Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - 1948 - with Benny Morris (Part 2)

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

PART 2 of 2 For more than 30 years of ‘on again-off again’ peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, many Israelis, and certainly most interested observers in the West, looked to the 1967 Six-Day War as the root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If only we could reverse the results of that defensive war in which Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza, the problem would be solved, so the narrative goes. And this served as the basis for all peace talks and agreements that have taken place since. But, to anyone willing to listen, the story that Palestinian leaders were telling had nothing to do with 1967, and everything to do with 1948. And the story they tell goes something like this: ‘In the 1940s Jews escaped the Nazis, fled Europe, colonized Palestine, and unprovoked - ethnically cleansed the Arabs. A textbook case of settler colonialism.’ They have managed to propagate this false narrative throughout much of Western society, where millions are mindlessly chanting those six words - ‘from the river to the sea.’ So while we never thought we’d need to re-litigate this topic, we invited to the podcast (for a special two-part discussion) one of the quintessential historians of 1948 - Benny Morris. Professor Morris has dedicated his entire career to studying and writing about the war of 1948, the circumstances that led to it and its aftermath - i.e The Palestinian Refugee Problem. Morris's first book was “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949”. His other books include: “1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War”, and “Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001”. He completed his undergraduate studies in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and received a doctorate in modern European history from the University of Cambridge. Links to all of Benny Morris’s books can be found here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Benny%20morris His recent published essays can be found here: https://quillette.com/author/benny-morris/?gad_source=1

And I'm pleased to welcome back to this conversation, Benny Morris, for the second part of our discussion. Last time we spoke about the first part of the war in Palestine, the civil war between the Arabs and the Jews, between November 1947 and May 1948, resulting with about somewhere just around 300,000 Arab refugees fleeing or expelled to the West Bank and neighboring Arab countries in the Middle East. Let's start with just a basic question. What triggered the 1948 Arab-Israeli war? And specifically, why did Arab states in the Middle East, who have just been crushed by the Jews in the civil war and are being massacred by the Jews. That's the way they presented it to the world. But the answer appears to be more complicated. Some of the Arab soldiers, some of the Arab leaders may have been motivated by a desire to help their fellow Arabs and to

restore those who had been uprooted from their homes back to their homes. But most of the Arab leaders had interests of their own. Jordan had been long interested in occupying East Jerusalem with the old city of Jerusalem at its center for religious and political reasons and to occupy the West Bank, which is what they did in the invasion of 48. Egypt had its eyes set on occupying the Negev Desert, the southern part of Palestine, which had been largely allocated for Jewish statehood. The Syrians apparently were interested in taking hold of the Sea of Galilee and the surrounding land around it because they coveted water and perhaps the sea for other reasons. So each of the Arab states invading probably had their own particular geopolitical interests in occupying parts of Palestine.

So we're talking about Jordan, Syria, Egypt. And what about Iraq? Iraq participated. The Iraqis were interested, firstly, in helping their brothers, the fellow Hashemite regime in Amman, in attacking the Jewish state, and maybe they were interested in controlling the whole length of the pipeline from Kirkuk to the oil refinery in Haifa. But in addition to all this, the Arab state's leaders were pressed into, or motivated into, invading by their masses, by the people, by the street, the Arab street in Amman, in Cairo,

in Damascus and Baghdad. They had been invading against the Jewish state or the emerging Jewish state for decades. They had been invading against the Zionist enterprise. And now the street came into its own large demonstrations in the streets of Damascus and Baghdad, calling on their leaders to invade, to help the Palestinian Arabs, to attack the Zionists. And so, when it came to the British departure on the 15th of May, the Arabs and leaders had no choice. Had they not invaded, some of them felt, the Arab masses maybe would have even toppled the regimes themselves by the masses whom they felt threatened by, were motivated also by jihadist yearnings, by a desire to expel the infidel. And this war begins with the British

