1.
Goodman:
We continue today on the sixtieth anniversary of the creation of the
state of Israel. Today, a debate around the legacy of 1948 and a possibility of
a just future for both Israelis and Palestinians. Benny Morris is seen as one
of the most important Israeli historians of the 1948 war. From his first book
twenty years ago, Morris has documented Israeli atrocities and the expulsion of
Palestinians, considered part of a group of so-called “revisionist” historians
who challenged conventional Israeli thinking about 1948. However, unlike his
critics to the left, Morris did not consider the expulsions to be part of a
systematic Israeli policy of transfer. His latest book, published in March by
Yale University Press, is called 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli
War. He joins us here in our firehouse studio. We’re also joined in
California by Saree
Makdisi. He’s in Los Angeles, professor of English and comparative
literature at UCLA. His latest book is Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, just out this month.
His most recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times is titled “Forget the Two-State Solution: Israelis and Palestinians
Must Share the Land Equally.” We are also joined on the telephone
from Brussels by Norman Finkelstein, author of four books, including The
Holocaust Industry, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict
and Beyond Chutzpah. He was in Brussels addressing a group of
parliamentarians around the issue of Palestinians. And our guest remains on
the line, Tikva
Honig-Parnass, who fought in the 1948 war, now is a progressive writer
in Israel and critical of what happened in 1948. Benny Morris, welcome to Democracy
Now! Explain, from your perspective, from your research, what happened in
1948.
2.
Morris:
Well, based on a large amount of documentation, which I’ve gone
through over the years, several decades, in fact, the international community
in the wake of the Holocaust voted to establish two states in Palestine, to
divide the land into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jewish side, the
Zionist movement, the Jewish Agency Executive accepted the international
decision and went about establishing their state. The Palestinian Arabs, backed
by the Arab world, rejected the decision and went to war against the Jewish
community in Palestine and subsequently against the state which was established
half a year later. As a result of this war, some 700,000 Palestinians were
displaced from their homes, not really turned into refugees, most of them,
because they were moved or moved from one place in Palestine to another. About
one-third moved out of Palestine and were genuine refugees.
3.
Goodman:
And on what do you base all of this?
4.
Morris:
Oh, on masses and masses of Israeli, American, United Nations,
British documentation. The Arab documentation isn’t
available. The Arab states, all of them being dictatorships, do not open their
archives. But all Western archives, especially the Israeli archives,
give a very good picture of what actually happened.
5.
Goodman:
Can you talk about the significance of your finding within the state
of Israel — you’re basing much of this on Israeli documents — how you broke
with convention in Israel?
6.
Morris:
Yeah. The traditional Zionist narrative
about what had happened in ‘48, especially relating to the refugee problem, was
that the refugees had been ordered, instructed, advised by their leaders, by
Palestinian leaders or Arab leaders outside the country, to flee, and that is
why 700,000 left their homes. The documentation gives us a much, much
broader and a more nuanced picture of what happened. Most
of the people who were displaced fled their homes. A small number were
expelled. Most fled their homes as a result of the war, the fear of battle, the
fear of being attacked, the fear of dying. A small number also left because of
the economic conditions. And a small number were advised or instructed by their
leadership, as in Haifa in April 1948, to leave the country. But it’s a
mixed bag, with the war itself, the hostilities themselves and fear of being
hurt being the main precipitant to flight.
7.
Goodman:
You have written that the humiliation of the Arabs going back to
1949 is what underlies so much of the hostility today. Lay out what you see as
the humiliations.
8.
Morris:
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. [Nothing
new.] 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.
9.
Goodman:
How was it that for so many years the Zionist narrative was that
there were either no Palestinians — it was an empty land — or the Palestinians
left of their own accord?
10.
Morris:
These are different subjects, but I think the Zionists preferred not
to see the 500,000-or-so natives who were there, as they regarded them at the
end of the nineteenth century, because if they had sort of looked at them and
they’d have seen the problem of what do you do with 500,000 people who don’t
want you to arrive and settle in your — in what they regarded as their land,
this would have knocked out the confidence from the Zionists and undermined
their enterprise. It was better to see that the — to
believe that the land was in some way empty. But if you look at the actual
Zionist documentation, they did see the Arabs, and they knew there was a
problem almost from the start.
11.
Goodman:
Saree
Makdisi, I wanted to bring you in, a professor at UCLA joining us
from Los Angeles. Your response to Benny Morris?
