The Post-Zionist Critique

Benny Morris's Reign of Error, Revisited

by Efraim Karsh

The collapse and dispersion of Palestine's Arab society during the 1948 war i one of the most charged issues in the politics and historiography of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Initially, Palestinians blamed the Arab world for having promised military support that never materialized.1 Arab host states in turn regarded the Palestin-ians as having shamefully deserted their homeland. With the passage of time and thedimming of historical memory, the story of the 1948 war was gradually rewritten withIsrael rather than the Arab states and the extremist and shortsighted Palestinian leader-ship becoming the main if not only culprit of the Palestinian dispersion. This false narra-tive received a major boost in the late 1980s with the rise of several left-leaning Israeliacademics and journalists calling themselves the New Historians, who sought to ques-tion and revise understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict.2 Ostensibly basing their re-search on recently declassified documents from the British Mandate period and the firstyears of Israeli independence, they systematically redrew the history of Zionism, turningupside down the saga of Israel's struggle for survival. Among the new historians, nonehas been more visible or more influential than Benny Morris, a professor at Ben-GurionUniversity in Beersheba, whose 1987 book, The Birth of the Palestinian RefugeeProblem, 1947-1949, became the New Historian's definitive work.

Prominent Palestinian politicians such as Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and HananAshrawi cited the "findings" of the New Historians to support extreme Palestinian terri-torial and political claims. Academics lauded Morris for using newly available docu-ments to expose the allegedly immoral circumstances of Israel's creation. With frequent

Efraim Karsh is director of the Mediterranean Studies Programme at King's College, University of London, and editor of the quarterly journal Israel Affairs. He is the author of Arafat's War: The Man and His Battle for Israeli Conquest (GrovePress, 2003). This is his third analysis of Benny Morris's scholarship to appear in the Middle East Quarterly.

1 Sir J. Troutbeck, "Summary of general impressions gathered during weekend visit to the Gaza district," June 16, 1949, FO371/75342/E7816, p. 123.
2 Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Avi Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1988); Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Reality (New York: Pantheon, 1987); Ilan Pappé, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951 (London:I.B. Tauris, 1992).

Karsh: Benny Morris / 31

media exposure, the New Historians had an im-pact on mainstream Israeli opinion, which be-came increasingly receptive to the notion thatboth the fault and the solution to the Arab-Is-raeli conflict lay disproportionately with Israel'sown actions.

Such plaudits, however, were undeserved.Far from unearthing new facts or offering anovel interpretation of the Palestinian exodus,The Birth recycled the standard Arab narrativeof the conflict. Morris portrayed the Palestin-ians as the hapless victims of unprovoked Jew-ish aggression. Israel's very creation becamethe "original sin" underlying the perpetuationof the Arab-Israeli conflict. Had there been anacademic foundation to Morris's revisionism,such acclaim may have been warranted. Butrather than incorporate new Israeli source ma-terial, Morris did little more than rehash old his-toriography. While laying blame for the Pales-tinian refugee crisis on the actions of the IsraeliDefense Forces and its pre-state precursor, theHaganah, Morris failed to consult the millionsof declassified documents in their archives, evenas other historians used them in painstakingresearch.3

Once this fact was publicly exposed,4 Mor-ris conceded that he had "no access to the ma-terials in the IDFA [Israel Defense ForcesArchive] or Haganah archive and precious littleto firsthand military materials deposited else-where."5 Yet instead of acknowledging the im-plications of this omission upon his conclu-sions, Morris sought to use this "major meth-odological flaw" as the rationale for a new edi-tion of The Birth which he claimed would in-clude new source material.6

DISHONEST REVISIONISM

Readers will be disappointed if they hope to find evidence of renewed intellectual honesty in this new edition, published in 2004 as The Birth ofthe Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited.7 Morris continues to ignore archival evidence bothof relentless Arab rejection of Jewish statehoodand of demonstrated commitment to Israel's de-struction. Available Arabic sources little utilizedby Morris include not only official documents butalso religious incitement and numerous statements by politicians, intellectuals, and journalists.

While Morris perfunctorily acknowledgesPalestinian and Arab culpability for the 1948 war,8The Birth Revisited continues to portray Israeliactions as the main trigger of the Palestinian exo-dus. Morris explains,

this is not a history of the 1948 war or ahistory of what the Arabs did to the Jews but a history of how and why the Palestinian

3 Among these were Uri Milstein, Shabtai Teveth, ElhannanOrren, Michael Bar-Zohar, Dan Kurzman, Yitzhak Levi, YuvalArnon-Ohana, and Shmuel Dotan.
4 See, for example, Efraim Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History:The "New Historians," 2nd rev. ed. (London: Cass, 2000), pp.195-6.
5 Morris, "Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of 1948," inEugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim, eds., The War for Palestine:Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 2001), p. 37.
6 Morris, "For the Record," The Guardian, Jan. 14, 2004.
7 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
8 Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revis-ited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 7,588 (hereinafter The Birth Revisited).

