Quotessence
Home / Authors / Benny Morris

Benny Morris Quotes

Author

Filter quotes by topic

AllTwo State SolutionLiberalismOne State SolutionSuicide BombingBritish MandateExpulsionIsraeli Palestinian ConflictMurderNazi GermanyPalestine

Famous Benny Morris Quotes

“Liberalism postulated the rational and 'progressive' evolutionary nature of the historical process. Besides success it upheld pragmatism, tolerance and compromise as the principal political virtues. At the core of the liberal outlook stood the 'idea of limits'. It abhorred excess and extremism; it believed that 'absolutist' thought of any sort assured at least failure if not perdition. All problems were seen as soluble with the application of reason; and reason, Liberals believed, ultimately did prevail. Reason, in fact, suffused all and was identified with reality.”

ReasonLiberalism
Book:The Roots of Appeasement: The British Weekly Press and Nazi Germany During 1930s
Create image

“The idea of a “secular democratic Palestine” is as much a nonstarter today as it was three decades ago. It is a nonstarter primarily because the Palestinian Arabs, like the world’s other Muslim Arab communities, are deeply religious and have no respect for democratic values and no tradition of democratic governance.”

One State Solution
Book:One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict
Create image

“To most Liberals, the concept of political ideology was both alien and abhorrent. Liberalism rejected the rule of dogma and absolutes in politics; it refused to believe that unswerving doctrine should or could be translated into policy. It therefore attempted, in the thirties, to dismiss the notion that Germany under Hitler was in fact governed by the ideology and precepts embodied in Mein Kampf. Even years of Hitlerite persecution at home and Nazi aggression abroad failed to convince many that here indeed was an ideology on the path of fulfilment. No doubt, the refusal of many Britons to admit this stemmed in some measure from a realization of the consequences if it were indeed true: if Nazi ideology was as malign as its detractors contended, and was being enacted, then the prospects for Europe were indeed bleak.”

LiberalismNazi GermanyPolitical Ideology
Book:The Roots of Appeasement: The British Weekly Press and Nazi Germany During 1930s
Create image

“If a one-state solution is a nonstarter, what are the prospects for a two-state solution? Put simply, they appear very bleak. Bleak primarily because the Palestinian Arabs, in the deepest fibers of their being, oppose such an outcome, demanding, as they did since the dawn of their national movement, all of Palestine as their patrimony. And I would hazard that, in the highly unlikely event that Israel and the PNA were in the coming years to sign a two-state agreement, it would in short order unravel. It would be subverted and overthrown by those forces in the Palestinian camp—probably representing Palestinian Arab majority opinion and certainly representing the historic will of the Palestinian national movement—bent on having all of Palestine. To judge from its past behavior, the PNA would be unwilling and, probably, incapable of reining in the more militant, expansionist factions—Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and so on—who would represent themselves as carrying on the patriotic, religious duty of resisting the Zionist invader. No Palestinian leader can fight them without being dubbed a “traitor” and losing his public’s support.”

Two State Solution
Book:One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict
Create image

“Although . . . polls have often concluded that most Palestinians, at least in the West Bank and Gaza, support a two-state settlement, they have also shown that there is almost complete unanimity among Palestinians in support of the “right of return,” the implementation of which would necessarily subvert any two-state settlement. And Palestinian Arabs are equally unanimous in denying the legitimacy of Zionism and Israel—which, again, would raise a vast question mark over the durability of any two-state arrangement.”

Two State Solution
Book:One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict
Create image

“A two-state settlement along the lines proposed by Barak and Clinton in 2000 is unlikely to come about or, if reached, to last long. It will not bring tranquility to the Middle East. And yet the two-state idea—the idea of a state for the Jews and a state for the Palestinian Arabs—remains the only sound moral and political basis for a solution offering a modicum of justice and, hence, a chance for peace, for both peoples.”

Two State Solution
Book:One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict
Create image

“The consistent refusal of the PNA-PLO leadership to accept Israel’s Jewishness points to a basic rejection of the two-state approach. Rather, it points to a desire to see the area of Israel eventually revert to an Arab majority presence and rule, whether through war and expulsion, through natural demographic increase among Israel’s Arab minority, through a mass refugee return, or a combination of the three.”

Two State Solution
Book:One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict
Create image

“Israeli Jewish society is incapable, for moral and political reasons, of murdering millions or hundreds of thousands of Arabs. It is also inconceivable that Palestine’s Arab inhabitants would abandon the country of their own free will. But a campaign of expulsion, as required to rid the country of all or most of its Arab population, would doubtless take weeks if not months to implement and would be halted in its tracks by the international community and by much of Israel’s Jewish public. Similarly, the achievement of a Jew-less Land of Israel through murder or expulsion or a combination of the two by the Arabs would in all likelihood be stymied by the international community, or at least the United States, which might well intervene militarily.”

MurderIsraeli Palestinian ConflictExpulsion
Book:One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict
Create image