Madam, - Prof Benny Morris is a renowned Israeli historian, whose ground-breaking 1988 book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem demolished several of the default positions of Israeli state propaganda. As a result, he was for many years spurned by the Israeli academic establishment - a state of affairs that he has successfully overcome by subsequently drawing conclusions that are drastically at variance with the evidence that he himself established.
This process has been meticulously charted by the US Jewish historian Norman G. Finkelstein in his classic Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.
In his letter of February 21st, Prof Morris advises David Norris and David Landy to "read some history books and become acquainted with the facts, not recycle shopworn Arab propaganda" - although, if these critics of Israel are "recycling" anything, it is the research of such Israeli historians as Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe, who followed Morris's lead without being constrained by his ideological blinkers.
In a notorious interview with the Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit, Morris claimed that "from April 1948, Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transfer. There is no explicit order of his in writing, there is no orderly comprehensive policy, but there is an atmosphere of [ population] transfer." Shavit comments that "I don't hear you condemning him", to which Morris brutally replies:
"Ben-Gurion was right. . .You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. . .A society that aims to kill you forces you to destroy it. . .There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. . .A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. . . Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history."
Nothing in Prof Morris's letter contradicts this scandalous viewpoint. He acknowledges that the state of Israel was established by means of ethnic cleansing, but brazenly asserts that such criminality was justified.
Enlisting the genocide of native Americans in defence of his thesis is vile enough in itself, but overlooks the fact that the establishment of Israel postdated the UN Charter, which was the first of several instruments that sought, in the wake of the second World War, to prevent such horrors from happening again.
With defenders like Benny Morris, the state of Israel needs no enemies. - Yours, etc,
RAYMOND DEANE,
Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign,
Dublin 2.