I read an article written by Roane Carey, managing editor at The Nation, in CounterPunch suggesting that the Israeli historian Benny Morris has something of a split personality.  There is Benny Morris the historian who departs from his cohorts in Israeli academia by recognizing the crimes committed by the nascent Israel during its war for independence. And there is Benny Morris the polemicist who calls for ethnic cleansing and the damnation of whole ethnic and religious groups.  Although the historian Benny Morris continues to deny the notion of an officially planned policy of expulsion of the Palestinians in the 1948 war, he still records that “transfer” (euphemism for expulsion) was accepted and understood by Israeli forces during these years. Carey adds, “In his new edition Morris documented more instances of Israeli massacres, rapes and expulsions during the war.” However, according to Carey, the other Benny Morris haunts the historian. He writes:

In an astounding January 2004 interview in the leading Israeli daily Ha’aretz, Morris went much further, arguing that the “ethnic cleansing” – his words – of the Palestinians was justified; that it was not only justified but that Israel’s leader at the time, David Ben-Gurion, didn’t go far enough and should have expelled all the Palestinians then living between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River; and that today’s Palestinian citizens of Israel are “a time bomb…an emissary of the enemy that is among us.” Morris topped off the tirade by applauding the “clash of civilizations” world view common in the West after September 11, condemning the entire Islamic world as one in which “human life doesn’t have the same value as it does in the West” and “the people we are fighting…have no moral inhibitions.” In a mad crescendo of bigotry he condemned Palestinians as “barbarians” and Palestinian society as “in the state of being a serial killer. It is a very sick society…. Something like a cage has to be built for them…. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another.”

I cannot recall how many Op-Ed articles I read by Benny Morris that made me cringe.  I have also read Morris’s work in my history classes. Unlike Carey, I think there is only one Benny Morris—the Zionist historian. The word “Zionist” means a lot of things to a lot of people. Here I use it in the most basic sense. A Zionist is someone who is a proponent of Zionism—a political movement that promotes an ethnically exclusive Jewish State (however Zionists disagree on how to achieve or sustain this idea).

Throughout his research Benny Morris, the Zionist historian, is well aware of how Israel was founded and what Zionism has entailed. In his Op-Ed articles Morris continues to speak as an historian. Whether in history books or Ha’aretz articles, his statements have always reflected Zionism’s policy and history. Despite Mr. Carey’s portrayal of Benny Morris as a man full of contradictions, Morris is perhaps one of the most consistent academics in Israel. Inconsistency and dishonesty is promoting an ethnically exclusive state without recognizing the crimes this very notion entails. So while some Israeli academics fabricate, propagandize, and contradict their own histories and policies, Morris represents truths about Zionism as a political movement in more than one way. Parsing out Benny Morris the person from Morris the academician is illogical as his advocacy is surely informed by his profession and knowledge of history. Moreover, dismissing his opinion and/or his work as an historian does little to help understand the social and political climate in Israel, or any realities and pitfalls of Zionism. Perhaps all that Benny Morris is is just an honest Zionist historian.