Benny Morris on 1948 - Recanting?

For many years, Benny Morris's work was seen as blaming Israel for the 1948 flight of the Palestinian refugees. Excerpts from his books were quoted selectively by Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim and others to "prove" his point. Morris did not object or take issue with this view until a few years ago. His actual work in fact, was always careful to just avoid pointing the finger of blame unequivocally, and on each page of his various books, you can find conclusions that appear to contradict other conclusions. He also quoted Ben Gurion and others out of context and selectively, as if to prove the point that Israeli leaders were contemplating transfer, and he gave undue weight to the opinions of Joseph Weitz, a transfer advocate, which were not accepted policies.

 

Now he tells a very different story.

 

Ami Isseroff

 

Jihad, 1948

 

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ABRAHAM RABINOVICH , THE JERUSALEM POST  May. 7, 2008

 

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'I haven't revealed any smoking gun," says Benny Morris, sitting in a Jerusalem café.

 

That muffled drumbeat on the eve of publication of his latest book - a history of the War of Independence - may be reassuring to Israelis still shaken by the smoking gun he laid on the table with his first book. That tome, on the Palestinian refugees, revealed that many of those who fled in 1948 were deliberately uprooted by Israel.

 

Morris's new book, called 1948, reshapes half a century's published research on the first Arab-Israeli war, vitalizes it with his own extensive archival forays and weaves a tale so gripping that even an informed reader feels he is learning about the country's early history for the first time. (Disclosure: This writer worked at the desk next to Morris's in the newsroom of The Jerusalem Post when the world was younger.)

 

Morris's book on the refugees, which brought him international renown when published two decades ago, made him a hero to the political Left, which saw him boldly acknowledging the plight inflicted on the Palestinians by Israel. It made him anathema to the political Right, which saw him gratuitously granting comfort and political ammunition to the country's enemies. In subsequent interviews, Morris made it clear that both sides had him wrong: The tragedy which overtook the Palestinians was something that merited an honest historical account, he argued, but not an apology. The Arabs had started the war with the intention of driving out or annihilating the Jews. Furthermore, he says, if a large, demonstrably hostile and fast-growing Arab minority had subsequently remained in place, a Jewish state would not have taken root.

 

Despite the new book's title, the story it tells begins in 1881 with the onset of modern Jewish settlement in Palestine; the chapters devoted to the pre-1948 years are among Morris's most absorbing. A sense of déjà vu that the book sometimes evokes comes from recognition that the underlying state of play a century ago and 60 years ago is often still the state of play today.

 

The 1948 war was a conflict between two national movements, but something else underlay the passions, says Morris. "It was also a jihad. 'To wipe out the infidel' - that's what drove the masses in the squares of Cairo and Baghdad to demand war and that's what drove the Arab leadership in making war. I don't know how much they were thinking about the Palestinians."

 

The Jews were divided into contentious political camps but it was rare for them to employ violence against each other and they proved able to achieve broad unity on major issues in orderly fashion. However, differences within the Palestinian camp - between militants led by the Husseini family and the more moderate faction led by the Nashashibis - were bloody and debilitating to the Palestinian cause, a theme echoed in the current Hamas-Fatah face-off. Lack of common purpose was in abundant evidence. The Nashashibis as well as the Husseinis publicly condemned the influx of Jews but both secretly sold land to them and hundreds of Arabs collaborated with the Zionist intelligence agencies.

 

MORRIS DIVIDES the war into two segments. The "civil war" between Jewish Palestinians and Arab Palestinians, the latter supported by volunteers from Arab countries, lasted from December 1947 to May 1948. The militias had initial successes in cutting roads to Jewish settlements and imposing a siege on Jerusalem, but when the Hagana went over to the offensive in April it was able to decisively crush them.

 

The major test came when 20,000 troops from the Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian and Iraqi armies crossed into Palestine following Israel's declaration of independence on May 14. (The Lebanese army did not cross the border but provided some artillery support. Israeli troops did later cross into Lebanon.) On paper, the Hagana outnumbered the invading Arab forces, but half the 30,000-person Jewish army, says Morris, was made up of rear-echelon troops, while the Arab contingents were all combat units. No less important, the Jews had no artillery when the war began and virtually no tanks, while the Arab forces had both.

 

"At this stage, when the Jews didn't have heavy equipment, motivation was a critical factor. They really did stop tanks with Molotov cocktails at Deganya and elsewhere, and at Kibbutz Nirim 60 members and a few Palmahnikim really did fight off 600 Egyptians."

