The problem with liberal Zionists is the same problem with white Northern liberals during the civil rights era in the United States: they won’t admit that they’re on the same side as the Klan. Liberal Zionists refuse to be honest about what their politics really mean. And in this tradition of political distortion, Benny Morris sets out to mask a white supremacist reading of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in ‘objective’ history.

In Righteous Victims, Benny Morris purports to write a highly detailed, objective account of what he calls ‘the Zionist-Arab conflict’ since 1881, the date which he has marked as the beginning of the conflict. The main argument of the book is that the root of this conflict can be found in the ideological differences between the two groups (Zionists and Arabs) over politics, religion, and ethnicity. While Morris presents this history as a fair and balanced account of the conflict, it is actually overwhelmingly favorable to the Zionist and Israeli perspectives.

Calling the conflict ‘Zionist-Arab’ rather than ‘Zionist-Palestinian’ or ‘Israeli-Palestinian’ effectively hides who this conflict really involves. Historically, and contemporarily, this conflict has almost always been between Jewish settlers in Palestine and native Palestinians. Most of the conflict has specifically involved the Palestinians, and not the broader Arab world. By referring to this conflict as ‘Zionist-Arab’ in his title, Morris has already completely falsified the nature of one of the two contenders. He has created a false impression whereby we don’t think of the Palestinians as an entity in and of themselves, but a small chapter or faction in the struggle of the entire Arab world or race with the Zionist settlers in Palestine. Morris is trying to minimize the role of the Palestinians, and shift the focus of analysis, forcing the reader to see this conflict as a clash of two civilizations. This is amazing considering the fact that the clash is not happening all over the Middle East, it is happening in Palestine, where the Israelis and Palestinians live. Calling this conflict ‘Zionist-Arab’ creates a false semblance of a tiny, embattled Jewish minority fighting almost courageously against a much larger pan-Arab foe. The sad reality of the situation, however, is that there really isn’t anything pan-Arab about the Arab world at all, at least in regard to Palestine. These days, the Middle Eastern ruling classes aren’t exactly taking a stand on Palestine. Meanwhile, Israel, possessing the strongest military and most advanced nuclear weapons technology in the region, is fighting a Palestinian enemy whose major weapons technologies are rock-throwing and homemade bombs. So much for Morris’s conception of the Zionist Alamo holding out bravely against the Arab hordes.

But why, specifically, is Morris a Jewish Supremacist? We know he is of the camp that would like to re-focus this conflict away from any use of the word ‘Palestinian,’ from any true conception of who this conflict actually involves. We know that he is of the contemporary Zionist camp that would like us to believe that, as one Zionist I’ve spoken with has told me, “The word ‘Palestinian’ is a very recent construction." We know this is false and racist and just plain bad history. But what is it about Righteous Victims that makes Morris undoubtedly a sympathizer with Jewish supremacy?

Well, from the very outset, all the way through the conclusion, Righteous Victims is plagued by a myriad of Jewish Supremacist assumptions and conclusions. The most obvious of these is the book’s painfully obvious Jewish-centric historiography. Most of this book is about the Jews – what they were thinking, what they were doing – in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Palestine, etc. In Morris’ account, the Jews have a historical existence both within and without this conflict; pieces of their history which do not directly relate to this conflict are given a lot of backdrop and color. Contrastingly, the Palestinians only exist in Morris’ book insofar as they come into conflict with Jewish settlers in Palestine. Palestinian history that does not directly relate to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not really discussed.

In the United States, there is a concept in contemporary racial theory known as ‘White Normativity.’ It is mostly used in discussing white-black race relations, and it refers to the somewhat unconscious assumption held by some white Americans that black Americans exist only when they are interacting with white Americans. An example of this would be African American history taught only as it relates to Caucasian American history. Here, it is taught almost dialectically, where it can be reduced to a Marxist antithesis which at every point in its existence is only concerned with the struggle for equality in white society. In this context, black history, black culture, black politics, etc. has never had its own inherent worth and dignity, has never even been its own separate entity, but has only been a small chapter in the story of the Great White Historical Center.

Another example would be the white liberal who cannot conceive of black people thinking and talking about things that do not somehow involve him and his race. For example, he can only conceive of African American student groups that relate all their discussions back to their interactions with the white world; he is either uncomfortable with, or cannot imagine, an African American student group that talks about things which have absolutely nothing to do with the white world. For him, black people only matter as a ‘race problem’ – they only exist in their comparison to and conflict with white Americans – and consequently, their varying histories, cultures, identities, political ideologies are taught, talked about, and theorized about to the extent that they somehow involve white people. Political groups that have all black membership, that discuss only those issues which involve non-white communities, are not okay for this kind of thinker, because they threaten his position as the racial and political norm. Cultural groups that have all black membership, that discuss only black culture, that discuss cultural issues that don’t relate to white culture, are not okay for this kind of thinker, because they threaten his position as the racial and cultural norm. Whiteness is the ideological norm here, and the very historical existence of black Americans depends on its existential relevance to and involvement with this white norm.

