Benny Morris

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Benny Morris

Benny Morris (born December 8, 1948 in Ein HaHoresh ) is an Israeli historian . He is considered one of the most influential and productive of the New Israeli Historians , a group of scholars who question the current historiography of Israel and Zionism .

Life

Morris' parents, members of HaSchomer HaTzair , had come to the country from Great Britain in 1947 and were among the founders of Kibbutz Jas'ur. In 1949 the family moved to Jerusalem . In 1957, father Jaakov was transferred to New York as a diplomat . The family lived there initially for four years and then again for two years from 1963.

After school, Morris was drafted with the paratroopers . During the Six Day War , his reserve battalion was deployed on the Golan Front, but did not take an active part in the war. In 1969, Morris suffered a shrapnel wound in the Suez Canal at the War of Attrition and was discharged from the military four months later.

He then took up a history degree at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and received his doctorate from Cambridge University . His doctoral thesis deals with the English-German relations.

After his return to Jerusalem, he worked for the Jerusalem Post for twelve years and spent free time researching the history of the Palmach in Israeli government archives . After he was finally denied access to these archives, he dealt with the Palestinian refugee problem as a result of the war of 1948 and in 1988 published a detailed research paper on the subject ( "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem" ) in Cambridge University Press made him known. In the same year he was detained for three months for refusing to do reserve duty in the occupied territories.

When Conrad Black took over the Jerusalem Post in 1990, Morris was fired with thirty-five other left-wing journalists.

Between 1990 and 1995 he worked as a freelance historian. During this time he published other books: "1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians" (1990), "Israel's Secret Wars" (1991), "The Roots of Appeasement" (1992), "Israel's Border Wars" (1993).

In 1997 he was appointed as Professor of Near Eastern Studies at the Ben-Gurion University of Be'er Sheva appointed.

In 2005 he accepted a visiting professorship at the University of Maryland in College Park .

In the winter semester 2010/2011 Benny Morris was Allianz visiting professor for Islamic and Jewish studies at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich , at the chair for Jewish history and culture.

Morris is married and has three children.

Positions

In his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (1988) Morris writes that the estimated 700,000 Palestinian refugees of the Palestinian War left their homes mostly because they feared being caught in the crossfire, but feared Israeli activities not because of an existing eviction plan. This was a very controversial position at the time of publication. The official Israeli position was that the Palestinians had left their homes (exclusively) voluntarily, or after pressure and encouragement from Palestinian or Arab leaders.

At the beginning of the book, Morris illustrates the Palestinian refugee problem with a map . According to his map, 228 villages were evacuated because of the attack by Israeli troops, residents of 41 villages were evacuated by military units and villagers from 90 villages fled in a panic after other villages were attacked. According to this report, only 6 villages were abandoned by their residents because local Arab leaders asked them to. He was unable to provide any information on 46 large villages.

At the same time, Morris was documenting possible acts of violence by the Israeli army, including alleged incidents of rape, torture and ethnic cleansing .

In his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004), he changed the perspective and now attributed the main responsibility to Jewish military associations. Morris writes that such associations were responsible for massacres that killed many more Palestinians than previously thought. The expulsion of Palestinians was a shared goal of those primarily responsible for the Jewish leadership of the time. According to the testimony of the Israeli politician Aharon Cohen, Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion issued orders in 1948 to destroy Palestinian villages. In the 2004 version, Morris emphasizes that the Jewish leadership wanted as few Arabs as possible in the conquered territories even before the state was founded. For demographic reasons, they would have wanted as many Palestinians to flee as possible. The Palestinians were a politicized, armed community committed to fighting Israel.

Morris was previously seen as a representative of the Israeli radical left and was labeled an "Israel hater". Later, his disillusionment with the peace process was shown by increasingly critical statements that are more likely to be associated with the conservative political spectrum. He himself continues to feel that he belongs to the left.

