 Hi everyone. Good evening. Shall we start? I'm Lime Sultani. I teach at the school floor here at SOWAS and it's my great delight and an honor to welcome to SOWAS Prof. Atterazaki Takriti, a friend, a comrade, and a well-known academic of the Palestinian history and the Palestinian revolution. Abed is the associate professor of an Arab-American educational foundation chair in modern Arab history in the University of Houston. He is the founding director of the Center for Arab Studies in the University of Houston. Recently he was the Derwish visiting professor in Palestinian Studies and he is the author of the award-winning book Monson Revolution Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman. As a doctoral dissertation, this book won the 2011 Middle East Studies Association of North America, the Malcolm Kerr Prize for Best Dissertation in the Humanities, and in the same year, the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies awarded the dissertation, the Lee Douglas Memorial Prize for Best Doctoral Dissertation. He's also the curator and the co-author of the website and the project, the Palestinian Revolution, alongside Professor Karman Abulsey from University of Oxford. Among his excellent writings, the following articles, recently a chapter on Arab socialism in the Cambridge history of socialism, the cord and the wind, the politics and poetics of Palestinian Kurdish affiliation, and in the American Historical Review, an article on colonial coups and the war on popular sovereignty and the Gulf. And finally, in the Radical History Review, an article on the history of before BDS, lineages of boycott in Palestine. So Professor Takrati will speak for about 50 minutes or so, and then we'll have a chance for questions and discussion. Just to note that we have two fire exits in cases of emergency. This event is being recorded, so please take that into account in terms of participation, and please know outside recordings are allowed. So please join me in welcoming Professor Takrati. Sorry, we're gonna need to put something here for the laptop. Thank you, never for the generous introduction. And it's a great honor to be here or to be back here at SOAS, a place that I dearly love and that I consider to be a beacon of progressive scholarship on this part of the world. I'm gonna be talking today about a subject that's very painful for Palestinians. It's painful to talk about the genocide that is currently unfolding in Palestine today. And it's a genocide, and we're using this term in accordance with the specific definitions of genocide. I'm not a big fan of using this term liberally, but in this case we have clear indications of intent, as you're gonna see in this talk. We have clear planning, and we have steps that have already been taken that have led to over 50,000 deaths and injuries inflicted upon the people of Palestine and Gaza in less than two months. It's a difficult subject to talk about also because of the participation of Western governments in this ongoing situation, and because it's also triggering for Palestinians. I've seen this scenario before, experienced this scenario before, and also experienced the participation of these same governments, as we shall see in this talk, in the original ethnic cleansing of Palestine. And we're gonna start there in 1948 with that original ethnic cleansing. In the closing days of April 1948, Mustafa Murad de Baq, the greatest Palestinian geographer, lost electricity and ran out of bread. Having survived weeks of shelling and siege, Palestine's most imminent geographer finally succumbed to the pleas of his relatives and his instinct for survival, hesitantly agreeing to believe to leave his beloved hometown, Yaffa. Accompanied to tens of thousands of his compatriots, he boarded a crowded small ship, docked in Yaffa's ancient harbor, carrying with him his soul and deer's possession, a treasure of ink and paper tucked in a small bag. This was none other than a 6,000-page manuscript, instilled into which was the historical geography, topography, flora, fauna, built environment, infrastructure, population, climate, and mineral resources of Palestine. Every city, town, village, and bed when deer was accounted for. With minute attention accorded to the personages, families, and clans that had long inhabited them, and their full diversity and complexity. A lifetime of individual effort went into this magnum opus only to be lost in a single moment of collective horror. The ship was overflowing with refugees to the point of danger. Rain was pouring from above. The sea was raging from below, and water began to flood in from every corner. Barely able to suppress his sorrow, the battery counts, and I'm quoting in here, the captain raised his voice, ordering the reduction of the load, for the alternative was to sink. I embraced the bag that contained my book, but the strong hand of a sailor, aided by a wave that has smashed into the back of the ship, snatched the bag and threw it into the water. The book was gone, along with the long years of labor I spent on it. Now this is clearly every