Benny Morris declares the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty dead
The Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty is
collapsing. Benny Morris says it's dead.
The fact is that following the fall of Mubarak, Egyptian rule in the Sinai Peninsula has disintegrated. Egyptians seemingly no longer assiduously block clandestine Iranian shipments of arms into the Gaza Strip through the tunnel system, and the native beduin tribes of the peninsula, traditional smugglers of goods and people (mainly drugs and illegal emigrants from Sudan and Eritrea) into Israel, have prospered. A largely destitute Sudanese-Eritrean community now populates a part of southern Tel Aviv, where it is a source of crime and social unrest.
But more directly threatening to Israel has been the upsurge in Sinai in direct anti-Israeli activities by Islamist and Palestinian groups, some of them backed by Iran, such as the repeated sabotage during the past few months of the pipeline running the length of the peninsula through which Egypt exported gas to Israel (this gas constituted some 50 percent of the fuel that ran the turbines that supply Israel's electrcity grid. The gas disruption, which the Egyptian government has been unable or unwilling to halt, has meant that Israel has suffered economically and has had to access alternative supplies of gas and coal from elsewhere. One of the charges against Mubarak in the ongoing Cairo trial of the ex-dictator and his family and cronies is that they benefited financially from the gas deals). The interim Egyptian military regime has been extremely sensitive to Israeli criticism of its loss of control in Sinai.
Then came the Thursday attack in which the Palestinian gunmen made their way from Gaza through the Rafah-area tunnels into Sinai and then traveled south, ultimately crossing into Israel just north of Eilat, the Egyptian military in the area aware of what was happening and doing nothing to halt the terrorists. Israel suspects that the Egyptian soldiers may have helped the gunmen, either out of sympathy or for financial gain. Some Israeli survivors of the attack said that the terrorists were dressed in Egyptian army fatigues.
The irony is that a few days earlier, Israel had allowed the Egyptians—by mutual agreement breaching the Sinai demilitarization clause of the peace treaty—to send into Sinai three battalions of troops, with armored personnel carriers, to help restore Egyptian sovereignty and to curb the bedouin and Palestinian militancy. But the Egyptians, as had happened with the gas pipeline, either lacked the will or the competence, and the Resistance Committees' raid went on effectively and, apparently, on schedule.
Here's the key: If Morris is right, the treaty is dead, and not because either side wanted to kill it, but because the Egyptians are no longer capable of implementing it. That ought to do wonders for the prospect of future treaties.
Labels: Benny Morris, Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty
What happened at Deir Yassin?
Saturday is Deir Yassin day, a day that commemorates a massacre that never was.
It's much harder to prove that there was no massacre at Deir Yassin than it would be today. Today, you'd have drones flying overhead photographing the battle to prove that your troops did not commit a massacre. But like Jenin 50 years later, there was no massacre at Deir Yassin (which is known today as Har Nof). It was all an Arab lie - one of the first instances of
Pallywood.
The attack on the Arab village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem (today, the Har Nof neighborhood) was not, as claimed, a "massacre" nor was it a premeditated killing. As we now know from Arab sources and other independent research, (see Bregman, Ahron & El-Tahri, Jihan, "The Fifty Years War, Israel and the Arabs," Penguin Books, BBC Books, London, 1998. pp. 27-34 and Klein, Morton A., “Deir Yassin History of a Lie, ZOA, NY 2005) the number of dead at the village was between 93 and 110, at the most. All of them were killed during the course of the battle, in house-to-house fighting. There were no mutilations or atrocities caused to the corpses as per testimony from the villagers themselves. The attacking combined force of Irgun and Lehi units brought with them a loudspeaker to the village entrance to warn the inhabitants. They also left an escape route open, which led to Ein Karem, so as not to have to harm the inhabitants unnecessarily and hundreds took advantage of this Jewish act of kindness in battle. All these preparations and actions belie any intent of a massacre.
We should recall that, for example, when Hulda was attacked in 1929, Efraim Chisik, brother of Devora Chisik who was killed nine years earlier at Tel Chai, after being shot dead by Arabs was then set alight and his body burned. The British soldiers who saved the survivors did not permit them to take with them his body which was recovered several days later, horribly mutilated as were the bodies of the famous 35 of Gush Etzion who were killed in January 1948.
