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By Ira Sharkansky
 JERUSALEM—Professor Benny Morris became prominent in the late 1980s when he published what some called a revisionist history of the 1948 war. He described numerous cases when Israeli soldiers expelled Palestinian villagers from their homes, as well as cases when Palestinian leaders urged the people to flee.
Morris came under attack for challenging one of Israel's myths: that Palestinians became refugees because their leaders urged them to leave temporarily, to give the Arab armies a free hand in defeating the Jews. When the Jews left, or were killed, the Palestinians could return to their own villages and take the Jews' property.
The criticism of Morris is one of those issues in intellectual history that beg the question of why. It was already known that the flight of Palestinians resulted from Israeli military pressure as well as the urging of Arab leaders. In one of Jerusalem's junior high school in the mid-1970s, my son was assigned a short story, written by an Israeli, that detailed Israelis' expulsion of villagers.
The controversy surrounding Morris illustrates Jewish hyper-sensitivity. If we are not perfect, whoever describes our lack of perfection is wrong-headed.
Professor Morris remains provocative. Most recently he has described the Israeli-Palestinian issue as insoluble, due to the refusal of Palestinians to accept Israel. Their maps show one Palestine from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. Some of them accept a "two-state" solution, but they refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and insist on the return of 1948 refugees and their families. Morris sees this as accepting a temporary division of Palestine. One part will be for Palestinians immediately, and another part will become Palestinian due to refugee families and Palestinian births. Now Professor Morris is being criticized by the left. He has put the criticism of the Israeli leadership behind him and is articulating what has become the prominent view of the Israeli
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right wing, as well as much of the center and moderate left. That is, it is impossible to reach agreement with Palestinians no matter what combination of compromises an Israeli leadership might offer.
Morris is also standing in the way of what has become a mantra of Palestinians, their chorus of international supporters, and the Israeli left: if Israel does not agree to what the Palestinians want, including a right of return, the world will insist on a one state solution. And the result of that--given Palestinian birth rates--is a Palestinian majority before too long in the area between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.
Morris and numerous other people who accept facts reckon that Palestinian birthrates may produce a Palestinian majority between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. But those who suffer will be Palestinians. Unless the Israeli electorate and leadership becomes mad enough to accept a one-state solution, the crowding will take place on the Palestinian side of the line. It does not require an abnormally high IQ to conclude that the barrier currently being built between Israeli and Palestinian settlements is meant to divide what God put between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.
Morris was right in the late 1980s, and he is right, now. He is more the scholar than the ideologue. He tells it as he sees it.
There are implications in his message. Well meaning Americans and Europeans are wasting their time. There is no use parsing this or that solution for the Middle East when none of them have any traction among Arabs who do not accept Israel's existence.
Israelis listen to their neighbors as well as to decent people in the west. Israelis have tried compromise. They will continue to meet with Palestinians, largely because not doing so will look bad in the offices of western officials, in the classrooms of western academies, on CNN and BBC.
Western officials and academics should not fool themselves. Israelis are not fools. They know who they are dealing with. Say they are just going through the motions of negotiating with Palestinians, and you will become like Professor Morris: telling it as it is.
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