Interview with Benny Morris
This is an interview done with Benny Morris about the Middle
East. He is a historian, and its contents are chilling. Please,
tell me your comments. I am very interested in them.
Denis Mueller
Rape, Massacre, Transfer
Q: Benny Morris, in the month ahead the new version of your
book on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due
to be published. Who will be less pleased with the book -
the Israelis or the Palestinians?
A: The revised book is a double-edged sword. It is based on
many documents that were not available to me when I wrote
the original book, most of them from the IDF archives. What
the new material shows is that there were far more Israeli
acts of massacre than I had previously thought.
To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape.
In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah [the
pre-state defense force that was the precursor of the IDF]
were given operational orders that stated explicitly that
they were to uproot [Palestinian] villagers, expel them and
destroy the villages themselves.
At the same time, it turns out that there was a series of
orders issued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the
Palestinian intermediate levels to remove children, women
and the elderly from the villages. So that on the one hand,
the book reinforces the accusation against the Zionist side,
but on the other hand it also proves that many of those who
left the villages did so with the encouragement of the
Palestinian leadership itself.
Q: According to your new findings, how many cases of
Israeli rape were there in 1948?
A: About a dozen. In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and
murdered her and her father. In Jaffa, soldiers of the
Kiryati Brigade raped one girl and tried to rape several
more. At Hunin, which is in the Galilee, two girls were
raped and then murdered. There were one or two cases of
rape at Tantura, south of Haifa. There was one case of rape
at Qula, in the center of the country. At the village of Abu
Shusha, near Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were
four female prisoners, one of whom was raped a number of
times. And there were other cases.
Usually more than one soldier was involved. Usually there
were one or two Palestinian girls. In a large proportion of
the cases the event ended with murder. Because neither the
victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we
have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were re-
ported, which I found, are not the whole story.
They are just the tip of the iceberg.
Q: According to your findings, how many acts of Israeli
massacre were perpetrated in 1948?
A: Twenty-four. In some cases four or five people were
executed, in others the numbers were 70, 80, 100. There was
also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men are
spotted walking in a field - they are shot.
A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shot. There
are cases such as the village of Dawayima, in which a column
entered the village with all guns blazing and killed anything
that moved.
The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir Yassin
(100-110), Lod (250), Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu
Shusha (70). There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale
massacre at Tantura, but war crimes were perpetrated there.
At Jaffa there was a massacre about which nothing had been
known until now. The same at Arab al Muwassi, in the north.
About half of the acts of massacre were part of Operation
Hiram: at Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Eilaboun, Arab al Muwasi,
Deir al Asad, Majdal Krum, Sasa. In Operation Hiram there
was a unusually high concentration of executions of people
against a wall or next to a well in an orderly fashion.
That can't be chance. It's a pattern. Apparently, various
officers who took part in the operation understood that the
expulsion order they received permitted them to do these deeds
in order to encourage the population to take to the roads. The
fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder.
Ben- Gurion (Israel's first Prime Minister) silenced the
matter. He covered up for the officers who did the massacres.
Q: What you are telling me here, is that in Operation Hiram
there was a comprehensive and explicit expulsion order. Is that
right?
A: Yes
Q: Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible
for a deliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion?
A: From April 1948, Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of
transfer. There is no explicit order of his in writing, there
is no orderly comprehensive policy, but there is an atmosphere
of [population] transfer. The transfer idea is in the air. The
entire leadership understands that this is the idea. The
officer corps understands what is required of them. Under Ben-
Gurion, a consensus of transfer is created.
Q: Ben-Gurion was a "transferist"?
A: Of course. Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that
there COULD BE NO JEWISH STATE WITH A LARGE HOSTILE ARAB in
its midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able
to exist.
Q: I don't hear you condemning him.
A: Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a
state would not have come into being. That has to be clear.
It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the
Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.
Q: In the end, do you in effect justify all this? Are you
an advocate of the transfer of 1948?
A: 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.
[Expulsions are ALWAYS war crimes according to the Geneva
Conventions. Ed. note.]
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.
Rape, Massacre, Transfer: Part II
Q: We are talking about the killing of thousands of people,
the destruction of an entire society. There is something
chilling about the quiet way in which you say that.
A: If you expected me to burst into tears, I'm sorry to
disappoint you. I will not do that.
Q: 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?
A: 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.
Q: You do not condemn them morally?
A: No.
Q: They perpetrated ethnic cleansing...
A: There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic
cleansing.
I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse
of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic
cleansing and genocide - the annihilation of your people -
I prefer ethnic cleansing.
Q: And that was the situation in 1948?
A: That was the situation. That is what Zionism faced. 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.
It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the
border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary
to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our
settlements were fired on.
Q: The term `to cleanse' is terrible...
A: 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.
Q: What you are saying is hard to listen to and hard to
digest. You sound hard- hearted.
A: 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.
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.
Q: And morally speaking, you have no problem with that deed?
A: That is correct.
Even the great American democracy could not have been
reated without the annihilation of the Indians. There are
cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and
cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.
Q: And in [Israel's] case it effectively justifies a
population transfer?
A: That's what emerges.
Q: And you take that in stride? War crimes? Massacres? The
burning fields and the devastated villages of the Nakba?
A: You have to put things in proportion. These are small
war crimes.
Q: Do you think that Ben-Gurion erred in expelling too
few Arabs?
A: If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should
have done a complete job. I know that this stuns the Arabs
and the liberals and the politically correct types. If he
had carried out a full expulsion - rather than a partial
one - he would have stabilized Israel for generations.Q: I find it hard to believe
what I am hearing. In his
place, would you have expelled them all? All the Arabs in
the country?
A: But I am not a statesman. I do not put myself in his
place. But as an historian, I assert that a mistake was
made here. Yes. The non-completion of the transfer
was a mistake.
Q: And today? Do you advocate a transfer today?
A: I can see expulsions. If we find ourselves with atomic
weapons around us, or if there is a general Arab attack on
us and a situation of warfare on the front with Arabs in the
rear shooting at convoys on their way to the front, acts of
expulsion will be entirely reasonable. They may even
be essential.
Q: Including the expulsion of Israeli Arabs?
A: The Israeli Arabs are a time bomb. Their slide into
complete Palestinization has made them an emissary of the
enemy that is among us. They are a potential fifth column.
Q: What does that mean? What should we do tomorrow morning?
To fence them in? To place them under closure?
A: Something like a cage has to be built for them.
I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there
is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be
locked up in one way or another.
Q: The situation as you describe it is extremely harsh. You
are not entirely convinced that we can survive here, are
you?
A: The possibility of annihilation exists.
Q: If Zionism is so dangerous for the Jews and if Zionism
makes the Arabs so wretched, maybe it's a mistake? Which
leaves us, nevertheless, with two possibilities: either a
cruel, tragic Zionism, or the forgoing of Zionism?
A: Yes. That's so. You have pared it down, but that's correct.
Q: The title of the book you are now publishing in Hebrew
is "Victims." In the end, then, your argument is that of the
two victims of this conflict, we are the bigger one.
A: Yes. Exactly. We are the greater victims in the course
of history and we are also the greater potential victim.