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refugee problem came about. In this context,what Jews did to Arabs, including massacres,played a role; what Arabs did to Jews was barely relevant.9

It is doubtful whether Morris believes hisown assertion. In his writings and interviewsover the past few years, he acknowledged thatin war, the activities of one belligerent affect allothers. "From the moment the Yishuv [the pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine] was at-tacked by the Palestinians and afterward by theArab states, there was no choice but to expelthe Palestinian population," he argued in Janu-ary 2004.10 Four months later he put the sameidea in somewhat blunter terms: "When an armedthug tries to murder you in your home, you haveevery right to defend yourself, even by throw-ing him out."11

Not only does Morris miss the opportunityto reconcile his evolving positions regardingArab and Palestinian culpability for the originand perpetuation of the refugee problem, but healso intensifies efforts to give academic respect-ability to the Arab indictment of Zionism as "acolonizing and expansionist ideology and move-ment ... intent on politically, or even physically,dispossessing and supplanting the Arabs."12In the original version of The Birth, Morristraced this alleged intention to the late 1930sand 1940s, claiming that Zionist leaders had de-spaired of achieving a Jewish majority in Pales-tine through mass immigration and had insteadcome to view the expulsion or "transfer" of theArab population as the best means "to estab-lish a Jewish state without an Arab minority, orwith as small an Arab minority as possible."13

In reality, the archives show that, far fromdespairing of mass immigration, Zionist leadersin the 1930s worried about the country's short-term absorptive capacity should millions of Jewsenter Palestine. While in an implicit acknowledg-ment of their inaccuracy, Morris removed someof The Birth's most inaccurate or distortedquotes about transfer,14 he, nevertheless, revertsto the problematic technique of relying on a smallnumber of Zionist statements either taken out ofcontext or simply misrepresented. In The BirthRevisited, Morris takes his initial claim furtherby attempting to prove, in a new chapter trum-peted as one of the book's chief innovations,that "the displacement of Arabs from Palestineor from areas of Palestine that would becomethe Jewish State was inherent in Zionist ideol-ogy" and could be traced back to the father ofpolitical Zionism, Theodor Herzl.15

Consider, for example, Morris's charge thatHerzl wished to dispossess Palestinian Arabsbecause of his fear that the Jewish state wouldlack viability if it were to contain a large Arabminority. Morris bases this assertion only upona truncated paragraph from Herzl's June 12, 1895

Karsh: Benny Morris 9 Ibid. p. 7.
10 Ari Shavit, "Survival of the Fittest," interview with BennyMorris, Ha'aretz Weekly Magazine (Tel Aviv), Jan. 1, 2004.
11 The New Republic, May 3, 2004.
12 Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-ArabConflict, 1881-1999 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1999), pp. 652,654.
13 Morris, The Birth, p. 24; idem, 1948 and After: Israel andthe Palestinians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 17.
14 The most egregious of these was the distortion of an October1937 letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son. Morris cited theletter as saying, "We must expel Arabs and take their place,"when Ben-Gurion actually said the opposite.
15 Morris, The Birth Revisited, pp. 5, 60, 588.

Karsh: Benny Morris / 33

diary entry, which had already been a feature of Palestinian propaganda for decades.16

But this entry was not enough to support such a claim. Below is the complete text, with the passage somitted by Morris in italics: When we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly … It goes without saying that we shall respectfully tolerate persons of other faiths and protect their property, their honor,

and their freedom with the harshest means of coercion. This is another area in which we shall setthe entire world a wonderful example … Should there be many such immovable owners in individual areas [who would not sell their property to us], we shall simply leave them there and develop our commerce in the direction of other areas which belong to us.17

By omitting the opening sentence, Morris hides the fact that Herzl viewed Jewish settlement as ben-eficial to the indigenous popula-tion and that he did not conceiveof the new Jewish entity as com-prising this country in its entirety.This is further underscored byHerzl's confinement of the envis-aged expropriation of private prop-erty to "the estates assigned tous"-another fact omitted by Morris. Any dis-cussion of relocation was clearly limited to thespecific lands assigned to the Jews, rather thanto the entire territory. Had Herzl envisaged themass expulsion of population, as claimed byMorris, there would have been no need to dis-cuss its position in the Jewish entity. Morris fur-ther ignored context. There was no trace of abelief in transfer in either Herzl's famous politi-cal treatise, The Jewish State (1896), or his 1902Zionist novel, Altneuland (Old-New Land).18Nor for this matter is there any allusion to "trans-fer" in Herzl's public writings, his private corre-spondence, his speeches, or his political anddiplomatic discussions. Morris simply discardsthe canon of Herzl's life work in favor of a single,isolated quote.

