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.