The War to Begin All Wars - The New York Review of Books

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stark past. At the book's beginning is a map of hundreds of Arab

villages whose residents fled or were expelled in the course of what

Palestinians call the Nakba, the Catastrophe. After that comes a map

of Jewish settlements established after the war, completing the

metamorphosis of the countryside. "In its most basic outlines," a

portion of the "submerged past" emerged from the smoke and fire of

Morris's account.

Just as the war and exodus transformed the landscape and Middle

East politics, Morris's book altered discussion of Israeli and

Palestinian history. In Israel, it ignited a long-running debate.

Shortly after the publication of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee

Problem, Morris fed the fire with an essay in the American journal

Tikkun, "The New Historiography," published in 1988, in which he

anointed himself and several other Israeli scholars as the New

Historians. The Old Historians, he argued, felt compelled to offer a

propagandistic, "consciously pro-Israel interpretation of the past"

and were shackled by their own biographies, having lived through the

war. The new generation was more impartial, he claimed. That

programmatic essay is republished in Making Israel , a recent

anthology edited by Morris that surveys the argument over writing

the country's past.

ince then, Morris has returned again and again to writing about

1948, as if he wakes up every morning anew in that year, inside

the impossible trauma of Israel coming into existence as the

Palestinians go into exile, rewriting it, dissatisfied, still seeking to get

the story right, trying to fulfill the credo he has set:

I believed, and still believe, that there is such a thing as

historical truth; that it exists independently of, and can be detached from, the subjectivities of scholars; that it is

the historian's duty to try to reach it....[1]

Four years ago, he published The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee

Problem Revisited —the original work enriched with documents

declassified in the interim by Israeli archives. Now, six decades after

the original events, Morris has produced yet another account in

1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War .

Rather than focusing on the exodus, 1948 is a military history of the

entire war. The wider angle provides a more extensive picture of thethreat faced by the Jewish side and its responses. The maps are of

battles, not vanished villages. The opening page is a poem by

American Zionist writer Marie Syrkin:

Suppose, this time, Goliath should not fail;

Suppose, this time, the sling should not avail....

The psalm is stilled, and David does not win.

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The poem suggests that Morris has swung toward the account of the

war he originally dismissed: the Jews were the heroic few facing

annihilation. In the context he provides, the judgments he makes, he

is now more willing to justify the choices made by the Jewish side,

more critical of those made by the Arabs. Islam, described harshly,

has entered his account. Fortunately, the vast amount of detail that

he includes creates a complex story that defies easy conclusions,

including some of his own.

The result is the richest chronicle yet of the 1948 war, yet

unavoidably one with its own slant. It reflects Morris's self-described

transition from dove to hawk since the collapse of the Oslo process.

(A recent expression of Morris's dizzying movement rightward was

his New York Times Op-Ed article in July, arguing that Israel may

have no choice but to launch a nuclear strike against Iran.[2])

The recent appearance of the essay collection Making Israel ,

recalling Morris's earlier views and their political setting, helps make

the contrast with his new positions clearer. Ironically, Morris, the

declared positivist, has demonstrated how much the present shapesthe past, how dry facts conflict with national narrative. History, he

has shown, is a story set inside the personal story of those who tell it.

he conflagration began on November 30, 1947, the morning after

the United Nations voted to partition British-ruled Palestine into

a Jewish and an Arab state. A band of Arab fighters fired the first

shots at a bus east of Tel Aviv, killing five Jews. The last military

operation ended on March 10, 1949. In those fifteen months, Jewish

forces defeated first the Arab irregulars of Palestine, then the

invading armies of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. The new Jewish

state's borders, and its survival, were a product of victory. Yet inthose same months, somewhere around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs

became refugees.

In The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, Morris, writing in

the 1980s, rejected both sides' explanations of the exodus. It was

neither the result of Arab leaders' instructions to Palestinians to

leave, as the Israelis insisted, nor of a premeditated Jewish policy to

expel them, as Arab leaders maintained. In fact, the strongest lesson

of Birth may be that it gives an unstated warning not to fall for the

fallacy that all historical events are intended, and not to presume that

there is a clear policy choice behind grand historical shifts. History ismessy, complicated, often morally ambiguous. It is not as simple as

the stories that nations tell about their past.

The Palestinian flight, Morris wrote in Birth, "was largely a by-

product of Arab and Jewish fears and of the protracted, bitter

fighting." To a lesser extent it resulted from decisions by officers and

politicians—although it was this part of his account that drew

disproportionate attention. As civil war began to engulf Palestine, he






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explained, much of the Arab middle and upper class left. For those

who stayed,

the daily spectacle of abandonment by their

"betters,"...with its concomitant progressive closure of

businesses, shops, schools, law offices and medical

clinics...led to a steady attrition of morale, a cumulative

sapping of faith and trust in the world around them.

It was, in Morris's account, as if the keystones had been pulled out of

every arch in every stone building in Arab Palestine. The departure of

communal leaders led to social collapse.

By April 1948, Jewish Jerusalem and other communities were under

siege by Arab irregulars, and the neighboring Arab countries were

preparing to invade when British rule of Palestine ended in mid-May.

Palestine's Jewish community, the Yishuv, turned to offense. As

Jewish forces advanced, Morris wrote, Arab society disintegrated

amid a "psychosis of flight," a contagion of panic. However, "a small

but significant proportion [of that flight] was due to direct expulsionorders." The mix of panic and expulsion continued after Israel

declared independence and began repelling the invasion. By June,

Morris estimated, 200,000–300,000 Arabs had fled their homes.

In the war's third stage, beginning that summer, there was "a

growing readiness in [Israeli] units to expel" Arabs from towns and

villages, even when General Staff orders discouraged such action,

Morris said. One reason for the shift, he wrote, was that the

unexpected exodus in previous months created hopes for a Jewish

state that would have few Arabs. Another reason was a desire for

vengeance against those seen as imposing a harsh war on the Jews.

Even more important, the new country's government decided that

those who left would not be allowed to return. That policy was the

turning point. Combined with the increased expulsions, it

transformed what happened in the chaos of a war into a lasting

reality. Afterward, the two sides told such different stories of the war

that they could have been describing separate planets.

et looking back, one has to ask why Morris's account, and the

work of the other New Historians, reverberated as loudly as it

did. This question runs through the essays in Making Israel . As Avi

Shlaim, another "new" scholar, notes, much of what they said was not

terribly new. As early as 1959, an Israeli scholar named Rony Gabbay

published an account of the Palestinian exodus, describing roughly

the same forces as Morris would. The book seems to have gone

almost unnoticed.[3]

Other evidence was in plain sight. A renowned Israeli novella—S.

Yizhar's The Story of Hirbet Hizah—portrayed a unit of the Israel






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Defense Forces emptying an Arab village of its people. The narrator,

one of the soldiers, doesn't want to "defile [his] hands." His

commander responds that Jewish immigrants will come to Hirbet

Hizah and work its land. When he published the story in 1949, Yizhar

was already a prominent writer and a Knesset member representing

the Mapai party of David Ben-Gurion, the founding prime minister.

As the historian Anita Shapira writes in Making Israel , Hirbet Hizah

set off a storm when it appeared, and again when it was filmed and

broadcast on state television in 1978. "I saw the columns of refugees

we ordered to leave, as did everyone who fought in this land," the

writer and 1948 veteran Amos Keinan responded when objections

were made to the televised version. He was an exception. Most of

those who saw the exodus managed to "veil it in forgetfulness,"

Shapira says. They regarded the war as defensive, and wanted to put

its "most inglorious, oppressive chapter" behind them.

Sometimes the suppression was conscious and political. In his 1979

memoirs, Yitzhak Rabin, at the time a member of the Knesset and

former prime minister, bluntly described his own actions in "drivingout" the Arabs of Lydda and Ramle, towns conquered by the IDF in

July 1948. A cabinet-level censorship committee blue-penciled the

offending paragraphs—which nonetheless were published in The

New York Times.[4] In the early 1980s, Benny Morris was given

access to the archives of the Palmah, the pre-independence

underground army that became the core of the IDF. There he found

Rabin's order to expel Lydda's Arabs.

The account of that expulsion—based largely on IDF documents—

may be the most harrowing section of Birth. It begins with Israeli

soldiers facing unexpected gunfire in Lydda just after it wasconquered. They responded by killing some 250 townspeople, in

what Morris calls a "slaughter." Fearing both a rebellion and a

Transjordanian counterattack, Ben-Gurion told his officers to empty

both Lydda and neighboring Ramle. Thousands of Palestinians were

forced to walk eastward under the July sun, at first dropping

belongings and later leaving "bodies of men, women and children,

scattered along the way."

s both Morris and Shlaim stress in Making Israel , a major

factor behind the new wave of historical scholarship was that in

the 1980s, Israeli, American, and British archives allowed access topapers from 1948. For Morris, that was crucial. In scholarly

argument over what is reliable, Morris is an unbending believer in

the value of the paper trail: documents establish fact; interviews with

participants are too subjective.