Most importantly, Herzl's diary entry makes no mention of either Arabs or Palestine, and for

17 Morris, The Birth Revisited, pp. 40-1; Raphael Patai, ed.,The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, vol. 1 (New York:Herzl Press and Thomas Yoseloff, 1960), pp. 88, 90 (hereafterHerzl diaries).
18 Morris, The Birth Revisited, p. 41.16 See, for example, Walid Khalidi, ed., From Haven toConquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem until 1948 (Washington D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies,1971), pp. 118-9; David Hurst, The Gun and the Olive Branch(London: Futura, 1978), p. 18; Edward Said, The Question ofPalestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 13.Members of the newly created state of Israel gather in Tel Aviv beneath the portrait of Theodor Herzl to hear David Ben-Gurion (center, standing) read the"Declaration of Independence." May 14, 1948.

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good reason. A careful reading of Herzl's diary entries for June 1895 reveals that, at the time, hedid not consider Palestine to be the future siteof Jewish resettlement but rather SouthAmerica.19 "I am assuming that we shall go toArgentina," Herzl recorded in his diary on June13. In his view, South America "would have a lotin its favor on account of its distance from mili-tarized and seedy Europe … If we are in SouthAmerica, the establishment of our State will notcome to Europe's notice for a considerable pe-riod of time."20 Indeed, Herzl's diary entries dur-ing the same month illustrate that he conceivedall political and diplomatic activities for the cre-ation of the future Jewish state, including thequestion of the land and its settlement, in theLatin American context. "Should we go to SouthAmerica," Herzl wrote on June 9, "our first statetreaties will have to be with South American re-publics. We shall grant them loans in return forterritorial privileges and guarantees." Four dayslater he wrote, "Through us and with us, an un-precedented commercial prosperity will come toSouth America."

In short, Morris based his arguments on ared herring. He not only parsed a quote to distortits original meaning, but he ignored the context,which had nothing to do with Palestine or Arabs.

Morris applies similar distortions to otherearly Zionist leaders. He repeatedly takes iso-lated and unrepresentative assertions out of con-text while omitting the often overwhelming evi-dence that undercut his thesis. For example, Mor-ris takes an extraordinary approach to Ze'ev(Vladimir) Jabotinsky, the founding father of thebranch of Zionism that was the forerunner oftoday's Likud party. While Morris cites a num-ber of quotes showing Jabotinsky's public re-jection of transfer-for example, his testimonybefore the 1936 Peel Commission, which investi-gated the roots of the Arab uprising-he, nev-ertheless, makes the unsubstantiated assertionthat Jabotinsky "generally supported transfer."22

Just as with his treatmentof Herzl, Morris's conclu-sions fly in the face of thehistorical record. In 1934,for example, Jabotinsky's Revisionist Party prepareda draft constitution forJewish Palestine that putthe Arab minority on anequal footing with its Jew-ish counterpart "through-out all sectors of thecountry's public life." Thetwo communities were toshare the state's duties,both military and civil service, and enjoy its pre-rogatives. Jabotinsky proposed that Hebrew andArabic should enjoy equal rights and that "inevery cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew,the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Araband vice versa."23

Morris also twists the historical record to indict Arthur Rupin, who headed the ZionistOrganization's Palestine office. Morris's condem-nation of Rupin revolves around the latter's solesuggestion at a 1911 meeting of "'a limited popu-lation transfer' of peasants to Syria."24 Again,Morris cites selectively in order to make his com-ment appear to be something it was not. Theoriginal document shows that Rupin was notdiscussing Palestine's Arab population as awhole but rather those Arabs squatting on landpurchased by Jews. Far from becoming policy,

Karsh: Benny Morris / 35

19 Herzl diaries, p. 133. Four days earlier, Herzl recorded in hisdiary, "In Palestine's disfavor is its proximity to Russia and Europe, its lack of room for expansion as well as its climate, which we are no longer accustomed to." He saw only one major advantage in this location: "the mighty legend" (idem, p. 56).
20 Herzl diaries, pp. 69-70, 134.
21 Ibid. pp. 70, 92, 134-5.
22 Morris, The Birth Revisited, p. 45.
23 Vladimir Jabotinsky, The Jewish War Front (London:Allen and Unwin, 1940), pp. 216-7.
24 Morris, The Birth Revisited, p. 41.

