Daniel Levy Covers for the 1948 Arabs

Daniel Levy reworks an article, adds an attack on Benny Morris and I have just one comment (there, they are closed) on this:-

Benny Morris the historian brought to light, in painful detail, the planned and forced expulsion of Palestinian towns and villages; of massacres and executions of Palestinians; and of incidents of rape against Palestinians.

That is more than a bit disengenuous.

Since he doesn't note any numbers, you might get the impression that all Israel did was expel, murder and rape. Which wasn't the case.

Moreover, Morris has also realigned his opinion exactly what did happen.

And third, Levy doesn't mention what the Arabs did.  They raped, murderd, massacred and other assorted actions as part of their aggressive war in violation of the UN.

Neat trick, that, Mr. Levy.


^

Karsh Creams Morris

In response to Benny Morris' defense against the attack of Efraim Karsh, Karsh now rebuts and his main thrust is this:

Since the outbreak of the Palestinian war of terror in September 2000, Morris has been playing an intricate game of Jekyll-and-Hyde. In press articles and media appearances, he blames the Palestinians for initiating and perpetuating the conflict since the 1920s and 1930s. In his books, he casts Israel in the role of the regional villain, as he has done for decades.

...Zionism, he explains therein, is a "colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement... intent on politically, or even physically, dispossessing and supplanting the Arabs."

...[later, he was] peddling the longstanding Arab canard that "the displacement of Arabs from Palestine... was inherent in Zionist ideology" and can be traced back to the father of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl.  How can this possibly square with his present day public statements squarely putting blame for the conflict on "the instinctive rejectionism that runs like a dark thread through Palestinian history"?

...Consider, for example, Morris's emphatic oath of allegiance to the Zionist ideal - "the establishment and perpetuation of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, the historic patrimony of the Jewish people" (a definition readers will be hard pressed to find in his books) - and its simultaneous derision as a "colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement."

Keenly aware that the latter libel - the standard Arab depiction of the Jewish national cause since the early 1920s - might not wash well with his present cohort of Israel sympathizers, yet reluctant to disown anything he ever wrote, Morris performs his trademark textual acrobatics in an attempt to square this impossible circle. "Zionism was never, as the Arabs charged, a 'colonialist' or 'imperialist' movement," he argues, "but it did proceed by establishing colonies (moshavot) in Palestine and expanding from them outward, to encompass as much of Palestine as possible."

So it has all been a matter of misunderstood semantics. Zionism is not a colonialist movement à la the Arabs, only a movement establishing and expanding colonies. But if the Land of Israel is the historic patrimony of the Jewish people, as Morris now admits, there is surely nothing wrong in the existence of Jewish localities there. Why then should communal villages, agricultural settlements, and rural communities (as moshavot would be translated in non-archaic Hebrew) be described as colonies? By this reckoning, the 1909 establishment of Tel Aviv would also qualify as such.

The truth, of course, is that in describing Zionism as "a colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement" Morris meant precisely that: an offshoot of European imperialism at its most rapacious...

But there is so much more.

Read it all.

^

Goldberg Finally 'Gets' It

Jeffrey Goldberg, writing in a book review of Benny Morris' new book:

In March, Muhammad Dahlan, a former chief of one of the Palestinian Authority’s multifarious secret police organizations, and once a tacit ally of the C.I.A., defended Fatah, the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, from the charge, made by Hamas, that it had previously recognized Israel’s right to exist.

“They say that Fatah has asked them to recognize Israel’s right to exist, and this is a big deception,” Dahlan said. “For the 1,000th time, I want to reaffirm that we are not asking Hamas to recognize Israel’s right to exist. Rather we are asking Hamas not to do so, because Fatah never recognized Israel’s right to exist.”

