Benny Morris and the Nakba

A revealing interview with Benny Morris, perhaps the single biggest authority on the events of 1948 (when, during the Arab-Israeli war the Palestinian people were expelled from what is now Israel).

It's interesting that, when all is said, all Benny Morris can say to justify the Nakba is that the Zionists felt that they had a just claim to the land. He says it would have been better (ie no conflict) if they had been able to totally expel the Palestinian population. But if you follow that logic, it would have been equally peaceful if the Zionists had been expelled too.

For Morris the primary reason for Palestinian resistance and Arab world reticence on the issue is sour grapes:

It’s a historic humiliation. It’s not a private, personal humiliation. I think the Arab world was brought up—the Islamic Arab world was brought up on tales of power and conquest dating back to the seventh century and the expansion of Islam and the Arabs out of the Arabian Peninsula and the conquest of the Mediterranean Basin, parts of Europe, and so on. And they had a self-image of a powerful people. And what happened in the—after the Turkish Ottoman conquests in the fifteenth century and subsequently belittled the Arab world, disempowered it. And then came the European imperial incursions, sometimes conquests in the nineteenth century. And topping all that came the Zionist influx and the unsuccessful Arab war against it in 1947-48. And this was a humiliation the Arab world could not take. 630,000 Jews had bested a 1.2 million Palestinians and 40 million Arabs surrounding that 630,000-strong community. And this humiliation is something which they have never been able to erase and still, I think, motivates them in large measure in their desire to erase the state of Israel.

This is a classically Orientalist mode of thought. It is not that the Palestinians were unjustly made homeless and stateless. It's just that the Arabs are bad losers.