Historian Benny Morris Attacks Palestinian Intransigence
Benny Morris is the Israeli historian whose scholarly work changed the way the Israel Palestine conflict is viewed. He coined the term ‘new historians’ which has come to include Avi Shalim, Ilan Pappe and Tom Segev. These historians challenged some myths about the creation of the state of Israel.
In more recent years Morris appears to have come to regret some of the assertions he has made, or perhaps more accurately, the way in which his research has been used.
Some extracts from his latest interview in Ha’aretz:
“The first intifada was violent but not lethal. It was a popular revolt. People threw stones and a few people were killed. But all told, about 1,000 Palestinians were killed and Jews were not killed, because the Palestinians barely used firearms. They said they didn’t want to live under a military government and Israeli oppression. I refused to take part in that oppression when my battalion was posted to the casbah in Nablus. I was jailed for a few weeks. That’s a light punishment. In other armies refusing an order can land you in prison for years.”
“In the second intifada I was against refusing an order, because it wasn’t just a rebellion against the Israeli occupation but also an attempt to bring Israel to a state of collapse. Many of the terrorist attacks took place on our side of the border and included mass killings. There was terrorist warfare against Israel. To refuse to serve in that situation is not right. At the same time, I am one of those who don’t want to man checkpoints or burst into homes in the middle of the night and turn the closets inside out in a search for weapons. That is very unpleasant work and morally problematic. But the Arab desire to destroy Israel is also morally problematic.”
“The change I underwent is related to one issue: the Palestinians’ readiness to accept the two-state solution and forgo part of the Land of Israel.”
“Anyone who says that Barak and Bill Clinton made the Palestinians an offer they could not agree to is lying. Dennis Ross, the principal negotiator, has already shown in his book that that claim is bullshit. The lack of territorial continuity would only have been between Gaza and the West Bank. They were offered a contiguous territorial bloc of 95 percent of the West Bank, and they rejected it. But the story here is not one plan or another, but the fact that they want 100 percent of the territory of Mandatory Palestine. They were merely playing a game when they said they were ready for a compromise.
PMW: PA: Peacebuilding "is treason"!
PA TV attacked the opening of an Israeli supermarket in Atarot in Northern Jerusalem. The supermarket chain is known as a place where Palestinians and Israelis work together. The TV story included this picture which showed skulls in a shopping cart and text stated that shopping there, which is "economic normalization," "is treason"New York Times Retreats From Gaza Medic War Crime Investigation
An important part of the people-to-people peacebuilding between Israelis and Palestinians that Israel encourages are the joint economic projects that bring financial gain to both. One Israeli prominent in advancing such peacebuilding is businessman Rami Levy who has built a number of supermarkets in which Palestinians and Israelis work side by side. The chain not only successfully employs both Palestinians and Israelis but in the aisles of the supermarkets Israelis and Palestinians are shopping together as well.
But the Palestinian Authority doesn't share Rami Levy's or Israel's interest in peacebuilding. In fact, it opposes it and works against it. When a new Rami Levy complex opened recently in the Atarot industrial area in Northern Jerusalem, official PA TV broadcast this cartoon of a woman with a shopping cart filled with various items. In the reflection in the mirror, her cart is full of skulls, the symbol of death. The text asserts that Palestinians shopping there would be committing "treason" and called for "boycotting" the supermarket:
Text upper left: "Do not be the occupation's partner in the Judaization of the city."
Text upper right: "Economic normalization is treason."
Text bottom right: "Calls from the national and Islamic forces to boycott this [Rami Levy] complex as it finances the occupation and strives to Judaize the city [Jerusalem]."
[Official PA TV, Affairs from the Capital, Jan. 13, 2019]
Two and a half weeks after a front-page Sunday investigative project in which ten New York Times journalists accused Israel of “possibly a war crime,” the Times is backing away from it by endorsing the Algemeiner’s criticism of the article.
The Times investigative project jumped to three full inside broadsheet pages of the December 30, 2018 New York Times.
One of my many criticisms of the piece for the Algemeiner was this: “The Times, for example, describes Israel as ‘the far stronger party’ relative to the Palestinians. But there are somewhere between 1.5 billion and 1.8 billion Muslims in the world, and around 14 million Jews. There are about 50 Muslim-majority countries, and one small Jewish state. The Muslims also have a lot of the oil. It may be convenient for the Times to stir sympathy for the Palestinians by depicting them as the underdogs, but it’s not as clear-cut a factual matter as the Times describes it.”
I wrote that for the Algemeiner on December 30, the same day the Times article appeared.
Now, on January 17, the Times has waddled in, belatedly, with its own story acknowledging precisely this point. Times “contributing opinion writer” Matti Friedman writes for the Times op-ed page:
Publishing one front-page news article pushing the “far stronger party” story line and then a weeks-later corrective op-ed acknowledging “that’s not the way Israelis see it” and that in fact was a “misunderstanding” and an “illusion” may be a smart short-term business strategy for the Times. It gets the Israel-haters to click on the story accusing “far stronger” Israel of “possibly a war crime,” and it gets the Israel-lovers to click on the story about how the first story was wrong.
From a longer-term perspective, though, this approach has its risks. The New York Times, after all, is a newspaper trying to brand itself as being for “Truth.” “The truth requires taking a stand. The Truth is more important now than ever,” claims a Times brand campaign ad that the newspaper is selling for $50 as an unframed poster at its own gift shop. On this one, though, the Times isn’t so much “taking a stand,” as trying to be on both sides of the issue.