 Hi, welcome everyone to this webinar, the annual lecture of the Center for Palestine Studies at SOAS. This is our eighth lecture, annual lecture I believe, and I'm just going to introduce myself and then I'll introduce my speaker now. And before I introduce her, I'll speak a little bit about the Center for Palestine Studies. So I'm the chair of the Center for Palestine Studies. My name is Dina Matar and I work at the Center for Global Media and Communication. And just to give you an idea about the Center for Palestine Studies briefly, it was established in 2012 under the umbrella of the London Middle East Institute. And it is mainly concerned with the question of Palestine, which has for long been a fundamental issue for research and for policy and politics in the Middle East with global significance. The Israel-Palestine conflict is one of the most complex and contracted conflicts in the world, and all the countries in the region are deeply implicated in it. Palestinian refugees remain the largest bodies of refugees in the world. But basically, the Center for Palestine Studies was formed to reflect and to address and to reflect on the complexity of the Palestine question. And the centrality of Palestine and its understanding to the region and to understanding issues related to the global south in general. For SOAS, the study of Palestine and Palestinians has always been a prominent feature of research and of art teaching, involving a number of staff and students. The CPS provides an institutional home for this work across the various disciplines represented at SOAS, whether it's in politics, law, history, development studies, economics, anthropology, gender studies, media and film, art and music. The CPS organizes lectures, seminars, conferences, film screenings and events, and we have been recording all our events, which we have kind of put forward via Zoom, and they're all available on our website. Our aim is to promote the highest quality research on Palestine, and therefore we seek the means to attain this goal. We also have started publishing a very illustrious and important series, the SOAS Palestine Book Series, the details of which you can find on our website as well. And, you know, I welcome you to read them. Before I start, I want to thank the members of the Center for Palestine Board, including Professor Shilbert Ashkar, who is on the panel. And I'm expecting two other panel members to join us. But before further ado, I want to introduce our speaker. And for reasons beyond her control and our control, we would have really liked to have the annual lecture on campus in the Brunei Gallery, and we had booked it way ahead of time. And our speaker, Professor Nadia Abul-Hajj from Columbia University had availed herself to come and speak to us in person, but for issues related to COVID, she couldn't make it, and so we have to revert to this format. Nevertheless, we are really looking forward to the discussion today, which is quite topical, the perils and promises of history. I leave the details to Professor Al-Hajj, but I want to introduce her and say a few words about her. Nadia Abul-Hajj is Anne Whitney, all-in-professor in the departments of anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University. She is the co-director of the Center for Palestine Studies and chair of the governing board of the Society of Fellows at the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of numerous journal articles published on topics ranging from the history of archaeology in Palestine to the question of race and genomics today. Professor Abul-Hajj is the author of three books, Facts on the Ground, Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, which was published in 2001, and which won the Albert Hurrani Annual Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association in 2002. The other book is the Genealogical Science, The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology in 2012. And the third one is Combat Trauma, Imagineries of War and Citizenship in Post-911 America, which was published in 2022. Without further ado, I welcome Nadia. She is going to give a lecture. There's no PowerPoint and just to kind of remind the audience that we will take questions and answers at the end of the talk. We're going to limit those to the most important ones and the most relevant ones. And I will then pose them to Nadia Abul-Hajj. There might be some questions coming from the panelists, but please welcome Nadia to this annual lecture. And thank you, Nadia, for making it today. Hi. Thank you so much, Dina, for that introduction and thank you for the invitation coming from the other Center for Palestine Studies on the other side of the pond. It's really quite a pleasure to be invited to give this talk. I should also say that having just finished a book on, which is about to come out the last one, the Combat Trauma book, which is really focused on American wars, post-911 wars and American militarism. It's sort of giving this talk, which I gave a version of or started working on about a year ago, is an opportunity for me to come back and write on Palestine, which I haven't done in a while, but or at least not in formal academic ways. And so this is the beginning of my thinking about a series of essays. So I'm looking forward to your feedback. Okay. Here we go. And sorry for the zoom I really was hoping to make it in person. Writing in the mid 1980s, Edward Said responded to the 82 invasion of Lebanon and to the ways in which Israel's narrative about self defense and a purity of arms survived that war to retain a stronghold over American public conversations and foreign policy. The facts do not stand on their own, he argued they required narrative and quote, I'm sorry, and the Palestinians had not yet gained permission to narrate. In closing, Said opined, and I quote here each of these two communities, that is, Israelis and Palestinians is interested in its origins, its history of suffering, its need to survive to recognize these imperatives as components of national identity, and to try and reconcile them strikes me as the task at hand The essay and its diagnosis of the struggle to authorize the Palestinian community narrative as he refers to it still resonates today. The Palestinian remains the terrorist now look cast most centrally in the figure of Hamas. Israel still acts in self defense, the IDF is a force that aspires to a purity of arms, even it can, even if it cannot always realize that purity, given the tactics of its enemies. Palestinians and their supporters assert counter historical narratives, and it's obviously this is strongest in the US. That is, as Palestinians married the neck but not as an event that happened in 48 but as an ongoing project of dispossession built into the very structure and design estate. They are charged with anti semitism and accusation that seems to be on steroids today. And again, especially from the context in which I'm writing. Unless it's also the case that much has changed over the past 40 years. There is far more specific space for a Palestinian narrative in the Euro American world. Perhaps better named a counter narrative, it was on display in the US nearly a year ago when congressional representatives stood on the House floor and condemn the Israeli assault on Gaza. The attack on Palestinians with Haram Sherif and the expulsion Palestinians from their homes in Shakespeare. Activists and unions came out in support of Palestinians, and even the New York Times published the photographs and names of every child killed as a result of the assault on Gaza. 66 Palestinians to Israeli. The black lives matter chant say her name echoed through that publishing choice. Political progress then is evident as many a fellow academic and activists insists on reminding me. And yet I remain a skeptic. Or will this care counter narrative have political force. What if the epistemological quad political ground is shifting beneath our very feet, such as the very permission to narrate may not turn out to be as consequential as Said once believed within the context of what is perhaps an even more pernicious figure configuration of epistemology of knowing and narrating and politics today I wonder. What if a Palestinian narrative can be to go back to say essay quote officially admitted to Israeli and I would