Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be at a special time: Friday at 11 AM EDT (not the usual Noon).
Our guest will be the Israeli historian Benny Morris. He gained renown for his 1988 book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, which broke taboos in Israel for documenting that Zionist forces were largely responsible for the mass expulsion of Palestinians during Israel’s independence war. He said later that readers had misinterpreted his political views and even suggested that Israel should have expelled all the Palestinians in 1948. Yet this month, despite previously criticizing human rights groups that accused Israel of practicing apartheid, he signed a letter that leveled the same accusation itself. We’ll talk about Zionism’s past and present, and how Morris—as an historian—views the relationship between the two.
As usual, paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Maggie Haberman, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
Sources Cited in this Video
Benjamin Pogrund on why he now believes Israel is guilty of apartheid.
Max Boot on why he can no longer defend Israel in the way he once did.
Max Boot, in 2021, on why “BDS supporters display a strange, selective animus against the Jewish state.”
Things to Read
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane dissects the new American debate over military aid to Israel.
On August 29 on Zoom, I’ll be talking about Palestinian refugee return and the Jewish concept of Teshuvah.
I spoke with Rula Jebreal about US policy towards Israel-Palestine on the podcast, Democracy-ish.
A beautiful review of a new biography of George Kennan.
As Members of Congress serenade Israel on an AIPAC-sponsored summer trip, it’s worth this revisiting this Saturday Night Live skit.
Israel Frey is my hero.
See you on Friday at 11 AM,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. Our call this Friday is going to be at 11am ET—11am ET not the usual noon—and our guest is going to be Benny Morris. I think Benny Morris is really one of the most fascinating, intriguing Israeli public figures of the last fifty years. He became renowned in Israel for his 1988 book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, which kind of broke a taboo by exposing the fact that most Palestinians had been expelled as a result of the actions of Zionist forces. He refused to do military duty in the West Bank. But later, he claimed that his political views had been misunderstood and made a series of extraordinarily right-wing statements. Infamously in an interview with Ari Shavit in 2004, he said that he wished that Israel had expelled all of the Palestinians in 1948. He recently wrote criticizing Amnesty International’s report accusing Israel of apartheid. And yet, just this month, he signed a letter that just came out that we discussed in last week’s video accusing Israel of apartheid. So, I’m really curious to know what he thinks today, but also to talk to him about how he thinks about 1948, about Zionism’s past and its present, and the relationship between the two. So that’ll be at 11am for paid subscribers. And, of course, paid subscribers also get access to all our previous conversations with folks like Ilhan Omar, Thomas Friedman, Omar Barghouti, Francis Fukuyama, Bret Stephens, and many others.
I wanted to talk for a minute about a kind of spate of kind of columns that have come out recently that are mea culpas of a sort. And I want to preface that by myself acknowledging that I’m the last person to criticize folks who were wrong about things, and then realized that they got those things wrong. I’ve done a lot of that in my career, and I imagine I’ll probably have to do more. So, I think it’s really important to recognize that everybody gets things wrong and it’s much better to acknowledge it if you’re in the public square, rather than just kind of pretending that you were infallible, which very few people are. But I do think that it’s important to—when you get things wrong—think about what it may be that you are still missing. And I wanted to kind of illustrate that by looking at these two particular kinds of mea culpa columns of a sort that came out recently, one by Benjamin Pogrund in Haaretz, and the second by Max Boot in The Washington Post. And they’re somewhat similar. Pogrund’s column is basically about the fact that after many years as an ex-South African who had criticized the idea that Israel was practicing apartheid, he now accepts that Israel does practice apartheid. Max Boot—although Boot doesn’t focus on the apartheid point—is kind of talking about his own trajectory in a similar way. The column is titled: ‘I don’t recognize the intolerant, illiberal country Israel is becoming.’ He talks about how Israel is on its way to becoming Hungary. So, both of them are essentially making this argument that something has changed in Israel, and therefore I can no longer defend it in the way that I did.
The first thing I would note about this though is that if you are going to acknowledge that you got some fundamental things wrong, it seems to me important to give some credit to the people who got those things right. And one of the striking things to me in the Benjamin Pogrund column, which is kind of dissonant, is at the very end of the column, after basically saying that he was wrong and that in fact the people who accuse Israel of practicing apartheid were right, he ends with this attack on BDS activists, particularly in South Africa. And he writes, ‘BDS activists will continue to make their claims out of ignorance and/or malevolence spreading lies about Israel.’ Well, there’s certainly nothing infallible about the BDS movement. I think there are critiques one can make of the BDS movement. But there seems to be something a little ungenerous about attacking BDS activists when they were actually the ones who were correct in retrospect in accusing Israel apartheid and you in retrospect were wrong, especially given that it was Black South Africans, you know, people like Desmond Tutu, and many other less famous Black South African activists in the ANC and elsewhere, who were long making the apartheid charge. And so, it seems to me a little bit unfair of Pogrund to basically in this kind of very vague way accuse these people of ignorance and malevolence when on the evidence, actually it was he who was more ignorant than they were given that he’s now come around to something that they said they were arguing for a long time.
