re:[Marxism] Exchange with Benny Morris in Counterpunch

["M. Junaid Alam" <mjunaidalam@xxxxxxxxxx>]

As someone who's written about Palestine for CP since I was 18, I'd like
to say I was never shocked by Morris' so-called revelation of his
genuine politics. The American left is so miserably weak on Palestine
traditionally - and still is - it tries desperately and pathetically to
cling to any sign and say, "Look - here are some respectable,
upstanding, honorable Israelis who we can cite in defending the
Palestinians so my liberal Zionist tea-time friends won't call me an
anti-Semite and disinvite me from their reading club." Morris' position
is a natural evolution of the viewpoint he put forth in 'Righteous
Victims', where the mountain of evidence he collected totally
contradicted his extremely mild conclusions about the Zionist project. I
for one shed no tears over Morris' "turn": now it's impossible for
Zionists to claim all the revisionist historians are merely biased
leftist traitors. Moreover there is nothing remarkable about Morris'
position, except from the jaundiced white liberal standpoint which
cannot concieve the notion of a Jewish racialist; Morris accepts the
conflict as a zero-sum game, lays out his base standard of Jewish ethnic
supremacy, and therefore views the Arab demographics as a cancerous
threat that must be excised and removed. He has clearly been brainwashed
and indoctrinated, like all Israelis, to believe there is some kind of
de jure status vis. Jews and historical Palestine, a position based not
really on any historical evidence - which for this purpose would be
pitifully scarce - but on notions of racial supremacy and contempt for
the Arabs, ie. the assumption of 'terra nullus', when it was obvious the
land was inhabited at the outset of the Zionist project.

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