academic's worst nightmare. The loss of this encyclopedic description of Palestine, all of Palestine, mirrored the loss of the land itself. By a perverse twist of fate, the scattering of its pages coincided with the dispersion of the people so intimately depicted in them. Through a combination of deliberate terrorization, intense bombing, massacre, and violent removal at gunpoint, most Palestinians, at least 900,000 out of 1,364,000 were thrown into the sea, pushed into the desert and the wilderness, or so sheltered in the closest safe Arab locals. Crucially, they were not only forcibly displaced, but were also never allowed to return. Out of Palestine's six administrative districts, three fell under total settler colonists' control, Haifa, Lid, and Al-Jaleel. In all of the principal cities and towns of these districts, excepting Nazareth, Palestinian Arabs were no longer to be found or were reduced to a meager minority. Their homes were either demolished, ruined, or taken over by Jewish colonists, most of whom had recently arrived from Eastern and Central Europe. This was the fate that befell Tabaria, Tiberias, on April 18, 1948, Haifa, April 23, 1948, Safad, May 10, 1948, Besan, May 12, 1948, Yaffa, May 13, 1948, Akka, May 17, 1948, Lid, July 11, 1948, and Ramle, July 11, 1948. Out of these eight cities, five including Haifa and Yaffa, the two economic and cultural capitals of Palestine fell prior to British withdrawal, and even before a single Arab army entered the territory. As for the three remaining administrative districts of Palestine, Jerusalem, so-called Samaria, the British name for Jabal Nablus, and Gaza, the largest district of them all, they also lost substantial territory, including the cities of El-Majdal on November 4, 1948, and Bir-Saba October 21, 1948, as well as the Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem. The situation in the countryside was equally grim, with 530 to 600 villages depopulated and destroyed. Their people had formerly farmed Palestine lands from the peaks of Jabal El-Kermel, Mount Kermel, the Galilean Highlands, and the western edges of the central range to the flat maritime plain, the coastal plain of Aker, Merzib and Amir, and the lowest depths of the Jordan Valley. Many of the Bedouin tribes that had previously dwelled, grazed, and cultivated in all parts of the land, including Danaqab, were also first into permanent dispersal, never to see their ancestral deers again, and most of them ended, guess where, in Gaza. Similar to the majority of Palestinians that had inhabited all the districts south of Yaffa and west of Hebu. Gaza became a principal site for concentrating Palestinian refugees who were brutalized, expelled, and subjected to the sort of campaign that we're seeing unfolding once again today. Let us be clear, Mustafa Murad Dabal did not leave as a result of bombing alone or siege alone. He left as also as a result of hunger, as a result of the inability to access food, the inability to sustain life. The people of Palestine tried to resist before they were forced out, but they were starved and bombed out of their towns, cities, and villages. I fear for our people of Reza today as they face the same fate that was faced by their grandparents. Unfortunately, even some of these grandparents are living in Reza today, living another 48, experiencing another 48. In less than two years between 1947-1948, a demographic fabric that had been interweaved over the course of long epochs was completely torn to shreds. The fact that fact was excruciating, not just for Palestinians, but for all those that were connected materially or discursively to their plight. It had a profound impact on neighboring Arab polities and societies, to which the Palestinians were connected by profound political, economic, social, and cultural bonds. It had a profound impact on the broader Islamic lands with which the majority of Palestinians had a shared religious identification. It had a profound impact on the global anti-colonial world in which the Palestinians firmly secured a place grounded in the commonality of struggle towards freedom and independence. Over the course of the three decades of British imperial rule, all of these spheres of humanity had witnessed varying levels of exposure to immobilization for the Palestinian cause. It was within these spheres that the attempts to prevent the Nakba and then to reverse it were waged, and in which the struggle for Palestinian freedom was born. From the very beginning, though, that struggle was opposed by the great powers that had embraced the project of transforming Palestine through intensive settler colonization from an Arab to a Jewish country. And it was within the political theaters of these powers that their rhetorical conceits that justified the Nakba were performed and the diplomatic and military means that facilitated it were produced. Today, these same powers are behind the second Nakba that is currently unfolding in Gaza. Then and as now, history or rather than an ideological reading of it was key to the colonization of Palestine and the oppression