The fighters were instructed before the attack specifically not to harm unarmed civilians. The survivors were provided transportation to the Old City of Jerusalem and no physical injury was done to them after the surrender. True, the battle itself was not conducted with the utmost professionalism. The underground combatants were not fully trained in urban warfare of this type. The house-to-house character of the fighting, the shooting from within the homes and the lack of knowledge of who was in the houses, all led to the use of dynamite rather indiscriminately causing thus many of the deaths. The portrayal in another recent docudrama, “The Promised Land” shown on Britain's’ Channel Four, is so ludicrous as to be a stain on film professionalism. The battle at the village, part of the “Nahshon” campaign to relieve Jerusalem of the siege the Arabs were applying to the city by blocking the main highway, was approved by the Hagana commander. Deir Yassin provided a base for the Arab attacks on the Castel and the Histadrut Davar newspaper issue of April 4, 1948, contained a report that the previous Friday night, shots from snipers had been fired from Deir Yassin towards Bet Hakerem and Bayit VeGan Jewish neighborhoods (see here). A local Palmach unit provided mortar support fire at one point. Claims of rape, butchering of bodies and other atrocities is simply not true.
The village, portrayed as a quiet and uninvolved village in the fighting, is also misleading. In the first instance, Iraqi soldiers and other Arabs state irregulars had been in the village for weeks. Secondly, the villagers had been involved in the 1920 and 1929 Arab communal riots on nearby Jews and in 1938, the Hagana attacked the village in a reprisal raid after sniper fire was directed at the main Jerusalem high way. The attacking force suffered 35% casualties of 5 killed and 40 injured.
Even Benny Morris included this in his 1999 book Righteous Victims:
"The attack, on the morning of April 9, was carried out with the prior approval of, and in cooperation with, the Jerusalem command of the Haganah. Some 130 IZL [Irgun Zvai Leumi - The National Military Organization] and LHI [Lohamei 'Herut Yisrael - Freedom Fighters of Israel a.k.a. the Stern Gang] fighters took part. During the battle, Haganah machine-gunners stationed nearby supplied covering fire, and two Palmah squads [Strike force within the Haganah] in armored cars joined in the actual battle. Palmah squads also helped evacuate the wounded, and the Haganah helped the combatants with ammunition...
But what is missing from all these commemoration events and film treatments is quite a simple fact: the village’s fate was sealed when sniping from the village was directed at two Jewish neighborhoods, Beit HaKerem and Bayit V’Gan, the Friday night before its conquest. For a rigorous treatment of the events see Uri Milstein’s account, among others.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Benny Morris, Deir Yassin, Pallywood, Yisrael Medad
Gadhafi tried to rape a Western reporter
I'm sure you'll all be shocked - just shocked - at Benny Morris' disclosure that Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi once tried to
rape a Western reporter (Hat Tip:
Elder of Ziyon).
The Arab world – as embodied in the Arab League – for decades, perhaps not happily, covered and apologised for this bizarre creature, pardoning his barbarism and ignoring his laughable, and sometimes deadly, quirks. Of course, his fellow Arab leaders, to a man, had all tortured and jailed and murdered their opponents. Still, in many ways Qaddafi outdid them. His Green Book was full of gibberish, rivalled in nonsense only by Mao's Red Book; he wore weird hats and large dark sunglasses and had a constant three-day bristle (in this he seems to have consciously aped Yasser Arafat). And, of course, Qaddafi – of beduin extraction - made a point of living (or at least appearing to live) in a tent in the backyard of one of his palaces (and in New York City and other places; tents have the virtue of travelling well).
Which reminds me of a story a fine, young journalist once told me about her experiences in Tripoli. It was in the 1980s, I think. She had come to interview Qaddafi. She was ushered into the famous tent. Qaddafi sent his aides away and the two of them shared lunch. And then Qaddafi tried to caress her. Flustered, she got up to leave. He then chased her around the table, bent on rape. She was brave and apparently fit; she outran him, at least long enough for his aides to rush in at the sound of her screams. Rape averted.
It is a shame journalists did not usually publish their impressions of and experiences with Qaddafi. This no doubt facilitated Western and Arab acceptance of cooperation with this almost unique, base specimen of humanity (perhaps Saddam Hussein came closest).
A shame but oh so common. A year or two ago an American network covered up in return for access to key government officials in a Muslim country (I think it was Iran, but I can't find it in Google). Closer to home, an Italian network apologized to the 'Palestinian Authority' for doing its job and covering the lynch of two IDF soldiers - with video - in 2000. So why should we be surprised when a Western network covers up an attempted rape perpetrated against one of its own correspondents by the local despot? Isn't it always this way?
Labels: Benny Morris, Muammar Gaddafi, rape
Palileaks prove nothing
Some of you may recall that the very
first story I did, and many others did, on Palileaks included a link to an article by al-Guardian's Jonathan Freedland in which this 'journalist' immediately concluded that the 'Palestinians' wanted to make peace and that the big, bad Israelis had spurned them.
Benny Morris
rips Freedland some new body parts.
