Report by Isvestia
On Tuesday evening, June 14th, Palestinian rights campaigners in London produced a determined and visible show of opposition when Israeli historian Benny Morris came to the London School of Economics to expound his repugnant views of Arabs and his whitewashing of the Nakba.
Benny Morris
An Opportunity Presents Itself
Earlier that evening, Palestinian rights campaigners sitting in a coffee shop near the LSE, spotted Benny Morris walking down Kingsway, a busy street near Holborn Tube Station. This was too good an opportunity to miss; in a flash, campaigners gathered around him and took turns to put questions directly to Morris about his writings and statements on the necessity of ethnic cleansing, his call for the caging of Palestinians, and the racist overtones of his descriptions of Arabs.
Morris ignored the questions and instead marched on. If he was hoping to get away with that, he was mistaken. Campaigners simply followed him and continued to put questions to him loudly and asked for him to reply. This carried on for about 200 yards and created a spectacle for the public. Morris then bolted into the LSE building along with his rather confused and bewildered minders. Morris had muttered ‘right’ a couple of times and that was the sum total of his engagement; his demeanour throughout had been more like a criminal trying to hide from the spotlight rather than an academic confident of his ground and willing to take up the invite of open debate.
Outside The LSE
The scene outside the entrance.
The venue for Morris’s lecture had been kept secret until 24 hours beforehand. It was an all-ticket affair which required pre-booking and disclosure of the name and address of those applying for tickets. Security was heavy; photo-ID required, no bags allowed and coats searched. Why was all this was necessary for a public lecture by a historian to promote his book? My guess is that the measures were designed to make it difficult for protest or opposition to be organised. If so, the measures were a miserable failure. Palestinian rights campaigners – and there were many of them – were highly visible outside the LSE; and handed flyers to people going into the lecture. The flyer – specially produced by London BDS – was headed with a simple question, Is Benny Morris a Serious Historian or Plain Old Racist? The body of the flyer contained quotes from Benny Morris; the reader was left to form his/her own conclusion. In the lecture hall itself, many people were seen reading the flyer as the audience waited for Morris’s talk.
In The Lecture Theatre
Morris was introduced by the Chair of the meeting as “an authority” on the events of 1948. It was not a particularly warm or personal introduction; and the Chair explained he was undertaking the role of Chair because he was part of the management body of the LSE’s Middle East Centre.
Professors Nigel Ashton (Chair) and Benny Morris
Morris then gave a 35-minute talk to the 350 or so attendees that included a plug for his latest book. He told us he would be focussing on the events leading up to and surrounding 1948 and what he called the First Arab Israeli War.
What follows is not a summary of his talk, but snippets which seemed to me to show – beneath the veneer of academic pursuit – what Morris is really about.
Security was tight even during the lecture. I'm certain that the two men standing on the left aren't academics.
Morris made brief reference to some events before 1948 which in his view were significant for understanding what came later. For Morris it is the Arab rejection of the 1937 Peel Commission and the 1947 Partition Plan which is the root of all future problems. At no point though did Morris deal with the fairness or the legality of the requirement on the indigenous population to hand over vast tracts of their land to foreign settlers and colonisers. For Morris it’s all the fault of the ‘Arabs’. This was his constant theme throughout the evening.
Morris accepts that fighting broke out well before 1948 – in fact in 1947. Morris said this was sparked by ‘the Arabs’ who attacked a bus carrying Jewish passengers. For Morris, it’s always the fault of ‘the Arabs’.
Morris claims that the war of 1948 was not only about land and national rights, but ‘the Arab’ side was also driven by an Islamic Jihad. He cited a few sources for this conclusion – it was not clear how authoritative or genuine the sources are, but that does not matter to Morris. He alone has found evidence of an Islamic Jihad and thinks that this is credible.
Morris claims there was no official policy to force out Arabs in 1948. He thinks the hundreds of thousands of Arabs refugees just happened – through fear. He does not mention or discuss at any time evidence from other historians that the forced expulsion of Palestinians in 1947 and 1948 was part of a calculated plan. Morris then went on to speculate that in 1948 Arabs had genocidal intentions towards the Jews. No evidence was provided by Morris to support his speculation.
It seems for Morris any significant evil intention on the part of Zionists is to be dismissed unless there is clear evidence in the official Israeli Archives that it existed; in other words that the criminal has written a signed detailed confession; but Arab evil intention is real merely if Benny Morris thinks it is so.
A number of the audience were unable to stomach listening to Morris for long and they walked out – some with stickers across their mouths saying ‘Morris Is Racist’ and ‘Apartheid’. They left quietly, but certainly got their message across.
