Summary
Israeli historian, one of the best-known figures of the ‘new history’, whose archive-based work in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Pappe credits with disproving the ‘voluntary flight’ myth while charging him with producing a very partial picture — taking Israeli military reports at face value, ignoring atrocities, and wrongly insisting there had been no forced evictions before 15 May 1948.
Details
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“One of the best-known figures writing on the subject was the Israeli historian Benny Morris. As he exclusively relied on documents from Israeli military archives, Morris ended up with a very partial picture of what happened on the ground. Still, this was enough for some of his Israeli readers to realise that the ‘voluntary flight’ of the Palestinians had been a myth and that the Israeli self-image of having waged a ‘moral’ war in 1948 against a ‘primitive’ and hostile Arab world was considerably flawed and possibly already bankrupt.” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.18)
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“The picture was partial because Morris took the Israeli military reports he found in the archives at face value or even as absolute truth. Thus, he ignored such atrocities as the poisoning of the water supply into Acre with typhoid, numerous cases of rape and the dozens of massacres the Jews perpetrated. He also kept insisting – wrongly – that before 15 May 1948 there had been no forced evictions.” Against this, Pappe cites Palestinian sources showing that months before the entry of Arab forces, while the British were still responsible for law and order, Jewish forces had already forcibly expelled almost a quarter of a million Palestinians (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.18).
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Pappe sets his own naming of individuals against attributions to elusive factors, “or, as Morris has it, ‘à la guerre comme à la guerre’”, which let sovereign states off the hook and enable individuals to escape justice (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.19-20).
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Sitta’s register is cross-keyed to Morris’s apparatus throughout: its column 3 is an “M No.” numbering for each locality and its column 7 gives each locality’s area “by Morris” (The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, PDF p.1, header repeated on every sheet). The register does not expand the initials or cite Morris’s works in these pages.
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In Manna’s Introduction, Morris is placed among the revisionist historians whose work offered new information on the disaster, but Manna reports his turn: in a 2004 Haaretz interview with Ari Shavit, Morris declared support for the expulsion policy Ben-Gurion led, blamed him for not expelling all Palestinians, retracted the claim there had been no top-level planning, and justified the policy of murder and expulsion (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.38-39).
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Manna quotes Morris’s admission, in Correcting a Mistake and an article on Operation Hiram, that information about the massacres in the Galilee is very limited because of the secrecy imposed by Israeli army archives on the relevant documents (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.44).
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In Manna’s Chapter 2 in full (part 3), Morris is corrected on Majd al-Krum: he had written “But the army did not order the inhabitants to leave the village”, was unaware of the village’s massacre until Manna spoke to him in person, and overlooked military documents he himself gave Manna about the army’s January 1949 return and expulsion of hundreds of its residents (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.106).
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Morris wrote that Muslims had several villages left — Dayr Hanna, ‘Arraba, Sakhnin and Majd al-Krum — whose residents “remained in place after the occupation and were not expelled”; Manna sets against this the al-‘Ayn Square massacre and the expulsion of hundreds from Majd al-Krum, and calls Morris’s lumped statement that Christians and Druze were treated better than Muslims a concealment of the army’s sect-differentiated policy (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.112-113).
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Morris amended his Operation Hiram conclusions in Correcting a Mistake, in a self-criticism Manna quotes: “I have described a chaotic situation including the absence of instructions from the center or a fixed policy, a situation in which the numerous military units acted in a discrepant manner towards the Arabs whose villages were occupied” (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.113).
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Manna quotes Morris on the 1950s border policy in Chapter 5 (part 6): “During that period, Israel implemented a policy along its entire border of shooting at infiltrators to kill. The soldiers, policemen, and border guards fired on everything that moved, particularly at night,” and, from Israel’s Border Wars, “between 2,700 and 5,000 Arab infiltrators were killed. All indicators point to the fact that the vast majority of those killed were unarmed.” (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.217).
Related pages
The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing, Acre