The documents were also one reason that Morris's account had so

resounding an effect. For Israelis, the testimony of IDF records was

harder to push aside than conflicting testimony of those who lived






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through 1948. Besides that, Morris had committed an Oedipal act:

killing the memories of his father's generation, the generation of the

country's founders. Older historians "lived through 1948 as highly

committed adult participants in the epic, glorious rebirth of the

Jewish commonwealth," he said in the 1988 Tikkun essay

republished in Making Israel . "They were unable to separate their

lives from this historical event," and could not be relied on. The fury

of the reaction from older writers and scholars reflected the passionsof a conflict between generations.

Yet Israel had also changed—another reason that the new account

had so strong an effect. Two decades had passed since Israel's

conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The 1982 invasion of

Lebanon, as Shlaim writes, shattered Israelis' conviction that their

country used force only when it had no alternative. Morris, born in

1948, wrote with the sensibility of those who had come of age in

1967, who had reason to be concerned about Israel's reckless use of

power.

Morris's broad conclusions—as stated in the 1988 "New Historiography" essay—provoked the strongest criticism. The idea

that 1948 had been a battle of "David and Goliath" was a myth, he

wrote. "The stronger side won.... The Yishuv was better armed and

had more trained manpower than did the Palestinians." Likewise,

facing the Arab armies, Israel had more soldiers and better

organization. Following the war, he argued, Israel's leaders were not

eager to reach peace at the price of territorial concessions. "In Tel

Aviv, there was a sense of triumph and drunkenness that

accompanied victory," he asserted. Today, reading those assessments,

what's most strik- ing is how well they describe Israel—after 1967.

In another essay in Making Israel , the left-wing former Knesset

member and IDF officer Mordechai Bar-On addresses the conflicting

advantages of the participant's view and the scholar who comes later.

Bar-On fought in 1948 and later became a historian. Living inside

events, he writes, a person may have no idea of the larger picture. As

"stories are told and retold," they "become distorted by prejudice,

loyalties, presumptions and even political interests." Nonetheless, the

participant reaches back to recall "the mood of the time" and how the

battle appeared from the inside, which is also part of history. Bar-On

could have added that even someone sifting through files long

afterward builds a story that is shaded by loyalties andpresumptions. A scholar can crack myths, and still be captive to the

mood of the day.

t the end of his 1988 essay, Morris suggested that "what is now

being written about Israel's past" might "in some obscure way

serve the purposes of peace and reconciliation." The intifada had just

erupted in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, pushing the Palestinian

issue into the center of Israeli politics. Since then, a peace process





incidence of rape." Arab forces also expelled or massacred Jews or

prevented their return to places they had fled— but they could do so

rarely, for the simple reason that the Arabs had few opportunities.

They were losing on the battlefield. Nonetheless, Jordan's Arab

Legion emptied the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City; Arab

fighters massacred about 150 Jewish defenders of the religious

kibbutz Kfar 'Etzion after they surrendered. In Morris's telling of this

complex tale, the reader can discern both the disappointed dove andthe dedicated chronicler.

One can begin with how Morris sets the scene. His original book

opened with a few sparse sentences on the birth of Zionism in

nineteenth-century Europe, Jewish immigration to Palestine, and

conflict with Palestinian Arabs. This time, he leaps back much

further: "The Jewish people was born in the Land of Israel, which it

ruled, on and off, for thirteen centuries," until the Romans crushed

the last, brief Jewish bid at independence in the second century CE.

Later Muslim rulers never treated it as a separate province. By the

nineteenth century it was an "impoverished backwater"—albeit one

where Arabs outnumbered Jews by a ratio of eighteen to one.

Morris's underlying point here is that Jews were returning to their

ancient homeland. In itself, this is correct, and is essential

background to the events of 1948. But it is also a classic Zionist

account, and is just one face of history. Seen from the other

direction, foreigners were coming to settle the land, to colonize it.

The argument between these accounts is like a debate over whether

water is really oxygen or really hydrogen. That both are partly true is

the starting point of the tragedy of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Yet when writing history, it is terribly difficult to avoid a choice, and

the choice is influenced by the writer's times. While Morris mentionsthe Palestinian view, his opening pages place this book more firmly—

and more defensively—within a Zionist perspective than his previous

writing.

In the years of British rule, as Morris writes, the quickly growing

Jewish community in Palestine developed quasi state institutions and

armed forces that allowed it to fight effectively in 1948. The Arab

population was politically fragmented, without effective institutions.