add your American history unquote, and rendered politically irrelevant at one and the same time. In my talk today I think about shifting configurations of power and knowledge. I reconsider a post colonial scholarly commitment to the significance of the archive. That is to rewriting history by recuperating at silences and absences, producing a counter colonial narrative. And I do so by focusing on the founding and ongoing project of the Jewish state. In other words, much of the struggle over this permission to narrate over who's narrative is going to be authorized and heard centers around the question of the what really happened in 1948. Why did Palestinians leave who is responsible, more broadly following Patrick Wolf's now famous assertion that settler colonialism is an ongoing process. What do answers to such questions about the Palestinian. What do answers to those questions say about the Palestinian present and future such questions such scholarly projects are of course inherently acts of political critique that it could have been, and that it can once again become otherwise to borrow from Teodor Adorno. The political future justice itself is being demanded, if often only implicitly, and imagined on this critical archival or historical terrain. I'll read this archival turn or this archival train within the terms of what the historian Joan Scott has called the judgment of history to quote Scott. The judgment of history refers to and I'm quoting now and abiding faith, at least for the general public if not all professional historians that in the end we will be vindicated by history that truth will eventually be recognized. And the record compiled of those actions by historians on quote, that is it indexes the judgment of history indexes a political unconscious to borrow Frederick Jameson's term that the arc of history bends towards truth and liberation. Against the background of that political unconscious, albeit I recognize it has a more tenuous hole today than it did at the height of anti colonial movements, I asked, given the now widely accepted aphorism that knowledge is is power in actual practice does, or how might knowing. In this instance, recuperating a counter historical narrative from and for an archive in foreign politics today. I say for here as well because of various archive building projects underway. Understanding the archive here in very broad sense, for example, the Palestinian Museum in Palestine or the Palestine land study centered AB. The talk will unfold in several parts. I begin by revisiting the post colonial commitment to be reading the archive. I also consider a contemporary historical sensibility that links remembering with justice and finally move more squarely into a discussion of the long standing struggle over history in his own past. So let me begin with the first section which is titled reading against the archival grain. For decades post colonial scholars in a variety of disciplines have insisted on the importance of revisiting the colonial archive and reading it against or along the archival grain. Recognizing the archive as a colonial institution and an active power scholars have combed archives in search of history silence in efforts to understand colonial rule against the grain of its own self image and narration. We have rewritten colonial histories and recuperated voices voices and forms of life, silence, destroyed or made unthinkable by colonial regimes. With respect to Palestine to take one, but one recent example, in his book Dear Palestine, Shaykh has can he turned to letters house in the Israeli state archives to in his words exit method, methodological nationalism. He depicts not just identities and formation, that is as Arabs as Palestinian as Jews, but also the, what he refers to as normal, quote unquote every day people's fear bravery failure and arrogance, quote. What did the war look like from the ground up. What and for what did people imagine themselves fighting the force or appeal of such projects as no mere antiquarianism they are driven by a commitment that we live among imperial to breathe to borrow and Stoller's turn, and a sensibility that in rewriting the past in recuperating if only in fragments that which has been lost destroyed or made unintelligible. For example, the category of Arab Jew, we might open up a space for a political otherwise, one that already existed and should not have been destroyed. This is an Ariela as well as words part of what is involved in the archival work of quote unquote unlearning imperialism. Writing in the 1990s, the late anthropologist Michel Roth to you argue that indeed colonial archives have silenced the colonized, but he insisted that only gets us so far. There is more than one kind of archival silence insist in the case of the Haitian Revolution, for example, the revolution itself was unthinkable it was what he refers to as an impossible history. Revolution is an act of politics he explains slaves were not man. Ergo slaves were not capable of this distinctly human act that is a politics archival documents that of the Haitian Revolution cast each instance of rebellion as expressions of the frustrations or pathologies of an individual slave. Their acts are never interpreted in the archive is adding or represented as adding up to a whole, that is to the collective political active revolution. This form of archival silence, Prio argues indexes and ontological impasse, given that particular capacities belong to some forms of being and not others slaves as not man could not be political actors. The question of whether Palestinians were civilized enough, capable of national consciousness, whether they possessed a right to a nation state of their own echoes through the project of British rule and Zionist, Zionist settlement in Palestine. Even if this was not an ontological impasse of the same order that we are describes less civilized than their European counterpart certainly, but Palestinians were not property. They were not strictly speaking not man, even if they were man of a different or inferior I want to take up to you as concept of an ontological impasse here then in a different register. I want to think about the relationships among the epistemological status of evidence, how reliable, credible or authoritative it is, and it's myriad forms, as written documents as material traces or objects as the memories and oral accounts of particular subjects. What evidence is there or what might count or be authorizes evidence of an enduring Palestinian presence in and right to this place. What forms of evidence, whose evidence has the power or permission to marry. I'm going to move to the second section here and ethics of historical memory. Quote, is it possible that the antonym of forgetting is not remembering, but justice. The historian Heim Yoroshalmi has asked in Yoroshalmi's question we hear a torquing of a modern historical sensibility that first emerged in the 19th century. History is fervor and pursuit was essential to the birth of nationalisms and Zionism was of course no exception. Caroline Steedman has argued the past emerged as a locus of identity in the 19th century, both personal and collective identity at one in the same time. The archive itself she argues is quote emblematic of a modern way of being in the world, express of a more of a more general fervor to know and to have a past. By the late 20th and early 21st centuries, however, we live with an additional a second iteration of that historical sensibility. Yoroshalmi's question is actually a command. Remember, you must remember less historical that is man made evil will reappear. By the second half of the 20th century, remembering was framed as a vile vital ethical act in the euro American imaginary. It speaks a powerful post Holocaust sensibility, a moral demand in relation to evil. And of course, a moral demand and sensibility than that haunts the Palestinian question or Palestine question in a very particular way. In her account of the Nuremberg trials that followed the Second World War, quote us associate Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg promised to document and punish the sinister influence of national socialism in a way that would make it at once unforgettable and unrepeatable, unquote, unforgettable and repeatable. That is what the judgment of history