The Revisionists and New Historians

            More than anything else, it was Arafat's rejection of the Clinton Parameters in late 2000 and the subsequent Palestinian launching of the war of attrition that dramatically affected Morris' thinking on the Arab-Israeli conflict.  However, whereas his interviews and non-scholarly articles after 2001 certainly demonstrated his new political leaning, his scholarly research and books were balanced, accurate, apolitical, and detached.  This was a continuation of the process he began in the later 1990s when he started  to add more context to his works.

            Benny Morris was born in 1948 to Jewish immigrants from England at kibbutz Ein HaHoresh.  The Marxist beliefs held by his parents placed the family on the fringe of the socialist Labor Zionist movement that dominated early Israeli politics.  Much of Benny's childhood was spent in Jerusalem and New York where his father was posted as an Israeli diplomat.  After graduating from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he completed his doctorate in European History at Cambridge.

            He returned to Israel in time to see Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, first as a journalist for the Jerusalem Post, and later as a soldier when his division was called to participate in the assault on Beirut.  It was during his visit to the Rashidia refugee camp outside of Tyre that he first encountered Palestinian refugees - which later would become the focus of his research.  While working at the newspaper, the Palmach invited him into their archives and asked him to write the Palmach's official history.  There he received his first taste in archival research, pouring over secret documents and battlefield orders.

            Sifting through the files, he came across a curious document from the Foreign Ministry that denied reports of Jewish involvement in the massacre at Deir Yassin.  The memo was essentially a set of talking points distributed to the Yishuv's diplomatic missions on how to deny the events at Deir Yassin.  The document's author was none other than Benny Morris' father.^[5]  From that point forward, the declassified documents in Israel's archives became his obsession.

            The Birth was published alongside other revisionists' works such as Ilan Pappe's Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, and Avi Shlaim's Collusion Across the Jordan, creating a public stir in Israel especially among the orthodox historians, just as the intifada began.  Amid the controversy in 1988, Morris' artillery unit was called up for reserve duty in Nablus.  He saw the actions of the Palestinians - throwing stones and striking - as a legitimate form of protest to Israel's 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.  He refused to serve and spent three weeks jail.

            A wave of criticism greeted the release of The Birth, not just from the establishment but from the radical left as well.  Norman Finkelstein argued that unlike Morris' conclusions, "Morris's own evidence points to the conclusion that Palestine's Arabs were expelled systematically and with premeditation."^[6]  Efraim Karsh led the orthodox historians in their criticism of the revisionists.  He argued that Morris engaged in five types of distortion: he misrepresented documents, resorted to partial quotes, withheld evidence, made false assertions, and altered original documents.^[7]  Morris countered, saying that the new historians "deployed a more objective mind-set" and that the old historians "refused to abandon the classic, propagandistic Zionist narrative..."  He reserved special criticism for Karsh, who "resembles nothing so much as a trigger-happy Wild West gunfighter out to make a name for himself, barging into the saloon of historiography with guns blazing."^[8]

            Morris continued his indictment of Israel with the release of Israel's Border Wars^[9] (1993) where he focused solely on Israeli policy.  It contained several errors and omissions, mostly when recalling Arab history.  He concluded that Israel was the villain throughout the period in question (1949-1956), and responsible for creating the infiltration, dismissing peace opportunities, and changing a regional conflict into a point of superpower confrontation. 

            By 1999, many of the revisionists authors began to attack Morris because his writing had begun to change and more context was included in his works.  The new historians preferred to keep their focus only on Israel.  He released Righteous Victims - a sweeping historical look at the Arab-Israeli conflict from 1881-1999.  The task of covering such a long period of time gave many enough ammunition to charge him with a selective focus.

            With the collapse of the peace process and the advent of the new Palestinian-Israeli war, everything changed.  In late 2001, he shocked an audience in liberal Berkeley, California when he declared that he now saw things differently.  He listed all of the Palestinians' rejectionism: the 1937 Peel commission partition, the 1947 UN partition, the autonomy plan in the 1978 Camp David agreements, and Clinton's offers in 2000.  He concluded that the Jews had been amenable to a negotiated settlement since the 1930s but the Palestinians stubbornly rejected everything.  This abrupt change sent shock waves through the revisionist community.

            A few months later in London's The Guardian, he explained the reasons for his change of heart.  Whereas he was "cautiously optimistic" during the Oslo years, the intifada and Arab reactions changed everything.  According to him, the reason the Syrians rejected peace with Israel was because of "a basic refusal to make peace with the Jewish state."  No one shifted Morris' thinking more than Yasser Arafat - who was now the villain in his eyes.  The Palestinians "do not want, merely, and end to the occupation - that is what they were offered back in July-December 2000, and they rejected the deal.  They want all of Palestine and as few Jews in it as possible...I don't believe that Arafat and his colleagues mean or want peace - only a staggered chipping away at the Jewish state."  Unlike his original findings in his 1987 The Birth (see below), he likened Arafat to Haj Amin al-Husseini who "led the Palestinians during the 1930s into their (abortive) rebellion...and during the 1940s into their (again abortive) attempt to prevent the emergence of the Jewish State in 1948, resulting in their catastrophic defeat and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem."^[10]  Morris would have undoubtedly been mortified to learn that the Palestinian negotiators in 2000 frequently quoted The Birth when making their case for refugees' right of return.^[11]

            Clearly, such an attack by Morris would not go unanswered.  Avi Shlaim wrote in The Guardian the next day that it was "a remarkable attempt to blame the victims for their own misfortunes."  The PLO had made their historic compromise by agreeing to the Oslo process.  Whereas for Morris, Palestinian mendacity was to blame for the collapse of the peace process, "for me it is Israeli expansionism."  The intifada was a result of Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount.  "The root problem today is the Jewish state's continuing occupation of most of the Palestinian territories that it captured in June 1967."  Peace was not sealed at Taba because Ariel Sharon was elected.^[12]  Whereas Morris had flipped around completely and now blamed the Palestinians, Shlaim remained consistent in his solid blaming of Israel for every problem - where the Palestinians are not actors but merely victims.  Clearly, neither absolute and extreme vision is accurate.

            In January 2004, Morris went even further in an interview in Haaretz just as his revised version of The Birth was about to hit the shelves.  He argued for the Jewish State's necessity to ethnically cleanse parts of Palestine in 1948 and suggested that Ben Gurion should have done more to ensure less Palestinians in the newly conquered Jewish areas.  "Ben Gurion was right.  If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being...You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs...A society that aims to kill you forces you to destroy it...There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing...as a historian, I assert that a mistake was made here.  Yes.  The non-completion of the transfer was a mistake."  He further found that "the Israeli Arabs are a time bomb."  Morris restated the reasons for his change of heart: "The bombing of the buses and restaurants really shook me.  They made me understand the depth of the hatred for us...they express the deep will of the Palestinian people."^[13]

            Four years after Morris' remarkable change of heart, one may have expected the release of his 2004 The Birth Revisited to be a highly politicized and one-sided work.  However, his political leanings did not translate into the pages of his book.  He still focused primarily on Israeli actions and he detailed many more accounts of Israeli atrocities, however, he added more context.  In the end, his conclusions did not mirror his words in the media.