of its people. Even before they managed to militarily occupy the land, British colonial officials and the Zionist movement alike drew on a range of rhetorical conceits that claimed Palestine for European Jews that were not living in the country, all the while dismissing the national and political rights of the existing Palestinian population. To begin with, there was the biblical framing of Palestinian history which gave rise to both religious and secular arguments. Religious appeals to this framework initially found in some by no means all with protestant resting circles. These frames endowed the Zionist movement with a moral, historical and religious right to settle the land. This was based on an idea of a divine covenant promising the land of Canaan to descendants of the Mesopotamian born Abraham. Zionism was also justified by the existence of Jewish policies in part of Palestine during biblical times. The presence of small Jewish communities at various points in history after the Roman suppression of the barred Hukba Revolt and religious expressions of yarning for the land articulated annually by Pious Jews during Passover. A second framing presented Palestine as a site of religious and civilizational conflict. By this reading Palestine was seen as a land usurped by Arab Muslim invaders for nearly a millennium and a half. By the law of precedence, according to those who believe in this clash of civilizations, doctrine, this land allegedly belonged to the descendants of the Israelites who had arrived before the Muslims and before the Roman Christians. By the logic of civilizational superiority, this holy land ought to belong to western rather than oriental civilization. In the words of Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, if the Zionist movement were to rule Palestine, quote, we should therefore form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should, as a neutral state, remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence. Does this sound familiar to you today, the discussions of barbarism, the presentation of Israel as civilization itself, as a representative of Europe on that land, and as a place that has to be guaranteed by Europe, protected by it, and of course today by the United States. Palestine was also presented as a legitimate site for appropriation based on European racial supremacy. Discussing the territory in 1918, Charles Buxton declared that he, quote, cannot admit the contention that the people who for the time being occupied a certain portion of the Earth's surface are necessarily entitled to exclude from it others who could use it better for the good of the whole, end of quote. In this regard, Buxton, a leading British Labour Party expert on imperial and colonial affairs, reflected commonly held views among the British imperial establishment about the innate and inherent inferiority of Native peoples around the non-Western world, including Palestinians. Such arguments were updated by political figures and thinkers who engaged in the historical rhetoric of colonial developmentalism, a rhetoric that is still being used today. Beyond its capitalist expressions, this rhetoric also had socialist iterations. Left-leaning advocates of Zionism wholeheartedly embraced the notion that colonization would bring economic progress. Best sections of the European social-democratic left were generally committed to the idea that colonization saved uncivilized people from their own lack of civility. Some were specifically exposed to the ideas of Polytheon, which deployed socialist language in the service of a nationalist colonial vision, celebrating the inevitable radical overthrow on the part of progressive settlers of, quote, reactionary Native feudalism, end of quote. Ramsey McDonald, who ultimately became the first Labour Prime Minister, expressed similar sentiments, although he emphasized the importance of industry as well as agriculture. Touring Palestine in 1922 and hosted by Jewish Labour leadership there, he detected a conflict between, quote, the Middle Ages and the 20th century, end of quote, noting that the Arabs, quote, do not and cannot use or develop the resources of Palestine, end of quote. This was in contrast to European Jewish colonists who were building, according to him, quote, a new garden city and factories in the middle of the sand dunes, end of quote. Besides, those socialists who were impressed by Zionist tractors and mechanized mills, there were others who framed Zionism as a utopia, bringing collectivist forms of ownership and a new redemptive spirit of cooperation to humankind. Thus, esteemed philosopher Martin Buber could lyrically proclaim in his philosophical and historical study of socialist utopian projects, quote, as I see history in the present, there is only one all out effort to create a full cooperative which justifies our speaking of success in the socialistic sense, and that is the Jewish village commune in its various forms as found in Palestine. Nowhere else in history do we have perfect utopian socialism except there, according to Martin Buber. Though