Karsh: Benny Morris / 35

Lord Peel arrives at the British Mandate ofPalestine, November 1936. The Peel commissionrecommended the partition of Palestine. The Jews accepted the recommendation, but the Arabs opposed the plan.

Rupin's limited proposal was rejected. Morrisfurther makes no mention of Rupin's commentstwo years later at the eleventh Zionist congress,where he stated, "It is, of course, useless to con-tent ourselves with merely assuring the Arabsthat we are coming into the country as theirfriends. We must prove this by our deeds."25

Morris's treatment of Rupin shows shoddyscholarship. Part of the problem is that Morrisneglected to examine the original document. He,instead, points readers to his own book, Right-eous Victims, which in turn cited the polemicalbook, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Con-cept of Transfer in Zionist Political Thought,1882-1948,26 by the London-based Israeli Arabacademic, Nur Masalha. Masalha worked fromWalter Laqueur's A History of Zionism (1972),which itself was based on an earlier study bythe Israeli scholar Paul Alsberg, once chief ar-chivist of Israel's State Archives. The inaccu-racy developed with Morris's trust of Masalha,who dismissed the historical context.As Laqueur explained in his originalwork:

[T]he idea of a population transfer wasnever official Zionist policy. Ben-Gurion emphatically rejected it, say-ing that even if the Jews were giventhe right to evict the Arabs, theywould not make use of it. Mostthought at that time that there wouldbe sufficient room in Palestine for bothJews and Arabs following the indus-trialization of the country and the in-troduction of intensive methods of ag-riculture. Since no one before 1914 ex-pected the disintegration of the Turk-ish Empire … the question of politi-cal autonomy did not figure in theirthoughts. They were genuinely ag-grieved that the Arabs were not moregrateful for the economic benefits thatthey had come to enjoy as the result of Jew-ish immigration and settlement.27

Morris also butchers Chaim Weizmann'srecord by claiming that Weizmann "suggestedto British Colonial Secretary Lord Passfield thata solution to Palestine's problems might lie acrossthe Jordan: Palestine's troublesome Arabs couldbe transferred over the river."28 In fact, it wasPassfield, not Weizmann, who made this sug-gestion. As Weizmann recounted:Lord Passfield agreed with the force of theargument; at the same time he said one had tostabilize conditions in the country. He didn'tthink it was an insuperable difficulty, andthere could be no question of conceding any-thing to the Arabs which was against the spiritof the Mandate, and the report did not con-cede anything. Possibly, he said, Transjordanmight be a way out.29

25 Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (New York: MJFBooks, 2003; reprint of the original 1972 edition), pp. 230-1.
26 Washington D.C., Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992.
27 Laqueur, A History of Zionism, p. 232.
28 Morris, The Birth Revisited, p. 44.
29 Chaim Weizmann, "Awaiting the Shaw Report" (report ona conversation with Lord Passfield on Mar. 6, 1930), in The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, Series B (NewBrunswick: Transaction Books, 1983), p. 591.

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Morris repeats the same distortion with re-gard to a January 1941 conversation betweenWeizmann and Ivan Maiskii, the Soviet ambas-sador in London, by claiming that Weizmanninitiated talk of a transfer when the opposite wastrue.30 "The British are hardly likely to agree tothis," Weizmann told Maiskii. "And if they don'tagree, what happens next?"31

In July 1937, the Peel Commission recom-mended partition of Palestine into two states: aJewish state to comprise 15 percent of the terri-tory west of the Jordan River and an Arab state, tobe united with Transjordan, itself carved from east-ern Palestine in 1921. To prevent friction betweenthe two communities, the commission suggested"a transfer of land and, as far as possible, an ex-change of population" between the Jewish andthe Arab states. The idea was not to transfer either community outside the bounds of Palestinebut rather to the territories of the respective Araband Jewish states, nor even to transfer the Jewishstate's entire Arab population.32 Here is how Morris related Weizmann's reaction to the report:

