Survival of the fittest

By Ari Shavit

Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist. People were mistaken when they labeled him a post-Zionist, when they thought that his historical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem was intended to undercut the Zionist enterprise. Nonsense, Morris says, that's completely unfounded. Some readers simply misread the book. They didn't read it with the same detachment, the same moral neutrality, with which it was written. So they came to the mistaken conclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that the Zionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually being condemnatory, that when he describes the large-scale expulsion operations he is being denunciatory. They did not conceive that the great documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with those sins. That he thinks some of them, at least, were unavoidable.

Two years ago, different voices began to be heard. The historian who was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israel had no one to talk to. The researcher who was accused of being an Israel hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academic establishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in the British paper The Guardian.

Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove, historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrew translation of his massive work "Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001," which was written in the old, peace-pursuing style. And at the same time historian Morris completed the new version of his book on the refugee problem, which is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominate Israel. So that in the past two years 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.

Both books will appear in the coming month. The book on the history of
the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew by Am Oved in Tel
Aviv, while the Cambridge University Press will publish "The Birth of
the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited" (it originally appeared,
under the CUP imprint, in 1987). That book describes in chilling detail
the atrocities of the Nakba. Isn't Morris ever frightened at the
present-day political implications of his historical study? Isn't he
fearful that he has contributed to Israel becoming almost a pariah
state? After a few moments of evasion, Morris admits that he is.
Sometimes he really is frightened. Sometimes he asks himself what he has
wrought.

He is short, plump, and very intense. The son of immigrants from
England, he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a member of the
left-wing Hashomer Hatza'ir youth movement. In the past, he was a
reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do military service in
the territories. He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev in Be'er Sheva. But sitting in his armchair in
his Jerusalem apartment, he does not don the mantle of the cautious
academic. Far from it: Morris spews out his words, rapidly and
energetically, sometimes spilling over into English. He doesn't think
twice before firing off the sharpest, most shocking statements, which
are anything but politically correct. He describes horrific war crimes
offhandedly, paints apocalyptic visions with a smile on his lips. He
gives the observer the feeling that this agitated individual, who with
his own hands opened the Zionist Pandora's box, is still having
difficulty coping with what he found in it, still finding it hard to
deal with the internal contradictions that are his lot and the lot of us
all.

Rape, massacre, transfer

Benny Morris, in the month ahead the new version of your book on the
birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be published. Who
will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or the Palestinians?

"The revised book is a double-edged sword. It is based on many documents that were not available to me when I wrote the original book, most of
them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives. What the new material
shows is that there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had
previously thought. To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape.
In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah [the pre-state
defense force that was the precursor of the IDF] were given operational
orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers,
expel them and destroy the villages themselves.

"At the same time, it turns out that there was a series of orders issued
by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinian intermediate levels
to remove children, women and the elderly from the villages. So that on
the one hand, the book reinforces the accusation against the Zionist
side, but on the other hand it also proves that many of those who left
the villages did so with the encouragement of the Palestinian leadership
itself."

According to your new findings, how many cases of Israeli rape were
there in 1948?

"About a dozen. In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered her and
her father. In Jaffa, soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped one girl and
tried to rape several more. At Hunin, which is in the Galilee, two girls
were raped and then murdered. There were one or two cases of rape at
Tantura, south of Haifa. There was one case of rape at Qula, in the
center of the country. At the village of Abu Shusha, near Kibbutz Gezer
[in the Ramle area] there were four female prisoners, one of whom was
raped a number of times. And there were other cases. Usually more than
one soldier was involved. Usually there were one or two Palestinian
girls. In a large proportion of the cases the event ended with murder.
Because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these
events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were
reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip
of the iceberg."

According to your findings, how many acts of Israeli massacre were
perpetrated in 1948?

"Twenty-four. In some cases four or five people were executed, in others
the numbers were 70, 80, 100. There was also a great deal of arbitrary
killing. Two old men are spotted walking in a field - they are shot. A
woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shot. There are cases
such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which a
column entered the village with all guns blazing and killed anything
that moved.

"The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir Yassin (100-110), Lod
(250), Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70). There is no
unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tantura, but war crimes
were perpetrated there. At Jaffa there was a massacre about which
nothing had been known until now. The same at Arab al Muwassi, in the
north. About half of the acts of massacre were part of Operation Hiram
[in the north, in October 1948]: at Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Eilaboun, Arab
al Muwasi, Deir al Asad, Majdal Krum, Sasa. In Operation Hiram there was
a unusually high concentration of executions of people against a wall or
next to a well in an orderly fashion.

"That can't be chance. It's a pattern. Apparently, various officers who
took part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they
received permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the
population to take to the roads. The fact is that no one was punished
for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. He covered up
for the officers who did the massacres."

What you are telling me here, as though by the way, is that in Operation
Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicit expulsion order. Is that
right?

"Yes. One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31, 1948,
the commander of the Northern Front, Moshe Carmel, issued an order in
writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arab population.
Carmel took this action immediately after a visit by Ben-Gurion to the
Northern Command in Nazareth. There is no doubt in my mind that this
order originated with Ben-Gurion. Just as the expulsion order for the
city of Lod, which was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, was issued immediately
after Ben-Gurion visited the headquarters of Operation Dani [July
1948]."

Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for a
deliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion?

"From April 1948, Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transfer. There
is no explicit order of his in writing, there is no orderly
comprehensive policy, but there is an atmosphere of [population]
transfer. The transfer idea is in the air. The entire leadership
understands that this is the idea. The officer corps understands what is
required of them. Under Ben-Gurion, a consensus of transfer is created."

Ben-Gurion was a "transferist"?

"Of course. Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could
be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst.
There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist."

I don't hear you condemning him.

"Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not
have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade
it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not
have arisen here."