he was a binationalist, that was more sympathetic to Palestinians than most within the Zionist movement, it did not occur to that philosopher that every settler called this utopia was a native dystopian. Buber's views, quoted here, expressed shortly after the Holocaust were shared by philisemites several decades before it. Completely bypassing Palestinian existence, let alone aspirations, their enthusiasm for Zionism as a utopian solution to the so-called Jewish question was informed by such events as Fin de siècle Russian pogroms and the Dreyfus affair. Ironically, however, their framing was shared by reactionary figures who propagated an unabashedly anti-Semitic reading of history. Among those the most influential was undoubtedly Lord Balfour, the man who was responsible for the anti-Jewish 1905 Aliens Act as prime minister, and for the 1917 Balfour Declaration as foreign secretary. This is the man that the Israeli state now names entire avenues and big promenades after. In his introduction to Sokolov's history of Zionism, Balfour framed the colonization of Palestine as a solution to what he saw as, quote, the problem of Jewish presence in the midst of Europe. I'm quoting him here. Conversations I held with Mr. Wiseman in January 1906 convinced me that history could not thus be ignored and that if a home was to be found for the Jewish people, homeless now for nearly 1900 years, it was vain to seek it anywhere but in Palestine. End of quote. This history that Balfour was referring to erased the Palestinian native from the story of Palestine. It further approached the centuries old European Jewish experience from an anti-Semitic lens seeing Zionism as quote, a serious endeavor to mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a body which it too long regarded as alien, as an evil hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb. End of quote. I'm using here a quote from, again, Balfour who is being honored by the Israeli state today. A significant anti-Semite who considers that Jews were headache for Europe and today he's being honored by people who claim to be combating anti-Semitism. Even more extreme than Balfour's anti-Semitism was the anti-Palestinianism of his fellow British policymakers, including the secretary of the colonies at the time, Winston Churchill, who explained the logic of his commitment to turning Palestine by force into a Jewish national homeland in the following terms. And I never miss an opportunity to quote this quote because we have to remember it. This was the man that inserted the Balfour declaration into the terms of the mandate. In other words, he was the most important figure in the disaster that we're seeing unfolding today. The disaster that has been unfolding for the past century, in fact, reflecting on his decision to incorporate the Balfour declaration into the terms of the mandate 101 years ago. He said, I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think that the red Indians had any right to say the American continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here. They have not the right nor had they the power. This is a triggering statement for Palestinians in this room, for Africans in this room, for indigenous peoples in this room, and for anybody that cares about humanity in this room. And guess what? This figure is on your five pound note. This is how this government remembers history. The horrifically racist and, I dare say, genocidal thinking underlying Churchill's commitment to colonizing Palestine and to thinking of its people as dogs that could be removed at wind and replaced with primarily Central East European Jewish settlers should be clear to everyone assembled here. But I would like you to take a moment and reflect on the last and most important part in his statement. Quote, they had not the right nor had they the power. End of quote. Why did Churchill consider that Palestinians did not have the power to prevent, quote, European settlers coming in here? End of quote. I'll give you an answer. Because they were a peaceful and largely unarmed population, mostly comprised of farmers and urban craftsmen and artisans. These are the ancestors of today's Palestinian refugees in Russia. And this population was confronting a project sponsored by the world's largest empire at the time with the tacit involvement, approval, and support of all the western great powers. How similar is the past to the present? Balfour's declaration combined with Churchill's incorporation of it into the terms of the mandate paved the way for yet another framework for discussing Palestine, a legalistic one that utilized a skewed reading of the history of British promises during the Great War to marginalize Palestinians. From the onset of the British occupation of Palestine in 1918 onwards, Zionists argued that Britain had a formal and binding obligation to facilitate Jewish colonization in Palestine. Given the Balfour Declaration, a short letter that Balfour wrote to Lord Rothschild during the Great War, the Balfour Declaration and the British mandate in Palestine that incorporated the