Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

Here is one of Israel’s acclaimed historians, Benny Morris, identifying the real problem in the Middle East.

“We are an outpost of the West, as they see it and as we also see ourselves, in a largely Islamic, backward and in some ways even barbaric area…The Muslims are busy killing people, and killing people for reasons that in the West are regarded as idiotic. There is a problem here with Islam.”

Sounds fantastically simple, except, as Norman Finkelstein has pointed out, Morris’s conclusions are belied by the very facts he adduces. Avi Shlaim, one of the finest of Israeli historians, points out:

“There are two Benny Morrises,” he says. “There is the first-rate archival historian whose work is of utmost importance in understanding the Israeli-Arab conflict. And there is the third-rate political analyst who has little understanding of what is driving the modern conflict.”

On Ethnic Cleansing

Among his more surprising contentions was that Ben-Gurion should have expelled more Palestinians during the 1948 war to leave a stronger Jewish majority between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

“If the man was already driving out people, maybe he should have gone the whole hog,” Morris says now. “Perhaps in the end population exchanges and transfers, although they may have caused great suffering at the time, may in the long run have been better for everyone concerned.”

According to Ilan Pappe,  Morris bothers him “for what he represents, not as a person,” because the “extremes he is willing to go to justify Zionism and the prejudice he shows against the Palestinians is shared by so many Jews.”

[I interviewed Pappe a couple of months back. I'll post the video here once I figure out how to publish it on YouTube]