صفحة جديدة 1

The similarity between the ethnic cleansing of:

The Indigenous Americans and Palestinian Arabs -

By: Adib S. Kawar

“And finally, as the dead and dying lay in the makeshift hospital in the Episcopal Church in Pine Ridge Village, Dr. Eastman paused to read the sign above the entrance that read:

"Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men”.!!!

A little history about Massacre at Wounded Knee Dec. 29, 1890: 116 Years Ago Today: By TIM GIAGO (NANWICA KCIJI) a Special to McClatchy Tribune written under the title: “Never Forget Today marks 116 years since the massacre at Wounded Knee” the last genocide against the Native Americans. But unfortunately Zionist massacres shall never end unless the last Palestinian is uprooted from his land and/or massacred on it, or the last Zionist understand that this land is not his, it belongs to its owners who are free to accept who ever they want to live with them in peace or not…

They, both the colonizers of Palestine and the Americans like those of the rest of colonized world, grant themselves cart blanches to exterminate and/or transfer the respective indigenous populations of the targeted lands, because the colonizers consider them “barbarians” thus they are not worthy to own their lands.

Zionist racist historian, Benny Morris, like the colonizers of the Americas considers Arabs Barbarians. He replied to Ari Shavit’s question during an interview for the Zionist daily, Haaretz, and entitled Survival of the Fittest? January 16, 2004: Are you a neo-conservative? Do you read the current historical reality in the terms of Samuel Huntington? Morris replied: “I think there is a clash between civilizations here [as Huntington argues]. I think the West today resembles the Roman Empire of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries: The barbarians are attacking it and they may also destroy it. (Noting that those who attacked the Roman Empire are the Nordics who came from northern Europe to attack the Roman Empire, that is exactly like the European Zionists who came to Palestine to colonize it, both had no roots in the invaded lands.)

Shavit asked: The Muslims are barbarians, then? Morris replied: I think the values I mentioned earlier are values of barbarians—the attitude toward democracy, freedom, openness; the attitude toward human life. In that sense they are barbarians. The Arab world as it is today is barbarian.

One of the earlier ideologists of Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who was an inspirer of Morris, contradicted his claim that Arabs and Moslems are barbarians, he said: Any native people view their country as their national home, of which they will be complete masters. They will never voluntarily allow a new master. So it is for the Arabs. Compromisers among us try to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked with hidden formulations of our basic goals. I flatly refuse to accept this view of the Palestinian Arabs. This doesn’t mean that Jobotinsky is not a racialist, but he said so to justify the use of force to uproot Palestinian Arabs from their land, and as he rightly said they will never willingly give up their land, as they are not fools to be tricked with hidden formulas…

Jobotinsky proceeded saying: They have the precise psychology that we have. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux upon his prairie. Each people will struggle against colonizers until the last spark of hope that they can avoid the dangers of conquest and colonization is extinguished. The Palestinians will struggle in this way until there is hardly a spark of hope. (Actually they will fight up to the last drop of blood in their veins, which was proved by their continuous resistance against Zionist and British colonization for a century and a quarter.)

Massacres

Shavit asked Morris: Are you trying to argue that Palestinian terrorism derives from some sort of deep cultural problem? He replied: There is a deep problem in Islam. It’s a world whose values are different. A world in which human life doesn’t have the same value as it does in the West, in which freedom, democracy, openness and creativity are alien.

Morris, although considered by some as a prominent historian, but he still adopts unfounded Zionist propaganda, which he could possibly not convinced with. What he considered as values of democracy, freedom, openness is simply a twisted meaning of Democracy, freedom and openness, which cannot be monopolized and denied to others, somebody who denies them to others cannot be democratic, believer in freedom and open minded.

Colonialists are supremacist, they convinced themselves that it is their right to sail to a land and tell its people: We want this land, because we are civilized and you are barbarians; so you have to get the hell out of it, don’t argue, other wise you will be uprooted from it by hock or by crock. If they refuse to accept this illogic they are slaughtered and/or kicked out. A European colonialist “civilization” cannot but clash with local’s so-called “barbarism”. The first prime minister of the Zionist entity, David Ben-Gurion argued: that the Arabs understand only force and that ultimate force is the one thing that will persuade them to accept our presence here”. And as per Morris “Ben-Gurion was right.” No, in spite of a continued Palestinian holocaust for a century and a quarter, Palestinian Arabs are continuing their resistance to Zionist occupation and massacres, which means they are civilized or else they will not understand the meaning of freedom and patriotism.

The tragedy of the so-called “Red Indians”, the indigenous population of the Americas has a stunning similarity with the Palestinian Nakbah; both are stories of invasions of foreigners to lands that belong to their indigenous populations with the aim of uprooting and/or massacring them.

In both cases the invaders came to these lands with the intention of ethnic cleansing them by means of terror and the force of arms to uproot or commit massacres against them, and in both cases their villages and towns were demolished to be replaced by colonies for the invaders, that is as Morris called them, the white Europeans.

Jabotinsky referred to the “Red Indians”: The natives will always struggle obstinately against the colonists – and it is all the same whether they are cultured or uncultured. The comrades in arms of [Hernan] Cortez or [Francisco] Pizarro conducted themselves like brigands. The Redskins fought with uncompromising fervor against both evil and good-hearted colonizers. The natives struggled because any kind of colonization anywhere at anytime is inadmissible to any native people.

The story of the massacre at Wounded Knee gives an example of many, many, many “Red Indian” villages that were demolished by the white European invaders unnecessarily to create space for their colonies and express their racism. Zionist racist historian, professor Benny Morris of the David Ben-Gurion University in “Beer Sheba”, who dug out the details of Zionist massacres, rape and ethnic cleansing out of the archives of the Haganah, gave the example of the creation of the United States of America as an example of Zionist ethnic cleansing, massacres and rape of Palestinian Arabs to “justify” their uprooting from their ancestral land.

Benny Morris replied in answer to the question: "And morally speaking, you have no problem with that deed (massacring the Palestinians)," he replied. "That is correct. 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." Morris added in relation to the Algerian war of independence, which, according to him should not be compared with the so-called Zionist so-called "war of independence," stated: "I am trying to be realistic. I know it doesn't always sound politically correct, but correctness poisons history in any case(!), it impedes our ability to see the truth. And I identify with Albert Camus... He was considered left-winger and a person of high morals, but when he referred to the Algerian problem he placed his mother ahead of morality. Preserving my people is more important than universal moral concepts." Thus he supports the “morality” of European colonialism of the rest of the world, as we quoted him here above to commit war crimes. “The massacre at Wounded Knee” is but one example out of hundreds if not thousands atrocities of various types that European colonizers committed in the Americas, not to speak about the rest of the world.