 

Although the dispatch of the four armies to the Palestinian arena was seemingly a high point of Arab unity, that soon proved illusory. There was no effective joint command and each army had its own agenda. The clearest was that of Jordan's Arab Legion. King Abdullah intended initially to seize only territories assigned to the Arabs by the UN partition resolution. He changed his plan so as to include Jerusalem - designated by the UN as an international enclave - when the Jews began attacks on the Old City and he feared the loss of the Muslim holy places, says Morris. But he never attacked areas assigned by the partition plan to the Jews.

 

"The Jordanians came into the war to take the West Bank. The other armies were out to destroy Israel if they could but, if not, then to take as much land as they could and also to prevent the Jordanians from taking too much."

 

The Egyptians, driving up the coast toward Tel Aviv, sent a column northeast through Hebron to Jerusalem not to support the Jordanians but, says Morris, in an effort to prevent the southern part of what became the West Bank from falling into Jordanian hands. Israeli attacks forced the Egyptians back.

 

The Jordanians blocked the road to Jerusalem at Latrun not with the intention of cutting off and capturing the Jewish half of Jerusalem as the Israelis believed, but to prevent the passage of Israeli reinforcements that might enable the Jews in Jerusalem to capture the Arab half of the city. Although Jordanian armored cars were stopped, with Molotov cocktails, when the Legion attempted to capture Notre Dame monastery on the seam between the two halves of the city, it had no intention of risking a plunge into the built-up Jewish neighborhoods. One of the first things the Jordanians did, says Morris, was to disarm the Palestinian militias and incorporate the West Bank into Jordan in defiance of the UN resolution and of the Palestinian elite who wanted a Palestinian state.

 

As the war continued, with intermittent truces, both sides grew in strength. By the end of the year, the Hagana had 110,000 men under arms, while the Arab forces numbered 60,000-80,000. By this time only the Egyptian army was engaged in active combat.

 

The UN partition resolution had allocated 6,000 square miles to the Jewish state. By war's end, an additional 2,000 square miles had been won in the field.

 

WHEN THE WAR had started, 630,000 Palestinian Jews had faced twice as many Palestinian Arabs. The latter held a greater part of the country and were assured the intervention of the Arab armies on their side when the British left. How, then, did the Jews prevail?

 

"They were far better organized for war," says Morris. "There was command and control, logistics, intelligence. Kibbutzim had trenches, barbed-wire fences and perimeter lighting. Much of this was done during the civil war before the real attack came."

 

Also, he says, the Jews were fighting with their backs to the wall. "They were fighting with their families alongside them and the Holocaust at their back, only three years earlier."

 

The Arabs were also fighting for hearth and home but knew that if defeated they would find refuge at no great distance.

 

At the end of May the first fighter planes arrived from Czechoslovakia. There would be 20 serviceable aircraft at war's end. The bulk of the pilots and ground crew were foreign, with probably more than half the pilots Christian. A number of non-Muslims served with the Arab forces, including a few SS veterans.

 

In the confrontation between the Yishuv and the Palestinians, writes Morris, societal differences were a major factor. "One [society] highly motivated, literate, organized, semi-industrial; the other backward, largely illiterate, disorganized, agricultural." Arab society was also deeply divided along social and religious lines. "For Palestinian men, loyalty lay mainly with family, clan, village and occasionally region. Nationhood remained a vague abstraction."

 

The basic history of the War of Independence until a few years ago was a book written in the 1950s, The Edge of the Sword by Netanel Lorch, founder of the IDF Historical Division. In the 1990s, official archives began making accessible previously classified material on the war. This was tapped by historians Yoav Gelber and David Tal to publish books in 2000. Official archives were also the principal source for Morris, who does not believe in relying on live testimony from participants or even, if he can help it, memoirs.

 

"People forget and distort. Collective memory becomes confused with personal memory. And as long as a conflict is ongoing, everybody will tilt [their testimony]. I decided I would do without memoirs unless there was such a big black hole that I had to fill it somehow."

 

He did not even rely on the memoirs of David Ben-Gurion, the central figure in the story. "He was wholly history-conscious all his life. He doesn't lie but he omits a lot, which of course is lying."

 

Ben-Gurion, who apparently didn't trust memory either, would compile his diary in real time. One official describes sitting down opposite him and seeing the white-maned head lowered as Ben-Gurion transcribed their ongoing conversation into a notebook. When Ben-Gurion's head rose, the visitor knew the conversation was over. Aware that history would be looking over his shoulder, Ben-Gurion would edit the diary afterward.

 

"We have the diaries of others who participated in meetings in which expulsion of Arabs was discussed," says Morris. "Ben-Gurion, in describing these same meetings in his diary, would not write 'expulsions.' He would say we discussed renovation of villages or settlement of Jews in villages."

