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January 08, 2004
Benny Morris redux
Roger and Allison are surprised by Benny Morris' latest opinions on the Palestinian-Israeli situation. Actually, Morris - formerly the poster child for revisionist Zionist history - has been re-revising his views since the start of Intifada II, but bloggers aren't the only ones who haven't caught up. Last summer Morris gave a talk at Berkeley which shocked the local leftist intelligentsia, leading to a heated Q&A after the lecture. Morris later said:
It?s left-wing, politically correct, Berkeley intolerance . . . I?ve lectured at Dartmouth and Middlebury and I didn?t encounter such a uniformity of intolerance.Also read Ben's comment.
UPDATE: Blogger Benjamin Kerstein has some very interesting commentary, in which he compares Morris' ideological journey to Tony Judt's.
What is most fascinating of all, however, is how the two men have, in essence, exchanged ideological positions in order to arrive at their conclusions. Judt, who has longstanding Zionist connections, including a stint as a Kibbutznik, has emerged as what can only be described as an anti-Zionist, as he now opposes outright the existence of a Jewish State in favor of a rather vaguely defined bi-national entity. Morris, a longtime Leftist whose books were among the first to recast Israeli historiography from what at the time was termed a “post-Zionist” point of view, has written for years of the Zionist movement and the Israeli state it founded from a position which was unmistakably critical, portraying Israel as, at best, a brutal, expansionist conqueror. He was and remains the most popular and most influential of the “post-Zionist” historians. Yet here is Morris in the pages of Israel’s most highbrow daily, read by all his intellectual peers, quite explicitly stating that . . . the right of the Jewish people to national existence is an inalienable one.Read the whole thing.
Judith | 01/08/04 at 11:46 AM | Categories: Competing narratives
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