In Bay Area, candid Israeli historian Benny Morris sounds off on genocide and politics [View all]

[Mosby]

Israeli historian Benny Morris doesn’t write to please his audience. “I don’t care about hasbara,” he told J., using the Hebrew word for public-relations efforts to portray Israel in a positive light to the rest of the world. “People who want to defend this or that cause, they work in foreign ministries, they work in other places. I work on history.”

Morris, who has written or edited a dozen books, is considered one of Israel’s preeminent historians. His 2008 tome “1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War” earned him the National Jewish Book Award in history. Considered a revisionist, he is one of three so-called “New Historians” who emerged in the 1980s and became known for challenging accepted narratives about Israel’s founding.

In the 1980s, Morris used state archives and newly declassified materials to write “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem,” a seminal work that took aim at the falsehoods underlying both traditional Israeli and mainstream Arab versions of the 1948 war.

The documents he reviewed showed the 700,000 or so Arabs who had fled their homes during what they refer to as the “nakba,” or the catastrophe, “had not done so, by and large, on orders from” Palestinian or Arab leaders, or autonomously, as many Israelis were led to believe. Nor were they systematically expelled as part of a “master plan,” as many Palestinians were taught, he summarized in a piece for the Guardian in 2012.

https://www.jweekly.com/2020/02/24/in-bay-area-candid-israeli-historian-benny-morris-sounds-off-on-genocide-and-politics/