The bleak bottom line, as far as historian Benny Morris is concerned, is that it's us or them.
Benny Morris.
Photo: Courtesy
The bleak emphasis, underlined in the concluding chapter of his new book, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, is that we should have realized this all along, but are only now, after 60 years, internalizing it.
And Morris's bleak assessment of historical flux is that the odds of the Zionist enterprise prevailing in a region so ruthless, so hostile to Jewish sovereignty, so consumed by the perceived religious imperative to annihilate Israel, are "very poor."
Morris does have an optimistic caveat... if you consider a nuclear strike to offer any conceivable grounds for optimism. His dismal outlook, he says, is based on "the current situation and trends."
If, however, Israel resorts to the use of nuclear weapons to counter Iran's drive toward a nuclear capability, "this could put the fight out of radical Islam for a few generations. The Arab world could soften and move to the West."
But before you get too relieved, Morris adds another reservation: "Of course, it could go either way. It could make them more vengeful and aggressive."
IF THE above cataclysmic outlook sounds rather matter-of-fact, then that reflects the way in which Morris delivers it. He unleashes appalling analyses at breakneck pace and with occasional chuckles - not because he considers the gravity of the threat to Israel to be amusing, but rather, I think, as a way of apologizing through a lightness of tone for the doomsday thrust of his content.
The concept of Morris as the heavy voice of gloom, highlighting the profundity of Arab intolerance for Israel, is surprising for two reasons.
First of all, personally, because when I first encountered him as a Jerusalem Post staffer a quarter century ago, Morris seemed to be so lighthearted - flip and wisecracking; anything but a heavyweight.
And second, more seriously, because in his subsequent incarnation at the vanguard of Israel's so-called "new historians," his researches were perceived as legitimating Palestinian grievance against Israel. By documenting what he described as orchestrated Jewish efforts to force Arab residents from their homes in what would become the Jewish State of Israel, detailing expulsions and massacres, his work both bolstered Palestinian claims to a "right of return" and international criticism of Israel for resisting it. The notion of Morris as a darling of the radical Left was strengthened by his own refusal to serve with his artillery unit in the West Bank 20 years ago, early in the first intifada, and his consequent jailing for three weeks.
But the Cambridge-educated Morris, however unexpectedly, subsequently argued that his works of history were being misread by many, and that in his honest documentation of the circumstances of Israel's founding, academic scrupulousness was misunderstood as opposition. In fact, he would later clarify, he understood and even endorsed the motives of Israel's political and military leaders 60 years ago. As he reasoned to Ha'aretz's Ari Shavit four years ago, "A society that aims to destroy you, forces you to destroy it. When the choice is between destroying or being destroyed, it's better to destroy... A Jewish state 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...
"Remember another thing," he went on at the time. "The Arab people gained a large slice of the planet. Not thanks to its skills or its great virtues, but because it conquered 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 point of view, the need to establish this state in this place overcame the injustice that was done to the Palestinians by uprooting them."
If anything, Morris, who is himself as old as the state, seems to have hardened further in recent years. His new book, impeccably timed to coincide with our 60th anniversary, is notable for its insistence that the religious dimension of Arab opposition to Jewish sovereignty, the rejection of Israel as an "infidel" and "alien" presence, was overwhelming from the earliest days of the struggle for statehood - and was underestimated by Israel's leaders from the earliest days, too.
Many, if not most, in the Arab world, he writes, viewed the war against Israel's establishment as a holy war.
He recalls, for instance, the Muslim Brotherhood declaring in 1938 that "To fight for Palestine was the 'inescapable obligation on every Muslim.'"
He quotes King Ibn Sa'ud of Saudi Arabia telling US president Franklin Roosevelt, in a letter five years later, that Palestine "has been an Arab country since the dawn of history and... was never inhabited by Jews for more than a period of time, during which their history in the land was full of murder and cruelty... [There is] religious hostility... between the Muslims and the Jews from the beginning of Islam... which arose from the treacherous conduct of the Jews towards Islam and the Muslims and their prophet."
He notes that the mufti of Egypt in 1948 "issued a fatwa positing jihad in Palestine as the duty of all Muslims."
In short, he insists, "The jihadi impulse underscored both popular and governmental responses in the Arab world" to the UN's partition resolution and was "central to the mobilization of the 'street' and the [Arab] governments for the successive onslaughts of November-December 1947 and May-June 1948."
As for the Palestinians, from the start, "the clash with the Zionists was a zero-sum game. The Palestinian national movement's leader during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, Haj Amin al-Husseini, consistently rejected territorial compromise and espoused a solution to the Palestine problem that posited all of Palestine as an Arab state and allowed for a Jewish minority composed only of those who had lived in the country before 1914."
