 Thank you, Hassan. Good evening to you all. And indeed, this is the second anniversary of the Center for Palestine Studies, and we launched the Center in this very room two years ago, and I'm sure quite a few among you were already at that meeting. And thank you all for coming this evening. We have the honor and privilege of having Professor Khalidi as our first speaker for this annual lecture series, which we intend as a prestigious annual event, which will try to coincide more or less with the anniversary, which is early March of the launch of the Center for Palestine Studies. So before giving the floor to our speaker and introducing him, let me just speak of some of what we have accomplished or are in the process of accomplishing when it comes to the Center. I mean, this is an initiative which started and is still functioning with zero funds, practically, except the help that we get from the London Middle East Institute and the administrative help in that regard. But otherwise, we have plenty of projects, and our next phase will be to try to get proper funding for the number of projects that we have. We have nevertheless, over these two years, I think managed to achieve quite a few results, and I will describe them quite briefly to give you an idea of what is going on. One of the first initiatives that we managed to realize was a Palestine Research Seminar, which includes the PhD students working on Palestine, and SOAS is such a center for Middle East Studies that there are quite a few and quite brilliant, actually, PhD students working on issues directly related to Palestine. So for the second year this year, this started last year, and this year for the second year, this seminar has been functioning. So this is one of the first achievements of the center. Another achievement or another project which is in the process of being realized is to remain in the academic sphere, or the directly academic sphere, the teaching sphere, if you want, is the fact that as a center we contributed in setting up an MA in Palestine Studies, which to my knowledge will be the first, with this kind of designation at least in the Western world, and that would include, I mean, as a core course, a course in Palestine Studies which will be open to students in various departments at SOAS, and I think this is an important, quite important achievement that we are in the process of fine-tuning and formalizing and going through the procedures needed for such initiatives. I should mention also that the Department of Media Studies, which is headed by one of the board members of the center, Dina Matar, Dina is here. Dr. Matar has also created a course on Palestine and the moving image and is working on a Palestine Film Club here at SOAS. There's also an opportunity to say that we are seeking closer collaboration with the Palestine Film Festival, which is already an institution here at London. Then the next achievement, and I consider this as a really important one, because the rest is, of course, but I'm stressing the importance of each of these achievements actually, is the fact that we are about to launch officially a call for manuscript for a new book series. We have an agreement, we are finalizing an agreement with I. B. Torres, the founder and director of which is here, Mr. Irat Baggerzade, and we will launch a series called the SOAS Palestine Studies series, which will be a peer-reviewed academic publishing project, open to everybody. It's not restricted to SOAS in any way. It will just be something which is run by the Center for Palestine Studies and the key editor of the series. Then we have further projects, and the next big project, let me speak now for the future, is to set up an international association for Palestine Studies with the idea of convening every two years here in London an international conference of Palestine Studies, which would be a major contribution in putting Palestine Studies very much on the map of the academia and the western academia and the global academia, and I think this is very important for the time being. There are just three Palestine Studies Center, one in Exeter and one of the founders of which is here, Dr. Radhakarmi. There is, of course, the Columbia Palestine Studies Center and our center here at SOAS. Last but not least, or actually what I started with, the annual lectures series, which we are starting this year. We have, as I said, the great honor and privilege of starting it with Professor Walid Khalidi, but I should say who better than Professor Khalidi could start such a series. I mean, Professor Khalidi is definitely, let's say, the dean, or in some way even the founder of Palestine Studies, if we're speaking of scientific study of the question of Palestine, he definitely is the main pillar or the original person who fought for the scientific elaboration of a counter narrative but built on historical facts and that has been extremely important. Professor Khalidi, I think most of you here would not even need to be introduced, but let me just mention the fact that actually he started working in Palestine, in the Arab office, before the partition and he has been also actually someone who has lived this whole history and among the very first person to build up a scientific discourse, a scholarly discourse on the issue, which at the same time was definitely dedicated to the Palestinian cause but again on a solid scientific ground. And of course, Professor Khalidi is the founder and director of the Institute for Palestine Studies and I happened to be last year in Beirut in November part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the