After seeing a copy of the Peel CommissionReport, Weizmann met Colonial Secretary William Ormsby-Gore, in secret, on 19 July1937, and wholeheartedly endorsed the trans-fer recommendation: "I said," Weizmann re-ported, "that the whole success of the [parti-tion] scheme depended on whether the Gov-ernment … [carried] out this recommenda-tion." Ormsby-Gore "agreed that once theGalilee was given to the Jews … the positionwould be very difficult without transfer."33

But, when Morris's omissions are restored,Weizmann's reaction was actually quite differ-ent. Again, text removed by Morris is includedin italics:

I said that the whole success of the scheme depended on whether the Government genu-inely did or did not wish to carry out thisrecommendation; the transfer could be car-ried out only by the British Government, andnot by the Jews. I explained the reasons why weconsidered this proposalof such importance. Mr.Ormsby-Gore said thathe was proposing to setup a committee for thetwofold purpose (a) offinding land for the trans-ferees (they hoped to findland in Transjordan, andpossibly also in theNegev), and (b) of ar-ranging the actual termsof the transfer … Heagreed that once [the] Galilee was given to theJews, and not the Negev, the position would bevery difficult without transfer.34

By twisting quotations to fit his thesis, Mor-ris misrepresents Weizmann, who did not meetOrmsby-Gore to express his delight, as Morrisimplies, but rather to inform the colonial secre-tary of Jewish apprehensions about the Peel re-port. As Weizmann related in his report, "I saidthat I had come to see him to try and clarify anumber of points. The Jews were perplexed, anda great many of them were against the partitionscheme."35 While Weizmann was concernedabout the British government's intention to carryout the proposed population exchange, Morrisrewrote the passage to imply that Weizmannspoke about its actual implementation.

Perhaps no figure is a greater victim ofMorris's distortions than David Ben-Gurion,Israel's founding father and the man who an-nounced the Jewish state's independence. By

30 Morris, The Birth Revisited, pp. 52-3.
31 "Meeting: I.M. Maiskii-Ch. Weizmann (London, 3 Feb-ruary 1941)," in Documents on Israeli-Soviet Relations, 1941-1953, part I (London: Frank Cass, 2000), pp. 4-5.
32 Palestine Royal Commission, Report, Presented by theSecretary of State for the Colonies to Parliament by Command of His Majesty, July 1937, Cmd. 5479 (London: HMSO, 1937),pp. 291-93 (hereinafter, Peel report).
33 Morris, The Birth Revisited, p. 62, fn. 24.
34 Ibid. pp. 56-7.
35 Chaim Weizmann, "Summary Note of Interview with Mr.Ormsby-Gore, Colonial Office, Monday, July 19th, 1937, at 10.45 a.m.," Weizmann Archive, p. 56.

Karsh: Benny Morris / 37

discrediting Ben-Gurion, Morris seeks to indict Israel's birth. As in the first edition, the base for Morris's assertions that Ben-Gurion was a strong transfer advocate revolves around misreadingof the Peel Commission and the subsequent Woodhead Commission.

Morris describes a July 1936 meeting be-tween Ben-Gurion and the high commissioner for Palestine. According to Morris:

by 1936, the mainstreamZionist leaders were more forthright in their support of transfer. In July, Ben-Gurion, the chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive and de facto leader of the Yishuv, and his deputy ,Moshe Shertok (Sharett), the director of the agency's political depart-ment, went to the high commissioner to plead the Zionist case on im-migration, which the Mandatory was consid-ering suspending: Ben-Gurion asked whether the government would make it possible for Arab cultivators displaced through Jewishland purchase … to be settled in Transjordan. If Transjordan was for the time being a coun-try closed to the Jews, surely it could not be closed to Arabs, also. The high commissioner thought this a good idea … He asked whether the Jews would be prepared to spend money on the settlement of such Palestinian Arabs in Transjordan. Mr. Ben-Gurion replied that this might be considered.36

By linking the issue of Jewish immigration toexpulsion of Palestinians, Morris implies a zero-sum relationship between the two. Nothingcould be further from the truth. The Zionists ingeneral and Ben-Gurion in particular had sincethe early twentieth century emphasized thatthere was sufficient room in Palestine for thetwo communities. Indeed, the "transfer issue"was not raised at the above meeting at all.

