Iraq Suweidan, which is estimated to have had a population of 766 at the time, we know almost nothing about the fate of its inhabitants. Obviously Ben-Zion Leitner's "battle scars" are more photogenic.

In his list of 6 causes for the "abandonment" of Palestinian villages in 1948, Israeli historian Benny Morris, in his 2004 book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, places Iraq Suweidan in category M - 'Military assault on settlement'.

To appreciate what this meant for the ethnically-cleansed villagers of Iraq Suweidan (and other Palestinian villagers in the area and throughout Palestine in 1948), and to ascertain more precisely what our "Hero of Israel" and his comrades got up to at the time, consider this passage from Morris' book:

"Giv'ati [Brigade] OC Shimon Avidan clearly intended to precipitate the flight of the Arab population of the area, bounded by Qazaza, Jilya, Idnibba and Mughallis in the east, Masmiya al Kabira and Qastina in the west, and Hatta and Beit 'Affa in the south. A preparatory order for the conquest of Masmiya al Kabira, Masmiya al Saghira, al-Tina, Qastina and Tal al Turmus was produced by Giv'ati's 51st Battalion during the First Truce, on 29 June. It spoke of the 'liquidation' (hisul) of the two Masmiya villages and conquering and 'cleansing' (bi'ur) the rest. On 5 July the brigade HQ discussed and outlined its plans for the 'Ten Days' [9-18 July] and two days later Avidan issued operational instructions. The order was to expedite 'the liquidation (hisul) of Arab villages in this area'. The 51st Battalion was ordered to take the large village of Tel as Safi and 'to destroy the enemy's fighting force and... to destroy, to kill and to expel (lehashmid, laharog u'legaresh) refugees encamped in the area, in order to prevent enemy infiltration from the east to this important position'. The nature of the written order and, presumably, the accompanying oral explanations, probably left little doubt in the battalion OC's minds that Avidan wanted the area cleared of inhabitants.

"Operation An-Far was unleashed on the night of 8-9 July, hours after the Egyptians broke the First Truce.  The area covered by Avidan's order was overrun during 8-11 July, with most of the population fleeing before the IDF columns reached each village. Tel as Safi was captured in the early morning hours of 9 July. Laying down a barrage of mortar and machine-gun fire, the 51st Battalion approached from the north and west. After taking the tel itself, the IDF fired on the houses down the slope 'increasing the mass flight, which was accompanied by screams of fear... ' According to the official IDF historian, the fall of this key village caused the mass flight of more than 10,000 Arabs from the area who saw themselves cut off... 'from Egyptian and irregular Arab forces to the east and south.' Beit 'Affa, 'Ibdis, Tall al Turmus and the village of Iraq Suwaydan all fell on 8-9 July, the villagers fleeing as IDF troops approached or attacked; local rumour had it that the Israeli troops had dealt with the inhabitants of Beit 'Affa 'as they had dealt with Deir Yassin'. The village of Karatiya was harassed by machine-gun fire and abandoned by its inhabitants. During 12-15 July, Giv'ati units raided and harassed a number of other villages, including 'Ajjur, Deir al Dubban, and Summeil, and conquered Bi'lin and Barqusya, which were both found empty. The last two were put to the torch, 'to the extent possible'. Reporting on these operations, the brigade's 'Combat Page', penned by the vengeful poet Abba Kovner, a former anti-Nazi partisan and Hashomer Hatza'ir stalwart, declared: 'Suddenly the ground was soft [under the wheels of the jeeps of Samson's Foxes', Giv'ati's commando unit] - bodies! Tens of bodies under their wheels. The driver was put off: human beings under his wheels! [But] wait a minute. He remembered [Kibbutz] Negba [and] Beit Daras [in both Arab troops had killed Jews] - and he ran them over! Do not be deterred, sons: murderous dogs - their punishment is blood! And the more you run over bloody dogs, the more you will love the beautiful, the good, and liberty'." (pp 436-37)

Avnery, I should point out, was a squadron commander in the Giv'ati Brigade, and later, in the Samson's Foxes commando unit.

'They Never Left'

Whether it was done deliberately, to placate the usual suspects, or out of sheer ignorance, the writer of the following introduction to a news item on Syrian refugees aired on ABC Radio National's "flagship current affairs program" AM on 23 December deserves the severest censure:

"The Lebanese government is refusing to build permanent homes for the many Syrian refugees that are enduring a harsh winter in camps across the country. Lebanon is bearing the greatest burden of the exodus from war-ravaged Syria, with a million refugees taking shelter there. The government is wary of the new arrivals because it doesn't want a repeat of 1948 when thousands of Palestinian refugees fled to Lebanon and never left." (Harsh winter ahead for Syrian refugees across the Middle East)

The hell they never left! They certainly tried, and here's what happened:

"Israel's defensive anti-infiltration measures resulted in the death of several thousand mostly unarmed Arabs during 1949-56, the vast majority between 1949 and 1952... Thus, upward of 2,700 Arab infiltrators, and perhaps as many as 5,000, were killed by the IDF, police and civilians along Israel's borders between 1949 and 1956. To judge from the available documentation, the vast majority of those killed were unarmed 'economic' and social infiltrators." (Israel's Border Wars: 1949-1956, Benny Morris, 1997, pp 135-7)

IOW, any Palestinian refugee caught trying to return to his home or land in 'Israel' after the ethnic cleansing of 1948, whether from Lebanon, Jordan or the Gaza Strip, was simply shot on sight by Israeli terrorists.

Yes, Geraldine, the Palestinians Were Ethnically Cleansed 2

So what exactly, I'd like to know, led to Radio National's decision to follow Monday's interview with Israeli historian Ilan Pappe with a rant by fellow Israeli historian Benny Morris on Tuesday? Lobby pressure or a craven act of self-censorship?

And what a rant it was! Morris threw every vile epithet in the book at Pappe in what amounted essentially to a case of character assassination. Pure projection of course, but nothing in Geraldine's questions betrayed the slightest awareness that she was dealing with a deeply disturbed individual.

Morris' tirade reminded me of nothing so much as the excoriations of a cult leader directed at one who not only got away but is now blowing the whistle on the whole mad enterprise. Poor Geraldine, desperately seeking relief from the cognitive dissonance occasioned by her exposure to the bleeding obvious on Monday, got more than she bargained for with motor-mouth Morris, the Israeli establishment's go-to historian on the events of 1948. Once a colleague of Pappe's, Morris has, in the words of the former, "transformed to become a racist anti-Arab pundit and less of a professional historian." (Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel, 2010, p 20)

Here's my transcript with bracketed commentary:

Doogue: Well there are other 'new' historians who see Israel's history very differently [from Ilan Pappe]. One of those is Professor Benny Morris an Israeli professor of history at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He's a harsh critic of Ilan Pappe. Indeed, writing in The New Republic last year he said: "At best Ilan Pappe must be one of the world's sloppiest historians. At worst, one of the most dishonest. In truth, he probably merits a place somewhere between the two." Well Benny Morris now joins us from Beersheva. Professor welcome to Radio National Breakfast.

Morris: Thank you for having me.

Doogue: Ilan Pappe says if you go to the sources and look at the documentation from 1948 onwards, which you have done as well, then you form a very different opinion of what happened to the Palestinians compared with mainstream Israeli history. Now how far do you disagree with that?

Morris: Ilan Pappe's description is mendacious and politically motivated. He's an anti-Zionist and he wants to blacken Israel's image. Actually, I saw the documents long before and published long before Ilan Pappe [inaudible] actually what happened. The documentation gives us a complex picture. We have the Palestinian Arabs launching an attack on the Jewish community, followed by an attack by the Arab states during which, in self defence, Israelis occupied Arab towns and villages, some of which they expelled. Most of the people fled and there was no pre-planning, no systematic what he calls ethnic cleansing. There were cases where there were expulsions, cases where Arab leaders instructed or advised Arabs to leave and in most cases Arabs fled the wrath of war, the flame of war and not because of any systematic plan or intention by the Israelis.

[Shhh... don't mention Ben-Gurion's telling the Jewish Agency mere weeks before the UN partition plan that to prevent the Palestinians in the proposed Jewish state becoming a fifth column, "they can either be mass arrested or expelled: it is better to expel them." (2/11/47)*

Or the infamous Master Plan for getting rid of the Palestinians, Plan Dalet of March 1948: "These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris) and especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state." (10/3/48)]**

What is true is that the Israelis as policy did not allow the Palestinians to return to their towns and villages, arguing that these very Palestinians tried to destroy Israel and would constitute a fifth column were they to return.