declaration into its administrative framework actively erased Palestinian history as politically meaningful. Both the text of the declaration itself and the British Charter for the Mandate refer to the Palestinians negatively as merely quote existing non-Jewish communities, end of quote, and contrasted them with quote the Jewish people who were presumed to have a greater historical claim to the land than the indigenous population. Balfour explicated this logic in a confidential memorandum he wrote to the British cabinet in 1919 where he admitted that the British government viewed the Palestinian Arab population described only as quote present inhabitants as an impediment to Zionist Jewish redemption. Whereas the Palestinians merely had quote desires and prejudices, Zionism was quote rooted in age-long traditions. Once again, a tendentious and overtly racist view of meaningful history rendered Palestine as quote a people without a history, rendered Palestinians quote as a people without a history. And here let's hear these words from Balfour. For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. The four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism be it right or wrong, good or bad is rooted in age-long traditions and present needs in future hopes of far profounder impact, import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land, end of quote. These same four powers, the United States, Britain, France, and Italy, along with Germany and an assemblage of lesser European states today, are giving cover, support, funding, and facilitation for the crimes committed against the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza at this very moment. In plain sight they have authorized war crimes on a massive scale underlined by genocidal intent. Indeed what is so historically unique about the unfolding genocide in Gaza today is that it is not being carried out as a result of a decision of a single state against their population, it has long dominated. Rather it is being pursued through a combined effort carried out by leaders of western states assembled, leaders that deliberated, spoke to each other, and spoke to Israeli authorities, leaders that attended Israeli cabinet meetings, leaders that are flagrantly disregarding the wills of significant portions of their own citizenry. This is unlike recent genocidal and ethnic cleansing campaigns carried out in modern history, including Irwanda, Bosnia, and Myanmar. In those areas it's a single country that is carrying out the genocide. Here we see a transnational orchestration carried out by the most powerful states in the world today. As such this is not just an Israeli crime but a Western one. In this regard unfolding genocide in Gaza like the Iraq war reflects a democratic deficit currently existing in the West. Recent polling in the United States reveals the unpopularity of this war against the Palestinian people. Recent demonstrations across Europe carried out despite unprecedented attempts at mass suppression revealed the same fact. Recent declarations of support for the colonized, brutalized besieged, and yes butchered Palestinians undertaken by individual citizens in Europe and the United States famous and ordinary alike carried out at even the risk of being docks cancelled or fired show that there is a great deficit, a democratic deficit. The feats of the leaders of the so-called great powers will be recorded for generations in the annals of historical shame. Biden's massive shipments of arms that have been that have destroyed much of Raza and that have killed or injured more than 50,000 of its inhabitants in less than two months. Lincoln's participation in Israeli cabinet meetings plotting the horrors inflicted on the Palestinian people. Sunach's arrival on a military warplane to declare support for an Israeli extremist cabinet that declared its intention to carry out genocide and ethnic cleansing. Germany sickening moral lecturing and the projection of his deep-seated history of genocidal anti-Semitism onto the Palestinian people. This is not to mention the racist discourse of the leaders' implicitly and explicitly promoted against European and American populations of Palestinian Arab and Muslim descent as well as other racialized groups standing with Palestinians. A racist discourse that was designed to destroy any sense of solidarity emanating out of a genuine feeling for humanity. People do not express support for Palestine to gain fame. They do not express support for Palestine to gain money. They know that they may lose both. They know that they may be smeared. They do it out of conviction, out of acting on their conscience, and yet they are treated by these leaders as criminals and outcasts. And carrying out their policies, these leaders were also engaging in a set of distortions, historical and contemporary alike that are required for justifying colonialism and genocide. They erase history by erasing the genocidal backgrounds of the Israeli cabinet that they are arming and supplying. Let s take a look at this wonderful cabinet. Now, scholars of genocide