12.
Makdisi:
Well, I mean, I think the most interesting thing is the way in which
Dr. Morris talks about there being a problem way before 1948, and he’s entirely
right. When the Zionist movement decided to create a Jewish homeland or a
Jewish state in a land that had a largely non-Jewish population at the
beginning of the twentieth century, there was in fact a problem. He’s totally
right. So the question is, as he puts it in his own
work, what do you do with this big population that doesn’t want there to be a
state that displaces them or ignores them or sidesteps them or overshadows them
or whatever? And as his own research shows and as the research of other
historians shows, from the — at least the mid-1930s on, there’s talk of
removing the population. And that goes on <to this very day> in different forms.
I mean, for example, there are people in Israel itself in Israeli
politics to this very day, both within Israel proper and in the Occupied
Territories, who talk about completing the process of transfer, of removal, of
1948. And as he also says, the other thing is that, irrespective of what
language one uses
— and notice how candy one can be with the use of language: are they “refugees”?
Are they “displaced persons”? It doesn’t really matter what language one uses;
the people who were removed from their homes, that’s what matters. And as
he says himself in what he just said now, what matters isn’t so much that they
were removed from their homes, it’s that they were never allowed back to their
homes. So whatever the circumstances of the removals and expulsions of 1948,
the more important fact is, that was seen as something — as an issue forty
years previously, if not longer before that, and as an issue to be blocked when
they decided — when they wanted to go back to their homes after the fighting
stopped. And they’ve never been allowed to go back, as
you know, despite their moral and legal right to do so. That’s what this
is all about.
13.
Goodman:
Norman Finkelstein, let me bring you into this conversation, author
of a number of books on Israel-Palestine — his latest is Beyond Chutzpah
— speaking to us from Brussels.
14.
Finkelstein:
Well, as it happens, on the plane ride over here, I read Benny
Morris’s new book, and what was most surprising to me is that although the
documentation remains pretty much the same as the past several books — he’s
added some new material, but it’s pretty much the same as several previous
books he’s written on the topic — the conclusions and the political framework
has been radically changed. Now, it’s no problem
for people to change their opinions on the basis of new evidence, but what happens in Morris’s new book, 1948, is he
radically changes his opinions by subtracting evidence. So let’s take
just briefly, because we’re a radio program, some examples. In his previous book, he says transfer was inevitable and
inbuilt into Zionism, and this aim automatically produced resistance among the
Arabs. And he goes on to say in another book that it was the fear of
territorial dispossession and displacement that was to be the chief motor of
Arab antagonism to Zionism. So we have two basis facts: number one,
Zionism, inbuilt into it was the expulsion of the indigenous population; and number
two, the Palestinians or Arabs opposed Zionism, because they were fearful of
losing their homes and losing their country. But now,
when you open up his new book, cause and effect have been reversed. It becomes
now the Palestinians who are the “expulsionists,” to use his words, and it’s
the Zionist movement which is reacting to the Palestinians, which causes them
to be occasionally expulsionists. It’s as if to say the Native American
population of the United States was expulsionist, because it refused to
acquiesce in the European settlers taking over their homes.
15.
Goodman:
Professor Morris?
16.
Morris:
I think Finkelstein has a blinkered view, and he sees only certain
documents. What I try to do is look at actually the breadth of the
documentation and derive conclusions about the past. The Palestinian National
Movement, led by Haj Amin al-Husseini in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, wanted to
expel the Jews. The Jews felt they had a moral right to
live in the country and to reestablish their sovereignty in the country, at
least in part of it. And the Palestinians thought not. They didn’t care
about Jewish history. They cared nothing about Jewish tragedy or persecution
over the 2,000 years and wanted to expel them from the country. They didn’t get the chance, because they lost the war. So
the war — something like the reverse had happened. But the fact is — and this
is something most Arab commentators ignore or don’t tell us — the Palestinians
rejected the UN partition resolution; the Jews accepted it. They accepted the
possibility of dividing the country into two states, with one Arab state and a
Jewish state. And the Jewish state, which was to come into being in 1947-48,
according to the United Nations, was to have had an Arab population of 400,000
to 500,000 and a Jewish population of slightly more than 500,000. That was what
was supposed to come into being, and that is what the Zionist movement
accepted. When the Arabs rejected it and went to war against the Jewish
community, it left the Jewish community no choice. It could
either lose the war and be pushed into the sea, or ultimately push out the Arab
minority in their midst who wanted to kill them. It’s an act of self-defense,
and that’s what happened. My facts in any —- in all my books have not changed
at all. They’re all there. But one has to look at also the context in which
things happened, and this was the context: an
expulsionist mentality, an expulsionist onslaught on the Jewish community in
Palestine by Palestine’s Arabs and by the invading Arab armies, and a Jewish
self-defense, which involved also pushing out large numbers of Palestinians.
