The Israeli national conscience

When he published The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 in 1987, historian Benny Morris

…found himself on a path that led to academic acclaim, an Israeli jail cell for refusing army call-up orders to perform reserve duty…

Scott Wilson writes in today’s Washington Post,

His conclusion that the Palestinian exodus was not entirely voluntary pricked the Israeli national conscience and gave moral weight to the claims of about 700,000 original refugees demanding to return to their homes. For decades, Israel has fiercely resisted this claim for a right of return, fearing an influx of Arab Palestinians that would threaten Israel's Jewish majority.

Now this is a very strange argument: The Palestinians who left the area that was later to become the State of Israel in 1948 and 1949 did so voluntarily, so that annuls their right of return. You hear this all the time. It’s a fundamental part of the Zionist narrative. And of course thanks to Israel’s ‘New historians’ Benny Morris and Ilan Pappé, we now know it is utter rubbish. Not that facts are relevant.

Hairsplitting sometimes occurs in Zionist discourse. For example, the famous United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, beloved of all adherents of the two state ‘solution’, calls for ‘Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict’. Some of Israel’s more ardent apologists, like Ted Lapkin, the Director of Policy Analysis at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), consider that Israel has fulfilled this requirement by withdrawing from the Sinai in 1982. Cynical as it may sound, technically, you can read the resolution that way.

So in much the same way, it’s irrelevant that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says ‘Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country’ (Art 13(2)) because it wasn’t proclaimed until 10 December 1948 (‘Human Rights Day’), months and months after Israel declared independence.

What might be relevant, however, is that many Israelis leave the country to travel or study or work, without compulsion. They are not loaded onto the backs of trucks at gunpoint. They depart entirely of their own free will. And yet they quite reasonably expect to be welcomed back in their country of citizenship, even if they are actually immigrants, even if they retain or acquire other nationalities. The difference of course is that those people are Jews and the demand for the right of return is for Arabs. And they say Israel isn’t racist!

Anyway, in Morris’s view,

"If the man [David ben Gurion] was already driving out people, maybe he should have gone the whole hog," Morris says now. "Perhaps in the end population exchanges and transfers, although they may have caused great suffering at the time, may in the long run have been better for everyone concerned."

The article is not the first time he has articulated this view. When he told to Ari Shavit ‘There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing.’ in an interview in Ha’aretz in 2004, it was a revelation.

"Had the war ended more definitively and logically demographically, everyone would have been better for it," Morris says amid the battlefields of Israel's first war. "Not only Israel and the Palestinians, but all of the Middle East."

He told Scott Wilson, "The problem that existed here in 1947 remains today -- the Arabs don't accept Israel's presence…A major switch in mind-set must occur for peace to come. That is the sine qua non of any peace agreement. All the rest -- the road map, the peace process -- is just footwork."

And yet, echoing Theodore Herzl’s formulation in The Jewish state, ‘a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism’,

"We are an outpost of the West, as they see it and as we also see ourselves, in a largely Islamic, backward and in some ways even barbaric area," Morris says in his trademark strafing-fire delivery. "The Muslims are busy killing people, and killing people for reasons that in the West are regarded as idiotic. There is a problem here with Islam."

So how, one might ask, does it come to pass that it’s ‘the Muslims’ whose ‘mind-set’ must switch? In ‘the West’, many don’t regard it as idiotic to deploy violence, even terrorist methods, to evict a coloniser. Indeed, it’s a fundamental element of the American national myth, and the Israeli nationalist myth, as well, as a matter of fact. On the other hand, many have enunciated the view that Israel’s wanton rampaging around the West Bank is not only politically and morally reprehensible, but actively counterproductive. But that would only be the case if there were a real intention to have a peaceful relationship with the Palestinians who live there at some stage. If the intent is to make their lives so miserable that the survivors are happy to leave, then perhaps it’s not as idiotic as all that.

"Two states is the only solution with an element of justice," Morris says. "But there are two other realistic solutions -- one is that the Jews will kick out all the Arabs across the river, and the other is that the Arabs will throw the Jews into the sea. I'm not sure one of them won't happen."

He holds out hope that a stable Palestinian state might one day emerge and ease hostilities. But he says he can just as easily imagine a day when Israel will have to drive more Arabs from the occupied territories or face expulsion itself.

Some say that Palestinians will be able to exercise their right to self determination in their little Bantustans if Israel ever tires of the peace process and decides the time has come for some kind of peace instead. That might be ‘an element of justice’, although it’s hard to see how anyone can seriously claim it is actually just. But I think it’s clear that Morris does not hold much hope for this outcome. In fact, it almost seems as if he prefers one of those ‘other realistic solutions’ and it’s not the one where ‘the Arabs’ push the Jews into the sea.