leaving the area. And I just want to establish exactly what the official trigger is, even though you're saying this was in the works well before this. It was the British leaving and the Israelis declaring independence on May 14th, 1948. Yeah. Simultaneously on the 14th of May, Ben-Gurion declares independence and the British lower the Union Jack and their fleet sails out of Haifa, basically leaving the country. And on the 15th of May, the Arab states invaded. They didn't say they wanted to destroy the Jewish state. This is important. They didn't declare we are invading to destroy the Jewish state. They put a positive spin on it saying we are invading to protect our brothers, the Palestinians. But I have to underline this point because you're saying that the leaders

of these invading countries had geopolitical ambitions on this territory. Each one had their own narrow geopolitical ambition. Nowhere in their calculation was actual solidarity with the Palestinian Arabs living there, even though their masses had sympathies for them. So they felt responsive to their own street, to their own populations. They had to at least make part of their rhetoric in terms of what the war was in service of, was solidarity with Palestinian Arabs. But the actual leaders of these countries could have cared less about the Palestinian Arabs. The reason I say this, Benny, is because this is extremely relevant with today. Yeah, the Palestinian Arabs had not been especially liked by the Arab societies and states around, and especially the leadership of the

Palestinians in the person of Haj Amin al-Husseini, were actually disliked or even intensely disliked by the Arab leaders. Abdullah, for years, talked about his desire to assassinate Haj Amin al-Husseini. As it turned out, Husseini's agents assassinated King Abdullah of Jordan. But Abdullah hated Husseini, and other Arab leaders also didn't especially like him. So the Palestinian leadership was disliked and this projected onto the desire of the neighboring states to come to the aid of the Palestinians. They didn't especially want the Palestinians' welfare and interest. This wasn't in the top of their minds. Okay, so now what was the IDF's condition on the eve of the war? How did it mount up against the neighboring armies that were invading it?

And then talk a little bit about the actual invasion. The main Jewish militia, the Haganah, basically changed its name on the 1st of June, 1948, two weeks after the Arab invasion. The Haganah changed its name to the Israel Defense Forces, the IDF. In the course of February, March, April, May, the Haganah gradually changed from a militia to an army with battalions and brigade formations. At the same time, the Zionist movement began to amass arms. It couldn't bring in arms in a large scale

while the British were in occupation of Palestine. The Haganah was an illegal organization in British eyes. It certainly wouldn't allow large arms like tanks, artillery, aircraft to come into the country. But the Haganah representatives abroad began to sign contracts, especially with the Czechs, who were backed by the Soviet Union, to purchase arms. And so arms were waiting on the 15th of May on Czech airfields to be flown or shipped eventually to Israel for the Haganah, which became the IDF. During those first weeks of the invasion, the Haganah IDF was at a great disadvantage because the Arab invading armies, even though they were small, and I'll talk

about this in a second, they did have heavy equipment. They had armored cars mounting small cannon. They had artillery batteries. They had tanks. They had combat aircraft, dozens of them. The Haganah IDF didn't have any of this. It didn't have artillery. It didn't have tanks. It didn't have proper armored cars with guns. And it didn't, of course, have combat aircraft. And these only began to arrive in the first weeks of Jewish statehood, in other words, during the second half of May and the first weeks of June. The Haganah IDF was at a great disadvantage during those weeks of the Arab invasion following the 15th of May. And they made up for this by sheer courage, by good organization, and by using weapons which weren't standard equipment like Molotov cocktails against tanks, but somehow they made do. Now, the Arab invading force was very

small. On paper, Ben-Gurion in his diary writes that the Arab armies all around the Middle East numbered 165,000 troops. But this was nonsense. There were far less real troops among them, and the Arab armies had very few weapons for their troops. The troops who actually invaded on the 15th of May, 16th of May, 17th of May, were probably 20,000 altogether. And about 6,000 or 8,000 of them were good troops. The Jordanian army, which was led incidentally by British officers who simply worked for the Jordanian government and were battalion brigade commanders and special forces commanders in the Jordanian army. And it was a well-equipped army. So that was the really good invading force. The they weren't really trained to fight a war, and they were poorly equipped, even though, as I said, they had heavy weapons, but they didn't