In Morris’ Righteous Victims,, there is a similar phenomenon, which we might call ‘Jewish Normativity.’ As we have said, historiographically, Palestinians really don’t have an existence in this book outside of their relationship with Jewish settlers in Palestine. This is strikingly apparent in the way that Morris structures his book. His first chapter, ‘Palestine on the Eve,’ isn’t so much about Palestine on the eve (of Jewish settlement), as it is about European Jews on the eve, and Zionism on the eve. Most of this chapter is a history of late 19th century and early 20th century Zionism. How is that ‘Palestine on the Eve?’

There is also a large subchapter in this chapter, entitled 'Islam and the Jews,' which is almost entirely devoted to a discussion of how Islam has been fundamentally antagonistic to Jewish people, and to a highly detailed account of a randomly selected series of unrelated, intercontinental, Muslim persecutions against Jews. The portion of this chapter which does discuss Palestinian people, discusses them either in this way (in the historical backdrop of a people traditionally intolerant of and hateful toward Jews), or as 'Palestinian Nationalists.' This is historiographical Jewish Normativity at its worst; Palestinians only have historical existence here as either the ancient, medieval, and early modern persecutors of Sephardic Jews (which, by the way, are still being persecuted by white Ashkenazi Jews in Israel today), or as nationalists responding to modern Ashkenazic Jewish settlement in their home. That is to say, in Morris’ account, Palestinians only exist when they are somehow interacting with Jewish people, and more specifically, only when they are being violent with Jewish people. While there is much discussion in this chapter of Zionist intellectual progression back in Europe, of Russian pogroms, of the Dreyfus Affair, of the successes and failures of various Zionist organizations, and of the writings and life experiences of the various Zionist leaders and pioneers, there is really no discussion of what is going on in Palestine ‘on the eve’ (except for Arab Muslim discrimination towards Jews, there is discussion of that). There is no serious discussion of what Palestine looked like during the late 19th century. What do the social, political, and economic hierarchies look like? What sort of cultural and intellectual movements are going on? Who are the fellahin? Why will they gradually grow to hate the ay’an? What are the effects on Palestine from the importation of European capitalist agricultural reorganization? What was Palestine like before this transformation and what did it look like after? What were its effects? Why were the fellahin being expropriated from their lands by the ay’an during this period? Why were the ay’an selling these lands to the Jewish settlers? How would the class antagonisms behind that expropriation lead to the Great Arab Revolt of 1936? What did power look like? What did the state look like? How did the state govern?

In short, why is there no serious discussion in ‘Palestine on the eve’ of what it was really like to be in Palestine during the late 19th century, politically, economically, socially, culturally, etc.? Finally, even within this narrow historical existence (and not even as Palestinians but as Palestinian nationalists resisting Zionist settlement in Palestine), most of Morris’ discussion of Palestinian nationalism is really of general Arab nationalism throughout the Middle East (which brings us back to the first point we made about calling it a ‘Zionist-Arab’ conflict), devoting a mere three pages to the specifically Palestinian branch of this ‘movement.’

There is also a lot of civilizational racism in Righteous Victims, in which Morris continually emphasizes Europe’s civilizational supremacy over Arab, Islamic, and Palestinian civilization. For example, he writes, “As the century progressed, an educational ‘system’ emerged, mostly owing to the penetration of European missionaries rather than to Ottoman or local Arab initiative” (Morris, 6). Morris is already setting us up to think that European colonialism, and more specifically, Zionist colonialism, was a good thing, bringing so much progress and upliftment to those it encountered and controlled. Morris continues; before white Jewish and white Christian settlers came, “Water supplies [in Palestine] were inadequate and frequently impure” (Morris, 6).[1] Morris also tells us that, “economic conditions as well as law and order in the towns vastly improved [when] trade with the West picked up” (Morris, 7).

Essentially, Morris presents us with an intensely ideological and imperial-apologist narrative of Europeanization and European colonialism in Palestine equaling progress for the Palestinians. He provides us with absolutely no analysis of inequalities of access to this progress (progress for whom?), and no analysis of how, for example, “progress” for the ay’an meant increased poverty, increased land expropriation, and general political disenfranchisement for the fellahin. Morris designates any increase in fellahin poverty to “more efficient and centralized [Ottoman] taxation,” ignoring capitalist agricultural reorganization, ignoring fellahin land expropriation, ignoring class conflict and exploitation as legitimate causes of this rising poverty.