This was not a helpful statement, at least not to the peace-processors in Washington and in Europe, and to their diminishing band of confederates in Israel and the Palestinian territories. But Dahlan’s comment helps buttress the main argument of Benny Morris’s new book, “One State, Two States.” Morris, a professor of history at Ben-­Gurion University in Israel, argues that Arab rejectionism is so profound a force that only the terminally obtuse could believe that Palestinians will ever acquiesce to a state comprised solely of the West Bank and Gaza...

...

Morris is equally dismissive of those who believe that a so-called one-state solution might work in place of a two-state solution. Muslim anti-Semitism and the deep cultural divide that separates Arab from Jew, among other realities, make this notion a fantasy. In this short book Morris asserts there is no one-state solution to the Middle East crisis, and no two-state solution. Morris does promote the possibility of a Palestinian confederation with Jordan, but he makes the case anemically and cursorily.

This is not to say that Morris isn’t convincing at times, for instance when he says that one-staters, like the constitutional scholar Daniel Lazar and the historian Tony Judt, who envision a utopian post-Zionist future, in fact are calling for Israel to be eliminated.

Yet Morris, like Judt, has an almost irretrievably dark vision of Israel’s future as a Jewish-majority state. The difference is that Morris does not believe that Israel’s mistakes — even the settlement movement that colonized the West Bank — are what might doom it. The culprit is the implacable fanaticism of Arab Islamists, who are unwilling to accept a Jewish national presence in what is thought of as Arab land, a position that hasn’t changed since the meeting of the third Palestine Arab Congress, in 1920, which rejected Jewish claims to the land since “Palestine is the holy land of the two Christian and Muslim worlds.”...

A New Benny Morris Article

A Relativist Muddle - The portrayal of pre-1948 Zionists as saintly and Israelis today as brutal is a misreading of history

...since before its inception, the Arab world has laid siege to the Zionist enterprise and tried to destroy or badly weaken it, in war after war and terrorist campaign after terrorist campaign, by continuous political delegitimisation, assault and boycott. And that much that is bad about Israel today – insensitivity toward Palestinian suffering, declining school standards, even the growing power of religious parties – is, directly and indirectly a result of this Arab belligerence.

Read it all.

On Forest Fires and The Writing of History

Gershom Gorenberg opens his book review essay in the latest New York Review of Books recounting a A.B. Yehoshua story:

In 1963 the young Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua published Facing the Forests, a novella destined to become a classic of Hebrew literature. It is a nightmarish story, the kind of dread-filled dream from which you awake shuddering, about a student who takes a job as a watchman in one of Israel's newly planted forests. His task is to watch day and night for fire; his only company is an old Arab whose tongue was cut out in "the war" — meaning Israel's war of independence in 1948 — and the Arab's young daughter. The forest, as the watchman learns, hides the ruins of an Arab village, the remains of an erased past: once other people lived here, members of a different nation. Their departure has to do with vague, unrecorded violence.

At the end, the mute Arab ignites the forest. The watchman-scholar does not participate in the arson, but welcomes the climax of fire and what it reveals: "And there, from within the smoke, from within the mist, the little village rises before him, reborn in its most basic outlines, as in an abstract painting, like every submerged past." As a watchman, the Israeli has failed. Perhaps as a scholar he has succeeded: he has uncovered history, as if in a hidden archive.

And in the past decade despite the campaign of the New Historians and the Post-Zionist academics and groups like Zochrot that have done much to revise history and also reveal history, the Arabs are still burning our forests despite no need - real or imagined, to unerase their past.

Here:

Fire Causes:
The first and most important cause of forest fires in Israel is arson (Table 2). In the 1980s and early 1990s arson comprised about one-third of all forest fires in Israel -- a very large proportion. Some of the sources for this arson were identified as the work of criminals whose sole aim was to collect insurance money. Many cases of arson in the late 1980s, however, were directly related to the Palestinian uprising (Intifada). Palestinians used fire as a means of their resistance movement as early as the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, but in the 1980s it was adopted as a highly visible action against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank. Arson was found to be easy to execute: all one had to do was cross the old border, which was unguarded and open to all, start a fire in one of the many forests which straddle the mountainous areas near the border, and then disappear. The occurrence of forest fires in areas adjacent to the old "Green Line" border between Israel and the West Bank was very frequent: in the years 1988-1990 between 288 and 388 forest fires were caused by arson and took place in areas near the old pre-1967 border (Kliot and Keidar 1992). In some of the fires which took place in northern Israel, Israeli Arab Palestinians were found to be responsible. These fires were extremely remarkable because 1988 was also rich in precipitation and, as a result, the vegetation concentration was highly combustible. Intifada-induced arson gradually faded out as the uprising started to die out in the early 1990s.