have many heavy weapons, and they didn't have large ammunition supplies to maintain war for a long time. And all of this worked to the Zionist's advantage during the weeks of the invasion. I must add one other thing. The Haganah were aided by several thousand volunteers from abroad, usually ex-servicemen from World War II, some of them Jewish, some of them non-Jews, who came to fight for the Jewish state, many of them because of Jewish sympathy for the Jewish state, but some of them just out of adventurism or even just for hard cash, because the Israeli government paid good wages to volunteer, for instance, pilots who came, some of whom were, as I said, non-Jews. So they had a core of professionals who had good World War II experience,

especially Air Force, Navy, intelligence, helping the Haganah during the fight. The Arab armies did have some volunteers from Arab states apart from the frontline states, Moroccans, Sudanese, Yemenite volunteers, but these all amounted to insignificant forces. How did the war go for the first two months? Well, the first four weeks were the crucial part of the conventional war between the Arab states and the state of Israel. Those four weeks from the 15th of May until the 11th of June are considered the weeks of the invasion when the Arabs had the advantage of simultaneously attacking the newborn state of Israel from various directions at the same time. They had, as I said, advantages in firepower, artillery, tanks, aircraft, but they didn't make great headway. And as I said, the Jews made up for lack of equipment with greater motivation.

By the end of those four weeks, by the 11th of June, when the new state of Israel had weathered this initial invasion, basically the Jews had won the war. The Arabs, if they were going to succeed and win the war, should have done it during those four weeks. In not managing to defeat the Haganah during those four weeks, the Arabs essentially lost the war. Because from that point on, the Jews increased the size of their army with mass mobilization and arms began to pour in from Czechoslovakia and some private arms purchases from various places like Mexico, Switzerland, and so on. And the disadvantage in armaments began to shift to the advantage of the Zionist side. In July 1948, a truce came into effect as a new partition plan was put forth by the UN. Both sides rejected this one.

What was that partition plan and why did both sides reject it? Well, the UN sent a mediator to Palestine at the end of May. Bernadotte was his name, a Swedish aristocrat. And he put together in two stages, a number of plans, but not new partition plans, but a plan to end the war. And essentially what Bernadotte said was that the refugees should be allowed to return to their homes, that the Jews should give up the Negev, the southern part of Palestine, which they had been allotted by the United Nations partition plan, and the Western Galilee should be given to the Jewish state in return. And the Jews rejected the plan, but so did the Arabs, who didn't want, of course, a Jewish state in any part of Palestine and wouldn't come aboard on this plan. Eventually, Bernadotte, incidentally, was assassinated in mid-September, and this, in a sense, brought to an end the United Nations' efforts to reach compromise between the

Jews and the Arabs during the war. So the two-month-long truce ends in September 48, launching new military operations that lasted another month. And so what happened during that month of fighting? In October, the IDF basically defeats the Egyptian army, though doesn't expel it thoroughly from Palestine, but defeats it in a number of battles, occupies the town of Beersheba and opens the road to the Negev for Israeli troops and occupation, and also in October conquers northern Galilee. And then Israel launches its final push against the Egyptian army, which is in the Gaza Strip, and defeats the Egyptians, surrounds the Egyptian expeditionary force in Gaza, and forces the Egyptians to sue for a ceasefire and eventually an armistice. This happens at the end of December, the beginning of January 1949, bringing the war to

an end, the hostilities to an end. The fact that the Israelis managed to defeat the major Arab participant in the war, the Egyptians, actually seals the fate of the whole Arab invasion, puts the stamp of an Israeli victory on the whole war. As I say, people say that the Israelis beat the Arab armies, but they didn't actually beat the Jordanians, and they almost didn't beat the Syrians. But nonetheless, the war's result was the establishment and consolidation of a Jewish state, which meant that the Arabs had lost the war because their intention had been to undermine the existence of a Jewish state, which meant that the Arabs had lost the war because their intention had been to undermine the existence of a Jewish state. Okay. 1948 and the outcome of 1948 and how this war

ended in 1948. Was it a miracle? Or is that mythology? Is that overblown? Because by any telling, Israel was up against extraordinary odds. Well, the war's result, I don't think, was a miracle. It was a matter of organization, tenacity, better generalship. A society which was organized for as against Arab states, which hadn't organized for war, were poorly led, were poorly motivated. The Egyptian army had come from the Nile Valley. The Iraqi army had come from Mesopotamia. They weren't fighting for their homeland. They were mercenaries in a sense, even though they didn't like the Jews or the infidels who had taken over Palestine,

