Benny Morris

Simkhe accuses me of ignoring a lot of other leftwing Jews' critiques of the neocons, and assuming I'm the first Jew to notice. I'm sure you're right; it's not a discourse I'm that familiar with. One thing I'd note is that I talked to Phyllis Bennis a couple years back and, yes she knows the issue better than I do, but she also said she wasn't bringing her Jewishness into it, it's an American issue, she's talking to Americans. One thing I'm trying to do is bring my Jewishness right in, figure out my own Jewish American identity in the process...

Tough Dove hits me for going over the line in the dual loyalty post. He and I go way back, we were young Jews at Harvard together. I consider him a friend. He says I'm unleashing plagues by using such language. Toughdove and I had lunch together a few months ago and he stated a similar fear at that time.

The first thing is, Toughdove is a political activist. I admire his work, which he refers to. He's in the liberal community, he's been sweating away at this issue for a long time before I even came around. Hats off to him. I'm not a political activist, I'm a writer. I'm interested in ideas here, and not as worried about the political consequences as I am about where the truth lies. Toughdove is holding the possibility of pogroms over me; a, I don't see them, and b, I feel as if Toughdove is failing to register the tremendous difference between Jewish status in America and the history of the diaspora in Europe from ghetto to emancipation to marginalization to extermination. I think our experience here is altogether a new thing, and really does challenge Jews to redefine their sense of their separateness from the goyim. It's a challenge to Jewish consciousness, and it's huge, sociologically.

On the ideas, I don't think Toughdove is responding to the point, which I would sharpen here: I don't think a Washington thinktank should tell us to invade Iraq based on the views of someone who is voting in both Israel and the U.S.—without telling us as much. I don't think the New Yorker should be running pieces on All the good reasons to invade Iraq by a guy who served in the Israeli military, without telling us that. That to me is over the line. I love a pluralist America. But Toughdove is deluding himself if he thinks the debacle in Iraq does not legitimately open the door on a (yes, emotionally charged) issue: How much the U.S. has conflated Israel's interests and our own, to our detriment. Sorting those interests out, when the Middle East is afire, is honorable work.

I bridle at Toughdove's claim that certain ideas are off limits because racists and antisemites have espoused them. That is anti-intellectual of him. Tony Judt has been eloquent on this point. I won't be bound by that type of blackmail—especially when so many people are suffering in Iraq. The liberals in Toughdove's camp who would quiet me here are shielding themselves from the tremendous negative consequences of the neocons' ideas. They worry about some possible pogrom in America; well thanks to a lot of causes Americans now need to examine, there are pogroms right now, killing far more people than the Russian pogroms of the 1880s, in Iraq. I bet Toughdove's children are not in any danger of dying in Iraq.

One other point. As I said, Toughdove went to Harvard, i.e., he gained Establishment certification. Two other liberal Jewish friends of mine from Harvard have written important pieces about Walt-Mearsheimer, the latest being Jim Traub in the New York Times Magazine the other day. Both these pieces, ala Toughdove, have written off as highly questionable/antisemitic the two scholars' questioning of the morality of Israel's founding. W-M dared to bring up the expulsion of the Arabs in '48 and said, Hey guess what, Israel isn't lily-white here—but we still believe there was a moral basis for its founding and that it has a right to exist. Both pieces I'm referring to (the other was in the NYRB) then quoted Israeli historian Benny Morris, who feels, angrily, that W-M had misused his historical work. Both pieces accepted Morris's view to argue that W-M are out of line.

I think this is an intellectual shortcoming. The treatment of the Arabs in the '48 War of Independence is something that American intellectuals should consider fully for themselves, that American Jews ought to know about, and Americans generally. Benny Morris isn't the only informant here; there is Norman Finkelstein, Shlomo Ben-Ami (in Scars of War, Wounds of Peace), and many Arab writers. But Jewish American writers routinely dismiss the issue out of hand. I'm not talking about the right of return per se, I'm not talking about the failure of Arab states to absorb the refugees in the last 58 years, I'm not talking about suicide bombers. I'm talking about a simple historical question: What befell these people? And what did we do in the U.S. to foster it?

In the liberal U.S. Jewish community, there's a real inability even to look at this because of the concerns about the political consequences. Joseph Lelyveld, the former executive editor at the Times, and author of a powerful book against apartheid (Move Your Shadow), 2 years ago published a memoir, Omaha Blues, where he talks about his Zionist father Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld's effort in the 1940s (underwritten by the nascent Zionist lobby) to discredit opposition to the formation of a Jewish state that came from my intellectual ancestors: assimilationist (or integrationist, as Rabbi Elmer Berger put it) non-Zionists and anti-Zionists within the Jewish community in the U.S. In his memoir, thoughtful Lelyveld never really considers the actual consequences of his father's actions. It's a matter for celebration, presumably. And yes, I grew up celebrating Israel's founding; and not knowing anything about al-Nakba, what the Palestinians call their catastrophe.

Acknowledgement of this catastrophe in our discourse would actually go some way toward healing the tremendous rage, and wounds, in the Middle East. That's the intellectual dereliction; let's open this up for discussion; thank you W-M! We're Americans, proud and free! Last night I met a young Palestinian Arab living in Syria, lately come to the U.S. on a State Department scholarship to study. He has a private dream. That one day he can achieve a status in this country that will allow him to visit the village his parents and grandparents described to him, growing up, a village they fled in war out of fear of massacre. He just wants to see it. Right now, he is stateless and angry. Can American Jews not understand his feelings of displacement?

The fallout from Walt and Mearsheimer's bombshell paper on the Israel lobby includes a loss of credibility to Commentary and the New Republic, two eminent journals (to which I subscribe, thereby emulating my parents, whose house was filled with stacks of Commentary) that have chosen to respond to W/M by denying that there is any such thing as an Israel lobby.