In both cases racist colonizers of both the Americas and Palestine and other Arab lands, the destruction of both the people and civilization were the aim practiced by people of European extract against the owners of the land. Both European colonizers of the Americas and the mostly European Zionists who were encouraged, assisted and armed by colonialist European nations committed ethnic cleansing, and practiced massacred and demolition of a whole society.

For Morris and his Zionist predecessors as well as all other colonialists ethics and morality is nonsense, the aim justifies the means: Whether through the Balfour Declaration or the Mandate, external force is a necessity for establishing in the country conditions of rule and defense through which the local population, regardless of what it wishes, will be deprived of the possibility of impeding our colonization, administratively or physically. Force must play its role – with strength and without indulgence. In this, there are no meaningful differences between our militarists and our vegetarians. One prefers an Iron Wall of Jewish bayonets; the other an Iron Wall of English bayonets.

To the hackneyed reproach that this point of view is unethical, I answer, 'absolutely untrue.' This is our ethic. There is no other ethic. As long as there is the faintest spark of hope for the Arabs to impede us, they will not sell these hopes – not for any sweet words nor for any tasty morsel, because this is not a rabble but a people, a living people. And no people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions, except when there is no hope left, until we have removed every opening visible in the Iron Wall. The Iron Wall – "O Zheleznoi Stene" – Rassvet, November 4, 1923.

Wounded Knee, as we said above, is but one example of the atrocities committed during the colonization of America, and like wise during the so-called Zionist “war of Liberation” in Palestine hundreds of Palestinian villages were demolished and leveled to the ground; so as to leave no place for Palestinian Arabs to ever think of returning to their land, but this was no hindrance to Palestinian Arab resistance to fight for this goal, to return to their land and rebuild their demolished homes, towns and villages. Zionist colonialist ambitions are unlimited. They were not satisfied with what their 1948 leader, Ben-Gurion, namely occupying 78% of Palestine, they occupied the rest of in 1967 and they are trying to fully uproot those who remained of them in historic Palestine; Morris was speaking on their behalf when he replied to Ari Shavit’s question saying: “But I do not identify with Ben-Gurion. I think he made a serious historical mistake in 1948. Even though he understood the demographic issue and the need to establish a Jewish state without a large Arab minority, he got cold feet during the war. In the end, he faltered.” Meaning that he blames Ben-Gurion for not completing his full ethnic cleansing of Palestine. And I don’t think that at least the early colonialists of the Americas did not regret such a “mistake”, although as lip service some U.S. officials apologized for the crimes committed against the so-called “Red Indians” leaving only a few alive.

Tim Giago gave the following example about the savageness of the European colonizers: When a soldier of George Armstrong Custer's former troop, the 7th Cavalry, tried to wrest a hidden rifle from a deaf Lakota warrior after all of the other weapons had already been confiscated from Sitanka's (Big Foot) band of Lakota people, the deafening report of that single shot caused pandemonium among the soldiers and they opened up with their Hotchkiss machine guns upon the unarmed men, women and children.

Zionist fighters of the so-called “war of independence” of the Zionist entity, which is actually the war of stealing and colonization of Palestine, did not need to have a deaf indigenous fighter not surrender his rifle to slaughter him and the rest of his tribe. For Zionists it was enough for an uprooted Palestinian from the city of Al-Lid, like the rest of the uprooted 750,000 Palestinian Arabs, to try to prevent the invaders from stealing the valuables he had on him to be shot dead by Zionist invaders. George Habash, a medical student at the time, said in an interview: “While thousands of men and women of all ages including babies and old men and women uprooted from our home town, Al-Lid, were ordered by the invaders to run eastward up the hills leading to the Jordan River. We didn't know where we were going, the soldiers were telling us walk, and we walked, it was a hot Ramadan day, some of the people around us were saying this is the end of time, this is hell. We reached the outskirts of the town where there was a Zionist check point for searching the flood of uprooted human beings, we didn't have arms. It seems that our neighbor, Amin Hanhan, was hiding some money; so he didn't accept to be searched. A soldier shot him dead in front of us. His mother and sister ran to him weeping, his younger brother was my classmate, and we used to study together..."

TIM GIAGO (NANWICA KCIJI) told us the story of the band of racist soldiers who were decorated with the nation’s highest Medal of Honor!: "The Massacre at Wounded Knee was called the last great battle between the United States and the Indians. The true version of the events of that day were polished and sanitized for the consumption of most Americans. Twenty-three soldiers of the 7th Cavalry were awarded this nation's highest honor, the Medal of Honor, for the murder of nearly 300 innocent and unarmed men, women and children." Benny Morris, who calls himself a leftist, and blamed the Zionist leader, David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of the Zionist entity, for not fully exterminating and uprooting Palestinian Arabs once and for all, replied to Ari Shavit question: According to your findings, how many acts of Israeli massacre were perpetrated in 1948?

Morris replied: Twenty-four. In some cases four or five people were executed, in others the numbers were 70, 80, 100. There was also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men are spotted walking in a field - they are shot. A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shot. There are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which a column entered the village with all guns blazing and killed anything that moved.

The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir Yassin (100-110), Lod (250), Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70). There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tantura, but war crimes were perpetrated there. At Jaffa there was a massacre about which nothing had been known until now. The same at Arab al Muwassi, in the north. About half of the acts of massacre were part of Operation Hiram [in the north, in October 1948]: at Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Eilaboun, Arab al Muwasi, Deir al Asad, Majdal Krum, Sasa. In Operation Hiram there was an unusually high concentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a well in an orderly fashion. (Still the so-called historian calls Palestinians “serial killers!!!)

That can't be chance. It's a pattern. Apparently, various officers who took part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they received permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the population to take to the roads (and Zionist propaganda claims that Palestinian Arabs deserted their homes and land by order of their leaders and those of Arab rulers). 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.

It ought to be noted that the claimed number of massacres, twenty four, committed during the so-called “War of Independence” as per Morris, were preceded and followed by hundreds of other massacres, and the list is too long to give in this article. Even during 1948 at least one or more massacre should have been committed in every Palestinian village, town and city that was over come by the invaders and demolished. As mentioned else where in this article Dr. Walid Al-Khalidi listed in his book “All That Remained” 418 villages were leveled to the ground; so a massacre in each of them should be inevitable.

