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Benny Morris
Benny Morris
Born	1948 Ein HaHoresh, Israel
Occupation	Historian

Benny Morris (born 1948) is an Israeli historian identified with the New Historians school, a group of historians who dispute the traditional Israeli view of the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Known for his work on the history of Palestinian refugees and his refusal to perform reserve duty in the West Bank, Morris was seen as an Israeli sympathizer of the Palestinian cause, and his work was cited and praised by pro-Arab writers. Since the outbreak of the Second Intifada Morris has increased his criticism of the Arab leadership, and has criticized "pro-Arab propagandists" for highlighting certain parts of his work while ignoring others. He has stated that the collapse of the Camp David peace talks was a product of Palestinian-Arab decisions.

Background

The son of Jewish immigrants from Great Britain, Morris was born in Kibbutz Ein HaHoresh. His father, Ya'akov Morris, a diplomat who at one time was the Israeli ambassador to New Zealand, and other times at the Consulates in India and New York, came to the Middle East from Ireland in 1947. He was also an author; among his writings are Pioneers from the West: A History of Colonisation in Israel by Settlers from English-Speaking Countries (1953) and Masters of the Desert: 6000 Years in the Negev (1961), the latter containing an introduction by David Ben-Gurion. Benny Morris received his doctorate from the University of Cambridge. For a number of years, he was the diplomatic correspondent of the Jerusalem Post.

Morris is currently professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be'er Sheva. In 2005, he taught at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Work

The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, 1988

Morris argues that the 700,000 Palestinians who fled their homes in 1947 left mostly due to Israeli military attacks, but also due to fear of impending Israeli attack, fear of being caught up in fighting, and expulsions, but not as the result of an expulsion policy. This was at the time a controversial position, as the official position in Israel had been that the Palestinians left voluntarily or after pressure and encouragement from Palestinian or outside Arab leaders. At the same time, Morris documents atrocities by the Israelis, including suspected cases of rape and torture.

The book shows a map of 228 empty Palestinian villages, and attempts to explain why the villagers left. In 41 villages, he writes that the inhabitants were expelled by military forces; in another 90 villages, that the inhabitants panicked because of attacks on other villages, and fled. In six villages, he writes, the inhabitants left under instructions from local Palestinian authorities. He was unable to find out why another 46 villages were abandoned.

The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2004

In the 2004 update of the 1988 book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, Morris answers critics of the first version and adds material from the opening of new archives. Morris's perspective evolves. He places more responsibilities on both the Israeli and the Palestinians. According to Morris, "for what the new documents reveal is that there were both far more explusions and atrocities by Israeli troops than tabulated in th book's first edition and, at the same time, far more orders and advices to various communities by Arab officials and officers to quit their villages fuelling the exodus".

1948 and after; Israel and the Palestinians, 1994

The book is a collection of essays dedicated to the Palestinian exodus of 1948 and subsequent events. It analyses Mapai and Mapam policy during the exodus, the IDF report of July 1948 on its causes, Yosef Weitz's involvement in the events, and some cases of expulsions that occurred in the fifties.

Righteous Victims, a history of the Zionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001, 1999

This work is based largely on secondary works and gives a synthesis of existing research on the various subjects and periods covered. Morris comments : "a history of this subject, based mainly on primary sources is, I suspect, beyond the abilities of a single scholar. There are simply too many archives, files, and documents. Nonetheless, parts of the present book-the coverage of the 1948 war and the decade after it, and of certain episodes that occurred during the 1930s and the 1982-85 Lebanon War-are based in large measure on primary sources." Re-published by "First Vintage" in 2001 with a new final chapter.

Criticism of Morris's work

Further information : Causes of the 1948 Palestinian exodus

Efraim Karsh

Efraim Karsh, professor of Mediterranean Studies at King's College London, has repeatedly stated that Morris fabricated his data about atrocities, stating that other historians who examined the same documents came to different conclusions.

Karsh's criticism of Morris and the New Historians is laid out in his Fabricating Israeli History: The New Historians. Since the publishing of the book Karsh and Morris have engaged in a lengthy and heated dialogue on these issues, which has often involved personal insults, and has sometimes been characterized as a feud.

In an answer in an article of four lines, Morris says that 'Efraim Karsh's article (...) is a mélange of distortions, half-truths, and plain lies that vividly demonstrates his profound ignorance of both the source material (his piece contains more than fifty footnotes but is based almost entirely on references to and quotations from secondary works, many of them of dubious value) and the history of the Zionist-Arab conflict. It does not deserve serious attention or reply.' Later Morris gave more details, saying that Karsh 'belabor minor points while completely ignoring, and hiding from his readers, the main pieces of evidence' and argued that 'In Fabricating, Karsh, while claiming to have "demolished" the whole oeuvre, in fact deal with only four pages of Birth. These pages tried to show that the Zionist leadership during 1937-38 supported a "transfer solution" to the prospective Jewish state's "Arab problem"'.

Anita Shapira criticizes the 'four line' answer of Morris to Karsh stating this is an example of the way how 'hoever dares to oppose or to criticize the pronouncements of these self-styled iconoclasts is savagely maligned'. Referring to Karsh's footnotes, she argues that he quoted Morris himself or referred to studies by major historians such as Avraham Selah and to books (...) that Morris himself now adduces in his new book'.

Norman Finkelstein

From the other side Morris has been criticised by Norman Finkelstein and Nur Masalha. They argue that Morris’s conclusions have a pro-Israeli bias, in that:

• Morris did not fully acknowledge that his work rests largely on selectively released Israeli documentation, while the most sensitive documents remain closed to researchers.
• Morris treated the evidence in the Israeli documents in an uncritical way, and did not take into account that they are, at times, apologetics.
• Morris minimized the number of expulsions: Finkelstein asserts that in the table in which Morris summarizes causes of abandonment, village by village, many cases of "military assault on settlement (M)" should have been "expulsions (E)".
• Morris’s conclusions were skewed with respect to the evidence he himself presents, and when the conclusions are harsh for the Israelis he tended to give them a less incriminating spin.