[This, of course, is typical Zionist double-talk: one version for the Geraldines of this world, another for his fellow Israelis. Keeping in mind that the Palestinian Arabs had been smashed militarily by the British in the late 30s and were therefore no great military threat to the Zionists in 1948, what Morris only hints at here, the Palestinian demographic threat - the fact that the Palestinian Arabs were the majority population in Palestine in 1948 - becomes explicit in an interview he gave to Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit in 2004, Survival of the Fittest: "That is what Zionism faced [in 1948]. A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them... I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which truly underwent a hard tragedy... But if the desire to establish a Jewish state here is legitimate, there was no other choice." (See my 11/5/08 post Benny Unhinged for a fuller account of this interview.)]

Doogue: So a central part of Ilan Pappe's thesis as I understand it anyway was that going right back to the end of 19th century through to the 30s and so on the planners, the people who were dreaming of the Jewish state did allow themselves to almost fantasise how good life would be if they had no Arabs around them at all and that this did amount to and led to a genuine plan to evict the Palestinians so they could have the land to themselves. Now you contest that, do you?

Morris: Again, it's a mixture of truth and fantasy. The world Zionist leaders, especially during the 1930s including Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Zionist community in Palestine, did talk about, think about the possibility of transferring Arabs out of Palestine but that was because the Arabs had revolted against British rule and were attacking the Zionist community in Palestine. The Jews in Europe were suffering from anti-Semitism and needed a safe haven and in order to supply them with one the Jews wanted a state in Palestine and they understood that as masses of Jews poured in they would be attacked by the Arabs who wanted to expel them. So part of the Zionist response was perhaps it would be best to transfer Arabs or some Arabs or all Arabs from Palestine but this was never [inaudible] and we see this in Ben-Gurion's diary. This was never adopted as policy. This was just an idea, one idea, among Zionist leaders how to deal with this problem of Arab belligerancy and expulsionism vis-a-vis the Jewish community. It was never adopted as policy by the Jewish Agency or the Israeli government subsequent to May 1948. It was never adopted by any major party as part of its platform. Without doubt though the feeling about transfer in the 30s in some way affected the actions of Israeli generals, officials and politicians in what happened in 1948. It affected them in not wanting the Arabs to return once they'd fled.

[Now compare the above antiseptic account of the 'transfer' idea with that in his 2004 book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited: "My feeling is that the transfer thinking and near-consensus that emerged in the 1930s and early 1940s was not tantamount to pre-planning and did not issue in the production of a policy or master-plan of expulsion; the Yishuv and its military forces did not enter the 1948 War which was initiated by the Arab side, with a policy or plan for expulsion. But transfer was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism - because it sought to transform a land which was 'Arab' into a 'Jewish' state and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab population; and because this aim automatically produced resistance among the Arabs which in turn persuaded the Yishuv's leaders that a hostile Arab majority or large minority could not remain in place if a Jewish state was to arise or safely endure. By 1948 transfer was in the air." (p 60) Just one idea among many, eh? If 'transfer' - expulsion - was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism maybe its publicity-conscious leaders not only didn't need to shout it from the rooftops but knew that to do so would be quite counter-productive under the circumstances. If Geraldine had had a clue, could she not have alluded to this?]

Doogue: It might be useful to listen to what he did say because he did say proof of the expulsion of the Palestinians, no matter what the exact plans were or how pre-meditated it was, is plain to see: "And the proof is there. Every Jewish settlement is built on the ruins of a Palestinian village. There are 5.5 million Palestinian refugees who are testimony to the fact that they were expelled. So actually the true story is there even without going to the archives but when you get to the archives you can see a very systematic planning, a realisation that is very sad for me, a realisation I don't agree with but that was how Zionist leaders saw it." So how far have your views... because you and Ilan Pappe if I'm right were pretty close. How far and why have you fallen out?

Morris: I don't think we've fallen out. Politically, we don't have the same agenda or beliefs and Pappe in my opinion is not a serious historian and invents things. There is no documentation for a plan or pre-plan or pre-determination for the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948, not before or during 1948. There was mass flight. In some cases there were expulsions. In some cases Arabs asked old people to leave their sites. The fact that there are 5 million refugees today - 700,000 of them in 1948 - is not proof of anything except that they left their homes. The question is why they left their homes and, as I said, they left mainly because of war. There is another fact which points in my view to the fact that there was no pre-plan or systematic expulsion and that is that at the end of the 1948 war 160,000 Arabs remained in place in the area that became the state of Israel alongside 700,000 Jews. IOW about a fifth of the population. The fact they remained there and were allowed to is proof that there was no systematic ethnic cleansing as he puts it. Had there been they would have been expelled as well.

[Of course, the only thing that the existence of an Arab minority in 'Israel' after 1948 proves is that ethnic cleansing isn't always 100% successful. In his 2004 Haaretz interview, Morris complained that Ben-Gurion "should have done a complete job" and "cleansed the whole country as far as the Jordan River." As for today's Palestinians (those still in Palestine that is), Israel's minority Palestinian Arab citizens, the descendants of those 160,000, and the Palestinians under Israeli military occupation in the Palestinian territories, here's what Morris told Haaretz in 2004: "In the present circumstances it is neither moral nor realistic [to transfer and expel the Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza, the Galilee and the Triangle]. The world would not allow it... But, in other circumstances, apocalyptic ones, which are liable to be realized in 5 or 10 years, I can see expulsions..."]

Doogue: What for you is the central problem with Pappe's approach, because he's going to be here in Australia with quite a few public appearances? How do you critique him?

Morris: The basic problem is he invents the documentation, mistranslates, invents whole sentences in the things he supposedly quotes. He is essentially a liar. Not one sentence in any of his books can be trusted, especially on this type of subject because he has a political axe to grind which is to blacken Israel's image to serve the Palestinian purpose. He wants no Jewish state, no Zionist state, just a Palestinian state which he says will contain Jews and Arabs, essentially a majority Arab state. That's his political agenda and he subordinates his history writings to this political end and this isn't the way historians are supposed to write history.

Doogue: Why would he do that though? Does he represent a real strand in Israeli society?

Morris: He represents a type of self-hating Jew. There have always been self-hating Jews and people who've been anti-Zionists within Israeli society. It goes beyond anti-Zionism in his case. It's something which only a psychiatrist could explain. There are such Israelis, academics who call for an international boycott of their own universities. But it's a very small number. Israel's a democracy. It allows them to flourish. Ilan Pappe no longer lives in Israel. He works in England. I'm not really sure he can be called an Israeli.

Doogue (who seems to have no problem whatever with Pappe being described as a psychiatric basket case who can hardly even be described as an Israeli anymore, still can't quite believe that Israeli Jews are Zionists) : He did claim in yesterday's interview that about 95% of Jews in Israel would be Zionist and that only a small percentage of Israelis would agree with his take on Israel's past. Does that misrepresent or correctly represent in your view the level at which the Palestinian issue is debated and contested among other Israelis?

Morris: No, there are gradations. It doesn't simply divide between Zionist and non-Zionist. He's actually quite correct that the number of anti-Zionist Jews living in Israel is very small. There are also a lot of ultra-Orthodox Jews who are also anti-Zionist but they're not involved in this kind of discussion. They care only about the Bible. There are also all sorts of gradations among the Zionists: more critical of the government, more critical of Israeli policies. It doesn't simply divide into yes-men and critics of the whole Zionist enterprise, which he of course is.

[He's right, of course, there are all sorts of Zionists: they range from those who want all Palestinians out (the hard-boiled) to those who just don't want them to become a majority again in their former homeland (the soft-boiled).]

There was a little more but I  weary, and anyway I think you've got the point.

[* Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 2006, p 49; ** ibid, Chapter 4: Finalising the Master Plan.]

But Who Pulled the Plug?

Note how the Washington Post frames the following report:

"At the remains of an ancient metropolis in southern Israel, archaeologists are piecing together the history of a people remembered chiefly as the bad guys of the Hebrew Bible. The city of Gath... is helping scholars paint a more nuanced portrait of the Philistines, who appear in the biblical story as the perennial enemies of the Israelites. Close to 3 millennia ago, Gath was on the frontier between the Philistines, who occupied the Mediterranean coastal plain, and the Israelites, who controlled the inland hills. The city's most famous resident, according to the Book of Samuel, was Goliath - the giant warrior improbably felled by the young shepherd David and his sling. The Philistines 'are the ultimate other, almost, in the biblical story', said Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University, the achaeologist in charge of the excavation." (At site in Israel, archaeologists seek to sketch the lives of Goliath's countrymen, AP, 8/7/11)

No surprises, really. Israelites, front and centre. Philistines, mere bit players in their triumphal march through history.

