Dan Snow's History Hit - Israel and Palestine: An Israeli Perspective with Benny Morris

Episode Date: May 29, 2021

The conflict between Israeli's and Palestinians is one that inflames strong emotions and opinions on all sides, but can a solution be found or is it an intractable one? In this episode of our series examing the Israel-Palestine struggle from different points of view, Dan is joined by historian Benny Morris for an Israeli perspective on the conflict that has wracked the region since the foundation of the Jewish state, the nature of Zionism, the demographics of the conflict and the many challenges to finding a solution to the conflict.You can also listen to previous episodes in our series looking at the Israel-Palestine conflict A Palestinian View with Yara Hawari and A Jewish Perspective with Daniel Finkelstein

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We've got another episode now on Israel-Palestine. We've heard from a Palestinian historian, we've heard from a member of the international Jewish diaspora, and we're now hearing from a prominent Israeli historian. He's Benny Morris, a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and he joins me to talk through an Israeli perspective on the conflict that has wracked Israel and Palestine ever since the foundation of the Jewish state and indeed before. And you and I set out to do some podcasts about Israel-Palestine that would inflame emotions, opinion on all sides, and I haven't been disappointed. So thank you for all of your

feedback, both constructive and, well, less constructive. But I hope that across the series of podcasts, you've been able to hear different perspectives and engage with different points of view. If you want to listen to those back episodes, they're of course available in the feed, or you can go back into the archive, for example, listen to Simon Sebag Montefiore talking about the history of Jerusalem on History Hit, our digital history channel. For a small subscription, you get five years worth of podcasts without the ads, folks, without the ads. You also, of course, get the Netflix for history, hundreds of hours of history documentaries, including our new two-part series on Bismarck, which was sunk 80 years ago this week. You get all of that for a very small subscription, particularly this week if you sign up. By the end of the weekend, using the code BISMARK,

you get 50% off your first three months. It's coming to an end, folks, within hours. So please head over to historyhit.tv, use the code BISMARK, sign up, join the revolution. As ever, a huge thank you for doing so. In the meantime, everyone, here is a conversation that I found hugely stimulating with Professor Benny Morris. Enjoy. Benny, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. I know it's almost heretical to ask this, but how important is history here? I mean, reticle to ask this, but how important is history here? I mean, does Israel derive its legitimacy from biblical roots or from the trauma of the Holocaust or the 1947 UN resolution, or does it just derive legitimacy because there's millions of Israelis who now live there who want

to live there and be Israeli? I think everything you've said as a question is correct as an answer as well. History plays a great part in the creation of Israel and its present constitution and decision making, etc. I would say that the fact that there are something like seven million Jews living in Israel today is sufficient ground for its continued existence, because wiping out those seven million Jews would be unfair and not very nice. But Israel also does, in the mind of most Israeli Jews, derive its legitimacy from a set of biblical and historical facts, one of which, of course, is that the Jews lived and controlled the land more or less for a thousand years between 1000 BC and 135 AD. It also derives legitimacy from the fact that the international community,

starting with the Balfour Declaration issued by Britain in 1917, but culminating especially in the United Nations General Assembly Resolution from November 1947, endorsed the creation of a Jewish state in the area of Palestine. And that's what arose partly in consequence of that UN resolution in 1948. I did a podcast with a Palestinian academic the other day, and lots of Jewish people go in touch with me to say the Israeli state is not a colonial settler entity because of that historic claim. Well, I take this view as well, though there are historians who dispute this. I would say this, that there were some colonial features in Zionism. The fact that the Europeans were settling in a third world country

and eventually carved part of that out for their own state. But in the main, it's an incorrect comparison. Colonial states, Britain's colonial empire settlements in the area of the Americas and in India and elsewhere, were an extension of a mother country projecting its power and its sons to another area to take over that area for political or economic gain. Here we have no imperial power basically sending Jews anywhere. It's the Jews themselves, in what the Jews regard as a national liberation movement, decided to end their exile, some of the Jews, and began streaming towards Palestine to establish a state of their own in the area they regarded as their ancient homeland, which it was. Some of them also viewed the Arabs who lived there as basically usurpers and conquerors, because the Arabs had never been here before the 7th century. They conquered the country in the 7th century.