Had he exercised memory, or looked, indeed, at his newspaper's own archive, he might have discovered that the astonishing Palestinian "concessions"—mainly, that the bulk of the new Israeli neighborhoods in north, east, and south Jerusalem, built on or across the 1967 lines, were already "conceded" to the Israelis in the Clinton "parameters"—President Bill Clinton's peace proposals—of December 2000, which the Palestinians to this day maintain were substantially accepted by the previous Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat. Clinton had laid down the principle, in dividing Jerusalem, of Jewish neighborhoods to go to Israel and Arab areas to come under Arab sovereignty.
Similarly, Arafat had already agreed that the Jewish Quarter and the Western ("Wailing") Wall (and perhaps also the Armenian Quarter) in Jerusalem's Old City should be under Israerli sovereignty, with the Palestinians getting the Muslim and Christian quarters. Nothing new here either.
But Arafat in 2000-2001 had balked at two things—and neither, as far as I know, have been conceded by the current heads of the Palestinian Authority-PLO: sole Palestinian sovereignty over the southeastern corner of the Old City, the Temple Mount\Haram ash Sharif; and the Palestinian refugees' "Right of Return," meaning that the Palestinians still alive from the 1948 War's exodus and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren must be allowed to return to the areas of pre-1967 Israel.
...
Let Wikileaks or Al Jazeera (or Freedland) find and publish the document showing that the Palestinian leadership has accepted the Clinton formula for solving the refugeee problem—i.e., settlement in place, in the Arab countries, in the future West Bank-Gaza Palestinian state, across the oceans in Canada, or wherever—and conveyed that acceptance to Israel, formally, officially and definitively, as well as the agreement for recognizing Israel as the Jewish state, and peace between Israel and the Palestinians would be achievable in short order.
Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.
Labels: al-Guardian, Benny Morris, Jonathan Freedland, Palileaks, Politics, World Politics
Benny Morris on the demise of the Labor party
Some of you might not have even noticed, but the Labor party, which dominated Israel's political scene from the 1930's to the 1970's,
fell apart this week. Benny Morris, argues that like himself, many Israelis
stopped believing in peace with the 'Palestinians' and left the Labor party with nothing to appeal to its members.
But there can be no serious argument about what transpired in July and December 2000, when Arafat sequentially rejected comprehensive Israeli and Israeli-American proposals for a two-state solution which would have given the Palestinians ("the Clinton Parameters") sovereignty and independence in 95% of the West Bank, all of the Gaza Strip, and half of Jerusalem (including half or three-quarters of the Old City). And there can be no serious argument either about Abbas's rejection of the similar, perhaps even slightly better deal, offered by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008. (Indeed, these rejections of a two-state solution were already a tradition set in stone: The Palestinians' leaders had rejected two-state compromises in 1937 (the Peel proposals), 1947 (the UN General Assembly partition resolution) and (implicitly) in 1978 (when Arafat rejected the Sadat-Begin Camp David agreement, which provided for "autonomy" in the Palestinan territories).
In the first decade of the third millenium, the Palestinians—Arafat and Abbas (and, needless to say, the fundamentalist anti-Semitic Hamas)—had, again, rejected not so much a set of proposals as an idea, a principle, the two-state solution. They wanted all of Palestine, and not an inch for the Jews.
And it was this rejection that destroyed the Israel Labor Party, which lost, and lost big, in all the general elections that followed Camp David. In 2000, the Israeli electorate grimly came to understand that there was no "peace partner", that the Palestinians would not, would never, sign on to the existence of a Jewish state in any part of Palestine, and that what Labor stood for—a two-state solution—was a sad delusion. So the electors voted for the hard right, the soft right, God's various anti-Zionist and ultra-Zionist parties, even a pensioners' list, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni, anything and anyone but Labor and its conciliatory affiliates. The electorate had moved, perhaps irremediably, to the right.
Indeed.
In
The Jewish State, Yoram Hazony devotes much of the first 100 pages to the Labor party. He argues that Labor was a very different party before Oslo and was much more in line with the Israeli center and even with the religious parties. When Labor turned to the peace process, it became hostile to anyone to their right, both politically and religiously. They thought they could get away with it. Now, they're paying the price.
Labels: Benny Morris, Ehud Barak, Ehud fled, Labor party
The opposition we really need
Daniel Gordis is spot-on with
this article about the type of opposition Israel really needs.
A couple of weeks ago, I sent a friend in the States a link to an article by Prof. Benny Morris entitled “Bleak House,” which argues that the prospects for peace have rarely been grimmer. It’s really a distillation of Morris’ book, One State, Two States, in which he claims that the Palestinians are no closer to accepting a division of the land than they were in 1948. Therefore, Morris claims, the two-state solution is essentially dead. I sent her the link because she’s a respected leader of American Jewish life, associated with the “get out of the territories and make peace” camp. I wanted to see if Morris’ article might enable her to at least understand those who espouse very different positions from hers.
