Reply to What should Israel do with Gaza?

Forum Index » Political Discussion

Reply to "What should Israel do with Gaza?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]Here is an opinion from a LEFT-WING, for chrissakes, Israeli historian Benny Morris, who is close to Ehud Barak.  Is he the only Israeli who negotiated himself into the position that horrible things are OK if they are good for Israel? I think not.

http://www.palestine-studies.org/files/correct_BM.pdf

Benny Morris, for decades you have been researching the dark side of Zionism. You are an expert on the atrocities of 1948. In the end, do you in effect justify all this? Are you an advocate of the transfer of 1948?

There is no justification for acts of rape. There is
no justification for acts of massacre. Those are
war crimes. But in certain conditions, expulsion
is not a war crime. I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands.

We are talking about the killing of thousands of people, the destruction of an entire society.

A society that aims to kill you forces you to destroy it. When the choice is between destroying or
being destroyed, it’s better to destroy.

There is something chilling about the quiet way in which you say that.

If you expected me to burst into tears, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I will not do that.

So when the commanders of Operation Dani
are standing there and observing the long and
terrible column of the 50,000 people expelled from Lod walking eastward, you stand there with them? You justify them?

I definitely understand them. I understand their motives. I don’t think they felt any pangs of conscience, and in their place I wouldn’t have felt pangs of conscience. Without that act, they would not have won the war and the state would not have come into being.

You do not condemn them morally?

No.

They perpetrated ethnic cleansing.

There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is
completely negative in the discourse of the 21
st
century, but when the choice is between ethnic
cleansing and genocide—the annihilation of
your people—I prefer
ethnic cleansing.
And that was the situation in 1948?
That was the situation. That is
what Zionism faced. A Jewish st
ate would not have come into
being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians
. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them.
There was no choice but to expel that population.
It was necessary to cl
eanse the hinterland and
cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads.
It was necessary to cl
eanse the villages from
which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.
The term “to cleanse” is terrible.
I know it doesn’t sound nice but that’s
the term they used at the time. I adopted it from all the
1948 documents in which I am immersed.
What you are saying is hard to listen to
and hard to digest. You sound hard-hearted.
I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which
truly underwent a hard
tragedy. I feel sympathy
for the refugees themselves. But if the desire to
establish a Jewish state here is legitimate, there
was no other choice. It was impossible to leave
a large fifth column in the country. From the
moment the Yishuv [pre–1948 Jewish community in
Palestine] was attacked by the Palestinians
and afterward by the Arab states, there was no c
hoice but to expel the Pa
lestinian population. To
uproot it in the course of war.
Remember another thing: the Arab
people gained a large slice of
the planet. Not thanks to its skills or its great
virtues, but because it co
nquered and murdered and
forced those it conquered to convert during many
generations. But in the end the Arabs have 22
states. The Jewish people did not have even one
state. There was no reason in the world why it
should not have one state. Therefore, from my poin
t of view, the need to
establish this state in
this place overcame the injustice that was
done to the Palestinians by uprooting them.
And morally speaking, you have no problem with that deed?
That is correct. Even the great American demo
cracy could not have been created without the
annihilation of the Indians. Ther
e are cases in which the overall,
final good justifies harsh and
cruel acts that are committed
in the course of history.
And in our case it effectively
justifies a popula
tion transfer.
That’s what emerges.
And you take that in stride? War crimes? Ma
ssacres? The burning fields and the devastated
villages of the Nakba?
You have to put things in proportion. These are
small war crimes. All told, if we take all the
massacres and all the executions of 1948, we come
to about 800 who were killed. In comparison
to the massacres that were perpetrated in Bosnia
, that’s peanuts. In comparison to the massacres
the Russians perpetrated against the Germans at
Stalingrad, that’s chicken feed. When you take
into account that there was a bloody civil war here
and that we lost an entire 1 percent of the
population, you find that we behaved very well.

There is a part 2, as well.
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics