A detailed critique of the New York Times’ distorted analysis of the origins of the Israel/Palestine conflict by Benny Morris

Benny Morris is one of the most respected and, I would say, honest historians, regarding the history of the endless conflict between Israel and Palestine. What follows is a video narrative that he wrote, and below the video is the text. Morris offers a detailed analysis of how, in his view, the New York Times distorted the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict. What the Times did is beyond disturbing. It wrapped a highly partisan view with the patina of objectivity. But don’t take my word for it, watch the video.

As we saw from this savage Hamas assault on southern Israel on 7th October, the Palestinians have certainly been active protagonists in their more than century-long battle against Israel and Zionism.

But the New York Times would have it otherwise.

Indeed, the underlying narrative in their (the New York Times) magazine piece of 6 February 2024, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the long shadow of 1948, is that the Palestinians have always lacked agency and have no responsibility for anything that has befallen them over the decades. This plus a welter of factual errors and misleading judgments has produced a seriously distorted description of the history of the first Arab-Israeli war and its origins.

The Times article consists of a lengthy discussion between Arab and Jewish scholars, three ostensibly from each side, and comments and clarifications and mis-clarifications by Emily Bazelon, the New York Times staff writer who moderated the dialogue and put the piece together. Five of the six people involved can hardly be deemed experts on either the Arab-Israeli conflict or the 1948 war. Only one, Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington, has published works of some relevance: ‘The Road Not Taken’, 1991, on the clandestine post-1948 Arab-Israeli peace talks, and ‘The War for Lebanon’, 1984, on the Israel PLO war of the 1980s.

During the discussion, the three Arab panelists, Nadim Bawalsa, an associate editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, Leena Dallasheh, who is writing a book on Nazareth in the 1940s and 1950s, and Salim Tamari, a sociologist from Birzeit University in the West Bank, almost uniformly towed the PLO or Hamas line, which is indistinguishable from propaganda.

The Drift of the Times article is that the innocent Arabs of Palestine just sat back and watched as suffering victims as the Zionists, Israel, and some international actors, principally Great Britain, did their worst.

This is pure nonsense.

Throughout the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, Palestine Arabs consistently rejected all proposals for a political compromise and flatly demanded all of Palestine from the river to the sea, and they did not restrict their activities to roundtable discussions.

In April 1920, May 1921, and August 1929, Arab mobs, whose passions had been whipped up by religious and political leaders, attacked their Jewish neighbors and passers-by in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Hebron, and Safad, killing dozens in what amounted to a succession of pogroms.

The New York Times studiously avoids this word, referring to them only as ‘assaults’. Emily Bazelon informs readers that the first bout of violence took place when the 1920 Muslim Nebi Musa festivities in Jerusalem turned into a deadly riot in which five Jews and four Arabs were killed.

Neither she nor any of the panelists mentioned that an Arab mob attacked, murdered, and wounded Jews, or that the crowd of perpetrators chanted, ‘Nasrabdam al-Yahud’, ‘We will drink the blood of Jews’.

Nor does she tell us that the crowd shouted, ‘Muhammad’s religion was born with a sword,’ according to eyewitness Khalil al-Sakakini, the Christian Arab educator.

After three days of rampage and despoliation, British mandate security forces finally restored order, killing all or most of the four Arabs, as Bazelon mentions in the process.

The findings of the subsequent British investigation are included in the July 1920 Palin report, which states, ‘All the evidence goes to show that these Arab attacks were of a cowardly and treacherous description, mostly against old men, women, and children, frequently in the back.’

In 1921 pogroms, which encompassed Jaffa, Hadera, Rehovot, and Peta Tikva, dozens of
Jews were killed and women were raped. In the efforts to restore peace, British security forces killed dozens of the attackers.

Leading contemporary Zionist journalist Itamar Ben-Avi wrote, ‘The Islamic wave and stormy seas will eventually break loose, and if we don’t set a dike, they will flood us with their wrath. Tel Aviv, in all her splendor, will be wiped out.’

The August 1929 riots were deliberately incited by the Mufti of Jerusalem, the country’s senior Muslim cleric, Haj Muhammad Amin al-Husseini, who was soon to emerge as the leader of the Palestine Arab National Movement.

He and his aides told the Arab masses that the Jews intended to destroy Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount and build a third Jewish temple on the site, and that they had violated the honor of Islam and raped the women and murdered the widows and the babies.

The resultant riots started in Jerusalem and quickly spread throughout Palestine. Dozens of Jews were massacred, and many Jewish women were raped in the area around Jerusalem and in Hebron and Safad.

The British High Commissioner John Chancellor condemned the atrocious acts committed by bodies of ruthless and bloodthirsty evildoers upon defenseless members of the Jewish population with acts of “unspeakable savagery.” The British Shore Commission, which investigated the multiple pogroms, concurred.

Bazelon comments that in 1929 the Palestinians rebelled against the British, and violence
broke out over control of the holy sites in Jerusalem. Throughout the New York Times piece, Bazelon uses the phrase “violence broke out” instead of explicitly stating that the Arabs assaulted the Jews, though she does concede that in 1929 Jews were massacred in Hebron and Safad.

