Benny Morris to lecture, teach during Greenberg residency

Benny Morris

Benny Morris, professor of Middle East Studies at Ben Gurion University, and Skidmore's 2009 Greenberg Middle East Scholar-in-Residence, will participate in two public events while on campus this fall.

On Tuesday, Sept. 29, Morris will give a lecture titled "1948: Back to the Beginnings." The talk, scheduled at 8 p.m. in Davis Auditorium of Palamountain Hall, will focus on the those matters unresolved at the time of Israel's establishment as a state that continue to undermine resolutions to the now more than 60-year long conflict.

On Thursday, Oct. 8, Morris and Robert Malley will participate in a panel discussion titled: "After Camp David: The Future of the Two-State Solution." Steven Hoffmann, professor of government at Skidmore, will moderate the panel, which begins at 8 p.m. in Gannett Auditorium of Palamountain Hall.

Both events are free and open to the public.

The Greenberg Middle East Scholar-in-Residence Series is made possible by a gift from Skidmore alumna Jane Greenberg. The series enables the college to host an Israeli scholar who through teaching, lecturing, and participating in campus life, educates the community on a range of topics concerning political life in the Middle East. The Office of the Dean of Special Programs coordinates the Greenberg series.

Background on the speakers

Born in Israel in 1948, the year of Israel's founding, from parents who emigrated from Britain to Israel in 1947, Benny Morris attended schools in Jerusalem and New York City, graduating from Ramaz High School in New York. He earned a B.A. degree in European history and European philosophy from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a Ph.D. degree in modern European history from Cambridge University. Morris completed his military service as a paratrooper, serving from 1967 to 1969, and in 1982 his division took part in the invasion of Lebanon. 

At that time he was also working as a journalist, and he interviewed Palestinian refugees from the Galilee who were then living in a refugee camp near Tyre. In 1988, during the first intifada, he was jailed briefly for refusing to serve when his division was called to go to the West Bank. While a journalist at The Jerusalem Post for many years, Morris established his reputation as an historian—and as pre-eminent among the "new historians"—with the 1988 publication of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, in which he "revolutionized Israeli historiography and, to a great extent, a nation's understanding of its own birth," according to David Remnick, writing in the May 5, 2008, edition of The New Yorker.  In this book and subsequent writing—nearly a dozen books and countless articles—Morris has painted "a far more complex picture (of their history) than many Israelis were prepared to accept," Remnick notes.

This past year, in addition to publishing another work of history (1948, A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, Yale University Press), Morris also produced a short work (One State, Two States; Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict, Yale University Press)—part history, part political commentary—on the past and future of the two-state solution.

Morris is a senior associate member at St Antony's College, Oxford, was a MacArthur Foundation fellow at the Brookings Institute, a fellow at the Truman Institute at Hebrew University, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Florida-Gainesville, Dartmouth College, and the University of Maryland-College Park. He has lectured quite widely at a number of colleges and universities and at many other venues in the US and Europe.

While in residence at Skidmore, and in addition to the lectures noted above, Morris is teaching a one-credit, five-week course titled Arab-Zionist Conflict 1881-1948, and visiting in a few classes.

Robert Malley

Robert Malley, director of Middle-East affairs for the International Crisis Group, was last fall a consultant to Barack Obama on Middle East affairs during the campaign, and withdrew when a storm of protest that emanated from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and accused him of being an anti-Zionist and Arab sympathizer, proved distracting. During the Clinton administration Malley was special assistant to the president for Mid-East affairs and was present during the Camp David negotiations.

Malley and Morris had a recent, rather heated exchange published in The New York Review of Books regarding the reasons for the failure of these accords: Malley drawing on his work in the International Crisis Group and his experience in the White House, and Morris on his historical work and interviews with former Prime Minister Ehud Barak.  In the Aug. 9 issue of The New York Times, Morris and Malley argued that the notion of a two-state solution is essentially a dead issue, and both have been talking about going back to 1948 and looking to restart and reconsider all the assumptions and presuppositions that have led to the current impasse.

Tags: robert malley, greenberg middle east scholar-in-residence, benny morris