17.
Goodman:
Saree Makdisi, this issue of the acceptance of the partition, can
you take it from there?
18.
Makdisi:
Yeah. I mean, there are several things about it. For one thing,
as Dr. Morris points out, it’s true that the mainstream Zionist movement
accepted the partition plan. But on the other hand, as his own historical
record shows, Ben-Gurion and others were very frank that the acceptance was
meant to be tactical rather than sort of, you know, whole-hearted. So the idea
was to accept and then go from there, not just to accept and then really settle
down into the two states as envisaged by the UN partition plan. Meanwhile,
the Arab rejection of the plan had to do with the fact that basically they
were—- the Palestinians and Arabs were being told that they should become a
minority in their own land. That’s what this is fundamentally all about, as
well. So, the question is, which viewers have to contemplate is, what would
they do if somebody came and told them that they should either become a
minority in their own homeland — that is, second-class citizens — or be removed from their
homeland? And I think almost anybody would say this is an unreasonable
proposition. So, again, it comes back to the question of, what would you do in
this situation? But more than that, I think what’s important to ask Dr. Morris,
as long as we have him with us, is: when you talk about
— Dr. Morris, when you talk about the events of 1948 in that famous interview
with Haaretz in 2004, you say quite clearly that ethnic cleansing is justified and that
the main problem, as far as you see it — then, anyway — was that Ben-Gurion
didn’t go far enough in completing the ethnic cleansing, that he should have
removed as much as possible of the non-Jewish population all the way to the
Jordan River. So my question to you is, is
this still a position that you hold? Do you still think it was justified? Do
you still think that Ben-Gurion should have finished the job? And do you think
still that in some ways that is the origin of the conflict as it persists to
this day?
19.
Morris:
My point in the Haaretz interview, and I repeat it since
then, is that a Jewish state could not have arisen with a vast Arab minority —
40, almost 50, percent of its population being Arabs — which opposed the
existence of that Jewish state and opposed their being a large minority in that
state. And they went and they showed that by going to
war against the Jewish state, which left the Jews in an intolerable position:
either they give in and don’t get a state, or they fight back and in fighting
back end up pushing out Arabs. My point also was that had — and this is
really the point, and I think you would agree with it and understand it perhaps
on the logical plane, if not on the emotional plane — had the war ended, the
1948 war ended with all the Palestinian population being moved — moving, it
doesn’t matter how — across the Jordan River and there establishing their state
in Jordan, across the river, a Palestinian Arab state, and had the Jews had
their state without or without a large Arab minority on the west bank of the
Jordan River, between the river and the Mediterranean Sea, the history of the
Middle East, the history of Israel-Palestine, the history of the Palestinians
and of the Jews, would have been much better over the past sixty years. Since ‘48, all we’ve
had is terrorism, clashes, wars, and so on, all of which have caused vast
suffering to both peoples. And had this separation of populations
occurred in 1948, I’m sure the Middle East would have enjoyed, and both peoples
would have enjoyed, a much better future since 1948.
20.
Goodman:
We’re going to go to break. Then we’re going to come back to this
discussion. Our guests are Benny Morris, a professor, historian at Ben-Gurion
University in Tel Aviv. We’re also joined from UCLA by Saree Makdisi, who is the
author of the book Palestine
Inside Out.
On the phone with us from Brussels is Norman Finkelstein, among his
books, The Holocaust Industry and Beyond Chutzpah. This is Democracy
Now! We’ll be back in a minute. [break] As we continue this discussion, I
wanted turned, though, to an excerpt of an interview I did with former US
President Jimmy Carter. This is President Carter talking about his book Palestine:
Peace Not Apartheid and why he describes the situation in Palestine as one
of apartheid.
21.
Carter:
Well, the message is very clear. It deals with Palestine, not inside
Israel itself, just the Palestinian Occupied Territories. [...] And the word “apartheid”
is exactly accurate. You know, this is an area that’s occupied by two powers.