And Morris's first ellipsis in the passagehe did quote? He omitted Ben-Gurion's mentionof western Palestine, thereby obfuscating theZionist leader's perception of Transjordan as"eastern Palestine." Such a perception wouldundercut Morris's thesis that the Zionists soughtto expel the Arabs from Palestine.37

Further compounding this misrepresenta-tion, Morris takes out-of-context a Ben-Gurionquote from a November 1, 1936 Jewish AgencyExecutive meeting. In reporting Ben-Gurion'swords, he omits those words present in the origi-nal document, represented below in italics:

We will tell [the Peel Commission] that Pal-estine extends over both banks of the JordanRiver, and that we have the right to settle there.But if because of security considerations, thetime is not yet ripe for our settlement there(and the government acknowledges our rightto do so, albeit not in public), why can't weacquire land there for Arabs, who wish tosettle in Transjordan? If it was permissible tomove an Arab from the Galilee to Judea, whyis it impossible to move an Arab from theHebron area to Transjordan, which is muchcloser? He, Mr. Ben-Gurion, sees no funda-mental difference between the eastern and thewestern parts of Palestine.

Dr. Hexter: It is clear that any agricultural question in the country is tied to political issues.

Mr. Ben-Gurion: If the government agrees to move the Arabs from place to place, why shouldn't it agree to move peasants to Transjordan? There are vast expenses of land there and we [in western Palestine] are over-crowded.

Rabbi Fishman asks whether the removal of Arabs to Transjordan does not imply an

36 Morris, The Birth Revisited, pp. 45-6. Morris seeks to create an impression that Ben-Gurion endeavored to expel the Arabs out of Palestine when what hed iscussed was resettlement within Palestine.
37 "Note of a Conversation between Mr. D. Ben-Gurion and Mr. M. Shertok and His Excellency the High Commissioner on Thursday, July 9th, 1936, at Government Offices," Central Zi-onist Archives (CZA), S25/19, pp. 4-5.

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acknowledgement that we have no rights in Transjordan?

Mr. Ben-Gurion: Certainly not. We now want to create concentrated areas of Jewish settle-ment, and by transferring the land-selling Arab to Transjordan, we can solve the prob-lem of this concentration.38

By misrepresenting the original text, Morris seeks to create an impression that Ben-Gurion endeav-ored to expel the Arabs out of Palestine when,what he discussed, was resettlement within Pal-estine. After all, the record demonstrates repeat-edly that Zionists viewed Transjordan as an in-tegral part of Palestine in accordance with theLeague of Nations mandate.39

Morris repeats the same distortion when describing a later Jewish Agency Executive meeting:

[T]he Jewish Agency Executive-the "gov-ernment" of the Yishuv-discussed transfer[Morris writes]. On June 7, 1938, proposingZionist policy guidelines, Ben-Gurion de-clared: "The Jewish State will discuss withthe neighboring Arab states the matter of vol-untarily transferring Arab tenant-farmers, la-borers, and peasants from the Jewish state tothe neighboring Arab states."40

Morris creates the impression that Ben-Gurionproposed his policy guidelines in the midst of adiscussion of the transfer idea and that theseguidelines revolved around that idea. In fact,there was no discussion of transfer at that par-ticular meeting. The agenda included eight items,of which the question of the Arabs in the pro-spective Jewish state ranked sixth. Of the eigh-teen packed pages of the meeting's protocol,only four lines referred to the possibility of thevoluntary removal of some Arabs who, "of theirfree will" (mi-toch retsonam ha-hofshi), mightchoose to leave the Jewish state.41

Without evidence, Morris speculates that"some executive members may have regardedthis [the granting of full equality to the Arabcitizens of the prospective Jewish state] as for-the-record lip service and posturing for poster-ity."42 But the fact remains that the meeting dealtwith the position of the Arab minority in theprospective Jewish state-not their expulsion.Not only was this tolerant vision of Arab-Jew-ish coexistence inherent in Ben-Gurion's strate-gic thinking from the 1910s until the 1948 war,but also many of the guidelines presented at this meeting became Israel's established policy toward its Arab minority.

Such selective rendering is reflective of Morris's method. He repeatedly takes a state-ment out of context and then dismisses the rest of the text as insincere propaganda. Thus, for example, at the November 1, 1936 Jewish Agency Executive meeting, he ignores Ben-Gurion's statement, "We do not deny the right of the Arabi nhabitants of the country, and we do not see this right as a hindranceto the realization of Zion-ism."43 He likewise dis-misses as phony "profes-sions of liberal egalitari-anism"44 Ben-Gurion'sassertions, in an October1941 internal policy paper,that "Jewish immigrationand colonization in Pales-tine on a large scale canbe carried out withoutdisplacing Arabs," and that "in a Jewish Pales-tine the position of the Arabs will not be worsethan the position of the Jews themselves."45

