Benny Morris > Quotes

“The division of historic Mandatory Palestine as proposed, of 79 percent for the Jews and 21 percent for the Palestinian Arabs, cannot fail to leave the Arabs, all Arabs, with a deep sense of injustice, affront, and humiliation and a legitimate perception that a state consisting of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (and perhaps large parts of East Jerusalem)—altogether some two thousand square miles—is simply not viable, politically and economically.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“If a one-state solution is a nonstarter, what are the prospects for a two-state solution? Put simply, they appear very bleak. Bleak primarily because the Palestinian Arabs, in the deepest fibers of their being, oppose such an outcome, demanding, as they did since the dawn of their national movement, all of Palestine as their patrimony. And I would hazard that, in the highly unlikely event that Israel and the PNA were in the coming years to sign a two-state agreement, it would in short order unravel. It would be subverted and overthrown by those forces in the Palestinian camp—probably representing Palestinian Arab majority opinion and certainly representing the historic will of the Palestinian national movement—bent on having all of Palestine. To judge from its past behavior, the PNA would be unwilling and, probably, incapable of reining in the more militant, expansionist factions—Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and so on—who would represent themselves as carrying on the patriotic, religious duty of resisting the Zionist invader. No Palestinian leader can fight them without being dubbed a “traitor” and losing his public’s support.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“Although . . . polls have often concluded that most Palestinians, at least in the West Bank and Gaza, support a two-state settlement, they have also shown that there is almost complete unanimity among Palestinians in support of the “right of return,” the implementation of which would necessarily subvert any two-state settlement. And Palestinian Arabs are equally unanimous in denying the legitimacy of Zionism and Israel—which, again, would raise a vast question mark over the durability of any two-state arrangement.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“From the eighth or ninth centuries, Muslim Arabs have been politically dominant in the Islamic world and have grown accustomed to that position; the notion of sharing power or being a minority in a non-Muslim Arab polity is alien to the Muslim Arab mentality.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“Thus, in the course of the civil war the Palestinian Arabs, besides killing the odd prisoner of war, committed only two large massacres-involving forty workers in the Haifa oil refinery and about iso surrendering or unarmed Haganah men in Kfar `Etzion (a massacre in which Jordanian Legionnaires participated-though other Legionnaires at the site prevented atrocities). Some commentators add a third "massacre," the destruction of the convoy of doctors and nurses to Mount Scopus in Jerusalem in mid-April 1948, but this was actually a battle, involving Haganah and Palestine Arab militiamen, though it included, or was followed by, the mass killing of the occupants of a Jewish bus, most of whom were unarmed medical personnel.
The Arab regular armies committed few atrocities and no large-scale massacres of POWs and civilians in the conventional war-even though they conquered the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem and a number of rural settlements, including Atarot and Neve Ya`akov near Jerusalem, and Nitzanim, Gezer, and Mishmar Hayarden elsewhere.
The Israelis' collective memory of fighters characterized by "purity of arms" is also undermined by the evidence of rapes committed in conquered towns and villages. About a dozen cases-in Jaffa, Acre, and so on-are reported
in the available contemporary documentation and, given Arab diffidence about reporting such incidents and the”
― Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War

“The mindset and basic values of Israeli Jewish society and Palestinian Muslim society are so different and mutually exclusive as to render a vision of binational statehood tenable only in the most disconnected and unrealistic of minds.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“In his memoirs, Celal Bey recalled what it felt like to witness what were, in effect, death marches. “I was like a person sitting beside a river,” he wrote, but “with no means of rescuing anyone from it”:

Instead of water, blood was flowing down the river. Thousands of innocent children, blameless old men, helpless women and strong youngsters were streaming downriver towards oblivion, straight to dust and ashes. Anyone I could hold onto with my bare hands, with my fingernails, I saved. The rest, I believe, went down the river, never to return.”
― Benny Morris, The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924