Guess either they don't like trees or they very much don't like Jews.

Getting back to the review essay, Gershom can't forgive Benny Morris his "dizzying movement rightward", that Morris' book is "unavoidably one with its own slant". Gee, that's so terrible. Are his facts wrong?

Gershom uses "1948 veteran Amos Keinan" to justify the showing of the Hirbit Hizah but neglects to note that Keinan himself participated in the conquest of Deir Yassin.

He also congratulates Morris:

"Morris is an unbending believer in the value of the paper trail: documents establish fact; interviews with participants are too subjective."

Ah, but who writes up reports? Objective persons?

Another point:

"Morris is using Arab statements from sixty or eighty years ago to make sense of today's stalemate; but it seems he is also reading those statements through the lens of today's events".

Or, of course, Gorenberg, et al., have been avoiding the "Mufti angle", that the so-called "Palestinian nationalism" has always been of a character of the most negative Islamic essence. That religious fanaticism is the basis of their movement, denial first, along with a horrendous capacity for hate and death although when forced to deal with a third book there on the issue, Gorenberg must conclude:

Exploiting Islam, al-Husseini succeeded in making Palestine a pan-Arab and pan-Islamic issue.

Gershom could have done more with this:

Arab forces also expelled or massacred Jews or prevented their return to places they had fled— but they could do so rarely, for the simple reason that the Arabs had few opportunities. They were losing on the battlefield. Nonetheless, Jordan's Arab Legion emptied the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City; Arab fighters massacred about 150 Jewish defenders of the religious kibbutz Kfar 'Etzion after they surrendered.

He could have mentioned Atarot, Neveh Yaakov, Bet Haaravah, all of Gush Etzion (Masu'ot Yitzhak, Revadim, Ein Tzurim) which he left out.

And he reveals his own slant:

This time, he leaps back much further: "The Jewish people was born in the Land of Israel, which it ruled, on and off, for thirteen centuries," until the Romans crushed the last, brief Jewish bid at independence in the second century CE. Later Muslim rulers never treated it as a separate province. By the nineteenth century it was an "impoverished backwater"—albeit one where Arabs outnumbered Jews by a ratio of eighteen to one.

Morris's underlying point here is that Jews were returning to their ancient homeland. In itself, this is correct, and is essential background to the events of 1948. But it is also a classic Zionist account, and is just one face of history.

Just one? It isn't factual? Gorenberg prefers prejudices one must assume.

Isn't This Illustration Threatening?

Edel Rodriguez's illustration for the Benny Morris New York Times' op-ed




The illustration may bother but read the op-ed!

Click here.

Shlomo Ben-Ami Peddles Academic Crap

My Obiter Dicta brought this book review of Benny Morris' "1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War" published in Foreign Affairs, Issue September/October 2008 to my attention. It's by Israel's former Foreign Minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, an academice and scholar being the Vice President of the Toledo International Center for Peace, in Spain (where he was ambassador) and a nice guy (he got some of us independents into the Press Center at the Madrid Conference in 1991, with me representing Counterpoint, which I edited at the time) even if his politics are screwy for he believes that Israel should pull back settlements and give up its '67 gains in order to secure its '48 victory.

The review is here:

A War to Start All Wars
Will Israel Ever Seal the Victory of 1948?


I have selected a few excerpts with my comments following:


1.