In the January Commentary, Gabriel Schoenfeld returns to his theme, Jewish powerlessness, when he argues that the U.S. government has always supported Israel for its own (goyische) reasons, not through any Jewish prodding. By this analysis, AIPAC should fold up its tent tomorrow, it's wasting a lot of hardworking people's money. And the ailing British chemist Chaim Weizmann should never have rushed to the White House to extract a commitment from Harry Truman to a Jewish state in 1948, again, a waste of time, Truman was planning to defy his own State Department and oppose a binational state.

Israeli scholar Benny Morris was the point man for the New Republic in its attack on Walt/Mearsheimer last year. Outraged that the authors had cited his (honorable) investigation of the expulsions of '48, Morris was shrill, his piece filled with meaningless discussions of his favorite subject, troop strengths in battles long ago. (What is it with these writers who fetishize combat?)

But in his 2001 book Righteous Victims, Morris several times refers to the Zionist and Israel lobby. He says, quite accurately, that Zionist pressure tactics were used on the Truman Administration to bring about American support for partition in '47 (in defiance of the State Department and the recommendations of the Anglo-American Inquiry Commission, the equivalent of the Iraq Study Group of that time). And Morris honestly describes the Israel lobby as a potent force in U.S. politics when he cites the secretary of state's threat to cut off "all public and private aid to Israel" to punish Israeli belligerence in the Suez crisis of '56:

President Eisenhower had just been elected to a second term; he could allow himself to ignore Jewish lobbying.

It just goes to show: Everyone knows there's an Israel lobby. The journalistic challenge is, what are its dimensions? The New Republic and Commentary have chosen to react angrily to the non-Jewish authors' statements rather than doing what they should do, telling us how the lobby works. By responding so defensively, these journals have damaged themselves, and the discourse; American readers deserve better.

P.S. Morris's point re Suez reveals the poverty of Dennis Ross's analysis of the lobby in the debate at Cooper Union last September. Ross basically said, Sure, AIPAC has the Congress in a half-nelson, but no one controls the presidency. Morris (and Abba Eban) contradict this claim.

A lot of us are looking forward to the big debate over Walt and Mearsheimer's paper next Thursday at Cooper Union. The ideas are finally coming where they belong: to New York. They were germinated in Chicago and Cambridge, broke ground in London, have popped up in Washington, and are finally arriving here, the center of the power structure in the U.S., where they ought to be debated. (And, interestingly, the pugilist who kept volunteering to be on the card, Dershowitz of Brooklyn, is nowhere in sight).

The wild card in the debate is Shlomo Ben-Ami, a historian and former Foreign Minister (one of the cool things about Israel is that being a young country, people get to have manifold roles—generals like Moshe Dayan and Yigael Yadin also get to be archaeologists). Ben-Ami will be arguing against the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis. Presumably he will take them on over the alleged role of the Israel lobby in such political events as the Camp David negotiations of 2000, in which he participated.

Because on one of the more controversial assertions of the paper, Ben-Ami is in agreement. Here is Walt and Mearsheimer's discussion of the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948:

[T]he creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres and rapes by Jews, and Israel's subsequent conduct has often been brutal, belying any claim to moral superiority.

This statement angered many supporters of Israel. Some said W-M were anti-Israel. Like historian Benny Morris, per Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books:

Benny Morris, whom Mearsheimer and Walt frequently cite, dismissed their work in The New Republic as "a travesty of the history that I have studied and written for the past two decades." He faulted them, among other things, for...falsely accusing Israel of adopting a policy of expelling Arabs in 1948...

But Ben-Ami sides with Walt and Mearsheimer on this issue. Earlier this year he published a book called Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. I've not finished the book, but it's stunning, layering a restrained manner and careful scholarship over a moral backbeat. Because Israel has "lived by the sword," Ben-Ami asserts, the military has taken "too central a function in defining both Israel's war aims and her peace policies." (cf, Lebanon 2006)

On 1948, Ben-Ami is emphatic. The historical record shows that once the Palestinians violently sought to oppose the '47 U.N. partition plan, the Zionists adopted a policy of pushing them out of their homes, and never letting them return.

The reality on the ground... was that of an Arab community in a state of terror facing a ruthless Israeli army whose path to victory was paved not only by its exploits against the regular Arab armies, but also by the intimidation, and at times atrocities and massacres, it perpetrated against the civilian Arab community. A panic-stricken Arab community was uprooted under the impact of masacres that would be carved into the Arabs' monument of grief and hatred... Benny Morris['s] thesis about the birth of the refugee problem being not by design but by the natural logic and evolution of the war is not always sustained by the very evidence he himself provides...Ben-Gurion...also instructed that abandoned Arab villages needed to be settled by Jews even before the end of hostilities.... Israel's formal rejection of the refugees' claim for return — a position that remains intact to this day — rather than the expulsion and dispossession, is the real defining moment of the conflict..

Israel as a society also suppressed the memory of its war against the local Palestinians because it could not really come to terms ith the fact that its finest Sabras, the heroes of its war for independence and the role models of the new nation, expelled Arabs, committed atrocities against them, and dispossessed them.

Wow. Strong stuff. And now let's be clear (and not emotional) about something: Walt and Mearsheimer cite ethnic cleansing not to deprive Israel of its right to exist, but because they are political scientists, who wish to see a more evenhanded American policy in a powderkeg region that has experienced a cycle of violence for more than 60 years, a cycle that persists because both sides have sought to valorize their actions on moral grounds, and outside powers have indulged these moral delusions. It will be interesting to see whether the issue comes up next week...