In an interview with Ari Schavit in Haaretz (January 2004), Morris said, referring to the development of his ideas since the outbreaks of Palestinian violence against Israelis after the signing of the Oslo Accords :

“The bombing of buses and restaurants really shook me. It was through them that I understood the depth of the hatred against us. Through them I understood that the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim violence against Jewish life here has brought us to the brink of annihilation. I do not view suicide bombings as isolated acts. They express a deep will of the Palestinian people. That is what the majority of the Palestinians want. They want what happened to the bus to happen to all of us. "

In the same interview, Morris explained his changed attitudes towards the displacement of the Palestinian population he was investigating:

“Ben-Gurion was right. If he hadn't done what he did, no Jewish state would have come into being. [...] I don't think the 1948 evictions were war crimes. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. You have to get your hands dirty. "

Morris went even further, claiming that Israel should have carried out a complete transfer of the Arab population as far as the Jordan at the time. This would have stabilized Israel for decades. Morris called the Arab minority in Israel a "time bomb" and compared it to a "serial killer".

He said:

“You have to build something like a cage for them [the Palestinians]. I know that sounds awful. It is really cruel. But we don't have a choice. There's a wild animal out there that needs to be locked up somehow, one way or another. "

In his book One State Two States , Morris accuses the Palestinian elite of pushing the postulated secular - democratic order of the future Palestinian state for purely tactical reasons towards western audiences. The real goal is the establishment of an authoritarian - Islamic-fundamentalist regime, which continues to aim at the destruction of Israel.

At an event at the University of Vienna in early May 2008, Benny Morris called for a pre-emptive strike against Iran : “With conventional weapons. And if that's not enough, then with unconventional [...] A lot of innocent people would die, "said Morris. But that is still better than a nuclear holocaust in Israel. In an interview with the Austrian newspaper Der Standard , Morris claimed that only a nuclear preemptive strike by Israel could stop Iran's nuclear program .

Criticism of Morris

Like the other new Israeli historians, Morris, her most important figure, has faced severe criticism from established historians.

Efraim Karsh , professor of war studies at King's College London , has repeatedly claimed that Morris' data on war crimes committed by the Israeli army is false. Other historians have examined the same documents but have come to very different conclusions. Karsh also pointed out that some texts from David Ben-Gurion's diary are misrepresented by Morris. Since then, Karsh and Morris argued in mutual statements on these issues and did not skimp on personal attacks.

Morris has also been criticized by Norman Finkelstein , who in the third chapter of his Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (2001) claims that Morris repeatedly misinterpreted sources to acquit members of the Israeli government and army of crimes against Palestinians. These allegations were made by Finkelstein before the revised edition of Morris' The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem .

Fonts (selection)

  • 1948. A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. Yale University Press , 2008. 544 pages. ISBN 978-0-300-12696-9
  • Correcting a mistake? Jews and Arabs in Palestine / Israel, 1936-1956 , Am Oved Publishers, 2000
  • Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 . Alfred A. Knopf, 1999
  • 1948 and after; Israel and the Palestinians , Clarendon, Oxford 1994
  • Israel's Border Wars 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War . Clarendon, Oxford 1993
  • Israel's Secret Wars: A History of Israel's Intelligence Service . Grove Weidenfeld, New York 1991
  • The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-1949 . Cambridge University Press , CUP, 1987
    • The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited . CUP, 2004 (updated, new edition)

literature

  • Joseph Croitoru : From myth breaker to conscience guardian , in: FAZ, 7 December 2018, p. 14

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Survival of the Fittest? An interview with Benny Morris
  2. ^ First: Haaretz, January 8, 2004
  3. ^ Welt online Adieu, Zionist morality
  4. ^ Ofer Aderet: Israel Will Decline, and Jews Will Be a Persecuted Minority. Those Who Can Will Flee to America. In: Haaretz , January 22, 2019
  5. ^ Benny Morris: One State, Two States, Yale, 2009 pp. 167ff
  6. ↑ War Threats from the Lecture Hall , Der Standard , May 4, 2008
  7. ↑ Last Chance Is An Israeli Atomic Bomb , Der Standard , May 4, 2008
  8. ^ Efraim Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History. The 'New Historians' , London 2000 (2nd ed.), Chap. 2.
  9. ^ "Survival of the fittest". Review , Haaretz , January 8, 2004, additional. Ari Shavit's interview with him.
personal data
SURNAME Morris, Benny
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli historian and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH December 8, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Ein HaHoresh , Israel