is supposed to be what it is supposed to promise. Let me quote quote Scott again at length. I began to think about the notion of the judgment of history in 2017. When Confederate flags flew and swastikas appeared in large numbers and then when pile Hitler sleuths welcomed white supremacist Richard Spencer's inflammatory orations on campuses across the country. Remember, of course, this is the US the summer after Trump is elected and there's this massive white supremacist demonstration in Charlottesville, where one woman ends up being killed. I had a counter demonstrator. Hadn't the Nazis and going back to Scott's word. Hadn't the Nazis been declared losers after World War two and morally out of bounds wasn't never again the promise of the Nuremberg and later the Eichmann trials. The idea that the evil of Nazism was banished forever from the political stage. Listening to the chance of the torch bearing Ku Klux Klan reenactors. I thought, didn't the Civil War and slavery not only as a practice but as an acceptable idea, having the civil rights movement made racial equality and national aspiration if not a reality. Any shame that this is still Scott's words at the public a vowel of these ideas suggests not just defiance, but refusal of what was supposed to have been history's judgment on quote. History of course is never simply a matter of what happened. I know there is no closure for history. No single story that can be told on quote, or to paraphrase paraphrase who you'll history is made of socio historical processes and their narrative, narrativization at one and the same time to with regard to the side's words, history is a struggle over the permission to narrate. It is a struggle over facts, but those facts are made sense of only within narratives, that is how they're how they are framed voice and heard, or whether they can be heard. And in the context of Palestine, one perhaps the central sticking point in that permission for power has been the founding event of the Israeli state. That is, the war of 1948. In the decades that followed 1948. And that was widely discussed among Palestinians in living memory people knew what had happened to them to their parents, their grandparents to their towns and villages and life worlds, even as Israeli politicians historians and the public writ large, continue to deny their rights. Moreover, Palestinian thinkers had no problem framing the neck but for what it was in Fayez science words, writing in 1965, quote, the Zionist ideal of racial self segregation demands with equal the departure of all Jews from the lands of their exile, and the eviction of all non Jews from the land of Jewish destination, namely Palestine, both he continues our essential conditions of Zionist fulfillment and Jewish national redemption. And quote, Nevertheless, while known and recounted among Palestinian communities and analyzed by Palestinian scholars for decades after the war this other narrative, and these facts were dismissed and silence, not just in Israel but throughout the world. That, however, was to change with the declassification in 1978 of documents pertaining to Israel's war of war of independence, the facts, the authorized facts that is would shift or would begin to shift. Israeli historians and historians gained access to previously unavailable documents to what had been state secrets. And a few began to rewrite the history of their state, or at least of its founding moment to paraphrase as realize analysis of Imperial citizenship and its relationship to the archive. Their very ability as Israelis and not Palestinians, who had been rendered either exiles or second class citizens. To address those archives speaks precisely to the privilege of Imperial citizenship, and I would add to the onto to the Imperial subjects ontological qua epistemological authority. On the basis of this newly available documentary evidence housed in Israeli official archives. The historians challenged the head few Israeli historians challenge the hegemonic narratives with that guarding its founded founding as we all know. Most fundamentally historians is different in many ways as Benny Morris and Elon paper to name two particular figures argue that Palestinians were driven out expelled by Zionist military forces during the war. There were disagreements monthly so called retrospectively named new historians. They were part of Palestinian scholars who continue to challenge them. Was the expulsion intentional pre planned essential to the establishment of the Jewish state. Was it an event that unfolded during the chaos or fog of war. Nevertheless, despite these non in not insignificant disagreements, the basic parameters of that so called new history became widely accepted in the Israeli Academy. During the Israeli public domain over time, during its war of independence, Zionist brigades drove out most of the Palestinians population, the founding of the Jewish state involved the expulsion of the mass majority, fast majority of his Palestinian inhabitants. By the middle of the 1980s. So called post Zionist scholarship seemed to pretend to promise the facts were out there archival evidence now in the hands of Israeli historians who were far more authorized to tell this tale demonstrated what Palestinians already knew and had long written about and said post Zionism was emerging as a term in a politics. The first intifada was unfolding on the ground. And there was cautious optimism in the air at least early on that a political solution imagined at the time as a two state solution would be achieved or widely imagined in those terms. Might a Palestinian historical narrative become more widely intelligible, more authoritative, authoritative, might the facts on the ground actually change where we had a turning point in the Palestinian struggle against the settler state. Two decades hence, beginning in the early years of the new millennium teams sent by the Israel by Israel's defense ministry began to pour through documents in Israeli state archives, removing some from the public domain. That is previously classified documents were resealed into the vaults of state secrecy. Quote, hundreds of documents have been concealed as part of a systematic effort to hide evidence of the neck but unquote one house journalist reported quite specifically the main document on the basis of which Benny Morris published his initial essay in 1786 quote the disappearance of the Palestinian refugee problem 1947 49 that's the title that that that sorry, the main document on the basis of a cheap pen that essay was disappeared. The highlights reporter asked you have the former head of the IDF Defense Department quote, Benny Morris has already written about the document so what's the logic of keeping it hidden unquote, whoever responded. I don't remember if the document, I don't remember the document you're referring to but if he quoted from it, and the document itself is not there, in other words where more assess it is, then his facts aren't strong. If he says yes I have the documents, I can't argue with that. But if he says it's written there, that could be right, and it could be wrong. There's a difference of night and day in terms of the validity of the evidence, unquote. The status and authority of the written word returns with a vengeance here in the absence of the original document, what could possibly count as proof documents in this ontology and more specifically documents held and preserved by an Israeli State archive are objects whose presence or absence all the epistemological and thereby presumably political difference makes. They transform matters of dispute into matters of fact. Kalev is not wrong as material objects as official sources housed in the state archive, such documents have an epistemological authority, not conferred on Palestinian accounts, memories, or for that matter, documents held elsewhere. Palestinians and their varied being by definition are unreliable witnesses to their own experiences of colonization and war. And it's worth emphasizing their unreliability as witnesses stands in stark contrast in Israeli society to the presumed unquestioned credibility of the Holocaust survivor as witness to genocide, a reality that has it has its roots in the Eiffelman trial if one looks back at the unreliable witness that in that indexes the