The reviewer wrote his M.A thesis at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem on the role of Arab Christians in the 1948 war. His present research for a PhD is on the history of Arab settlement in Palestine (Aretz Israel) between 1871 and 1948.
The 1948 Arab-Israeli war, called variously the Israeli war of Independence and the Nakhba (catastrophe), may be one of the most important wars of the 20th century. It has gained this reputation for a variety of reasons; for Jews and Christianity it is important because it resulted in the re-establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel for the first time in 2000 years. However in recent years, Palestinian Nationalism and Arab nationalism have led to the rise of Islamism in the region. This rise of Islamism, from Hamas to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, has often been seen as central to the Clash of Civilizations thesis developed by Samuel Huntington. Moreover, in terms of the Arab world, the Palestinian refugees have played a major role in de-stablizing of the regimes of Jordan and Lebanon and have been used as a tool throughout the Middle East and the Muslim world by such leaders as Gamel Abdel Nasser, Saddam Hussein and Mahmud Ahmadinjed. The progenitor, supposedly, of all this is the 1948 war which resulted in the creation of the State of Israel in the ‘heart’ of the Muslim world and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. This is a problem of central importance to the United Nations which has not only spent more per capita on the refugees than anyone else, has changed the definition of the term ‘refugee’ to appease them and has issued more resolutions defending them than any other people in the world.
When Benny Morris published 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War in 2008 he did so on the 60th anniversary of the war. What is most interesting is that over that sixty years there has been a paucity of books dealing with the history of the 1948 war. General military histories written by Trevor Dupuy or Chaim Herzog have dealth with the 1948 war as one war within the context of the Arab-Israeli wars. Probably one of the first full length books to deal with it was the popular text, O Jerusalem (1988) by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. That was followed by Netanel Lorch’s military history of the war entitled The Edge of the Sword: Israel’s War of Independence 1947-1949 (1991). On the heels of that followed another popular account in 1992 by Dan Kurzman, Genesis 1948: The First Arab-Israeli war and the birth of Israel. Perhaps because of the Oslo peace process there was a hiatus in books on the conflict only rekindled after 2001 with The War for Palestine: Re-writing the Israeli history of 1948 (2001) edited by Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim, Efraim Karsh’s The Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Palestine War 1948 (2002), David Tal’s War in Palestine, 1948: Strategy and Diplomacy (2003) culminating inYaov Gelber’s Palestine 1948: Escape and the Emergence of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (2006). This last book was published in the midst of Benny Morris’s writing of his own book and apprently Morris decided that it was worthwhile to move forward with his own project despite Gelber’s publication. There was some discussion that Michael Oren, the author of Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East and Power Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to present, was taking on the 1948 war as a project but that has not materialized.
In addition to the accounts of the war various accounts of the Arab side of the war or the refugee problem were published over the years, including Aref el Aref’s Nakhba: wa al-Firdaous al-Mafqoud (Nakba and the Lost Paradise) (six volumes 1956-1960), Benny Morris’ own Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (1988, revised 2004), All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (1992) by Walid Khalidi and Ethnic-Cleansing of Palestine (2007) by Ilan Pappe.
Thus the 1948 war remained an orphan of history to a great extent until the late 1980s. This was due to the fact that those military historians interested in Israel’s victories were less than astonished by the rag tag armies who fought over Palestine in 1948. The emergence of the Palestinians as an important factor in world affairs gave some impetus to renewed interest in the war. But mostly what seems to have propelled renewed interest was the emergence of the Israel’s ‘New Historians’ in the 1980s, including Benny Morris. When Morris first set about investigating the writing of a history of the Palmach he decided to instead set his sights on the Palestinian refugees and the 1948 war. Given his access and understanding of this vast amount of material he was perfectly placed to write a book on the 1948 war but resisted calls to do so, instead revising his own book on the refugee problem and re-releasing it in 2004 with new conclusions based on additional archival research. Critics had long complained that his book served as a rally point for Israel-bashers and that he had single handedly released a Palestinian genie from the bottle by documenting the destruction of Palestinian villages. When asked why he didn’t focus on the Jewish refugees from the 1948 war, including those from Arab countries, he continually noted that this was not his subject. But the consumate research Morris, who forthrightly noted that he would not use interviews by former Arab residents because their memories tended to change with time and be influenced by modern politics, finally set about writing a history of the 1948 war.