They came out of Arabia with swords flashing and took over the area from Byzantines. It wasn't under the control of Jews at the time, but they conquered a land which wasn't theirs. After the 7th century, they lived there, but basically as conquerors for 1400 years. And then along came the Jews. The Arabs, of course, blamed them for conquering the country, but the Arabs conquered it before them, as incidentally, the Hebrews and Jews did 2,000 years before that. That's how history works. But does history also work that it was understandable that the Arabs were not hugely impressed by the international community partitioning or giving away some or all of the territory between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean? Yeah, look, the Arab peoples in general, the Arabs who lived in Palestine in particular,

who later came to call themselves Palestinians, did not recognize the Jews' claim to the country. They didn't care at all about Jewish history or the past. In fact, Arafat, their leader, Yasser Arafat, was their leader for decades, starting in the late 1960s, basically said the Jews were never here. It's a legend. There was no temple on the Temple Mount. It probably existed somewhere near Nablus, but Jerusalem never had Jews in it, basically.

That's what he was saying, as he was, by extension, saying Palestine was never a Jewish homeland, which the Jews, of course, don't call Palestine. They call the land of Israel. All of this is nonsense and counter-historical, but they refused to accept the Jewish past in the land because that, they understood, was a basis for a claim of legitimacy by the Jews. And this, incidentally, is taught to Arab schoolchildren in Palestine, but also outside Palestine in Arab countries. The Jews were never there. It's a legend that they were there, that this was their land. And they are basically a colonialist, imperialist aggressors.

Speaking of aggressors, simultaneously with the establishment of the State of Israel, you get the 1948 to 49 war. The scars from that war are still unhealed. And the arguments rage about whether it is right to use the term ethnic cleansing by the Israeli forces in removing Arabs from territory that was deemed essential to a functioning state of Israel. Tell me a bit more about that. Well, following the UN resolution of the 29th of November 1947, endorsing the division, the partition of Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, the Arabs of Palestine and the Arab states around said no, rejected that partition resolution. The Jews accepted it. The Arabs of Palestine launched a guerrilla war against their Jewish neighbors,

the Arab community in Palestine against the Jewish community in Palestine. And when they lost the war, that guerrilla war, the Palestinian Arabs, the Arab states invaded on the 15th of May 1948, and then it turned into a conflict between the Arab states and the newborn state of Israel, which Israel eventually won that war and established itself as a state. In the course of that war, something like 700,000 Palestinians were uprooted from their homes, most of them, incidentally, ending up in other parts of Palestine, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. A minority, about a third, ended up in Arab states outside, in Transjordan, Syria, and Lebanon. There is an argument ever since what caused them to flee.

Was it a systematic expulsion or was it a call, as the Israelis claimed, a call by Arab leaders for them to leave, which prompted them to leave? The truth lies probably somewhere in between, though I would say more leaning towards the Arab explanation. there was a war and the Jews, in the course of that war, drove out those 700,000 from their homes and then refused to allow them to return to those homes and lands which they had abandoned. Some of them were actually expelled by Israeli troops. Some of them were ordered out by their own people, their own leaders, for tactical and strategic reasons. Most of them just fled in the face of battle, as people do. But as I say, the Israeli state refused to allow them back, saying that they

would become a disloyal minority in the Jewish state. They had actually begun a war against the Jews. Why should one expect them to become loyal citizens of a Jewish state living under Jewish leadership? So the Jews said, no, we're not going to allow them back. And this has been Israeli government policy consistently, every Israeli government since 1948, not to allow the refugees to return to their lands. Today, incidentally, of those 700,000 who became refugees, a small number remain, are still alive, but there are five to six million Palestinian refugees

on the UN road books because they had children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And uniquely, Palestinians, descendants of original refugees, are recognised by the UN as refugees. And Israel, of course, doesn't want to be swamped by Palestinian returnees because it would turn instantly from a Jewish majority state into an Arab majority state, which would mean no Jewish state. Speaking of the issue of demographics, following the 1948-49 war, the next essential turning point was the 1967 war, which saw this stunning expansion of Israel into Golan, the West Bank, Sinai. Is that important today? Because that inevitably brought

huge numbers of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. Those are the two turning points in Middle East history, in effect, the 1948 war, and then the follow up war of 1967, in which, as you say, Israel conquered the West Bank, East Jerusalem critically, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula. The Sinai Peninsula was returned to Egypt in exchange for a peace agreement, also a breakthrough event. In 1979, Israel and Egypt signed peace in exchange for all of Sinai returning to Egypt. The Israeli government in June 1967 refused to decide about the future of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. They were willing to give back the Golan to the Syrians in exchange for peace and demilitarization of the territory. They were willing to give back the Sinai Peninsula

in exchange for demilitarization and peace with Egypt, but they refused to decide about the future of the Palestinian inhabited territories, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Some were for annexing the territories, some were for keeping them under prolonged indefinite Israeli control, some were also for giving them back to the Arabs in exchange for peace, but that didn't happen because of this division in the cabinet. And this essentially remained a division among Israel's citizens for the following 50 years. In other words, Israelis cannot decide to give back the territories. Israel has made it much more complicated by allowing first the Israeli labor governments, then Israeli right-wing governments, by allowing massive Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Somehow the Gaza

