Righteous Victims:
A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001
by Benny Morris

This is a history of the Palestinian/Arab and Israeli conflict written by a Zionist Israeli. He was the first Zionist historian to admit to the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948 and to the use of terrorism to drive the Palestinians out. His only reservation is that Ben Gurion stopped short. He should have driven all the Palestinians out between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. Other than that, it's a useful history that is worth reading. Just realize Morris is blind to the aspirations of non-Europeans. Following is the interview where he justified ethnic cleansing. I guess it's depends on who is doing the cleansing. I'll bet he didn't think it was justified when the Germans did it in the 1930s.

Survival of the fittest

Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist. People were mistaken when they labeled him a post-Zionist, when they thought that his historical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem was intended to undercut the Zionist enterprise. Nonsense, Morris says, that's completely unfounded. Some readers simply misread the book. They didn't read it with the same detachment, the same moral neutrality, with which it was written. So they came to the mistaken conclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that the Zionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually being condemnatory, that when he describes the large-scale expulsion operations he is being denunciatory. They did not conceive that the great documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with those sins. That he thinks some of them, at least, were unavoidable.

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Survival of the fittest (cont.)
When ethnic cleansing is justified

"There is no justification for acts of rape. There is no justification for acts of massacre. Those are war crimes. But in certain conditions, expulsion is not a war crime. I don't think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands."

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Diagnosing Benny Morris
The Mind of a European Settler

Israeli historian Benny Morris crossed a new line of shame when he put his academic credentials and respectability in the service of outlining the "moral" justification for a future genocide against Palestinians. Benny Morris is the Israeli historian most responsible for the vindication of the Palestinian narrative of 1948. The lives of about 700,000 people were shattered as they were driven from their homes by the Jewish militia (and, later, the Israeli army) between December 1947 and early 1950. Morris went through Israeli archives and wrote the day by day account of this expulsion, documenting every "ethnically cleansed" village and every recorded act of violence, and placing each in the context of the military goals and perceptions of the cleansers.

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The Education of Benny the Barbarian

In an interview with Haaretz, Benny “the barbarian” Morris voiced some candid and disturbing opinions about his newly acquired knowledge. Being a barbarian, Morris apparently enjoyed the accounts of massacres, rapes and forced transfers. So much so, that he opines that Ben Gurion was a wimp who didn’t have the stomach to finish off the Palestinians by cleansing them all the way to the Jordan River. He goes on to make a case for future episodes of ethnic cleansing that would include the possible transfer of Israeli Arabs.

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Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion

At some point in the interview, when the reader might think that Benny Morris has already said the most terrible things, he brings up, in passing, the extermination of the Native Americans. Morris contends that their annihilation was unavoidable. “The great American democracy could not have been achieved without the extermination of the Indians. There are cases in which the general and final good justifies difficult and cruel deeds that are carried out in the course of history.” Morris seems to know what the general and final good is: the good of the Americans, of course. He knows that this good justifies partial evil. In other words, under specific conditions, specific circumstances, Morris believes that it is possible to justify genocide. In the case of the Indians, it is the existence of the American nation. In the case of the Palestinians, it is the existence of the Jewish state. For Morris, genocide is a matter of circumstances, that can be justified under certain conditions, all according to the perceived threat that the people to be annihilated represent to the people carrying out the genocide, or just to their form of government. The murderers of Rwanda or Serbia, that are standing trial today in international courts for their crimes against humanity, might like to retain Morris as an advisor. The circumstantial justifications for transfer and for genocide are exactly the same: in some circumstances there’s no choice. It is just a question of the circumstances. Sometimes you have to expel. Sometimes expulsion is not enough, and you must kill, exterminate, destroy. If, for instance, you have to expel, and those expelled insist on returning to their homes, there’s no choice but to eliminate them. Morris documents this solution in his book on Israel’s border wars in the 1950s. A straightforward reading might lead one to think that he is describing the State of Israel’s greatest sin: the sin is not that Israel expelled the Palestinians in the course of a bloody war, when the Jews faced a genuine threat, but that they shot to death anyone that tried to return to their homes, and would not allow the defeated refugees to return to their deserted villages and accept the new authorities, and be citizens, as they allowed the Palestinians that did not flee. But Morris the careful commentator offers a different interpretation from Morris the historian: there was no choice. Not then and not today. He suggests that we see ourselves as remaining for at least another generation in the cycle of expulsion and killing, ready at any moment to take the harshest measures, when required. At the present stage we have to imprison the Palestinians. Under graver conditions we will need to expel them. If circumstances require, and if the “general, final good” justifies it, extermination will be the final solution. Behind the threat of prison and expulsion lies the threat of extermination. You don’t need to read between the lines. He stated it clearly in the interview. Ha’aretz printed it.

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Benny Morris' Alamo

The problem with liberal Zionists is the same problem with white Northern liberals during the civil rights era in the United States: they won’t admit that they’re on the same side as the Klan. Liberal Zionists refuse to be honest about what their politics really mean. And in this tradition of political distortion, Benny Morris sets out to mask a white supremacist reading of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in ‘objective’ history.

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Read the criticism and then read the book.