IPS, the Institute for Palestine Studies. And we had a panel there and at the same time, the same year saw the publication of collections of former articles by Professor Khalidi, both in French and in Arabic, in Arabic it's in the Majella de la Seate de la Palestine the Arabic counterpart of the Journal for Palestine Studies, the JPS and in French it's in a book series which is connected to the IPS and well, I mean, there was a consensus in the panel to very much emphasize the way these articles, some of them were, I mean, I think the oldest of the articles was one published in 1959, how much they still stood the test of time and this is absolutely the best testimony to the importance, solidity and the quality of Professor Khalidi's research and that's why, as I said, there couldn't be any better person to inaugurate this cycle, this series of annual lecture than Professor Khalidi. So thank you very much for coming and we very much appreciate also the effort of coming from all the way from Boston where Professor Khalidi establishes thought and research for many years at Harvard, among other several places, Princeton and the rest and so we very much appreciate the effort. It took you to come and join us for that. Before just ending this, I would like to thank all those who made this event possible and especially once again Dr. Matar who played a major role and Professor Izdat Darwazi and Katan Foundation which also helped us make this possible. So many thanks to all of you and please join me in welcoming Professor Khalidi. Thank you. I must first thank Professor Ashkar for his very generous and kind words about me by which I was deeply touched and moved and I would like to say I salute the Center for Palestine Studies for the good sense of making him head of the Center. Ladies and gentlemen, we meet today to celebrate the second anniversary of the establishment of the SOAS Center for Palestine Studies. I'm honored to have been asked to deliver this first annual lecture. It is deeply gratifying to be addressing you on this occasion. In the name of a sister institution, the Institute for Palestine Studies which has just celebrated its 50th anniversary as an independent, private, non-partisan, non-profit public service research institute. We at IPS look forward to long years of innovative cooperation between our two institutions. Like other Centers of Palestine Studies, we are both researching the same phenomenon. The ever-growing debris generated on that fateful day of November the second 1917 by the so-called Balfour Declaration, the single most destructive political document on the Middle East in the 20th century. How far this university has traveled and how alien the idea of a Center for Palestine Studies would have been to Lord Balfour can be gauged from the oft-quoted words dripping with Olympian disdain he uttered in 1919. Quote, the great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes of far-pro-founder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who inhabit that ancient land. The expression Palestine problem is shorthand for the genesis, evolution and fallout of the Zionist colonization of Palestine, which began in the early 1980s and is ongoing at this very hour. One century ago this year the floodgates of World War I opened to usher the chain of events that led to the Balfour Declaration. By the time it was issued in 1917, almost 40 years had passed since the beginning of Zionist colonization and 20 since the first Zionist Congress at Basel. Despite the further of the early colonists, the movement of the Jewish masses fleeing its arist rule was not southwards towards the Levant, but westwards across Europe towards the magnetic shores of North America. A trickle arrived in Palestine, a flood rolled across the Atlantic. Most rabbinical authorities throughout the diaspora were hostile to Zionism for pre-empting the Messiah. While the American and European Jewish bourgeoisie were embarrassed by Zionism and fearful of gentile charges of dual loyalty. All this changed when Britannia gave its blessing to the Zionist venture in the Balfour Declaration. Not only did it give its blessing, it also agreed to transform this unilateral declaration into a self-imposed obligation guaranteed under international law in the newly established League of Nations mandate system. Uniquely in its governance as an imperial power, it agreed to carry out this obligation in partnership with a foreign private body, the world Zionist organization, now elevated in the guise of an international Jewish agency to an independent actor recognized by the League for the specific purpose of establishing the Jewish national home in Palestine. An immediate question leaps to mind. How could London, teaming with pro-consular expertise, ripened during centuries of dealings with multitudinous races and faiths across the globe? How could it have fallen for the Zionist plan? The short answer is too syllabic. Hubris, at the end of World War I, with the U.S. withdrawn behind a wall of isolationism and with Ottoman, Romanov, Habsburg, and Hohenzollern empires in ruins, British power was paramount. King Clovis' realm across the channel alone could challenge it, but this was no big deal because Sir Mark Sykes had found a handy formula to win French acquiescence, divide the loot. There is, of course, a longer answer, which is where our research centers come in. Setting aside the trees and thick foliage of the mandate periods, white papers, blue books, and commissions of inquiry, our scholars would do well to look more deeply into how and why Imperial London, between