Pre-State Jewish Underground Leader Dies.

“An old man sat with his back to the village — he could not bear to watch it burn,” said Yisrael Cohen, a Jewish militia officer, recalling the conquest of an Arab village. “From a burning courtyard a young boy came running to me laughing; he wanted to play. He came up and I took him into my arms and he hugged me. What will I do with him, I thought. It was such a contradiction to what was going on around us.” (more…)

The New York Times is such a master at disguising Israeli crimes in a cloak of romanticism and feel-good nostalgia. You really have to give them credit. I mean, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians began months before the Arab armies invaded — entire families were killed, women raped, villages razed, hundreds of thousands forcibly expelled (not “evacuated” as the article claims) from their homes. But all this is irrelevant to the NYT… We are meant to empathize with this poor man who struggles with the difficult task of ethnic cleansing.

Is it possible for someone who matter-of-factly supports crimes against humanity to be a good historian? A startling and provocative question, no doubt, but one that inevitably arises upon consideration of the remarkable career of Israeli scholar Benny Morris. A professor in the Middle East Studies department at Ben-Gurion University, Morris is well-known as one of the most important of the “New Historians,” a group that upended traditional Zionist historiography of the Israeli-Arab conflict. In the first edition of his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (1988), Morris conclusively demonstrated, through the mining of newly released Israeli government archives, that the refugees from the 1948 war had, overwhelmingly, fled or been expelled by Israeli forces rather than left as a result of encouragement by Arab leaders, as a previous generation of Israeli propagandists had claimed.

After the release of that book and in subsequent years, with the publication of Israel’s Border Wars (1997) followed by a general history of the conflict, Righteous Victims (1999), Morris was generally lauded by liberals as a historian willing to expose uncomfortable truths about the Israeli past. This Morris, the seemingly liberal Morris, rose to fame at the time of the first Palestinian intifada and the Oslo period that followed, when both support for Palestinian resistance to occupation and new hope for a peaceful resolution of the conflict gained traction around the world. (more…)