Benny Morris:Right of Reply / I do not support expulsion [but Palestinians
want to destroy Israel]

Haaretz Magazine section 23 January 2004
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/386065.html

A few days after the publication of the interview with me ("Survival of the
fittest," Haaretz Magazine, January 9), an angry Israeli-Arab student came
to my office at Ben-Gurion University. He suggested that the Holocaust never
happened (he cited what he called "an important and world-renowned Egyptian
historian"), and claimed that the Twin Towers in New York were destroyed at
the order of the CIA or the Mossad, and that Israeli soldiers and pilots in
the territories are deliberately targeting and murdering innocent civilians.
I mention this so that we all understand the kind of world we in the Middle
East are living in.

The war being waged against us since September 2000 is three-dimensional: On
one level, which is the one highlighted by Palestinian spokespersons, a
struggle is being waged for liberation from Israeli occupation in the West
Bank and Gaza Strip; on the second level, the Palestinians - according to
spokesmen for Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah militants - are waging a war to
eradicate the Zionist state and to restore their "rights" over all of
Palestine; on the third level, the Palestinians' struggle is part of the
global struggle being waged by jihadist Islam against the "Western Satan,"
with Israel being a vulnerable extension of Western culture in our region.

For jihadist Islam, Israel represents the embodiment of all the values it
abhors - democracy and freedom, openness, tolerance and pluralism,
individualism and secularism, criticality (including the value of expressing
self-criticism, which is absent from their culture), women's rights,
liberalism and progress, sexual freedom - while the proponents of jihad
aspire to return to the days in which the sword of Islam ruled from India to
the Atlantic Ocean and minorities quaked under its shadow. These jihadists -
and the societies that support them and dispatch them - who rejoice in the
streets whenever a building is brought crashing down upon hundreds or
thousands of occupants or a bus is reduced to a smoldering hulk, deserve the
name "barbarians." It's unfortunate that many in the West and in the extreme
Israeli left prefer to ignore the second and third dimensions and to view
the Palestinian struggle solely through the prism of the first dimension,
resistance to occupation.

A central accusation in the letters to Haaretz Magazine ("The judgment of
history," January 16) concerned the issue of "ethnic cleansing." I will
repeat my words, which apparently did not register (perhaps because of the
misleading title on the cover): I do not support the expulsion of Arabs from
the territories or from the State of Israel! Such an expulsion would be
immoral, and is also unrealistic. What I said was, that if in the future,
these communities were to launch massive violence against the State of
Israel in combination with a broad assault on Israel by its neighbors, and
endanger its survival, expulsions would certainly be in the cards. As for
Israeli Arabs, my comments may be seen to represent a minatory road sign
pointing in two possible directions: They could, as a whole, choose the path
of loyalty to the Jewish state and integration within it as equal citizens,
and thus enjoy quiet, prosperous lives; or they could choose the path of
disloyalty to the state and of active and violent support for those who seek
its demise. The latter path - with which many Israeli Arabs identified in
October 2000 and with which many in its leadership seem to identify today,
in one convoluted way or another - will help lead to either the destruction
of the Jewish state or to their being uprooted.

A general comment on the matter of ethnic cleansing: I am aware that "ethnic
cleansing" is not politically correct and is morally problematic. But, what
can we do - the history of the 20th century is replete with instances of
ethnic cleansing that occurred under catastrophic circumstances and were
ultimately beneficial for humanity, including for the expulsees themselves.
Was not the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans (after World War II) - who
contributed to the destruction of the Czechoslovak Republic - justified? And
didn't it contribute, in the end, to their happiness, and certainly to the
happiness of the Czech people? In the final analysis, didn't the ethnic
cleansing perpetrated by the Turks against their Greek minority and by the
Greeks against their Turkish minority after World War I contribute to the
welfare and happiness of the two peoples, and to the peace that has
prevailed between the two nations ever since?

One more thing: Among the biggest religio-ethnic cleansers in human history,
in the distant past and in our time, has been the Arab Islamic nation.
Mohammed and his men cleansed the Arabian Peninsula of its Jewish tribes, in
part through the mass slaughter of the men and the enslavement and forced
conversion of the young women. (According to the Koran, in one day,
Mohammed's men massacred 800-900 men of the Bani Qureiza tribe - a larger
number than all the Arab victims of Jewish massacres through the whole of
the 1948 war.) In the ensuing centuries, the Muslim empires and the Arab
states, with the help of the pogrom and the law, uprooted from their midst
or forcibly converted most of their Christian communities and ethnically
cleansed themselves of their Jewish communities. Has a single word of
criticism about any of this history ever been voiced by MK Mohammed Barakeh
and Dr. Haggai Ram and their friends? (And, by the way, every Jewish
community that was conquered by the Arab armies in the course of the 1948
war, including the Jewish Quarter in the Old City, was ethnically cleansed
and every site was completely leveled.)

