Benny Morris, a professor at Ben Gurion University, is an Israeli historian and scholar. This month will mark the sixtieth anniversary of the creation of the Israeli state and Morris marks it with a new book called 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War
It’s a definitive and heavily documented account of the circumstances around Israel’s "War of Independence", something that Palestinians refer to as "Al Nakba" or "The Catastrophe".
The book is a detailed look at a historic event that has been mythologised by those who wish that Israel had been born only in purity and beauty. The hard facts are that the country was born out of a bitter and cruel war, which Morris strongly implies accounts for the continuing violent resistance by Palestinian Arabs 60 years on.
Morris documents massacres of defenceless or lightly-armed Arabs and pulls no punches when it comes to demolishing the myth that European Jews had come to "a land without people for a people without land". Following the defeat of the Arabs, there was a truce, during which Israeli soldiers carried out what was euphemistically called Operation Cleaning. On one occasion, an Israeli patrol discovered that a large group of Arabs had returned home to their village, to tend their animals and harvest their crops. The soldiers killed the Arab civilians and burned their homes. In all, approximately 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled their homes or were forcibly expelled during and after the fighting. Most of them – their children and grand-children remain refugees today.
Professor Morris is not optimistic about the future. Near the close of the book he says this: “Whether 1948 was a passing fancy or has permanently etched the region remains to be seen”.
It’s clear from the book however, that the war, which resulted in the formation of a European-style state in The Middle East is not over yet. The echoes can be heard in every Muslim State in the region. As Aaron Miller, a former senior U.S. government official puts it…”In a hopelessly divided and largely dysfunctional Arab world, no single issue still resonates everywhere more than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this book is the fact that it was written by an Israeli, proving one thing beyond any doubt: authors, critics, politicians and scholars in Israel can be far more blunt, realistic and critical than their counterparts on the outside.
I give this book Five Stars.
Other writings by Professor Morris
The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, Palestine and the Jews
Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999
The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949
There are some bargains in this list of books by Proffesor Morris