This decision to write his book came after Morris had experienced an odd break with the New Historians and had been accused, by the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling among others, of being a ‘secret’ right wing fanatic who justified the ‘ethnic-cleansing’ of Palestine in 1948. This was the result of an an article about Morris appearing in Haaretz in 2004. The sum of Morris’ supposedly new opinion was “When the choice is between destroying or being destroyed, it’s better to destroy.” As Ari Shavit noted in an interview with Morris in 2008 “two years ago, different voices began to be heard. The historian who was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israel had no one to talk to. The researcher who was accused of being an Israel hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academic establishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in the British paper The Guardian.” But Morris was correct. People simpy hadn’t asked him what he thought. They had taken his book’s revision of the story of the Palestinian refugee problem and determined that it represented him. Morris has never claimed that writing 1948 was some way of either redeeming himself as a Zionist after years of being a poster boy of post-Zionism, nor has he claimed that he wanted to finally put the record strait with a full account of the war, he has remained mum on what propelled to write 1948. He leaves no clues as to his own reasons and thus 1948 stands by itself, the interesting achievement of a man who many consider has made a journey from left to right but who, probably, remained strictly himself over the years while academia, politics and the shrill words of the pundits have revolved around him.
The book is organized in the traditional military history manner, covering the partition, the ‘civil war’ between Jewish and Arab militias, the Arab invasion, the ‘first truce’, the ‘ten days’ and operations to secure the Galilee and the Negev, resulting in the defeat of the Egyptian army. This periodization is not original except for the fact that he destinuishes a second stage of the ‘civil war’ between April and May, 1948, the stage in which the Jewish Haganah gained the upper hand over the Arab militias and began to conquer territories alloted the Jewish state in the partition plan. Morris is an excellent story teller. He is at his best throughout the book, whether it s describing high level diplomatic events or military engagements. His makes observations that have been made before “the Arab leaders…did almost nothing to prepare their armies for war.(183)”
1948 is full of new materal, old material and material Mr. Morris was familiar with from his earlier writings on the Palestinian refugees. Because of his familiarity with the destruction of Arab villages and the decision by Arabs to abandoned their villages he includes more detail on these subjects than otherwise might have been included. This detial not only shows that there was no ‘master plan’ or conspiratorial ‘plan D (plan D existed but was not the conspiracy made out by authors such as Ilan Pappe)’ to remove or ‘transfer’ all the Palestinian Arabs. But Morris does not hide what did take place. “A wide swath around Michmar Ha’emek was cleared of Arab inhabitants…the villages were then systematically levelled.(p. 136)” In fact those unfamiliar either with the old maps of Palestine from before 1948, Benny Morris’ earlier works or the Land of Israel may have trouble following the plethora of place named Morris mentions, names he became familiar with from his earlier work.
Morris concentrates on facts and themes that other authors have ignored. One of the most important of these is the role and fate of Arab Christians in the war. This subject was ignored usually in the past as Arab Christians simply became ‘Arabs’ and authors neglected to examine them as a category unto themselves. Thus the question of why a disproportionate number of Christian Arab villages were left after the war, how Christians jumped from 10% of the Arab population in Palestine in 1948 to more than 25% in Israel in 1949 were never answered. No one ever bothered to examine why Christians formed majorities of the Arabs remaining in cities such as Haifa, Jaffa, Acre and Ramla/Lydda.
Morris also reminds us of the role of Europeans and the ‘international community’ in the 1948 war, the meddling, false promises, lies and duplicity that have marked the UN’s treatment of Israel since the 1960s actually have clear origins and precursers in 1948. The famous comparison that has found itself in the Western Press more and more of Israel as a ‘nazi’ state carrying out ‘ethnic-cleansing’ or ‘aparthied’ have their origins in 1948 as well. After the Irgun (IZL) hanged two British sergeants in 1947, in retaliation for the hanging of two Irgun men by the British, the Times of London ran an article that noted “the bestialities practiced by the Nazis themselves could go no further.(pg. 39)” This case of the comparison of some Jewish action to a Nazi action, so soon after the Holocaust, shows that this canard and this European need to find parellels to Nazism elsehwere, perhaps out of a need to show that ‘we aren’t the only Nazis’ already existed just two years after the liberation of the death camps. The fact that the Times of London could not destinguish then between the acts of the Nazis and the acts of the Irgun in hanging two British soldiers shows that already the mindset of creating a narrative of Israel as a ‘Nazi’ regime was complete. Later manifestations, such as comparing the siege of Beirut in 1982 or the battle for Jenin in 2002 to the Warsaw ghetto were not new developments. In fact in the aftermath of the hanging the British public went on a warpath in London, Liverpool, Newcastle, Gateshead and Holyhead, “anti-semitic demonstrations, Jewish shops and Synagogue windows were smashed.(pg. 40)” Such was Europe in 1947, just two years after the Holocaust.
In general the reader who is familiar with the war will not find a great deal of new material but will find that the material has been presented in a better way than usual and that the flow of the story is first rate. 1948 should be considered the best history of the war and it should remain the standard for years to come.