More of Morris

Another Benny Morris interview.

He gets better with age.

With the 1987 publication of "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949," 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 and, in recent years, despair over the violence and futile peace efforts. Along the way, his critical perspective seems to have reversed course, the same slow spin that has hardened many Israelis against the Palestinians and now complicates the Bush administration's current bid to revive a peace process between them.

As he embarks on a new book project to explore whether two states for two peoples is still a viable option for resolving the long conflict, Morris has come to believe peace with the Palestinians and the larger Arab world may not be possible, especially as radical Islamic movements that deny Israel's right to exist gain ground in the region.

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.

"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."

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The second Palestinian uprising broke out a year after that book's publication in 1999.

"It sent people politically, like a centrifuge, spinning in all directions," Morris says. "It polarized the Israeli left, driving those inclined to the far left farther that way and those of us in the Zionist left in the other direction."

In Morris's view, shared by many Israelis, the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was responsible for the collapse of U.S.-brokered peace talks at the time and the violence that followed.

...Morris's research had long suggested to him that the Arabs would never accept a Jewish state in Palestine. The second uprising, spearheaded by the radical Islamic movement Hamas, confirmed his view that "Arab rejectionism has always been very deep and very religious."

He began speaking out in interviews. Among his more surprising contentions was that Ben-Gurion should have expelled more Palestinians during the 1948 war to leave a stronger Jewish majority between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

"If the man 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 problem that existed here in 1947 remains today -- the Arabs don't accept Israel's presence," Morris says. "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.