At Wounded Knee also great massacres were committed by the invaders, Giago related the following story: She put her hands over their mouths to keep them quiet, but a mounted soldier spotted them. He fired a bullet into the head of one girl, then calmly reloaded his rifle and fired into the head of the other girl. He then fired into the body of the Lakota woman.

Rape

Rape crimes were committed by, European Zionists and the European invaders of the Americas. Giago related the following incident, which although not a full act of rape but it is not far from being so: she feigned death and, although badly wounded, lived long enough to relate her terrible ordeal to Dr. Eastman. She said that as she lay there pretending to be dead, the soldier leaned down from his horse, used his rifle to lift up her dress in order to see her private parts, then snickered and rode off.

On the other end, and as far as we know the rape crimes during the so-called “War of Independence” were by far worse, as they were committed actual rape crimes and murdered their victims. Ari Shavit of Haaretz asked Morris: According to your new findings, how many cases of Israeli rape were there in 1948?

About a dozen. In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered her and her father. In Jaffa, soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped one girl and tried to rape several more. At Hunin, which is in the Galilee, two girls were raped and then murdered. There were one or two cases of rape at Tantura, south of Haifa. There was one case of rape at Qula, in the center of the country. At the village of Abu Shusha, near Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four female prisoners, one of whom was raped a number of times. And there were other cases. Usually more than one soldier was involved. Usually there were one or two Palestinian girls. In a large proportion of the cases the event ended with murder. Because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg. Massacres, rape and transfer crimes are all justified for establishing the only democracy in the Middle East, as he claims were justifiable to create the “great American democracy”! The two “democracies”, which committed an endless chain of wars throughout their histories, both were established by the force of arms and terror?

Both invaders of the Americas and Zionists looked down at the indigenous populations as fit only to serve them and do their dirty jobs. The American missionaries were no better than their armed soldiers. The first who were supposed to help the “Red Indians”, and introduce them to Christianity, the religion of love and tolerance, were completely some thing else. Tim Giango wrote: As the shooting subsided, units of the 7^th Cavalry rode off toward White Clay Creek near Pine Ridge Village on a search-and-destroy mission. When they rode onto the grounds of Holy Rosary Indian Mission, my grandmother Sophie, a student at the mission school, and the other Lakota children, were forced by the Jesuit priests to feed and water their horses.

The uprooted Palestinian activist Ahmad Al-Yamani, who insisted on staying in his land, and if necessarily die on it, rather than desert it and leave it to the Zionist enemy, wrote in his memoirs “My experience with life”: “As soon as the senior officer left the office a new meal of beating, kicking and cursing of our fathers, mothers, sisters…and the people was renewed, and up till then no enemy soldier had asked us any questions… The soldiers were practicing their malicious sovereignty… matters continued till the evening when I was taken to a dark room where I stayed till the morning without bed, cover, food and not even a drop of water… torturing was continued in the morning, I was led to the courtyard of the center barefooted and without a shirt and was ordered to sweep the floor while being beaten, knocked, cursed and still without food nor water. This was a daily procedure along with… sweeping, cleaning especially toilets!!!

“I, with my fellow detainees, were led to the police headquarters, which became an intelligence center. We were whipped while on our way to the detention compound, which was a camp of open sided tents, surrounded with barbed wires and guarded by venomous soldiers, where we found a number of detained Palestinian Arabs. Each of us was given a couple of blankets that was of course not enough in this stormy weather, and we were fed with the same utility meals that never changed… a crumb of bread and boiled potatoes three times a day, with of course the usual daily desert of beating, kicking and cursing…”

THE BARBARIANS SHOULD BE EXTERMINATED:

Ralph Schoenman wrote in his book “The Hidden History of Zionism” http://www.takingaim.info/

“What distinguishes Zionism from other colonial movements is the relationship between the settlers and the people to be conquered. The avowed purpose of the Zionist movement was not merely to exploit the Palestinian people but to disperse and dispossess them. The intent was to replace the indigenous population with a new settler community, to eradicate the farmers, artisans and town-dwellers of Palestine and substitute an entirely new workforce composed of the settler population.”

“In denying the existence of the Palestinian people, Zionism sought to create the political climate for their removal, not only from their land but from history.” It seems that Benny Morris copied his description of Arabs including Palestinians as “barbarians” from his Zionist predecessors: “When acknowledged at all, the Palestinians were re-invented as a semi-savage, nomadic remnant. Historical records were falsified – a procedure begun during the last quarter of the 19th century but continuing to this day in such pseudo-historical writings as Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial.”

Ralph Schoenman proceeded in exposing the criminal racist colonialist Zionist plans for Palestinian Arabs by saying: “The Zionist movement would seek alternative imperial sponsors for this bloody enterprise; among them the Ottoman Empire, Imperial Germany, the British Raj, French colonialism and Czarist Russia. Zionist plans for the Palestinian people anticipated the Ottoman solution for the Armenians, who would be slaughtered in the first sustained genocide of the 20th century.”

And continued saying: “From its inception, the Zionist movement sought the "Armenianization" of the Palestinian people. Like the Native Americans, the Palestinians were regarded as "a people too many". The logic was elimination; the record was to be one of genocide.”

Both invaders of the Americas and Palestine called for the extermination of the indigenous populations of the lands they sailed to to colonize, which were preferably, as we red in the above quotes, cleansed in one way or another of what they called their “Barbarian” inhabitants. The barbarians are the Palestinian Arabs and the original Americans and the rest of what they call now the “third world”. Unlike the colonizers in other parts of the “third world” such as in Africa and Asia, where they wanted to economically exploit the land and the people and not to displace and replace them: "The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilizations, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth." (Civilization!!!)

It is surprising to see the similarity between the invasion of Iraq, as the American president George W. Bush called it, the liberation and democratization, of that land, one of the earliest civilizations in the history of mankind, and the colonization of the Americas. What was the result? More then two and a quarter million Iraqis died between the reigns of Bush senior and Bush junior, that is between 1990 and 2007, the country was divided into splinters of sectarian and ethnic entities, it is swimming in a swamp of blood, chaos, destruction of the infra structure: water and electricity supplies, communications, health and the educational systems, the oil industry… and the learned and professional elites are being targeted and murdered, thus they are fleeing with their lives from the country that was one of the most advanced in all these fields in the area.

