When it comes to Israel, Ben­ny Mor­ris is an icon­o­clast. He was the first of the new Israeli his­to­ri­ans and the first among post-Zion­ists. But that was a long time ago, and Ben­ny Mor­ris, an author, thinker, and ana­lyst, no longer sub­scribes to those orig­i­nal ideas. He has come to dif­fer­ent con­clu­sions about the Israel/​Palestinian con­flict and where and with whom to lay blame. Accord­ing to his analy­sis, the sna­fus are many and there is plen­ty of guilt to go around. 

In the eyes of Ben­ny Mor­ris, the Pales­tini­ans bear the respon­si­bil­i­ty for most of the failed deal­ings with Israel. Mor­ris attrib­ut­es a good por­tion of the Pales­tin­ian fail­ure to lack of lead­er­ship, i.e., inabil­i­ty to take charge or to counter the extrem­ists who have tak­en the goal of a Pales­tin­ian state and pushed it fur­ther and fur­ther away from reality. 

Mor­ris does not claim that Israel is blame­less. Yes, he says, Israel made mis­takes, but those mis­takes were not colos­sal. Israel’s mis­takes were small, tac­ti­cal, moral blun­ders, not the fun­da­men­tal mis­takes of con­cep­tion and decep­tion that plague the Pales­tin­ian side. 

The most pow­er­ful ele­ment of this bit­ing cri­tique is actu­al­ly not the cri­tique at all, but that it is Ben­ny Mor­ris who is criticizing.