The publisher's advertising on the back of my soft cover edition of Benny Morris's Righteous Victims says the book demolishes "myths cherished by both sides." The antagonists are identified in Morris's subtitle--"A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001"--and, in the opinion of this reader, it is the myths of the Zionists that take the harder hit in the first hundred or so pages.
"A land without people for a people without a land"--we learn on page 42 of Morris's sober narrative that this, the most famous of the Zionist slogans, made its first appearance in 1854, six years before the birth of Herzl, in a memoir of the British politician Lord Shaftesbury. Morris juxtaposes this factoid with the assessment of two Jewish writers, Ahad Ha' Am and Moshe Smilansky. The former wrote, after visiting Palestine in 1891, "We abroad are used to believing that Eretz Yisrael is now almost totally desolate, a desert that is not sowed. . . . But in truth this is not the case. Throughout the country it is difficult to find fields that are not sowed." Years later, misperception takes on the aspect of a deliberate lie, and the latter writes: "From the inception of the Zionist idea, Zionist propaganda described the country for which we were headed as a desolate and largely neglected land, waiting eagerly for its redeemers."
Herzl, more than anyone responsible for making Zionism an international political movement, wrote in his diary, in 1895, "We must expropriate gently. . . . We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country. . . . Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly" (pp. 21-22). The current euphemism for this strategy is "removal." Moshe Shertok, the first foreign minister of Israel, was impatient with countrymen reluctant to face essential facts:
We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from a people inhabiting it, that governs it by virtue of its language and savage culture. . . . Recently, there has been appearing in our newspapers the clarification about "the mutual misunderstanding" between us and the Arabs, about "common intersts" [and] about "the possibility of unity and peace between two fraternal peoples." . . . [But] we must not allow ourselves to be deluded by such illusive hopes . . . for if we cease to look upon our land, the Land of Israel, as ours alone and we allow a partner into our estate--all content and meaning will be lost to our enterprise (p. 91).
The accruing evidence is assembled and set before the reader in a prose notable for its cold monochrome. Only once so far have I detected a trace of emotion. Having just quoted Lord Balfour on the "present needs" of Zionism being "of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land," Morris on page 76 comments, "This was to be the Palestinian Arabs' tragedy: They were seen as insignificant 'natives' and usurpers, whereas the incoming Jews were viewed both as Europeans and as the rightful owners of Palestine."
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