but they weren't fighting for their country or their peoples. The Israelis were. In this sense, it wasn't a miracle. It was just human perseverance and courage. But as I say, organization was important, and so was money. The Jews were well-funded by the world jury, especially American jury. The Arab states, the confrontation states, were very poor. They didn't have the money, really, to finance a prolonged war. The Israelis

did, and this was telling in the outcome as well. So there was never a sense of potential annihilation? No, I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say that. During the weeks of the invasion, the Israelis didn't know how well the Arab armies would function or how poorly they would function. On the 15th of May, when the Arab states invaded, the Jews were apprehensive. On the 12th of May, just before the invasion,

what amounted to the Israeli cabinet chaired by Ben-Gurion asked Igael Yadin, later a famous archaeologist, but at the time the acting leader, commander of the Haganah, they asked him what does the Haganah believe is going to happen? And Yadin, on the 12th of May, told the Israeli leaders, it's 50-50, the chances are even. Those are the phrases he used, saying the Haganah wasn't sure we're going

to win this war when the Arabs invaded, because they didn't understand whether the Arabs would fight well or not fight well. As it turned out, the Jordanians fought well, but didn't intend to attack the Jewish state, even though they ended up fighting around Jerusalem and in Jerusalem, but they didn't go for the jugular of the Jewish state, which was Tel Aviv, for example. But the other Arab armies functioned very poorly. We have Nasser's diary. Nasser, who later became president of Egypt, later published a recollection in the 50s of the year he had spent in Palestine as a junior officer, a major. And he said, when we invaded, we came through the Gaza Strip, that is from Sinai, from Egypt, through Sinai, through the into the Gaza Strip, and I had to give money. I had to actually give pounds

to my junior officers to go buy olives and cheese because my troops didn't have anything to eat. This is the invading army. How poorly prepared was the Egyptian army was when it invaded. This is a bit of an exaggeration because they were regular armies. They didn't have heavy equipment, which Jews, as I said, on those first few weeks, but the Arabs performed very poorly by and large. During the 48 war, this phase that we're talking about, can you talk about the numbers of Arab refugees who fled or were expelled and what it brought the total number to? In the course of the conventional war, following the Arab state's invasion of Palestine on the 15th of May, another 300,000 approximately, three, 400,000 Palestine Arabs were uprooted from their

homes in areas which the IDF progressively conquered and became refugees, leading to something like 700,000 plus altogether Palestinians who had been uprooted and were recognized by the United Nations as refugees by war's end. Why is this specific point, the 1948 Palestinian exodus, a controversial topic among historians like you and your peers? Well, because there were two explanations were offered by the two sides for why the refugee problem had occurred. The Arabs said, basically, the Zionist movement had intended from the start to uproot the Palestinian Arabs from their homes and take over the country and their properties, their lands and their houses. And this is what they did in the 48th war. They used the opportunity of the war to uproot the Palestinians from their

homes. This was the Arabic explanation. The Jews at the time and for years afterwards said, no, it wasn't us who expelled them. We had no intention of expelling them. In fact, we'd accepted the UN partition resolution. We were willing to live side by side with them, with a large Arab minority inside the Jewish state. But the Arabs began the war. And when we started fighting, as a result of the fighting, they fled. They were fearful. In addition to that, so said the Jews in 1948, the Arabs' leaders, their own leaders and Arab states' leaders, told or advised the Palestine Arab population to flee the country so that it would open the road for the Arab army's invasion. This is the way the Zionists explained why the Palestinians had fled. This was a legend.

The Arab states' leaders and the Palestinian leaders, leaders by and large had not urged or ordered the Palestine Arabs to leave. But this is how the Zionist explained what had happened. Because otherwise, if this wasn't the explanation, then the Zionists would be blamed for expulsion. Okay. Did the Arabs ever accept that the Jews were indigenous to the land of Israel? That's an interesting question. There's a tourist brochure produced by the Palestinian Higher Committee in the 1920s, which speaks actually of the Jews having a temple on the Temple Mount in ancient times and so on. This came out in the 1920s, basically by the Palestinian Arab National Movement's leadership.

