Better in than out?
On the marginal utility of expelling Palestinians
Professor
is an absolute boss. He set up a Substack two months ago, and literally just reposts old content and what are essentially diary entries that must have taken him five minutes to write, and he has 3.4k subscribers already.
This is very inspiring for me obviously, but Prof. Morris has an even better claim to fame, which is that he is really the one man who looked at the events of 1947-8 square in the face, through the prism of tens of thousands of original documents, and came out the other side without giving in to the urge either to become a looney simp for Palestinian nationalism, or turn off his conscience. The mere words ‘Benny Morris’ are an almost failsafe incantation you can use to make cranks, imbeciles and dishonest interlocutors - whether they be on Team Israel or Team Palestine - identify themselves by frothing at the mouth, thus allowing you to make your excuses before your ears start to hurt.
There is one more thing Prof. Morris is famous for, namely his 2004 Haaretz interview where, as Israel was reeling from the Second Intifada, Morris discussed with a frankness that is rarely paralleled what it means to be an Israeli knowing both what Israelis and Palestinians had done to each other, and what they were doing to each other. It’s not long, so read it all, but the bit I want to talk about today is:
But I do not identify with Ben-Gurion. I think he made a serious historical mistake in 1948. Even though he understood the demographic issue and the need to establish a Jewish state without a large Arab minority, he got cold feet during the war. In the end, he faltered.
…
If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job. I know that this stuns the Arabs and the liberals and the politically correct types. But my feeling is that this place would be quieter and know less suffering if the matter had been resolved once and for all. If Ben-Gurion had carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country – the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River. It may yet turn out that this was his fatal mistake. If he had carried out a full expulsion – rather than a partial one – he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations.
In truth, Morris is mixing up two things here. For Ben Gurion to have expelled Arabs from the whole Land of Israel he would have first had to control the whole Land of Israel; so Morris is saying Israel should have conquered more land. It’s not clear, however, that they even could have. Gaza, certainly, could have been taken, but the Haganah tried to hold on to and retake the Gush Etzion block and failed. So, this seems to amount to a suggestion that the Yishuv army should have done better in the war. Well, yeah, I guess. However, later in the same interview, Morris makes clear that he means that Israel should have completed the ethnic cleansing of the territory it actually controlled:
But I am not a statesman. I do not put myself in his place. But as an historian, I assert that a mistake was made here. Yes. The non-completion of the transfer was a mistake.
…
The Israeli Arabs are a time bomb. Their slide into complete Palestinization has made them an emissary of the enemy that is among us. They are a potential fifth column. In both demographic and security terms they are liable to undermine the state. So that if Israel again finds itself in a situation of existential threat, as in 1948, it may be forced to act as it did then. If we are attacked by Egypt (after an Islamist revolution in Cairo) and by Syria, and chemical and biological missiles slam into our cities, and at the same time Israeli Palestinians attack us from behind, I can see an expulsion situation. It could happen. If the threat to Israel is existential, expulsion will be justified.
The context for Morris’s fears, as he indicates, was the horror Jewish Israelis felt during wave after wave of depraved suicide bombings as they saw high levels of support among Arab Israelis who apparently appreciated not at all the rights and economic advantages they had as Israeli citizens.1 Instead, they increasingly identified as Palestinians hostile to the very existence of an Israeli state, precisely at the time when Palestinian nationalism was disgracing itself with an orgy of senseless murder. Even worse, Arabs were continuing to outbreed Jews, threatening a reality where there would simply be too many to control, and they would burst out in an explosion of nationalist violence they were clearly working themselves up to.
Such a process seemed virtually inevitable. Morris knows his history and was sure it was going to happen. But it didn’t. First of all, this is what happened to the Arab birth rate:
At the same time as the collapse of the Arab fertility, the crest of nationalist radicalization unexpectedly peaked and then went into reverse. There are many indicators of this, but the most obvious is to compare what Benny Morris says with what actually happened among the Arab Israeli population when Israel was attacked from Gaza, and then repeatedly by Iran i.e. nothing. If you are on Israeli Telegram groups then you can still OD on videos of some ape-thing creature in Umm Al Fahum saying mad depraved things (just like if you go on pro-Pal telegram groups you can find teenagers in Afula saying equivalent things), but the reality is that Arab Israelis at large responded like this:
Now, the obvious response is that wouldn’t Israel nevertheless still be better off without Arabs? Weren’t there riots in Lod, isn’t Arab crime disproportionately high, aren’t there Arab towns it isn’t safe to walk in, isn’t the proportion of Arabs who are fiercely hostile to Israeli society disturbingly large, aren’t Israeli Arabs sometimes even involved in committing terrorist attacks? Yes. To be as clear as I can possibly be, yes, Israel would obviously be better off if its Arab population literally didn’t exist. You can restack that sentence. However, I am being precise, because the decision before us is not whether to push a button that will make Israeli Arabs dissolve into the ether or, with Walt Bismarck, to send them to Mars. The choice is to keep them here or to send them to some place on earth that actually exists and which they can be sent to.