“This is the most dismal and depressing analysis I have seen in a while,” she replied. “I’m not convinced that Morris is right... but assuming for the moment that he is, what are we left with? What are we to do? I know you think a lowlevel conflict can simmer for the next 100 years, but I don’t think Israel’s soul can sustain that... [I]f he’s right, how can we not despair?"
Despite her gentle dig at me, I was thrilled by her response. Because I do think that Benny Morris is right, when I find myself listening to the standard “end the occupation” mantra of the American Jewish opposition, I feel like I’m watching kids squeezing their eyes tightly shut, hoping against hope that this night, the tooth fairy really will come after all.
Our presence on the West Bank may be necessary, or it may be foolhardy; about that, reasonable minds can and do differ. But the notion that our presence on the West Bank is the prime impediment to peace is sheer myopia.
That is why it is so important that the peace camp, despairing of a country that it believes no longer cares about peace, reads Morris carefully. Because once it does, as my friend’s reply demonstrates, it can start asking the questions that truly matter, and it can become the kind of opposition that Israel desperately needs.
Read it all.
For those who are wondering, the Benny Morris article to which Gordis refers is
here, and I discussed it (indirectly)
here.
Labels: Benny Morris, Palestinian state, two-state solution
Back to the 1930's?
Ron Radosh reviews a lengthy piece in the Tablet by
Benny Morris. It's definitely worth it to
read the whole thing, but among other things, he comes up with this.
Benny Morris understands that for the Arab mentality, little has changed since 1948 and the creation of the Jewish State. The first reason no peace is possible, he writes, “the one that American and European officials never express and — if impolitely mentioned in their presence — turn away from in distaste, is that Palestinian political elites, of both the so-called ’secular’ and Islamist varieties, are dead set against partitioning the Land of Israel/Palestine with the Jews.” Morris continues:
“They regard all of Palestine as their patrimony and believe that it will eventually be theirs. History, because of demography and the steady empowerment of the Arab and Islamic worlds and the West’s growing alienation from Israel, and because of Allah’s wishes, is, they believe, on their side. They do not want a permanent two-state solution, with a Palestinian Arab state co-existing alongside a (larger) Jewish state; they will not compromise on this core belief and do not believe, on moral or practical grounds, that they should.”
The truth, Morris believes, cannot be mentioned by our statesman, because if the Palestinian and Arab position is accurately stated, it means that “the Israeli-Arab conflict has no resolution apart from the complete victory of one side or the other (with the corollary of expulsion, or annihilation, by one side of the other) — which leaves leaders like President Barack Obama with nowhere realistic to go with regard to the conflict. Philosophically, acceptance of the rock-like unpliability of this reality is extremely problematic, given the ongoing military and philosophical clash between the West and various forces in the Islamic world.”
Instead of facing this truth and trying to decide what is to be done, our leaders continue on with the farce of always trying to resurrect a peace process that always fails, and will continue to do so in the future. Speaking as a historian, Morris argues the similarities with the era before World War II — the age of “appeasement” — are too striking to ignore. He writes:
“In this connection, our age, it may turn out, resembles the classic age of appeasement, the 1930s, when the Western democracies (and the Soviet Union) were ranged against, but preferred not to confront, Nazi Germany and its allies, Fascist Italy, and expansionist Japan. During that decade, Hitler’s inexorable martial, racist, and uncompromising mindset was misread by Western leaders, officials, and intellectuals — and for much the same reasons. Living in unideological societies, they could not fathom the minds and politics of their ideologically driven antagonists. The leaders and intellectuals of the Western democracies, educated and suffused with liberal and relativist values, by and large were unable to comprehend the essential ‘otherness’ of Hitler and ended up fighting him, to the finish, after negotiation and compromise had proved useless.”
History, he clearly fears, might just this time actually repeat itself. Certainly, the comparisons are too striking to be ignored, a point that Pastor Hagee also pointed out in his speech. At this moment, Hamas is pledged to obliterate Israel as its very raison d’etre, and while Fatah claims to be willing to accept a two-state solution, it insists upon the acceptance of what they call “the right to return,” without any exception. For Abbas and his comrades, this is non-negotiable. A few years ago, the group of journalists I traveled to Israel with met with Saeb Erekat, the top Palestinian negotiator. He argued that everyone knows a two-state solution could be accepted overnight. But, he added, they will never — and he emphasized this — accept less than the state of Israel agreeing to the right of return of the Arab refugees who fled at the time of the 1948 war between Israel and the invading armies of six Arab nations.
Like I said,
read the whole thing. It's not just on the Iranian front that the Obama administration is trying to return us to 1930's-style appeasement.
Labels: 1930's, Barack Obama, Benny Morris, Palestinian intransigence, Ron Radosh
The Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty is collapsing. Benny Morris says it's dead. 
