[Peace-discuss] "1948"

Wed May 7 05:59:42 CDT 2008

  John Mearsheimer: Eviscerates the NYT Review of Benny Morris's book, 1948

Source: John Mearsheimer, writing at Mondoweiss (blog) (5-4-08)

Make sure you read David Margolick's review of the new Benny Morris book in the 
NYT Book Review section today. It is another shocking piece, given how much we 
now know about 1948.

First, he talks about "the dramatically outnumbered Jews," how the Arab armies 
had "numerical superiority" over the Israelis. This is simply not true. The 
Zionist/Israeli fighting forces outnumbered the Palestinians between December 
1947 and May 1948, and they outnumbered the Arab armies from May 1948 to January 
1949, when the fighting stopped. Steve [Walt] and I lay out the numbers on p. 82 
of the Lobby book.

Second, and related, he says that "on paper and on the ground, the Palestinians 
had the edge." This is not a serious argument. The Palestinian fighting forces 
had been decimated by the British in the 1936-1939 revolt, and they were in no 
position to put up a fight against the Zionists in 1948. This is why Yigal 
Yadin, a prominent military commander in 1948, said that if the British had not 
been present in Palestine until May 1948, "we could have quelled the Arab riot 
in one month." And it was essentially a riot, because the Palestinians had 
little fighting power, thanks to what happened a decade before. An excellent 
source on this matter is Rashid Khalidi's book, The Iron Cage.

Third, Margolick says that "transfer -- or expulsion or ethnic cleansing -- was 
never an explicit part of the Zionist program." It just started happening in the 
course of the war, and the "Jewish leaders, struck by their good fortune," 
pushed it along. This is not true; there is an abundance of evidence that 
contradicts Margolick’s claim. He ought to read Nur Masalha's Expulsion of the 
Palestinians and Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of the Palestinians. Plus, 
the argument fails the common sense test. Given demographics and where the Jews 
and Arabs lived, there was no way that the Zionists could create a Jewish state 
without transfer. Not surprisingly, that point was well understood by the 
Zionist leadership. Consider what Morris told a Ha'aretz interviewer in 2004: 
"Of course. Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no 
Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be 
no such state. It would not be able to exist... Ben-Gurion was right. If he had 
not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be 
clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, 
a Jewish state would not have arisen here." Although Benny Morris tries to argue 
that the transfer was "born of war," he provides too much evidence to the 
contrary in his books and interviews, which is what allowed Norman Finkelstein 
to undermine Morris's case in Image and Reality (chapter 3).

Fourth, Margolick effectively repeats the myth that one of the main reasons that 
the Palestinians fled in 1948 was because Arab leaders broadcast messages to 
them telling them to leave their homes. He writes: "apocalyptic Arab broadcasts 
induced further flight and depicted as traitors those who chose to stay behind." 
One would have thought that this myth had been put to rest by now. The truth is 
that most Arab leaders urged the Palestinian population to stay at home, but 
fear of violent death at the hands of the Zionist forces led most of them to 
flee. This is not to deny that some Arab commanders did instruct Palestinian 
civilians to evacuate their homes during the fighting, either to make sure that 
they did not get caught in a firefight or to ensure that they were not killed by 
the Zionist forces engaged in ethnically cleansing Palestinians.

Fifth, he clearly implies that the expulsion was the Arab's own fault. He 
writes: "The Arabs, it was said, had only themselves to blame for the upheaval: 
they’d started it. And, Morris notes, the Jews were only emulating the Arabs, 
who’d always envisioned a virtually Judenrein Palestine." This is an outrageous 
argument. The Zionist came to Palestine knowing full well that there were an 
indigenous people there and that they would have to steal their land. Margolick, 
to his credit, quotes Ben-Gurion saying that the Zionists stole their land. Of 
course, the Palestinians resisted the Jews. Who could blame them? Again, 
Ben-Gurion is worth quoting: “Were I an Arab, I would rebel even more 
vigorously, bitterly, and desperately against the immigration that will one day 
turn Palestine and all its Arab residents over to Jewish rule."

