A Betrayal of History
Avi Shlaim
The Guardian (February 22, 2002)
Yesterday
in G2, Benny Morris said there was no chance of peace in the Middle
East, and laid the blame at the door of Yasser Arafat and the
Palestinians. Rubbish, says fellow historian Avi Shlaim - Morris's
views have more to do with propaganda than with proper research
‘A nation,’ wrote the French philosopher Ernest Renan, ‘is a group of
people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their
neighbours.’ By this definition, Benny Morris may now be counted as a true
member of the Israeli nation. In his account in the Guardian of his
‘conversion’, Benny explains that, although he has not undergone a brain
transplant as far as he can remember, his thinking about the current Middle
East crisis and its protagonists has radically changed during the past two
years. Willingness to re-examine one’s thinking is always a commendable trait
in a historian. Unfortunately, in Benny’s case the re-examination is confined
to only one protagonist in the Middle East conflict: the
Palestinians. As a consequence his new version of the recent history of the
conflict has more in common with propaganda than with genuine history. Like
most nationalist versions of history, it is simplistic, selective, and
self-serving.
By his own account, Benny’s conversion was a pretty dramatic affair. He
imagines that he feels a bit like those Western fellow-travellers rudely
awakened by the trundle of Russian tanks crashing into Budapest in 1956. But
there is surely some mistake in this analogy. Benny could not have possibly
heard the trundle of Palestinian tanks crashing into any Israeli city because
there are no Palestinian tanks. What he might have heard is the sound of
Merkava tanks invading Palestinian cities on the West Bank and refugee
camps in Gaza in the most
flagrant violation of a long series of agreements that placed these areas under
the control of the Palestinian Authority. Another minor flaw in Benny’s analogy
is that the Palestinians, by any reckoning, can only be seen as the victims,
while Israel is the
aggressive and overbearing military superpower. If we are going to look for
historical antecedents for this grossly unequal contest, it would make more
sense to update the Biblical image of David and Goliath: a Palestinian David
facing an Israeli Goliath.
There is a historical irony in Benny’s conversion to the orthodox
Zionist rendition of the past for he was one of the trail-blazers of the ‘new
history’ which placed Israel’s political and
military conduct under an uncompromising lens. Indeed, it was he who coined the
term ‘the new historiography’ in order to distinguish it from the traditional
pro-Zionist literature about the birth of Israel and the first
Arab-Israeli war of which he was so savagely critical. His 1988 book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee
Problem, 1947-1949 drove a coach and horses through the claim that the
Palestinians left Palestine of their own
accord or on orders from their leaders. With a great wealth of recently
declassified material he analysed the role that Israel played in
precipitating the Palestinian exodus.
Three or four subsequent books consolidated Benny’s reputation as the
standard bearer of the new historiography. The hallmark of his approach was to
stick as closely as possible to the documentary evidence, to record rather than
to evaluate. While his findings were original and arresting, he upheld the
highest standards of historical scholarship, and he wrote with almost clinical
detachment.
Sadly, the article in the Guardian does not display any of Benny’s
former scholarly objectivity or rigorous use of evidence. Instead of evidence
we are treated to a rambling and self-pitying monologue, seething with contempt
and hatred for the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular. The
message, pithily summed up in a long interview that Benny gave to Yediot Aharonot about his
highly-publicised conversion, is that ‘The Arabs Are Responsible’. Where no
evidence is available to sustain the argument of Arab intransigence, Benny
makes it up by drawing on his fertile imagination. According to Benny, what
stayed the hand of Hafez Assad of Syria, and that of his
son and successor Bashar, from signing a peace treaty was not quibbles over a
few hundred yards but a basic refusal to make peace with the Jewish state. The
evidence? Benny can see the father, on his deathbed, telling his son: ‘Whatever
you do, don’t make peace with the Jews; like the Crusaders, they too will
vanish.’ It would appear that Benny can no longer tell the difference between
genuine history and fiction or fabrication along the lines of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. At this rate Benny is in danger of becoming what
Isaiah Berlin once described as ‘a very rare thing – a genuine charlatan’.
Most of Benny’s venom and vitriol are,
however, reserved for the Palestinians in what amounts to a remarkable attempt
to blame the victims for their own misfortunes. He trots out again Abba Eban’s
tired, old quip that the Palestinians have never missed an opportunity to miss
an opportunity, blithely disregarding all the opportunities for peace that Israel has missed since
1967. But the main reason, we are told, around which Benny’s pessimism gathered
and crystallized was the figure of Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian
movement since the late 1960s. Arafat-bashing has become of late a national
sport in Israel and Benny has a
field day, calling him, among other things, an ‘implacable nationalist and
inveterate liar’. To be sure, Arafat is no paragon of virtue but it is far too
easy and too simplistic to place the entire blame for the failure of the Oslo peace process on
the shoulders of one individual.