know that the first step to genocide is covering up that it is happening. That s the case in most places. Not in the Israeli state. Quite remarkable. They re so confident about the transnational alliance protecting them and supporting them that they re talking openly about what they re doing. In Israeli official discourse, the purposes and nature of the war carried out against the Palestinian people are clearly announced. Now, the scholarly audience here in such an esteemed academic institution is likely familiar with the pronouncements of Israeli officials, so I m going to spare you a repeat of them. We ll just have a selected few cases. And it s worth recounting these selections so that we can look at this theme. Netanyahu has been candid with his domestic audience when it comes to his genocidal intent, for example. In his mission speech, he recalled the divine instruction to destroy Amalek in Samuel 1.15.3. And let s hear this passage from the Old Testament. Now, go and smite Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have and spare them not, but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. The Old Testament further states that Saul infuriates God by sparing some of the Amalekites in their livestock, by the way. Is this not what s happening in Raza today? The bit on infant and suckling is especially chilling for me because that s the majority of the deaths currently being recorded. The biggest segment that is affected at the moment is children and then women. Now, if you think this is just a statement made out of anger at a certain moment or out of a response to a certain event, which is how the history of October 7 is being portrayed now since October 7. Let s take a step back and reflect. That is not the case. Netanyahu s own lineage should not be forgotten here. His father, Benzion Milikowski, who later changed his name to Netanyahu, had been active in the most extreme sections of the Zionist movement since his youth. He was a colonist coming from Warsaw, Poland. He eventually became the secretary of the Zionist extremist leader, Vladimir Yobotinsky, who was also a colonist hailing from nearby Odessa, Ukraine, relatively nearby. Through his involvement in revisionist Zionist circles, Benzion Netanyahu became a propagandist in the U.S. for organs of the revisionist movement led by Menachem Begin and his Ergun Gang. He was, by British and American definitions at the time, essentially a spokesperson for a terrorist group. Two of its most notorious operations were the terrorist bombings of the King David Hotel and the horrific murder of the villagers of Dariusine in one of the worst massacres of the Nakaba. I should note here, by the way, that terrorism as a tactic and a method was introduced to the Middle East by the Zionist movement. First large-scale deployment of it in this part of the world came from them. And of course, they were familiar with this tactic because it was used in the early 20th century in the areas from which they emanated from in Eastern Europe. Let's note to the general public about Ergun was that it was behind the seized starvation and bombardment and ethnic cleansing of Yaffa that was mentioned in the beginning of this talk and that led to the destruction of the geography of Palestine, the greatest manuscript of its geography, and the expulsion of Mustafa Murad Dabbar and tens of thousands of his compatriots from that city. Many of the people of Yaffa and southern districts assaulted by Ergun ended up being forcibly displaced into Gaza as we mentioned already. And today, the descendants of an Ergun leader, the descendant of an Ergun leader is currently trying to displace them again in a twisted historical irony. The descendants of the victim are being victimized again by descendants of the perpetrators. Your criminality goes on 75 years onwards. And what is this descendant of this Ergun terrorist leader trying to do now? He's pushing the Palestinians into the Egyptian desert through a combination of terror, starvation, and that. And that's in the name of combating terrorists. Let's look at another wonderful character, Benzalel Smotrich, finance minister. His family originates from the city of Smotrich in Ukraine and was a long-term admirer of the biblical figure Joshua Ben-Nan, a figure killed, supposedly numerous Canaanite and other populations clearing the way for the biblical colonization of Palestine on the part of Israelites coming from Mesopotamia. Now long before the events of Gaza, he presented his plan to offer the Palestinians three options, leave the territories, continue to live there with second-class status. That's another option that's his generous offer. Or he tells Palestinians, continue resisting. And what solution is offering if they continue resisting? Quote, the Israeli defense forces will know what to do in that case. Now this man obviously has no feeling of humanity towards Palestinians, but additionally is even engaging in the denial of their own existence. Because he considers that there is no such thing, and I'm quoting him here, there is no such thing as Palestinians