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Historian Benny Morris has published an updated version of his landmark 1988 book on the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem. The new material he has uncovered, he says, indicates that Israeli soldiers were involved in more massacres of Arabs and other war crimes in the 1948 War of Independence than previously believed. In the article below, Morris details his research regarding one alleged massacre site, at what is today Kibbutz Nahsholim, in May 1948.
In all, Morris says he has found evidence of about two dozen cases of massacre and numerous other acts of arbitrary killing, and about 12 cases of rape. However, in a recent interview with the Ha'aretz daily, Morris argued that the total of fewer than 800 Arabs killed in war crimes was 'peanuts' in comparison to atrocities committed by other people, even in recent decades, in similar civil wars: 'When you take into account that there was a bloody civil war here and that we lost an entire 1 percent of our population, you find that we behaved well.' Morris also claimed that David Ben- Gurion covered up for those involved in the massacres and added that Ben-Gurion was 'a transferist,' someone who recognized that it was 'necessary' to uproot 700,000 Palestinians from the incipient sovereign Israel - because 'without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.' Indeed, Morris argued that Ben-Gurion erred in not forcibly removing all the Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and Israel itself, and that should Israel again find itself under existential threat, such expulsion 'will be justified.' Despite espousing such sentiments, Morris, who was jailed for refusing army service in the territories, insists he always has regarded himself as left-wing. But he says that those who have claimed to find proof of this in his historical writings have failed to appreciate his objectivity and detachment. For many, though, Morris's scholarship - as exemplified in this article on the events at Tantura - may henceforth be perceived in an entirely new context. Between Kibbutz Nahsholim and Moshav Dor, on the Mediterranean coast some 30 kilometers south of Haifa, a dirt parking lot serves visitors to the adjacent beach. Beneath its off- white, dusty surface, by some palm trees,...