Palestinian subjects ontological difference or one element of it in the settler imaginary that presumably is one reason why the struggle to declassify documents is an ongoing one among radical in a particular Israeli historians of the Israeli state. On one hand, one may not want to partake in the colonial hierarchy of reliable and unreliable witnesses and subjects. On the other hand, official documents and even on official ones that have been chosen, preserved and classified in official state archives are conferred an epistemological authority that the Palestinian witness and narrator will never have. In this book, the theater of operations, the anthropologist Joseph Moscow explores the reconfiguration of the US security state in an era defined by the threat of terror obviously he's writing about the continuity and discontinues between the Cold War and the post 911 anti terror state. The impact of an expansive state secrecy is one thread of his analysis. Following September 11 and the anthrax attacks carried out about a month later, the US federal government removed many previously declassified Cold War security documents from the public domain now reclassified or more often categorized as sensitive but unclassified but removed from the public domain nevertheless in other words there's a parallel project of reclassification going on in both Israel and the US in the early oz. What worse does secrecy do he asks, Moscow asks, especially in a context in which many of these same documents are in fact still available on the web. Moscow argues that quote removing something from public view endows it with social power, but the object of secrecy, its information is often less important than the organizational approach to managing and unquote, drawing on Jody Dean's work. He argues that quote recognition of state secrecy, and the accompanying conspiratorial subtext to everyday life that it engenders functions today to block political participation, and contain the possibility of truly democratic endeavors unquote. The national security state system of and I continued quote now quote compartmentalized secrecy produces a world in which knowledge is already rendered suspect unquote. In other words as Moscow is asking, what don't I know unquote. Moscow's analysis is incisive. And yet I want to propose that relationships among matters of fact of knowing and matters of power and politics are far more multifarious today. That is, might state power, even in a democracy or a Jewish democracy in the case at hand, operate effectively without relying on classification and state secrecy. In a way, might have and the Israeli state he is representing be a little too frightened, frightened of the power of particular documents of particular matters of fact, rather than matters open to dispute. Sorry, my throat, despite the Israeli states anxiety. And it parent anxiety in its desire to reclassify certain documents, even in the face of empirical facts, I want to suggest, even in the face of a narrative that frames those facts as an active expulsion. And that remains an impossible history to return to Rolf Twio's words, even when the facts are out there, no recognition of their ethical or political significance, and as such no political consequences follow suit. This most blatantly in the words and political project of the settler movement to take both one example in news footage of a riot last year by settlers in East Jerusalem, one such rioting settler told an Israeli journalist Israeli journalist, expelling Arabs from Sheikh Jarrah is no different and no less necessary than what was done in 48. We are acting in concert with what has been done before and it needs to be done again. This can't possibly be described as a post truth, or alternative facts sensibility, as so much of the conversation about the rise and power of the radical right has been framed, especially in the US been on exclusively exclusively so, nor is it captured by Hannah Arendt's account of fascism, in which she wrote there was quote nothing but propaganda. Quite the contrary, this settler embraces the neck but as necessary and ongoing for the very survival of the future Jewish state. In other words, he agrees with Patrick Wolf. Dispossession is the ongoing structure of the state. It would be too facile however to hide behind the radical right in thinking about the political radical right which is pretty widespread in Israel I want to be clear in thinking about the politics of the next line Israeli society, and for that matter among the Jewish diaspora today. By the early 2000s many Morris had turned from a reluctant post sinus to a staunch defender of the neck but all nations are founded in violence Israel is no exception it had to be done he declared, and in taking that position he was far from alone. After Morris's recantation, a prominent left leaning Israeli column columnist published a journalistic account of Israel's founding and contemporary political impasses. The book, my promised land is also an ethical quite explicitly so reckoning with the violence against Palestinians on which the state of Israel was built. Inside the book was republished to why to claim in the US and reviewed as this profound and sincere ethical exploration and acknowledgement of the state of Israel's. I don't know moral transgressions by one of Israel's most prominent liberal column. Lidda stands at the heart of Chevy spoke Palestinians were expelled from the city during the war for 48 he writes but there's more to the story. This particular Palestinian town in dirt a massacre. How then does a self fashioned liberal Zionist subject. And for that matter, self fashioned liberal subject grapple with a reconcile himself to that. Lidda and chef and Chevy it's narrative stands for a tragic inevitability, according to him not recognized by Jewish settlers until it was too late. Quote Lidda is our black box he writes in it lies the dark secret of Zionism. The truth is that Zionism could not bear Lidda. Zionism was to be Lidda could not be if Lidda was to be Zionist could not be unquote for a good 50 years he can he continues. Zionism quoted quote succeeded in hiding from itself the substantial contradiction between the Jewish national movement and then in three days the cataclysmic in that in the cataclysmic summer of 1948 contradiction contradiction struck and tragedy revealed its face in other words, Palestinians would be have to be forced to leave if the Jewish state was to be born. Of course, there was such a conversation among Zionists both the right wing movements who happily owned it and the binationalism by nationalists who warned of its dangers long before those cataclysmic days in 1948, but we will leave that empirical detail aside. In Shavit's hands the fact of expulsion does not lead to any auto political critique, however. It's an unfortunate fact and truth for which he says there is no good answer, and there is certainly no political resolution thus he talks about the impasse of Israel and Palestine. Shavit represented as a tragedy at once unavoidable and a sign of the set Jewish settlers if only partial fall from grace with the massacre in Lidda Zionism lost its innocence he states. But while the massacre might have been avoided its conditions of possibility that is the necessity of expulsion were not. He asked himself rhetorically quote, do I turn my back on the Jewish national movement that carried out the deed of Lidda. His answer. I'm going to quote at length. I am faced with something too immense to deal with for when one opens the black box that is of Lidda. One understands that whereas the small mass massacre could have been a misunderstanding, bought about brought about by a tragic chain of accidental events that conquest of Lidda and the expulsion of Lidda were not the choice to start either reject Zionism because of Lidda or accept Zionism, along with Lidda. Shavit tells his readers that his choice is quote to stand by the day. The philosopher Stanley Covell draws a distinction between what he calls knowing on the one hand and what he calls acknowledging on the other to borrow his distinction. The stories that the declassified and now partially reclassified documents tell are widely known in Israeli society and amongst Zionist diaspora. They have expelled Palestinians from their lands. They even carried