Just as the Zionist master narrative dominates Palestine's modern history, so too, in the Israelites and their imagined Israel - the blind obsession of biblical studies - it dominates Palestine's ancient past.

This mutilation of ancient Palestine on the procrustean bed of biblical studies is the subject of an absolute must-read study, Keith W. Whitelam's The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (1996):

"The situation in antiquity as presented by biblical scholarship is remarkably similar to the modern period leading up to the foundation of the modern state of Israel. Scholarship seems to mirror the late 19th century Zionist slogan for Palestine: 'a land without people, for a people without land'. What we have in biblical scholarship from its inception to the present day is the presentation of a land, 'Palestine', without inhabitants, or at the most simply temporary, ephemeral inhabitants, awaiting a people without a land. This has been reinforced by a reading of the biblical traditions and archaeological findings, interpreted on the basis of a prior understanding of a reading of the Bible, which helps to confirm this understanding. The foundation of the modern state has dominated scholarship to such an extent that the retrojection of the nation state into antiquity has provided the vital continuity which helps to justify and legitimize both. The effect has been to deny any continuity or legitimacy to Palestinian history. If there were no Palestinians in antiquity then there could not be a Palestinian history. The notion of continuity is reinforced by the assumption that European civilization, the pinnacle of human achievement, has its roots in this Judeo-Christian tradition. Europe has retrojected the nation state into antiquity in order to discover its own roots while at the same time giving birth to the Zionist movement which has established a 'civilized' state in the alien Orient thereby helping to confirm this continuity in culture and civilization. The irony of this situation is that for the past there is a Palestine but no Palestinians, yet for the present there are Palestinians but no Palestine. The politics of scholarship is brought home by the remark of Menachem Begin in 1969: 'If this is Palestine and not the land of Israel, then you are conquerors and not tillers of the land. You are invaders. If this is Palestine, then it belongs to a people who lived here before you came'. In the scholarship of the past and in the reality of the present, Palestine has become 'the land of Israel' and the history of Israel is the only legitimate subject of study. All else is subsumed in providing background and understanding for the history of ancient Israel which has continuity with the present state and provides the roots and impulse of European civilization." (p 58)

So what actually happened to the ancient Philistines of Gath and other cities?

Of their fate, the Washington Post can speak plainly, albeit exclusively reliant on the Bible:

"The razing of Gath at that time appears to have been the work of the Aramean king Hazael in 830 BC, an incident mentioned in the Book of Kings... In 604 BC, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon invaded and put the Philistines' cities to the sword. There is no remnant of them after that." (At site in Israel...)

Curiously, however, when it comes to more modern times - 1948 to be exact - the Post gets terribly tongue-tied:

"Crusaders arriving from Europe in 1099 built a fortress on the remains of Gath, and later the site became home to an Arab village, Tel el-Safi, which emptied during the war surrounding Israel's creation in 1948. Today Gath is a national park." (ibid)

The inhabitants of ancient Gath were put to the sword and their city razed, but, wonder of wonders, little Tel el-Safi just... emptied.

Ah, but who pulled the plug?

Here's Israeli historian Benny Morris:

"Operation An-Far was unleashed on the night of 8-9 July... The area covered by [Shimon] Avidan's order [to take the large village of Tel as-Safi and... 'to destroy, to kill and to expel refugees encamped in the area, in order to prevent enemy infiltration from the east to this important position'] was overrun during 8-11 July, with most of the village fleeing before the IDF columns reached each village [in the area]. Tel as-Safi was captured in the early morning hours of 9 July. Laying down a barrage of mortar and machine-gun fire, the 51st Battalion approached from the north and west. After taking the tel itself, the IDF fired on the houses down the slope 'increasing the mass flight, which was accompanied by screams of fear...'" (The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2004, p 437)

What the Post should have said was that the people of Tel el-Safi were put to the sword and their village, like hundreds of others at the time, razed.

Not For the Faint of Heart

"While the investigations published by the Israeli military have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that [Palestinian] civilians [in Gaza] were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy." ('If I knew then, what I know now': Israel did not target civilians in Gaza, Richard Goldstone, washingtonpost.com/Sydney Morning Herald, 4/4/11)

So, to invoke the military euphemism for bloody murder, His Honour seems to believe that those civilians were simply collateral damage, and that Israel is therefore off the hook as far as their deaths are concerned. But I'm afraid it's not that simple. As Canadian philosopher Michael Neumann points out:

"There is... another element of contemporary warfare that might be equivalent to terrorism, and that is 'collateral damage'... The critics... spare no effort to show that the US and Israel do, in fact, willfully kill innocent civilians. But it is not easy to show this, because you can't get inside people's heads: how do you prove their claimed intentions are not their real ones?... However, the issue is not whether a distinction can be made between collateral damage and terrorism; it is rather whether this distinction has moral importance. The answer depends on a further distinction: there is more than one kind of 'collateral damage'. One kind of collateral damage is, in important ways, morally distinct from terrorism. The other is not.

"Suppose, for instance, some naval battle in which a destroyer is sunk in shallow water. After the fighting is over, divers inspect the vessel and are horrified to discover it carried several dozen civilians... who were being transported to safe exile in a nonbelligerant country. This is unexpected collateral damage: no one imagined... this terrible but also terribly unusual circumstance.

"But when the Americans - or for that matter the Israelis - speak of collateral damage, they are not speaking of the unexpected kind. On the contrary, they know with certainty - the commanders, the soldiers, the decision-makers - that civilians are in the firing line and that they will be killed... This is expected collateral damage, innocent deaths that no reasonable person could fail to expect.

"Expected collateral damage involves knowingly killing innocent civilians. Terrorism involves intentionally killing civilians. The conceptual difference is discernible, but the moral difference is too academic even for an academic... An example will make this plain. Suppose Joanne decides she wants to kill Jack by running him over in her SUV. She knows he goes to a movie at the Paramount every Friday night. She plans to drive into that movie line at high speed. She will hit him and, as she knows full well, some of the people standing behind him and in front of him. She also knows full well that, when she hits them, they will be killed. She executes her plan. According to most legal codes, she is guilty of homicide; not only of Jack, but of anyone else she kills. It's literally collateral damage, but it's not accidental. Certainly to the dead it doesn't matter that she did not intend to kill them, but only decided to perform an action that she knew would kill them. If this difference doesn't matter, neither does the difference between terrorism and expected collateral damage." (The Case Against Israel, 2005, pp 160-162)

Nor is His Honour being entirely honest with us in this matter. As Israeli historian Ilan Pappe explains:

"'If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone report would have been a different document'. Thus opens Judge Richard Goldstone's much-discussed op-ed in The Washington Post. I have a strong feeling that the editor might have tampered with the text and that the original sentence ought to have read something like: 'If I had known then that the report would turm me into a self-hating Jew in the eyes of my beloved Israel and my own Jewish community in South Africa, the Goldstone report would never have been written at all'. And if that wasn't the original sentence, it certainly is the subtext of Goldstone's article.

"This shameful U-turn did not happen this week. It comes after more than a year and a half of a sustained campaign of intimidation and character assassination against the judge, a campaign whose like in the past destroyed mighty people such as US Senator William Fulbright who was shot down politically for his brave attempt to disclose AIPAC's illegal dealings with the State of Israel.

"Already in October 2009, Goldstone told CNN, 'I've got a great love for Israel' and 'I've worked for many Israeli causes and continue to do so' (Video: 'Fareed Zakaria GPS.' 4/10/09)

"Given the fact that at the time he made this declaration of love he did not have any new evidence, as he claims now, one may wonder how could this love not be at least weakened by what he discovered when writing, along with other members of the UN commission, his original report.

"But worse was to come and exactly a year ago, in April 2010, the campaign against him reached new heights, or rather, lows. It was led by the chairman of the South African Zionist Federation, Avrom Krengel, who tried to prevent Goldstone from participating in his grandson's bar mitzvah in Johannesburg since 'Goldstone caused irreparable damage to the Jewish people as a whole'. The South African Zionist Federation threatened to picket outside the synagogue during the ceremony. Worse was the interference of South Africa's Chief Rabbi, Warren Goldstein, who chastised Goldstone for 'doing greater damage to the State of Israel'. Last February, Goldstone said that 'Hamas perpetrated war crimes, but Israel did not', in an interview that was not broadcast, according to a 3 April report on the website of Israel's Channel 2. It was not enough: the Israelis demanded more.