The birth of the state of Israel in 1948 has long been the subject of self-congratulatory historiography by the victorious side and grievance-filled accounts by disinherited Palestinians. To the Israelis, the 1948 war was a desperate fight for survival that was settled by an almost miraculous victory. In the Arab world, accounts of the war tend to advance conspiracy theories and attempt to shift the blame for the Arabs' defeat. In both cases, the writing of history has been part of an uncritical nationalist quest for legitimacy.

This time element is BS. Since the early 1980s, that is, 28 years ago, the Post-Zionist historiography trend has been around. That is almost as long as the 32-33 years of the former 'official' historiography.

2.

Refusing to admit that the noble Jewish dream of statehood was stained by the sins of Israel's birth and eager to deny the centrality of the Palestinian problem to the wider conflict in the Middle East, the Israelis have preferred to dwell on their struggle for independence against the supposedly superior invading Arab armies.

The ruling political and social elites did, not those, like me, who were blamed for the few instances of ill-disciplined fighting like at Deir Yassin when Palmach and Hagana battles, some even more ferocious were ignored or downplayed.

3.

When the war was over, the Palestinian problem practically disappeared from Israeli public debate, or it was conveniently defined as one of "refugees" or "infiltrators." It was as if there were no Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Palestinian people. As Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously put it in 1969, "They did not exist."

More BS. First of all, Golda said the enityt termed "Palestinian Arabs" did not exist as a category of a people. The Arabs who called themselves "Palestinians" did exist but not as a separate national grouping. She even reminded all that she herself, with a former British Mandate document was "Palestinian". It wasn't "conveniently defined" but that was the reality. There was no "Palestinian people" before but various groupings of Arabs who were in or who flocked to the Mandate area, like the Arabs of the Golan or earlier, in the 19th century who came from North Africa (see: From Time Immemorial)

4.

Once a peacenik with impeccable credentials -- he went to jail for refusing to serve as an Israeli army reservist in the occupied territories during the first intifada, in 1987 -- Morris has gradually drifted, together with most Israelis, toward a position vehemently critical of the Palestinians. He has blamed Palestinian leaders for the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the al Aqsa intifada, which began in September 2000.

In January 2004, Morris famously lamented that the architects of Israel's 1948 war strategy had not more thoroughly purged the Jewish state of its Arab population...But even if his left-wing critics consider him a controversial citizen of the present, Morris remains an honest and superbly professional student of the past.

So, there is yet hope for Ben-Ami?

5.

No such new history has yet emerged in the Arab world, nor have any Arab archives been opened to allow for such a fresh perspective. Most Arab historians continue to absolve their countries' militaries of all responsibility for the defeat. By exonerating the Arab armies and attributing their failure to the treachery and incompetence of conservative civilian elites, such scholars provided legitimacy for the revolutionary military regimes that took power across the Arab world after 1948.

Exactly. It's all in their minds.

6.

...the idea of population transfers had a long and solid pedigree in Zionist thought. The evictions of 1948 stemmed from an ideological predisposition in the Jewish community and a cultural and political environment that made military commanders feel comfortable initiating or encouraging the mass eviction of Arabs. Zionist leaders differed on many issues, but they generally agreed, as Morris points out, on the benefits of "transfer" -- a euphemism for "expulsion." The idea of forced transfer was explicitly endorsed by the British government's 1937 Peel Commission on Palestine...

Well, since Nansen received a Nobel Prize for Peace for his transfer scheme between Greece and Turkey [Nansen arranged an exchange of about 1,250,000 Greeks living on Turkish soil for about 500,000 Turks living in Greece, with appropriate indemnification and provisions for giving them the opportunity for a new start in life] and the British Labour Party's 1944 support for transfer of Arabs from the Palestine Mandate to Iraq or Herbert Hoover's 1943 plan, why should Jews be less Catholic than the Pope?

7.