the two World Wars, nurtured a rival Imperium in Imperio under its governance. The puzzle deeperness, when one considers that this Imperium was not only local, it had an external dimension, the Imperium ex Imperio in the Jewish agency whose major central financial institutions and other sources of power were largely American and beyond London's control. Thus, when in 1939, Bangurian, the pre-eminent leader of the Yishuv, decided to change horses, discarding the British mount, favored by his political rival, Chaim Wiseman, for an American steed, he did so in deliberate calculation of America's potential as a counterweight and successor to Britain. The story is as old as history, the revolt of a client against a metropolitan patron. But the erosion of Anglo-Zionist concord by the late 1930s also illustrates an iron law of politics. No two political entities remain eternally in sync. There may be a moral here for the current relationship between Obama's Washington and Beebe's Tel Aviv. Ladies and gentlemen, the events of 1948 have stirred up more controversy than any other phase of the Palestine problem, giving rise eventually to a new post-Zionist school of historiography in Israel. Its authors have been designated as the new historians, as opposed to the old historians who articulated a mythical Zionist foundational narrative. The old narrative featured a Yeshua David facing an Arab Goliath with perfidious Albion bent on strangling the infant state. It also involved hundreds of thousands of Palestinians leaving their homes, farms and businesses in response to orders from their leaders to make way for the invading Arab armies on the 15th of May 1948. Given the role of the IPS and this speaker in the articulation of the Palestinian counter-narrative to that of the old historians, it could be useful for the record to share some elements of how it developed. One of the first authoritative accounts of an early version of the Israeli orders myth is given by the Palestinian historian Araf el-Araf. Araf had been based in Ramallah as assistant district commissioner in the last days of the mandate and the Jordanians kept him on as de facto civilian governor. In mid-July 1948, Israeli forces launched a massive attack against Lidda and Ramallah. While the Arab armies, a stone's throw away, stood by. The entire population of the two towns, some 60,000 people, were forced on a long trek towards Ramallah. They arrived there in pitiable condition after hundreds had dropped along the way. Count Bernadotte, the UN mediator, arrived in Ramallah the third week of July 1948. Araf, who was delegated to accompany him, was astonished when Bernadotte told him that the senior Israeli officials he had just met had assured him that the inhabitants of Lidda and Ramallah had left because of orders given them by the town leaders. Araf immediately arranged for Bernadotte to meet these leaders, still living in caves and under bridges after the recent expulsion. Muslim and Christian ecclesiasts, municipal counselors, judges, professionals of all kinds. There is little doubt in my mind that this experience contributed to Bernadotte's recommendation to the United Nations on the return of the refugees, which the General Assembly passed after his assassination by Yitzhak Shamir's Sterngang. In the 1950s, the order's myth was well over the British press. By this time, the predominant Israeli version was that the orders had been broadcast by the top Palestinian leadership, not the local leaders. The most aggressive exponent of this version was the British journalist John Kimche, then editor of the weekly Jewish Observer, the organ of the Zionist Federation in Britain. The top Palestinian leader, Haj Amin al-Hassani, was then living in exile in Lebanon. I had known him from childhood and he had always treated me kindly. When I described to him the impact of the order's myth in the West, he immediately allowed me unrestricted access to his archives since destroyed by the phalanges during the Lebanese Civil War in the 1970s. I had earlier gone through reams of the BBC monitoring records of the 1948 radio broadcasts kept at the British Museum in London. I added the data from Haj Amin's archives to the findings from the BBC records to produce my article Why Did the Palestinians Leave? which was published in 1959 by the AUB Journal Middle East Forum. Enter Erskine B. Childers. Soon after the article's publication I received in Beirut a visit from this young Irish journalist who showed great interest in the question of orders and in the BBC records. And he said to me that he intended to examine himself upon his return to London these BBC records. Enter early 1960, Ian Gilmore, owner of the Spectator, the prestigious British weekly. He had just been to Israel and had heard all about the orders from the senior Israeli officials. Having read my article in Middle East Forum he asked me many questions and left. On 12th of May 1961 the Spectator published Childers' article entitled The Other Exodus whose conclusion was No Orders. There ensued a crackling correspondence of readers' letters that lasted almost three months in the columns of the Spectator and in which, thanks to Ian Gilmore, subsequently a Cabinet Minister, the counter Israeli narrative was given unprecedented exposure. An early responder was John Kimche who loftily opined quote, new myths have taken place of old ones. The Israelis have contributed their share but more lately it has been the Arab propagandists, Walid Khalidi and Erskine Childers. At the time I was on sabbatical from the AUB at Princeton checking the CIA