out a massacre or two, although the latter point is a little more disputed than the first. The facts, in other words, even the narrative is out there. One might say, even if it isn't Palestinians were doing the narrative during the narrative, doing the authorized narrating elements of the Palestinian narrative have certainly been and are being voiced by Israelis and diaspora Jews themselves, including by and large the fact of the Nekba at least in its most basic contours is accepted among the Israeli Jewish public and by the American liberal establishment liberal Jewish establishment heavily that so enthusiastically embraced Shavit's book. It is even embraced by the settler movement that is the Nekba that wants not just to repeat the expulsion, but to do an even better, a more complete job. Nevertheless, while known, the Nekba is not acknowledged. In Caval's terms, it does not emerge as a matter of public concern and action. It does not appear in such a ways to merit political consideration and judgment. And of course, if one remembers aren't and the centrality of judgment to politics. This is how disavowal works. I'm almost done. I promise to draw on Lisa with Dean's felicitous description of disavowal quote, it goes beyond denial, in that the problem calling for judgment is posed unquote, the Nekba in other words, how is it to be judged that question is posed once one recognizes the question. Let me go back to the Dean's words in disavowal, the power of ideology comes especially both comes into especially bold relief with subjects hailed into a position where the where the realities that can no longer be denied can still be dismissed. The next button other words does not need to be denied. Let me go back to the Dean's words, although she's not talking about the next undergirded by investments that prove sticky, even in the face of knowing better. She writes, in this instance, an investment in the virtue of a Jewish state, a political attachment to nationalism is and I'm referring to returning to her words quote reflected in and generated a new through ordinary moments of disavowal in the, I know very well, yet nevertheless rationalizations that allow us to participate in an uphold existing orders Shavit story of Linda demonstrates that Israel was founded on the violence of conquest and expulsion and massacres of its Palestinian population. And in living memory at that. And yet, if the Jewish state was to be born, there was no other choice. Today, there is nothing to be done, other than to admit that it did indeed occur. There is no demand here that this historical wrong be repaired. The existing order needs to be whole upheld. Nevertheless, remembering then to go back to your show me right has no relationship to justice here, no longer silence, no longer forgotten, the catastrophe of 1948 carries no ethical let alone political force. More accurately, perhaps as an aside, it has ethical force in the hands of liberal Zionist but only as a practice of liberal self fashion. For I shall be 10 is American admirers the very expression of guilt and pain which is all over the book, over having to stand by the dam. A well rehearsed trope not just in the book, but more widely among liberal subjects engaged in the violence of war, which I wrote about in the book is coming out soon. This produces its own his own standing as a moral subject, but beyond that there is no ethical meaning here. If there is an arc of history in Chevy and Morris's political reckoning, it does not bend toward justice. Yes, the war the Palestinians have long remembered, and the Palestinian historians have documented on the basis among other sources of the testimony and memories of its survivors is true. That genie isn't going back into any bottle anytime soon, no matter how many documents the Israeli state reclassifies. And yet the nutmeg is not our history worthy of consideration repair. That would require an ethical and political choice, a judgment, and that choice has a far more tenuous relationship to questions of epistemology to how we know to what we know, then many of us might like to believe for all the desire to to insist on further declassifying archives to collect and document the destruction of Palestinian forms of life. The question needs to be asked, who is the community of address. What is imagined, what is imagined to be the effects. If it is an Israeli public or for that matter or Euro American one, we might want to ask, don't they already know more than enough. That is, if they care to acknowledge what they already know. Then let me return to Osha and these words quote forgetting with the opposite of justice he writes unquote, well sometimes, maybe at other times destroying the historical trace might be priced precisely what justice demands, considering the father following story told to me by my father, Lisa, in so far as I remember it. It was Jerusalem sometime after the 1967 war, a construction crew was digging at the site of my grandfather soon to be built hotel. They opened up the ground and came upon a mosaic beneath their feet. If the antiquities authority got with its existence construction would be stopped at the very least, temporarily, far more troublesome. My grandfather could lose his land. This was East Jerusalem after all, classifying a plate as an antiquity site was one known means of land seizure. My grandfather told the workers to cement over the find immediately. Had my grandfather not cemented over the mosaic email may well have lost his land and livelihood. And for the second time of that, because his livelihood had been Western from prior to 48. At times in other words, justice requires not just forgetting, but outright erasure destruction that is to be clear, there may well be intrinsic reasons for insisting on recovering other traces and other forms of life now largely destroyed. There may be powerful desires for acts of recuperation of archiving even regardless of their political efficacy or inefficacy. After all, ethics need need not be consequential. But to insist that forgetting is the opposite of justice a statement that falls squarely within the grammar of what Jim calls the judgment of history is to operate within a political calculus and rationale. And for that matter epistemology that misses a powerful contemporary for a duration of power, and more specifically settler power in Palestine and for that matter elsewhere in other words, US, Canada, Australia, etc. settler nationhood may no longer depend on suppression of the historical trace, the outright denial of an anti or clone counter colonial fact. Sorry, the outright denial of anti or county counter colonial facts, narratives and claims, it can just as easily operate to the embrace of a far more brazen and explicit seizure of power. Yes, the next but no, we Israelis don't care to end with Octav Manoni's felicitous term of phrase quoted above. I know we know very well, yet nevertheless. Thank you. Thank you so much. I wish we could clap. It's a very, very rich token and so much to think about and particularly that ending we know, but never be left. I think you know this is quite important to reflect on. I don't know that you better wants to come in or whether we want to go straight to questions and from the audience. I've only got one question here at the moment. You know, kind of from my own perspective reflecting on on on on on the political implications of what you ended with, which is we know, but nevertheless, in a sense, what what matters is is much more the question of the question of, we can live with it, or something you know this is how what I got from the talk, but maybe you could elaborate on that I'm beginning beginning to get some more questions that are more concrete than mine. And I'm happy to. Yeah, I'm sorry. I'll be honest, I guess what the political implications are and where to go from there is what I'm beginning to try to think about and I should say that this comes from me both writing. It also comes from me thinking about the American Wars, this is the book I just finished in the Iraq and Afghanistan and it's complicated it's about American militarism and trauma but the issue is there's this very prevailing. It's coming from two places one is there's this very prevalent discourse in the US about post 911 wars, which is the American public