“Alec Kirkbride later graphically described the events in Amman on 18 July:

"A couple of thousand Palestinian men swept up the hill toward the main [palace] entrance... screaming abuse and demanding that the lost towns should be reconquered at once... The king[of Jordan] appeared at the top of the main steps of the building; he was a short dignified figure wearing white robes and headdress. He paused for a moment, surveying the seething mob before, then walked down the steps to push his way through the line of guardsmen into the thick of the demonstrators. He went up to a prominent individual, who was shouting at the top of his voice, and dealt him a violent blow to the side of the head with the flat of his hand. The recipient of the blow stopped yelling... and the king could be heard roaring: 'so you want to fight the Jews, do you? Very well, there is a recruiting office for the army at the back of my house... go there and enlist! The rest of you, get the hell down the hillside!'

Most of the crowd got the hell down the hillside, indeed...”
― Benny Morris, 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War

“The idea of sharing Palestine (as indeed, the sharing of any Muslim Arab land with non-Muslims and non-Arabs)—either through a division of the country into two states, one Jewish, the other Arab, or through a unitary binational entity, based on political parity between the two communities—is alien to the Muslim Arab mindset.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“The idea of a “secular democratic Palestine” is as much a nonstarter today as it was three decades ago. It is a nonstarter primarily because the Palestinian Arabs, like the world’s other Muslim Arab communities, are deeply religious and have no respect for democratic values and no tradition of democratic governance.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“The Zionist movement, while ideologically regarding the country as the ancient patrimony of the Jewish people and as wholly, legitimately, belonging to the Jews, has over the decades politically shifted gears, bowing to political and demographic diktats and realities, moving from an initial demand for Jewish sovereignty over the whole Land of Israel to agreeing to establish a Jewish state in only part of a partitioned Palestine, with the Arabs enjoying sovereignty over the rest.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“The British desire to appease Germany before 1933 is intelligible in the light of the reign of liberalism; appeasement, as an enlightened policy of justice for all, including Germany, was a child of that outlook. For over a decade it was promoted (ineffectually, because of French recalcitrance) by men as diverse as J.M. Keynes and Ramsay MacDonald, Gilbert Murray and Stanley Baldwin. But appeasement did not end with the ascent of Hitler to the chancellorship. In this respect, 1933–1935 marked a watershed; appeasement, gradually but perceptibly, changed from a policy based on 'morality' and on a quest for 'justice' to one compelled by fear and expediency. Thus appeasement changed its meaning.”
― Benny Morris, The Roots of Appeasement: The British Weekly Press and Nazi Germany During 1930s

“The attempt, then, was to explain Nazism in the light of something, for liberals, readily identifiable, rational and precedented, be it in economic or political terms. That such explanations contained and imparted a measure oftruth is undeniable. But the peculiar admixture ofknown and unprecedented elements which constituted Nazism produced something novel and alien which was not explicable in the light of each ofits parts. Nor was the thrust of Nazi internal and foreign policies intelligible without attending to the ideology's racial core. The failure to understand the ideology resulted in the emergence of secondary misconceptions concerning the workings and policies of the Third Reich. For many years, Nazi excesses were attributed to the first flush of revolutionary zeal or to 'evil counsellors', such as Streicher and Goebbels, with whom the Führer surrounded himself. That the evils and excesses were inherent in the ideology and in the system of government in which it was embodied was thus lost upon many observers.

