Benny Morris

I read books, primary sources.

I've read over 2,000 books on this situation, including anti-Israel books, Ilan Pape, you know, just as much on the other side as Efraim Kars, Benny Morris, I.F. Stone, who was later...

Anti-Israel.

And so I get the idea of not getting bogged down in factoids, but factoids, as he said, and I'll mimic him, is important.

He goes on, I want to...

Yeah, and all of this, of course, erasing the work of the historian's

including the Israeli Zionist historian Benny Morris, that have detailed all of the false flags that were part of this mass expulsion, mythical mass expulsion of Jews from the Middle Eastern countries in the 40s.

Yes,

the famous Levon Affair, also known as Operation Susanna.

So, so I mean, w- there is enough chaos, enough books about the disastrous history of Zionism have been written.

You got the, the so-called new historians like Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, and all these guys that, that have shown us, you know, how Zionism is just a, a, a mixture of, again, just like communism, good intentions, corruption, bad ideas, cracking eggs for the greater good.

But when you crack those eggs, you're gonna have, you know, all kinds of issues.

So there is enough people, enough has been written, enough chaos, just like the Soviet Union.

So, I mean, there is enough chaos, enough books about the disastrous history of Zionism have been written.

You got the so-called new historians like Benny Morris, Ilian Pape, and all these guys that have shown us how Zionism is just a mixture of, again, just like communism, good intentions, corruption, bad ideas, cracking eggs for the greater good.

But when you crack those eggs, you're going to have, you know, all kinds of issues.

So there is enough people, enough has been written, enough chaos, just like the Soviet Union is happening, where maybe very soon we can put together the right ideas and have a Berlin Wall fall of moment for Zionism.

Well, can we talk about the whole greater Israel thing? Cause this is something that's always brought up and I'd like to know both of your thoughts on it because Jay, it sounds like one of the reasons you think they're not, they don't want to write a constitution is because there is a contingent of people within Israel that do want a greater Israel that do want Nile to Euphrates or some lesser version of that.

And we talked last time, Destiny, I asked about, you know, Benny Morris in his interview with Coleman Hughes was pointing out that the right wing kind of far right Ben Givier type voter.

more children than the liberal secular Israelis and that the demographic shifts are moving in such a way that that faction is going to gain more and more power.

And they seem to be the more pro greater Israel people, however you want to define that.

It's built into it.

Just like Benny Morris said in one of his real rare moments of lucidity, Benny Morris, he said that transfer, which was the euphemism for expulsion-

Mm-hmm

... transfer was, and now I'm quoting him.

Did that count as like expulsion or did that count as fleeing? I think that's the big challenge.

I know Benny Morris goes through this, is it in Righteous Victims where he tries to go through, you know, what, how, how many he thinks like fled versus were expelled.

But the, the reality is that trying to figure out like who fled versus who was expelled, it's actually a pretty difficult question.

I think that on a purely, if we were doing peace goat language, in an autistic sense, you would say that the, the majority of the people in the Nakba fled.

The battles between the Zionist militias and the Palestinian and Arab forces focused on strategic points, including the road that connected Tel Aviv, the time of settlement of Eastern European Jews who had come to escape persecution, and Jerusalem, the future road number one.

Two resources that will be helpful for you here, 1948 by Benny Morris, which is a military history of that war, goes into 1949 in the armistice.

I'm sure I'm out of cards, so I'll put a link in the description, as well as The War for Palestine, which is a collection of essays edited by Avi Schleim and Eugene Rogan.

Very helpful and breaks down even the movements of particular armies and what was going on in Iraq, what was going on in Syria, what was going on in Egypt and these other countries to give you more context as to the military occupations.

During this period, clashes between Zionist militias and Palestinian armed resistance and attacks on villages, especially Palestinian ones, led to the expulsion or forced flight of about 750,000 Palestinians out of the 1 million originally inhabiting today's Israel.

This is a so-called Nakba, the Arab term for catastrophe, which is still commemorated as such by Palestinians across the globe.

I'll put a link in the description to a review of a documentary I did for part one done by Al Jazeera on the Nakba, written and directed by a Palestinian, as well as the Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited by Benny Morris.

which is a very long text, which I still think is a definitive text on the refugee problem specifically, because he had access to all sorts of Israeli documents that no Palestinian is ever going to be given access to.

But the new historians...

It was an earth-shattering thing that Benny Morris, Ilan Pape, I forget the name of the others, that uncovered what happened in 1948.

It was such an earth-shattering thing because that was totally tucked away, intentionally so, to pretend like it never happened.

And then suddenly you have people coming and exposing what actually took place.