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Benny Morris and the Israeli Dilemma
May 9, 2008
What’s in My Bookbag: Benny Morris’s just-published 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (Yale Univ.), in honor of Israel’s 60th anniversary (celebrataed yesterday). To some, it might seem a strange celebration to read a book that relates horrors committed by Israelis as well as Pal-estinians. But for me, this tale embodies. But Israel’s conflicted story is deeply ingrained in me.
The man whose photo hung in my gmaternal grandmother’s bedroom was Theodor Herzl, and her he roine was Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah.
My paternal grandfather finally fulfilled his own Zionist dream when his New Haven dairy shop failed during the Depression. My father, at age 18, went with his parents and younger sisters to settle in Palestine, where he remained through World War II and to which he al-ways hoped to return.
When you come from that kind of family, you can’t avoid the intense emotion that emanates from the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Nor can you avoid appreciating the significance of Israel’s 60th anniversary. I’m keenly aware that, unlike my parents, I have no ex-perience of a world without a state of Israel. That is the precarious world Michael Chabon imagines so well in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.
Benny Morris is the dean of Israel’s “New Historians,” who have tried to balance the romantic myths of their country’s founding with some harder, uglier facts, and in 1948 he offers an un-airbrushed account of Israel's war of independence.
I particularly identified with the Benny Morris I read about in David Remnick’s recent New Yorker review (more of a profile, really), because his moment of disillusionment with the peace process had also been mine—the moment when Yassir Arafat walked away from the table at Camp David in 2000. That was the mom ent when I thought, “There will not be peace between Israelis and Palestinians in my lifetime.” I was disheartened, but worse, I felt betrayed by a leader who I now believed had only pretended to seek peace. I continue to support a two-state solution, but I’m no longer sure the Palestinians do.
Even more pointed is is an interview with Morris by Ari Shavit of the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, a visceral portrait of a man who embodies the dilemma of Zionism. Shavit writes that Morris “describes horrific war crimes offhandedly, paints apocalyptic visions with a smile on his lips. He gives the observer the feeling that this agitated individual, who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandora's box, is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it, still finding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are his lot and the lot of us all.
Shavit continues, “Isn't he fearful that he has contributed to Israel becoming almost a pariah state? After a few moments of evasion, Morris admits that he is. Sometimes he really is frightened. Sometimes he asks himself what he has wrought.”
Will Morris ever make peace with himself? Will any of us? I hope not—that internal conflict is the moral compass that may, some day, lead us to peace. Morris’s 1948 might help keep us on that uneven keel.
Posted by Sarah Gold on May 9, 2008 | Comments (2)
