Genocide, Variations on a Theme #I
Part Seven, Benny Morris #1
Benny Morris, who was born on the 8th of December 1948 in the kibbutz Ein HaHoresh to immigrants from the U.K., is a very British yet very Israeli historian. Reading his well-written book: “The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem 1947-1949” it is almost indistinguishable, with its fair, balanced and reasonable tone, from any other British tome. In the acknowledgments there is even a hint of resentment about his sole dependence on British support: “In writing this book, which I began in 1982, I was helped financially only by the British Council.”
Unlike the average British academic Morris had what might be termed an eventful life and although there is no reason to doubt his assertion that “I embarked upon the research not out of ideological commitment or political interest. I simply wanted to know what happened” the issues involved were more immediate and more pressing for an Israeli than more remote questions, such as the Renaissance, might be for the average Briton.
Morris served in the infantry and paratroops during 1967-1969 and was wounded, like Netanyahu, at the Suez Canal in 1969. He studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and then Cambridge. He returned to Jerusalem, worked as a journalist and fought in the Lebanon War, where he served in a mortar unit and participated in the siege of Beirut.
In 1987 Cambridge University Press published the book that would make him famous. When he was called up again, a year later, he refused to serve and spent three weeks in jail.
The first thing that strikes one about the book is the map, which shows the location of what were once Palestinian villages. Morris lists 369 Palestinian villages, which were abandoned in 1948-49, including Abil al Qamh, Zuq al Fauqani, Shauqa at Tahta, As Sanbariya, Khisas, Hunin, Al Ulmaniya, Arab Zubeid, Deishum, Alma, Saliha, Fara, Al-Bassa, Az Zib, At Tell, Al Kabri, Majdal, Ghuweir Abu Shusha, Hittin, Nimrin, Lubiya, At Tira, As Sarafand, Kafr Lam, Tantura, Salama, Al Kheiriya, Al Muzeiri‘a, and Qula, to name but a few.
Khaled Mansour relates the tale of Um al-Zeinat, a village, which “sat like a fortress on the slopes of the great Mount Carmel”[1]. It was 17 kilometers to the southeast of Haifa and overlooked the Mediterranean on the one side, and the plains of Marj Ibn Amer on the other.
According to him: “The land of Sahel al-Rawha lies flat and wide like the palm of your hand. It yields an abundance of wheat, corn and legumes in addition to the olives that grow on its hillside and the fruits that every soul desires, from figs, pomegranates and cactus fruit.”
Um al-Zeinat was, according to Khaled Mansour, “a simple and quiet village” with a population, in 1948, of roughly 1,750 persons. “Its inhabitants were true peasants who loved the land as much as their children.”
There were two cemeteries, water cisterns, springs of fresh water, caves, threshing floors, where weddings and celebrations took place, a mosque and a school.
His father once took him around. “He showed me ... where my great grandfather Mohammad al-Hamad was buried. He showed me the location of every house, he pointed out to me the location of our old home (Dar Subeh). He said: ‘This was the location of the Bisher’s house, this is al-Marah neigbourhood where the Fahamneh family had lived.’ He pointed out Abu Khalil’s house, Hassan’s house, Sheikh Yousef’s house, Hardan’s house, the Khatib’s house, Salama’s house, and Abu Tarboosh, the Bayaries and he did not forget the house of Abu Hanna the only Christian who lived in the village. He was a shoe repairman, the tailor, the doctor and a storekeeper. My father loved Um al-Zeinat. He was fond of its gardens and its people. I have never seen in my life anybody love anything in that way. He loved it to the point where while he was walking among its ruins he could recognize the houses that were totally erased by Jews in the 1970s. He identified them by the surrounding olive trees, the fig trees, the pomegranates and the cactus that are still there today, living and growing in the same place despite the attempt of the occupiers to erase everything that is Arab from the village. He stood by every house he remembered, sighed and then said this is the house of ... and then mentioned everything about that person’s wife, his children and their whereabouts.”
