Benny Morris
Benny Morris is an Israeli historian. He was a professor of history in the Middle East Studies department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in the city of Beersheba, Israel. Morris was initially associated with the group of Israeli historians known as the "New Historians", a term he coined to describe himself and historians Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé and Simha Flapan.
Morris's 20th century work on the Arab–Israeli conflict and especially the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has won praise and criticism from both sides of the political divide. Despite regarding himself as a Zionist, he writes, "I embarked upon the research not out of ideological commitment or political interest. I simply wanted to know what happened." One of Morris's major works is the 1989 book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1948 which, based on then recently declassified Israeli archives, demonstrated that the 1948 exodus of Palestinian refugees was in large part a response to deliberate expulsions and violence by forces loyal to Israel, rather than the result of orders by Arab commanders as had often been historically claimed.
Scholars have perceived an ideological shift in Morris's work starting around 2000, during the Second Intifada. Morris's perspective has been described as having become more conservative and more negative towards Palestinians, viewing the 1948 expulsions as a justified act.
Biography
Morris was born on 8 December 1948 in kibbutz Ein HaHoresh, Israel, the son of Jewish immigrants from the United Kingdom.His father, Ya'akov Morris, was an Israeli diplomat, historian, and poet, while his mother, Sadie Morris, was a journalist. According to The New Yorker, Benny Morris "grew up in the heart of a left-wing pioneering atmosphere." His family moved to Jerusalem when Morris was one year old. During his youth, he lived for two long periods in New York, where his father was an envoy in Israel's foreign service, and attended the Ramaz School.
Morris served in the Israel Defense Forces as an infantryman, including in the Paratroopers Brigade, from 1967 to 1969. He saw action on the Golan Heights front during the Six-Day War and served on the Suez Canal during the War of Attrition. He was wounded in 1969 by an Egyptian shell in the Suez Canal area and was discharged from active service four months later, but continued to serve in the military reserve until 1990. He completed a BA in modern European history from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and then received a doctorate in modern European history from the University of Cambridge in 1977. His thesis was on Anglo-German relations in the 1930s. Unable to find a job in academia, he took a position as a reporter for The Jerusalem Post. He would work for The Jerusalem Post for 12 years.
Morris served in the 1982 Lebanon War as an army reservist, taking part in the Siege of Beirut in a mortar unit. He also covered the war as a correspondent for The Jerusalem Post. He interviewed the residents of the Rashidieh Palestinian refugee camp near Tyre, which helped pique his interest in the Palestinian refugee issue. In 1986, he did reserve duty in the West Bank. In 1988, when he was called up for reserve duty in Nablus, he refused to serve on ideological grounds, as he viewed Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories as a necessity and did not want to take part in suppressing the First Intifada, later recalling that "my sympathies were with the rebels. I thought the Arabs really meant what they said and they were out to liberate the West Bank and Gaza from military occupation. I thought that was just. And therefore, I refused to fight them." He was sentenced to three weeks in military prison and was imprisoned for 19 days, with the remaining two deducted for good behavior. He was subsequently discharged from reserve service.
While working at The Jerusalem Post in the 1980s, Morris began reading through the Israel State Archives, at first looking at the history of the Palmach, then turning his attention to the origins of the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight. Mainstream Israeli historiography at the time explained the 1948 Palestinian exodus from their towns and villages as having been driven by fear, or by instructions from Arab leaders. Morris found evidence that there had been expulsions in some cases. Another event that Morris revealed for the first time based on his archive study was the contacts between the Israeli officials and the Lebanese Kataeb Party figures, including Elias Rababi, in the period 1948–1951. The related news reports were also published in The Jerusalem Post in 1983.
After publishing The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem in 1988, Morris was widely criticized in Israel. He left The Jerusalem Post in 1991 as part of a mass walkout of journalists due to a perceived right-wing turn in the newspaper and began searching for an academic position, but found that no university would hire him. He continued researching and writing but found it impossible to support his family from his work and had to rely on loans from friends. He considered leaving Israel but was persuaded to stay by Ezer Weizman, then Israel's president, who found him a job at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 1997.