"Readers might ask 'so what?' and 'why could Goldstone not withstand the heat?' Good questions, but alas the Zionization of Jewish communities and the false identification of Jewishness with Zionism is still a powerful disincentive that prevents liberal Jews from boldly facing Israel and its crimes. Every now and again many liberal Jews seem to liberate themselves and allow their conscience, rather than their fear, to lead them. However, many seem unable to stick to their more universalist inclinations for too long where Israel is concerned. The risk of being defined as a 'self-hating Jew' with all the ramifications of such an accusation is a real and frightening prospect for them. You have to be in this position to understand the power of this terror.

"Just weeks ago, Israeli military intelligence announced it had created a special unit to monitor, confront, and possibly hunt down, individuals and bodies suspected of 'delegitimising' Israel abroad. In light of this, perhaps quite a few of the faint-hearted felt standing up to Israel was not worth it.

"We should have recognised that Goldstone was one of them when he stated that, despite his report, he remains a Zionist. This adjective, 'Zionist', is far more meaningful and charged than is usually assumed. You cannot claim to be one if you oppose the ideology of the apartheid State of Israel. You can remain one if you just rebuke the state for a certain criminal policy and fail to see the connection between the ideology and that policy. 'I am a Zionist' is a declaration of loyalty to a frame of mind that cannot accept the 2009 Goldstone report. You can either be a Zionist or blame Israel for war crimes and crimes against humanity - if you do both, you will crack sooner rather than later.

"That this mea culpa has nothing to do with new facts is clear when one examines the 'evidence' brought by Goldstone to explain his retraction. To be honest, one should say that one did not have to be the world expert on international law to know that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza in 2009. The reports of bodies such as Breaking the Silence and the UN representatives on the ground attested to it, before and after the Goldstone report. It was also not the only evidence.

"The pictures and images we saw on our screens and those we saw on the ground told only one story of a criminal policy intending to kill, wound and maim as a collective punishment. 'The Palestinians are going to bring upon themselves a Holocaust', promised Matan Vilnai, Israel's deputy minister of defense to the people of Gaza on 29 February 2008. There is only one new piece of evidence Goldstone brings and this is an internal Israeli army investigation that explains that one of the cases suspected as a war crime was due to a mistake by the Israeli army that is still being investigated. This must be a winning card: a claim by the Israeli army that massive killings of Palestinians were a 'mistake'.

"Ever since the creation of the State of Israel, the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel were either terrorists or killed by 'mistake'. So 29 out of 1,400 deaths were killed by an unfortunate mistake? Only ideological commitment could base a revision of the report on an internal inquiry of the Israeli army focusing on only one of dozens of instances of unlawful killing and massacring. So it cannot be new evidence that caused Goldstone to write this article. Rather, it is his wish to return to the Zionist comfort zone that propelled this bizarre and faulty article.

"This is also clear from the way he escalates his language against Hamas in the article and de-escalates his words toward Israel. And he hopes that this would absolve him of Israel's righteous fury. But he is wrong, very wrong. Only a few hours passed from the publication of the article until Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and of course the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate President Shimon Peres commissioned Goldstone with a new role in life: he is expected to move from one campus to the other and hop from one public venue to the next in the service of a new and pious Israel. He may choose not to do it; but then again he might not be allowed to attend his grandson's bar mitzvah as a retaliation.

"Goldstone and his colleagues wrote a very detailed report, but they were quite reserved in their conclusions. The picture unfolding from Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations was far more horrendous and was described less in the clinical and legal language that quite often fails to convey the magnitude of the horror. It was first Western public opinion that understood better than Goldstone the implications of his report. Israel's international legitimacy has suffered an unprecedented blow. He was genuinely shocked to learn that this was the result.

"We have been there before. In the late 1980s, Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote a similar, sterile, account of the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Palestinian academics such as Edward Said, Nur Masalha and Walid Khalidi were the ones who pointed to the significant implications for Israel's identity and self-image, and nature of the archival material he unearthed. Morris too cowered under pressure and asked to be readmitted to the tribe. He went very far with his mea culpa and re-emerged as an extreme anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racist: suggesting putting the Arabs in cages and promoting the idea of another ethnic cleansing. Goldstone can go in that direction too; or at least this is what the Israelis expect him to do now.

"Professionally, both Morris and Goldstone tried to retreat to a position that claimed, as Goldstone does in The Washington Post article, that Israel can only be judged by its intentions not the consequences of its deeds. Therefore only the Israeli army, in both cases, can be a reliable source for knowing what these intentions were. Very few decent and intelligent people in the world would accept such a bizarre analysis and explanation.

"Goldstone has not yet entered the lunatic fringe of ultra-Zionism as Morris did. But if he is not careful the future promises to be a pleasant journey with the likes of Morris, Alan Dershowitz (who already said that Goldstone is a 'repentant Jew') between annual meetings of the AIPAC rottweilers and the wacky conventions of the Christian Zionists. He would soon find out that once you cower in the face of Zionism - you are expected to go all the way or be at the very same spot you thought you had successfully left behind you.

"Winning Zionist love in the short-term is far less important than losing the world's respect in the long-run. Palestine should choose its friends with care: they cannot be faint-hearted nor can they claim to be Zionists as well as champions of peace, justice and human rights in Palestine." (Goldstone's fateful U-turn, The Electronic Intifada, 4/4/11)

About That Falling Man

Surprise! Surprise! The Australian has bookended Christopher Hitchen's Dear Virginia, there really is an Israel lobby in its Saturday edition with Benny Morris' Look at moi, look at moi, Chrissy, look at moi please... in its Monday edition.

While Morris hearts Hitchens on his fingering of those bloody Arabs/Muslims as corrupt, violent, autocratic, nihilistic, medieval etc, he complains that, alas, "he still has a soft and blind spot for the Palestinians, who can apparently do no or little wrong..." (Portraying Palestinians as victims who can do no wrong is one-eyed, 11/10/10)

"In Hitch-22," moans Morris, "Hitchens approvingly cites (and expands) a metaphor coined (I think) by Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for The Atlantic* : a man (the Zionist Jew), to save himself, leaps from a burning building (in anti-Semitic and Holocaust Europe) and lands on an innocent bystander (a Palestinian), crushing him. To which Hitchens adds - and the falling man lands on the Palestinian again and again (the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza, the suppression of the intifadas, the construction of settlements in the territories, etc). But the metaphor is disingenuous, and it requires amplification to conform to the facts of history." [*Wrong. It was coined by Isaac Deutscher.]

Now Morris is correct about Hitchens' metaphor being disingenuous, but not for the reasons he thinks. The falling man metaphor is based on the false premise that the Zionist project in Palestine was first and foremost a rescue mission for persecuted European Jewry, when, as American academic M Shahid Alam argues convincingly, it was more of a Jewish power-trip:

"It is unlikely that anti-Semitism was the chief catalyst in the thinking of the Zionist precursors. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Jews of Western and Central Europe were moving toward legal equality with the Gentiles; they were making their mark in Europe's finance, industry, politics, science, academia, and in artistic and literary circles. At this time, Jews were keenly aware of their success; they were acquiring a sense of their growing economic and social power. The Zionist precursors wanted to leverage this power, only recently acquired, to claim nationhood for the Jews. Anti-Semitism may not have been too far from the minds of these Zionist precursors, but, primarily, they were seeking Jewish national self-expression, a chance for the Jews to become important actors on the stage of history." (Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism, 2009, pp 55-56)

IOW, to place Alam's insight in the context of Hitchens' misleading metaphor, the crushing of the innocent Palestinian bystander did not arise as the result of a desperate leap from a burning building, as this self-serving Zionist fairytale would have it, but rather as the inevitable result of a colonial-settler project set in train by the latest and strangest of all the species of toxic, ethnic European nationalisms.

Erstwhile historian, now unbuttoned Zionist propagandist, Morris continues: "In fact, as the leaping man nears the ground he offers the bystander a compromise - let's share the pavement, some for you, some for me. The bystander responds with a firm 'no' and tries, again and again (1920, 1921, 1929, the Arab revolt of 1936-39 and the 1947-48 War of Independence), to stab the falling man as he descends to the pavement. So the leaping man lands on the bystander, crushing him. Later, again and again, the leaping man, now firmly ensconced on the pavement, offers the crushed bystander a compromise ('autonomy' in 1978, a 'two-state solution' in 2000 and in 2008), and again and again the bystander says 'no'. The falling man may have somewhat wronged the bystander, but the bystander was never an innocent one, he was an active agent in and a party to his own demise."

Ho hum. What gives the game away here, though, is Morris' reference to the falling man somewhat wronging the bystander. Somewhat wronging! Ain't that a doozy? Morris was actually far more forthcoming in a 2004 interview with Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit:

"I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which truly underwent a hard tragedy... 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." For the real Benny Morris, as opposed to the crafty apologist for the Zionist project on display in Monday's Australian, see my 11/5/08 post Benny Unhinged.