 

In retrospect, Morris regrets not having interviewed one player who was still alive when he began working on the book - Yitzhak Rabin, who was a senior Palmah commander in 1948. "He was a very honest man."

 

What Morris does rely on are official documents like operational orders, battle reports, intelligence reports and diplomatic analyses. Cabinet protocols are an important source. In the US, Morris notes, cabinet meetings are not recorded, while in Britain, cabinet minutes are taken but only a terse précis reaches print. This is aimed at giving ministers greater leeway in expressing themselves.

 

In Israel, a stenographer records the cabinet discussions verbatim and types them up. Ministers are able to amend their words in the printed draft but almost always these changes are limited to matters of style, since the other ministers will see the changes. On extremely sensitive subjects, entire pages are occasionally blanked out. Morris believes that the blanked-out sections from the 1948 protocols include a discussion on the expulsion of Arabs from Lod and Ramle which sat astride the main road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

 

A major hole for any historian of the Israel-Arab conflict is the absence of access to Arab records from any period. "Their archives are closed," says Morris. "To everybody. We don't even know what's in them."

 

Although an occasional document might be leaked or sold, Morris says, that is an out-of-context finding, not the product of serious archival research. Because of the presence of British officers in the Arab Legion, some material from Jordan did reach the British public records office, which Morris also researched together with American archives. Indirect access to the Arab side was available through Israeli intelligence reports, POW interrogations and diplomatic reports, including from foreign military and political attaches.

 

Morris hesitates to use the word "great" when asked to evaluate Ben-Gurion as a leader. "Ben-Gurion devoted all his life to accumulating power - personal power and then for his nation. He was both a gambler and cautious. He was always pushing things but pulled back when he had to."

 

As prime minister during the war he made critical operational decisions, but he also twice overrode his military advisers and ordered attacks on Latrun which proved costly failures.

 

One of Ben-Gurion's most important moves was to steer the Zionist movement away from the concept of a Greater Israel to partition. He had been enthusiastic about the recommendation of the British Peel Commission in 1937, whose partition proposal included transfer of Jews and Arabs out of the territory designated for the other group.

 

"He had resigned himself to the necessity of partitioning Palestine," says Morris. "He may have pushed during the war for expanding the Jewish part, and adding Jerusalem, but he never seriously thought of capturing all the Land of Israel."

 

Why not? "Maybe because of international circumstances. Maybe because of morality. Maybe he felt that the Palestinians deserved a chunk of Palestine."

 

The writer is author of The Yom Kippur War.

 

abra@netvision.net.il

 

 

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An excerpt from Benny Morris's new book, '1948'
BENNY MORRIS , THE JERUSALEM POST  May. 7, 2008

 

1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War
By Benny Morris
Yale University Press
£19.99

 

'The Palestine problem is still in its infancy. The preface ended with the [end of the] Mandate and Chapter One began [in November 1947]... Do not miss [the 'next installment']!" recommended the British consul general in Jerusalem midway through the 1948 War.

 

"Chapter One," the first war between Israel and the Arabs, was the culmination of developments and a conflict that had begun in the 1880s, when the first Zionist settlers landed on the shores of the Holy Land, their arrival and burgeoning presence increasingly resented by the local Arab population. Over the following decades, the Arabs continuously inveighed, first with the Ottoman rulers, and then with their British successors, against the Zionist influx and ambitions, and they repeatedly attacked the new settlers, initially in individual acts of banditry and terrorism and then in growingly massive outbreaks, which at first resembled nothing more than European pogroms.

 

The Zionists saw their enterprise and aspirations as legitimate, indeed, as supremely moral: the Jewish people, oppressed and murdered in Christendom and in the Islamic lands, was bent on saving itself by returning to its ancient land and there reestablishing its self-determination and sovereignty. But the Arab inhabitants, supported by the surrounding, awakening Arab world, decried the influx as an aggressive invasion by colonialist, infidel aliens; it had to be resisted. The culminating assault on the Yishuv in 1947-1949 was a natural result of this posture of antagonism and resistance.

 

David Ben-Gurion well understood these contradictory perspectives. As he told his colleagues, against the backdrop of the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939: "We must see the situation for what it is. On the security front, we are those attacked and who are on the defensive. But in the political field we are the attackers and the Arabs are those defending themselves. They are living in the country and own the land, the village. We live in the Diaspora and want only to immigrate [to Palestine] and gain possession of [lirkosh] the land from them." Years later, after the establishment of Israel, he expatiated on the Arab perspective in a conversation with the Zionist leader Nahum Goldmann: "I don't understand your optimism... Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?"

