In “From Dove to Hawk” in Newsweek, May 8 (thanks to Paul Green), Newsweek finally notices what Israeli historian Benny Morris, who has rejected leftist views for realism, has been saying for years: that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not about land, but is fueled by a religious imperative:
…ConÂtrary to current historiographic discourse I believe there is such a thing as the Truth””what, why and how things happened””and I’ve always sought it in my research. If I’ve since come to a much bleaker opinion about the possibility of reconciliation beÂtween Jews and Palestinians””many would now call me a hawk””it is also because of that research.
During the 1990s, as the Oslo peace process gained momentum, I was cautiousÂly optimistic about the prospects for peace. But at the same time I was scouring the just opened archives of the Haganah and the IDF. Studying the roots of the Arab-IsÂraeli conflict””in particular the pronounceÂments and positions of the Palestinian leadership from the 1920s on“”left me chilled. Their rejection of any compromise, whether a partition of Palestine between its Jewish and Arab inhabitants or the creÂation of a binational state with political parity between the two communities, was deep-seated, consensual and consistent.
Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem and leader of the Palestinian naÂtional movement during the 1930s and 1940s, insisted throughout on a single Muslim Arab state in all of Palestine. The Palestinian Arab “street” chanted “Idbah al-Yahud” (slaughter the Jews) both during the 1936-1939 revolt against the British and in 1947, when Arab militias launched a campaign to destroy the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine. Husseini led both campaigns.
So when Yasir Arafat rejected Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s two-state proposals at Camp David in July 2000, and then President Clinton’s sweetened offer the followÂing December, my surprise was not excesÂsive. Nor was I astounded by the spectacle of masses of suicide bombers launched, with Arafat’s blessing, against Israel’s shopÂping malls, buses and restaurants in the second intifada, which erupted in SeptemÂber 2000. Each suicide bomber seemed to be a microcosm of what Palestine’s Arabs had in mind for Israel as a whole. Arafat’s rejectionism and, after his death, the election of Hamas to dominance in the PalesÂtinian national movement, persuaded me that no two-state solution was in the offing and that the Palestinians, as a people, were bent, as they had been throughout their history, on “recovering” all of Palestine.
[…]
It has become clear to me that from its start the struggle against the Zionist enterprise wasn’t merely a national conflict between two peoples over a piece of territory but also a religious crusade against an infidel usurper. As early as Dec. 2, 1947, four days after the passage of the partition resolution, the scholars of Al Azhar University proclaimed a “worldwide jihad in defense of Arab Palestine” and deÂclared that it was the duty of every Muslim to take part.
[…]
For all its economic, political, scientific and cultural achievements and military prowess, Israel, at 60, remains profoundly insecure””for there can be no real security for the Jewish state, surrounded by a surgÂing sea of Muslims, in the absence of peace.