They are now completely separated. Palestinians can’t even ride on the same
roads that the Israelis have created or built in Palestinian territory. The
Israelis never see a Palestinian, except the Israeli soldiers. The Palestinians
never see an Israeli, except at a distance, except the Israeli soldiers. So
within Palestinian territory, they are absolutely and totally separated, much
worse than they were in South Africa, by the way.
22.
Goodman:
Professor Morris, your response?
23.
Morris:
I think the image of apartheid is problematic and inaccurate. I
think there are — there is a separation of the settlers — between the settlers
and the local Arab population in the territories, between the soldiers, the
Israeli soldiers, and the Arab population, but it all stems from a vast problem
of security: Arab terrorism, Arab warfare by neighboring states who support the
Palestinians. And the whole thing is simply a mechanism of self-defense, which has
— which has obviously unpleasant and anti-humanitarian offshoots. But
you have to remember — and this is something people also forget when they talk
about history — in 1967, Israel was assaulted by Jordan in the West Bank. It
didn’t go into the West Bank and East Jerusalem out of free will. The Jordanians opened up with cannon and machine guns against
West Jerusalem and against the environs of Tel Aviv. And Israelis reluctantly
went into the West Bank and started this occupation. It wasn’t something
generated or initiated by Israel. It was defending themselves against Jordanian
attack. I’m not talking now about the southern front, but the central front.
The Jordanians were told twice on the morning of the 5th of June, ‘67, “Do not
shoot. We will not touch you.” And after they started shooting, King Hussein of
Jordan was told by the Israelis through American and UN intermediaries, “Stop
shooting, and we will not touch East Jerusalem or the West Bank.” He continued
shooting and forced Israel’s hand. Unfortunately, Israel stayed there after ‘67,
until, in some ways, this very day. And this is a large part of the problem.
But it’s worth looking at the root of the problem, as well.
24.
Goodman:
Norman Finkelstein?
25.
Finkelstein:
Well, first of all, the comparison with apartheid at this point has
become almost a cliche. If you opened up Haaretz, Israel’s most influential newspaper, just two
weeks ago, it had an editorial, which read, “Our Debt
to Jimmy Carter,” and it says that although Israelis feel uncomfortable
with the apartheid analogy, they go on to say, quote, “the situation begs for
the comparison.” So I don’t think it’s really controversial, what Carter
said, in the real world. Number two, I think
Dr. Morris is probably the only [homosapiens] on earth who still believes all
of Israel’s actions in the Occupied Territories bear strictly on security. Does
he really believe that all 460,000 settlers in the Occupied Territories, the
settlements, the Jewish bypass roads, or Jews-only bypass roads — can he
possibly believe still that these are there only for security and not because
Israel wants to annex the territory? This is not very serious. Furthermore,
Mr. Morris engages in all sorts of fantasies about what happened in 1967. Now
is not the time to go through it. But if you read Tom
Segev’s book, you’ll find, already in the third week of May, the Israeli
officer corps was stating clearly that “Come what may, we’ll use the
opportunity of the next war to occupy or to annex or to attack the West Bank.”
26.
Morris:
OK, can I — can I —-
27.
Finkelstein:
It’s true -— it’s true — it’s true that Mr. Hussein, keeping to his
peace treaty with — or I should say his treaty with Egypt, joined in the attack
after Israel launched its attack on Egypt. But this
notion that the West Bank just by chance came to be occupied, just like Mr.
Morris’s fantasy that 700,000 Palestinians just by chance came to find
themselves outside their homes in 1948, is just not serious.
28.
Goodman:
Professor Morris?
29.
Morris: I don’t know why Norman Finkelstein calls what I
write “fantasies.” Most of his work on the Middle East and on the Israeli-Arab
problem is based on my work. Look at his footnotes. But that’s a separate
issue. There is no fantasy at all in understanding
that in ‘67 Israel was under mortal — in mortal peril, under Arab threat and
attacked by the Jordanians and by the Syrians. The business of the south
and the Egyptians is more complex, but he also knows that the Egyptians closed
the Straits —-
30.
Finkelstein:
One second, Egypt attacked Israel in 1967?
31.