Thus liberalism's values and preconceptions served as a necessary backdrop to the emergence and adoption of a policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany. Attitudes to war, attitudes to Versailles and perceptions of Nazism constituted the fabric of the backdrop. But while a necessary pre-condition, they were not the sole or indeed main 'cause' of appeasement. Liberalism was responsible for a mood, anti-war and anti-Versailles, and afforded, when necessary, pretexts for that policy.”
― Benny Morris, The Roots of Appeasement: The British Weekly Press and Nazi Germany During 1930s

“If Arab expressions in the early years of the twentieth century of fear of eventual displacement and expulsion by the Zionists were largely propagandistic, today—in view of what has happened—they are very real. And if Jewish fears in the 1930s of Arab intentions to push them “into the sea”—to destroy the Zionist enterprise and perhaps slaughter the Yishuv—were, if heartfelt, unrealistic (as it turned out), today they are very real, as are Jewish fears of a nuclear Holocaust at Islamic hands. These fears and hatreds make a shared binational state, in which each community inevitably would seek to dominate the other, if only to prevent the other’s domination of itself, inconceivable.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“From inception, the Palestine Arab national movement, backed by the national movements and societies in the surrounding Arab countries, demanded that Palestine become an independent sovereign Arab state (except for the Syrian nationalists, who generally claimed and wanted Palestine as part of the future Syrian state) and rejected the notion of sharing the country with the Jews, either demographically, in a binational structure, or geographically, through partition.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“Western liberals like or pretend to view Palestinian Arabs, indeed all Arabs, as Scandinavians, and refuse to recognize that peoples, for good historical, cultural, and social reasons, are different and behave differently in similar or identical sets of circumstances.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood denounced the UN decision, called for volunteers for Palestine and contributions, and announced that "it is a ... battle either for life or death to a nation of 70 million souls ... whom the vilest, the most corrupt, tricky and destructive people wish to conquer and displace. " 198”
― Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War

“The blindness of the weeklies towards Nazism was the blindness of liberalism. At the core of Nazi ideology stood the concept of race; it interpreted history as a necessary and perpetual conflict of races; and it conceived of morality as a function of racial well-being. Such doctrine was directly antithetical to the precepts of liberalism. Liberals flatly denied its truth and refused to believe that a 'civilised' nation of 70 millions could subscribe to it, let alone base domestic and foreign policies upon it. When faced with the evidence of Hitler's rule, many looked on with despairing and total incomprehension.”
― Benny Morris, The Roots of Appeasement: The British Weekly Press and Nazi Germany During 1930s

“David Ben-Gurion well understood these contradictory perspectives. As he told his colleagues, against the backdrop of the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939: "We must see the situation for what it is. On the security front, we are those attacked and who are on the defensive. But in the political field we are the attackers and the Arabs are those defending themselves. They are living in the country and own the land, the village. We live in the Diaspora and want only to immigrate [to Palestine] and gain possession of [lirkosh] the land from them." Years later, after the establishment of Israel, he expatiated on the Arab perspective in a conversation with the Zionist leader Nahum Goldmann: "I don't understand your optimism.... Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”
― Benny Morris, 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War

“It will be shown — and this constitutes the major conclusion of this study — that a consensus supporting appeasement emerged in the weeklies in the course of 1935 and that it remained virtually intact until September 1938. The consensus encompassed the supporters of the National Government as well last the bulk of the Liberal and left-wing weeklies ostensibly committed to 'collective Security' and 'resistance to Fascism'. In the course of 1938 this consensus was irreparably undermined; the shock and humiliation of Munich left a permanent mark. The occupation of Prague in March 1939 rendered the continuance of appeasement objectionable to most Britons. It compelled the Government to adopt a posture of resistance to aggression. However, it will be seen that in the weeklies March 1939 did not witness an abrupt and revolutionary change of heart; rather, it marked a stage in the gradual shift, ending in September 1939, from appeasement to resistance.”
― Benny Morris, The Roots of Appeasement: The British Weekly Press and Nazi Germany During 1930s

“Literally thousands of articles on Germany appeared in the weeklies in the course of the thirties. No more than 25 (!) specifically set out to define, explain or analyse Nazi ideology. Most of the editors apparently regarded that ideology as ridiculous, irrelevant or simply intellectually uninteresting. Even those, like Gavin, who displayed an awareness of the connection in German politics between the idea and the action failed to print analyses of Nazi ideology. Most, simply, viewed polite and policies as the product of material forces, interests and ambitions struggling within a context of a changing set of physical circumstances.”
― Benny Morris, The Roots of Appeasement: The British Weekly Press and Nazi Germany During 1930s