So, with that said, what has happened with Palestinians who were expelled in 1947-48? First of all, their fertility has not declined at the same rate as the ones inside Israel. Not at all:
So, for every unit of Palestinian expelled in 1947-48, you have significantly more units of Palestinian today versus those not expelled in 1947-48. On top of that, the ones who were expelled are orders of magnitude more radical. I don’t need to belabour this point, because hasbarists themselves are always - accurately - telling us how deranged and bloodthirsty Palestinians are. Here’s a video, though. If you like it, I have a bunch more.
Therefore, if we combine quantity of Palestinians with level of radicalization, each additional Palestinian expelled in 1947-8 turns out not to have relieved Israel of a burden, but to have added to it significantly. I will be clear again. Morris is certainly right: it was necessary to expel hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1947-48 to make the demographics numbers add up and allow Israel to be viable. The question, however, is whether Israel would be have been better off expelling an additional n quantity of Palestinians who would have (a) had significantly more descendants and (b) would have had significantly more radical descendants, or whether it would have been better off expelling n fewer Palestinians to achieve the opposite result.
What in practice, has been the consequence of expelling the Palestinians? Well, in the first decades of the state’s existence it was repeated cross-border raids and massacres from Gaza and Yehuda/Shomron that could only finally be stopped by the conquest of these territories. How bad were these raids? Pretty bad:
February 1951 - Jamil Muhammad Mujarrab, a member of a Jordanian armed group, raped and murdered an Israeli girl in Jerusalem's Katamon neighborhood.[3]
Jan 1, 1952 - Seven gunmen attacked and killed a nineteen-year-old girl in her home, in the neighborhood of Beit Yisrael, in Jerusalem. On investigation, the Mixed Armistice Commission found that the case against Jordanian infiltrators could not be substantiated.
December 31, 1951/ Jan 1 1952 - a rape-murder occurred. The MAC investigating officer, Major Loreaux, reported that the body of the girl, Leah Feistinger,[4] had been found hidden in a cave about a mile from the Jordan border, the girl had been raped, murdered, and her face had been mutilated. While it was believed by Israeli police that this atrocity had been committed by Jordanians, they did not find evidence of an infiltration. The case had not been discussed by the Commission. Major Loreaux expressed the opinion that the Israeli police would have a better chance of finding the killer than the Arabs would.[5] A “reprisal raid” carried out at Beit Jalla on January 6, 1952 was attributed to Israelis.
Apr 14, 1953 - Infiltrators tried for the first time to infiltrate Israel by sea, but were unsuccessful. One of the boats was intercepted and the other boat escaped.
June 7, 1953 - A youngster was killed and three others were wounded, in a shooting attacks on residential areas in southern Jerusalem.
June 9, 1953 - Gunmen attacked a farming community near Lod, and killed one of the residents. The gunmen threw hand grenades and sprayed gunfire in all directions. On the same night, another group of terrorists attacked a house in the town of Hadera. This occurred a day after Israel and Jordan signed an agreement, with UN mediation, in which Jordan undertook to prevent terrorists from crossing into Israel from Jordanian territory.
June 10, 1953 - Attackers infiltrating from Jordan destroyed a house in the farming village of Mishmar Ayalon.
June 11, 1953 - Gunmen attacked a young couple in their home in Kfar Hess, and shot them to death.
Sept 2, 1953 - Attackers infiltrated from Jordan, and reached the neighborhood of Katamon, in the heart of Jerusalem. They threw hand grenades in all directions. No one was hurt.
October 12, 1953 - Yehud attack - A Palestinian Fedayeen squad threw a grenade into a civilian house in Yehud, killing a woman and her two children.
Mar 17, 1954 - Scorpion Pass Massacre - Bandits ambushed a bus traveling from Eilat to Tel Aviv, and opened fire at short range when the bus reached the area of Ma'ale Akrabim (Scorpion Pass) in the northern Negev. In the initial ambush, the bandits killed the driver and wounded most of the passengers. The bandits then boarded the bus, and shot some of the passengers, one by one. Eleven passengers were murdered. Survivors recounted how the murderers spat on the bodies and abused them. The massacre was apparently a reprisal raid conducted by members of a Bedouin tribe expelled from the al-Auja region of the Sinai three and a half years earlier.[6][7][8]
Jan 2, 1955 - Gunmen attacked and killed 2 hikers in the Judean Desert.
Mar 24, 1955 - Gunmen threw hand grenades and opened fire on a crowd at a wedding in the farming community of Patish, in the Negev. A young woman was killed, and eighteen people were wounded in the attack.
August 29, 1955 - Beit Oved attack - a Palestinian Fedayeen squad fired small arms at a group of Israeli laborers, killing four and injuring ten.[citation needed]
Apr 7, 1956 - A resident of Ashkelon was killed in her home, when attackers threw three hand grenades into her house. Two members of kibbutz Givat Haim were killed, when terrorists opened fire on their car, on the road from Plugot Junction to Mishmar HaNegev. There were further hand grenade and shooting attacks on homes and cars, in areas such as Nitzanim and Ketziot. One person was killed and three others wounded.
Apr 11, 1956 - Gunmen opened fire on a synagogue full of children and teenagers, in the farming community of Shafir. Three children and a youth worker were killed on the spot, and five were wounded, including three seriously.
Apr 29, 1956 - Killing of Roi Rotberg and Moshe Dayan's eulogy killed by Egyptian-backed Fedayeen, 21 years of age, from Nahal Oz.
August 16, 1956 - Egged bus 391 ambush - a Palestinian Fedayeen squad carries out an attack on an Israeli civilian passenger bus traveling from Tel-Aviv to Eilat. Three Israeli soldiers and a female civilian passenger were shot dead by the attackers who ambushed the bus. In addition, three other civilian passengers were injured in the attack.
Sept 12, 1956 - Ein Ofarim killings - Attackers killed three Druze guards at the Ein Ofarim facility, in the Arabah region.
Sept 23, 1956 - Ramat Rachel shooting attack - Gunmen opened fire from a Jordanian position, killing four archaeologists and wounded sixteen others near kibbutz Ramat Rachel.
Sept 24, 1956 - Attackers killed a girl in the fields of the farming community of Aminadav, near Jerusalem.
Oct 4, 1956 - Negev desert road ambush - A squad of 10 armed Palestinian Arab militants, who infiltrated into Israel from Jordan, ambush and kill five Israeli construction workers in Sdom.
Oct 9, 1956 - Two workers were killed in an orchard of the youth village, Neve Hadassah, in the Sharon region.
However, while the 1967 war and subsequent occupation put a temporary stop to this by taking away fellahin bases, it didn’t put a stop to it for long because Palestinians then started attacking from Lebanon, which, again, only finally ended following an Israeli invasion. How bad was this? Pretty bad:
During the 1970s and the early 1980s, Israel suffered attacks from PLO bases in Lebanon, such as the Avivim school bus massacre in 1970, the Maalot massacre in 1974 (where Palestinian militants massacred 21 school children) and the Nahariya attack led by Samir Kuntar in 1979, as well as a terrorist bombing by Ziad Abu Ein that killed two Israeli 16-year-olds and left 36 other youths wounded during the Lag BaOmer celebration in Tiberias.
As its price for eventually putting an end to this slaughter, Israel’s occupation created Hizb’Allah.
All of this is the consequence, not of Israel failing to expel enough Palestinians, but precisely because it expelled Palestinians. The unsurprising truth is that refugees who exist outside of a stable political order are a constant source of chaos for everyone around them, and most specifically the people over the border who expelled them. You can respond that this is still better than Israel not expelling the Palestinians at all and being drowned in an un-endable civil war and, to repeat again, you would be correct. The point I am making is just that expulsion is not a magic wand, but a trade off, and, like all tradeoffs, it must be assessed according to the principle of marginal utility. The question before us has never been and never will be whether abstractly to expel all the Palestinians or none of the Palestinians, but whether to expel specific Palestinians in specific circumstances to specific places. The answer to the question of whether this is a good idea depends on the specific circumstances. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. I make this point because Israeli rightwingers keep saying things like this:
I live in a town called Karmiel. It’s up in the Galilee, way up north. So far north that, as the crow flies, at least, we are closer to Damascus than we are to Jerusalem. And Syria has no government to speak of. So it seems fairly obvious that those Arabs who don’t want to leave of their own accord should simply be taken to our border with Syria, and frog-marched across. It’s as simple as that. If Syria could do anything about it, they’d already be attacking us.
Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t as simple as merely saying it. There are logistics to be considered. Emptying out Gaza with a convoy of trucks headed up north through the Golan Heights will take time. We’ll stock the trucks with water bottles and bags of Bamba for them to munch on during the trip. We wouldn’t want anyone to say we were being inhumane. They can fend for themselves once they’re in Syria.
Lisa Liel is to be credited for actually answering the question, usually they don’t bother at all. However, the obvious problem with the ‘dump them at the border’ solution is that this is what Israel already did, and it has been dealing with the fallout for 77 years. And I do mean 77 years because don’t forget:
Yahya Ibrahim Hassan al-Sinwar was born on 29 October 1962,[25] in the Khan Yunis refugee camp, when the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian occupation, where he spent his early years.[26] His family were forcibly expelled from Majdal Asqalan (Arabic: مدينة المجدل, romanized: Medīnat al-Majdal),[27] now known as Ashkelon, during the Nakba, and sought refuge in the Gaza Strip. Sinwar, discussing his refugee upbringing, tied it to his Hamas involvement in conversations with fellow prisoners during his later imprisonment. According to Esmat Mansour, another inmate, Sinwar was deeply affected by the communal living conditions and food distribution in the refugee camp.[8] After he graduated from high school at Khan Yunis Secondary School for Boys, he went on to the Islamic University of Gaza, where he received a bachelor's degree in Arabic studies.[28][29] His younger brother is Mohammed Sinwar, a military leader of Hamas.
If you want to get hasbara-y, you can point out that moving from Ashkelon to Gaza hardly counts as an expulsion; it’s basically a morning’s brisk walk:
But hasbara is about making yourself feel better, and I want you to do better instead. If Sinwar’s parents had not been expelled, they would, statistically, have had fewer children, and their children would have been less cracked in the head. The story of the ethnic cleansing of Ashkelon is interesting. Most ended up in Gaza, some in Jordan, and some in Israel. Had Sinwar’s parents been among the latter group, would October 7th have happened? Of course, we’ll never know.
What we do know is that, for many decades, a broad consensus existed across the Israeli security establishment that the least bad practicable thing to do with the Palestinians of Gaza was to keep them penned in in Gaza where they are far away from most of Israel and contained behind easily defensible borders. Better there than anywhere else. That turned out to be wrong, but basically for technical reasons. If a few things had gone differently that morning then the calculus would still be the same as it was before. Expulsion isn’t a magic solution that Israel hasn’t taken because bad leftists won’t let us for no reason at all; it’s just an option like all the others, with upsides and downsides that principally depend on the details of how it is implemented, and not at all on how based you feel doing it. If expulsion activists have a plan for those details, they deserve to he heard out no less than anyone else. If they wave their hands and say the details don’t matter, then they don’t.2 So, uhh, do they?
The Arabs can go to …. somewhere else! Problem solved.
Stay tuned for Part 2 next week, in which we will analyze successful historical examples of expulsion which have led to sustainable decreases in violence rather than amplifying it, and the conditions for achieving that.
It should be noted that, at the time, the advantage of Arab Israelis vs. Arabs in the rest of the region was greater than today, because the economic takeoff of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States was only just beginning.
On that score, I suppose I should say something about the unpleasant topic of Baruch and what he felt inspired to write at the first opportunity on Hol haMoed. But what is there to say that I didn’t say already?
A political conversation with a normal intelligent person goes something like this: you present your case, he presents his, you bring relevant facts and arguments to support it, and, when these are pertinent, you acknowledge and adjust accordingly. The next time you discuss the topic, you pick up where you left off, incorporating the progress you made in your previous discussion. A conversation with a rightoid crank goes like this: he says something absurd, you point out he is wrong, he tries to catch you in a contradiction by obviously distorting what you have said and contrasting it with a distortion of some other thing you said. Then he does the same exact thing every time you talk until you get bored and walk away. The rightoid crank is convinced that the frustration and annoyance he inspires is, in fact, proof he has touched a nerve, that he is on to something. He parades it as if it were a trophy.
One of the rare moments of lucidity that rightoids have is that contraceptives and having women join men in school and at work and so forth - 20th century triumphs by many people's standards - may be one of the causes of lower birth rates in the 21st.
But then they have the temerity to whine about comparative birth rates. You can't have it both ways!
Rightoids, have the courage of your convictions; spread Feminism to the Arabs to own the libs.
Nonzionism is in fact a combination of benny Morris, rav froman, amir hetsroni and the satmar rebbe