38 Morris, The Birth Revisited, p. 46, compared with "Proto-col of the Meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive, held inJerusalem on Nov. 1, 1936," CZA, S100-20A, pp. 8-9.39 Peel report, pp. 228, 304.
40 Morris, The Birth Revisited, p. 49.
41 "Protocol of the Meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive,held in Jerusalem on Jun. 7, 1938," CZA S100/24b, pp. 5970-1 (lines of action 18, 22).
42 Morris, The Birth Revisited, p. 50.
43 "Protocol of the Meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive,held in Jerusalem on Nov. 1, 1936," CZA, p. 7.
44 Morris, The Birth Revisited, p. 63, fn. 31.
45 David Ben-Gurion, "Outlines of Zionist Policy-Private andConfidential," Oct. 15, 1941, CZA Z4/14632, p. 15 (iii & iv).There was never any Zionist attempt to inculcate the "transfer" idea in the hearts and minds of Jews.

Karsh: Benny Morris 39

The list of Morris's inaccuracies extends even further, though. In April 1944, the British Labor Party adopted an election platform, which among other positions advocated a transfer of Arabs out of Palestine. According to Morris,"the publication of the resolution prompted adebate on May 7 in the Jewish Agency Execu-tive-not so much about the notion of transfer(all were agreed about its merits if not its practi-cality) as about how the Zionist leadershipshould react."46

Reality, however, was quite dif-ferent. The meeting wasnot convened in responseto the Labor resolution butto hear a political report byMoshe Sharett, then headof the Jewish Agency's political department, uponhis return from a workingtrip to London. This fo-cused on a number of is-sues that preoccupied theZionist movement at thetime, from the acrimoni-ous working relationship between Ben-Gurionand Weizmann, to the rescue of the remnants ofEuropean Jewry, to Jewish immigration to Pales-tine, to general U.S. and British policy. Labor'selection platform occupied a minor place inSharett's presentation (about two of seventeenpages)-not surprising given Labor's positionas an opposition party at the time. There was no debate whatsoever at the May 7 meeting al-though some participants did express their views.

Again, Morris provides only a truncatedrendition of Ben-Gurion's comments, ignoringall that text highlighted with italics below:

This resolution has three phases: 1) [the cre-ation of] a Jewish state; 2) the expansion ofthe Jewish state's borders; 3) transfer. Thefirst thing should be received with great satis-faction; at least from a moral point of view, itis very satisfactory. As for the second thing,we will certainly not bemoan it. The third thing[transfer] can be problematic.When I heard about these things from the news-papers, I had some difficult thoughts. This question troubled me last night, and even more soyesterday. I asked myself: "What if I happenedto be in London, and they came to ask mewhether or not to introduce [the transfer is-sue], or if after introducing this [clause] theyasked me whether or not to leave it in place?"I would like to tell [you] the conclusion I reached,and it might not be the correct one. I can't saythat I have a feeling of complete certainty. Thereare pros and cons in this issue. The question isthat of weighing one factor against the other,and should we not be able to do something tokeep the first two items alone, should we do this[i.e., support the keeping of the transfer issueas well]? And I reached the conclusion that it is better that this thing remains.47

By ignoring the most important elements of theLabor resolution, Morris withholds the real gistof Ben-Gurion's reasoning. In contrast toMorris's claim, far from relishing the introduc-tion of transfer into Labor's platform, Ben-Gurion viewed it as an unwarranted impediment tha tmight complicate an otherwise historic platform. Had transfer been proposed on its own, Ben-Gurion would have dismissed it out of hand:

Were they to ask [me]: "What should be our[i.e. the British Labor's] program?" I would find it inconceivable to tell them transfer. Were they to ask me whether to introduce this [transfer] as well [in addition to the proposalon a Jewish state], I would not have advised them to do so, because talk on the subject might cause harm … But now we are con-fronted with a fait accompli. It is not the Jews who made or publicized this [proposal] but rather gentiles. Englishmen made this proposal and advertised it.48

46 Morris, The Birth Revisited, p. 54.
47 Ibid., p. 55, compared with "Protocol of the Meeting of theJewish Agency Executive, held in Jerusalem on May 7, 1944, "CZA, S100, p. 10177.
48 "Protocol of the Meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive,May 7, 1944," p. 10178.

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None of this elaborate reasoning is noted by Morris.