It turned down compromises in the form of the Peel Commission

proposals for partition in 1937 and then the UN partition plan a

decade later. Morris now sees the influence of Islam as a key reasonfor Arab hostility toward Jews and Zionism, perhaps the preeminent

reason. For Arabs, the 1948 war "was a war of religion as much as, if

not more than, a nationalist war over territory." He cites a hadith—a

tradition ascribed to Muhammad—that was regularly quoted at the

time, apparently by Islamic activists: "The day of resurrection does

not come until Muslims fight against Jews...until the trees and stones

shout out, 'O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.'"





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o balance this perspective, it is worth reading A History of

Palestine, by Gudrun Krämer, a German scholar of Islamic

studies. In Krämer's description, Palestine's Arabs faced a blocked

road to political development. The British "denied the Arabs any

political representation for as long as they refused to accept the

Mandate Treaty." But accepting the treaty meant accepting the

Balfour Declaration—with its promise of a Jewish "national home"—

and renouncing self-determination. The exception was the Britishappointment of Amin al-Husseini—a Palestinian aristocrat with a

background more nationalist than Islamic—as mufti of Jerusalem,

and creation of a Supreme Muslim Council headed by him. This was

just one factor in the "gradual Islamization of Arab politics in

Palestine," Krämer writes. Trying to stop Jewish land purchases and

political intentions, al-Husseini and other Arab spokesmen

developed the idea of Palestine as a sacred trust given to all Muslims.

Exploiting Islam, al-Husseini succeeded in making Palestine a pan-

Arab and pan-Islamic issue.

So rather than being the foundation of Arab opposition to Zionism,Islam was itself transformed by nationalism. Anti-Jewish texts could

be pulled from the attic of tradition in response to political

circumstance. The hadith about the trees and stones, for instance,

appears in early Islamic compendiums, but according to David Cook

of Rice University, an expert on Islamic apocalyptic thought, has

been widely quoted only in recent decades. The rewriting of religion

to serve ultra-nationalist aims should be familiar to Israeli historians,

who have seen the same process unfolding in Judaism since 1967.

After the Israeli victory that year, a group of rabbis and Orthodox

activists emerged who made settlement and permanent Israeli rule

over the conquered land into fundamental religious values,transmuting both theology and Jewish religious law. Religion is

protean. Describing Islam as an unchanging force is ahistorical, and

makes any accommodation between it and Israel appear

unimaginable.

s Morris concentrates on the events leading to civil war, the

pervading theme is that both Jews and Arabs lost control. In a

"fatal twist," the British cabinet decided not to help implement

partition, and to keep the UN commission that had been assigned

that task out of Palestine. The leaders of the weak Arab regimes

feared popular fury if they did not stop partition, and they also fearedeach other's designs. Both Egypt and Syria, for instance, suspected

that Jordan wanted to annex all or part of Palestine. Within

Palestine, Arabs and Jews shared feelings of dread. An Iraqi general,

Ismail Sawfat, warned the Arab League that Arabs living in the

territory destined for the Jewish state faced "destruction." Jewish

leaders thought they faced a second Holocaust.

The difference was that the Jews were organized and had a trained




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militia, the Haganah, that could be transformed into an army—and

had nowhere to flee. The Arabs had village militias, and the option of

flight. "Demoralization" set in among the Arabs, Morris writes. Yet by

March 1948, the Jewish position was also desperate. The road to

Jerusalem had been cut by local Arab forces; starvation loomed in

Jewish areas of the city.

Morris is at his best describing the intricate and chaotic progression

of the war. The illusion of comprehensive strategies on both sides

often disintegrates, in his telling, into impromptu decisions and

desperate measures. A key example is the Jewish offensive beginning

in April. Previous accounts have described it as implementing the

Haganah's "Plan D." Drawn up by the Haganah chief of operations,

Yigael Yadin, Plan D aimed at taking control of the land assigned to

the Jewish state, opening the road to Jerusalem, and preparing for

defense against the coming Arab invasion. In pro-Palestinian

histories, Plan D has been described as a program for expelling the

country's Arabs.

In fact, Morris explains, there was never a decision by leaders of theJewish forces to carry out Plan D. Responding to immediate crises,

the Haganah launched local operations. These actions added up to a

shift toward taking the offensive and in retrospect roughly fit Plan D.

