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1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, by Benny Morris. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2008. 524 pp. $32.50.
Benny Morris’s new book gives no hint of the controversies that have swirled around his historical work and political pronouncements for the past two decades. He is best known as a founder of the new historians’ school, which has dedicated itself to critiquing normative Israeli assumptions about the founding and nature of the state. In particular, his earlier work argued that Israel’s leaders were responsible for creating the Palestinian refugee problem in prosecuting the 1948 War of Independence. After he published The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949, in 1988, 1948 and After, in 1994, and Righteous Victims, in 1999, mainstream historiography and ordinary Israelis could no longer comfortably deny the murder and expulsion of Palestinian civilians during the War of Independence.
Understandably despised by the right, he has also been criticized by historians on the left for his work’s supposed pro-Israel bias. Lately, Morris has also gained notoriety for statements that the massacres and expulsions were necessary given the threat of genocide faced by the nascent state. Moreover, in the wake of the second intifada, Morris has expressed pessimism about Arab interest in a lasting peace with Israel. Morris’s new book, 1948, is both consistent with his earlier work on the 1948 War and a radical departure.
The bulk of the book consists of a detailed, workmanlike account of the war. The tone is sober, straight out of the just-the-facts-ma’am school of history writing—there is no conceptualizing or situating of the work within the context of contemporary historical debates. Description of military strategy and tactics predominate, along with consideration of how the political and, to a lesser degree, social environment placed constraints on and provided opportunities for both Israeli and Arab leaders in their conduct of the war.
Readers interested in military strategy and tactics will appreciate the book’s comprehensiveness on this score, while others will be drawn in by the sheer drama of the war, with its interweaving of military and political action, told clearly and swiftly. However, a book that concentrates so heavily on battle will also inevitably suffer from nearly inscrutable passages. Even with the book’s excellent maps, developments are at times difficult to follow for readers who do not know the area’s geography well or who are unfamiliar with military concepts.
Nevertheless, I suspect that most readers will focus more on Morris’s conclusions, which are restricted to the book’s short final chapter. And well they should, as there the author brings together a number of critical points sprinkled throughout the narrative. Moreover, nearly all figure prominently in current arguments regarding the respective sides’ claims to sympathy, moral superiority, and historical justice.
Morris’s conclusions regarding the fact that civilian massacres by Israelis were an important factor in creating the Palestinian refugee problem are consistent with his previous work. As in that work, Morris in 1948 narrates how Israelis murdered civilians on a number of occasions, precipitating Palestinian flight, and in other instances also expelled Arab villagers.
However, Morris retreats from assertions in his earlier work that the Zionist leadership embraced a doctrine of expulsion before and during the war. On the contrary, Morris argues that expulsion was never central to Zionist ideology or Israeli military-political strategy. The Israeli impulse to expel Palestinians emerged in response to the Arab leadership’s own fierce expulsionist rhetoric, as well as to European antisemitism. Nevertheless, the killings were mostly limited to the civil war phase, in which neither side had the capability of creating prisoner of war camps because the British were still in control of Palestine. Few massacres occurred after Israel declared independence and the Arab states attacked, as soldiers on both sides were better organized and more disciplined than in the previous phase. Moreover, after partition the British were no longer around to prevent the creation of POW camps. In short, Morris’s new view is that the Palestinian refugee problem was a product of the war, rather than of any deliberate Israeli policy of murder and expulsion. Frustratingly, Morris does not state what prompted him to change his mind on this bitterly contested matter; he does not even note that his position has changed nor that the matter is disputed.
The book is striking both for detailing Israelis’ inhumane acts—the massacres and expulsions—and for arguing that the Arabs’ own actions harmed their cause. For example, unlike the Yishuv, the Palestinians failed to set up the quasi-governmental institutions, such as a trained militia, that would have enabled them to field a unified, coordinated military force. Similarly, the Arab governments decided to attack despite having made inadequate preparations for war, never achieving the political unity that would have permitted a coordinated war effort, and realizing their own military and political weaknesses. It is tempting to see this more evenhanded apportionment of historical culpability as influenced by Morris’s experience of the second intifada.
Morris believes that the Arabs’ experience of 1948 led them to a rejection of a permanent accommodation with Israel that continues to this day. But his most important and novel assertion is likely to be that the Arabs’ prime motivation for the conflict was religious. He notes that Arab nationalism was not well-developed at the time, especially among the impoverished majority. While he recognizes the practical dimension of the war as a contest over land, he states that the “depth of the Arabs’ abhorrence of the Zionist-Jewish presence” was “anchored in centuries of Islamic Judeophobia” (393). The Arabs understood the war as a religious struggle between civilizations, between East and West.
Morris does not relate this aspect of the war to the Middle East’s recent history, but it is clearly on his—and the reader’s—mind. Bookended between the fate of Egypt’s King Farouk in 1952 and the rise of Hezbollah, Hamas, and al Qaeda, the era in which nationalism predominated in the Arab world central ideology seems particularly brief, and the ideology itself brittle. Indeed, in retrospect it seems obvious that Arab governments’ attempts to suppress their citizens’ religious impulse to remake the political world were far from successful.
While Morris marshals evidence to support this view of the primacy of the jihadi impulse, I am reluctant to endorse it wholeheartedly as, given the nature of the book, he does not go as deeply into the subject as its importance requires. Moreover, it fits so conveniently within present debates (and prejudices) regarding the roots and objectives of Islamic militancy that one would be well-advised to seek a more thoroughgoing analysis in order to avoid reading the present into the past or finding unwarranted support in the past for today’s jihadism.
Like much of Morris’s previous work, 1948 is unlikely to satisfy those on the right who accuse him of pro-Palestinian bias, nor those on the left who lambast him for allegedly favoring Israel. It is as difficult to escape the conclusion that the reader’s reaction to 1948 is a Rorschach test of his or her politics as it is necessary to grapple with the book’s conclusions: the formative experience of the war, and its reverberations on the ground and in the ideology of Jews and Arabs alike, guarantee its continued centrality to any understanding of the ongoing conflict.
Joel Streicker
Central American Resource Center |