What a fraud!

Giving Poetry a Bad Name

I first came across the following poem on Michael Danby's website. (Before you leap to the conclusion that Danby's a lover of verse, let me stress that it is the one & only poem on his website):-

Yusra

The Public Morals Unit of Hamas
Saw Yusra al-Azzuri, bold as brass,
In Gaza City, walk with her betrothed,
Her sister also present. Half unclothed.
All three behaved as if beyond the reach
Of justice. Laughing, dancing on the beach,
They almost touched. They thought to drive away.
The Unit followed them without delay.
Her young man drove. Beside him as they fled,
Yusra died quickly in a hail of lead.
The other two were hauled out of the car
And beaten senseless. With an iron bar,
The riddled corpse of Yusra, as the worst
Offender, was assaulted till it burst.
She would have prayed for death. It can be said,
Therefore, it was a blessing she was dead
Already. Thus we look for just one touch
Of grace in this catastrophe. Too much
To bear, the thought that those young men were glad
To be there. Won't the memory drive them mad?
Could they not see the laughter in her face
Was heaven on earth, the only holy place?
Perhaps they guessed, and acted from the fear
That Paradise is nowhere if not here.
Yusra, your name too lovely to forget
Shines like a sunrise joined to a sunset.
The day between went with you. Where you are,
That light around you is your life, Yusra.

It was written by expatriate Australian poet and UK TV wit Clive James and published in The Australian's literary supplement The Australian Literary Review of September 7 2007. To the best of my knowledge, apart from Danby's website, its only other airing has been in James' recently published collection Opal Sunset: Selected Poems 1958-2008. Thank God for small mercies.

At first blush, one might assume, as reviewer Benjamin Lytal of the Los Angeles Times did, that Yusra has some basis in fact: "Others, like Yusra, take a name out of the headlines in order to saddle current events with James' metered chivalry." But, like Lytal, you'd be wrong. Yusra al-Azzuri is pure fiction and Hamas has no 'Public Morals Unit'.

The closest I can find to a 'PMU' in the Palestinian territories is a 'morality police' unit set up by the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah following Hamas' successful pre-emptive coup in Gaza in 2007. Its job is reportedly to "comb the streets of central Ramallah to maintain 'public order' and 'tradition' [and] bust anyone caught violating the fast during Ramadan..." (Fatah uses 'morality police' to burnish image, Joshua Mitnick, Christian Science Monitor, 11/10/07) And that's "bust," as in take offenders down to the station for a talk - not riddle them with bullets and beat their corpses to a pulp. While noting that the PA's establishment of a 'morality police' unit was designed to compete with Hamas' reputation among all Palestinians for piety and lack of corruption, Mitnick writes that "no such morality squad exists in Gaza," and adds that "local observers say that in a territory known as more traditional than the West Bank, Hamas has been careful not to give its critics a justification for allegations that it is a Taliban wannabe."

James' fabrication cannot simply be excused as poetic licence. Yusra is blatant black propaganda, pure and simple. It tells us nothing whatever about Hamas, Palestinians, or Gaza. Just look at those young lovers: taking the (sports?) car for a spin along the coast as though they were the Gazan equivalent of middle class Lebanese twentysomethings on a jaunt to Beirut's Corniche, for God's sake. The fact that blockaded, impoverished, fuel-starved Gaza has been virtually carless for years, is simply not on James' radar. No, what Yusra is really all about is James and his lurid, post 9/11 orientalist fantasies.

In the unlikely event that James ever chooses to write about the real thing, of course, he could always draw on the actual case of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish divorcee who was beaten to the point of requiring medical treatment in her Jerusalem home by thugs in the pay of an ultra-Orthodox 'modesty patrol' because she had allegedly "stopped maintaining an ultra-Orthodox lifestyle and had relationships with men." The mercenaries who carried out the attack had been, in the words of the Israeli judge who sentenced one of them to 4 years jail, "hired to beat and abuse, to curse and threaten, to humiliate and brutalize" the woman. (Modesty patrol 'mercenary' gets 4 years for assaulting woman, Yair Ettinger, Haaretz, 16/3/09) Fat chance!

But there's another twist to this story. George Orwell, who once opined that "during times of universal deceit, telling truth becomes a revolutionary act," would no doubt be turning in his grave if he knew that James had been awarded the 2008 Orwell Prize for political journalism. Here's Jean Seaton, chair of the Orwell Prize and professor of media history at the University of Westminster: "Clive James is a master, in the Orwell tradition, of the essay. Whether written or broadcast, his words are sharp but humane."(Hari & James take Orwell prizes, Stephen Brook, guardian.co.uk, 25/4/08)

Ever read a James essay? One such appeared in The Australian of 10 April 2004. Written in bad blood is James' take on the history of the Palestine -Israel conflict. Unsurprisingly, considering he's the author of Yusra, he manages to get just about everything wrong. For reasons of space, I will deal only with the slanders, distortions, and errors of just the first half of this appalling diatribe:-

According to James, the Palestinians are possessed of "the mad idea that the Jews have no right to exist... and the equally mad idea that the state of Israel can somehow be eliminated." That's "the Jews" anywhere and everywhere, folks, not just those who flooded into Palestine. A bit like asserting that indigenous Australians were not only opposed to those who invaded and colonized their homeland but also opposed the very existence of each and every European in the lands from which the invaders and settlers first issued. For James, the Palestinians weren't simply opposed to the handover of their homeland by a European colonial power to a bunch of European settlers who wanted to turn it into an ethnically exclusive state at their expense - no, they just hated Jews. Full stop. End of story.

This outrageous slander of the victims of the Zionist colonial-settler project in Palestine came about, according to James, because the "Arab nations never studied at the University of the Holocaust [and] saw nothing wrong with Hitler's determination that as many potential colonists as possible should be dealt with at source."

Studied at the 'University of the Holocaust'?! Presumably, "the Arabs" (but not necessarily the Europeans) should have been alive to the fact that another European colonial power, other than the one forcing the foreign settlers on them, had 'issues' with certain European 'tribes' to its east and was intent on rolling them. And not only should they have twigged to that - they should also have jumped for joy at the prospect of helping out the most persecuted of those European 'tribes' by a) prevailing upon their own colonial master to open the gates of Palestine to said 'tribe', and b) prevailing upon the Palestinians themselves to shower its members with rice and rose petals before promptly handing over their house and car keys and then decamping across the Jordan.

Apart from the odd reference to this or that Zionist primer, James appears simply to make things up as he goes along: "Ben-Gurion was ready to accept a partition of Palestine: even though his resulting portion would be tiny..." Oh, really?If 56% of Palestine is "tiny" for those who had bought up a mere 6% of it prior to 1947, how then would James describe the 44% alloted to the Palestinians? Teensy? How, moreover, would he describe a Palestinian state on a mere 22%? Teensy weensy? And how would he describe a Palestinian state on 22% minus Jewish settlement blocs, apartheid wall, Jews-only roads, army bases, etc? Microscopic?

James makes basic errors such as in "when the new state was attacked [by the Arab states] from all sides... the Irgun teamed up with the Stern Gang to massacre over 300 Arabs at Deir Yassin, and the exodus of the Palestinians ensued." The Deir Yassin massacre occurred over a month before the Arab armies entered Palestine, and just over 100 Palestinians were butchered. Moreover, the Palestinian "exodus" was well under way by the time the Arab armies intervened.

Crucially, he glosses over David Ben-Gurion's key role in planning and implementing the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, using the Irgun and Stern Gang as fall guys: "Although [the Palestinians'] disappearance suited Ben-Gurion's purposes - already embattled on a half-dozen external fronts, he would probably have lost the war if he had been forced to fight on an internal front as well." As Zionist historian Benny Morris has pointed out, Ben-Gurion was a "transferist... He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst... Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here." To which I would add this from Israeli historian Ilan Pappe: "On 2 November, ie, almost a month before the UN General Assembly [partition] Resolution was adopted... the Executive of the Jewish Agency, Ben-Gurion, spelled out for the first time in the clearest possible terms that ethnic cleansing formed the alternative, or complementary means of ensuring that the new state would be an exclusively Jewish one. The Palestinians inside the Jewish state, he told his audience, could become a fifth column, and if so 'they can either be mass arrested or expelled; it is better to expel them'." ( The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, p 49)

And check out these bizarre sentences: "The Jews were suitably sorry at the time. But the Palestinians were sorry forever." Run that past me again. If "the Jews" were in fact "suitably sorry" at the time, all they had to do was facilitate the return of the refugees - as opposed to what they actually did (and have continued to do ever since) - block it and confiscate the refugees' homes and lands. And if the Palestinians, as a consequence of their dispossession in 1948, then became in James' ridiculous phraseology "sorry forever" would that not be sufficient to account for their rage without all that nonsense about anti-Semitism?