Nor was there a plan for ethnic cleansing of the country. Villagers

sometimes fled as soon as Haganah units approached. But Plan D, as

written, allowed commanders to destroy captured villages, especially

if they resisted conquest. It was a way to keep the enemy forces—

meaning the villagers—from returning to their base. In the actual

fighting, this tactic became more common. At that stage, it was a war

of communities, not of states; it was cruel and desperate; at stake

was survival. Both sides killed prisoners. The British, still nominally in charge though concerned mainly with their own withdrawal, would

not have allowed POW camps.

When the British withdrew, the Arab armies invaded. They had not

agreed on a plan of attack. Arab leaders said they were protecting

Palestinian Arabs, but they intended to exploit the cause for their

own ends. They had no intention of creating a Palestinian state.

Jordan wanted the West Bank; Egypt wanted to grab the southern

half of the West Bank first.

The initial Jewish goal was not to be overrun. Once Israel gained theupper hand, it sought defensible borders, which meant gaining

territory. At least some Israeli leaders, including Ben-Gurion, wanted

to "reduce the number of Arabs." The policy of not allowing refugees

to return was partly defensive, to avoid a fifth column. But in a

crucial cabinet meeting on the issue in June, Foreign Minister Moshe

Shertok also described all "the lands and the houses" as "spoils of

war," and as compensation for what Jews had lost in a fight forced on

them. He was not alone in seeing the exodus as an unplanned benefit





of the battles. On the other hand, leaders of the socialist Mapam

party objected to razing Arab villages, and said that once the fighting

ended, the refugees should be allowed home. In a subsequent

meeting in September, the cabinet rejected an immediate return and

left the refugee question to be resolved when formal peace was

achieved. In practical terms, this was a decision to make the exodus

permanent. It was the critical moment when confusion, panic, and ad

hoc choices gave way to a deliberate, fateful policy. For, as Morris writes, "peace never came, and the refugees never returned."[7]

This is a story where many actions are horrifying, most of all when

they are understandable. Perhaps that is a definition for tragedy. In

this case, it defies the author's efforts to reach clear judgment on who

is at fault. Morris suggests that Palestinian nationalists had a clear

goal of expelling the Jews, and that "Zionist expulsionist thinking"

was "at least in part a response." His own evidence suggests another

reading: once the United Nations voted to partition Palestine but

could not enforce its own decision, a bitter war was almost

inescapable between two communities; each was certain its existence

was at stake. Both flight and expulsion followed as if fated. How

many Jews and Arabs would lose their homes depended on the

balance of forces in battle. The Jews won. That Israeli writers can

more easily reexamine their own side's actions may be one of the

fruits of victory.

The conflagration of 1948 was the war that began all Arab–Israeli

wars. This will not be the last history of it, and not only because new

papers will come to light, perhaps from still-sealed Arab archives. If

the story is retold after peace—by Benny Morris or someone else—the

facts and the motives will necessarily look different. It might be

easier to see both Jews and Arabs with greater sympathy, as human beings caught in a storm. In the meantime, Morris has indeed served

the purpose of reconciliation, by making a fuller picture of what

happened in 1948 part of Israeli memory. For that he deserves

gratitude.

Notes

[1]Benny Morris, "Politics by Other Means," The New Republic,

March 22, 2004.

[2]Benny Morris, "Using Bombs to Stave Off War," The New YorkTimes, July 18, 2008.

[3]Rony Gabbay, A Political Study of the Arab–Jewish Conflict: The

Arab Refugee Problem, a Case Study (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1959).

[4]David K. Shipler, "Israel Bars Rabin From Relating '48 Eviction of

Arabs," The New York Times, October 23, 1979.

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[5]Benny Morris, "From Dove to Hawk," Newsweek, May 8, 2008,

available at www.newsweek.com/id/136085.

[6]See Benny Morris and Ehud Barak, "Camp David and After—

Continued," The New York Review, June 27, 2002. This was written

in reply to "Camp David and After: An Exchange (2. A Reply to Ehud

Barak)," by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, The New York Review,

June 13, 2002.

[7] In his 2004 book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem

Revisited , Morris described the harsh consequences:

but if a measure of ambivalence and confusion attended

Haganah/IDF treatment of Arab communities during

and immediately after conquest, there was nothing

ambiguous about Israeli policy, from summer 1948,

toward those who had been displaced and had become

refugees and toward those who were yet to be displaced,

in future operations: Generally applied with resolution

and, often, with brutality, the policy was to prevent arefugee return at all costs. And if, somehow, refugees

succeeded in infiltrating back, they were routinely

rounded up and expelled (though tens of thousands of

"infiltrators" ultimately succeeded in resettling and

becoming Israeli citizens).

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