Strip was returned to Arab control, if not full sovereignty, and it ended up in Hamas hands. But the West Bank became full of Jews. There are about half a million Jewish settlers today in the West Bank, alongside something like two to three million Arabs. And these half a million make it almost impossible for Israel to disengage, to leave the West Bank, because many of these 500,000 wouldn't agree to it. There would be a civil war among the Jews if the decision was taken to force them to leave. In addition to that, Israelis, and this has always been true, calculate that leaving the West Bank is not going to actually solve the problem, because the Palestinians want all of Palestine. The leaders of the Palestinian

people, Hamas, and incidentally the Fatah, the so-called secular wing of the Palestine national movement, both of them want all of Palestine. They don't really hide this from anybody. Sometimes they talk about making a hudna, some sort of temporary peace, but essentially they believe all of Palestine belongs to the Arabs and the Jews are there not by right, but as robbers. And they should eventually be pushed out of the West Bank and all of today's Israel. And so given that understanding of what the Palestinians want, Israelis say, why should we go to civil war about leaving the West Bank? When in any case, they want all of us to leave Palestine, Tel Aviv, as well as Jerusalem, Hebron, etc.

It isn't Dan Snow's history. We're talking Israel-Palestine again, this time with Professor Benny Morris. More after this. Have you heard of the teenage werewolf prosecuted in 1603? Did you know that the 17th century British government relied heavily on female spies? And do you want to know about chin-chucking and thigh sex? Of course you do. I'm Susanna Lipscomb, and my new podcast, Not Just the Tudors, is a deep dive into what I like to think of as the long 16th century. We'll be talking about everything from Aztecs to witches, Velazquez to Shakespeare, Mughal India to the Mayflower.

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and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. I was a teenager in the 1990s, but it felt like Clinton deal that was on the table, which was land for peace, chunks of the Negev in return for some of the Israeli settlements on the West Bank, you know, a kind of horse trading. Is that as close as we've come to peace, do you think, in the last, well, 80 years? I think you're right. I think the Clinton parameters, initially expressed in July 2000 during the summit at Camp David, but then reiterated and even expanded on in favor of the Palestinians in December 2000, the Clinton parameters offering the Palestinians a state comprehending all of the Gaza Strip and approximately 95% of the West Bank and a large chunk of East Jerusalem, I think that's the farthest Israelis would be willing to go.

Moderate, I'm talking about Israelis, not right-wing Israelis who today control Israel, but the moderate Israelis, this is as far as they would be willing to go for peace with the Palestinians. In other words, to give them back this amount of territory. The Palestinians, on the other hand, they never actually responded to them except by saying no, would say this is insufficient. They also want what they call the right of return. In other words, they want Israel and the international community to accept the principle of massive Palestinian refugee return and then an actual Palestinian refugee return to the territory of the State of Israel as established in 1949, which would mean

flooding Israel with Arabs, meaning that there would be less Jews in the country than Arabs, meaning an Arab state which would eventually comprise the whole of Palestine. So long as the Palestinians hold out for the right of return as an essential ingredient for any peace treaty, there will be no peace treaty because 95% of Israeli Jews will not agree to a right of return. There's lots of left-wing Israelis who will agree to all sorts of concessions, myself included, in Jerusalem, on the Temple Mount. All sorts of things can be conceded, but not turning the Jewish state into an Arab state demographically. And that's what would happen if the right of return was allowed. It's often lazily described as a kind of intractable situation. Is that what it

is? Yeah, I'm afraid that's one of the good possible descriptions of how things stand now and look to stand in the future. I don't see a way out. I don't see Israel conceding so much in territory and demography as to make itself insecure in exchange for a peace which they don't believe would last as a result. I don't see Israelis making such concessions that the Palestinians could agree to them, as I say, the right of return, etc. And I don't see the Palestinians agreeing to Israel retaining something like 80% of the land mass of Palestine. When I use the word land mass, it's a bit ironic, because we're talking about one of the smallest pieces of territory on earth. If Israel was Russia, I can see us dividing the two and establishing two states without too much conflict. But in Palestine,

just to divide Palestine in half, when the width of the country is about 50 to 60 miles between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, I don't see how that can happen. And as I say, I don't see the Palestinians accepting the mini state, which is an offer, was an offer under Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Barak in the year 2000, and also offered by Israeli Prime Minister Olmert in the year 2007, and was again rejected. This idea of basically partition, with the Jews getting 80% and the Arabs getting 20%. I don't see any Palestinian leader actually accepting that. So what I'm saying is there's no basis for a compromise as things look now, and I don't think they're going to get