Nowhere does James' cluelessness come through better than in this outrageous statement: "There is enough oil money in the Arab nations to give every refugee a hotel suite with 24-hour room service. Instead they have been obliged to remain in camps that are display cases, so that they can testify with their desperation to Jewish inhumanity." If the goose had bothered to find out what the refugees themselves thought about their plight, he'd have discovered that nothing short of a return to what is rightfully theirs is acceptable to them. But face it, research or no research, if you've got a modicum of empathy for anyone who has been rudely shoved aside by those more powerful, you wouldn't even entertain such a callous and insensitive idea in the first place.

Poet? Orwell-Prize-winning journalist? You've got to be joking!

Avnery's Apology: A Critique

Taking the Canadian Prime Minister's recent parliamentary apology to the indigenous people of Canada as his cue, veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery has followed his problematic essay 1948 (see my 1/6/08 post, Uri Avnery: A Critique) with an equally problematic stab at an official Israeli apology (An Apology, 14/6/08) to the Palestinian people:-

"We recognize the fact that we have committed against you an historic injustice, and we humbly ask your forgiveness. When the Zionist movement decided to establish a national home in this country... it had no intention of building our state on the ruins of another people. Indeed, almost no one in the Zionist movement had ever been in the country before the first Zionist Congress in 1897, or even had any idea about the actual situation here."

Avnery at least appears here to concede that there is no meaningful distinction between "national home" and "state." The contrary has, of course, been argued by legions of Zionist propagandists. The notion that the early Zionists were prepared to settle for anything less than a Jewish state has, however, been decisively refuted by Canadian philosopher and author of The Case Against Israel, Michael Neumann: "Could pre-Israel Zionism be understood as the quest for a homeland as opposed to a state?" he asks. "Was this to be a scattering of Jewish homes and farms, or a Jewish country with its own army, police, and government?" Neumann's evidence leaves us in no doubt. To quote just 3 of his many authoritative statements (pp 23-30):

1) "The founder of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, had already in 1896 written an essay called 'Der Judenstaat'. In it, he said, 'The Idea which I have developed in this pamphlet is a very old one: it is the restoration of the Jewish state... Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation, the rest we shall manage for ourselves'."

2) "Max Nordau, Herzl's vice-president at early Zionist congresses, wrote in 1920 that: 'I did my best to persuade the claimants of the Jewish state in Palestine that we might find a circumlocution that would say all we meant, but would say it in a way that would avoid provoking the Turkish rulers of the coveted land. I suggested 'Heimstatte [homeland] as a synonym for state... It was equivocal but we all understood what it meant... to us it signified Judenstaat and it signifies the same now'."

3) "Here is Walter Laqueur's account: 'When a Zionist delegation appeared on 27 February 1919 before the Supreme Allied Council, Weizmann was asked by Lansing, the American secretary of state, what exactly was meant by the phrase 'a Jewish national home'. Weizmann replied that for the moment [my italics] an autonomous Jewish government was not wanted, but that he expected that 70 to 80 thousand Jews would emigrate to Palestine annually. Gradually a nation would emerge which would be as Jewish as the French nation was French and the British nation British. Later, when the Jews formed the large majority, they would establish such a government as would answer to the state of the development of the country and to their ideals'."

But when Avnery claims that "the Zionist movement had no intention of building our state on the ruins of another people," it is hard to take him seriously. Assuming that the early Zionists went about their business of agitating for a homeland/state in Palestine without being aware of the grave implications their project held for the majority indigenous Palestinian Arab population defies belief.

Theodore Herzl, the 'father' of political Zionism, was certainly wise to the matter, writing in his diary in 1895: "We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly. Let the owners of immovable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back. The voluntary expropriation will be accomplished through our secret agents. The Company would pay excessive prices. We shall then sell only to Jews, and all real estate will be traded only among Jews." (Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, I, 51)

Typically, however, as Israeli historian Benny Morris points out in his discussion of the idea of transfer (the Zionist euphemism for ethnic cleansing) in Zionist thinking, the leaders of the movement tended to be forthcoming only in private*. (The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, p 41)

That the logic of the Zionist push for a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine meant that the Palestinians, absent an effective campaign of resistance, were doomed to dispossession, must surely have exercised the minds of all concerned, colonists and colonized alike. Neumann again: "Certainly it was possible that the Zionists would settle for less than all of Palestine. It was possible they would not forcibly transfer the indigenous population; it was just barely possible that, somehow, Zionism would be abandoned altogether. But there was no basis for supposing any of these outcomes likely. Nor could it be assumed that even a territorial compromise could be obtained without catastrophe... Indeed, the Palestinians could look at all of modern European history from the 17th century religious wars to the year of the Balfour Declaration as a record of failed territorial compromises. When settlers move into an inhabited area, territorial compromises are all too often mere pauses in a savage process of dispossession. This was apparent at the time. The rise of Zionism coincided with the last bloody stages of just such a process in the American West. Significantly, the American settler's progressive and very violent displacement of the native inhabitants was not some grand scheme thought out in advance. At many points in the story, the settlers seemed to have got all they wanted. But successful settlement and increasing immigration brought new usurpations. Enough was never, it seemed, enough. Even if the Zionists had never dreamed of taking all of Palestine from the Palestinians, it would have been foolish to suppose that they would not come to do so, bit by bit. The prospect of a Jewish state, therefore, posed a mortal danger to the Palestinians, a prospect of ethnic subjugation and very likely of what is now called ethnic cleansing." (pp 45-46)

As improbable as it sounds, Herzl and others may have entertained fantasies that the Palestinian Arabs could simply be bought out, but the Zionist movement's first Likudnik, Vladimir Jabotinsky, put paid to such nonsense in 1923: "Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birthright to Palestine for cultural and economic gains... Colonization has its own explanation, integral and inescapable, and understood by every Jew and Arab with his wits about him. Colonization can have only one goal. For the Palestinian Arabs this goal is inadmissible... Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population." (See my 12/6/08 post, Pemulwuy in Palestine for a fuller quotation) To this end, Jabotinsky saw the necessity for a successful Zionist colonization to proceed behind an iron wall of bayonets, perhaps British, preferably Jewish. He was adamant that every Jew "with his wits about him" understood the logic of the Zionist enterprise, and that the only question was how to cleanse Palestine of its indigenous population. In fact, even Herzl admitted the need for a Jewish paramilitary corps "in preparation for the struggle against the indigenous population whose land was being systematically occupied." (Diaries, I, 88-89) It was of course Zionist militarism and force of arms, Jabotinsky's "iron wall," that prevailed in 1948. Avnery's depiction of his Zionist forbears as essentially well-intentioned blunderers, therefore, lacks all credibility.

[*David Ben-Gurion, who was later to to preside over the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and become Israel's first prime minister, continued this venerable Zionist tradition of dissimulation. He is described by Benny Morris as a man who "knew what to say and what not to say in certain circumstances; what is allowed to be recorded on paper and what is preferable to convey orally or in hint." (The New History & the Old Propagandists, Haaretz 9/5/89)]

"The Zionist founders who came to this country were pioneers who carried in their hearts the most lofty ideals. They believed in national liberation, freedom, justice and equality. We are proud of them. They certainly did not dream of committing an injustice of historic proportions."

Lofty idealists? How to square this with the testimony of Zionist moderate, Ahad Ha-Am, who wrote as early as 1891: "They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause, and even boast of these deeds; and nobody among us opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination." Ha-Am was later compelled to ask, "Is this the dream of a return to Zion which our people have dreamt for centuries: that we now come to Zion to stain its soil with innocent blood?" He scathingly described Avnery's pioneers as "a small people of new Levantines who vie with other Levantines in shedding blood, in desire for vengeance, and in angry violence? If this be the 'Messiah', then I do not wish to see his coming." (Quoted in The Zionist Mind, Alan R Taylor, p 103)

Or take the findings of the shelved 1919 report, Recommendations of the King-Crane Commission with Regard to Syria-Palestine and Iraq. US President Woodrow Wilson, who believed that the wishes of the population concerned should be the determining element in the choice of a mandatory power, had sent Henry King and Charles Crane to take the pulse of both communities in Syria/Palestine. Finding that Lord Balfour, in his famous 1917 declaration favouring 'the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people', 'it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine', had gone too far, they called for "the extreme Zionist programme" to be "greatly modified. For a national home for the Jewish people is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission's conferences with Jewish representatives, that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase." This was for public consumption. It was left to the British interviewees to reveal the elephant in the room: given the intensity of the indigenous opposition to unlimited Jewish immigration, "No British officer, consulted by the Commissioners, believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms."