doesn't know the problems they don't know and they don't care. And I sort of make an argument that the war isn't even nobody even pays attention, and I make an argument that they do pay attention, but the figure of the traumatized American soldier stands in for the war, but contrary to I think a politics that has been saying the problem is Americans don't know right so wiki leaks becomes important and it becomes this kind of state secrecy argument that Joe masco is making. I think no no people know enough. They know more than enough like what would they need to know to think that this is good to recognize that this has been a brutal war right one can think about that about race politics, black lives matter people don't know they know. So what do we do with that, and there and I think there's a, you know, honestly the Chevy thing I've written a talk on but not in this framework when the book first came out. And it struck me that it's not just a phenomenon here, and it's not and whereas a lot of conversations have been about sort of fascist right. What do we do about the middle like what do we do about most people who like, don't really want to put let's say migrant kids in cages, but they don't aren't they don't acknowledge it as something politically important. Right, or Chevy doesn't going to support the settlers doing an extra again, there was one, but the question of acknowledgement I think is much more complicated I think, and the question of disavow. So I think we're at this moment where I don't have an answer, but I'm a little worried about, I don't worry but I'm a little, I've become skeptical even of my own historical or my own scholarship which is, yeah so I can rewrite these histories through facts on the ground one can write a counter historical narrative and don't get me wrong I think they're intellectually important anyway, but we all believe that we all visit those kinds of post colonial projects are driven by political commitments right. But they're not making a difference, it's not that people don't know the night the war of 1948 is not denied in the way that it used to be. But one can live with it. So whatever the political move now is I think has to take that into account, and take that into account for people who are basically liberals, whether in the US, and I, you know, or in Israel. Right, but that might be the question of disavow, as opposed to just the settler embrace might be more of a stumbling block, then. Because you need the support of a much wider population to keep this politics going, right, but I don't know where to go with it I will be honest I'm starting to think about that. I think that the, the quotation from the deed and disavow is really up. I want to go to some of the questions and Tom Hickey is asking a question in facts on the ground you argue that beyond archaeology is for making collective memory it's the context and practices of the sciences that determine the discourse is not the other way around. And that precisely the nature of a reparative history that can interrogate the historians practice, and how it is just how it is not just popular investment of necessity of expulsion that transcends the discourse of competing narratives, but precisely what the histories are being used for, in which case isn't your skepticism skepticism about the reparative role of history unjustified or at least overstated, even if the political force of counter narrative has been largely lost lost. Yeah, it may well be overstated it may be sort of more reflection of my current political. I don't know my lens, but I. Okay, so I guess but I guess this is that that is certainly been the hope of sort of a reparative historical project, but what I would say is in contrast to archaeology right that these are these are, whatever scientific or intellectual projects that are in different sides of the power dynamic right. So, the, the practice of archaeology, or in the next book I read which wrote which deals with the early Israel in terms of the early state that the states that the states embrace of the scientific projects. In fact, is essential to understanding their power it's not I mean I'm not I don't do that they're simply reflective obviously they're generated but they're generated in an institutional context in which this, in which there's a kind of convergence and dialectic between state power and the practices of knowledge when one's talking about a kind of counter had demonic project. Then the question is a different one now, obviously the work of historians in this counter whatever post colonial reparative project has been essential to shifting the narrative. And it didn't come out of nowhere right the fact that one can have these conversations and even that the settler will now say it. Yeah, we did it and 48 will do it again is part. It wouldn't have happened without these rewriting of history but my question then is. Okay, but now what, because now what we're finding is not people saying. Okay, so what we need to say or some people are saying it clearly, but the push against this having any actual reparative political consequences on the ground is extremely strong and it's strong not by saying it didn't happen but by a project process of disavowal. So it's not I'm saying don't do that. I'm just saying now we have to think about how do we now talk again, because it's not depending on denial it's depending on disavowal, which is a different. It's a different problem. I think this is a very strong point it reminds me of, you know what we talk about in. It isn't the same, obviously, but it's about this idea of compression fatigue or ideas around that. But I've got a couple of other questions that are coming in one from gala saying thanks for the interesting lecture I would like to hear more about what you think this means for Palestine studies as a field. As you have so powerfully shown that knowing doesn't mean acknowledgement. How can our research before the otherwise, quote unquote and make liberal Zionist and their allies, quote unquote may care. So in a sense, what does it mean, you know, do we stop writing do we stop researching do we stop knowledge production. Sorry. Um, I would separate the two parts that question, which is one week, but Palestine studies invoking the otherwise and the question is what it means to convince sort of liberal Zionists or others. Look, of course I wouldn't announce but that's why I end on the I don't think ethics is always consequentialist and obviously, I think, or, you know, maybe politics. I think Palestinian studies should not throw up their hands. I mean their Palestinians are invested in invoking the otherwise and imagining a future in ways that I think is important. I mean, if one thinks about the history of utopic thinking right and I don't mean this is utopia I'm just saying in a parallel manner. It is important to keep those alternatives and cracks open. And it's important I think for Palestine communities, like, you know, people who build their own archives for themselves as well right. You know, I do think it has a virtue in opening up an intellectual conversation. So I have no way saying, let's throw in the bad. I'm just saying that the faith that we had of how this might shift the political ground is something we have to rethink and I'm not convinced. So I don't. So what I would say is no Palestine studies is really important and in fact it's coming more and more unto its own and that is a reflection of the difference between now and 40 years ago and say he wrote that piece on Lebanon many other things he wrote, but at the same time, I don't know that we at the same time I don't have an answer to how we're going to convince, because I think that is a very different kind of conversation which is about whose lives are valued. Right. I mean, right. I mean that becomes a conversation about acknowledgement comes in conversation that this matters. So how you make someone recognize that Palestinian lives matter is a very different question than how you make someone recognize that in fact there wasn't a dispossession and it's ongoing. And I guess I don't know. I mean, I'm not answering the question I don't have an answer. But that's where I'm stuck. I don't precisely know where to go from here. And this comes really ties in with a question by Lori Ellen, where she says thanks