Benny Morris
London: I. B Tauris, 2002, £24.50, h/b
In report after report on the major media we hear about or see pictures of ‘refugee camps’ in Israel – and no-one ever explains from where the refugees came. Perhaps editors think we know already. Benny Morris is an Israeli historian who became well known in his country for showing that the refugees…….came from Palestine, expelled from their homes by the Israelis. You may have thought this was well known (Where else could they have come from? Why else would they have left their homes?) but in Israeli history it was, apparently, a bombshell. (Quite what the previous history looked like I cannot imagine: they just upped and left of their own accord?) For his contributions to the ‘new Israeli history’ and later for refusing to serve in the Israeli army on the West Bank, Morris became a celebrity. I kept bumping into his writing on the Net and when I saw this book of his in the I. B. Tauris catalogue I asked for a copy. Unfortunately I have started at the wrong end of his work, for this is a detailed account of a minor piece of the story which makes little sense without knowing the bigger picture.
Glubb was Sir John Glubb, the British commander of the army of Jordan, the Arab Legion, during the period when the Israelis were creating the ‘refugee problem’ which forms the backdrop to much of today’s news from the Middle East. Morris shows how he began as sympathetic to the Israelis but, watching the new state being built by killing, expelling or subjugating its original inhabitants, Glubb became anti-Israeli and finally, in later life anti-Jewish. That much is intelligible to this general reader. The rest is footnotes to the major story about which Morris has written elsewhere, and which will only be of use to historians of the period.(1)
Notes
1 Since then Morris has changed his mind somewhat and has since become anti-Palestinian; or, at any rate, anti-Yassir Arafat. This political shift does not seem to have yet intruded in his research if this book is anything to go by. An exchange on recent Arab-Israeli politics between Morris and Avi Shlaim, a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford, was in The Guardian 21 February 2002, and is on the Net at
< http://www.ajds.org.au/intifada/morris_ shlaim.htm >.