Nor did Ha-Am's "new Levantines" improve with the advent of a leadership "obsessed"* from the 30s on with the idea of forced transfer of the Palestinians (Morris, Haaretz, 9/5/89) - a leadership who even managed to convince themselves that it was "just, moral and correct,"** who hatched and implemented (in April, 1948) Plan Dalet ["a strategic and ideological anchor and basis for expulsions"***] , and who "understood at every level of military and political decision making that a Jewish state without a large Arab minority would be stronger and more viable both militarily and politically."****

[*Morris, Haaretz, 9/5/89; **Morris, 1948 & After: Israel & the Palestinians, p 43; *** Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, p 63; **** Morris, 1948 & After, p 22]

Avnery's idea of "a solution that may not fulfill all justified aspirations nor right all wrongs, but which will allow both our peoples to live their lives in freedom, peace and prosperity" is, of course, the two-state solution: Israel as an apartheid state ("governed by laws of our own making" as he puts it, presumably including those laws which incorporate the distinction between Jews and non-Jews and deny 93% of Israeli territory to non-Jews, Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel and the Palestinian Arab refugees of 1948) on 78% of historic Palestine, and a truncated state of Palestine on the remaining 22% currently occupied by Israel, which he hypes as "... the free and sovereign State of Palestine in all the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, which will be accepted as a full member of the United Nations..." Avnery clings to the stale formula now trotted out by every friend of Israel within coee of a microphone. Meanwhile, the settlements expand, the Jews-only roads snake across the occupied West Bank, and walls and cages spring up around defenceless and impoverished Palestinians faster than than the words 'viable, contiguous and independent Palestinian state' can trip off a politician's lip.

And what of the thorniest problem of all, that of the Palestinian refugees ethnically cleansed by Zionist forces under cover of war in 1948?

We must approach with open hearts, compassion and common sense, the task of finding a just, and viable solution for the terrible tragedy of the refugees and their descendants. Each refugee family must be granted a free choice between the various solutions: repatriation and resettlement in the State of Palestine, with generous assistance; staying where they are or emigration to any country of their choice, also with generous assistance; and yes - coming back to the territory of Israel in acceptable numbers, agreed by us."

Like the two-state solution, Avnery's notion of the refugees exercising a "free choice" of returning to "the territory of Israel in acceptable numbers, agreed by us" is yet another example of his "solution(s) that may not fill all justified aspirations." Despite the fact that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) enshrines the right of all refugees to return and claim their properties (Articles 13 & 17), that the Palestinian refugees have the backing of the UN Charter and international law for their right of return, and that UNGA Resolution 194 calls for precisely that, Avnery is only prepared to go so far.

Sorry, Uri, it's back to the drawing board I'm afraid.

Uri Avnery's 1948: A Critique

If you want to sort the political sheep from the goats in the Palestine/Israel fold, just look at the positions taken by pundits on the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948-1949. Uri Avnery is a case in point. Avnery is the 84 year-old veteran leader of Israel's peace movement, Gush Shalom (Israeli Peace Bloc), and an often perceptive and insightful commentator on the Israel/Palestine conflict. Yet his recent essay, 1948* (10/5/08, gush-shalom.org), reveals a major blind spot. In fact, at many points, I thought I was reading Benny Morris.

[*In which he states that his wartime reports from that era "will soon appear in English."]

Avnery views the first Arab-Israeli war as two wars: that waged by Zionist forces against the Palestinians (from the UN partition resolution of 29/11/47 until the proclamation of the state of Israel on 14/5/48), and that waged by Zionist forces against Arab military intervention after 15/5/08. He misrepresents the first as an "ethnic war" of the kind that wracked the Balkans in the 1990s. In doing so he overlooks the fact that the great bulk of the Jewish community in Palestine had only entered the country over the previous 30 years, under British imperial sponsorship and protection, and against the wishes and interests of its indigenous Arab inhabitants. Although both the Palestine and Balkan conflicts are characterised by acts of ethnic cleansing, the latter clearly lacked the colonial context that pertains in Palestine, which is more accurately described, from 1948 to the present, as a war between a colonial-settler movement and an indigenous population.

Avnery writes, "At the time, I hoped until the last moment that [the war] could be avoided... " Really? Avnery played an active part in a movement which expressly aimed to create an exclusively Jewish state in a land inhabited by a non-Jewish majority, and he hoped that the inevitable clash "could be avoided"? Did he really expect the Palestinians to just stand by as their homeland was carved up by the Bushs and Blairs of the day? And this despite their violent opposition to an even earlier partition proposal in the 30s? Avnery then writes, "In retrospect it is clear to me that it was already too late." One is compelled to ask, why only "in retrospect"?

Avnery continues, "The Arab side was determined to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state in the country which they (rightly) considered an Arab country. That's why the Arabs started the war." Hello? What is this talk of "the Arabs [starting] the war"?

In hoping that the war could have been avoided, but realising in retrospect that it was already too late by 1948, Avnery implies that, at some earlier point, war could have been avoided. If so, when? He doesn't say. Could it be that the Zionist idea itself, with its goal of creating a Jewish state in a non-Jewish land, is to blame for the 1948 war? When Yusuf Diya-uddin Pasha al-Khalidi, the mayor of Jerusalem in 1899, wrote to Zadok Khan, the chief rabbi of France, advising that, since Palestine was already inhabited, the Zionists should "in the name of God let Palestine be left alone," maybe Herzl, who was shown the letter, should have taken his advice. In retrospect, would that not have been the better course? But Avnery doesn't go there, presumably because blaming the war of 1948 on the Zionist project itself would only undermine his faith in that project. Hence his glib talk of "the Arabs starting the war."

And can he be serious about the following? "When I enlisted at the beginning of the war, we were totally convinced that we were faced with the danger of annihilation." Annihilation? Surely not at the hands of the Palestinians? Hillel Cohen, in his 2008 study of Palestinian collaborators, wrote of a pervasive "unwillingness to do battle" on the part of the Palestinians and claimed that "Senior figures in the Shai and Jewish Agency concluded that the Arabs of Palestine were not interested in fighting. They also deduced that Jewish offensive actions had increased the ranks of Palestinian fighters." (Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948, pp 232 & 234). The leadership of the Haganah, in a 25/3/46 memorandum to the Anglo-American Committee, exhibited no such fear: "As far as the strength of the Arabs of Palestine is concerned, we are in possession of well-founded information. There is no doubt that the Jewish force is superior in organization, training, planning and equipment, and that we ourselves will be able to handle any attack or rebellion from the Arab side without calling for any assistance from the British or Americans. If you accept the Zionist solution [partition and a Jewish state in the greater part of Palestine] but are unable or unwilling to enforce it, please do not interfere, and we ourselves will secure its implementation." (Quoted in Before Their Diaspora, Walid Khalidi, p 306)

At the hands of the Arab armies then? Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has written: "In public, the leaders of the Jewish community portrayed doomsday scenarios and warned their audiences of an imminent 'second Holocaust'. In private, however, they never used this discourse. They were fully aware that the Arab war rhetoric was in no way matched by any serious preparations on the ground... they were well informed about the poor equipment of these armies and their lack of battlefield experience and... training... The Zionist leaders were confidant that they had the upper hand militarily and could drive through most of their ambitious plans. And they were right." (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, p 46) The Arab states' lack of enthusiasm for war was also evident in their failure to intervene before May 15, 1948, by which time the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, including areas of the UN-proposed Arab state, was well under way. It is difficult to imagine how the Avnery we know today could have fallen back then for propaganda about "annihilation."

