This article has been written in response to an earlier piece published by Professor Benny Morris on e-International Relations, Israel and Iran: A Response to James Petras, in which Professor Morris replied to Professor James Petras’ criticisms of his article in the New York Times: The New York Times: Making Nuclear Extermination Respectable
One of the hallmarks of totalitarian ideologues is the use of the big lie: a virulent attack on a defenseless group and then a categorical denial turning victims into executioners and executioners into victims.
Zionist genocide promoter, Benny Morris practices the Big Lie1. He claims, “I have never supported the brutal expulsion of all Palestinians…I have said, repeatedly, that the expulsion of the Palestinians is immoral and impracticable.”
In a recent interview in Israel, Morris states,
“Under some circumstances, expulsion is not a war crime. I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 (of nearly a million Palestinians) were war crimes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands. Moreover, if he (Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion) 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 cleaned 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 carried out a full expulsion – rather than a partial one – he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations.”
In its extremism, Morris’ promotion of Judeo-fascist ethnocide of Palestine/Jordan exceeds that of any expressed by a secular public Jewish figure in Israel.
Uprooting, massacring and driving 3 million Palestinians from their homes, land and communities, according to Morris, lessens suffering – for Jews – and promises a quieter life for Israeli Jews! This is the same rationale that Hitler pronounced in his project to ‘purify’ Nazi Germany.
Morris fabricates a tale about Israel’s peaceful role in the Middle East when in fact it has been the most aggressive, militarist, expansionist state in the entire Middle East. He writes,
“I am completely unaware that Zionism ever aimed to ‘rule the Middle East’…Zionism simply wanted to establish and maintain a (miniscule) Jewish state in the Land of Israel/Palestine, the patrimony of the Jews…conquered by savage Muslim Arab invaders.”
The history of the Israeli state tells us otherwise. Israel has expanded and colonized over three quarters of Palestine since the original partition in 1948. Israel has invaded Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and seized and occupies territory from three of the four countries. Israel is the only country in the Middle East, which has repeatedly invaded Lebanon, destroyed its infrastructure, slaughtered Palestinian refugees in camps and attempted to establish a puppet regime in South Lebanon. Israel is the only Middle Eastern country, which shot down a Libyan commercial airliner carrying pilgrims to Mecca killing all aboard.
Israel’s ‘lobby’ – the Zionist power configuration in the US – has secured over $120 billion dollars of US military aid and the most advanced military technology for Israel, to insure Israel’s ‘overwhelming military superiority’ in the region. The military superiority of Israel has served the Jewish state to threaten, pressure, destabilize and influence Arab states.
The biggest nuclear threat in the Middle East and the sole nuclear power (over 200 nuclear bombs) and the only country, which publicly threatens to attack with nuclear weapons – is Israel. Israel has engaged in cross border terrorist assassinations throughout the Middle East, training death squads in Northern Iraq (Kurdistan) to Colombia and recognizes no sovereign borders in pursuit of its hegemonic goals.
Morris’ style is as revelatory as the substance of his totalitarian beliefs. He claims, “Israel has been threatened by Iran with destruction and the Iranian nuclear project appears to have Israel as its target.” Apart from a vague remark, which was grossly mistranslated, of Iranian President Ahmadinejad about Israel “Disappearing from the page of history” (a remark pointing to a political change of the ethnic nature of the state), the Iranian government has never threatened to nuke Israel. Morris, the prophet of Armageddon, with special powers to delve into the “self-sacrificing mindset of the mullahs who run Iran,” knows that deterrence will not work. No evidence founded on action is presented. No history of Iranian foreign policy over the past 50 years is presented.
The key to understanding Benny Morris’ proposal for nuclear genocide is his totalitarian-racist view of Arabs, Muslims and Iranians. In an interview in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (2004) regarding Israeli-Palestinian relations he asserted, “Something like a cage has to be built for them…There is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another.” According to Morris, Palestinians are “barbarians who want to take our lives…At the moment that society is in the state of being a serial killer. It is a very sick society. It should be treated the way we treat individuals who are serial killers.” To Morris, the dispossessed Palestinians are the killers while the Israeli colonial state, which dispossessed millions, tortured tens of thousands, jailed hundreds of thousands and killed thousands and is building a huge ghetto wall destroying the livelihood of 3 million, is a sane, healthy society. Dehumanizing the victims and the use of sub-human analogies is common practice of totalitarian ideologues. Considering Muslims as sub-human eases the way to incinerating them with nuclear weapons.
