Benny Morris: “The Iranian nuclear program is Netanyahu’s obsession. And that of many Israelis, myself included.”

While certain historical truths are too often silenced, stating them does not necessarily mean taking on the role of demystifier. The great merit of this interview with Benny Morris, first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on June 20, 2025 [on the eve of the US attack], is that it illustrates how accurate and lucid historical work can lead to salutary political clarifications. As the war with Iran raged, the Israeli historian, a leading figure among the “new historians” of the 1980s and author of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949^[1] – a pioneering work on the causes of the Palestinian exodus – revisited the roots of the Middle East conflict and the myths surrounding it.

 

 

It could be that you have to go into a shelter during our conversation.

Benny Morris: I should, but I prefer not to.

How will Israel proceed in Iran?

BM: Israel will intensify its attacks on Iranian government institutions and public infrastructure. Certain actions, such as the destruction of oil facilities on Kharg Island and in the southwest, have not yet been taken. As we know, hundreds of thousands of people are already fleeing Tehran. Perhaps much of the population expects that Israel will do these things.

Is Israel aiming for a regime change?

BM: I think so. But I consider it unlikely. The regime is very strong and very repressive. It is not like that of the Shah, which ultimately collapsed like a house of cards when large public demonstrations occurred.

Some Israeli voices say that too much is at stake for Israel in this new war.

BM: Israel has gotten used to rocket attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah; their rockets carry thirty or fifty kilograms of explosives, but Iranian rockets carry about 500 or even 2000 kilograms of explosives.

Are you expecting a longer war?

BM: There will be international pressure on Israel to end this war. It depends on the USA, that’s the only international pressure Israel cares about. The nuclear project, which appears to be Israel’s main target, has apparently not yet been significantly damaged. The facilities are widely dispersed, large installations in Natanz, Fordow, and other places are underground, and it’s difficult to actually destroy them. Israel probably asked Trump, who is unreliable in every way, to deal with these facilities that Israel cannot easily destroy.^[2]

Some claim, predictably, that Netanyahu wants to distract from Gaza.

BM : That’s nonsense. One could argue that Netanyahu prolonged the war in Gaza over the past 19 months to stay in power and prevent new elections, but this is a different matter. This is about Netanyahu’s obsession: the Iranian nuclear project. And not only he was obsessed with it – many Israelis, like myself, were too. The Israelis recently received information that the Iranians had made progress in uranium enrichment and could soon reach the critical phase where this uranium can be turned into warheads.

Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza?

BM: I’m not a genocide researcher, but together with Dror Ze’evi, I wrote a book about the Turkish genocide against Armenians, Greeks, and Syrians between 1894 and 1924. I know what a genocide looks like. A genocide must be organized by the state, systematic, and targeted. There must be the intention to actually destroy a people. None of that exists regarding the Palestinians, except perhaps in a few Israeli ministers. The Israeli airstrikes target Hamas fighters. It’s known that they hide among civilian infrastructure, which is why other people are killed as well, something that is even allowed under international law. The question of proportionality then arises.

There’s almost nothing left of Gaza.

BM: There are 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, two-thirds of the buildings are either completely or partially destroyed, but people are living in tent cities and among the ruins – the aim of Israeli attacks is not to kill them. The images never show Hamas fighters, only women and children, which is a bit strange since Israel has killed about 20,000 Hamas fighters. You also never see Hamas fighters with weapons killing Israeli soldiers. You simply never see them. And it’s hardly mentioned anymore that Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killed 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, and abducted another 250.

You told Haaretz that the hearts of Israelis are being prepared for genocide.

BM: That has to do with the spirit of the country and what has happened here in recent decades since the Right came to power and began dominating the education system in various ways, especially since October 7. People are being conditioned to view Palestinians as subhumans, and this dehumanization is a necessary precondition for eventual genocide. The Nazis dehumanized the Jews and then killed them. The Turks dehumanized the Armenians and Greeks and then killed them. At the same time, this reflects the conditioning of Palestinians toward Israelis. Palestinians now view Israelis as subhumans or demons, a mix of omnipotent and weak beings. They’ve done this since the beginning of the Zionist project in the 1880s, intensified after 1948 and 1967. So there is a parallel process of dehumanization on both sides. The Israelis are more powerful, but Hamas is a genocidal organization.