Morris' characterization of the conflict of 1948 as an Islamic jihad against Jewish-Western infidels in Palestine is also unpersuasive. It is true that the figurehead of Palestinian nationalism at the time was the fanatically religious and viscerally anti-Semitic mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. And Arab discourse during 1948 was occasionally peppered with the rhetoric of holy war: the Syrian author Vadi'a Talhuq's book A New Crusade in Palestine, published on the eve of the Arab invasion, compared the war to the liberation of Palestine from the crusaders. Yet Israel in 1948 was no tool of the West.

Stupid. What has the "West" got to do with Arab antisemitism and jihadist orientation against Jews and Zionists?

8.

...In 1967, a powerful group of settlers in the Galilee region pressured the government to take over the Golan Heights. The hunger for land persists to this day, as settlers lobby politicians to allow the expansion of outposts in the West Bank. The redemption of the land of Israel by settling it -- which was encouraged just as enthusiastically by Labor Zionists as by those on the right -- was always central to the Zionist enterprise.

That first group were secular, left-wing Zionists of the Ahdut Ha'Avoda faction. Using "settlers" indicriminately, Ben-Ami would have us think all "settlers" are all right-wing religious national fanatic extremists. Of course, redeeming the land was a central Zionist tenet. Without land, what do you return to? A dream? A vision? Or something real?

9.

And in today's era of long-range ballistic warfare, the belts of Jewish settlements in the West Bank along the Jordan River and the old Green Line offer Israel no military advantage whatsoever.

More stupidity. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff report demolishes this theory as did the Second Lebanon War.

10.

The Zionist tradition of support for settlements should be challenged on political grounds as well; after all, a normal state is not supposed to occupy land beyond its legitimate borders.

Legitimate borders? Does he mean the temporary armistice lines never internationally recognized? (The armistice agreements were intended to serve only as interim agreements until replaced by permanent peace treaties. However, no peace treaties were actually signed until decades later. The armistice agreements, except for the one with Lebanon, were clear (at Arab insistence) that they were not creating permanent or de jure borders. The Egyptian-Israeli agreement stated "The Armistice Demarcation Line is not to be construed in any sense as a political or territorial boundary, and is delineated without prejudice to rights, claims and positions of either Party to the Armistice as regards ultimate settlement of the Palestine question." [11] The Jordanian-Israeli agreement stated: "... no provision of this Agreement shall in any way prejudice the rights, claims, and positions of either Party hereto in the peaceful settlement of the Palestine questions, the provisions of this Agreement being dictated exclusively by military considerations" (Art. II.2), "The Armistice Demarcation Lines defined in articles V and VI of this Agreement are agreed upon by the Parties without prejudice to future territorial settlements or boundary lines or to claims of either Party relating thereto." (Art. VI.9) [12] 11 The Avalon Project: Egyptian-Israeli General Armistice Agreement, February 24, 1949 12 The Avalon Project: Jordanian-Israeli General Armistice Agreement, April 3, 1949 )

11.

It is worth remembering that Arab armies did not invade Palestine in 1948 for the sake of the Palestinians; it was their war against the Jews that drew Arab governments into the Palestinian question.

Yes, but why did the so-called "Palestinian Arabs" launch their war on the day following the Partition Resolution that awarded them a state?

12.

Israel...must now belatedly seize this unique opportunity and negotiate peace agreements with Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians for a return to the June 4, 1967, lines -- essentially the same borders established in the aftermath of Israel's crushing 1948 victory.

That's just great. What didn't impress the Arabs in 1967 when they went to war to obliterate Israel, something they failed in 1948 and couldn't accomplish with the fedayeen in the early 1950s, will grant them sdatisfaction in 2008 after the disengagement failure with the Hamastan Gaza and the Qassams, etc.?


13.

A failure to do so, coupled with rapidly shifting demographic trends -- namely, a higher birthrate among Arabs than among Jews -- will permanently destroy the credibility of the two-state solution, allowing the binational model to gain sway among the Palestinians as they become a majority.