“Facing off in 1947-1948 were two very different societies: one highly motivated,
literate, organized, semi-industrial; the other backward, largely illiterate, disorganized, agricultural. For the average Palestinian Arab man, a villager, political independence and nationhood were vague abstractions: his affinities and loyalties lay with his family, clan, and village, and, occasionally, region. Moreover, as we have noted, Palestinian Arab society was deeply divided along social and religious lines. And, among the more literate and politically conscious, there was a deep, basic fissure, going back to the 19zos, between the Husseinis and Nashashibis.”
― Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War

“more tellingly, the AHC, local NCs, and various militia officers often instructed villages and urban neighborhoods near major Jewish concentrations of population to send away women, children, and the old to safer areas. This conformed with Arab League secretary-general Azzam's reported thinking already in May 194.6 ("to evacuate all Arab women and children from Palestine and send them to neighboring Arab countries," should it come to war)80”
― Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War

“Liberalism postulated the rational and 'progressive' evolutionary nature of the historical process. Besides success it upheld pragmatism, tolerance and compromise as the principal political virtues. At the core of the liberal outlook stood the 'idea of limits'. It abhorred excess and extremism; it believed that 'absolutist' thought of any sort assured at least failure if not perdition. All problems were seen as soluble with the application of reason; and reason, Liberals believed, ultimately did prevail. Reason, in fact, suffused all and was identified with reality.”
― Benny Morris, The Roots of Appeasement: The British Weekly Press and Nazi Germany During 1930s

“The Second Intifada did nothing to push the Palestinians toward accepting a two-state solution. Indeed, because of Israel’s countermeasures, the Palestinian rebellion appeared to harden popular attitudes against Israel, which was certainly Hamas’s intention in the first place.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“The suicide bombings, as every poll among Palestinians has shown, were, and remain, immensely popular.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“end of March 1948 most of the wealthy and middle-class families had fled Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem, and most Arab rural communities had evacuated the heavily Jewish Coastal Plain; a few had also left the Upper Jordan Valley. Most were propelled by fear of being caught up, and harmed, in the fighting; some may have feared life under Jewish rule.”
― Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War

“A two-state settlement along the lines proposed by Barak and Clinton in 2000 is unlikely to come about or, if reached, to last long. It will not bring tranquility to the Middle East. And yet the two-state idea—the idea of a state for the Jews and a state for the Palestinian Arabs—remains the only sound moral and political basis for a solution offering a modicum of justice and, hence, a chance for peace, for both peoples.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“on iz February 1948 a British patrol disarmed a Haganah roadblock
and arrested its members on Jerusalem's Shmuel Hanavi Street. The four men were later "released" unarmed into the hands of an Arab mob, which lynched them and mutilated their bodies.'9 A similar incident occurred a fortnight later, on 28 February, when British troops disarmed Haganah men at a position in the Hayotzek Factory near Holon. Eight men were "butchered.""' (The next day, LHI terrorists blew up a British troop train near Rehovot, killing twenty-eight British troops and wounding dozens more.)”
― Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War

“In the late 1980s and the 1990s, it appeared as if the PLO, under Yasser Arafat, might be abandoning the one-state goal and adopting a two-state paradigm, envisaging a Palestinian Arab state arising, on 22 percent of historic Mandate Palestine, alongside Israel, and coexisting with it in peace. Such a vision, at least from the Israeli side, underlay the Oslo peace process. But already at the time the sincerity of Arafat’s newfound commitment to a two-state settlement was doubtful in view of some of his public pronouncements, his incitement to hatred and terrorism vis-à-vis Israel, and his serial nonimplementation of various provisions, especially those related to curbing terrorism, of the interim agreements he signed during the 1990s.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict