The Nonlinear Library LW - Book Review: 1948 by Benny Morris by Yair Halberstadt
Dec 4, 2023
20:07
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Book Review: 1948 by Benny Morris, published by Yair Halberstadt on December 4, 2023 on LessWrong.
Content warning: war, Israel/Palestine conflict
Potential bias warning: I am a Jewish Israeli
My copy of 1948 arrived in late September, but I was in the middle of another book. Then October the 7th happened, and with the horrors of that day fresh in my mind, and my country in a brutal war, I wasn't in a mental state where I could read about all the cruelties of another war between Israelis and Palestinians.
But ultimately I couldn't abandon it. If Hamas was willing to justify genocide of Israelis based on the 1948 Palestine war and it's aftermath, and Israel the permanent occupation of the Palestinians, and I was willing to pay taxes to and thus implicitly support Israel in that conflict, I felt like I had a duty to at the very least get my facts straight about what happened.
So here is a review of that book, and some of my concluding thoughts at the end.
Bias
No book about the Israel Palestinian conflict can be completely free of bias. You always have to pick which events to highlight, which sources to trust. But with that caveat, 1948 is a pretty good pick.
Benny Morris is a liberal Israeli Zionist, albeit one with ever changing, and often maverick, views. However he is not interested in telling a narrative. His aim is to get the facts straight about what happened, and damn the political consequences.
Critics of his book rarely claim he's lying or deliberately manipulating the reader. Instead they focus on his inability to read Arabic, and his preference for official documents over interviews with participants. Since Israeli, American, and British documents from the period are generally declassified, but Arab ones are not, and the Israelis were far more literate than the Palestinians, this creates a natural blind spot around the Arab/Palestinian narrative.
With that in mind, we can be sure that when Benny Morris says something happened it almost certainly did, but there may be events, perspectives and details he's simply not privy to. Given the brevity of the book, I don't think that makes too much difference - see below.
Brevity
I've previously read Martin Gilbert's history of Israel,[1] which dedicates a fair few chapters to the 1948 war. In it he paints a richly detailed picture of the war, and you come out feeling like you've got a pretty good understanding of the various different battles and events.
1948 is the opposite. Although spending its 400+ pages entirely focused on this war, it discusses everything very briefly, with a sparsity of detail. Most individual battles get a clause or a sentence, some get a paragraph, and only very occasionally do we get an account from an individual soldier. Massacres and expulsions are similarly given a sentence or two at most - this happened, here are some various different casualty estimates, moving on. What does get a bit more detail and texture is the politics - the mindset of the various decision makers, and how that influenced the progression of the war.
This highlights how Morris is not trying to tell a narrative. He's not trying to get you to understand what it would feel like to be involved in that war. He's trying to give you a survey of almost all battles and events in that war, and if he spends 2 pages giving accounts of the battle of Nirim, he won't be able to tell you anything about the battle of Beit Hanoun. What he does focus on though, is the decision making and background for the events that occurred, since that is critical for putting the war in perspective.
Nonetheless the book is fairly readable, and the brevity mitigates most of our worries about bias - we know we're discussing pretty much every major event, at least briefly, and since nothing is strongly highlighted, we know that's not adversely select...
Content warning: war, Israel/Palestine conflict
Potential bias warning: I am a Jewish Israeli
My copy of 1948 arrived in late September, but I was in the middle of another book. Then October the 7th happened, and with the horrors of that day fresh in my mind, and my country in a brutal war, I wasn't in a mental state where I could read about all the cruelties of another war between Israelis and Palestinians.
But ultimately I couldn't abandon it. If Hamas was willing to justify genocide of Israelis based on the 1948 Palestine war and it's aftermath, and Israel the permanent occupation of the Palestinians, and I was willing to pay taxes to and thus implicitly support Israel in that conflict, I felt like I had a duty to at the very least get my facts straight about what happened.
So here is a review of that book, and some of my concluding thoughts at the end.
Bias
No book about the Israel Palestinian conflict can be completely free of bias. You always have to pick which events to highlight, which sources to trust. But with that caveat, 1948 is a pretty good pick.
Benny Morris is a liberal Israeli Zionist, albeit one with ever changing, and often maverick, views. However he is not interested in telling a narrative. His aim is to get the facts straight about what happened, and damn the political consequences.
Critics of his book rarely claim he's lying or deliberately manipulating the reader. Instead they focus on his inability to read Arabic, and his preference for official documents over interviews with participants. Since Israeli, American, and British documents from the period are generally declassified, but Arab ones are not, and the Israelis were far more literate than the Palestinians, this creates a natural blind spot around the Arab/Palestinian narrative.
With that in mind, we can be sure that when Benny Morris says something happened it almost certainly did, but there may be events, perspectives and details he's simply not privy to. Given the brevity of the book, I don't think that makes too much difference - see below.
Brevity
I've previously read Martin Gilbert's history of Israel,[1] which dedicates a fair few chapters to the 1948 war. In it he paints a richly detailed picture of the war, and you come out feeling like you've got a pretty good understanding of the various different battles and events.
1948 is the opposite. Although spending its 400+ pages entirely focused on this war, it discusses everything very briefly, with a sparsity of detail. Most individual battles get a clause or a sentence, some get a paragraph, and only very occasionally do we get an account from an individual soldier. Massacres and expulsions are similarly given a sentence or two at most - this happened, here are some various different casualty estimates, moving on. What does get a bit more detail and texture is the politics - the mindset of the various decision makers, and how that influenced the progression of the war.
This highlights how Morris is not trying to tell a narrative. He's not trying to get you to understand what it would feel like to be involved in that war. He's trying to give you a survey of almost all battles and events in that war, and if he spends 2 pages giving accounts of the battle of Nirim, he won't be able to tell you anything about the battle of Beit Hanoun. What he does focus on though, is the decision making and background for the events that occurred, since that is critical for putting the war in perspective.
Nonetheless the book is fairly readable, and the brevity mitigates most of our worries about bias - we know we're discussing pretty much every major event, at least briefly, and since nothing is strongly highlighted, we know that's not adversely select...