Shavit asked Morris: Yet we, too, bear responsibility for the violence and the hatred: the occupation, the roadblocks, the closures, maybe even the Nakbah itself. That is in occupied Palestine, to which he replied: You don’t have to tell me that. I have researched Palestinian history. I understand the reasons for the hatred very well. The Palestinians are retaliating now not only for yesterday’s closure but for the Nakbah as well. But that is not a sufficient explanation. The peoples of Africa were oppressed by the European powers no less than the Palestinians were oppressed by us, but nevertheless I don’t see African terrorism in London, Paris or Brussels. The Germans killed far more of us than we killed the Palestinians, but we aren’t blowing up buses in Munich and Nuremberg. So there is something else here, something deeper, that has to do with Islam and Arab culture. Of course Palestinians would not possibly forget their Nakbah the continuous holocaust that started a century and quarter ago, their ethnic cleansing that Zionism is working hard to sooner or later complete. But we believe that it is not possible for the racist colonialism and racism to understand what they are committing is the contrary to civilization… Colonialists and especially Zionists cannot understand that no civilization or a god will ever justify massacres, rape, ethnic cleansing, racism… ancient old and modern Arabs are not barbarians; they have a history and civilization… Palestinian Arabs had built their own land, and in their diaspora in what ever land they are presently living, they contributed a lot in advancing these lands from the first to the third world… Barbarians are those who justify their war crimes whether in Palestine or in the Americas.

Morris continues to mention that Arabs are full with hatred for the Zionist entity and Zionism, which in my opinion is fully justified, but why doesn’t he and his co-Zionist conduct a simple study of the out bursting hatred that boils in their hearts towards the people they uprooted from their land and homes and persecuted them. A poll of students that was published in January 2007 suggests that racism is even stronger among young Jews. Three-quarters believed Palestinian citizens are uneducated, uncivilized and unclean, and a third are frightened of them. Richard Kupermintz of Haifa Univ., who conducted the survey more than two years ago, believes the responses would be even more extreme today.

As for the why Africans are not still retaliating against their former colonizers, the answer is clear. Africans were not ethnically cleansed from their lands, colonialism ended and their colonizers apologized from their African victims for the crimes they committed against them… That is why, but the Palestinian holocaust is still in the process.

The number of the victims of the colonizers does not matter, it is the crime that matters. Morris doesn’t realize who the victim is and who is the murderer, he said: “In comparison to the massacres the Russians perpetrated against the Germans at Stalingrad, that’s chicken feed.” What a joke?! Who was the invader and who was the invaded? Jews were the victims of Nazi Germany; so the post war Germans had to be sucked by Zionism and are still being sucked by hundreds of billions of dollars in “compensation”, but when it comes to the invaded Russia where the invading Nazis murdered more than ten million Russians, and destroyed every thing in the invaded land, here comes the Zionist Morris to tell us: “In comparison to the massacres the Russians perpetrated against the Germans at Stalingrad, that’s chicken feed.” Is Stalingrad an invaded Russian city by the Germans or a Russian one invaded by the Germans? Russians fought the most heroic battle to liberate it… What percentage of the Russian population was lost as a result of this invasion? Certainly more than the 1% the colonizing Zionists Morris claimed that they have lost during their colonization of Palestine!

Shavit replied to Morris: I want to insist on my point: A large part of the responsibility for the hatred of the Palestinians rests with us. After all, you yourself showed us that the Palestinians experienced a historical catastrophe.

Morris replied: True. But when one has to deal with a serial killer, it’s not so important to discover why he became a serial killer. What’s important is to imprison the murderer or to execute him. Serial killer!!! Morris the “historian” justified all the war crimes of European colonialism and called the defenders of their land “serial killers”. As for only 800 Palestinians were killed in 1948, is a big lie, but any how whether one or a million it is a crime to murder a soul especially if they are defending their land and people. During the 1982 invasion of Lebanon more than 22,000 Lebanese, Palestinians and Syrians Arabs were massacred in Lebanon by the invading Zionist army. In the June/July Zionist invasion of Lebanon about 1200 Lebanese were murdered in addition to the vast destruction the Zionist air raids and other war tools inflicted all over Lebanon.

If Jewish blood is sacred for us Arab blood is more sacred…

Shavit proceeded with his questions: Explain the image: Who is the serial killer in the analogy?

Without shame Morris replied: The barbarians who want to take our lives. The people the Palestinian society sends to carry out the terrorist attacks, and in some way the Palestinian society itself as well. 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. Why do those Arabs want to take the lives of the barbarian Zionists? Zionists wage an endless series of wars to uproot a people from their land and homes and replace them in it, with the excuse that they want a new lands to be colonized by white Europeans. The serial killers are the Zionists. The Zionist rogue state of “Israel” is the one that contains the very sick society that rejected all Arab peace initiatives, because they want to proceed with their expansionist wars, and ethnic cleanse every Arab soul from Palestine and its surroundings. Arabs should be a very sick society if they don’t defend themselves against the invaders. Morris and other Zionists call Palestinians “suicide bombers”. What about this rogue state, which imports young men and women, puts them in military fatigues, train them and arm them to kill and be killed, aren’t they “serial killers” and suicide bombers?! During the Zionist invasions of the Egyptian Sinai peninsula soldiers were ordered “don’t take prisoners” wounded or not, just kill any thing that breaths!!!

Cage them

One of the most striking similarities between the colonizers of the Americas and Palestine is their plan to cage the indigenous populations of the colonized lands, with the aim of exterminating them or at least uproot them from their land. Black Elk of Lakota wrote: ".My people looked pitiful. There was a big drought, and the rivers and creeks seemed to be dying. Nothing would grow that the people had planted, and the Wasichus had been sending less cattle and other food than ever before. The Wasichus had slaughtered all the bison and shut us up in pens. It looked as if we might all starve to death. We could not eat lies, and there was nothing we could do.." L. Frank Baum - Editor and Publisher, “The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer” December 1890

Up till today “Red Indians” are caged in reserves, which are not far from being Zoos, true they are not actual zoos, and “Red Indians” have the privilege of running gambling casinos, and have some tax free commodities, but still they are caged, they are as L. Frank Baum said, they “shut us up in pens”, and they are there so that tourists will come to see the few remaining living specimens of the indigenous “Red Indians”.