Like Benny, I was cautiously optimistic after Israel and the PLO
signed the Oslo accord in
September 1993, but our interpretation of the subsequent history is very
different. Oslo represented a
historic compromise for the Palestinians: they gave up their claim to 78 per
cent of mandatory Palestine in return for a
state of their own over the remaining 22 per cent, comprising the West Bank and Gaza. Israel, for its part,
recognised the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinians people,
and the two sides agreed to resolve their outstanding differences by peaceful
means. For Benny the principal reason for the collapse of this historic compromise
is Palestinian mendacity; for me it is Israeli expansionism. The building of
settlements in the occupied territories has always been illegal under
international law and an obstacle to peace. Expanding Jewish settlements on the
West Bank is not a violation of the letter of the Oslo accord, but it
is most certainly a violation of its spirit. Israel’s protests of
peaceful intentions were vitiated by its policy of expropriating more and more
Palestinian land and building more Jewish settlements on this land. By
continuing to build settlements Israel basically went
back on its side of the deal that had been concluded at Oslo.
The main landmarks in the breakdown of the Oslo peace process
are the Camp David summit of July 2000 and the outbreak of the intifada
towards the end of September of that year. Israel’s official
history is full of myths, as Benny knows so well from the earlier stage in his
career when he was in the business of exploding national myths and slaughtering
sacred cows. The latest national myth is that of the generous offer that Ehud
Barak is said to have made to Yasser Arafat at Camp David, only to be
confronted with a flat rejection and a return to violence. There is a broad
national consensus behind this myth, including the Left and the peace camp, but
popular support is not the same as evidence. The role of the historian is to
subject the claims of the protagonists to critical scrutiny in the light of all
the available evidence. In this instance, however, Benny seems to have
swallowed the official Israeli line on Camp David hook, line, and
sinker. The first-hand account of the American official Robert Malley is not
even mentioned. It suggests that Barak mishandled the summit from start to
finish. Benny also glosses over the fact
that the al-Aqsa intifada, which so far has claimed the lives of 941
Palestinians and 273 Israelis, broke out not on orders from Arafat but in
response to a provocative visit to Haram al-Sharif by the then leader of the
opposition, Ariel Sharon.
Benny’s account of the next phase in the ‘final status’ negotiations is
hopelessly inaccurate. On 23 December 2000, President
Clinton presented his ‘parameters’ for a final settlement of the conflict.
These parameters reflected the long distance he had travelled from the American
bridging proposals tabled at Camp David towards meeting
Palestinian aspirations. The new plan provided for an independent Palestinian
state over the whole of Gaza and 94-96 per cent of the West Bank (with some
territorial compensation from Israel proper); Palestinian sovereignty over the
Arab parts of Jerusalem, Israeli sovereignty over the Jewish parts; and a
solution to the Palestinian refugee problem in which the new state would be the
focal point for the refugees who choose to return to the area.
According to Benny, the Palestinian leadership rejected ‘the
Barak-Clinton peace proposals of July-December 2000’. In fact, they rejected
Barak’s proposals of July and accepted in principle Clinton’s proposals of
December, as did the Israeli leadership. Both sides had their reservations. On Jerusalem the Israeli
reservations were more substantial than the Palestinian ones. Benny not only
conflates two entirely separate sets of proposals; he makes no mention at all
of the negotiations at Taba in the last week of January 2001. At Taba the two
teams made considerable progress on the basis of the Clinton paremeters and
came closer to an overall agreement than at any other time in the history of
this conflict. But by this time Clinton and Barak were on their way out and
Ariel Sharon was on his way in. During the lead up to the elections, Barak
hardened his line on Jerusalem. At this
critical juncture, as so often in the past, the peace process was held hostage
to internal Israeli politics. With Sharon’s election, all
the progress made at Taba towards a ‘final status’ agreement was rendered null
and void. A new and grisly chapter in the history of the conflict was about to
begin.
Benny’s conclusion
follows naturally from his deficient and defective account of the history of
the last decade, and especially of the last two years. His conclusion is that
the root problem today is the Palestinian leadership’s denial of the legitimacy
of the Jewish state. The conclusion that I draw from my version of history is that
the root problem today is the Jewish state’s continuing occupation of most of
the Palestinian territories that it captured in June 1967. All the neighbouring
Arab states, as well as the Palestinians, recognise Israel’s right to exist within its 1967 borders. None
of them recognise the legitimacy of the Jewish colonial project beyond the
Green Line. Nor do I. This is where Benny Morris and I part company. His
post-conversion version of history is old history with a vengeance. It is
indistinguishable from the propaganda of the victors. He used to have the
courage of his convictions. He now has the courage of his prejudices.
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