Morris:
No, do not -— I didn’t — I didn’t bother you. I didn’t bother
you. I didn’t interfere with you. Please let me finish. The Egyptians closed the Straits of Tiran, expelled the
United Nations peacekeeping force and threatened Israel with destruction in May
1967, and this is what led to the crisis. You are right that there were
expansionist urges among some parts of the Israeli population, including part
of the officer corps, not the officer corps, but that isn’t what
motivated the Israeli government to strike at Egypt on the 5th of June. What
motivated the Israeli government — and it doesn’t matter what Tom Segev
writes or doesn’t write in his book, which is a pretty bad book, but that’s not
the point — the key thing was security in ‘67. I
think you even understand that.
32.
Finkelstein:
Security is always the key thing, Mr.
Morris.
33.
Morris:
It’s not always — it is the key. It’s
true. Since Israel —-
34.
Finkelstein:
You can justify taking over a whole continent in the name of
security.
35.
Morris:
Since Israel -— since Israel was invaded —- since Israel -—
36.
Finkelstein:
That’s what Hitler did.
37.
Morris:
Since Israel is — the comparison of Israel with Hitler is ridiculous —-
38.
Finkelstein:
Yeah, but the -— no, the notion of security
39.
Morris:
—- the same as your book on the Holocaust is ridiculous.
40.
Finkelstein:
— to constantly justify expansion.
41.
Morris:
No, security is a fact of Israel —-
42.
Finkelstein:
Every state does that, Mr. Morris.
43.
Morris:
The problem of -—
44.
Goodman:
One at a time.
45.
Morris:
The problem — no, he’s interfering with what I’m saying.
46.
Goodman:
Right.
47.
Finkelstein:
That’s how we went from the East Coast to the West Coast. We
called it “security.”
48.
Morris:
The problem of security has reigned,
dominated over Israeli life since ‘48 quite justifiably. Israel was attacked by the Palestinian Arabs. It was
invaded by Arab states. It was threatened for decades with extinction by its
Arab neighbors and is currently being threatened with extinction by the Hamas,
by the Hezbollah and by the Iranian patrons who are trying to get atomic
weapons. So don’t dismiss the problem of security in Israeli minds
or objectively.
49.
Goodman:
Professor Makdisi, I want to bring you into this discussion. Your
response?
50.
Makdisi:
OK. Well, I mean, there are several things to be said. The first of
all is the business of security. And, you know, actually, I am convinced
that Dr. Morris is speaking the truth, I mean that he’s being honest when he
says that this is a question of security. In other words, I think that the
Israelis really do think that security is what matters and that it justifies
all of their actions. The question is, what kind
of collective neurosis does it take when the fact that what they’re doing in
the Occupied Territories isn’t just holding territory to defend their very
existence, as he’s putting it, but actively settling, colonizing — illegally
colonizing — the Occupied Territories? As he knows, or as he ought to know, to
this very day, the Jewish settler population in the Occupied Territories is
increasing at a rate three times greater than that of the rate of population
increase of Israel itself. So there is a will here to settle the land. Now, are
you going to tell me that the process of putting in civilians into militarily
occupied territory is done on the basis of security? Whose security is
safeguarded by —-
51.
Morris:
Let me just add something.
52.
Makdisi:
—- actively — can I finish my sentence? Whose security is
safeguarded by putting civilians into a war zone? That just doesn’t make any
sense at all as an argument. That doesn’t mean that the Israelis don’t also
think there’s a question of security. But the question is, when the Israelis
look at these things, one has to understand a kind of collective neurosis is
taking place, and I think that’s part of why we’re at loggerheads here, because
they are convinced that everything — look at the way he’s talking. Before the break, what he was saying was,
the conflict wouldn’t now have the shape that it does if the ethnic cleansing
of 1948 had been completed all the way to the Jordan River. Another
way of saying the same thing would — to go back to what he’s saying, which is
why it’s justified, as far as he’s concerned — is if the Palestinian people had
been literally annihilated in 1948, there also wouldn’t be much of a conflict
now, because the other people wouldn’t be there. Now, is that justified? And
how can one talk about the process of either mass expulsion or genocide, virtual
or literal or whatever, in terms of security? So, and then also, how can one
talk about —-
53.
Goodman:
Well, let’s put the question to Professor Morris.
54.
Morris:
Amy, please.
55.
Goodman:
Are you for the completion of the expulsion of Palestinians?
56.
Morris:
No, I’ve always said that I’m opposed, both morally and on practical
grounds, to expulsion in present circumstance -—
57.
Makdisi:
That’s not what you said in that interview.
58.
Morris:
— in present — that’s what I said in the interview, as well — in
present circumstances. But projecting back on ‘48, I said both peoples would
have had a much pleasanter, a more pacific existence since ‘48, if what had
happened between Turkey and Greece in the 1920s had happened also in Palestine.