On the other side the barbarian “historian”, Benny Morris responded to Shavit’s question: What does that mean? What should we do tomorrow morning? We have to try to heal the Palestinians. Maybe over the years the establishment of a Palestinian state will help in the healing process. But in the meantime, until the medicine is found, they have to be contained so that they will not succeed in murdering us. (!) Heal the Palestinians, does this mean subjugate them to be healed! Palestinians were living in peace, prosperity and tranquility till they were invaded and their slaughter was started first with the help of British colonialism to be followed by American/Zionist colonialism. These parties are experienced in running slaughter houses in the Americas; so they didn’t need any further training to run it in Palestine.

And in reply to a further question: To fence them in? To place them under closure? Morris responded: “Something like a cage has to be built for them. I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another.”

Benny Morris like his co-racist Zionists were inspired by their tutor Jabotinsky who was described by Ralph Schoenman for the idea of what ever you call it Iron fence, iron cage, concrete wall, barbed wire and/or electrified fence, or as we may read below: “the iron law”, "Iron Hand" are nothing but to fence the Palestinians in, "the siren of 'an iron wall, “Iron Brain” through which the local population can not break through" and of "the iron law of every colonizing movement ... armed force', found his call echoed in major Zionist forays against victim peoples in the decades to come".

Schoenman proceeded: "Israel's current Minister of Defense (1988), Yitzhak Rabin, launched the 1967 war as Chief of Staff with "Iron Will". As Prime Minister in 1975 and 1976 he declared the policy of Hayad Barzel, the "Iron Hand", in the West Bank. Over 300,000 Palestinians were to pass through Israeli prisons under conditions of sustained and institutionalized torture exposed by the Sunday Times of London and denounced by Amnesty International. Just as a reminder, more then half of the Palestinians presently living in the West Bank, the Gaza Slip and East Jerusalem spent some time in “Israeli” prisons and detention camps.

"His successor as Chief of Staff, Raphael Eitan, imposed the "Iron Arm" – Zro'aa Barzel – on the West Bank, and assassination was added to the repressive arsenal. On July 17, 1982, the Israeli cabinet met to prepare what the London Sunday Times would term "this carefully pre-planned military operation to purge the camps, called Moah Barzel or 'Iron Brain'". The camps were Sabra and Shatila and the operation "was familiar to Sharon and Begin, part of Sharon's larger plan discussed by the Israeli cabinet". [*] London Sunday Times, September 26, 1982."

Targeted assassinations of Palestinian resistance and other Arab activists reached its peak during the Sharon era to be followed by the Zionist troika Olmert/Perutz and their scapegoat resigned/fired chief of staff, Halutz. Palestinian resistance men are being assassinated mostly targeted by air strikes. A big number of civilian bystanders fell victims of these racist war crimes.

Schoenman continued: "When Yitzhak Rabin, who had supported the Revisionist Likud in Lebanon during the war, became Shimon Peres' Minister of Defense in the current "national unity" government, he launched in Lebanon and the West Bank the policy of Egrouf Barzel, the "Iron Fist". It is the "Iron Fist" which Rabin again cited as the basis for his policy of allout repression and collective punishment during the 1987-1988 Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza."

The cage suggested by Morris and his fellow Zionists is about to be completed by the racist Zionist rogue state of “Israel”. Isn’t it that eight meters high and 650 kilometers long concrete wall with barbed and electrified fences Morris is talking about. Zionists hope that their project of ethnic cleansing shall be enforced when they imprison about four million Palestinian Arabs in walled enclaves, open air prisons, or cages, practically without any means of livelihood, all the agricultural land is confiscated, and all water resources are stolen, no free exit or return to and from the outside world… Definitely Palestinian Arabs who are adamant to stick their feet deep in their land will not quit it under any circumstances. Barbaric Zionism is creating national resistance that Morris likes to call “serial killers”, and as Morris predicted in reply to Shavit’s question: The situation as you describe it is extremely harsh. You are not entirely convinced that we can survive here, are you?

The possibility of annihilation exists. Morris is right to be pessimistic about the future of an artificial state and its people, which can only survive as long as it continues to commit war crimes and targeted assassination against the tough resistance of the willful indigenous population.

Shavit continued asking: Would you describe yourself as an apocalyptic person?

The whole Zionist project is apocalyptic. It exists within hostile surroundings and in a certain sense its existence is unreasonable. Zionists willingly and by the use of terror put themselves in hostile surroundings, and they should be fools to think that they will be welcomed with love and kisses by Arabs, they created a hateful environment, and implanted themselves in its midst…

Shavit asked Morris, So what you are telling me is that you live the Palestinian Nakbah of the past less than you live the possible Jewish Nakbah of the future?

Yes. Destruction could be the end of this process. It could be the end of the Zionist experiment. And that’s what really depresses and scares me. Morris is reasonable enough to realize the fate of a racist entity established, we repeat, by the force of arms and state terror, which is as he put it, destruction and annihilation, unless they give up their racist Zionism.

If Palestinian Arabs surrender and raise the white flag their fate will be like that of “the Red Indians” total extermination or about: ".A detachment of soldiers was sent into the camp to search for any arms remaining there, and it was reported that their rudeness frightened the women and children. It was also reported that a remark was made by one of the soldiers that "when we get the arms away from them we can do as we please with them," indicating that they were to be destroyed. Some of the Indians could understand English. This and other things alarmed the Indians and [a] scuffle occurred between one warrior who had [a] rifle in his hand and two soldiers. The rifle was discharged and a massacre occurred, not only the warriors but the sick Chief Big Foot, and a large number of women and children who tried to escape by running and scattering over the prairie were hunted down and killed." Thomas H. Tibbles Omaha World Herald

CONCLUSION:

One difference between the two acts of colonization in Palestine and the Americas, namely, no body volunteered to coin a term for those who defend the “Red Indians”, as Zionists, and unfortunately, many Americans and Europeans do when some body defends the Palestinian cause, and condemns Zionist crimes, those people are called “anti-Semites”, and if they happen to be of the Jewish faith, they are called “self hating Jews”.

Attached:

* Survival of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris With: Ari Shavit - Haaretz

* The Hidden History of Zionism - By: Ralph Schoeman

Survival of the Fittest?

