For the past several years, Benny Morris’ views of the Israeli-Arab conflict have grown increasingly bellicose and extremist. But in his recent NY Times op-ed, he’s taken them to their apotheosis, advocating an Israeli nuclear strike against Iran. Upon the likely failure of a conventional attack against Iran, he urges Israel:
to escalate and use the only means available that will actually destroy the Iranian nuclear project: Israel’s own nuclear arsenal.
I’m not even sure someone as nuts as Michael Ledeen has done so. John Hagee came within a hair’s breath of doing so. These two are certifiable right-wing lunatics. What’s Morris’ excuse?
If you read Morris’ best work, it is deeply-infused with references to archival sources used to document his overarching arguments. Not so here. Everything is opinion and not based on any sources:
ISRAEL will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven month…
“Almost surely?” Says who? A general? A prime minister? A defense minister? Sy Hersh? Benny, if you want to make outrageous statements at least give us some reason to believe you’re not pulling this out of your a…denoids.
And listen to the presumption of this statement:
Israel’s leaders, from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert down, have all explicitly stated that an Iranian bomb means Israel’s destruction…
I have read the Israeli press regularly on this subject for the last year or more and while I have heard all manner of bellicosity toward Iran, I have never quite heard Olmert or any centrist Israeli politician say what Morris claims they’ve ALL said.
Benny Morris KNOWS to the core of his being that Iran only wants a bomb so it can use it against Israel. What is the basis for such knowledge? Has Iran ever said it would do so? Has Iran ever implied it would do so? No one denies that the Iranian regime hates Israel, just as no one denies that Israel hates Iran. But there is a big difference between hating a nation’s government and being willing to use a nuclear weapon to eradicate it. It seems to me Morris has made an awfully big jump without a parachute on this one.
In the following passage, Morris seems to have morphed into Gen. Curtis LeMay, a man who was willing to sacrifice millions of American lives to destroy the Soviet menace:
The Iranians will also likely retaliate by attacking Israel’s cities with ballistic missiles (possibly topped with chemical or biological warheads); by prodding its local clients, Hezbollah and Hamas, to unleash their own armories against Israel; and by activating international Muslim terrorist networks against Israeli and Jewish — and possibly American — targets worldwide…
To me, it borders on insanity for someone like Morris to be willing to accept the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of Israelis for the sake of destroying Iran’s nuclear weapons capability. Especially when there is neither a guarantee that Iran will succeed in its effort, nor any certainty that Iran would ever use such a weapon against Israel if it did succeed. In effect, Morris countenances the death of millions of Iranians and Israelis on the off chance that Iran might someday use its bomb against Israel.
Note below the typically racist and unsupported view that Muslim extremists do not value life and are willing to sacrifice their own citizens on the altar of Jew-hatred:
Given the fundamentalist, self-sacrificial mindset of the mullahs who run Iran…
And the equally racist and unsupported notion that we westerners are the only ones who truly value life and can be dealt with “rationally:”
Israel knows that deterrence may not work as well as it did with the comparatively rational men who ran the Kremlin and White House during the cold war.
To me, the idea Morris proposes here–that Iran is NOT a nation with a set of rational national interests–is the height of folly and betrays Morris’ utter ignorance of anything to do with Iran. In fact, what particular expertise does he have in the field? None that I can see.
Gershom Gorenberg has also written a terrific critique of Morris’s essay and notes a few of the security threats that concern Iran and might lead it to want a nuclear weapon:
To its east, Iran has a Sunni-led country, Pakistan, that has nuclear arms. On its north is Russia; on its west is Israel. Besides nuclear powers, there is the old conventional threat of Turkey and the possibility that Iraq may someday be reconstituted as a functioning country and a military power. Any Iranian nationalist, whether Shi’ite, Pahlavian, or Marxist, would consider seeking the bomb – unless offered other reassurances about his country’s security, in the form of regional and international agreements.
We do a tremendous disservice to our own cause and to our enemy when we presume their motives to be base and presume ourselves and our motives to be pure as the driven snow. I am sorry to say that Benny Morris has become a warmonger. Just because he, like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove, is willing to ride the big one to its target in Teheran, doesn’t mean the rest of Israel has to join him in his folly. I can only hope that cooler, more rational, and more cautious heads prevail in Tel Aviv and Washington.
Richard Silverstein,
I thank you for your article. It is refreshing to see sanity outside of the world image created by Benny Morris.
My take on Iran “What would you do if you were the president of Iran? What does Iran Want?”
http://straveler-myamerica.blogspot.com/2008/07/what-would-you-do-if-you-were-president.html
Benny Morris is the strangest human being alive. I can’t think of another example of a warmonger who has exposed the war crimes of his own country, admitted that they were wrong (in the sense that it’s wrong to kill innocent people or rape women) while simultaneously wishing that the ethnic cleansing had been more thorough. So it’s not surprising that he wrote this. He’s a moral nutcase.
What’s really despicable (but not surprising) is that the NYT carried this on their op ed page. Imagine them carrying a piece by some crazed lefty (I’ve read one or two) in favor of military strikes against Israel until they offer the Palestinians a fair and just solution. Why not let any crazy lunatic have their say?
