Why historian Benny Morris has finally decided to use the label ‘apartheid’

The divisive academic says he resisted using the word because it implies racism. He now concedes that Israel’s governance of the West Bank is an apartheid, based on nationalism but not race.

During the 1980s, a young journalist turned historian authored a pathbreaking book on the actions and policies of Israeli authorities and forces towards Palestinians in 1948, thereby becoming a leading force among Israel’s “new historians” who challenged self-serving myths about the country’s origins.

Today, Benny Morris, 74, is an elder historian. He is thinking about his legacy precisely at a time that Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition is, in his view, stripping Israel of liberalism.

Morris raised eyebrows in August when, for the first time, he signed on to use of the term “apartheid regime” to describe Israel’s rule in the West Bank. This was part of a written appeal to the American Jewish community to thwart the perceived goals of Netanyahu and his Jewish supremacist allies, including moving towards authoritarianism and endangering, relocating and further oppressing Palestinians.

“The current government and its actions have led me to become far more critical and use terms I haven’t used before,” Morris told The Jewish Independent in a lengthy interview.

Veteran right-wing commentator Amnon Lord, a columnist for Israel Hayom newspaper, offered a different explanation for Morris’s decision to join about 1500 Israeli, Palestinian and American academics and personalities in signing the letter: “It’s apparently a way for Morris to blend in with the central current. During the last year, the positions of the extreme Left from the 1960s and 1970s have become mainstream for part of the Israeli establishment, of which Morris is a part.”

In remarks to The Jewish Independent Media, Lord stated that Morris’s adoption of the word apartheid was part of warfare against the Netanyahu government and places him in the ranks of those “delegitimising Israel” and “causing antisemitism” that can result in murder of Jews.

It is far from the first time that Morris has touched off controversy or appeared to anger people by changing his statements or views. The Ben Gurion University emeritus academic, however, says he has always considered himself on the Left and continues to do so.

His parents immigrated from the UK to Israel and there are elements of a British accent in his speech. A doctorate at the University of Cambridge and visiting scholar stints at US universities have enabled him to have a “more objective eye” as a historian than many others, he believes.

But being Israeli and living constantly in the shadow of the Arab-Israeli conflict has also strongly impacted him. He worked as a journalist for the Jerusalem Post for 12 years, some of that as diplomatic correspondent. He also served in the army, including during the 1982 Lebanon war. But Morris drew the line of conscience when he was called up as a reservist during the first intifada six years later and served time briefly in military jail for that refusal.

Morris came to attention in 1988 when he debunked the widely held tenet that the Palestinian displacement of 1947-49 resulted from Arab leaders calling on the Palestinians to leave or their being afraid. In a book titled The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-49, Morris proved through painstaking research from recently opened Israeli archives that in many instances, Palestinians were forcibly uprooted or coerced to depart or that a mixture of factors were at work.

Some of his subsequent books also involved exploring the archives to reconstruct what happened during the fateful period around 1948 and he is writing a study of Israeli and Arab war crimes during the War of Independence, known to Palestinians as the Nakba. That he has faced criticism simultaneously for either going too far or not going far enough does not appear to rattle him.

“My work is aimed at truth. But truth is usually found somewhere in the middle. That’s my experience with documentation and looking at what happened in past episodes and eras. Usually, one finds that truth is not in the extremes but somewhere in the middle. If you like, you can call that balance.”

Origins was widely praised, including for being rigorously documented, but some felt he failed to take the very facts he had unearthed fully into account, when he concluded that the refugees’ disaster was not a result of an original Zionist intent. Critics also noted a dearth of Arab source materials.

Still, it was an earthquake in the historiography of the conflict and was seen to right a wrong by pinning responsibility on Israel, though the degree of this responsibility continues to be disputed. "Benny Morris’s work on 1948 is invaluable. He’s done more than anyone before or since to expose the Israeli policies, military plans, and secret operations behind the ethnic cleansing of 1948, the root cause of conflict which has festered ever since,” Sarah Helm, an award-winning British journalist and historian who writes frequently on the Middle East, told The Jewish Independent.

Helm said Morris’s Birth amounted to “a huge historical and journalistic scoop. It probably took an Israeli historian to do it, but mostly it took a rigorous investigative journalist, driven by the search for facts. And if those facts were being hidden from him, it drove him on even more”.