An Interview with Benny Morris

With: Ari Shavit

Haaretz

Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist. People were mistaken when they labeled him a post-Zionist, when they thought that his historical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem was intended to undercut the Zionist enterprise. Nonsense, Morris says, that is completely unfounded. Some readers simply misread the book. They didn’t read it with the same detachment, the same moral neutrality, with which it was written. So they came to the mistaken conclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that the Zionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually being condemnatory, that when he describes the large-scale expulsion operations he is being denunciatory. They did not conceive that the great documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with those sins. That he thinks some of them, at least, were unavoidable.

Two years ago, different voices began to be heard. The historian who was considered a radical leftist suddenly maintained that Israel had no one to talk to. The researcher who was accused of being an Israel hater (and was boycotted by the Israeli academic establishment) began to publish articles in favor of Israel in the British paper The Guardian.

Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove, historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrew translation of his massive work “Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001,” which was written in the old, peace-pursuing style. And at the same time historian Morris completed the new version of his book on the refugee problem, which is going to strengthen the hands of those who abominate Israel. So that in the past two years citizen Morris and historian Morris worked as though there is no connection between them, as though one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating.

Both books will appear in the coming month. The book on the history of the Zionist-Arab conflict will be published in Hebrew by Am Oved in Tel Aviv, while the Cambridge University Press will publish “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited” (it originally appeared, under the CUP imprint, in 1987). That book describes in chilling detail the atrocities of the Nakbah. Isn't Morris ever frightened at the present-day political implications of his historical study? Isn't he fearful that he has contributed to Israel becoming almost a pariah state? After a few moments of evasion, Morris admits that he is. Sometimes he really is frightened. Sometimes he asks himself what he has wrought.

He is short, plump, and very intense. The son of immigrants from England, he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a member of the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement. In the past, he was a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and refused to do military service in the territories. He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheba. But sitting in his armchair in his Jerusalem apartment, he does not don the mantle of the cautious academic. Far from it: Morris spews out his words, rapidly and energetically, sometimes spilling over into English. He doesn't think twice before firing off the sharpest, most shocking statements, which are anything but politically correct. He describes horrific war crimes offhandedly, paints apocalyptic visions with a smile on his lips. He gives the observer the feeling that this agitated individual, who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandora's box, is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it, still finding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are his lot and the lot of us all.

Rape, massacre, transfer

Q: Benny Morris, in the month ahead the new version of your book on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be published. Who will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or the Palestinians?

Morris: The revised book is a double-edged sword. It is based on many documents that were not available to me when I wrote the original book, most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives. What the new material 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. In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor of the IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves.

At the same time, it turns out that there was a series of orders issued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinian intermediate levels to remove children, women and the elderly from the villages. So that on the one hand, the book reinforces the accusation against the Zionist side, but on the other hand it also proves that many of those who left the villages did so with the encouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself.

According to your new findings, how many cases of Israeli rape were there in 1948?

According to your findings, how many acts of Israeli massacre were perpetrated in 1948?

Twenty-four. In some cases four or five people were executed, in others the numbers were 70, 80, 100. There was also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men are spotted walking in a field - they are shot. A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shot. There are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which a column entered the village with all guns blazing and killed anything that moved.

That can't be chance. It's a pattern. Apparently, various officers who took part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they received permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the population to take to the roads. 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.

What you are telling me here, as though by the way, is that in Operation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicit expulsion order. Is that right?

Yes. One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31, 1948, the commander of the Northern Front, Moshe Carmel, issued an order in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arab population. Carmel took this action immediately after a visit by Ben-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth. There is no doubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion. Just as the expulsion order for the city of Lod, which was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited the headquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948].

Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for a deliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion?

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. The transfer idea is in the air. The entire leadership understands that this is the idea. The officer corps understands what is required of them. Under Ben-Gurion, a consensus of transfer is created.

Ben-Gurion was a transferist?

Of course. Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist.

I don't hear you condemning him.

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 Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.

When ethnic cleansing is justified

Benny Morris, for decades you have been researching the dark side of Zionism. You are an expert on the atrocities of 1948. In the end, do you in effect justify all this? Are you an advocate of the transfer of 1948?

There is no justification for acts of rape. There is no justification for acts of massacre. Those are war crimes. But in certain conditions, expulsion is not a war crime. I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands.

We are talking about the killing of thousands of people, the destruction of an entire society.

A society that aims to kill you forces you to destroy it. When the choice is between destroying or being destroyed, it’s better to destroy.

There is something chilling about the quiet way in which you say that.

If you expected me to burst into tears, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I will not do that.

So when the commanders of Operation Dani are standing there and observing the long and terrible column of the 50,000 people expelled from Lod walking eastward, you stand there with them? You justify them?

I definitely understand them. I understand their motives. I don’t think they felt any pangs of conscience, and in their place I wouldn’t have felt pangs of conscience. Without that act, they would not have won the war and the state would not have come into being.

You do not condemn them morally?

No.

They perpetrated ethnic cleansing.

There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide the annihilation of your people I prefer ethnic cleansing.

And that was the situation in 1948?

That was the situation. That is what Zionism faced. A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.

The term “to cleanse” is terrible.

I know it doesn’t sound nice but that’s the term they used at the time. I adopted it from all the 1948 documents in which I am immersed.

What you are saying is hard to listen to and hard to digest. You sound hard-hearted.

I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which truly underwent a hard tragedy. I feel sympathy for the refugees themselves. But if the desire to establish a Jewish state here is legitimate, there was no other choice. It was impossible to leave a large fifth column in the country. From the moment the Yishuv [pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine] was attacked by the Palestinians and afterward by the Arab states, there was no choice but to expel the Palestinian population. To uproot it in the course of war.

Remember another thing: the Arab people gained a large slice of the planet. Not thanks to its skills or its great virtues, but because it conquered and murdered and forced those it conquered to convert during many generations. But in the end the Arabs have 22 states. The Jewish people did not have even one state. There was no reason in the world why it should not have one state. Therefore, from my point of view, the need to establish this state in this place overcame the injustice that was done to the Palestinians by uprooting them.

And morally speaking, you have no problem with that deed?

That is correct. 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.

And in our case it effectively justifies a population transfer.

That’s what emerges.

And you take that in stride? War crimes? Massacres? The burning fields and the devastated villages of the Nakbah?