In the Camp David meetings between Clinton, Barak, and Arafat in the year 2000, July. This is Arafat, Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and President Bill Clinton. Yeah, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, President Clinton, who had invited Barak, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, they're having dinner, and at some point, Clinton speaks about the Jewish temple on the Temple Mount, which had existed 2000 years ago before the Romans destroyed it. And Arafat said, what temple? There was no temple there. Maybe there was a temple in Nablus, but there was no temple in Jerusalem. And basically, for years, Arafat had been saying the Jews are not a people, they are just a religion,

and they had never really been in Palestine, something which the Arabs had been in for the past 4,000 years. That's how he used to say. They weren't Arabs, of course, 4,000 years ago, but that's what he used to claim. No Jews in Palestine, no connection between the Jews and the land of Israel, Palestine. The truth is that the Arabs in the 19th century and early 20th century in Palestine understood that the Jews had been there. One of the mayors of Jerusalem, an Arab Khalidi, Yusuf ad-Din al-Khalidi, actually wrote a letter to Theodor Herzl, the visionary and leader of the Zionist movement at its inception in the 1890s, he wrote him a letter saying, we know that this is the Jews' land, Palestine, but what can we do? It's now full of

us Arabs, and you can't come. There's no room for you here. You can't dispossess us. This is our land. So the Arabs recognized, and not far from me, incidentally, there's an Arab village called Batir, which was the last stronghold of the second Jewish revolt against Rome under Bar Kochva. It's called Beit Ar in Jewish tradition. There's an Arab village there called Batir. Next to it, there's a little hillock, which the Arabs say is called Jabal al-Yahud, the hill of the Jews, because they knew the Jews had been there and fought there. But now the Arab Palestinian national movement denies, essentially, in its textbooks, in its school books, in its public rhetoric, denies that the Jews have any claim or any past in the land of Israel, Palestine. We talked about in the first part of our conversation, which was the last episode,

we talked a lot about the Peel Commission, which was the first effort to establish, create, recommend a division of the land into a, I'll call it a Palestinian Arab state and a Jewish state. And as you and I discussed then, that has always served as the basis for a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. From the Peel Commission of 1937 to the UN Partition Plan in 1947 to the 1993 Oslo Accord. You were just referring to the Camp David talks of 2000. It's always been about this partition plan that we can trace back to 1937. So we, those who care about Israel and the future of the Middle East, have been using a model for about, just as I said, roughly 90 years, that hasn't really innovated much, that hasn't really changed much. Could it be that it's the wrong model? Could it be that partition is not the solution? over the decades. As you say, the Peel Commission accepted by the British government, the United Nations in 1947, again, basically Western democracies charting the course of that resolution. And in recent years, the American government and Western European governments

supporting a two-state solution. But not all the Arabs have accepted, or most Arabs have not accepted over the decades, a two-state solution. Most of the Arab states, through most of the conflict, have rejected any state for the Jews in any part of Palestine. They've always wanted Palestine as a Palestinian Arab state, with or without a Jewish minority living in it. In recent decades, the Arab states have come around, some of them at least, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, have come around to accepting the two-state framework for a compromise between Israel and the Palestinians. The Palestinians, in my view, have never accepted that. The Hamas says so quite openly. They want to destroy the Jewish state. They will not accept

any Jewish sovereignty over any part of Palestine. And the PLO or the Palestinian Authority sometimes, when speaking in English, talks about the two-state solution, but in its heart doesn't want a Jewish state to exist here either. This is my view of the PLO, Palestine National Authority, Arafat, Abbas. None of them wanted a Jewish state. They don't believe the Jewish state is legitimate. How it will turn out, I don't know. If the Palestinian people can in some way be persuaded that it's inevitable or just and inevitable that a Jewish state exists in part of Palestine, there will be a two-state solution here ultimately. But if the Palestinian