Similarly, Max Boot in 2021 wrote a column in which he essentially called in as many words, accused the BDS movement of antisemitism for boycotting Israel and not China. I think kind of overlooking an important distinction, which is that Palestinian civil society is asking for a boycott, whereas Chinese civil society on mass is not—not to mention the fact that the US has many, many sanctions against China already. And so, I think it would be worth Max Boot rethinking that position now in light of his own evolution. Again, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with admitting that you were wrong about things. But I do think that if you’re going to do that, it seems to me one needs to offer some kind of respect to the people who got things right. You don’t always have to agree with them. But it seems to me you should be taking their claims a little bit more seriously than I think Pogrund is in his column or that Max Boot was in his column about BDS in 2021. But the other point that I think is worth making about these columns is they’re both based on the idea that in Israel there’s been some kind of fundamental change. You know, Max Boot’s column is that he doesn’t recognize the intolerant, illiberal country Israel is becoming, and he says it’s becoming like Hungary. Pogrund starts out with his comparison between the Israel of 2023, which he argues is undergoing the same kind of fundamental transition that apartheid South Africa went in 1948 when the National Party took power and imposed the series of apartheid laws.
I think it’s worth questioning whether in fact this narrative makes sense. It’s become so commonplace to say that Israel now has the most right-wing government in its history. But is that in fact true? I think part of the problem is when we say ‘right-wing,’ we’re conflating a number of things. So, one of the things right-wing could mean is neoliberal and ultra-capitalist. And in that sense, you might say yes, that Israel had governments that pursued more socialist economic policies. And, certainly in recent years, and particularly this government, you could say may be more anti-socialist, more neoliberal. So, in that sense, perhaps it is the most right-wing. Or, at least, certainly Israeli governments have been becoming more right-wing in recent decades on their economic policies. I think another thing that people mean when they say Israel has the most right-wing government is that it is the most religious government. And there’s a kind of conflation between religion and being right-wing because of issues having to do with, for instance, the treatment of women or LGBT people. And I think it is undoubtedly true that this is the most religious government, in the sense it’s the government where orthodox and ultra-orthodox figures have the most influence.
So, in those cases, it’s true. But what happens is right-wing as an economic kind of ideology and right-wing in terms of kind of religious views vis-a-vis questions like gender and sexuality gets conflated with treatment of the Palestinians. But, in fact, if one looks at Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, it’s not necessarily to me so obvious at all that this is the most right-wing government. So, to go back to Pogrund’s column, he starts by comparing Israel in 2023 to South Africa in 1948, suggesting that it’s undergoing this fundamental transition. But if you look at the laws that South Africa passed in 1948 that created the foundation of apartheid, for instance the Group Areas Act which essentially segregated people along racial lines, or the Population Registration Act in 1950, which classified people along racial lines. The best analogy to those laws is not anything that’s been passed by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir and Benjamin Netanyahu. It is in fact to the laws that Israel passed at almost exactly the same time as South Africa was passing the apartheid laws. So, Israel’s Absentee Property Law in 1950, for instance, which said that land on which now-expelled Palestinians lived inside Israel would now become property of the state and could be distributed to its Jewish citizens, or the Citizenship Law, which is set in 1952, which essentially said that Palestinian refugees who have been expelled could not return.
These legal building blocks of apartheid actually were established in Israel at roughly the same time that they were established in apartheid South Africa. For all of their sins, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir have not passed anything nearly as foundational as what was passed by David Ben-Gurion and that original Israeli government. And, if you think about the question of expulsion of Palestinians, right, one of the things that many people have been warning about is that people like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are interested in some kind of expulsion of Palestinians. And there have been some small-scale expulsions of Palestinians. But if one means by right wing that you’re gonna expel a lot of Palestinians, then these guys are really still pikers compared to David Ben-Gurion. Yes, he was a socialist. Yes, he was secular in a sense. But this was the person who oversaw the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians. Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir aren’t anywhere near that. So, why do we necessarily say that they are more right-wing?
Even Benny Gantz, you know, under the previous Israeli government, outlawed all of the Palestinian human rights organizations in the West Bank—all the most prominent ones. One could argue that that is actually in a more authoritarian, racist move than even anything that Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have done. So, I think that the problem with Pogrund and Boots’ claim that Israel kind of became something fundamentally different is that it ignores the fact that the fundamental structure was actually built under governments that we think of as kind of left-wing or socialist because, again, we’re using these terms right-wing and left-wing I think in somewhat confusing ways, and it ignores the degree to which this government is simply saying in very kind of open and crude ways things that have always been essentially taken for granted in the Israeli mainstream.
Another example, for instance, you know, there’s a lot of concern about what Itamar Ben-Gvir would want to do, and how he wants to treat Israel’s Palestinian citizens. But, as far as I’m aware, he has not called for placing them under military law, right? You probably know where I’m going with this, right? Palestinian citizens of Israel inside the Green Line were under military law under David Ben-Gurion and Israel’s governments from the creation of the state until 1966. So, I think that the problem with suggesting that Israel has become something fundamentally different, and that this is the most right-wing government, is it ignores these deep continuities, and it creates the possibility that if Israel were to return to a government that was more ‘centrist’ like the previous government of Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz, that you might think that then somehow it had stopped being an apartheid state, that somehow that it was OK.
And so the point I want to end on is that while I think Pogrund and Max Boot deserve credit for having kind of these new things that they’re saying—and again I don’t think anyone should have to pretend that they never get anything wrong—I think that what I hope is that these new realizations that they’ve made might make them look a little more deeply not just at this government but at some of the very basic structures of the state, and maybe look with a little bit more humility and modesty at some of the people—particularly Palestinians but also Black South Africans and others—who have actually been noticing this deep structure for a very, very long time. And at the very least, not slam those people who have been proven right at the very moment that you acknowledge that you had been wrong. We again are going to be joined by Benny Morris on Friday at 11am for paid subscribers. I hope many of you will join us.
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