The Palestinians certainly did not start this conflict. They were simply 
reacting to an attempt by the Zionists to take away their homes and land, which 
they eventually did. Furthermore, to talk about a "Judenrein Palestine" is a 
subtle way of implying that the Palestinians were Nazis, which they were not. It 
is also worth noting that there were Jews living peacefully in the area we call 
Palestine before the Zionists began moving there from Europe. Moreover, there 
was little resistance to the first Jews who came to Palestine in the late 1800s 
and early 1900s. The resistance appeared when the Arab population came to 
understand the Zionists' agenda.

Finally, Margolick goes to some lengths to portray Morris as the beacon of 
reason and light. He writes: "No one is better suited to the task than Benny 
Morris, the Israeli historian who, in previous works, has cast an original and 
skeptical eye on his country’s founding myths. Whatever controversy he has 
stirred in the past, Morris relates the story of his new book soberly and 
somberly, evenhandedly and exhaustively." He later says: "Deep inside Morris’s 
book is an authoritative and fair-minded account of an epochal and volatile 
event. He has reconstructed that event with scrupulous exactitude. But despite 
its prodigious research and keen analysis, ‘1948’ can be exasperatingly tedious."

Of course, he does not say that there are all sorts of experts on 1948 who 
disagree with Morris. Nor does he mention Morris's outrageous statements about 
the Palestinians in his infamous January 9, 2004 interview in Ha'aretz, where he 
described them as "barbarians" and "serial killers" who are part of a "sick 
society." He went on to say that: "Something like a cage has to be built for 
them. I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. 
There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another."

One would think any fair-minded reviewer would at least make mention of the fact 
that Morris has made such comments. But, of course, The New York Times is rarely 
fair-minded when it comes to Israel.

Posted on Monday, May 5, 2008 at 2:14 PM

http://hnn.us/roundup/14.html#50098

David Green wrote:
> http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2008/05/make-sure-you-r.html
>  
> This comment on Israeli historian Benny Morris's new book is linked to 
> on Juan Cole's website, who writes "The review repeats a lot of old 
> discredited chestnuts about the 1948 war. The Arab governments did not 
> call on the Palestinians to leave, guys. There is no transcript of any 
> such transmission in any archive. Nor would it make sense to deprive 
> their armies of sympathetic locals who could offer food and information. 
> Etc., etc. But Zionist propaganda, like other nationalist propaganda, 
> has immense staying power in the face of contrary evidence."
>  
> It's really too bad that this stuff has to be re-done again and again, 
> not only 20 years since the revisionist school of thought largely 
> dispensed with the mythology, and even 47 years after the myth of "Arab 
> broadcasts" was dispensed with in 1961.
>  
> But this is the sort of thing that allows so-called "moderates" like the 
> guy who spoke at Hillel on April 1st to begin his talk by summarizing 
> 100 years of Zionism as "the Jews came in peace, but the Arabs wanted war."
>  
> While Mearsheimer overestimates the power of the Israel Lobby in his 
> book of the same name, his general antipathy towards Israeli policies is 
> well grounded. The books mentioned serve as essential texts, and it 
> should be understood that the perspective taken at Hillel would not be 
> taken seriously in the history department on this campus, or in any 
> history or Middle East studies department in this country.
>  
> If we want to consider why this nonsense is perpetuated at Hillel (and 
> beyond that, how it is perpetuated in the name of "moderation"), it's 
> important to understand why it survives at the NY Times. As Norman 
> Finkelstein has commented recently, 1948 is no longer a topic of serious 
> historical controversy, because the facts on the ground resulting from 
> 1948 are no longer politically relevant--Israel has it's 78% of 
> mandatory Palestine, and it's internationally acknowledged that they get 
> to keep it. 1967 is still a subject of some controversy, although it 
> shouldn't be, because resolution of the conflict relates to occupation 
> and settlement of land beyond that 78%, all of course which is illegal.
>  
> But the wholesale propaganda goes on and on, because any chink in the 
> armor of Zionist mythology is seen as threatening to the whole fable 
> (and indeed the American imperial fable), and indeed it should be. It's 
> like when something spills on your kitchen floor, and while cleaning it 
> up you realize the whole thing is filthy anyway.
>  
> So let's just keep spilling stuff, historically speaking, so everybody 
> can waste time on cleaning up mess after mess. It's both Sisyphean and 
> Kafkaesque, it that's possible.
>  
> DG
>  
> 
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