records, monitoring records, of the 1948 Arab broadcasts at the Firestone Library. From there I wrote to the Spectator disclaiming acquaintance with Childers which was untrue but expressing great delight that he had independently arrived at the same conclusion as myself which was true. I also noted that my latest findings in the CIA records corroborated my earlier findings in the BBC records. No orders. As it happened, while at Princeton I had also been looking at the Hebrew sources with the help of a sympathetic, elderly Sephardic lady scholar. The result of my research was Plan Dalet, the Zionist master plan for the conquest of Palestine soon to be published in 1961 again in the Middle East Forum. As the Spectator correspondence increasingly involved the Palestinian exodus in general, I weighed in with a summary of my findings at Princeton. My letter to the Spectator at the time 1961 said the following, inter alia, a Zionist master plan called Plan Dalet for the forceful occupation of Arab areas both within and outside the Jewish state given by the United Nations to the Zionists was put into operation. This plan aimed at the de-Arabization of all areas under Zionist control. Plan Dalet aimed at both breaking the back of Palestinian Arab resistance and facing the United Nations, the United States and the Arab countries with the political and military fit that completely in the shortest possible time. Hence the massive and ruthless blows against the centers of Arab population. As Plan Dalet unfolded and tens of thousands of Arab civilians streamed in terror into the neighboring Arab countries Arab public opinion forced their shilly, shallying governments to send their regular armies into Palestine. I concluded by the following. It is the considered opinion of this writer that it was only the entry of the Arab armies that frustrated the more ambitious objective of Plan Dalet which was no less than the military control of the whole of Palestine west of the Jordan. To the best of my knowledge this is the first public mention of Plan Dalet in the west. Ladies and gentlemen just as World War I gave birth to the Balfour Declaration the 1967 war gave birth to another momentous document Security Council Resolution 242 and just as the Balfour Declaration is in a sense the fountain head of all developments in the Palestine problem and Arab Israeli conflict in the 20th century up to and including the 1967 war so is Security Council Resolution 242 in a sense the fountain head of all developments in the conflict throughout the balance of the 20th century and to this day oddly many observers look with favor on Resolution 242 largely because its preamble talks about the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war but in its operative in its operative paragraphs Resolution 242 does the precise opposite true it talks about withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the French territories occupied but it does not specify the time when the withdrawal should begin the line to which Israel should withdraw or how long the withdrawal should take place nor does it mention by name the territories to be withdrawn from the resolution calls for peace and security recognized borders between all the protagonists but it does not indicate who decides the security or location of these borders there is no mention of the armistice lines the resolution affirms the need for a just settlement of the refugee problem but it does not indicate who decides the justice of the settlement or who these refugees are the word Palestinian is totally absent and there is no reference to the applicability of the Geneva Convention to the occupied territories this remarkable text should be seen against the background of decisions taken by the Israeli cabinet on the 18th and 19th of June soon after the hostilities ended briefly the Israeli cabinet consensus was on one withdrawal only on condition of peace agreements two peace treaties with Egypt and Syria on the basis of the international frontiers and Israel's security three annexation of the Gaza Strip and four the Jordan River as Israel's security border implying permanent control of the West Bank you don't have to be a cryptographer to see the concordance of the resolution 242 with these specifications of the Israeli cabinet or rather these instructions of the Israeli cabinet the focus on peace treaties with Egypt and Syria in the cabinet's guidelines to the exclusion of Jordan is of course designed to decouple these countries Syria and Egypt from the Palestine problem and to isolate both the Palestinians and Jordan on 28th of June 1967 10 days after this cabinet meeting Israel revealed its true intentions by annexing the 2.5 square miles of Jordanian municipal east Jerusalem together with an additional 22.5 square miles of prime adjacent West Bank territory in an obscene territorial configuration sticking northwards at Ramallah resolution 242 was an Israeli diplomatic and political victory no less momentous than its victory on the battlefield but it was only possible because of President Lyndon Baines Johnson what really motivated LBJ remains a field of study for our centers of Palestine studies as a senator in 1956 Johnson had adamantly opposed Eisenhower's decision to force Israel to restore the status quo and give back territories acquired by war in the aftermath of the 1967 war Foreign Minister Aba Iban worked closely with LBJ's inner circle including US ambassador to the United Nations Arthur Goldberg as a member of a pre-Saddam Iraqi delegation to the United Nations General Assembly right after the war I had to listen to