people continue to reject the legitimacy of Zionism, the whole enterprise and the state of Israel it created, continue to reject this in their hearts, I don't think a two-state solution will emerge. Or if it's signed, it'll never actually persist. It'll never continue because the Palestinians will try to overthrow such a settlement when it's signed. So I don't know. The alternative offered by a lot of left wingers sitting inably in safety together in partnership in a one-state polity in all of the land of Israel, Palestine. I think that's will of the wisp. It's not something which is going to happen. Jews and Arabs have been fighting in Palestine for over a hundred years. If anything, hatreds have grown worse with what Arabs did to Jews, terrorism, wars, etc., and what Jews did to Arabs in

counterterrorism, and what's going on today in Gaza, Israel's response to the slaughter of the October 7th. All of this, I think, has hardened hearts and made the possibility of a binational state with Jews and Arabs living comfortably together in one state under one roof. It's not going to happen. Not in my lifetime for sure, and I don't think in anybody's lifetime. Benny, I have followed the arc of Benny Morris's thinking, at least as it's been expressed in your public commentary.

And to me, the big dividing line for your thinking, and I don't want to speak for your thinking, you can speak for your thinking, but just based on what I've read and heard, the dividing line was 2000, which was, we talked earlier in this conversation about the Camp David meeting between Arafat, Ehud Barak, and President Clinton, where Ehud Barak went farther than any Israeli government had ever been willing to go, which was creating a Palestinian state that comprised of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and parts or all of East Jerusalem. I don't even know if the Jewish public would have ever gotten behind that on a majority basis, but Barak was

ready to try. In fact, it was so controversial, the East Jerusalem, making East Jerusalem the capital of a Palestinian state that Barak even knew how divisive it would be within Israel. He was willing to put it up for a referendum, or at least that's what was talked about at the time. Obviously, Arafat rejected that offer, and then came the second Intifada, 140 terrorist attacks, well over a thousand Israelis slaughtered, every major city in an Israeli-Palestinian peace. And it did happen around the year 2000, but for two reasons. One was, as you say, Arafat's rejection of the two-state compromise proposed initially by Barak and then expanded slightly by Clinton in his parameters of December 2000. As you say, basically the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem were

offered to the Palestinians for statehood and Arafat said no. That was one reason why I lost hope that a two-state compromise would be achieved between Israel and the Palestinians. But the second reason is in a sense deeper and that is that during the 90s, I wrote a book called Righteous Victims, which was a history of the conflict from its origins in the 1880s until 1999, which was when the book was published. And in my research for that book, which is quite long, I believe still quite good, I discovered the depth of Palestinian enmity and hatred of the Zionist project. In the readings for that book about the early years of Zionism, about the 1930s, about the 40s, about the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, it came to me that the Palestinians were not ready for a two-state solution and for a territorial

compromise. So the two things merged. By the time I'd written the book, by 1999, completed the book, and the Palestinian rejection of the Barack Clinton compromise offered in Camp David, and the outbreak of the second intifada that year, I lost hope that there was going to be an Israeli-Palestinian compromise. And let me add what happened on October 7th and what happened since October 7th with Israel's invasion of the Gaza Strip. All of this has only deepened my pessimism about the possibility of an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. Were you shocked by October 7th? When I say shocked, I don't mean, I think we're all shocked by the nature of the massacre, the depravity, the barbarism, but it was also a strategic decision by Hamas.

There was no way Hamas could launch this without thinking they weren't going to lure Israel into a major war that is doing to Gaza what we're watching right now. Were you shocked by Hamas's decision? I suppose yes and no. I was shocked, as you say, by the barbarism of the attack itself, in which 850 civilians, Jewish civilians, women, children, babies, old people were massacred, beheaded, raped. I was surprised by the barbarity of their behavior and the hostage-taking, families and so on. But I wasn't really surprised because I have, unlike many Israelis, acknowledged and understand what has befallen

the Palestinians over the past hundred years or the hundred years before what happened, which includes refugium of most of the Palestinians, continuous Israeli counterinsurgency strikes and mass killing of Palestinians in these various rounds of battle. The siege, if you like, of the Arabs in the Gaza Strip who've lived in poverty and whatever. It's, of battle, the siege, if you like, of the Arabs in the Gaza Strip who've lived in poverty and whatever. It's, of course, partly due or largely due to what happened in the past 20 years between Israel and the Gaza Strip to an Arab rocketing of Israel's settlements outside the Gaza Strip, those settlements which they actually invaded and raped on October 7th. So I'm aware of the depth of Arab hatred of Jews and of Israel and of the Zionist project.