“Despite his old age, my father was never tired of roaming around town. He spent hours and hours wandering on its old roads. He was looking for something he might have forgotten when he left town for the last time ... One day I asked my father: ‘Why did you leave your village? Why didn’t you defend it?’ He replied with agony in his heart. ‘We did everything we could, we resisted with all the means available to us, our weapons were very humble and very few. We had no training in comparison to the Jews who were well-trained and owned modern English guns but we didn’t leave our homes till after the Haganah forces had killed many of our people and blew up a number of our houses.’”
Ilan Pappé criticizes Morris for failing to deal with the oral history of the Palestinians and for failing to deal with the “other side of the issue”. This criticism is largely unfair. Given Morris’ limited resources it was an impossible task. Even now many oral histories of the Nakba lack English subtitles, making them, for all intents and purposes, pretty much useless.
What Morris is extremely good at, and what makes the book valuable is his background of the conflict in 1948. To understand how the Nakba was possible it is vitally important to understand the nature of Palestinian society and most important of all to realize that it lacked the institutions and structures possessed by the Zionists.
The Zionists replicated, hardly surprising given their European backgrounds, European bodies of government. These were far superior to what the Palestinians had and this was the reason, ultimately, according to Morris, why Israel was created.
“For a variety of reasons, including lack of educated personnel and political consciousness, Palestine’s Arabs never established state or pre-state structures akin to those of the Yishuv; in the main they lacked all self-governing and administrative machinery by 1948.”
What Morris doesn’t mention, but which is implied, is that the British didn’t do their job: they failed to prepare Palestine for statehood.
Ultimately the British were to blame for not creating the requisite institutions. The consequent wild scramble for power, the brutal and vicious conflict which broke out, and is still going on today, is a direct consequence of their negligence and irresponsibility.
The disunity among the Palestinians, the rivalry between the Husayni and Nashashibi families, the fact that the Palestinian society was predominantly agrarian and fragmented, with each village competing with the next, is only part of the picture.
Not only did the British fail to create institutions of government in Palestine, which they were supposed to do, they sided with the Zionists. This is also an extremely important part of the narrative Morris, heavily pro-British as he is, fails to mention: the unfairness of the British and their rather unsavory as well as shameful role in the destruction of Palestine. As Pappé has pointed out: Israeli tactics, such as using human shields and blowing up houses, were introduced by the British.
Nobody symbolized Britain’s role better than Orde Wingate, who served as an intelligence officer in Palestine between 1936 and 1939.
Wingate’s Zionism was heavily influenced by the views of the Plymouth Brethren and he saw it as both his religious and moral duty to help the Jewish community form a Jewish state.
He was in a good position to actually do so. His Special Night Squads of British-led Jewish commandos, armed with grenades and light arms, ambushed Arabs and raided their villages. They also often imposed severe collective punishments such as the blowing up of houses.
Moshe Dayan, who trained under Wingate, said he “taught us everything we know.”
The brutality and ferocity of the British oppression can be deduced from the fact that 10% of the male Palestinian population was wiped out in the space of just three years.
The British occupation, which involved a huge concentration of troops, roughly 100,000 men, was extremely costly and imposed an immense strain on British finances. This was one of the reasons it was decided, in 1939, to change tack and to stop the influx of Jews into Palestine. By then though the damage had been done: the Zionists had been organized, armed and trained while the Palestinian resistance had been effectively crushed. It was this, more than anything else, which paved the way for the emergence of Israel.
The Palestinians were acutely conscious of their military weakness: “A Jewish intelligence source in October 1947 described the situation in the countryside thus: ‘the fellah (farmer) is afraid of the Jewish terrorists ... who might bomb his village and destroy his property ... The town dweller admits that his strength is insufficient to fight the Jewish force and hopes for salvation from outside (i.e., by the Arab states).’ At the same time, the ‘moderate majority’ of Palestine’s Arabs, ‘are confused, frightened ... they are stockpiling provisions ... and are being coerced and pressured by extremists ... (But) all they want is peace, quiet.’”
The Palestinians were right to be frightened. As Morris notes: “By May 1948, the Haganah had mobilized and deployed in standing military formations 35,780 troops – some 5,500 more than the combined strength of the regular Arab armies who invaded Palestine in May 1948 ... The Haganah’s successor from the beginning of June, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), in July 1948 had 63,000 men under arms.”
[1] https://www.badil.org/phocadownload/Badil_docs/publications/al-majdal-26.pdf