Iban weaving the spider webs of his false hoods but I also got the chance to rebut him Iban reveals in his memoirs that he urged his American counterparts to eradicate from their minds the very concept of armistice and to link Israeli withdrawal from the current ceasefire lines to peace negotiations in which boundaries would be fixed by agreement this meant that the starting point for the negotiations would be the farthest foxholes reached by Israeli armor deep in Arab territory it also meant that Israel could as indeed it did use the full weight of its conquests and the full weights of its military superiority to dictate the time tempo sequence and extent of its withdrawal the regime established by resolution two for two has been acquiesced in if not abetted by successive American administrations since Johnson's presidency the resolution's opagness and permissiveness has made possible the settlement policy ongoing to this very hour it is this regime that sent Sadat to Jerusalem and Arafat to Oslo the 1967 war dealt the coup de grace to secular Arabism already in its death throes but it catapulted the Palestinian guerrilla movement to the front ranks because it symbolized resistance for the entire Arab world after the humiliation of the Arab armies but the war's most profound and potentially catastrophic impact lies in the inspiration it gave to neo-zionist religious fundamentalist messianism and to its creation of conditions conducive to a clash over Jerusalem's holy places between Jewish and Christian evangelical jihadists on the one hand and Muslim jihadists on the other ladies and gentlemen when one looks at the Palestinian scene today one sees a people hanging by their fingernails to the ramp of their ancestral land in such dire straits the top most Palestinian priority should surely be to close ranks this is why the Fatah Hamas rift is so scandalous you need your two fists your two fists to survive both sides are equally to blame and both sides should be tirelessly and relentlessly urged to reconcile of course the very act of reconciliation between them would be punched on by Netanyahu is an act of war but surely Israel knows that the intra-Palestinian reconciliation is a must for any Palestinian Israeli peace the gap between Fatah Hamas on the mode of struggle is wide Abbas is committed to non-violence this commitment is not philosophical as a practitioner of violence in his guerrilla days Abbas was quietly absorbing its cost and consequences it is no coincidence that he was the first within the Fatah leadership to propose a dialogue with sympathetic Israeli interlocutors Abbas's commitment to non-violence is strategy not tactics I know this for certain having listened to him and to his three predecessors Arafat Shukri and Haj Amin in many ways Abbas is a tragic figure he is a guerrilla leader withingly turned collaborationist every night his security forces keep to their barracks while Israeli Kobando squads prowl the Kaspas and refugee camps and West Bank villages hunting young militants this is a terrible price to pay for moral high ground how long can Abbas maintain this policy without real progress towards peace how long can the Palestinians put up with his leadership nevertheless it should not be forgotten that the BDS movement could not have progressed so far without Abbas wide though it is the gap between Abbas and Hamas on the issue of armed struggle is not unbridgeable there is evidence of pragmatism within the Hamas leadership and if it thinks theologically it can also conceive of a theological exit strategy from its declared commitment to the armed struggle besides Abbas's commitment to non-violence does not preclude disobedience this could be the meeting ground once the will to reconcile takes over and the time for civil disobedience comes ladies and gentlemen if the Fatah Hamas rift is dangerously detrimental to the Palestinian cause so is this agreement about the political goal it is no secret the one state, two states issue is a major topic of debate not only within the Palestinian camp but also within a much wider circle of allies and supporters as you may have surmised I am not a congenital advocate of the partition of Palestine the two states formula in fact I came to it pretty late it was only in 1978 that I espoused it in an article in foreign affairs entitled thinking the unthinkable I am still a two state and this is why there is global support for a two state solution with the possible exception of the federated states of Micronesia it would be irresponsible to forgo this invaluable asset we have already tried the one state framework during the 30 years of the British mandate and we know what happened even though the balance of power was at first massively in favour of the Palestinians the balance of power today is crashingly in favour of the other side Israel is the superpower of the Arab Mashrek thanks to the rottenness of the Arab state system in a one state framework Israel would have the ideal alibi to remove whatever constraints remain on settlement within a twinkling the Palestinians would be lucky if they had enough land to plant onions in their back gardens and to bury their dead alongside Israel's 1948 declaration of independence pledged to ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all inhabitants irrespective of religion race or sex now is insisting on prior recognition of the Jewish character of Israel as an absolute condition of a peace agreement of the 37 signatories of the 1948 Israeli Declaration of Independence only one was born in Palestine the others came mostly from Poland and the