There has already been much discussion in the blogosphere of the interview given by historian Benny Morris to Haaretz, since it appeared some days ago. I'm not going to excerpt it. It should be read in full. An adequate discussion of all the questions it raises cannot be encompassed in a blog post. I just want to argue for a distinction which Morris's discussion does not observe.
That is the distinction between justifying crimes committed in the foundation and initial defence of the state of Israel, more generally justifying the origin of the state of Israel, on the one hand, and justifying its continued existence, on the other. War crimes and crimes against humanity are not justifiable, on any side, as a matter of state or organizational policy. That is precisely one of the meanings the global human community legislates by designating them so. Therefore such crimes committed in the foundation of Israel or its defence cannot be justified retrospectively. If, as Morris argues, such crimes were, and had to be, a part of the foundation of the state of Israel - if Israel's very foundation, in other words, could not have happened without crimes of this kind - then the conclusion would have to be drawn that the foundation of the state was not justifiable at the time and so should not have happened. I leave this question open. It needs further thought. Or, at least, I want to think further about it. It's a conclusion I myself would find unwelcome, but I am not shocked by it. It is thinkable. And I don't know whether the premise, Benny Morris's premise - that it could not have been otherwise, the new state without the crimes committed to establish it - is indeed true. But in any event, his reasoning seems to be that, since the existence of the state of Israel is, for him, justified, anything that was necessarily done in bringing it into existence must also be justified. This is an unacceptable moral logic and cannot be allowed to go through.
At the same time, an opposite moral logic is also not acceptable: the logic, namely, that because Israel's original foundation was based (and perhaps necessarily) on grave moral crimes, its present and future existence cannot be justified - on the basis that grave crimes committed must be reversed. The question whether Israel now has a right to exist is not the same question as that of whether its initial foundation was justified. Consider that for the very greatest of crimes one can't say 'must be reversed'; because the greatest of crimes are, by their nature, irreversible. In fact, there's a sense in which virtually any crime above a certain (lowish) level of seriousness is irreversible. The Shoah, the destruction of two-thirds of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its accomplices, was not and is not reversible. The fates visited by European colonists and settlers upon the indigenous peoples of the Americas, or of Australasia - the dispossession, destruction, the genocidal killing - are irreversible. In cases like this, subsequent and/or contemporary efforts to redeem or make amends for what was done (as nothing, in truth, can redeem or make amends for them) have to aim at whatever combination of reparations, compensation, bringing the principal perpetrators to justice if they are still living, reconciliation and memorialization, may be judged to be fit and right in the prevailing circumstances.
Israel has been in existence for more than half a century and the Israeli Jews constitute a nation, with a right to national self-determination as valid as is the same right of the Palestinian people. A forcible expulsion of the Israeli Jews, or the forcible imposition upon them of a state they could not regard as their own, would be a new crime in itself and it could probably only be accomplished by a whole series of constituent crimes against humanity in the strict sense - a road down which sections of the Palestinian movement have already begun to travel.
The constraints upon a just overall solution are hereby defined: unless and until the two peoples are themselves agreeable to living within a common state, there must be two states, Palestine and Israel. That of course leaves all the problems which we know about intact and to be resolved. But, outside of the constraints of this solution, there lies an abyss.
(See also the Benny Morris piece in today's Guardian.)