In the end, what-ever was said at the Jewish Agency Execu-tive meeting is immate-rial simply because theZionist movement re-jected the British LaborParty's transfer recom-mendation. In the origi-nal edition of TheBirth, Morris con-cedes that "Ben-Gurion, testifying be-fore UNSCOP [UnitedNations Special Com-mission on Palestine]on 8 July 1947, wentout of his way to re-ject the 1945 BritishLabour Party platform 'International Post-war Settlement' which supported the encour-agement of the movement of the Palestine Ar-abs to the neighbouring countries to make roomfor Jews."49 In the revised edition, he ignoresthis fact altogether in an attempt to create thefalse impression of Zionist endorsement of the proposal.

Morris's misrepresentation is all the moresignificant since just months after Ben-Gurion'stestimony before the U.N. Special Commissionon Palestine, the Palestinian Arabs launched awar to abort the U.N.'s partition resolution ofNovember 29, 1947. Having falsified Ben-Gurion's actual position, Morris claims that "by1948, transfer was in the air." While he concedesthat "the Yishuv and its military forces did notenter the 1948 war, which was initiated by theArab side, with a policy or plan of expulsion,"he argues that lack of an official policy madelittle difference, since "thinking about the pos-sibilities of transfer in the 1930s and 1940s hadprepared and conditioned hearts and minds forits implementation in the course of 1948."50 Mor-ris cites no evidence to support this claim norcould he, for there was never any Zionist at-tempt to inculcate the "transfer" idea in the heartsand minds of Jews. He could find no evidence ofany press campaign, radio broadcasts, publicrallies, or political gatherings, for none existed.

In contrast to Morris's thesis-and therhetoric of many Arab politicians at the time-Ben-Gurion told his party members, "In our statethere will be non-Jews as well-and all of themwill be equal citizens; equal in everything with-out any exception; that is: the state will be theirstate as well."51 In line with this conception, com-mittees laying the groundwork for the nascentJewish state discussed in detail the establish-ment of an Arabic-language press, Arab health

49 Morris, The Birth, p. 28
50 Morris, The Birth Revisited, p. 60.
51 David Ben-Gurion, Ba-ma'araha, vol. IV, part 2 (Tel Aviv:Misrad Ha'bitahon, 1959), p. 260.

Karsh: Benny Morris / 41

care, incorporation of Arab officials into the gov-ernment, integration of Arabs within the policeand the ministry of educa-tion, and Arab-Jewish cul-tural and intellectual inter-action. No less impor-tantly, the Haganah's mili-tary plan to rebuff an an-ticipated pan-Arab inva-sion was itself predicated,in the explicit instructionsof Israel Galili, the Haga-nah's commander-in-chief,on the "acknowledgementof the full rights, needs,and freedom of the Arabsin the Hebrew state with-out any discrimination, and a desire for coexist-ence on the basis of mutual freedom and dignity."52

The Birth Revisited is a misnomer. Rather than offer a reassessment of Morris's previous writings on the creation of the Palestinian refu-gee problem, The Birth Revisited is but a longer replica of its dishonest and shoddy predecessor. To downplay his failure to consult the mostimportant archives in the preparation of TheBirth, Morris argued that "the new materials … tend to confirm and reinforce the major lines ofdescription and analysis, and the conclusions,in The Birth."53 And so, The Birth Revisitedcontinues the stubborn refusal of Morris to basehis arguments and conclusions on archival evi-dence and the historical record. Far from con-firming and reinforcing his arguments, archivaldocuments demonstrate that "the Palestinianrefugee problem" was the creation of Palestin-ian and other Arab leaders, not of the Zionists.

Ironically, Morris's press comments from the time during which he drafted The Birth Revis-ited again contradict his conclusions, squarely putting the blame for the Palestinian tragedy on "the instinctive rejectionism that runs like a dark thread through Palestinian history."54 Yet this is not good enough. For the damage done by Morris's written words outweigh his more truth-ful public assertions. His books have become a staple of the academic curriculum in both West-ern and Israeli universities. And so the younger generation of students will continue to be incul-cated with the lies and distortions on the origin of the Palestinian refugee problem. That Morris admits errors, but continues to print them, raise squestions about whether the star New Historian is motivated more by headlines than by truth. Regardless, it is both truth and scholarship whic hsuffer. That Morris admits errors but continues to print them raises questions about whether he is motivated more by headlines than by truth.

52 Rama to brigade commanders, "Arabs Residing in theEnclaves," Mar. 24, 1948, Hagana Archives 46/109/5.
53 Morris, "Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of 1948," p. 37.
54 Morris, "The Rejection," review of Baruch Kimmerling andJoel S. Migdal, The Palestinian People: A History, in The NewRepublic, Apr. 21, 2003.

42 / MIDDLE EAST QUARTERLY SPRING 2005