The trouble with Benny Morris

I want to thank my blogging comrade, Gabriel Ash, for supplying a quick and much needed antidote to the sick article by Benny Morris in today's Guardian. The Morris article is about what the racist (against Arabs and Jews) Theodor Herzl would have thought of Israel today:

Herzl would have beamed at Israel's military victories in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982, seeing them as proof positive of his expectation that Zionism, once the Jews were re-established in their ancient homeland and sovereign over their destiny, would mould a new assertive, muscular Jew, unlike his weakling forebears of the diaspora.

I thought they lost 1982 but took 18 years to realise it. Also they lost in Lebanon in 2006. But have another slice:

A child of the European imperial age, Herzl would have been astonished at the spectacle of Arab nationalism (indeed, of any third world nationalism), though not by the barbarism of Israel's terrorist foes - after all, he always conceived of the Jewish state as an outpost of western values and modernity in an area characterised by savagery.

Enough of that though given the views he's expressed since his "new" history in the 1980s I'm guessing he toned down the racism for the hypocrites at the Guardian as Gabriel's al Ahram article demonstrates:

Israeli historian Benny Morris crossed a new line of shame when he put his academic credentials and respectability in the service of outlining the "moral" justification for a future genocide against Palestinians.

That'll do for that one but do read the whole thing if you haven't already.

I prefer the next link though. That's to Dissident Voice. Here's a chunk: Morris’s byline describes him as a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel and the author of "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited,"

Here’s an alternative byline:

Benny Morris is the Israeli historian who told Haaretz that the extermination of Native Americans by European settlers was a good thing, a step in human progress, and so was the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948. (see Haaretz, January 8, 2004)

And in common with so many others, including Israeli ministers, Gabriel can't avoid the obvious comparison:

Imagine had someone claimed that the holocaust was a good thing, because, for example, it contributed to the “progress” of Europe towards peace, the creation of the European Union, etc. Would that person be welcome on the op-ed pages of The New York Times?

Again, please read the whole thing.

I just had to go back to retrieve the link to the Morris article and it turns out it's a Comment is free piece. Needless to say the zionists are out in force but comments seem to be closed for the night.