The Canadian Derek Penslar of Harvard University, one of the three Jewish panelists, explains that ‘Muslims thought that the Jews were planning to take over the Temple Mount’ and recommends to readers Israeli historian Hillel Cohen’s book, ‘Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1929’, which argues that the Jews and the Arabs were equally to blame for the violence of that year. Indeed, Cohen writes that Jews, not just Arabs, initiated the cycle of murders in Jerusalem that set off the country-wide violence.

Penslar’s sympathies seem clear here and elsewhere, as when he remarks that ‘many Zionists wanted to believe that they represented progress, the implication being that he thinks otherwise.’

The panelists then discuss the crucial years, 1936 to 1939, when the Arabs rebelled against the British. Arabs like to call the previous bout of violence of 1929 a ‘rebellion,’ though it wasn’t, and the British, partly in response, eventually switched from supporting Zionism to supporting the Arabs.

In 1936, during a pause in the fighting, the British sent the Peel Commission to investigate
matters and propose a solution. The Commission, composed of eminent jurists, ex- diplomats and academics, recommended that the British abandon the mandate and that Palestine be partitioned into two states, a Jewish state on 17% of the land and an Arab state on most of the rest. The British were to retain Jerusalem and Bethlehem, together with a thin corridor to the Mediterranean.

Penslar admits that the Palestinians rejected partition out of hand. This is true, but he adds, ‘The Zionists split over the proposal. Some opposed partition. More pragmatic Zionists accepted partition in principle, but rejected the 17% share as they desired a larger state.’

This is a misleading attempt to project even-handedness. The in-expert reader is left with the impression that neither the Zionists nor the Arabs endorse the proposed compromise.
In fact, against the backdrop of the Arab revolt and the looming threat of the Holocaust
in Europe, the representatives of the Zionist movement, led by David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weisman, abandoned their traditional claim to all of Palestine and resigned themselves to partition, although they did hope to negotiate a greater share of Palestine to be earmarked for Jewish statehood.

As Weisman at one point put it, “Because of the acute need for a safe haven for European Jewry, the movement would accept a state even the size of a tablecloth.”

The New York Times describes the 1948 war in the same euphemistic terms as the Arab
attacks of 1920, 1921, and 1929. The 1948 war, Bazelon explains, simply, “broke out.”

This is an obfuscation.

What actually happened is that the Arabs of Palestine and the surrounding Arab states rejected the United Nations General Assembly Partition of 29 November 1947, Resolution 181, and the following day militia men, slash ‘terrorists’ ambushed two Jewish buses near Tel Aviv and snipers fired at Jewish passers-by in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, thus initiating the civil war between the Jews and the Arabs of Palestine.

In May 1948, following the Palestinian failure to halt the establishment of a Jewish state,
the armies of the neighboring Arab states invaded the country.

A similar distortion of the historical record informs the expert’s discussion of the international
context of the conflict. Blame is laid at every doorstep — except — that of the Arabs.

The British, who ruled Palestine from 1917 to 1918 until mid-May 1948, are portrayed
as gung-ho, pro-Zionists and Arab bashers.

The reality was more nuanced.

True, in November 1917, London issued the Balfour Declaration, which expressed support
for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. But during the first years of British control, the rulers were frankly hostile towards the Zionist enterprise, and in the years that followed, while they protected the Zionist enterprise, albeit avoiding an explicit endorsement of Jewish statehood, the British sporadically curbed Jewish immigration to Palestine.
In 1938 to 1939, the British definitively switched sides. They turned against Zionism and supported Arab majority rule over Palestine, as presaged in the White Paper of May 1939. This remained British policy until the last days of the mandate.

Even as World War II was raging, the British naval blockade prevented Jews from escaping
the Holocaust in Europe and reaching Palestine shores. London stopped supporting Jewish statehood and abstained from the crucial November 1947 vote on partition.

In the 1948 war, the British supported the Arabs in various ways, including by supplying
them with arms, continuing the Jewish anti-blockade of the country’s shores until mid-May 1948, and threatening to intervene directly against the IDF in the south.

Though it is true that the mandate government in Jerusalem and the withdrawing British troops
generally behaved even-handedly, a fact misrepresented in both Israeli and Palestinian historiography.

Panelist Tamari is therefore quite mistaken when he concludes the British were largely
complicit in the 1948 Arab defeat.

But the article’s worst historical distortions concerned the events surrounding the Second
World War.

Penslar claims that between 9,000 and 12,000 Palestinians fought for the Allied forces
in World War II. In fact, as far as I know, it is doubtful whether any Palestine Arabs actually fought during the war, though perhaps some 6,000 of Palestine’s 1.2 million Arabs signed up with the British and served as cooks, drivers or guards in the British installations in Palestine.

By comparison, around 28,000 of Palestine’s Jews, out of a population of around 550,000,
joined the British army, and many of them actually fought in North Africa and Italy in 1941–1945.