Demographic demonlogy. Arab birthrate is lowering and the figures are unrealiable as to exactly how many Arabs there are between the Jordan River and the Green Line. And if demography really is a problem, what are we to do with the Galillee?

14.

...Israel must admit once and for all that the territorial phase of Zionism has ended, dismantle most of the West Bank settlements, and help create a viable Palestinian state as soon as possible.

Just the opposite, that would be the worst scenario possible. "Palestinianism" is the negative of Zionism. It's rational is to destroy Israel as an independent political entity, in whatever border configuration. It is not a matter of geogrpahy but ideology.

On Benny Morris

But, just as the Arab world’s rejection of the 1947 partition plan pushed Israeli leaders toward an even harsher view of their adversaries, Yasir Arafat’s rejection of the peace proposals proffered by Ehud Barak in 2000 at Camp David and at Taba, Egypt, coupled with the second intifada, which followed, disillusioned Benny Morris to the point of embitterment. Morris, who has always voted for parties on the left, said that Arafat had “defrauded” the Israelis, and he decided that the Palestinians had no intention of forging a compromise. Morris was not at all persuaded by explanations and press reports claiming that Clinton and Barak had offered Arafat an unfair, hastily prepared deal. Even if Israel returned to its pre-1967 borders, Morris concluded, the Palestinians would consider that only a step in a “phased plan” to eliminate a “crusader state” from sacred Arab lands. After 2000, he said in a 2004 interview with Ha’aretz, “I understood that they were unwilling to accept the two-state solution. They want it all. Lod and Acre and Jaffa.” Morris did criticize the Israeli government for continuing to build on occupied territory, but, especially in his role as pundit and polemicist, he was no longer giving equal weight to two “righteous victims.”

In the Ha’aretz interview, Morris took a tone that was in scant evidence in his earlier journalism or scholarly work. He spoke of a “deep problem in Islam,” of a world in which “life doesn’t have the same value it does in the West.” The Arabs belonged to a “tribal culture” in which “revenge” played a “central part,” a society so lacking in “moral inhibitions” that “if it obtains chemical or biological or atomic weapons, it will use them.”

Morris was hardly the only Israeli liberal dispirited by Arafat’s behavior in 2000 and the suicide bombs and re-occupations that followed; nor was he alone in his gloom after September 11th. But his new language came as a shock. He described the Arab world as “barbarian,” and said that the Israeli massacres committed in 1947-48 were “peanuts” compared with those in Bosnia. Then, there was his call to build “something like a cage” for the Palestinians: “I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no other choice. There is a wild animal that has to be locked up in one way or another.” Upon reflection, even Morris was appalled by those words and later apologized.

To some extent, Morris has been writing the same book throughout his scholarly life, and one theme that has been pronounced is that of “transfer.” In all his work, he has explored the thorny question of whether or not Ben-Gurion and his colleagues explicitly endorsed a policy of “transferring”—exiling—the Arab population from Israel.

By the time of the 2004 Ha’aretz interview, Morris had adopted a harsher, more prescriptive tone that was sometimes chilling to the liberal audience that had first welcomed him. Fearing the loss of a Jewish majority and the rise of an Arab fifth column, some right-wing politicians have advocated transferring either the Palestinian Arabs or the Israeli Arabs, or both, to Jordan—a country they refer to as the true Palestinian state. (That was once a theme of Ariel Sharon’s.) Although Morris does not endorse such a policy—“It is neither moral nor realistic”—he does say that, historically speaking, BenGurion “faltered” in 1948. “If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job,” he told Ha’aretz. “I know that this stuns the Arabs and the liberals and the politically correct types. But my feeling is that this place would be quieter and know less suffering if the matter had been resolved once and for all.” Morris acknowledged that ethnic cleansing was “problematic” but later pointed out catastrophic situations in which it could be “beneficial for humanity.” He cited the Turkish expulsion of the Greek minority, Greece’s expulsion of its Turkish minority after the First World War, and the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia after the Second World War.

Source

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."

- - -

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.