What book to give a Zionist?

[u/Jche98]

My cousin is a Zionist. He made Aliyah and has served in the IDF in Gaza and Lebanon. He was in the brigade that responded to Oct 7 and lost one of his best friends to a Hamas bullet that day. I've spoken with him and he's open to learning more. I'm looking for a book to give him which is a very GENTLE introduction to an alternative viewpoint from Zionism, something that won't scare him. Can anyone recommend something.

[u/SirPansalot]

Morris, B. (n.d.). 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. Ukraine: Yale University Press.

Palumbo, M. (1989). The Palestinian Catastrophe: The 1948 Expulsion of a People from Their Homeland. United Kingdom: Quartet Books.

Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory. (2007). United Kingdom: Columbia University Press.

Segev, T. (2019). A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion. United States: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Khalidi, R. (2020). The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. United States: Henry Holt and Company.

On 1848: Every single academic review of it praises its objectivity, remarks on Benny Morris’ Jewish chauvinist views, and note one HUGE flaw of the book. It postulates that the Arab struggle against the Zionists was a Jihad/holy war, with the evidence spanning only a few pages and containing only a couple of random quotes, as Avi Shlaim notes: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/may/31/history1

https://archive.ph/20181121212127/https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2008-09-01/war-start-all-wars

https://azure.org.il/article.php?id=475&page=all

Both of these reviews by Shlomo Ben-Ami and Yoav Gelber are throughly unconvinced by Morris’ characterization of the Arab resistance to Zionism as a “Jihad.”

There’s also the elephant in the room here; Morris’ political views:

https://archive.ph/20130901144338/http://hnn.us/articles/3166.html

“Morris has abandoned his historian’s mantle and donned the armor of a Jewish chauvinist who wants the Land of Israel completely cleansed from Arabs. … I do not know today any American historian or social scientist that agrees that the annihilation of the indigenous population of the continent was a necessary condition for the American nation or the constitution of American democracy. And these are facts and not “political correctness” as Morris loves to call any arguments he cannot deny… hatred toward the Arabs, their society and culture crush any logic in Morris’s thought. The Palestinians are ”the barbarians who want to take our lives. The people the Palestinian society sends to carry out the terrorist attacks… At the moment, that society is in the state of being a serial killer. It is a very sick society. It should be treated the way we treat individuals who are serial killers.” …If the Palestinian society is sick, who is responsible for this sickness and which society is sicker and an institutionalized serial killer?” [in 2004, as noted by Baruch Kimmerling)

This means that it was very surprising to see an overall objective overview of the 1948 war by Morris 4 years later in 2008, as noted by Avi Shlaim in the same review.

However: We can clearly see by Morris; bizarre treatment of the Arab side in 1948 as a holy war (based off of the zealous statements of Arab religious leaders, none of which actually translated into action in the ground as a holy war; Yoav Gelber notes that the Muslim brotherhood sent only one ragtag regiment to fight) is part of a broader critical flaw of this book, which is that it is harsh in its treatment of the Palestinians due to Morris’ modern political views bleeding into his work. (It’s especially prevalent in 1948 with the whole jihad thing. Thus, he has little empathy for the people expelled and as a result found even less use of their own stories and accounts of the war.

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/2sb1n

Tom Segev’s review: https://web.archive.org/web/20100708234349/https://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/1177968.html

“Morris’ obliviousness to the story of the people behind the documents he quotes is also revealed by an almost complete avoidance of describing the suffering of the refugees. It seems that in his opinion at least some of them, especially the residents of Lyd and Ramleh, should have been grateful for the expulsion.”

Benny Morris is basically the opposite of Shlomo Ben-Ami. Both are Zionists and both honestly acknowledge the full extent of the Palestinian nakba and the expulsions and massacres that came and the shattering of an entire society that came with it. Morris then goes to say that all of it is justified becuase “war is war” (he later denied the nakba is ethnic cleansing in 2016) while Ben-Ami fully admits how unjust and planned out the ethnic clenasing was, since in his words: “transfer had a long pedigree in Zionist thought.” (Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, p. 43 I think)

The broader thing with Morris’ work is that he (as a self-declared Zionist and very honest historian) is very squeamish about following the logical conclusions form the implications of his own work and this is critical, he almost SOLELY relies on the WRITTEN record above all less.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100331123841/http://www.ameu.org/uploads/vol23_issue4_1990.pdf

Morris generally relies mainly on official, “carefully screened” Israeli sources, especially for radio transcripts of Arab broadcasts. An overall policy of expulsion ca be gauged from looking at informal and unscreened “unofficial” documents/transcripts from the BBC and CIA. (So materials from Israeli archives (which is disproportionately locked and far mroe carefully screened/classified, while the comparatively freer U.N, American, and British archives are relatively ignored)

In the same 2004 article, Baruch Kimmerling notes how close Morris’ conclusions are to the official Israeli narrative despite how controversial they were and how detached he was from the events in question:

“Morris in general loved to leave his moral and ideological attitude toward the events he described ambiguous, and this was a correct position from his positivistic historian’s point of view, in which role he claims objectivity, even if a careful reading of almost all of Morris’ writings reveals a very simplistic and one-dimensional view on the Jewish-Arab conflict. Despite all his “discoveries” about moral wrongs perpetrated by the Israelis, on the bottom line, he always tended to adopt the official Israeli interpretation of the events (in The Refugee Problem and Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001, but less in Israel’s Border Wars).”