So in that sense, it's not a surprise. What surprised me, of course, is the incompetence of the Israeli intelligence service in not picking up the preparations for the attack, and the Israeli army in its initial response on October 7th and 8th to the Hamas attack. These things really surprised me. Do you understand the conflict based on everything you've learned from your experience following 2000, and then obviously October 7th, 2023? Do you understand the conflict as a territorial conflict, as a conflict about political differences, about self-determination of peoples? Or do you understand the conflict

to be a civilizational conflict? I've come to understand, and I think this is largely based on my research for the book Righteous Victims, I've come to understand that the conflict is a mix of a political territorial conflict between two national movements, unusually in territorial political conflicts, wanting the whole of a territory. Most political territorial conflicts between states or national movements are about hinterlands, about Alsace-Lorraine between Germany and France, not about the whole of France or the whole of Germany. But this conflict, in this sense, is about the whole of the territory of Palestine-Is, or the land of Israel.

But it's also a religious, as you put it, civilizational conflict. There has been a very large religious element to Arab antagonism, which means Muslim Arab antagonism to the Jewish state, the infidel taking over what they regard as holy Muslim land, and the desire to uproot this infidel, eject this infidel from the land. The Jews have been considered enemies of Islam from the time of Muhammad, from the time of the Quran, which has deep anti-Semitic elements in it. And so this hostility has translated into antagonism towards Zionism and the state of Israel. So I'm saying that's one element of the conflict, in addition to the political territorial conflict between two national movements.

It's also civilizational in the sense that Israel is an outpost, as Herzl incidentally conceived of it, the Jewish state he imagined. It is an outpost of Western civilization, of the West, in the Middle East. And unfortunately, this is true. And it's regarded as such by many Arabs, perhaps most Arabs, which is what they call it a colonial settler enterprise. It may not be a colonial settler enterprise, but it definitely is in some way a representative and the front line of the West in a world embracing civilizational conflict

between the West and its democratic, liberal values and a Muslim Arab world which has totally different values. There has been a civilizational conflict between the Islamic world and the West or Europe, certainly since the time of the Crusades and the time of the Muslim invasions of Europe under the Ottoman Turkish Empire, who were at the gates of Budapest and Vienna in the 17th, 16th, 17th, 18th centuries. And there is a civilizational conflict between the West and Islam, which has been going on for decades with bin Laden as one expression of it, world embracing Islamic terrorism against the West everywhere, London, Madrid, Paris, and so on. And Israel, unfortunately, is a front line in this conflict. Benny, you have said, and I just want you to

explain it here, you have said that Israel must respond to October 7th aggressively if it is to survive in the Wild West, that is the Middle East. Can you just briefly explain what you mean? Yeah, I think that what happened on October 7th was the rape of Israel by barbarians, savage barbarians. And Israel must respond in the sense of desiring revenge, revenge on a personal and national level against what had happened, against those who had perpetrated what had happened. But also, Israel had to respond this way because without doing this, Israel would be seen as weak and a loser in the Middle East. And this would just invite further assault by its Islamic enemies, Iran, Hezbollah, Houthis,

and their proxies. They're doing it now, but they would do it much more readily were they to see Israel as a weak, unresisting partner. So it had to do what it's doing today in the Gaza Strip. Unfortunately, thousands, many thousands of Arabs are dying. I don't know if they're innocent exactly, but they're dying in this conflict, which is something probably the Hamas envisioned would happen and would be weaponized against Israel in the international arenas where the subject is brought up. But Israel had no choice but to do what it's doing. Benny, we will leave it there. Thank you for your patience.

Thank you for your time. Thank you for your energy. And thank you for your teaching. I've benefited from it. I think the same will be said of our listeners. And thank you for your teaching. I've benefited from it. I think the same will be said of our listeners. And I look forward to keeping in touch. Okay. Thank you. That's our show for today. To keep up with Benny Morris, I highly recommend reading his books, which we will link to in the show notes, as well as some of his recent essays.

Call Me Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin Huergo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.