You have to put things in proportion. These are small war crimes. All told, if we take all the massacres and all the executions of 1948, we come to about 800 who were killed. In comparison to the massacres that were perpetrated in Bosnia, that’s peanuts. In comparison to the massacres the Russians perpetrated against the Germans at Stalingrad, that’s chicken feed. When you take into account that there was a bloody civil war here and that we lost an entire 1 percent of the population, you find that we behaved very well.

The Next Transfer

You went through an interesting process. You went to research Ben-Gurion and the Zionist establishment critically, but in the end you actually identify with them. You are as tough in your words as they were in their deeds.

You may be right. Because I investigated the conflict in depth, I was forced to cope with the in-depth questions that those people coped with. I understood the problematic character of the situation they faced and maybe I adopted part of their universe of concepts. But I do not identify with Ben-Gurion. I think he made a serious historical mistake in 1948. Even though he understood the demographic issue and the need to establish a Jewish state without a large Arab minority, he got cold feet during the war. In the end, he faltered.

I’m not sure I understand. Are you saying that Ben-Gurion erred in expelling too few Arabs?

If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job. I know that this stuns the Arabs and the liberals and the politically correct types. But my feeling is that this place would be quieter and know less suffering if the matter had been resolved once and for all. If Ben-Gurion had carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country - the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River. It may yet turn out that this was his fatal mistake. If he had carried out a full expulsion - rather than a partial one - he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations.

I find it hard to believe what I am hearing.

If the end of the story turns out to be a gloomy one for the Jews, it will be because Ben-Gurion did not complete the transfer in 1948. Because he left a large and volatile demographic reserve in the West Bank and Gaza and within Israel itself.

In his place, would you have expelled them all? All the Arabs in the country?

But I am not a statesman. I do not put myself in his place. But as an historian, I assert that a mistake was made here. Yes. The non-completion of the transfer was a mistake.

And today? Do you advocate a transfer today?

If you are asking me whether I support the transfer and expulsion of the Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and perhaps even from Galilee and the Triangle, I say not at this moment. I am not willing to be a partner to that act. In the present circumstances it is neither moral nor realistic. The world would not allow it, the Arab world would not allow it, it would destroy the Jewish society from within. But I am ready to tell you that in other circumstances, apocalyptic ones, which are liable to be realized in five or ten years, I can see expulsions. If we find ourselves with atomic weapons around us, or if there is a general Arab attack on us and a situation of warfare on the front with Arabs in the rear shooting at convoys on their way to the front, acts of expulsion will be entirely reasonable. They may even be essential.

Including the expulsion of Israeli Arabs?

The Israeli Arabs are a time bomb. Their slide into complete Palestinization has made them an emissary of the enemy that is among us. They are a potential fifth column. In both demographic and security terms they are liable to undermine the state. So that if Israel again finds itself in a situation of existential threat, as in 1948, it may be forced to act as it did then. If we are attacked by Egypt (after an Islamist revolution in Cairo) and by Syria, and chemical and biological missiles slam into our cities, and at the same time Israeli Palestinians attack us from behind, I can see an expulsion situation. It could happen. If the threat to Israel is existential, expulsion will be justified.

Cultural dementia

Besides being tough, you are also very gloomy. You weren’t always like that, were you?

My turning point began after 2000. I wasn’t a great optimist even before that. True, I always voted Labor or Meretz or Sheli [a dovish party of the late 1970s], and in 1988 I refused to serve in the territories and was jailed for it, but I always doubted the intentions of the Palestinians. The events of Camp David and what followed in their wake turned the doubt into certainty. When the Palestinians rejected the proposal of [prime minister Ehud] Barak in July 2000 and the Clinton proposal in December 2000, I understood that they are unwilling to accept the two-state solution. They want it all. Lod and Acre and Jaffa.

If that’s so, then the whole Oslo process was mistaken and there is a basic flaw in the entire worldview of the Israeli peace movement.

Oslo had to be tried. But today it has to be clear that from the Palestinian point of view, Oslo was a deception. [Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat did not change for the worse, Arafat simply defrauded us. He was never sincere in his readiness for compromise and conciliation.

Do you really believe Arafat wants to throw us into the sea?

He wants to send us back to Europe, to the sea we came from. He truly sees us as a Crusader state and he thinks about the Crusader precedent and wishes us a Crusader end. I’m certain that Israeli intelligence has unequivocal information proving that in internal conversations Arafat talks seriously about the phased plan [which would eliminate Israel in stages]. But the problem is not just Arafat. The entire Palestinian national elite is prone to see us as Crusaders and is driven by the phased plan. That’s why the Palestinians are not honestly ready to forgo the right of return. They are preserving it as an instrument with which they will destroy the Jewish state when the time comes. They can’t tolerate the existence of a Jewish state - not in 80 percent of the country and not in 30 percent. From their point of view, the Palestinian state must cover the whole Land of Israel.

If so, the two-state solution is not viable; even if a peace treaty is signed, it will soon collapse.

Ideologically, I support the two-state solution. It’s the only alternative to the expulsion of the Jews or the expulsion of the Palestinians or total destruction. But in practice, in this generation, a settlement of that kind will not hold water. At least 30 to 40 percent of the Palestinian public and at least 30 to 40 percent of the heart of every Palestinian will not accept it. After a short break, terrorism will erupt again and the war will resume.

Your prognosis doesn’t leave much room for hope, does it?

It’s hard for me, too. There is not going to be peace in the present generation. There will not be a solution. We are doomed to live by the sword. I’m already fairly old, but for my children that is especially bleak. I don’t know if they will want to go on living in a place where there is no hope. Even if Israel is not destroyed, we won’t see a good, normal life here in the decades ahead.

Aren’t your harsh words an over-reaction to three hard years of terrorism?

The bombing of the buses and restaurants really shook me. They made me understand the depth of the hatred for us. They made me understand that the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim hostility toward Jewish existence here is taking us to the brink of destruction. I don’t see the suicide bombings as isolated acts. They express the deep will of the Palestinian people. That is what the majority of the Palestinians want. They want what happened to the bus to happen to all of us.

Yet we, too, bear responsibility for the violence and the hatred: the occupation, the roadblocks, the closures, maybe even the Nakbah itself.

You don’t have to tell me that. I have researched Palestinian history. I understand the reasons for the hatred very well. The Palestinians are retaliating now not only for yesterday’s closure but for the Nakbah as well. But that is not a sufficient explanation. The peoples of Africa were oppressed by the European powers no less than the Palestinians were oppressed by us, but nevertheless I don’t see African terrorism in London, Paris or Brussels. The Germans killed far more of us than we killed the Palestinians, but we aren’t blowing up buses in Munich and Nuremberg. So there is something else here, something deeper, that has to do with Islam and Arab culture.

