Israel Revisited

Roots of Rejectionism

Morris was born on a kibbutz to British immigrants whose Marxist beliefs placed them on the fringe of the socialist Labor Zionist movement that then dominated politics.

The family spent much of his childhood in Jerusalem and New York, where his father was assigned as an Israeli diplomat. He finished studies at Jerusalem's Hebrew University and headed to Cambridge, where he received a doctorate in European history.

He returned to Israel in time to witness the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, first as a journalist with the Jerusalem Post and then as a soldier when his reserve division was called up to participate in the assault on Beirut. Along the way, Morris visited the Rashidia refugee camp outside the southern city of Tyre, his first encounter with the Palestinian refugees who would become the focus of his research in the coming decade.

He was working for the newspaper when he received the kind of offer that can make a career.

Veterans of the Palmach, the elite Jewish forces that fought in Israel's founding war, invited the ambitious young journalist into their archive to write their official history. He plunged into the secret planning documents, battlefield orders and other material detailing the group's actions during the 1948-49 conflict that Israel calls the War of Independence.

Several months later, Morris was kicked out of the Palmach archives when veterans began doubting the wisdom of entrusting their history to a reporter with a doctorate from Cambridge University.

By fortunate coincidence, Israel's government also had begun declassifying its wartime archives. Sifting through the files, Morris came across a Foreign Ministry document rejecting reports that Jewish militiamen killed more than 100 Arab men, women and children in Deir Yassin, a village on the northern edge of Jerusalem. The memo was essentially a series of talking points distributed to pre-state Jewish diplomatic missions on how to deny what became one of the war's most notorious events.

It was written by his father.

Morris believes he wrote the memo after turning hawkish following the Arab refusal of the United Nations' partition of Palestine in November 1947, which outlined the borders of a Jewish state.

"I think it was the weight of Arab rejectionism that pushed him there," Morris says.

The killings and destruction of many former Arab villages in April 1948 were later condemned by the pre-state Jewish government. But the events -- including what Morris described as a "victory parade" by Jewish militiamen, who drove some of the bodies through the streets before dumping them in Arab East Jerusalem -- prompted many Arabs to flee their homes in fear.

Morris's research also confirmed some aspects of Israel's official version of the war, including the scope of orders issued by Arab military commanders for Palestinians to leave their homes and return with their invading forces. His book noted that Arab troops also carried out brutal attacks on Jews, including an ambush of a convoy of doctors, medical staff and patients in the days after Deir Yassin that killed some 70 civilians.