 

To be sure, while mentioning "God," Ben-Gurion - a child of Eastern European social democracy and nationalism who knew no Arabic (though, as prime minister, he found time to study ancient Greek, to read Plato in the original, and Spanish, to read Don Quixote) - had failed fully to appreciate the depth of the Arabs' abhorrence of the Zionist-Jewish presence in Palestine, an abhorrence anchored in centuries of Islamic Judeophobia with deep religious and historical roots. The Jewish rejection of the Prophet Muhammad is embedded in the Qur'an and is etched in the psyche of those brought up on its suras. As the Muslim Brotherhood put it in 1948: "Jews are the historic enemies of Muslims and carry the greatest hatred for the nation of Muhammad."

 

Such thinking characterized the Arab world, where the overwhelming majority of the population were, and remain, believers. In 1943, when President Franklin Roosevelt sent out feelers about a negotiated settlement of the Palestine problem, King Ibn Sa'ud of Saudi Arabia responded that he was "prepared to receive anyone of any religion except (repeat except) a Jew." A few weeks earlier, Ibn Sa'ud had explained, in a letter to Roosevelt: "Palestine... has been an Arab country since the dawn of history and... was never inhabited by the Jews for more than a period of time, during which their history in the land was full of murder and cruelty... [There is] religious hostility... between the Muslims and the Jews from the beginning of Islam... which arose from the treacherous conduct of the Jews towards Islam and the Muslims and their prophet." Jews were seen as unclean; indeed, even those who had contact with them were seen as beyond the pale. In late 1947 the Al-Azhar University 'ulema, major authorities in the Islamic world, issued a fatwa that anyone dealing with "the Jews," commercially or economically (such as by "buying their produce"), "is a sinner and criminal... who will be regarded as an apostate to Islam, he will be separated from his spouse. It is prohibited to be in contact with him."

 

This anti-Semitic mindset was not restricted to Wahhabi chieftains or fundamentalist imams. Samir Rifahi, Jordan's prime minister, in 1947 told visiting newsmen, "The Jews are a people to be feared... Give them another 25 years and they will be all over the Middle East, in our country and Syria and Lebanon, in Iraq and Egypt... They were responsible for starting the two world wars... Yes, I have read and studied, and I know they were behind Hitler at the beginning of his movement."

 

The 1948 War, to be sure, was a milestone in a contest between two national movements over a piece of territory. But it was also - if only because that is how many if not most Arabs saw it (and see it today) - part of a more general, global struggle between the Islamic East and the West, in which the Land of Israel/Palestine figured, and still figures, as a major battlefront. The Yishuv saw itself, and was universally seen by the Muslim Arab world, as an embodiment and outpost of the European "West." The assault of 1947-1948 was an expression of the Islamic Arabs' rejection of the West and its values as well as a reaction to what it saw as a European colonialist encroachment against sacred Islamic soil. There was no understanding (or tolerance) of Zionism as a national liberation movement of another people. And, aptly, the course of the war reflected the civilizational disparity, in which a Western society, deploying superior organizational and technological skills, overcame a coalition of infinitely larger Islamic Arab societies.

 

Historians have tended to ignore or dismiss, as so much hot air, the jihadi rhetoric and flourishes that accompanied the two-stage assault on the Yishuv and the constant references in the prevailing Arab discourse to that earlier bout of Islamic battle for the Holy Land, against the Crusaders. This is a mistake. The 1948 War, from the Arabs' perspective, was a war of religion as much as, if not more than, a nationalist war over territory. Put another way, the territory was sacred: its violation by infidels was sufficient grounds for launching a holy war and its conquest or reconquest, a divinely ordained necessity. In the months before the invasion of 15 May 1948, King 'Abdullah, the most moderate of the coalition leaders, repeatedly spoke of "saving" the holy places. As the day of invasion approached, his focus on Jerusalem, according to Alec Kirkbride, grew increasingly obsessive. "In our souls," wrote the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, "Palestine occupies a spiritual holy place which is above abstract nationalist feelings. In it we have the blessed breeze of Jerusalem and the blessings of the Prophets and their disciples."

 

The evidence is abundant and clear that many, if not most, in the Arab world viewed the war essentially as a holy war. To fight for Palestine was the "inescapable obligation on every Muslim," declared the Muslim Brotherhood in 1938. Indeed, the battle was of such an order of holiness that in 1948 one Islamic jurist ruled that believers should forgo the hajj and spend the money thus saved on the jihad in Palestine. In April 1948, the mufti of Egypt, Sheikh Muhammad Mahawif, issued a fatwa positing jihad in Palestine as the duty of all Muslims. The Jews, he said, intended "to take over... all the lands of Islam." Martyrdom for Palestine conjured up, for Muslim Brothers, "the memories of the Battle of Badr... as well as the early Islamic jihad for spreading Islam and Salah al-Din's [Saladin's] liberation of Palestine" from the Crusaders. Jihad for Palestine was seen in prophetic-apocalyptic terms, as embodied in the following hadith periodically quoted at the time: "The day of resurrection does not come until Muslims fight against Jews, until the Jews hide behind trees and stones and until the trees and stones shout out: 'O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.'"

