Each week, the Gaggle Book Club recommends a book for Gagglers to read and—most important—uploads a pdf version of it.

Our practice is that we do not vouch for the reliability or accuracy of any book we recommend. Still less, do we necessarily agree with a recommended book's central arguments. However, any book we recommend will be of undoubted interest and intellectual importance.

This week's selection is Benny Morris’s "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949" (1988). This was a landmark work that fundamentally altered the historiography of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the origins of the Palestinian refugee crisis. His research, based on newly declassified Israeli archives, challenged the traditional Israeli claims that Palestinians fled voluntarily, obeying orders to leave allegedly issued by Arab leaders. Morris debunks the claim that Arab leaders ordered mass evacuations. While some isolated orders existed, most refugees fled because of fear, violence or expulsion.

However, Morris disputes the claim that Israel pursued a carefully pre-planned policy of ethnic cleansing, though he does acknowledge that the Israeli Defense Forces and the Haganah did engage in deliberate expulsions and the destruction of villages. They also conducted massacres and spread fears of massacres in order to clear villages.

In his 2004 work, "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited," Morris revises some of the conclusions he reached in his earlier work. In 1988, he had argued that there was Israel had not pursued a systematic expulsions policy. In 2004, Morris argued that expulsions were far more widespread and far more intentional than he had first thought. More seriously, Morris had by now thoroughly reassessed his position. In interviews after 2000, he argued that the 1948 expulsions should have been more complete. He claimed that leaving large Arab populations in Israel created long-term security problems. According to him, the ethnic homogenization of other states, such as Poland and the post-1948 Indian subcontinent, had prevented future conflicts.

It is interesting to compare Morris's book with the work of Ilan Pappé. Pappé argues there was indeed a deliberate, premeditated plan of ethnic cleansing of Palestine, while Morris maintains that while expulsions happened, they were not systematically pre-planned. The two differ sharply on the role played by David Ben-Gurion. According to Morris, Ben-Gurion supported some expulsions but did not order a mass ethnic cleansing campaign. According to Pappé, on the other hand, Ben-Gurion masterminded a systematic ethnic cleansing policy. Morris argues that local commanders made many expulsion decisions on the ground and that, while Ben-Gurion did little to stop the expulsions, he did not personally orchestrate them. Pappé argues that Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders intentionally designed and executed a plan to remove Arabs from what became Israel.

Morris, though critical of Israel’s past, remains ultimately a Zionist and a champion of the Jewish state. Over time, he became increasingly radical in his Zionism, arguing that the reluctance on the part of Israel's leaders to expel all of the Palestinians left the Jewish state with long-term, insoluble problem. Pappé, by contrast, rejects Zionism entirely, calling it a settler-colonial ideology that displaced Palestinians, and supports a one-state solution.

Benny Morris’s "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem" was a groundbreaking work that dismantled traditional Israeli narratives and forced Israelis to take confront the darker side of the state's founding. Whether it's forced Israelis to adopt a more humane approach toward the Palestinians is a different matter altogether.