Rather than torture readers with more of Morris’ double-standards, I will move on to a report of the Q&As.
Morris took questions in blocks of three for about an hour. This enabled him to evade many questions altogether, or give only part replies. Nonetheless, I would estimate that two out every three questions from the public were direct challenges to his facts and or conclusions. These questions covered the illegitimate nature of the UN Partition Plan, the mass murders of Palestinians, the bogus nature of the claims of Zionists to the land of Israel, the issue of Palestinian refugees, the prospects for peace, illegal Settlements, Jerusalem and Morris’s own moral framework. Supporters of Palestinian rights continually challenged Morris in the session with well constructed and reasoned questions and there seemed to be a determination that Morris was not going to be allowed to come to London and simply schmooze his way through the issue of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
As time went on Morris seemed to become more flippant with his responses – wrongly playing to what he thought the audience wanted. This clearly angered many in the audience; and shouts of ‘Answer the Question’ became frequent and loud. At one point Morris referred to the Palestine Papers and dismissed these as US diplomatic cables; he repeated again they were US diplomatic cables which caused huge laughter and anger in equal proportions from the audience. Audience members pointed out loudly that the Palestine Papers were internal documents of the Palestinian Authority and nothing to do with US diplomatic cables. Not for the first time during the evening Morris’s factual foundations were found to be rotten.
The Chairperson closed the meeting at the allotted time. About a third of the audience did not applaud Benny Morris at the end. I rushed to the doors for fresh air and most of all – sanity.
But I had to wait, as the audience was not allowed to leave until Morris had been escorted from the building.
Photographs courtesy of www.inminds.com
BRAVO, London! This article is very good coverage of Morris at LSE. Thank you. I’m amazed that Morris’ advisers approved his visit to LSE, like, they didn’t think that there would be fierce objection to this racist apologist for Zionist atrocities toward Palestinians? Which continue hourly, to this day? Let’s see Morris come to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. Israel is running very scared now; our efforts are reaping tangible results, finally. September will be very interesting.
A repugnant man from all accounts – glad he was challenged.
Answering questions taken in blocks is standard practice though.
And (though I don’t want to start some standard bullshit to and fro here):
“Extraordinary though, is his view about the Zionist movement at the time; Morris said later in an answer to a question from the audience that Zionists in the 1948 war were almost atheists and not mainly motivated by religion. ”
An interesting one. I’d not realised till I went to the West Bank with ISM and talked to my (Jewish) dad about that time (though he was a kid). He said that many many Jews around that time were atheists. Yes they had bought into the lie that it was a “land without people for a people without land” and knew no better. But what motivated many was that they had been struggling for a better world in many countries without success, campaigning from communist, anarchist and other such viewpoints…and they had not got anywhere. Now they had a chance to make a socialist/anarchist paradise on earth. Things such as the kibbutz came out of these ideals, and other things I know little about, but of course we all know that it all went hideously wrong. But I can believe this claim of his – there were and are a majority of Jews that identify as such for cultural and not religious reasons. There are still a high proportion of Jews in progressive movements. It’s also part of the history.
By the by, when a eugenicist came to speak to the Galton Institute in London with his vile racist pseudo-science, we decided to disrupt the talk and not let it happen. I think people should at very least consider this for the future – though you will get resistance from academics and students who think someone should be tackled on their ideas, allowed to speak and then be challenged, with good leaflets, banner and speakers this can be addressed. No Platform for racists. Simple as.
Zionism was originally a largely secular movement – many Zionists were socialists, and obviously socialism and atheism are closely related.
These aren’t the best sources to point to, but give an idea of Labour Zionism (the socialist strand of Zionism) which dominated Zionism in the 30s, 40s and 50s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Zionists
http://www.mideastweb.org/labor_zionism.htm
The confusion is between Zionism as a secular movement that many Jewish people were heavily in and between Judaism as a religion. Added to that is the fact that many Jewish people (such as myself) see themselves as Jewish even if they do not believe in God. It can be hard to get your head round this, but if you really want to understand Zionism, then that is kind of what you have to do.
Ben and AC. Thanks for the explanations about Zionism and its atheist adherents. I will bear this in mind- and if I get time read up on it.
Finkelstein once said, ‘the truth is a bitter pill to swallow’ – this works for everybody. Shouting louder or resisting harder, will not make anything more true; and will not change the past.
The article calls Morris a racist, but does not explain why. Investia you need to come clean. I appreciate your enthusiasm but so what if Morris does not agree with Masalha, what makes you think that Masalha knows better?