Russian Empire from Plonsk, Poltava Pinsk Lodz, Kornas these men were mostly left of centre but they had not come all the way to Palestine to share their new home with its inhabitants when Netanyahu speaks of a Jewish state he is speaking in the name of a vast and growing religious fundamentalist right wing nationalist constituency which splits Israeli Jewish society right down in the middle the division in the Jewish population of Israel today is no longer between left and right but between the secularists and the religious many of the secularists are liberal post-Zionist but they are not in the ascendant in the ascendant is a neo-Zionist messianic triumphalist religious right settler movement allied to the US Christian apocalyptic evangelism fired by the 1967 conquest of the whole of Eritz Israel and the return of the temple mount to Jewish military possession this coalition considers Palestinians Canaanites whose doom is biblically predestined it does not look much more favourably on the secular Jewish leaders Israelis there is no consensus in Israel on who is a Jew indeed we should ask BB for a definition of Jewish many proponents of BDS are one-staters looking to the success of sanctions against South Africa looking against South Africa but between the start of sanctions against South Africa in the early 1960s and Mandela's election in 1994 there was 30 years 30 years this is time time is not an asset for Palestinians in a one state framework despite the demographic factor I am not against BDS I want it to succeed to succeed it needs the Jewish post Zionists and the liberal Zionists de legitimize the occupation and your chances are bright de legitimizing Israel itself will cost you the bulk of your Jewish allies and most of the friendly world capitals let us have two BDS campaigns BDS one to end the occupation BDS two to implement a pledge to its Arab citizens in Israel's declaration of independence in that sequence ladies and gentlemen to hug one's identity in an age of globalization is a global phenomenon witnessed in the breakup of states and devolution movements worldwide the one-staters run counter to this trend a Palestinian state is a Palestinian imperative Palestinians need to maintain their own link to what is left of their own ancestral land they need an umbilical cord to the collective memories of their parents and grandparents they need a tribune who will stand up for those of them who will remain in their diaspora they need to pass an inheritance to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren they need a spot under God's son where they are not aliens stateless ghosts as citizens ladies and gentlemen just how sorry the state of the Arab nation is can be gauged from the fact that the future of Palestinians hinges more on the desires and prejudices of Benjamin Benzion Natan Yahu than on those of any incumbent in the proud Arab capitals of Umayyad Damascus Abbasid Baghdad Ayyubid Cairo or Wahhabid Riyadh still the current tripartite discourse between Natan Yahu Kerry and Abbas is in reality a facade for the arm wrestling marathon that has been going on between Bibi and Obama for five years I listed Bibi's parentage advisedly his ideological template was forged by and embodied in the teachings of his grandfather Rabbi Natan and his father Professor Benzion Rabbi Natan a contemporary of Herzl's a national religious Zionist a rare species at the time he was an ardent follower of Ladimir Jabotinsky the founder of the Zionist revisionist movement so named because from the early 1920s it sought to revise the gradualist dissembling strategy of Wiseman and Bengarion Jabotinsky insisted on unabashed assertion of the end point of the Jewish national home a Jewish state through which river Jordan flowed not one in which the river was a border this goal was to be achieved in the shortest possible time by massive immigration by means of an iron wall by which he meant overwhelming military might Bengarion routinely referred to Jabotinsky as Vladimir Hitler Benzion's ardor for Jabotinsky was no less intense than Natan's he joined the revisionist party at 18 and later edited a revisionist daily entitled Jordan which relentlessly criticized Benzion and Bengarion Benzion followed Jabotinsky to the United States where he became his secretary he stayed there for 10 years spreading the revisionist ideology but returned to Israel to blast Begin for the peace treaty with Egypt recently not long ago before his death Benzion told an Israeli daily that withholding food from Arab cities preventing education terminating electrical power the Arabs won't be able to exist and will run away from here Bibi's Israeli biographers tell us that Benzion tutored his sons in history and Judaism and that they held their father in holy reverence as a boy Bibi often wanted to discuss the two banks of Jordan principle if Bibi's grandfather and father were his formative ideological influences his role model in life was his older brother Jonathan the commander leader the hero of Entebbe where he was killed in action this is where Bibi's swagger comes from Jonathan's death traumatized father and son to honor him they established the Jonathan institute in Jerusalem for the study of international terrorism appropriately one of its conferences was addressed by prime minister Menahim Begin though he apparently was trained from sharing his reminiscences about Daria Sin or about how his organization the Irgun had introduced the letter bomb the parcel bomb the barrel bomb the market bomb and the car bomb to the Middle East for Bibi the US is as much home ground as possible