included Norman, Benny Morris and Saree Makdisi on the subject too.
snip* AMY GOODMAN: Saree Makdisi, I wanted to bring you in, a professor at UCLA joining us from Los Angeles. Your response to Benny Morris?
SAREE MAKDISI: Well, I mean, I think the most interesting thing is the way in which Dr. Morris talks about there being a problem way before 1948, and he’s entirely right. When the Zionist movement decided to create a Jewish homeland or a Jewish state in a land that had a largely non-Jewish population at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was in fact a problem. He’s totally right. So the question is, as he puts it in his own work, what do you do with this big population that doesn’t want there to be a state that displaces them or ignores them or sidesteps them or overshadows them or whatever? And as his own research shows and as the research of other historians shows, from the—at least the mid-1930s on, there’s talk of removing the population.
And that goes on to this very day in different forms. I mean, for example, there are people in Israel itself in Israeli politics to this very day, both within Israel proper and in the Occupied Territories, who talk about completing the process of transfer, of removal, of 1948.
And as he also says, the other thing is that, irrespective of what language one uses—and notice how candy one can be with the use of language: are they “refugees”? Are they “displaced persons”? It doesn’t really matter what language one uses; the people who were removed from their homes, that’s what matters. And as he says himself in what he just said now, what matters isn’t so much that they were removed from their homes, it’s that they were never allowed back to their homes. So whatever the circumstances of the removals and expulsions of 1948, the more important fact is, that was seen as something—as an issue forty years previously, if not longer before that, and as an issue to be blocked when they decided—when they wanted to go back to their homes after the fighting stopped. And they’ve never been allowed to go back, as you know, despite their moral and legal right to do so. That’s what this is all about.
AMY GOODMAN: Norman Finkelstein, let me bring you into this conversation, author of a number of books on Israel-Palestine—his latest is Beyond Chutzpah—speaking to us from Brussels.
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Well, as it happens, on the plane ride over here, I read Benny Morris’s new book, and what was most surprising to me is that although the documentation remains pretty much the same as the past several books—he’s added some new material, but it’s pretty much the same as several previous books he’s written on the topic—the conclusions and the political framework has been radically changed.
Now, it’s no problem for people to change their opinions on the basis of new evidence, but what happens in Morris’s new book, 1948, is he radically changes his opinions by subtracting evidence. So let’s take just briefly, because we’re a radio program, some examples. In his previous book, he says transfer was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism, and this aim automatically produced resistance among the Arabs. And he goes on to say in another book that it was the fear of territorial dispossession and displacement that was to be the chief motor of Arab antagonism to Zionism. So we have two basis facts: number one, Zionism, inbuilt into it was the expulsion of the indigenous population; and number two, the Palestinians or Arabs opposed Zionism, because they were fearful of losing their homes and losing their country.
But now, when you open up his new book, cause and effect have been reversed. It becomes now the Palestinians who are the “expulsionists,” to use his words, and it’s the Zionist movement which is reacting to the Palestinians, which causes them to be occasionally expulsionists. It’s as if to say the Native American population of the United States was expulsionist, because it refused to acquiesce in the European settlers taking over their homes.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Morris?
BENNY MORRIS: I think Finkelstein has a blinkered view, and he sees only certain documents. What I try to do is look at actually the breadth of the documentation and derive conclusions about the past.
The Palestinian National Movement, led by Haj Amin al-Husseini in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, wanted to expel the Jews. The Jews felt they had a moral right to live in the country and to reestablish their sovereignty in the country, at least in part of it. And the Palestinians thought not. They didn’t care about Jewish history. They cared nothing about Jewish tragedy or persecution over the 2,000 years and wanted to expel them from the country. They didn’t get the chance, because they lost the war. So the war—something like the reverse had happened.
But the fact is—and this is something most Arab commentators ignore or don’t tell us—the Palestinians rejected the UN partition resolution; the Jews accepted it. They accepted the possibility of dividing the country into two states, with one Arab state and a Jewish state. And the Jewish state, which was to come into being in 1947-48, according to the United Nations, was to have had an Arab population of 400,000 to 500,000 and a Jewish population of slightly more than 500,000. That was what was supposed to come into being, and that is what the Zionist movement accepted. When the Arabs rejected it and went to war against the Jewish community, it left the Jewish community no choice. It could either lose the war and be pushed into the sea, or ultimately push out the Arab minority in their midst who wanted to kill them. It’s an act of self-defense, and that’s what happened.
My facts in any—in all my books have not changed at all. They’re all there. But one has to look at also the context in which things happened, and this was the context: an expulsionist mentality, an expulsionist onslaught on the Jewish community in Palestine by Palestine’s Arabs and by the invading Arab armies, and a Jewish self-defense, which involved also pushing out large numbers of Palestinians.
AMY GOODMAN: Saree Makdisi, this issue of the acceptance of the partition, can you take it from there?
SAREE MAKDISI: Yeah. I mean, there are several things about it. For one thing, as Dr. Morris points out, it’s true that the mainstream Zionist movement accepted the partition plan. But on the other hand, as his own historical record shows, Ben-Gurion and others were very frank that the acceptance was meant to be tactical rather than sort of, you know, whole-hearted. So the idea was to accept and then go from there, not just to accept and then really settle down into the two states as envisaged by the UN partition plan.
in full:
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/16/as_israelis_celebrate_independence_and_palestinians
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