for your talk. I'm wondering what you're talking about is a gap between those who are beholden beholden to liberal assumptions on one hand, and those who are not on the other isn't the assumption of the redemptive power of history memory. And it's based on liberalism. And what you're noting is the fact that the politics of the Israeli state and much of the population is not liberal and do not prioritize liberal values. I mean, a liberal right liberal ring is to fight with a hand or two type behind the back. The redemptive power of history memory has to do with assumptions that recognizing and admitting incorrect violence excessive inhumane should and should lead to a justice process. So isn't the question not who is the community of address of archival recovery of counter narratives, because it is not the right, but how to activate these historical facts how to move them into a political process. How to force them into a demand for actions. That is the question I wonder whether you have comment on that. Okay. Hi Lori, although I can't see you. Let me start with the liberal. I see I think in fact it depends what you mean by liberal. I think large sectors of the Israeli public are still liberals and I mean Chevy book is the classic liberal reckoning of, I am a moral subject. You know, I suffer this, I suffer the pain and he talks about everybody, all the people we interviewed and their trauma of having carried out massacres. I guess I'm not sure that I, I guess what I do think, and it's true in the context of the US and it's true in the context of Israel that liberals can I think the project of disavowal is a project that we cannot assume does not incorporate liberal subjects. And I think it incorporates in different ways there's, there's disavowal in an extreme way so Lisa would need, for example, is writing about Syria when she writes this right and she's saying so how do all these secular liberal bourgeois demo scenes stand behind the Syrian regime they've decided that's it. We know I said is what are the attachments that make them in the end back I said surviving. In fact it's their liberalism that does, because they're so scared of the alternative right. They would, I mean liberalism both in an economic sense of their, you know, their desire for a certain kind of capitalist life but also liberalism in their sense that they're very scared of the Islamic alternative. I think that it's the same if you think about the Israeli public it's yes there's this rise of the radical right but the question is, how does that the settler movement, and through your regular set like citizen settlers, where do they converge and I think they converge around they, I think the difference is, I recognize this, but nevertheless, versus, I recognize this and I'm going to do it again, but I think they all share a certain kind of I recognize this I'm not sure I would put that I would, I would not put them outside of that liberal And in fact if you think about Holocaust reparations, these are liberal subjects they completely believe in Holocaust reparations right, and the reparative project of history. In fact this entire discourse comes out of a post Holocaust sensibility. How does one activate this into a political process. That's what I'm stuck on, because I think that the kind of anti colonial politics and even post colonial scholars we had some faith that if one can change the conversation if one can get the world to understand that. I mean it's science project of Palestinian narrative that there that this would translate into political processes and of course we're not in the same place we were 40 years ago, but I think we're up against a different kind of stumbling block. And, you know, as I said I'm really just beginning to go back and write and think directly about Palestine and your question is the right one. And I don't have an answer for it. I wish I did. I have a question by Haim Rashid, who missed the first few minutes, but thank you for an excellent talk the recent events parked by the documentary film about Tantura by Elon, Elon Schwartz are a great example of what you are pointing out for more than seven years. The fact that the Israelis denied quite successfully that a major massacre took place, and even claim this in a famous court case where the student who has written his thesis about this lost the case as a liar. The fact that the evidence of the Palestinian survivor was there for this whole period and was denied for seven decades is a proof of your argument so just agreeing with you I presume. This is a point by Bruce Stanley, your excellent points remind me of Stan Cohen state of denial, and how even with the facts of torture the Israeli public did not care, and in the context of Ukraine and the control of the discourse of war, or Syria, projects to the murder of war crimes is not the key issue, but restoring virtual ethics of being human is the key issue. So perhaps you could comment on these two kind of comments, or, you know, kind of. Okay. You know I haven't seen the documentary although I've heard of it but now I'm actually going to watch it. You know what I was, I was going to say, and so I had a thought in response to that which was the other thing that becomes very clear is even the question of what it means. Before that post 78 reckoning whatever it is or I should be goes back and interviews all these people it's not just in Palestinian living memory that people knew what happened. So, like, these were the people that fought the war these were designers for gates so people knew they weren't, they were talking about it, perhaps amongst themselves but not publicly so even that I think is really important to keep in mind. This was never a state secret. And the way that let's say, some of things mask goes, mask goes looking at is, I mean the facts of expulsion and massacres are not state secrets. How they were how the expulsion was imagined or designed or order that may have been state secret, but this isn't the nuclear weapons, like, you know, the, what do you call it, the blueprints for building a nuclear weapon, of course it was known. This is like 3040, you know, the 70s were barely 30 years after we're not even 30 years after the war of 1948. We're not even there like these were public I would say in our sense these were public secrets, everybody knew, nobody talked about it, right in Israeli society. Oh, I don't, you know, I, in response to the question of like, I'm sorry reestablish a kind of virtue ethics or virtue. I think it was, it was about the fact that maybe the point is not to restore a virtual ethics of being human. Sorry, the key question is to restore virtual ethics of, of, of being human. So it's not the issue of collecting data, but trying to reconfigure or to rethink the virtual ethics of being human. So in a sense, response. Right. What you are proposing, I guess. Right, no. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I think that is really, I mean, I think that's what ultimately that's what Covell's notion acknowledgement is trying to get at when you pair him Linda's really who's a political theorist tries to pull aren't and Covell together in an interesting way. And, and the okay so aren't makes a distinction between scientific facts and. Two kinds of truth they're scientific truths and there are. Oh my God, I can't even think about whatever facts of the world, and the kinds of facts that exact facts which are not scientific facts which are facts of the human world in other words facts of politics she says are always vulnerable to the world. Not because as she says, you know, we can declare in 50 years that France invaded Germany in the second world war rather than Germany invaded France but that in the end they depend on opinion, like they're a come to some notion of factual that's what is factual truth. It is vulnerable because it's about politics and it requires a kind of coming together and agreeing on something. But the point about agreeing in that instance is not just agreeing on the fact that it's it's also the green that it matters, right. The question is what what matters in a political domain and who matters. And in that sense, yes, it is about an ethics. And I think for a long time they're right, and I think that's exactly what one has to begin to disentangle which is how does one fight