Finally, in a stroke of both masterful distortion and distraction and mind-numbing historical idiocy, Morris ignores that it was this which brought on the huge fellahin migration to Palestinian cities, telling us instead that they went to the towns and cities to escape “more efficient taxation.” Why in the hell would you run to tax-collecting centers to escape your taxes? Morris can’t tell us the real reasons behind this massive urbanization, because that would look negatively on the Zionist colonization project.

Morris next spends a rather dramatic four pages outlining medieval and early modern Arab Muslim abuses against Jews, focusing, interestingly, on anti-Semitic abuses and crimes committed in Morocco, Persia, Baghdad, Granada, and Yemen, but not so much in Palestine. Throughout this historical narrative, Morris betrays a marked tendency to equate or deflate the similarities and differences between all Jews, or between all Muslims, according to the current ideological needs of the passage he’s writing at the time.

For example, he opens his ‘objective’ discussion of this conflict with a graphic and detailed history of Muslim Arab crimes committed against Jews. The intention is to try and make the reader immediately sympathetic to an abstract, transhistorical, transcontinental Jewish victim of Arab persecution. Morris fails, however, to mention that all of these pre-Zionist colonization crimes were committed against Sephardic Jews (non-white Jews), who are, again, continually to this day persecuted, colonized, and made into second class citizens by their Ashkenazic (white) Jewish brothers and sisters in Israel. In other words, these crimes happened for different reasons than and in a different historical context from the anti-Semitic crimes that happened in Europe, and have no relation to the already weak justifications for the Zionist colonization of Palestine. Furthermore, Morris details these mostly non-Palestinian Arab crimes against non-European Jews in a blurred, generalized fashion. He recounts how in Yemen and Morocco, local Muslim children were accustomed to throwing stones at their Jewish neighbors, an image which is highly evocative of, and which makes a false connection to, modern-day Palestinian children throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. This conflation of separate historical experiences suggests a legacy of transhistorical anti-Semitic crimes committed by Palestinians against white European Jews before Zionist colonization of Palestine, which is completely a fabrication of Morris’ discourse. The effect is to inject the reader with a pro-Israeli sympathy from the start, a sympathy based on Morris’ affinity for conflating ethnic and religious identities when convenient for his historical purposes.

After all of this documentation of Arab abuses against Jews, Morris writes, “However, despite [this]… the nineteenth century witnessed a gradual change for the better in Jews’ statuses" (Morris, 12). But Morris gives no credit for this improvement to the Arabs themselves; he attributes it to “emancipatory and egalitarian winds blowing in from Europe” (Morris, 12). So what we are gradually confronted with in this text is a narrative of intolerant, backward, and hateful Arabs, persecuting an abstractly transcontinental and transhistorical Jewish population, who are eventually rescued by “emancipatory and egalitarian” Europeans. The problem with this narrative, however, is twofold. For one, if Arab persecution of Jews was so bad, and if European states were so “emancipatory” towards the Jews, then why did Jewish settlers flee Europe en masse to settle in Palestine, an 85-90% Arab land? This narrative ignores events such as the Russian pogroms, which is amazing, considering that Morris mentions them multiple times in the pages before, when attempting to make excuses for the Zionist colonization of Palestinian land.

This is essentially the fundamental contradiction in Zionism; it claims oppression as a justification for dealing out more oppression, to a third party nonetheless, who did nothing to deserve this oppression other than be non-white in a white supremacist world. Secondly, how could the European presence in the Middle East be anything close to an approximation of “emancipatory and egalitarian,” when the very nature of this presence was in the shape of colonial empires? How could anybody, particularly a historian, ignore the legacy of colonialism in the Middle East, and describe Europe’s relationship to this region as “emancipatory and egalitarian?” Colonialism is the opposite of “emancipatory and egalitarian!”

There is a strange and biased tension in this book. On the one hand there is the author’s need to establish European Gentile persecution of Ashkenazic Jews as so bad that it justified colonizing, exploiting, and expropriating a whole other set of people merely to escape it. Then there is his other contradictory need to establish white European civilizational and political superiority over the Arab world, so as to dwell upon distorted pictures of the ‘gift of progress’ brought to the backward Palestinians by Jewish colonization. As we have said, this contradiction is at the very heart of Zionist ideology. And because Zionism apologizes for colonialism followed by apartheid on the basis that the colonizers are white, European, 'emancipatory,' and 'egalitarian,' and that the colonized are backwards, intolerant, persecutory, and inferior, it dooms itself to be, forever, a white supremacist ideology. Morris’ preconceived notions and foregone conclusions are fully saturated by this ideology, and it is because of this that as cartographers of modern intellectual history, we really need to start plotting his ideas where they belong: on the historical trajectory of white supremacist ideology.