But that’s the secondary subject here at the moment. You raised the subject
of settlements, and I think we’re in partial or even more than partial
agreement on the problem of settlements. I have always opposed Israel’s
settlement venture in the territories, realizing that the establishment of
settlements represented an obstacle to peace. But this doesn’t undermine the argument
that some of the settlement was undertaken with security in mind. It’s
true that other factors entered into it, such as a desire to return to historic
homelands. Religious convictions and so on went into the settlement venture, as
well. But there was always, underlying the settlement venture, especially along
the Jordan River in certain places on the high ground of Judea and Samaria,
there were security considerations in establishing settlements. These should
have been overtaken by a desire for peace and a peace agreement by both
peoples. Unfortunately, this desire for peace, I don’t
think exists on the side of the Palestinians and on the part of some of their
patrons like Iran, Hezbollah, and so on. [I’m getting tired of this shit.]
I think, incidentally, if you look at any poll of Israel’s Jewish population,
it will tell you that the Israelis, by and large, 70 percent, 80 percent, want
to get out of the West Bank and to end the settlement venture. But Hamas and
Hezbollah and Iran and others have not enabled them to leave, because they
haven’t enabled or haven’t persuaded the Palestinians that peace is the right
option and a two-state solution is the only possible settlement. [I’m getting
tired of this shit.]
59.
Goodman:
We have about forty-five seconds for each of you to talk about what
has to happen right now. I want to begin with you, Norman Finkelstein. At this
point, what needs to happen?
60.
Finkelstein:
What has to happen is, Israel has to join
the international community and accept the principles for resolving the
conflict that the entire world has accepted. You look at the last UN
General Assembly resolution passed 161-to-7, the seven dissenting states being
the United States, Israel, Nauru, Palau, Micronesia, Marshall Islands and
Australia. 161 countries said a full Israeli withdrawal to the June ‘67 borders
and a just resolution of the refugee question. That’s what the whole accepts,
and that’s what Israel rejected.
61.
Goodman:
Benny Morris, what has to happen?
62.
Morris:
There has to be a change of mindset on the
Palestinian side and acceptance of the two-state formula as the only necessary
formula for a solution. Without the acceptance of two states, there will
never be peace in Palestine.
63.
Goodman:
Saree Makdisi?
64.
Makdisi:
At this point, precisely because of the kind of aggressive
colonization of the Occupied Territories, it’s no longer possible to separate
the two populations, if it ever was. I’m not sure that it ever was, but
certainly at this point it isn’t possible to do so. So
the only way out at this point is for the two peoples to share the land equally
and to realize that each — for each side to realize the other is not going to
go away and that fantasizing about completing the process of 1948, as Benny
Morris has done, is not going to lead to peace and that the only way out is
peaceful, just coexistence.
65.
Goodman:
And do you have hope that there will be peace, Saree?
66.
Makdisi:
Yes, I do have hope, because, in fact, the situation we’re in now is
a situation where there’s a country that rules over more or less equal
populations of Jews and non-Jews, and it privileges Jews over non-Jews, it
gives rights to Jews over non-Jews —-
67.
Morris:
A one-state -—
68.
Goodman:
Benny Morris, do you have hope?
69.
Morris:
A one-state solution will end in anarchy and
bloodshed. It will not exist for very long.
70.
Makdisi:
Why? What’s wrong with the people in mixed populations?
71.
Morris:
Because
Jews and Arabs are so different and have been in enmity for 120 years.
[Totalitarianmentality.] Those are Muslims, and those are Jews. Those
have Allah, and those have God, or at least they’re mostly secular, they cannot
live together in one polity. They’re too different types of peoples.
72.
Makdisi:
You know as well as I do, Professor Morris, that the great moments
of Sicily and Spain, and so forth, and Baghdad, etc., were always moments where
Jews and Arabs lived together and worked together —-
73.
Morris:
Totally different circumstances.
74.
Makdisi:
Well, circumstances change. It’s not one -—
75.
Morris:
Totally different circumstances. [inaudible]
76.
Goodman:
We’re going to have to leave it there, but we will certainly
continue to discuss this. We urge you, folks, to write in; you can write to us
at mail@democracynow.org. Saree Makdisi, Benny Morris, Norman Finkelstein in
Brussels, we thank you all for being with us.
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