This talk of Palestine Arabs fighting alongside the British is at best misleading. Palestine’s Arabs, like most of the Middle East’s Arabs, would have preferred a Nazi German victory and the defeat of the Western democracies. The British were seen as the common enemy of the Germans and the Palestinians.

As Sakakini, a Palestinian nationalist, relates in a diary entry of 1941, the Arabs of Palestine
had rejoiced when the British bastion at Tupruk fell to the Germans. And not only the Palestinians rejoiced, but the whole Arab world.

The support for Hitler wasn’t merely a matter of the older daj that, ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend’. Mohamed Amin al-Husseini, the leader of the Palestine National Movement, was an outspoken anti-Semite. He aided the 1941 pro-Nazi revolt in Baghdad. When it collapsed, he fled to Berlin, where he spent the rest of the war years enjoying a handsome salary for his work as a Nazi propagandist and a recruiter of Balkan Muslims for the SS.

Palestine’s Arabs thus assisted in the destruction of European Jewry in two ways: They successfully pressured the British into closing the gates of Palestine to European Jews fleeing the Holocaust. And they supported Germany’s efforts to win the war.

In radio broadcasts from Berlin, Husseini called on the Arab world to rebel against
Britain and kill the Jews. All these inconvenient facts are shoved under the carpet in the New York Times piece.

Leena Dallasheh does briefly mention that the Mufti made a visit to Hitler, which is often
used against the Palestinians. But she quickly adds that, ‘in siding with Hitler, the Mufti was not representative of the Palestinian community. Many rejected Nazism.’

Bazelon backs her up. In a footnote, she cites Lebanese scholar Gilbert Achcar’s book, ‘The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives’, which she says notes articles in the Arab press that denounce Nazi brutality and fascism.

Achcar teaches at SOAS, the London School of Oriental and African Studies.

Tamari slightly offsets this whitewashing by adding that, ‘By allying with Hitler, the Mufti completely undermined himself with the British and the European states’.

Towards the end of the panel discussion, Bazelon asks, ‘Why did the Palestinians reject partition in 1947?

This is the crux of the issue.

Since their rejection of partition is arguably the reason why the Palestinians do
not have a state to this day, the panelists offer a variety of misleading answers.

Abigail Jacobson, a historian at Tel Aviv University and one of the three Jewish participants,
argues that the Palestinians could not accept a resolution that earmarked 55% of Palestine
for the Jews, who only comprised a third of the country’s population.
While the Arabs, two-thirds of the population, were only awarded 45% of the land.
‘If you were a Palestinian’, she asks her readers, ‘would you accept this offer?’
But Jacobson forgets that most of the land assigned to the Jewish state was the barren
wasteland of the Negev Desert.

She also elides the basic truth, which is that the real reason the Palestinian leadership
opposed the resolution was that they opposed the grant of any part of Palestine, no matter
how small a percentage of the land to Jewish sovereignty.

In their view, all of Palestine every inch belongs solely to the Palestinian Arabs.

Jacobson argues that the Palestinian national movement was ready to accept the Jews as
a minority within the Arab state.

That is correct. But the point is that they were only willing to accept them as such.

Tamari takes an even more misleading tack by arguing that while partition was rejected
by much of the Palestinian leadership, at least half of the Palestinian political class favored it.

(It is) an assertion for which there is not a shred of evidence.

He says that the Defense Party headed by the Nashashibi family and the Palestinian Federation of Labor both favored partition. But in fact, the Nashashibis did not support partition and the Palestinian Federation of Labor was a completely insignificant body, if it ever actually existed beyond a heading on stationery.

In any case, the Palestinian national movement was led and dominated by the popular Haj Amin
And the Husseinis. And no one in November to December 1947 stood up to oppose them over partition.

Finally, the article’s mega-treatment of the 1948 war is itself fraught with errors.

Take Bazelon’s introductory paragraph describing the war’s second half. Her first sentence is correct. ‘On May 14 Israel declared itself a state.’ But then she adds, ‘The next day the British began leaving and Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq attacked the new state later joined by Jordan.’

This sentence contains no less than three basic errors.

Firstly, the British had already begun their staggered withdrawal from Palestine in December 1947, and had lowered the Union Jack on the 14th, not the 15th of May — though some small British units remained in the north of the country until the end of June 1948.

Secondly, Lebanon never attacked Israel.

And thirdly, Jordan participated in the Pan-Arab invasion of 15th of May rather than joining later.

Tamari blithely dismisses the war by saying that the Palestinians and the Arab states were weak and that the Arab defeat was almost a foregone conclusion.

But this only seems true in retrospect.

In May 1948, the Arab and British intelligence services predicted an Arab victory and the acting chief of staff of the main Jewish militia, Hagenah, Yigael Yadin, who became the acting
chief of the general staff of the IDF, told a worried gathering of Zionist leaders that
there was a 50/50 chance of defeat. In truth, at the outset of the war, no one knew how well or poorly the Arab forces would perform.

All in all, it is unfortunate that the readers of the New York Times have been given a biased,
distorted view of the 1948 war and its origins.

At a time when truth and accuracy about the history of the conflict should be at a premium.