Lastly, Morris is markedly pro-Israel in that at various points he comes right out and blames the Palestinians as the original initiators of the conflict. He writes, “Muslims…drove the colonists, at least during the early decades of Zionism, toward occasional overassertiveness and even aggressiveness in an effort to wipe out the traces of their traditional and formerly humiliating image” (Morris, 13). This is the classic liberal Zionist position on who to blame for the violence between Israel and the Palestinians (if you haven’t guessed yet, it’s the Palestinians). Morris has the gall to pose as a progressive because he has made a very mild criticism of Israel’s ‘overassertiveness and aggressiveness.’ Nonetheless, let there be no mistake, the Palestinians “drove the colonists” to do it! Never mind that the colonizers colonized the Palestinians and took their land, it was the Palestinians who are to blame for the violence. Like a battered housewife sitting in an emergency room hospital bed, like a female rape victim who “provoked” her attacker by her very existence, the Palestinians have been hearing “why do you make me do it, honey? Why do you make me do it?” for over a hundred years. Would the Zionists then say that the Native Americans, who originally welcomed the Pilgrims as refugees but fought them when they let it be known that they came as colonists, provoked their own genocide? If the European crimes against European Jews were so bad (which they definitely were), why didn’t the Jews flee to Palestine as refugees and not as colonists? Why did they not, and why do they not, seek multiracial harmony, rather than the racist apartheid that is Israel today?

But there is another point to make about the above quotation from Morris. May I remind the reader, in making it, of our previous discussion of Morris’ absurd transcontinental conflation of all historical Jewish persecution, of Morris’ construction through this conflation of a single, mythic, and binary anti-Semitic foe, and of Morris’ abstract transposition of all these crimes onto the convenient face of this supposedly united foe at the time of conflict initiation (late 19th century Jewish colonization). Keeping all of this in mind, what’s amazing about this particular quotation is that Morris has convinced us to step out of the colonial paradigm as an explanation for this conflict and instead see abstract images as reasonable justifications for violence against the Palestinians. Forget colonialism, forget labor exploitation, discrimination, and exclusion. Forget land expropriation, and political disenfranchisement – none of these things are potential causes that are worthy of Morris’ discussion. What is worthy of his discussion, and indeed, what he expects us to take very seriously as a cause of the conflict, is the abstract image of the weak and humiliated Jew (which, by the way, Zionism has always strove to retain a monopoly of definition and articulation over; the Palestinians did not create this image). This is only page 13 of a 700 page book, and Morris is already seriously valuing Jewish images over Palestinian people. How could an account which values such images over people ever claim to be a fair and balanced account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

Time and again in this book, Morris traces the root of the conflict to Palestinians’ unwillingness to compromise with Jewish colonization and expropriation of their land, Palestinians’ unwillingness to meet the colonists halfway, the Palestinians’ unwillingness to sympathize with the Jews’ plight (Morris, 678). But while every ethical person should always sympathize with genocide, is colonization the answer to that? And furthermore, why should the Palestinians have to meet their colonizers halfway? Sure they should sympathize with the pain caused by the Jewish holocaust. Sure they should welcome the Jews as refugees and racial equals, with whom they should live side by side in multiracial harmony (just as the Israelis today should welcome the Palestinian refugees back into their country, recognize their right of return, and live with them side by side in multiracial harmony). But as long as the Jews in Palestine continue to be colonists and not racial egalitarianists, why should the Palestinians have to meet them halfway?

They’re colonizers. And the Palestinians are a colonized people. Why should they have to prove they’re a ‘partner in peace?’ Morris also writes that, “the Palestinians never really understood the Zionist claim to the land” (Morris, 678). This phrase “never really understood” is evocative of a Palestinian people too stupid to understand Zionist history. Furthermore, the Zionist claim to Palestine, so far as Morris is able to explain it, is that the ancient Jews lived there 2,000 years ago, and that this millenniums old inhabitation, added to the Nazi genocide of the Ashkenazi Jews, justified the colonization of Palestine and the expulsion of the native Palestinians from their land. Imagine if the Celts, who used to span from Ireland to Turkey, but were beaten back to Ireland and Britain by the Romans about 2,000 years ago, wanted to resettle a portion of western Europe and turn its current inhabitants into expelled refugees! The fact that ancient Jews were once kicked out of Palestine 2,000 years ago is not a legitimate claim to the land and doesn’t justify a new diaspora. Secondly, if the experience of genocide gives an ethnicity the right to diasporize an unrelated third party, could the Rwandan Tutsis diasporize modern Israelis and colonize Israel-Palestine? No, absolutely not. Zionist justifications for Jewish colonization of Palestine have always been based on racist disrespect for the rights of Palestinians, and Benny Morris does not stray from these justifications.[2]