Are you trying to argue that Palestinian terrorism derives from some sort of deep cultural problem?

There is a deep problem in Islam. It’s a world whose values are different. A world in which human life doesn’t have the same value as it does in the West, in which freedom, democracy, openness and creativity are alien. A world that makes those who are not part of the camp of Islam fair game. Revenge is also important here. Revenge plays a central part in the Arab tribal culture. Therefore, the people we are fighting and the society that sends them have no moral inhibitions. If it obtains chemical or biological or atomic weapons, it will use them. If it is able, it will also commit genocide.

I want to insist on my point: A large part of the responsibility for the hatred of the Palestinians rests with us. After all, you yourself showed us that the Palestinians experienced a historical catastrophe.

True. But when one has to deal with a serial killer, it’s not so important to discover why he became a serial killer. What’s important is to imprison the murderer or to execute him.

Explain the image: Who is the serial killer in the analogy?

The barbarians who want to take our lives. The people the Palestinian society sends to carry out the terrorist attacks, and in some way the Palestinian society itself as well. 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.

What does that mean? What should we do tomorrow morning?

We have to try to heal the Palestinians. Maybe over the years the establishment of a Palestinian state will help in the healing process. But in the meantime, until the medicine is found, they have to be contained so that they will not succeed in murdering us.

To fence them in? To place them under closure?

Something like a cage has to be built for them. I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another.

War of Barbarians

Benny Morris, have you joined the right wing?

No, no. I still think of myself as left-wing. I still support in principle two states for two peoples.

But you don’t believe that this solution will last. You don’t believe in peace.

In my opinion, we will not have peace, no.

Then what is your solution?

In this generation there is apparently no solution. To be vigilant, to defend the country as far as is possible.

The iron wall approach?

Yes. An iron wall is a good image. An iron wall is the most reasonable policy for the coming generation. My colleague Avi Shlein described this well: What Jabotinsky proposed is what Ben-Gurion adopted. In the 1950s, there was a dispute between Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett. Ben-Gurion argued that the Arabs understand only force and that ultimate force is the one thing that will persuade them to accept our presence here. He was right. That’s not to say that we don’t need diplomacy. Both toward the West and for our own conscience, it’s important that we strive for a political solution. But in the end, what will decide their readiness to accept us will be force alone. Only the recognition that they are not capable of defeating us.

For a left-winger, you sound very much like a right-winger, wouldn’t you say?

I’m trying to be realistic. I know it doesn’t always sound politically correct, but I think that political correctness poisons history in any case. It impedes our ability to see the truth. And I also identify with Albert Camus. He was considered a left-winger and a person of high morals, but when he referred to the Algerian problem he placed his mother ahead of morality. Preserving my people is more important than universal moral concepts.

Are you a neo-conservative? Do you read the current historical reality in the terms of Samuel Huntington?

I think there is a clash between civilizations here [as Huntington argues]. I think the West today resembles the Roman Empire of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries: The barbarians are attacking it and they may also destroy it.

The Muslims are barbarians, then?

I think the values I mentioned earlier are values of barbarians—the attitude toward democracy, freedom, openness; the attitude toward human life. In that sense they are barbarians. The Arab world as it is today is barbarian.

And in your view these new barbarians are truly threatening the Rome of our time?

Yes. The West is stronger but it’s not clear whether it knows how to repulse this wave of hatred. The phenomenon of the mass Muslim penetration into the West and their settlement there is creating a dangerous internal threat. A similar process took place in Rome. They let the barbarians in and they toppled the empire from within.

Is it really all that dramatic? Is the West truly in danger?

Yes. I think that the war between the civilizations is the main characteristic of the 21st century. I think President Bush is wrong when he denies the very existence of that war. It’s not only a matter of bin Laden. This is a struggle against a whole world that espouses different values. And we are on the front line. Exactly like the Crusaders, we are the vulnerable branch of Europe in this place.

The situation as you describe it is extremely harsh. You are not entirely convinced that we can survive here, are you?

The possibility of annihilation exists.

Would you describe yourself as an apocalyptic person?

The whole Zionist project is apocalyptic. It exists within hostile surroundings and in a certain sense its existence is unreasonable. It wasn’t reasonable for it to succeed in 1881 and it wasn’t reasonable for it to succeed in 1948 and it’s not reasonable that it will succeed now. Nevertheless, it has come this far. In a certain way it is miraculous. I live the events of 1948, and 1948 projects itself on what could happen here. Yes, I think of Armageddon. It’s possible. Within the next 20 years there could be an atomic war here.

If Zionism is so dangerous for the Jews and if Zionism makes the Arabs so wretched, maybe it’s a mistake?

No, Zionism was not a mistake. The desire to establish a Jewish state here was a legitimate one, a positive one. But given the character of Islam and given the character of the Arab nation, it was a mistake to think that it would be possible to establish a tranquil state here that lives in harmony with its surroundings.

Which leaves us, nevertheless, with two possibilities: either a cruel, tragic Zionism, or the forgoing of Zionism.

Yes. That’s so. You have pared it down, but that’s correct.

Would you agree that this historical reality is intolerable, that there is something inhuman about it?

Yes. But that’s so for the Jewish people, not the Palestinians. A people that suffered for 2,000 years, that went through the Holocaust, arrives at its patrimony but is thrust into a renewed round of bloodshed, that is perhaps the road to annihilation. In terms of cosmic justice, that’s terrible. It’s far more shocking than what happened in 1948 to a small part of the Arab nation that was then in Palestine.

So what you are telling me is that you live the Palestinian Nakba of the past less than you live the possible Jewish Nakba of the future?

Yes. Destruction could be the end of this process. It could be the end of the Zionist experiment. And that’s what really depresses and scares me.

The title of the book you are now publishing in Hebrew is “Victims.” In the end, then, your argument is that of the two victims of this conflict, we are the bigger one.

Yes. Exactly. We are the greater victims in the course of history and we are also the greater potential victim. Even though we are oppressing the Palestinians, we are the weaker side here. We are a small minority in a large sea of hostile Arabs who want to eliminate us. So it’s possible than when their desire is realized, everyone will understand what I am saying to you now. Everyone will understand we are the true victims. But by then it will be too late.

This interview first appeared in Haaretz.