Both Finkelstein and Masalha prefer the central conclusion that there was a transfer policy.

In a reply to Finkelstein and Masalha, Morris answers he ‘saw enough material, military and civilian, to obtain an accurate picture of what happened’, that Finkelstein and Masalha draw their conclusions with a pro-Palestinian bias, and that with regard to the distinction between military assault and expulsion they should accept that he uses a 'more narrow and severe' definition of expulsions. Morris sticks to his central conclusion that there was no transfer policy.

Michael Palumbo

Palumbo criticises Morris' choice of sources. He says Morris disregards the more neutral archives of the U.N., the U.S. and Britain, and oral testimonies of Palestinians and Israelis, which can be reliable if their substance can be independently verified. Palumbo says:

Morris' regard for documentation is indeed commendable, were it not for his tendency to choose sources which support his views, while avoiding those document collections which contain information inconsistent with his principal arguments. His decision not to use the testimony of Israeli veterans is unfortunate, since some of them have spoken candidly about Israeli atrocities and expulsion of civilians at Deir Yassin, Lydda-Ramle and Jaffa.

Morris's political views

Morris was once considered a representative of the radical left; he was accused of being an "Israel hater" and was boycotted by the Israeli academic establishment. But his disillusionment with the peace process has caused him to increasingly make statements commonly associated with the right-wing.

According to 'The Economist': "Mr Morris also said, in an interview that stunned his supporters, that Israel was justified in uprooting the Palestinian “fifth column” once the Arabs had attacked the infant state, and that the number executed or massacred—some 800, on his reckoning—was “peanuts” compared with, say, the massacres in Bosnia in the 1990s."

Benny Morris describes himself as being from the left. Comparing him with Ilan Pappé, he says he always voted Labor or Meretz while as far as he knows Pappé voted Israel Communist Party . He also says he is a Zionist but underlines that his adversaries see in him solid Zionist convictions (as does Pappé) or solid anti-Zionist convictions (as do establishment Zionists) .

Benny Morris views 2000's intifada as a "political-terroristic assault on Israel's existence (and also as an offshoot of fundamentalist Islam's ongoing assault on the West, in which Israel, unfortunately, figures as a front-line outpost)". He is very critical of Avi Shlaim who, according to him, "moved steadily to the left--or is it, really, to the right? After all, he shares his anti-Israeli analysis with European neo-fascists and the Islamic jihadists, who openly advocate Israel's destruction in the name of medieval religious values."

When a Haaretz interviewer called the 1948 Palestinian exodus "ethnic cleansing," Morris responded that "here are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide—the annihilation of your people—I prefer ethnic cleansing."

Books by Morris

• The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, (Cambridge University Press, 1989)
• Israel's Secret Wars: A History of Israel's Intelligence Service, (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991)
• Israel's Border Wars 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)
• 1948 and after; Israel and the Palestinians, Clarendon Press, Oxford (1994)
• Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999, (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999)
• Correcting a Mistake? Jews and Arabs in Palestine/Israel, 1936-1956, (Am Oved Publishers, 2000)
• The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, Palestine and the Jews. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2003
• The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, (2004)

References

1. Edward Said (1998) ‘New History, Old Ideas’ in Al-Ahram weekly, 21-27 May.
2. Benny Morris, The Birth... revisited, p.5
3. Morris, 1996, 'Undeserving of a Reply', The Middle East Quaterly
4. Benny Moris, "Review of 'Fabricating Israeli History: The "New Historians."' by Efraim Karsh", J. Palestine Studies 27(2), p. 81-95.
5. Anita Shapira, The Failure of Israel's "New Historians" to explain war and peace. The Past Is Not a Foreign Country, The New Republic On-Line, 29 november 1999.
6. N. Finkelstein, 1995, ‘Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine conflict’, Verso, London, ISBN 1-85984-339-5
7. N. Finkelstein, 1991, ‘Myths, Old and New’, J. Palestine Studies, 21(1), p. 66-89
8. N. Masalha, 1991, ‘A Critique of Benny Morris’, J. Palestine Studies 21(1), p. 90-97
9. Morris, 1991, 'Response to Finkelstein and Masalha', J. Palestine Studies 21(1), p. 98-114
10. http://www.doublestandards.org/palumbo1.html
11. The Economist, 'Nations and narratives', 2 November 2006.(requires subscription)
12. Morris in an interview with Haaretz, 8 January 2004,

See also

• Avi Shlaim
• Anita Shapira
• 1948 Palestinian exodus
• Causes of the 1948 Palestinian exodus

External links

• Survival of the Fittest? - interview w/Benny Morris
• Camp David and After: An Exchange (1. An Interview with Ehud Barak) by Benny Morris, The New York Review of Books August 9 2001
  • Continued
• "Benny Morris and the Reign of Error" - Efraim Karsh, Middle East Quarterly
• Benny Morris essay regarding a nuclear Iran - Jerusalem Post, January 18 2007
• Israel Revisited Benny Morris, Veteran 'New Historian' of the Modern Jewish State's Founding, Finds Himself Ideologically Back Where It All Began, by Scott Wilson, Washington Post Foreign Service, March 11 2007
• 'New Historian' Shifts from Old View of Israel Israeli "new historian" Benny Morris was online Monday, March 12, at 2 p.m. ET to discuss his books and changing views that have driven him away from the critical perspective of Israeli history that he helped create.

• Alumni of the University of Cambridge
• Israeli historians
• Jewish historians
• Living people
• New Historians
• Israeli educators