Through tricks of discourse, shifts and distortions of historical focus, overemphasis on specific historical events, and a rather transparent loyalty to the somewhat Orwellian and hermetically circular ideology of Zionism, Morris not only seeks to blame the Palestinians for the conflict in question, but pretends to analyze this from an objective standpoint. Anybody who reads this book as their first introduction to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will undoubtedly receive a markedly pro-Israel account of the conflict, based on subtle historical exaggerations, and not-so-subtle cultural and civilizational racism towards the Palestinian people.

From all of this analysis, the reader might deduce that while it may be appropriate call Morris’ history ‘Jewish Supremacy,’ the phrase ‘White Supremacy’ is going too far. This couldn’t be further from reality. As I hope I have made undoubtedly clear, Morris’ Zionism, and indeed the entire thrust of the liberal Zionist tradition from which he is writing, is steeped not only in a Jewish Supremacist ideology but a White Supremacist ideology. The former complements the latter. Righteous Victims is certainly pervaded by the academic racism which I have termed ‘Jewish Normativity,’ but it is also completely saturated by the ideology of white European civilizational and political superiority. Whether apologizing for European colonialism in Palestine by pointing out the ‘great’ educational system which the colonists brought there, lying about the colonists’ improvement of access to water (did he really think the Palestinians didn’t know how to get clean water before the white Europeans arrived?), lying about the real reasons behind 19th century Palestinian urbanization, or lying about “emancipatory and egalitarian winds blowing in from Europe,” Morris is always lying about one thing: white people doing good, when they’re really doing bad.

To apologize for colonialism, be it for Jewish settlement or the British Mandate, is to argue that it’s okay for the colonizers to do this. All of the colonizers which Morris apologizes for are white. The darker skinned Sephardic Jews did not settle Palestine, the white skinned Ashkenazi did. Black people did not establish the British Mandate, white British people did. And all of the colonized which Morris brushes over, were not white. Morris wants us to see pre-Zionist crimes against Sephardic Jews as crimes against the white Zionist Jews who later settled Palestine. Morris repeats the classic white supremacist argument that all historical claims held by Jews (if any) belong first and foremost to the white European Jews. His entire historiography is crippled by his assumption that the white Europeans are somehow the sole descendants of the ancient Jews, and therefore the rightful owners of Palestine, rather than say Northern African Jews who are closer to the original area, or Palestinians who are right in that area. So Morris’ painfully transparent racism is not just theorized in a Jewish vs. Palestinian-Arab paradigm, but is more specifically theorized in a white vs. non-white paradigm. This is why his history can be reasonably labeled ‘white supremacist;’ it is because his racism hinges upon a very specific duality between white and non-white. And of course, Morris is operating from within a liberal Zionist tradition. Most of his ideas aren’t even his own. This means that whether you’re a conservative or a liberal is irrelevant; if you’re a Zionist, your philosophy is permanently handicapped and deeply saturated by white supremacist tendencies.

The scary truth about liberal Zionist histories such as Morris’ is that they are so good at passing themselves off as objective accounts, completely devoid of any racism at all, let alone white supremacy. And it is a sad truth that this has forced many of the world's historians who don’t subscribe to white supremacy to devote themselves to deconstructions of ideologies such as liberal Zionism, to exposes of works such as Righteous Victims, that they don’t have time to produce historical accounts of their own. I usually hate to quote George Orwell because so many right-wing historians do this as well, but it is certainly true that “whoever controls the present controls the past; and whoever controls the past controls the present.” Until liberal Zionism relinquishes its hold on mainstream American thinking about the Israeli occupation of Palestine, that occupation will be hard for anyone to bring down, Palestinians or American radicals or both. What is vitally necessary in the American academy today, is an all out bombardment against the white supremacy of liberal Zionism. As we chip away at racism, we may begin to see the chips fall. Exposing liberal Zionism for the values that it represents is the first step in any meaningful attempt to be in solidarity with the Palestinian people as they struggle for their lives and for their freedom against Israeli occupation and white supremacist apartheid.

Benny Morris, ed. Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001. New York: Vintage Books, 2001. 784p.

Notes