Avnery's refusal to acknowledge that ethnic cleansing was perpetrated by Zionist forces prior to the Arab military intervention in May, 1948, is astonishing. He writes, "The hundreds of Arab villages throughout the country dominated the main arteries that were crucial to our survival... In the middle of May, when the expected intervention of the Arab armies was approaching, we were already in possession of a contiguous territory. This was not yet 'ethnic cleansing' but a by-product of the war. Our side was preparing for the massive attack of the Arab armies and we could not possibly leave a large hostile population at our rear. This military necessity was, of course, intertwined with the more or less conscious desire to create a homogenous Jewish territory. In the course of the years, opponents of Israel have created a conspiracy myth about 'Plan D[alet]', as if it had been the mother of ethnic cleansing. In reality that was a military plan for creating a contiguous territory under our control in preparation for the crucial confrontation with the Arab armies." Benny Morris has said much the same thing: "There was no Zionist 'plan'... of evicting the Arab population, or of 'ethnic cleansing'. Plan D... was the master plan of the Haganah... to counter the expected pan-Arab assault on the emergent Jewish state." (Quoted in my 11/5/08 post, Benny Unhinged)

For both Avnery and Morris, it seems, as long as there's a war going on, moving the civilian population on with a spot of shock and aware is justified and cannot be described as ethnic cleansing. Yet wasn't World War 1, for example, the context for the ethnic cleansing/genocide of the Armenians by the Turks? After the Turkish defeat at Sarikarmis, and during the Allied assault at Gallipoli, the Turkish leadership, fearing an attack on Anatolia itself and viewing the Armenians as a potential fifth column (Avnery's "large hostile population at our rear"), moved in earnest to eliminate them. (See A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide & the Question of Turkish Responsibility, chapter 4, Taner Akcam)

Both Avnery and Morris play down the significance of Plan D, which provided for the destruction of Palestinian towns and villages and the expulsion of their inhabitants: yes, they admit, there was a plan, but it wasn't The Plan. Avnery slips the following in almost as an afterthought: "The military necessity was, of course, intertwined with the more or less conscious desire to create a homogenous Jewish territory." More, I would suggest, rather than less. Ilan Pappe's coupling of Plan D with the desire to create an Arabrein Jewish state is surely more accurate: "Plan Dalet was not created in a vacuum. It emerged as the ultimate scheme in response to the way events gradually unfolded on the ground, through a kind of ad-hoc policy that crystallized with time. But that response was always inexorably grounded in the Zionist ideology and the purely Jewish state that was its goal. Thus, the main objective was clear from the beginning - the de-Arabisation of Palestine - whereas the means to achieve this most effectively evolved in tandem with the actual military occupation of the Palestinian territories that were to become the new Jewish state of Israel." (Quoted in my 11/5/08 post, Benny Unhinged)

Without any reference to the manifest injustice of the UN partition plan for Palestine*, Benny Morris has written propagandistically of the Palestinian Arabs "defying the will of the international community, as embodied in the UNGA Resolution of November 29, 1947 (No 181)" (Quoted in my 7/5/08 post, Bend It Like Benny). Avnery's reference to it is not much better: "The Arab spokesmen... demanded the withdrawal of the partition resolution. The Jewish side stuck to [it wanting] to prove that it was possible." The latter assertion is simply not true. Zionist forces did not stop at the 54% of Palestine assigned to the Jews by the partition resolution, but went on to overrun a further 24%, conducting operations in the UN-proposed Arab state from April to May, 1948. Nor did they 'stick to' the partition plan's recommendation that Jerusalem be separate from both the Jewish and Arab states.

[* See my 14/3/08 post, The Israeli Occupation of Federal Parliament 3.]

Both Avnery and Morris fudge the issue of responsibility for the Nakba. Here's Avnery: "But the reality of the war itself caused the mass exodus." And here's Morris: "Most of Palestine's 700,000 'refugees' fled their homes because of the flail of war..." (Quoted in my 7/5/08 post, Bend It Like Benny). The reality of war/the flail of war, take your pick. It's euphemisms all round, folks. Anything to avoid acknowledging the ugly reality of Zionist ethnic cleansing.

Avnery does, however, concede as much in his discussion of war No. 2: "[A]fter the advance of the Arab armies was halted, a deliberate policy of expelling the Arabs became a war aim on its own." But even that is heavily qualified by the rider, "For truth's sake, it must be remembered that this was not one-sided. Not many Arabs remained in the territories that were conquered by our side, but, also, no Jew remained in the territories that were conquered by the Arabs, such as the Etzion Bloc kibbutzim and the Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem. The Jewish inhabitants were killed or expelled. The difference was quantitative: while the Jewish side conquered large stretches of land, the Arab side succeeded in conquering only small areas." Avnery sounds not unlike your average Zionist propagandist here: the massive violence of the perpetrator is balanced, even cancelled, by the counter-violence of the victim; the overwhelming, state-of-the-art firepower of the IDF by the homemade Qassems of Hamas; the million odd Israeli cluster bombs in south Lebanon by the two Type-81 cluster strikes of Hezbollah (See Lebanon/Israel: Hezbollah Hit Israel with Cluster Munitions During Conflict, hrw.org), and so on.

Avnery writes that "The real decision was taken after the war: not to allow the 750,000 Arab refugees to return to their homes." Ah yes, the real decision. Does he really believe, tooth-fairy style, that only after "we had received orders to kill every Arab who tried to return home" (See his account below of his wartime experiences), not to mention the wholesale destruction and theft of the refugees' villages, homes, lands, and businesses during the war, that such a decision was made? One longs for the honesty of a Yeshayahu Ben Porat? "Yeshayahu Ben Porat was a member of the Haganah during this period. He noted that while he had been in the Zionist youth movement, he 'was trained to despise the Arab population'. He was taught that he must one day struggle for a Zionist state that would be goyim rein. 'They did not educate us in the perspective that there will be a Jewish state here where Arabs and Jews will live together. The hidden thought and sometimes the overt thought was: they will go away and we shall stay'. Ben Porat later recalled that on the eve of the conflict most Jews believed, 'we needed a war with the Arabs. In the kibbutzim they looked at the Arab villages in the vicinity and they divided up their land in their thoughts." (The Palestinian Catastrophe: The 1948 Expulsion of a People from Their Homeland, Michael Palumbo, p 37)

Avnery writes of his war record thus: "When the war broke out, I immediately joined a combat brigade (Givati)... the place of every decent and fit young man at such a time was in the combat units... At the beginning of the war I was a private soldier in the infantry and fought around the road to Jerusalem [ in the UN-proposed Arab state?], and in the second half I served in the Samson's Foxes motorized commando unit on the Egyptian front... Throughout the war I wrote up my experiences... I reported that we had received orders to kill every Arab who tried to return home." And did he carry them out? He doesn't say.

Israeli activist, author, and one-time political ally of Avnery Uri Davis has commented that: "[T]o my knowledge [Avnery] has yet to account for his activities, possibly war crimes, in the 1948-49 war as a soldier with the Giv'ati battalion commando unit 'Samson's Foxes' directed... by such criminal 'orders of the day' as were issued in the daily battle sheets of the political commissar of the Giv'ati battalion, Abba Kobner, a survivor of the Nazi occupation of Europe and the Kobna Ghetto rebellion, who turned to Nazi rhetoric himself, issuing such battle sheets as Battle Sheet dated 12.7.1948 entitled 'Aju al-Yahud (The Jews Have Come): The Night of Raid and Purge: 'Indeed we broke the spirit of the enemy and also rent their bodies open. But the enemy strength is still there. It is an enemy. It is an army. Though we are confidant that the dung of the corpses of the invaders [will fertilize] our fields into blossom...' After all, Uri Avnery is reported to have taken part in the Samson's Foxes operation in the Palestinian Arab village of 'Ibdis, subsequently destroyed and razed to the ground... and to have participated in operations where the Samson's Foxes were ordered to move from Arab village to Arab village and 'shoot at anything that moved, man, woman, child, camel or donkey'* as well as to have taken part in operations in the south where the Samson's Foxes commandos 'raced with their jeeps after all those [Arabs] like hunters hunting rabbits' (Yair Lev, The Subject: Uri Avnery, Guerilla Pictures, 2002). Uri Avnery does not deny his participation in these operations - but claims that he did not shoot." (Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within, pp 147-148)

[*In his essay, Avnery writes of the modus operandi of Samson's Foxes: "In general, things happened this way: in the course of the fighting, an Arab village came under heavy fire. Its inhabitants - men, women and children - fled, of course, to the next village. Then we fired on the next village, and they fled to the next one, and so forth, until the armistace came into force..."]

I leave the last word to Uri Davis: "Uri Avnery and Gush Shalom are aware that the laws on war crimes are not subject to the statute of limitations and perpetrators can be brought to trial anywhere, anytime. They have joined their voices to those inside Israel and abroad condemning the war crimes perpetrated by the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as well as cautioned against the prospects of Israeli attempts to orchestrate the mass expulsions of Palestinians from the post-1967 occupied territories under the cover of the US-led illegal attack on Iraq. Yet, given Avnery's own failure and the failure of his camp to engage in self-critical assessment of their political choices in 1948, condemn the war crimes perpetrated by the Israeli army in the course of the 1948-49 war, and motivate prosecution for these war crimes, their peace advocacy today is tainted in that it betrays the rights of those most victimized by the political Zionist settler colonial project in Palestine, the 1948 Palestine refugees and their descendents, some 4 million people today." (p 148)