Walid Khalidi on Morris’ 1948

“Should the olives know who planted them… their oil will turn to tears.” Courtesy of Hanzala Art

Every now and then I come across something so beautifully eloquent, logical, powerful, rational and affirmative that it makes me happy that I was lucky enough to be enlightened by it; and makes me wish I had the intelligence to say it myself.

This below is what I have been trying to articulate for a while as the best response to Benny Morris and his nonsensical racist hodgepodge of explanations, justifications and exonerations for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948. From Walid Khalidi’s “Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine” in the Autumn 1988 issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

“Morris, for example, unequivocally and commendably confirms the death of the (albeit long-deceased) Arab evacuation orders. But along with the others he views the Palestinian exodus in an historical vacuum. To be sure, he mentions discussions before 1948 in the highest Zionist circles of the “transfer” (euphemism for expulsion) of the Arab population, but he sees no link between this and Plan Dalet. He regards the obvious linear dynamic binding together the successive military operations of Plan D as fragments in an, as it were, cubic configuration accidentally related to one another only through their joint occurrence in the dimension of time.

“From his perspective, no connection exists between the imperative to “transfer” the Arab population and seize its lands and the imperative to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of Jews it was planned to bring to the new Jewish state. Morris bravely admits the evacuation through force or fear of the bulk of the 369 Palestinian villages, which he meticulously lists (see Appendix D below). But he subliminally places the moral burden of this, not on the invader, but on the invaded, who by resisting or panicking brought permanent exile upon themselves. If their villages were blown up in order to prevent the return of their inhabitants and to parcel out their farms among existing Jewish colonies and new Jewish immigrants, this was only as an afterthought, an extemporized innovation, a lightning brainwave with no ideological, attitudinal, motivational, or strategic antecedents.”