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"The language used by Morris was particularly shocking for its racist undertones. In a 2004 interview with Ha'aretz, he described the Arab world as "barbarian" and the Palestinians as wild animals who had to be locked up in "something like a cage". Morris's personal journey is interesting to note because it mirrors the journey of Israeli society at large from the heady days of the Oslo accords to the dark pessimism of the second intifada.
Against this background, I must confess, I had low expectations of Morris's new book on the 1948 war. I expected it to be history with a political agenda, to display prejudice against the Arabs and partiality towards the Jews. But I was in for a pleasant surprise. This is Benny Morris at his best: immensely well informed, thorough, careful in the use of evidence, thoughtful and thought-provoking. While the entire book is underpinned by formidable scholarship and 72 pages of meticulous endnotes, it is presented in a fluent and readable style. Morris has used the full panoply of secondary and primary sources to produce a lively, absorbing and fast-moving narrative history of the war. All in all, it is a most impressive achievement of original research and synthesis."
Avi Shlaim praises a study of Israel's first armed conflict, 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris, that confronts national myths head on
Saturday May 31, 2008
The Guardian
 |  Buy 1948 at the Guardian bookshop |
by Benny Morris
524pp, Yale, £19.99"Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation," wrote Ernest Renan, the 19th-century French philosopher. Israel is no exception. Nineteen forty-eight was a seismic year in the history of the Jewish people and that of the modern Middle East. It witnessed the birth of Israel and its first war with the Arabs. Israelis call it "the war of independence"; Arabs call it the nakba or the catastrophe. The literature on this conflict by Zionist and pro-Zionist writers is vast, but it also incorporates a number of myths. Like most nationalist versions of history, this literature tends to be one-sided, selective, demonising of the enemy, and self-congratulatory.
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