But Origins is also a frustrating read, Helm added. “While revealing new material, he seems troubled by some of the material he reveals - especially on ’48 war crimes, so he chips in with his own author-comments to play down their significance - an atrocity he describes which is quite clearly a massacre - is not really a massacre, he tells us, for example.” Morris evoked shock and dismay on the Israeli Left and among Palestinians who had used his writings in a bid to prove Israel’s birth was a sin when he appeared to voice regret, in an interview with Haaretz in 2004, that Israel did not go even further in 1948 and empty the land of all its Palestinians.

He declared at the time that ethnic cleansing is justified in certain circumstances, specifically when the alternative is facing genocide. But he also gave the appearance of being morally vacuous when he regretted that the possibility for a complete expulsion of Palestinians had been missed by Ben-Gurion. “If he had carried out a full expulsion rather than a partial one he would have stabilised the state of Israel for generations,” Morris said.

In the same interview, Morris cast the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as part of a battle of civilisations between the enlightened West and an Islam that has no moral inhibitions. Perhaps he now wants to mitigate the impressions still lingering from this ill-fated interview. “It’s nonsense that I went far Right,” he told The Jewish Independent Media. “People who say that didn’t read what I said properly,” he recalled of the Haaretz interview.

Morris is a man who chooses his words carefully and that is all the more reason to take his allegation of Israeli apartheid in the West Bank more seriously than others among the growing number of Israelis who have adopted it, most recently Tamir Pardo, former head of the Mossad.

For example, Morris declines to label the notorious killings by Jewish forces of Palestinian civilians at Deir Yassin outside Jerusalem on April 9, 1948, as a massacre, as it is widely known. “It was called a massacre,” he says. “It certainly was a collection of atrocities.”

Similarly, he has his own take on apartheid, insisting that in the West Bank its underlying driver is different from that of South African apartheid.  “The use of the word apartheid is more or less applicable to the situation that exists in the West Bank. You have three million people who, for 56 years, have lived under Israeli military rule. It’s not that they do not have equal rights. They have no rights at all, they are stateless, everything is arbitrary, decided by the army, not by themselves.

"Everything, including things such as movement and work, is determined by a military dictatorship.

 “I’ve always resisted using the word apartheid,” he stressed. “In fact, I’ve criticised the use of it because people attach it to race, saying ‘Israel is a racist government, so the way they govern is apartheid.’

“I’m saying it’s a form of apartheid based on nationalism, not race. Unfortunately, I’ve come to agree this is a term [that is] accurate to describe Israel’s governance in the West Bank and it’s connected to efforts by the current government to deliberalise Israel and turn it into an autocratic state.”

Morris says another loaded term, “ethnic cleansing”, is accurate in describing much of the Coalition’s attitude towards the Palestinians of the West Bank. “It’s an outlook of ethnic cleansing. They would like to drive out the Arab population from the West Bank. They would like to de-Arabise it. That’s what [Meir] Kahane wanted and that’s what these Kahanists want.”

Not everyone is overwhelmed by Morris’s shift on apartheid. Some, it seems, may never forgive him for his Haaretz interview. Former PLO executive committee member Hanan Ashrawi says Morris’s “justification of ethnic cleansing came as a real shock”. Still, she credits his work on refugees and the emergence of the “new historians”.

“It was incredible the way he exposed things by going through the archives,” she said.

But ultimately, Ashrawi considers Morris a disappointment. “You never know what he will say. He goes back and forth. Scholarship should be based on fact, not the latest opinion.”

Helm, however, believes the same perceived wheels of ethnic cleansing from 1947-49 are grinding away in Israel’s current policies in the West Bank and Negev. She is not surprised that Morris has adopted the term apartheid.

But potentially more significant than the terminology change is Morris’s voicing of fear for the very future of his profession because of mounting denial of access to previously available archival material. This, he warns, can only result in spreading a false view of Israeli history. The Defence Ministry body responsible for extending the strictures is mandated to protect security secrets, but is going much further, he warns.

“Documents I once used are now closed,” Morris says. “They are trying in some way to hinder reconstruction of the past in historiography. That’s what the government, presumably with Netanyahu’s approval, is doing.”

Photo: Protesters in Hebron (Palestinian International Solidarity Movement)