[lbo-talk] Benny Morris

Jim Farmelant farmelantj at juno.com
Sun Jan 11 10:11:19 PST 2004


On Sun, 11 Jan 2004 12:20:52 -0500 Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> writes:
> Brad DeLong wrote:
>
> >I would like to report that Israeli historian Benny Morris has just
>
> >freaked me out totally:
> >
> >http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/380986.html
> >
> >That is all.
>
> Amazing. From the interview:
>
> >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."
> >[Q] 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 a few screens later:
>
> >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.
>
> So you gotta kill and expel the lower types so that the better sorts
>
> can flourish.

What that shows is that Benny Morris is at heart a rather old fashion Labor Zionist. Years ago, it was not uncommon for Labor Zionists, at least privately, to justify their treatment of the Palestinians, in language similar to Morris's. Israel was said to represent a a more advanced social formation (i.e. a socialist democracy) which therefore had the right to to use whatever means necessary for prevailing over the less advanced , reactionary social formations like the feudal monarchies of the Arab states.

In public, most Labor Zionists wouldn't put things in such words, since they thought it necessary to deny that Zionists had engaged in ethnic cleansing in 1948, but privately more than a few would justify Israeli actions in terms similar to those that Morris uses. And the fact is there was considerable precedent within the socialist tradition for those sorts of rationales, when we consider that much of the Marxism of the Second International was colored by social Darwinist thinking. Indeed, as Louis Proyect once pointed out, (http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/1999m05.e/msg00078.htm), Karl Kautsky before becoming a Marxist, had been an enthusiastic follower of Darwin and Herbert Spencer, and indeed in an 1881article for Die Neue Zeit titled "The Indian Question," he argued according to Proyect that:

"The reason the Europeans defeated the Indians, he explains, is that they had not gone far enough in the development of technology. In other words, they lacked Darwinian fitness, or quite possibly they lost the "competition and . . . struggle for existence," in Harvey's words."

And lest we forget, the revisionist Social Democrat, Eduard Bernstein was a defender of European colonialism.

Jim F.


>
> Doug
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