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Expulsions in Israel's War of Independence Were Acts of Self-Defense

(National Interest) Benny Morris - In the circumstances of 1948, when the Palestinian Arabs and then the surrounding Arab states assaulted the Jewish community in Palestine-Israel, and threatened it with annihilation (that's how the Jews at the time, three years after the Holocaust, saw it, and the Arabs reinforced this view when, in the course of that war they expelled the Jews from, and razed to the ground, every site they conquered), the Jewish defense forces had every right to expel Palestinians from the villages which served as their military bases (much as the kibbutzim served as the Jews' military bases). The expulsions, where they occurred - and most of the 700,000 Arabs who were uprooted in that war were not expelled, but simply fled in face of the flail of war - were acts of self-defense. When facing the choice between expelling your attacker or being slaughtered - my preference remains expelling the other. The writer is a professor of history in the Middle East Studies Department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
2014-11-14 00:00:00
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