In the modern age, no one has been more racist and more intolerant of "the
other" - Kurd, Jew, Sudanese Christian and animist, Maronite Christian,
etc. - than the Arab states. The constitution of Jordan, one of the more
moderate Islamic Arab states, even includes a clause prohibiting Jews from
being Jordanian citizens. The Arabs' attempt to annihilate the Jewish Yishuv
[pre-state community in Palestine] in 1948 compelled Israel to uproot them
from the Jewish territory.

Mr. Barakeh: Enough of your hypocrisy. Only one side in the conflict in our
region is under the threat of annihilation and that's the Jewish side, and
you know it. So it was in 1948 (see, for example, the declaration by Azzam
Pasha, Secretary of the Arab League, on the eve of the Pan-Arab invasion of
Palestine, about how the anticipated slaughter of the Jews would rival the
carnage wreaked by the Mongols during their 13th-century invasion of the
Middle East), and so it could also be in the future. The deep hatred among
the Arabs of Palestine and the proximate Muslim world for the Zionist
enterprise constitutes an infrastructure for such a future genocide. There
is no such hatred for anyone among the Jews or in me.

In our region, the side that has been engaging for generations now in the
systematic dehumanization of the adversary is the Palestinian side against
the Jews - see the Hamas charter and the official political manifests of
Hamas and Islamic Jihad, who represent at least half of the Palestinians in
the territories, which routinely refer to the Jews, in accordance with
Islamic tradition, as "sons of monkeys and pigs," "killers of prophets" and
as a "lowly people." Yes, I will stick to the definition "savage beasts" to
describe suicide bombers who are prepared to massacre dozens or even
thousands of civilians in buses and skyscrapers in cities in Israel and the
West.

In 1988, I regarded the Palestinian rebellion ("the first intifada") as a
legitimate struggle for liberation from occupation. And I believe that most
of the Palestinian stone-throwers then saw their struggle that way. This is
why I felt it was right to refuse to serve in the territories, and to sit in
prison. (Incidentally, I do not recall seeing the names of my morally
enlightened colleagues from Ben-Gurion University appearing on the list of
refuseniks then, just as I did not come across them during my service in the
Paratroop brigades.)

In 2000, the Palestinians, led by Yasser Arafat, began a war that combined
the three dimensions I've mentioned and whose ultimate objective is the
destruction of Israel (or, "flying the flag of Palestine over the walls of
Jerusalem," as Arafat coyly puts it) - just as Saladin destroyed the
Crusader Kingdom. In Arafat's eyes, we are the "new Crusaders." This is the
main reason why Arafat, in the name of the Palestinian people and without
argument on the part of his colleagues, rejected the Barak-Clinton peace
proposals of December 2000, which included Israeli withdrawal from about 95
percent of the West Bank and from 100 percent of the Gaza Strip, the
evacuation of most of the settlements, and the establishment of a
Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. He rejected the
proposals because he and his people want the entire country (their
intransigence over the "right of return" is not a tactical matter).

And in so doing, Arafat remained consistent with the rejectionist heritage
of his people, who in 1937 rejected the compromise proposed by the Peel
Commission; in 1947-48, rejected the compromise proposed by the UN (the
Partition Proposal); and in 1978, rejected the Egyptian-Israeli compromise
(the Camp David Accords, in which the Palestinians were offered autonomy,
which would in time have evolved into a Palestinian state).

Unfortunately, the destruction of Israel and the right of return of the
refugees have become a key component of Palestinian identity, and as long as
this component does not vanish, there is no possibility of an historic
compromise. And without a compromise that is based on two states, in the
end, only one state will remain here - either a Jewish one without a large
Arab minority, or an Arab one with a Jewish minority that will continuously
dwindle until it disappears, just as the Jewish communities disappeared from
the Islamic world in the last century (after all, what Jew in his right mind
would want to live as a minority in an Islamic state headed by the terrorist
from the Muqata'a and the wheelchair-bound fanatic from Gaza?).

As for the near future, Israel must get out of most of the West Bank and
from Gaza and East Jerusalem, with or without an agreement, and a fence will
separate the two peoples (and if the Palestinians see it as prison, they are
the ones responsible for its construction). As long as the Arabs' intentions
toward us are murderous, there is no option but to complete the fence, but
not along the planned route. The Israeli government is using a just
enterprise to make unjust gains.

The compression of the seven hours of my interview with Ari Shavit into two
pages did not do me justice, at least in terms of the tone. From a whole
range of statements on different issues, the harshest ones were chosen,
sometimes without nuances or qualifications. I admit, I slipped here and
there - I do not support and did not support the extermination of the
Indians, and I regret the use of the word "cage."

One last thing. I find it odd that the editors of Haaretz Magazine chose to
accompany an article dealing with the tragedy of two peoples with
photographs of a smiling Benny Morris. Contrary to the implication, I do not
rejoice over bloodletting and expulsion. I also do not understand why the
English edition of the magazine chose to entitle the interview, "Survival of
the fittest." I did not use that expression and I abhor it.

In any event, I will be the first to rejoice if my judgments and predictions
are proved wrong.