40 Facts About Benny Morris

Benny Morris was a professor of history in the Middle East Studies department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in the city of Beersheba, Israel.

Benny Morris is a member of the group of Israeli historians known as the "New Historians," a term Morris coined to describe himself and historians Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe and Simha Flapan.

Benny Morris was born on 8 December 1948 in kibbutz Ein HaHoresh, the son of Jewish immigrants from the United Kingdom.

Benny Morris's father, Ya'akov Morris, was an Israeli diplomat, historian, and poet, while his mother, Sadie Morris, was a journalist.

Benny Morris later accompanied his parents to New York, where his father was an envoy in Israel's foreign service.

Benny Morris served in the Israel Defense Forces as an infantryman, including in the Paratroopers Brigade, from 1967 to 1969.

Benny Morris saw action on the Golan Heights front during the Six-Day War and served on the Suez Canal during the War of Attrition.

Benny Morris was wounded in 1969 by an Egyptian shell in the Suez Canal area and was discharged from active service four months later, but continued to serve in the military reserve until 1990.

Benny Morris completed his undergraduate studies in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and received a doctorate in modern European history from the University of Cambridge.

Benny Morris served in the 1982 Lebanon War as an army reservist, taking part in the Siege of Beirut in a mortar unit.

Benny Morris was sentenced to three weeks in military prison and was imprisoned for 19 days, with the remaining two deducted for good behavior.

Benny Morris covered the 1982 Lebanon War for The Jerusalem Post, a war he fought in as a reservist.

Benny Morris found evidence that there had been expulsions in some cases.

Benny Morris believes they failed to read his book with moral detachment, assuming that when he described Israeli actions as cruel or as atrocities, he was condemning them.

Benny Morris told Shavit that his views changed in 2000 after the Palestinian rejection of President Clinton's peace accords and the beginning of the Second Intifada.

Benny Morris had originally viewed the First Intifada as a legitimate uprising against foreign occupation, and was imprisoned for refusing to serve in the occupied territories as a reservist.

Benny Morris told Shavit that he still describes himself as being left-wing because of his support for the two-state solution, but he believes his generation will not see peace in Israel.

Benny Morris's work has been criticised by Arab writers for failing to act on the evidence he found of forced evictions.

Benny Morris claimed that as soon as the Palestinians did have rights, Israel would no longer be a Jewish state, and that it would descend into intercommunal violence with Jews ultimately becoming a persecuted minority and those who can emigrating.

Benny Morris argues that there was no centralised expulsion policy as such, but expulsions were ordered by the Israeli high command as needed.

Benny Morris was unable to find out why another 46 villages were abandoned.

Benny Morris writes that the contents of the new documents substantially increase both Israeli and Palestinian responsibility for the refugee problem, revealing more expulsions and atrocities on the Israeli side, and more orders from Arab officials to the Palestinians to leave their villages, or at least to send their women and children away.

Benny Morris writes that his conclusions are unlikely to please either Israeli or Palestinian propagandists, or "black-or-white historians".

In 1948, Benny Morris gives a detailed account of the war between various factions that year that caused the creation of the modern state of Israel.

Benny Morris argues that Morris overestimates Israel's military strength, and disagrees with Morris about the aims of King Abdullah of Jordan.

Benny Morris contends that there is no two-state solution to the Middle East crisis, and that the one-state solution is not viable because of Arab unwillingness to accept a Jewish national presence in the Middle East and cultural differences including less Arab respect for human life and rule of law.

Benny Morris suggests the possibility of something like a three-state solution in the form of a Palestinian confederation with Jordan.

Avi Shlaim, retired professor of international relations at the University of Oxford, and himself a New Historian, writes that Benny Morris investigated the 1948 exodus of the Palestinians "as carefully, dispassionately, and objectively as it is ever likely to be", and that The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem is an "outstandingly original, scholarly, and important contribution" to the study of the issue.

Many of Benny Morris's critics cling to the tenets of "Old History", the idea of an Israel born untarnished, a David fighting the Arab Goliath, Shlaim writes.

Benny Morris argues that these ideas are simply false, created not by historians but by the participants in the 1948 war, who wrote about the events they had taken part in without the benefit of access to Israeli government archives, which were first opened up in the early 1980s.

Norman Finkelstein, Nur Masalha and others argue that Benny Morris has been too soft on the Israelis, often ignoring the force of his own evidence.

Efraim Karsh alleges that Benny Morris has distorted source material, an allegation not accepted by other historians.

Efraim Karsh, professor of Mediterranean Studies at King's College London, writes that Benny Morris engages in what Karsh calls "five types of distortion".

Benny Morris expects his readers to take on trust his assertions that fundamental contradictions exist between published accounts and the underlying documents.

Benny Morris is simply not what he makes himself out to be, a trained historian.

Benny Morris has been criticised by Norman Finkelstein and Nur Masalha.

Benny Morris holds to his conclusion that there was no transfer policy.

Benny Morris wrote a review critical of Ilan Pappe's book A History of Modern Palestine for The New Republic.

Benny Morris says it subjugates history to political ideology, and "contains errors of a quantity and a quality that are not found in serious historiography".

Replying, Pappe accused Benny Morris of using mainly Israeli sources, and disregarding Arab sources, which he cannot read.