Many who went thru the 1948 war are still alive, and if there was a conspiracy to ‘transfer’ people, we would have known, and Masalha would need not take 10 years to ‘unravel’ his allegations. I think Masahla is an intriguer plotter.
The debate is being stifled by throwing insults, I challenge ‘Palestinian new historians’, yes this would be refreshing, who won’t be afraid to turn their world upside down, the way new historians have done.
isvestia – There are two good online sources for the “socialist” nature of Zionism, one being a book in pdf and the other a Ph.D. thesis.
Arthur Ruppin and the Production of the Modern Hebrew Culture by Etan Bloom, then a TAU doctoral student. He explains Ruppin as a single personality who largely shaped the agenda of the second aliyah, when the kibbutzim movement began. The collective farming efforts were part of his experiment to reshape what he saw as the Jewish volk into their ancient agricultural being, having been tainted over the centuries by Semitic interbreeding into a contemplative and mercantile people (He saw Jews as a mixed Aryan-Semitic people and wanted to filter the Semitic component).
Bloom’s thesis also ties together various personalities that are well known to students of the early Zionist movement, including Syrkin, Borochov, AD Gordon, Katznelson and of course Ben-Gurion and how they were either influenced or superseded by Ruppin.
The Global Political Economy of Israel by Shimshon Bichler and Jon Nitzan basically explains who gains what from Middle East conflict and why for a certain strand of capitalists, namely those in defense and oil, conflict is preferable to peace. They include detailed background on how Israel became a capitalist society controlled by a narrow upper-crust that liquidated much of the country to outside investment.
I walked away from both works realizing that Zionism wasn’t a socialist movement so much as a movement that took in certain figures with vague socialist ideas and crushed these ideas to bits.
Bloom’s thesis does have the pratfall of not rejecting Zionism outright, even though it contains enough information to make any sane being want to punt all Zionist founding figures from Moses Hess on down into orbit. It’s like reading Benny Morris’ early work, which takes the Haganah’s defense of its own actions at face value, e.g. the attack on al-Khisas that killed six civilians and was rationalized away as the initiative of a local commander, and being told by the same guy there was no plan to transfer the Palestinians. Likewise, Bloom is reluctant to call Zionism a colonial-settler movement even though he’s the last person who should be. If you read it, just be ready for that frustration.
be sure that Bloom is not a second Benni Morris.
he just doing his work as an historian and culture researcher and let the reader understand and judge it by himself. if he would say what you want to hear he would not be able to pass in TAU or in any other Jewish/Zionist institution.
As to colonialism, Bloom goes beyond the general definitions of colonialism attached to Zionism (Zionism is indeed colonial movement for Bloom but he wants to and define it as a colonialism of the memory, he use the term “memory manipulation” to designate the way Zionist colonialism operated.
Good report, he seems to have changed his opinion over time though. In the 1980s he produced groundbreaking research that proved that in a very large percentage of the Palestinian villages that the refugees fled from, the reason they left was that they were forced out by zionist militias or fled in advance of the militias coming. He essentially proved that it was ethnically cleansing, although his moral jusgement was that Palestine should have been completely ethically cleansed. It is interesting he has forsaken his earlier work and now is in Nakba denial
For evidence of Morris’s racism see his interview with Haaretz magazine in 2004.
For more recent evidence see Review in Haaretz 09/07/2010 by Tom Segev of
A History of the first Arab-Israeli War” by Benny Morris – A War of Necessity :
At the same time, he carefully states again and again that Arabs, including prisoners of war and civilians, including women and children, were “executed”. Jews, on the other hand, were generally “murdered”, as he puts it. The civilians who were killed by Arabs in Gush Etzion were murdered in a “massacre” writes Morris. This was after the events of Deir Yassin, but the Deir Yassin incident is not one that he defines as a massacre. Even those of the villagers who were shot after the battle were, as he put it, “executed.”
londonbds.org is a site by activists, for activists campaigning for human rights and answering the call by Palestinian civil society for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions. If you are looking for an academic debate you are on the wrong site. As for me, I am too busy helping plan and execute the next londonbds action with my colleagues. Have a nice day.
Benny Morris should be allowed to defend his views. So should David Irving. Traditional left-wing anti-racism was effective defeating apartheid in Africa, but has proven useless in the struggle against apartheid in Palestine. Political correctness was not designed to undermine Jewish power.
Thanks for your contribution Jay and also for the following comment/link in the Pacifica Forum:
We’ll let both your comments linger.
Thanks for not being offended by my comment, which seemed funny when I wrote it