As one of the New Historians, you began addressing the flight and expulsion of Palestinians by Jewish militias during the founding of the state in the 1980s. In the 1947–1948 war, about 700,000 Arabs were displaced. But in your recently published book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, you precisely show that the Zionists did not actually have a plan to expel the Arabs. So what happened?

BM: The Zionist movement never had an official policy or program to expel the Arabs. But among Zionist leaders, there were considerations of resettlement, which essentially amounted to expulsion. This was triggered in the mid-1930s by a number of developments, including the growing antisemitism in Europe, which made the creation of a safe haven for Jews more urgent. Between 1936 and 1939, the Arab Revolt occurred, making Palestine unsafe for incoming Jewish refugees. In 1936, the British sent a commission to Palestine – the Peel Commission. It proposed partitioning Palestine into a small Jewish state next to a larger Arab one. Furthermore, the commission recommended a transfer, in essence, the expulsion of Palestinians from the territory designated for Jewish sovereignty.

So the British commission proposed expelling about 200,000 Palestinians from the territory where the small Jewish state, roughly 20% of Palestine’s land, was to be established?

BM: They said the logical solution was to resettle the Arabs from the Jewish state. We’re talking about 1,250 Jews and 250,000 Arabs. Essentially, the expulsion of Arabs from the small Jewish state’s territory. After the British endorsed the idea of transferring Palestinians out of the emerging Jewish state, Ben-Gurion and Weizmann said: if the British, who are a democratic and enlightened country, can say this, we can agree with it too. So there was this line of thinking before 1948, though it never became official policy, no one formally supported it, but in the private letters and writings of Ben-Gurion and Weizmann, you can find support for the idea of transferring Arabs.

Then the Arabs attacked the Yishuv.

BM: In 1948, Palestinian Arabs attacked first, then the Arab states attacked the Jews. And the thinking was that it would be good if the Arabs fled, then a Jewish state could be formed with as few hostile Arabs in its midst as possible.

Why did the British pro-Zionist stance change at the start of WWII?

BM:

People like Churchill remained pro-Zionist, but under Chamberlain, the British government turned against Zionism around 1936/37. Britain faced three aggressive rising powers challenging the empire – Germany, Japan, and Italy. Against that backdrop, they wanted to end the Arab revolt and neutralize Arab hostility toward Britain. The Arabs should not side with the fascist powers. In 1939, Britain issued a White Paper declaring restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine. They limited immigration to 15,000 Jews per year over five years, so a maximum of 75,000, and thereafter, any further immigration would require Arab approval, which would never come. This effectively meant that from that point on, there would be an Arab majority in the country. A second clause in the White Paper stated that the majority would determine the character of the land and gain independence within ten years. So they promised the Arabs independence in an Arab-majority country within a decade.

How much land in Palestine was privately owned by Arabs in 1947? Some claim the Jews stole land.

BM: This lie needs to stop. The land accumulated by Jews between the start of the Zionist movement in the 1880s and 1948 was bought from Arabs. As they began buying land, prices rose, so more Arabs wanted to sell. In 1948, about 7% of Palestine’s landmass was privately owned by Jews. Arab propaganda likes to imply that the remaining 93% belonged to Arabs, but that’s nonsense. Arabs owned somewhere between 20 and 30% of the landmass; the rest was state land—before 1917 under the Ottoman Empire, then under British Mandate from 1918 to 1948. In 1948, Israel conquered privately owned Palestinian land, land designated in the UN partition plan of November 1947 for Arab sovereignty, and also some Arab territory.

When do you date the beginning of Palestinian Arab nationalism?

BM: Palestinian nationalism began in July 1920. The French conquered Damascus and then governed Syria and Lebanon. From then on, Arabs living in Palestine stopped viewing themselves as southern Syrians. Until then, no one had talked about Palestinians – there was no such term. The Arabs in Palestine understood their development was linked to Zionism. From that moment on, a distinct Palestinian-Arab nationalism emerged, as opposed to Syrian nationalism, which was more pan-Arab. It took decades for the Palestinian masses to see themselves as Palestinians. Before that, they saw themselves as residents of Haifa, as Arabs, as Muslims, but not necessarily as Palestinian Arabs. Although they increasingly became the elite of Palestine from July 1920, they began thinking in terms of a Palestinian movement – there was the 1936–39 revolt against the British, and in 1947/48, a Palestinian-Arab national movement emerged. The term “Palestinians” only became common in the 1960s.