because there is no such thing as the Palestinian people. End of quote. It's one of those Bushism's, you know, strange statement. There is no such thing as Palestinians because there is no such thing as the Palestinian people. It's a weird statement to make. But this man who currently makes decisions of life and death in a place like Gaza is a settler and Israeli occupied West Bank, he lives in Khadoumian, a particularly vicious settlement that has a long history of attacking Palestinian lands nearby and expropriating Palestinian property and taking Palestinian lives. It is of course illegal under international law, but he resides there. All these world leaders meet with him. I'm not going to, I'm going to spare you his racist and homophobic statements in general, but I'll tell you one thing, and as opposed to when Israeli pride was being organized, he organized a beast parade to counter it. So this guy is a hater to use American pop culture language. Now, Itamar bin Gvir, another figure, Minister of National Security, a settler of course, is faced charges for many years of hate speech against Palestinians, Arabs. For many years, he had a portrait of the terrorist Baruch Goldstein hanging in his living room and only removed it to present himself as a legitimate figure internationally later on when it began to attract international attention. For those that were not alive or born in 1993, I will remind you Baruch Goldstein is, he was the man that massacred worshipers in the Haram El Ibrahim in the Abraham's Mosque in Hebron. He went there, killed them. Why? Because he believes that all religious structures in this land belong to Jews and Jews alone. Muslims should have no place there. I should note also that bin Gvir has on many occasions been suspected of participating in terrorist activities, and he was even caught sometimes with what seems to be equipment that could have been used for such activities. Guess what's the name of his party? That's now one of the major partners in the Israeli government that Rishi Sunak loves so much, Jewish power. Otsma Yehudi. Jewish power over whom? In a place like Palestine? Over Palestinians of course. Moving on to Yohav Galant, the Israeli Defense Minister. This is the man carrying out the current unfolding genocide in Rezegh. And in his view, and this is a public view that he wants to share with the world and is openly shared with the world, we are fighting against human animals. This is how he views Palestinians. And clearly this is somebody who's not even into animal rights, so he wants them slaughtered. He advocated a complete siege on Rezegh. He was born, by the way, in Mustafa Murad's home town, Yaffa. And who knows, maybe the son of Polish colonists was born in a house near Mustafa Murad's home. That has happened to many Palestinians, where those that replaced them now want to murder and expel their maiming Palestinians on the land. The ironies of history again continue. Now, an interesting historical note, since we're talking about the use of history in politics. Who is Yohav? What is Yohav named after? Does anybody here in this room know? Nimr, you know a lot about these things. Who is Yohav named after? Yohav is named after Operation Yohav. And Operation Yohav has a big meaning in Gaza today, because it was an operation that was carried out in 1948 by a unit that Yohav's father was a participant in. This operation led to a major massacre, one of the biggest in 1948, in Arabid Dawaim. It led to the depopulation and expulsion and killing of a large proportion of the Naqab and the western districts of Hebron, which led to the creation of Rezegh as a major concentration camp for refugees. Rezegh is only 340 square kilometers and it houses now 2.3 million people. Why? Because these people came from this operation, in large part, from this operation Yohav, after which Yohav Gallant is named. And now he intends to carry out an operation to continue along his father's footsteps. Do we hear this history when Rishi Tsunak and other politicians in the west talk about Palestine? No. This history is erased. Instead, and I'm going to end my talk on this and then we'll open the space for discussing this in the Q&A. These leaders engage in two forms of misframing, historical misframing. They present what is going on, not as a continuation of the Naqba, not as a continuation of the colonization of Palestine, not as a continuation of a long history of violence, dispossession, and expulsion that has been carried out against the Palestinian people. They present it as a response to an event, October 7th. And for anybody that notes that there's a structural reality that produced October 7th and everything before it and everything after it, they'll come and smear them with the accusation of supporting terrorism. This is quite astonishing, but it's a byproduct of a system of thought that we need to assault, a system of historical thought that has been going on now for quite a while in the west. The system relies on the logic of the war and terror. Epistemologically, this system has been disastrous for