Benny Morris bases his argument for launching a nuclear attack against Iran on two boldface lies: (1) “Every intelligence agency in the world believes the Iranian program is geared to making weapons, not to the peaceful application of nuclear power”; and (2) “Everyone knows that such measures (economic sanctions) have so far led nowhere and are unlikely to be applied.” The sixteen leading US intelligence agencies released a National Intelligence Estimate in 2007 based on all available high tech sources and inside informants, stating that Iran was not preparing enriched uranium for weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which has permanent on site inspectors and makes continuous visits to Iranian nuclear facilities over the past decade, has not found any evidence of a weapons program. Every country, except Israel and the Zionist-dominated US Congress and White House believe that negotiations should continue. China, Russia, the states of the Middle East have supported sanctions among other countries. Iran’s uranium enrichment program is legal and is practiced by dozens of countries around the world. Only Israel, the US and the EU have arbitrarily decided to exclude Iran from developing nuclear enrichment programs for peaceful uses. Morris and the Israelis equate Iran’s legitimate activity with nuclear weapon production and extrapolate the latter to an immediate threat against Israel’s very existence.
Morris’ most laughable assertion is his claim that he “never advocated a genocidal attack on Iran with the aim of killing 70 million Iranians.” In his own words, just a few weeks earlier in a July 18 editorial in the New York Times he wrote,
“Iran’s leaders would do well to re-think their gamble and suspend their nuclear program. Barring this, the best they could hope for is that Israel’s conventional air assault will destroy their nuclear facilities. To be sure, this would mean thousands of Iranian casualties and international humiliation. But the alternative is an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland.”
By posing the question to Iran as one of ‘no choice’ but surrendering national sovereignty to an “Israeli nuclear threat’ Morris has pre-determined the result: Israel will have to engage in a genocidal nuclear assault on Iran. Morris’ double talk and utter confusion in claiming to oppose Iranian genocide while supporting ‘limited’ nuclear strikes against Iran reveals his total ignorance of the most elementary consequences of the long-term, large-scale effects of radiation, contamination, economic devastation and widespread social trauma, not to mention the immediate effects of a thermonuclear attack on a populous nation. A nuclear strike against a country is genocidal in its effects on that nation – involving millions of human beings in Iran and throughout the entire region with widespread global contamination.
Benny Morris’ rant, in itself, is of no great concern were it limited to some Israeli version of a Munich beer hall. But the fact that ‘respectable’ capitalist print media, like the New York Times among others, publish and circulate blatant advocacy of nuclear genocide as ‘just another opinion’ is of prime political concern: It tells us how far imperial-militarism has infected Western political discourse; we have moved from a scratch to gangrene.
Postnote: A declaration signed by over 200 Israeli academics and peace activists was released August 5, 2008 stating:
There is no military, political or moral justification to initiate war with Iran. A constant flow of information bears witness to the fact that the Israeli government is seriously considering attacking Iran, in order to disrupt its nuclear plans. We do no disregard irresponsible actions by the Iranian government – we also oppose atomic weapons of mass destruction in the region. However, it is clear that the main source of the immediate danger of a new, widespread war stems from the policies of the Israeli government and the flow of threats from it, backed by provocative military maneuvers.
After serious consideration, we reiterate our position that all the arguments for such an attack are without any security, political or moral justification. Israel might get caught up in an act of adventurism that could endanger our very existence, and this without any serious effort to exhaust the political and diplomatic alternatives to armed conflict.
We are not certain that such an attack will occur. But the very fact that it is being weighed as a reasonable option makes it imperative that we warn and caution against the destructive results of an offensive strike against Iran.
Professor Petras is the author of Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of US Power (Clarity Press 2008) and The Power of Israel in the US (Clarity Press 2006).
Further Reading on E-International Relations
- Opinion – The Broader Significance of the ICJ’s Ruling on Genocide in Gaza
- Opinion – Is the Next Middle East War on the Horizon?
- Opinion – Israel’s Two Front War
- With Hezbollah’s Retaliation Strategy in Disarray, Israel and Iran Brace for War
- National Honor and Religious Duty: Iran’s Strategic Evolution in Confronting Israel
- The Politicization of Genocide: Is There a Genocide in Karabakh?