any better in the decades to come, because more and more Israelis will be settling in the West Bank. More and more Arabs will be antagonistic towards Israel for various things Israel does. Hatred is very deep among the Arabs. And I think it's even growing among the Jews as well. So this has been happening in the last few decades. You mentioned Ehud Barak, you mentioned Olmert. These were Israeli leaders that were prepared to countenance these deals. How has Israeli politics changed and why has it changed since then? Unfortunately, in my view, Israel has drifted rightwards over the past 50 years. I think a major fact in this drift rightwards

was the conquest and occupation and settlement of the territories, especially the West Bank, which the right-wingers call Judea and Samaria. That's one reason for the drift or shift rightwards among the Israeli population. More importantly, I think it's Arab antagonism, rejectionism, hostility, which told the Israelis, well, there's no point in trying to negotiate a deal because they don't really want to compromise. They want all of Palestine. are such that the right-wingers have more children than left-wingers and centrists. The right-wingers are religious, some of them are fanatical, many of them as faraday, who are the base of Netanyahu's political career and political hold on the country. All of these have more children, so it has been until now.

In fact, among the religious and ultra-orthodox, many more children, like six, seven per family, as opposed to secular Israelis who have two to three per family. What that means is every few years there are more and more potential voters for the right than there are for the left. And this has been a steady phenomenon of the past decades, essentially since the Likud, the right wing, took power in 1977. What does the future hold? Well, the immediate future, in my view, unfortunately holds more of the same. In other words, we will have more settlement in the territories, more rejectionism by Arabs, more violence and hostilities among Arabs. And unfortunately, in the last round of hostilities, Israeli Arabs also, at least the younger generation,

or part of the younger generation among them, joined in support of the Hamas in Gaza and started attacking Jews in Israeli streets, especially in the mixed cities like Lida, Haifa, Jerusalem. We'll see more of this violence and no end to it because the Israeli state is much more powerful than its Palestinian neighbors and subjects, if you want to call them that. So the Palestinians can't overthrow the Israelis. They can't throw them out. They can't defeat the Jewish state. The Arab states have grown more and more reluctant to engage in battle with the Jews. They lost a number of wars. It doesn't serve any of their purposes, that is the individual national purposes of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, to keep on fighting against the Jews. So they're basically leaving the battleground to the Palestinians. And that leaves a sort of a

continuous civil war situation, but mini civil war with the Jews that much more powerful than the Palestinians. So that's probably what's going to continue happening in the next decade or two. Israel will demographically turn into a more or less Jewish Arab state. In other words, a one state with an equal number of Jews and Arabs. But in large parts of that territory, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Arabs will not be enfranchised. So there'll be an emergent apartheid state. Israel has always rejected this comparison. But in point of fact, there will be between the river and the sea, something like seven, eight million Jews and seven, eight million Palestinian Arabs. And most of these Arabs will not have the vote and will not be equal citizens. That's the situation.

If there's a so-called one state solution, which is that state, how can the Israeli state deny Palestinians the vote and citizenship? How can proponents of a single-state solution not follow through on creating an actual state? Extreme Israeli left-wingers would say that, yes, we should have a one-state solution. There is no possibility today of a two-state solution. And the one state should consist of all the Arabs living under Israeli rule and all the Jews in the country, and they should all have the right to vote. But most Israelis would not agree to giving the Palestinians this major equal right of citizenship and the vote because it would mean being swamped by Arab voters.

The Arabs have higher birth rates. Ultimately, in 50 years time, there will be far more Arabs between the river and the sea than there are Jews. So most Israelis will not agree to that. But the alternative they also refuse to face, and that is that what they are creating is an apartheid state, a state with two peoples, one of which has rights, another of which has very few. Interesting stuff. Thank you so much for coming on and explaining this to everybody. My pleasure. What's your latest book? My newest book,

which I hope will come out next year, maybe even by the end of this year, is a biography of a man called Sidney Riley, who was a very famous spy in the first half of the 20th century. He was actually called Rosenblum and adopted this silly Irish name as cover. But anyhow, it's a biography of the spy Zygmunt Rosenblum, who was executed by the Bolsheviks in 1925. Worked for MI6 for part of the time. Well, you have to come back on the podcast when the book's out. Thank you very much indeed. My pleasure. I feel we have the history upon our shoulders.

All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Hi, but just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys.

In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I'd really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things,

and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.