The Israeli historian Benny Morris has been very vocal of late in denying that Palestine was ethnically cleansed of Arabs in order for the “Jewish state” of Israel to be established.
In a series of articles in the Israeli daily Haaretz, Morris has debated the question with several of his critics who contend that ethnic cleansing is precisely what occurred.
Not so, argues Morris. So who’s right?
It’s worth noting at the outset that, while such a debate exists in the Israeli media, the US media remains, as ever, absolutely silent on the matter.
Who Started the War?
One of Morris’s main arguments underscoring his denial of ethnic cleansing is that it was the Arabs, not the Jews, who started the war after having rejected the UN partition plan.
He points to hostile actions by the “Arabs”, (Palestinians and pseudo-volunteer armies from Jordan and Lebanon), between the end of November 1947 and May 1948, but, of course, there were also hostile actions by the Jews during this same period. So is there a particular incident Morris can point to as having marked the initiation of these hostilities?
In fact, in his book 1948, he does point to a specific event.
Early in the morning on November 30—the day after Resolution 181 in 1948 was adopted in the UN General Assembly—an eight-man armed band from Jaffa ambushed a Jewish bus near Kfar Syrkin, killing five. Half an hour later, the gang attacked a second bus, killing two more. “These were the first dead of the 1948 War”, Morris writes.
Yet Morris also acknowledges that these attacks were almost certainly “not ordered or organized by” the Arab Palestinian leadership. And “the majority view” in the intelligence wing of the Haganah—the Zionists’ paramilitary organization that later became the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)—“was that the attackers were driven primarily by a desire to avenge” a raid by the Jewish terrorist group Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang, on an Arab family ten days prior.
Lehi “had selected five males of the Shubaki family and executed them in a nearby orange grove” as an act of revenge for the apparently mistaken belief that the Shubakis had informed the British authorities about a Lehi training session that prompted a British raid on the group in which five Jewish youths were killed.[20]
So why wasn’t the murder of five Arabs by the Jewish terrorist organization the initiating act of hostility marking the start of the 1948 war, in Morris’s account?
Clearly, to try to assess responsibility for the war by pinpointing this or that incident of tit-for-tat violence is an exercise in futility.
Moreover, apart from overlooking the Zionists’ own acts of hostility, Morris’s claim that the Arabs started the war serves to remove the mutual hostilities that broke out in the wake of the General Assembly’s adoption of Resolution 181 from their larger context—and it is only within that larger context that a proper assessment of which side bore greater responsibility for the war can be made.
Note: Israel was created by a single “majority vote in the UN where 2/3 of the current nations had Not gotten their independence. It was the UN of the colonial powers)
As in the above example, Morris tends to portray Jewish violence against Arabs as always being preceded by Arab violence against Jews—even though, as just illustrated, it was equally true that the Palestinian violence had, in turn, been preceded by Jewish violence.
Elsewhere, in contrast to how he characterizes Arab violence, Morris describes unambiguous war crimes committed by the Zionist forces as merely “mistakes”.
Included among the Haganah’s “mistakes” was an attack on December 18, 1947, on the village of Khisas. Carried out with the approval of Yigal Allon, the commander of the Palmach (an elite unit within the Jewish army), Zionist forces invaded the village and indiscriminately murdered 7 men, a woman, and 4 children.
Morris describes this as a “reprisal” for the murder of a Jewish cart driver earlier that day, even though, as he superfluously notes, “None of the dead appear to have been involved in the death of the cart driver.”[21]
Another of the Haganah’s “mistakes” occurred on the night of January 5, 1948, when Zionist forces entered the West Jerusalem neighborhood of Katamon and bombed the Semiramis Hotel, killing 26 civilians, including a government official from Spain. “The explosion triggered the start of a ‘panic exodus’ from the prosperous Arab neighborhood.” The British were furious, and Ben-Gurion subsequently removed the officer responsible from command.[22]
“But generally”, Morris continues, “Haganah retaliatory strikes during December 1947–March 1948 were accurately directed, either against perpetrators or against their home bases”—meaning the Arab villages where they lived.
Thus, according to Morris’s own criteria, when the Haganah attacked an Arab village that happened to be home to one or more combatants and proceeded to go about “accurately” killing innocent civilians and destroying their homes, this was by no means a “mistake”.
Instructively, Morris quotes a document from the intelligence wing of the Haganah on the consequences of what he describes as the “Jewish reprisals” that occurred during those months:
“The main effect of these operations was on the Arab civilian population” (emphasis added), the Haganah noted, including “the destruction of their houses” and psychological trauma.
Among other consequences, “The Jewish attacks forced the Arabs to tie down great forces in protecting themselves” (emphasis added).[23]
Thus Morris’s characterization of Arabs as the aggressors and the Haganah as being on the defensive throughout this period is contradicted by his own account, citing primary source evidence that precisely the opposite was true.
Indeed, Morris goes into considerable detail documenting how, in his own summation, “the Yishuv had organized for war. The Arabs hadn’t.”[24]
Morris’s characterization of the Arabs as always being the aggressors and the Jews as being on the defensive, despite occasional “mistakes” such as those just noted, extends well prior to the onset of the 1948 war.
While Lehi’s murder of five members of the Shubaki family on November 20 seems to fit Morris’s criteria for a “mistake”, he could, in turn,
He writes, for example, that in the spring and summer of 1939 the Irgun Zvai Leumi, “which had been formed by activist breakaways from the Haganah, subjected the Arab towns to an unnerving campaign of retaliatory terrorism, with special Haganah units adding to the bloodshed through selective reprisals” (emphasis added).[25]
Once again we see that, while Morris doesn’t try to justify such acts of terrorism, he does characterize them as only occurring in retaliation for earlier acts of aggression by Arabs.
Indeed, Morris could go back a decade prior, within this exercise of trying to pinpoint responsibility for the initiation of such tit-for-tat violence, and point to the 1929 massacre of Jews in Hebron; or, further, to May 1921, when Arab mobs murdered Jews in Jaffa; or further still, to April 1920, when Arab rioters killed five Jews in Jerusalem.
There is no dispute that these earlier incidences of violence were initiated by Arabs. But the question remains of why they occurred.
Did these murderous attacks reflect an inherent hatred of Jews among the Arab population? Or is there some other context that the debate Morris has had with his critics is still missing?
Adonis Diaries 