world peace, for humanity. A lot of people think it began after 9-11. That is not true. When the Algerians were fighting the war to liberate their country, they led the Algerian Revolution to overthrow a system of French colonization, sector colonials. They were accused of terror. And anybody that spoke in favor of Algerian independence in Britain, in France, in Europe at the time was accused of supporting terrorism because the FLN had engaged in bombings in the Paris metro and elsewhere. Those that spoke about Mao Mao as legitimate resistance in Kenya and that spoke about the establishment of the armed wing of the South African Revolution to liberate South Africa from apartheid were also accused of supporting terrorism. Those that spoke in favor of the liberation of Ireland. And I know this is a controversial subject here because many of the bombings carried out by the IRA took place in London, in this city, were simply reduced to supporters of terrorism. Now, you may reject the tactics, but what's difficult to reject are the fundamental structural issues that these movements emerged out of. The IRA did engage in bombings, but for many years those that did not want to see peace in Ireland were saying we should not talk to the IRA. We should not think about what's going on in Ireland except through the prism of war and terrorism. Was that politically useful? Same in Kenya. And we ended up with massacres, thousands of African bodies piled in Kenya as they were seeking their own liberation for the sake of very violent white centers. Same with South Africa. Nelson Mandela famously referred to as a terrorist. And for years, South Africa liberation was delayed by this framing that was carried out by the likes of Margaret Thatcher and others. So when we talk about expanding the political space, we're not talking about supporting terrorism, we're not talking about supporting tactics. We're talking about reflecting on structural issues and seeing what's the way forward for humanity. What's the right thing to do in a place like Palestine? What is the right thing to do in a place like Ireland? And that means political decisions. That's what responsible leadership means. That's what moderate leadership means. Those leaders that talk about radicalism, they're engaging in radicalism by not acknowledging the real underlying issues behind situations that have a great impact on world peace, economy, and politics. And no issue in the Middle East has been as persistent or significant as the Palestinian issue in this regard. Now, the distortion of history and reducing it to a framework of terrorism is also accompanied by another misframing, antisemitism. Again, antisemitism is a big problem in this world. It's a problem that was produced here in Europe. It's a problem that was produced by Europeans like Lord Balfour, we just heard them, who could not grapple with the idea of diversity, who wanted to see a Europe that is homogenous, a Europe that does not allow for the existence of others, a Europe that was hostile to immigrants, hostile to those that were different, that had other faiths that dressed in a different way, that looked different. That's where antisemitism comes from. And of course, it had genocidal results. But again, the perpetrators were European. If you watch the news today, you think that Palestinians invented it. That's what these leaders seem to suggest, that somehow this comes out of an Islamic tradition. That is simply not true. There is no Islamic tradition of genocidal attitudes towards Jews. And I stand by this statement and I challenge anybody to show me that there is. So, misframing of this kind has to be called out for what it is. We cannot be even defensive about it. We have to be open about what the purposes of this are. They are using legitimate causes, the causes of the loss of innocent life, the causes of discrimination against an entire people and potentially the extermination of that people, which almost happened in this continent. They're using that to suppress the Palestinian people today and to perpetuate an ongoing genocide. It's twisted. So, those who seek a better world, I think it's very important for us to reclaim history, to ground ourselves in it again, to view things in terms of their structural reality. There is a pushback against that. In the United States today, we see people accusing anybody who talks about history as engaging in woke politics. We see people that do not want a discussion of underlying issues. We see people using scare tactics and McCarthyism. We have to be brave and confront them. As academics, as scholars, as students, as people who like to inquire about the origins of things and who want to put an end to suffering in this world and who want to see a world in which there is a flourishing of common humanity, including for Palestinians and, yes, Israeli settler colonists also, for everybody. For us, we have to reclaim a different kind of history. And that reclamation starts with acts of solidarity of the sort that we've seen on this campus in the past couple of months. Thank you very much.