Morris is a fine example of how you become your enemy if you fixate upon them and don’t move on – he is a modern nazi – a zio-nazi … and now he finds it within himself and within his radical movement to actively seek to commit mass-killings of people in the name of their own protection. Did not Pinchet also claim “terrorism” at every turn as he committed vicious murders and fascistic progroms against his own people for their “protection?” Morris’s rant – and the baffling decision by NY Times to run it – bespeaks of a terrible sickness plaguing the geopolitical situation in the Middle East. Truth has clearly been trampled and reasonable voices intimidated into silence or ignored as the steamroller (or IDF bulldozer) of “pre-emptive” warmaking ideology thunders ahead with their grand plan – and what is right be damned, what is justice be damned, what is best for particular nations (such as the U.S.) be damned, the lives of thousands (or even millions) be damned, all in the name of the grotesque lust for power by the Likkudnik/American neocon conspiracy and their helpers.
@stop_crazy_zionists: There is enough to object to in Morris’ essay w/o dragging in extraneous, irrelevant sloganeering like calling him a “zion-nazi.” I don’t mind attacking Morris–have at him. Just avoid the grandstanding please.
The only silver lining in Morris’s piece is that it reveals to fair-minded citizens of the world the insane delusions and barbaric assumptions of the Israeli warmongers.
I realize that Israeli media would like us to hate and despise anything the has to do with these evil Persians, but, in fact we have a lot of common ground. From a linguistic perspective alone, Persian has enriched the Hebrew language tremendously. Consider these Hebrew words which origniate from Persian:
ushpizin (the famous Sukkah guests) and ishpez (to hospitalize) – come from the Persian word meaning guest. Through the Greek it entered the English creating the words hospital, hospis, and hotel.
etrog – comes form the Persian word meaning green-yellowish.
boostan – a garden – comes from the combination of the Persian words “bo” – nice smell, and “stan” – place.
balagan – the untranslatable Hebrew slang word (closest would be “a mess”) – comes from the Persian bala-khana – the attic (lit. high room).
sarbal – overalls – is usually used in connection with sarbal tisa, air force pilots’ overalls – comes from the Persian word “sharval” meaning pants.
So, we have a real balagan here. Just imagine, the Israeli pilots who would be sent to bomb Iran would be wearing their sarbalim – an Iranian/Persian word…what a crazy world.
(This is just a partial list; we owe many other words to the Iranians).
Persians and Israeli Poeple H Faces
The following article is a good starting point for Persians and people of Israel start to talk together; war is not a sane solution.
”
The looming Iran-Israel confrontation has a seemingly deterministic quality to it. Listening to the politicians, one gets a sense that powers beyond our control are pulling us toward a 21st-century disaster. Yet a great deal of the force propelling us into confrontation is fueled by ignorance and dehumanization. Israel is demonized as “Little Satan,” while Iranians are portrayed as irrational Muslim extremists.
Indeed, mutual ignorance of our respective societies plays into the hands of the hard-line leaders who are calling for blood and destruction. They manipulate and distort; above all, they do everything to prevent us from recognizing that the enemy has a face.”
Please read the total article:
These enemies have faces
By Trita Parsi and Roi Ben-Yehuda
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1003236.html
no you only have to listen to or read Arab Muslim leaders who state and have stated clearly that there advantage is that they value and honor martyrdom in the pursuit of “resistance operations” and “strking the enemy” “killing the zionists”….
Iran has indeed over and over used bellicose language about wiping Israel off the map… you try and even state that it has not even “implied so”… lol!!! and then try the old moral equivocation –
“sure Iran hates Israel JUST AS Israel hates Iran”…
No Israel has not advocated wiping Iran off the map only preventing it from getting nukes to threaten to do as such to Israel…
It always amazes me the lenghts to which people like you will bend over backwards in moral equivocations and shadings to make a point.. it’s not enough to simply disagree with Morris and state that he has in your opinion go over the top – no it is imperative to tar and feather and demonstrate that he’s simply a lunatic
Ironically this lunatic has written the most extensive cited history of the 48 war which the far left always cites.. so to then paint him as a genocidal out of his mind nut one has to ask – well why is he stating how imperative it is for Israel to wipe out Iran’s potentical nucleur capabilities? Perhaps there is a reason….
@Shlomo Glickstein:
You’ve been reading too much MEMRI. That translation from Persian was faulty. First, “Iran” has not said this. An Iranian president, losing power by the minute, has stated that he wished Israel would disappear. He did not say Iran would wipe Israel off the map.
If you think what I wrote was strong you should read the hundreds of comments at the NYT site. They were equally if not more vehement.
I acknowledged in my post that Morris has written important works documenting Israel’s crimes against its Arab inhabitants in 1948. But I note that he was forced to simply admit what was in the archives. However, Morris now wishes that Israel had compouned its crimes by being even more systematic about its expulsion of the Arab population. In effect, he has documented war crimes and now says there should have been more of them. But at least this is an academic field in which he has some expertise.
He has no academic expertise regarding Iran. He doesn’t cite any experts or archival material or any source to justify his lunatic ranting. If this were the only piece he’d ever published he’d be laughed out of academia. Lucky for him, he has built some credibilty because of his previous work in a field about which he knows something.