 

The jihadi impulse underscored both popular and governmental responses in the Arab world to the UN partition resolution and was central to the mobilization of the "street" and the governments for the successive onslaughts of November-December 1947 and May-June 1948. The mosques, mullahs, and 'ulema all played a pivotal role in the process. Even Christian Arabs appear to have adopted the jihadi discourse. Matiel Mughannam, the Lebanese-born Christian who headed the AHC-affiliated Arab Women's Organization in Palestine, told an interviewer early in the civil war: "The UN decision has united all Arabs, as they have never been united before, not even against the Crusaders... [A Jewish state] has no chance to survive now that the 'holy war' has been declared. All the Jews will eventually be massacred." The Islamic fervor stoked by the hostilities seems to have encompassed all or almost all Arabs: "No Muslim can contemplate the holy places falling into Jewish hands," reported Kirkbride from Amman. "Even the Prime Minister [Tawfiq Abul Huda]... who is by far the steadiest and most sensible Arab here, gets excited on the subject."

 

Nor did this impulse evaporate with the Arab defeat. On the contrary. On 12 December 1948 the 'ulema of Al-Azhar reissued their call for jihad, specifically addressing "the Arab Kings, Presidents of Arab Republics,... and leaders of public opinion." It was, ruled the council, "necessary to liberate Palestine from the Zionist bands... and to return the inhabitants driven from their homes." The Arab armies had "fought victoriously" (sic) "in the conviction that they were fulfilling a sacred religious duty." The 'ulema condemned King 'Abdullah for sowing discord in Arab ranks: "Damnation would be the lot of those who, after warning, did not follow the way of the believers," concluded the 'ulema.

 

The immediate trigger of the 1948 War was the November 1947 UN partition resolution. The Zionist movement, except for its fringes, accepted the proposal. Most lamented the imperative of giving up the historic heartland of Judaism, Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), with East Jerusalem's Old City and Temple Mount at its core; and many were troubled by the inclusion in the prospective Jewish state of a large Arab minority. But the movement, with Ben-Gurion and Weizmann at the helm, said "yes."

 

The Palestinian Arabs, along with the rest of the Arab world, said a flat "no" - as they had in 1937, when the Peel Commission had earlier proposed a two-state solution. The Arabs refused to accept the establishment of a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. And, consistently with that "no," the Palestinian Arabs, in November-December 1947, and the Arab states in May 1948, launched hostilities to scupper the resolution's implementation. Many Palestinians may have been unenthusiastic about going to war - but to war they went. They may have been badly led and poorly organized; the war may have been haphazardly unleashed; and many able-bodied males may have avoided service. But Palestinian Arab society went to war, and no Palestinian leader publicly raised his voice in protest or dissent.

 

The Arab war aim, in both stages of the hostilities, was, at a minimum, to abort the emergence of a Jewish state or to destroy it at inception. The Arab states hoped to accomplish this by conquering all or large parts of the territory allotted to the Jews by the United Nations. And some Arab leaders spoke of driving the Jews into the sea and ridding Palestine "of the Zionist plague." The struggle, as the Arabs saw it, was about the fate of Palestine/the Land of Israel, all of it, not over this or that part of the country. But, in public, official Arab spokesmen often said that the aim of the May 1948 invasion was to "save" Palestine or "save the Palestinians," definitions more agreeable to Western ears.

 

The picture of Arab aims was always more complex than Zionist historiography subsequently made out. The chief cause of this complexity was that fly-in-the-ointment, King 'Abdullah. Jordan's ruler, a pragmatist, was generally skeptical of the Arabs' ability to defeat, let alone destroy, the Yishuv, and fashioned his war aim accordingly: to seize the Arab-populated West Bank, preferably including East Jerusalem. No doubt, had his army been larger and Zionist resistance weaker, he would have headed for Tel Aviv and Haifa; after all, for years he had tried to persuade the Zionist leaders to agree to Jordanian sovereignty over all of Palestine, with the Jews to receive merely a small, autonomous zone (which he called a "republic") within his expanded kingdom. But, come 1948, he understood the balance of forces: the Jews were simply too powerful and too resolute, and their passion for self-determination was not to be denied.