What about the memory of 800,000 Jews who fled Arab countries?

BM:  It’s often said that Jews supported Zionism and therefore left.

But there were pogroms against Jews.

BM: In 1948, there were pogroms in Syria and Bahrain, Libya, and Morocco. In Egypt and Iraq, there was major persecution of Jews, and of course a pogrom in Yemen. But I don’t see much discussion of this. There was also a pull factor. The Jews in Palestine, i.e., the leadership, wanted Jews from Arab states to come because they lacked labor. The labor force they had hoped for was murdered by the Nazis and their allies during WWII and the Holocaust, so they turned to Jews in Arab countries, whom they hadn’t really wanted in 1948. But 80–90% of the Jews came to Israel because they had nowhere else to go.

What about the Arab archives? Have they been opened?

BM: The Arab archives about 1948 are closed, even to Arab researchers. The Jordanian Hashemite royal archive likely has a lot of material, as they were trained by the British and probably preserved it. Elsewhere, they may not have kept records, because they would show their armies were incompetent.

The massacre at Deir Yassin, committed by Zionist dissidents, has become a symbol of the Nakba. Does it have a paradigmatic character for what was done to the Arab population?

BM: It’s not paradigmatic. There were massacres in several dozen Arab villages. One was Deir Yassin. The number killed there by right-wing dissident groups was around 100. They were killed in battle; some were massacred afterward. During the 1948 war, Israel captured about 400 Arab villages. In 20–25 of them, there were massacres. In the rest, people mostly fled. But Arabs like to use Deir Yassin as a symbol of the Nakba because it supposedly proves the Jews were murderers. 700,000 fled, not because of massacres but because they were afraid and their leaders gave them no guidance. The British government and Arab states claimed 250 people were massacred in Deir Yassin. Later, Arab researchers showed it was around 100. But everyone had an interest in inflating the number. The British disliked the Irgun and the Stern Group, who had killed British soldiers during the revolt. The Haganah also wanted to paint their enemies as monsters.

Why were your objectively researched studies on the founding of the state and the Palestinian refugee problem only recently translated into German, while Ilan Pappé’s theses about supposed ethnic cleansing have been widely circulated for years?

BM: That has to do with the overall atmosphere. It’s not just Ilan Pappé, it’s also Rashid Khalidi’s book about the so-called war against the Palestinians. I believe these are taught in universities. Pappé’s books are full of lies and false claims. And Khalidi’s book, in my view, is a distorted description of what happened. I think my books are balanced in that I believe I understand both sides.

Is Israel currently witnessing the final end of a possible two-state solution?

BM: It would be the only solution offering both sides some measure of justice. But it will never happen because the Palestinian-Arab national movement has always opposed a two-state solution. They want all of Palestine. The Jews deserve no part of it. And on the Israeli side, most people increasingly don’t want a two-state solution either. They fear a Palestinian state would be run by Hamas.

Some dream of a binational state.

BM: The binational state may exist in the minds of people in Paris cafés, but multiculturalism doesn’t work here. The Arabs don’t want Jews here, especially not Jews who are richer, better educated, and more powerful. This idea was supported by a few hundred intellectuals, like Martin Buber or Gershom Scholem. A few tried to find Arabs willing to join them, but they never found them.

What is the plan for Gaza?

BM: The Israeli government wants the Arabs to leave voluntarily. But it wouldn’t be voluntary. They live in such horrible conditions that it wouldn’t be a free choice. Hamas doesn’t want people to leave. And no one wants them. Not the Egyptians, who could have given them part of the Sinai, not the Jordanians, not the Lebanese, and no one else. Unfortunately, they’ll be stuck in Gaza. It will take years to clear the rubble and even longer to rebuild everything.

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Interview by Tania Martini, for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung [FAZ], June 20, 2025.

Benny Morris is an Israeli historian born in 1948, known for his central role in the “new historians” movement, which challenged the official version of the birth of the State of Israel. He is particularly noted for his research on the Palestinian exodus of 1948, which he documented using Israeli archives. His major work, ‘The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949’, published in 1988, is considered an authoritative account. A specialist in the Arab-Israeli wars and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, his intellectual journey, marked by ideological shifts, makes him a controversial yet essential figure in the Israeli historian landscape.