he knew the country from age 7 elementary school high school MIT a Boston consulting firm during this period he honed a Philadelphia accent and mastered baseball vocabulary at least three of his uncles had emigrated to the United States where they became steel and tin tycoons after Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon Yitzhak Shamir then foreign minister sent Bibi as an attache to the Washington embassy to help repair Israel's image Bibi was an instant success ubiquitously glib in the media lionized by the Jewish major organizations ambassador to the United Nations from 84 to 88 he consolidated his stardom with the pro Israeli public in the United States in 1991 Shamir now prime minister made Bibi deputy minister further feeding his Himalayan political appetite by 93 Bibi was the Likud leader by 96 he was prime minister a major source of insights into the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv is the memoirs and autobiographies of successive presidents and secretaries of state the space devoted to the Arab Israeli conflict in these writings recently has grown enormously in the recent decades curiously to date there has been no serious attempt to collate this information with the other sources one other field of study for Palestine centers since his Washington embassy days Bibi has dealt in various capacities with five US administrations he considers the American political arena as legitimately his own he believes that his writings on terrorism convinced president Reagan to change American policy on how to deal with it he brags that he successfully lobbied Congress to end secretary Baker's attempts to open a dialogue with the PLO he explains all I did was force him forcing Baker into a change of policy by applying a little diplomatic pressure that's the name of the game unquote on his first visit to the United States minister in 1996 Bibi addressed Congress receiving tumultuous Jack in the box bipartisan ovations a tycoon uncle whom he had invited to the session told the US newspaper that he believed his nephew could beat Bob Dole and Bill Clinton at the presidential race President Clinton complained that when Bibi came to the White House for a visit, evangelist Jerry Falwell was outside rallying crowds praising the Israeli government's resistance to withdrawal from the occupied territories Clinton believed that Bibi recoiled at heart from the peace process his favorite tactic was to stall and fill a buster and when challenged he would cry national insult enter Barack Obama Bibi born in 1949 is 12 years older by the time Obama ran for the US Senate in 2003 Bibi had already been UN ambassador leader of the Likud prime minister foreign minister and was then the incumbent finance minister it was probably only after Obama's 2004 speech at the national democratic convention that Obama began to loom on Bibi's political radar screen where on earth did this guy come from and with that middle name it is tempting to speculate that Bibi feels Obama impinging on Bibi's own turf there is no time to go into the various rounds of the Obama Bibi arms wrestling match the settlement freeze Iranian nuclear ambitions the 1967 lines UN recognition of the PLO the Hamas Fatah agreement some observers believe Bibi has humbled Obama I think they are at deuce as in federal federal the other chap ladies and gentlemen in the last 100 years since 1914 Zionism rode piggyback first on packs Britannica then on packs americana to establish packs israeliana of the palestinian people how long can it persist in its refusal to seriously address what it has done to the palestinians my hunch is that Bibi will acquiesce to carries framework proposals but only with the intention to stall he thinks he can get away with it he sees himself as more than the prime minister of Israel in 2010 and 2012 the Jerusalem Post ranked him first on a list of the world's most influential Jews to Bibi the Atlantic flows through erets Israel Bibi knows he will outlive Obama politically in Israel once a prime minister always a prime minister Obama has three less than three more years to go meanwhile Bibi knows he can outflank Obama in the congress he certainly has more bipartisan support than the incumbent in the oval office all the other protagonists are committed to a peaceful resolution Kerry is his master's voice and Obama's understanding of the Palestine problem far surpasses that of all his predecessors Abbas's commitment to peace is genuine at his age peace would be the crowning achievement of a lifetime the Gulf dynasts are panting for a resolution they want to focus on the real enemy the un-Islamic anti-monarchical Tehran Bibi will never share Jerusalem continued occupation and settlement while tightening the noose around East Jerusalem is a sure recipe for an apocalyptic catastrophe sooner or later over the Muslim holy places in the old city with the continued surge in religious fundamentalist zealotry on both sides the road to Armageddon will lead from Jerusalem that is why ladies and gentlemen Benjamin Benzion Ben Natan Natanyahu is the most dangerous political leader in the world today thank you very much Mr. Khalidi thank you very very much for this fascinating fascinating lecture and I should say an also fascinating performance quite humbling to all of us teachers and public speakers who are in this room and we again thank you very much for this big effort that you did and this is a person who just arrived in Jerusalem yesterday so I mean you got enough food for thought for a long time I guess maybe it's time for the other kind of food thank you very very much