1/2 continued in next comment

[u/SirPansalot → u/SirPansalot]

Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory. (2007). United Kingdom: Columbia University Press.

“Morris supports his conclusions by archival sources, contemporary journalism, leaders’ memoirs, and diaries. The case of al-Dawayima exemplifies the complex interactions among historians, historiography, and oral histories. In his book The Palestinian Catastrophe, for example, Michael Palumbo claims accuracy for Palestinian oral memoirs when juxtaposed with Western, non-Arab sources, e.g., American, United Nations, British and Israeli (Palumbo 1987: 17). In contrast, Benny Morris explains that he “very, very, rarely” used interviews to establish facts:

While contemporary documents might misinform, distort, omit or lie, they do so in my experience, far more rarely than interviewees recalling highly controversial events some forty years ago. My limited experience with such interviews revealed enormous gaps of memory, the ravages of aging and time, and terrible distortions or selectivity, the ravages of accepted information, prejudice and political beliefs and interests. (MORRIS 1987: 2)

Decades later in the revised 2004 edition, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, Morris insists on the archives as the sole reliable window to the past, largely disregarding the role of those in power who influence the formation and content of the archive.… It is noteworthy that Morris’s expressed concern with the unreliability of memory is occasioned by an anecdote about Israeli memory, hence a lapse or rupture not by the victims but in the perpetrator’s memory. The largest single expulsion of Palestinians, some 50,000 urban-dwellers, occurred from July 9-18, 1948 after the Israeli conquest of the towns of Lydda and Ramla. Morris’s decision never to rely on interviews with Jews or Arabs is clinched by a spectacular case of repressed and denied Israeli, not Palestinian, memory:

My brief forays into interviewing had persuaded me of the undesirability of relying on human memories 40-50 years after the event to illuminate the past. The clincher came when I asked Yigal Yadin, the famous professor of archaeology who in 1948 had served as the Haganah/IDF head of operations (and often de facto chief of general staff) about the expulsion of the Arabs from the towns of Lydda and Ramle. “What expulsion?” he asked-about what had been the biggest expulsion of the war. He did not deny that an expulsion had taken place; he merely said that he could not remember. (MORRIS 2004a: 6)

Morris’s fidelity to the Israeli archives ensures a steady stream of revelations documenting new Israeli massacres and rapes of Palestinians in 1948.In what has since become a famous interview with journalist Ari Shavit published in Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper on January 9, 2004, Morris documents statistics of a dozen cases of rapes and twenty-four instances of massacres as supporting evidence for a pattern:

What the new material [Israel Defense Force Archives] shows is that there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought. To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape… The fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. He covered up for the officers who did the massacres. (SHAVIT 2004)

Morris starkly opposes the truth of written documents in the Israeli archives against Palestinian false memory and witnessing, oppositions that help to explain both his remarkable research into, and his subsequent support of, Israel’s “mass expulsion” and “population transfer” of the Palestinian population in 1948. Morris currently counts himself among the “transferists,” placing himself in the company of David Ben-Gurion: ”Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestin-ians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here” (Shavit 2004).

…[I]t is the discipline of oral history that challenges Morris’s methodological prejudices foremost by foregrounding the humanity, hence the role of the excluded Palestinian as primary witness in the face of statistics, categories, and archival documentation. When the voices of the survivor and victim are inaudible except as mere cases, the consequences for those who are the subjects of repression are political and ethical. So too, are the methodological consequences, because impeded is the creation of the secondary witness: the historian and anthropologist empathetically attentive to and informed by the full presence of Palestinians speaking and remembering. Written history, therefore, need not be opposed to witness memories; rather, memory is a source for, indeed it propels, history by instigating the inquiry into accurate, empirical facts about what happened in each destroyed Palestinian village.

A different historiography, grounded in testimonial witnessing by displaced villagers, permits access to Palestinian history and narratives kept alive in no small part by Israeli attempts to expunge all traces of destruction; these attempts call the narratives of massacre into being. Archives, too, are products of their time and place, their selecting and collecting practices, often written with an eye to the future. Diplomatic, military and political documents are problematic as records of an authoritative historical understanding. Especially important here is what is absent from the Israeli archives.

(pp. 30 - 33)

TL;DR: I highly recommend Morris’ works with a couple of crucial caveats along with multiple other works by the likes of Tom Segev snd Micheal Palumbo to act as anecdotes for the flaws of Morris’ approach and to cover the stuff he almost always misses.