Israeli historian Benny Morris has doubled down on his defense of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that took place in 1948.
In a new interview with Israeli paper Haaretz, Morris addressed previous comments he has made concerning the events of 1948.
Israeli historian Benny Morris calls 1948 expulsion of Palestinians 'very clean war' – https://t.co/WTVfaSKF8R #Palestine #Nakba pic.twitter.com/Q14vdZvqkV
— al whit (@soitiz) January 13, 2019
70-year-old Morris said:
“When you judge the acts of slaughter in other wars, especially in other civil wars, what happened here in 1948 was a very clean war, on average.”
In a 2004 interview in Haaretz, Morris justified the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Invited to reassess those remarks in the latest interview, the historian doubled down.
While apparently regretting some of his language, Morris continued to back the population expulsions that took place.
In the fall of 2016, an important debate was had in the pages of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that illuminated just how untenable it is to deny that Israel was established through ethnic cleansing. Here's how it went:https://t.co/zeCulaBmVx#FreePalestine
— ForeignPolicyJournal (@ForPolJournal) January 12, 2019
Morris told Haaretz:
“Everyone must do their own calculation to decide if in 1948 they did right or wrong. I think it would have been preferable to both sides if we would have separated back then.”
He added:
“If only the War of Independence had ended with a total separation of populations – the Arabs of the Land of Israel on the east side of the Jordan (River) and the Jews on the right side of the Jordan, the Middle East would be less unstable, the suffering of the two peoples in the last 70 years would be much smaller … They [the Palestinians] would have been satisfied with a state of a sort (in the present-day Kingdom of Jordan) – not exactly what they wanted, and we would have received the whole Land of Israel”.
In advance of his forthcoming book "The Thirty Year Genocide" (@Harvard_Press) Benny Morris, one of the founding 'new' Israeli historians gave a lengthy and controversial interview to Haaretz @oferaderet….
— Dan Porat (@porat_dan) January 12, 2019
Morris was pessimistic about the future.
He hypothesized:
“This place will deteriorate into a Middle Eastern state with an Arab majority. The violence between various populations inside the state will continue to increase … The Arabs will demand the return of the refugees. The Jews will remain as a small minority in a large Arab sea of Palestinians – a persecuted minority or a slaughtered minority, as it was when they lived in Arab countries … In another 30 to 50 years, they will overcome us, one way or another”.
(MEMO, PC, Social Media)
In 2004, Ha’aretz journalist, Ari Shavit, asked Morris what new information his completed revised version of The Birth of the Palestinian Problem 1947-1949 would provide. Morris replied: “It is based on many documents that were not available to me when I wrote the original book, most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives. What the new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought. To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape. In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them & destroy their villages.” Haaretz, Jan.9/04
Benny Morris changed his tune in exchange for a professorship at Birzeit University.