From 2015–18, Morris served as the Goldman Visiting Israeli Professor in Georgetown University's Department of Government.
He lives in Srigim and is married with three children.
Political views
2004 ''Haaretz'' interview
In 2004, Haaretz published an interview with Morris conducted by Ari Shavit that has generated significant controversy. Morris told Shavit that his views changed in 2000 after the Palestinian rejection of President Clinton's peace accords and the outbreak of the Second Intifada. He had originally viewed the First Intifada as a legitimate uprising against foreign occupation, and was imprisoned for refusing to serve in the occupied territories as a reservist. In contrast, he has characterized the Second Intifada as a war waged by the Palestinians against Israel with the intention of bringing Israeli society to a state of collapse. According to Morris, "The bombing of the buses and restaurants really shook me. They made me understand the depth of the hatred for us."Morris said that Israel was justified in uprooting the Palestinian 'fifth column' after the Arabs attacked the infant state, and that proportion should be employed when considering the "small war crimes" committed by Israel. In the interview, Morris stated that:
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.
There 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.
Morris criticised David Ben-Gurion for not fully carrying out such a plan, saying: "In the end, he faltered.... If Ben-Gurion had carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country... If he had carried out a full expulsion—rather than a partial one—he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations." Morris also said: "I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which truly underwent a hard tragedy. I feel sympathy for the refugees themselves. But if the desire to establish a Jewish state here is legitimate, there was no other choice. It was impossible to leave a large fifth column in the country. From the moment the Yishuv was attacked by the Palestinians and afterward by the Arab states, there was no choice but to expel the Palestinian population. To uproot it in the course of war."
He sees the Jews as the greater victims, as they are "a small minority in a large sea of hostile Arabs who want to eliminate us." According to him, "Arab people gained a large slice of the planet. have 22 states. The Jewish people did not have even one state. There was no reason in the world why it should not have one state. Therefore, from my point of view, the need to establish this state in this place overcame the injustice that was done to the Palestinians by uprooting them."
Morris told Shavit that he still describes himself as being left-wing because of his support for the two-state solution, but he believes his generation will not see peace in Israel. He has said, "I don't see the suicide bombings as isolated acts. They express the deep will of the Palestinian people. That is what the majority of the Palestinians want." On the subject of "people the Palestinian society sends to carry out the terrorist attacks," he calls them "serial killers" and "barbarians who want to take our lives".
In the same interview, Morris called Israeli Arabs "a time bomb," claiming that "their slide into complete Palestinization has made them an emissary of the enemy that is among us. They are a potential fifth column." On the subject of the potential expulsion of Israeli-Arabs, he stated that "in the present circumstances it is neither moral nor realistic. The world would not allow it, the Arab world would not allow it, it would destroy the Jewish society from within. But I am ready to tell you that in other circumstances, apocalyptic ones, which are liable to be realized in five or ten years, I can see expulsions. If we find ourselves with atomic weapons around us, or if there is a general Arab attack on us and a situation of warfare on the front with Arabs in the rear shooting at convoys on their way to the front, acts of expulsion will be entirely reasonable. They may even be essential."
Morris called the Israel–Palestinian conflict a facet of a global clash of civilisations between Islam and the Western World in the Haaretz interview, saying, "There is a deep problem in Islam. It's a world whose values are different. A world in which human life doesn't have the same value as it does in the West, in which freedom, democracy, openness and creativity are alien...Revenge plays a central part in the Arab tribal culture. Therefore, the people we are fighting and the society that sends them have no moral inhibitions."
In response, Ari Shavit commented on Morris' justification for the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948 by contrasting "citizen" Morris with "historian" Morris, and noting that, at times "citizen Morris and historian Morris worked as though there is no connection between them, as though one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating."
Morris later denied the term "ethnic cleansing" with regard to the actions undertaken by Jewish forces in Israel during the year 1948. He said that possibly, the term might apply in a limited or partial context to Lod and Ramla. He says that according to historical records, approximately 160,000 Arabs remained within the territories of Israel post-1948 and that while many were indeed expelled, a significant number managed to return and retained their status as citizens of the newly established Jewish state.