for that level of acknowledgement or recognition. Without assuming that what's needed is more data and more facts because we know. Again, I feel like people know enough about everything do we need one more secret we don't need one more secret. We know enough so that is really the struggle and I, and it's a struggle that's very different from a kind of commitment to reading with or against the archival grain and the questions does that have any role. And interestingly, there are various people we're now thinking about archives for the future like literally kind of art projects moving forward and imagining although I'm not sure. As much as I appreciate that imaginative leap. I'm a little more in Lori Allen's version of like how do you act politically on the ground. Yeah, it's like the future is a future is a movement and so on. That has a question what a brilliant talk thanks for the insightful talk I would be interested in hearing your thoughts about how we can link this neutralizing recognition of the network in the western world and Israeli society with what called called called the colonial politics of recognition of into indigenous experiences in settler colonial states like in Canada, for example. Yeah, how can we think about that, you know, neutralizing recognition with the colonial politics of recognition. Right. Yeah, that's a great question. I, you know, I know other people a little better than I know Coltard because I read it in a while but okay so I think that's where one gets into maybe go back to Lori Allen's question about liberalism. The kind of liberalism which is the multicultural liberalism right of Canada the US Australia. Unless the US vis-à-vis indigenous communities but Australia and Canada is a different kind of incorporative act. And of course there are these, you know, I think one of the best books on this is a book called the cutting of recognition by was by Beth Pove and Ali right. It's precisely the impossibility of ever and like the very process of recognition is its own form of incorporation and and not really like it's not reparative in the way that it's imagined by the liberal state, although it is the process in which indigenous communities are caught. But I think it so I think it's related but in a very complicated way which is in Israel because it is a liberal state quote unquote but a Jewish state. I don't know that that that that whatever that fight is going to be cannot take the same for right so the arguments about multiculturalism in Israel. And again I haven't been following it as carefully in recent years I've been working on the US though. I think it's no accident that it happens around Mizrahi Jews primarily and sometimes that wins who are classified as their own people right, or their own traditional indigenous people. So, the recognition project is a move as as failed as it is to say there has to be some kind of a reparative project, or all the criticisms of it show that it's failure of that reparative project, but it's, it's taking the no very well, yet nevertheless, farther, because it's saying, okay, we do need to do something probably not right and I'll strip. What is done is never going to be something that actually challenges in any economic or political way the foundations of the state, but it's not simply saying we embrace this, and so what. Right. So, in that sense this is a much cruder version of disavow. I think it's a much more absolute version of disavow. Right. So as because it's as in as inadequate as it is, it's a conversation about reparation. There is no such conversation, right. Or no such significant conversation attached to the next by the Israeli state, and the fact that it ends up ongoing dispossession. And this is a question, you know, this comes to a question by Stefan Tarnowski is this about the kinds of narrative that we should tell ourselves about knowledge. So to borrow from Scott instead of a sort of romantic reading of knowledge leading to power justice acknowledgement, we should have a tragic sensibility that it probably won't go according according to plan. I step on I can't see you but um, well, yeah I mean obviously you are and I know influenced by David Scott work on post colonial tragedy. Perhaps I guess I don't want to get stuck in the tragedy, but I want to figure out. I'm not really answering anybody's question about where to go with this. I don't want to turn this into a tragic sensibility. But I also, but but again, because I don't look okay does it look at I will answer since I don't think it's just tragic. It is absolutely the case that the conversation has changed over the last 40 years. The fact that even if it was a handful of five or six representatives in the US House of representatives right rented who stood up and defended Palestinians. Again, are they going to have an influence on US foreign policy in my lifetime. God no, but would that have been possible 40 years ago. Absolutely not wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago. So I don't think it's pure tragedy. I think it's, I think these two things are happening at the same time that conversation is moving. And whatever site called the Palestinian narrative although God knows there's not just one is certainly present and authorized in a way that it wasn't 40 years ago, and yet at the same time, the resistance to it is increasingly a project of disavowal, and we're out to embrace, rather than denial so we have these two processes going on at one in the same time. And again the fact that the Israeli state is still reclassifying documents means they're still scared of that truth. So it's not that I think this has replaced something else. I think all of the above remains, there's still a state secrecy which means there are certain facts that the state is scared of. Maybe they're too scared of those facts. Yes, the historical conversation therefore the political conversation because we understand this is ongoing has shifted and is shifting. At the same time, there's the movement of this there's this other movement that is emerging at the same time. So I guess maybe what I'm doing in the paper is overstating a case, I just think you have these two things simultaneously. That's the question of secrecy thrown in there somewhere. And that puts us in a different matrix of what how we speak what we say what we think the struggle will look like. But it's not tragic because tragic would mean that it's literally gone nowhere and I don't believe that. I think you know this comes to a particular question I had, or, or maybe comment I don't know whether it's a question or a comment which is reminds me of all the talk about racism, and you know kind of acknowledgement that there is racism but kind of the disavowal at the same time. Black Lives Matter movement and so on, and also about, you know, the incredible knowledge production that is coming out from the ground, or by ordinary Palestinians in in in the occupied territories and as well. And kind of, you know, disavowal by the world of that you know they know it's that you know they kind of take note of it maybe but but nothing happens so I wondered whether when you are developing this you will you will also talk about the, the ways that knowledge or production of knowledge is shifting to to other, you know, kind of areas and you know, particularly that that we see coming up in the sort of active social media and so on. Absolutely, I absolutely want to look at that much more carefully and also think about these futures vision, so I think right the question and the possibility for circulation of, of whether it's art or other things being produced in Palestine is very different now because you can circulate it I mean obviously the kind of new media technologies open up a possibility of circulation. I think what I really do have to do more carefully and obviously in a paper that's longer is really follow both threads, the thread that's opening up and the thread that's shutting it down in a very particular way. And that might help me think through the questions I'm being asked which are completely fair questions and I knew I was walking into this the minute I just, but it is what I'm struggling. And I think if one pulls both those threads simultaneously. It doesn't sound like I'm just writing a story of post colonial tragedy, but I do think I'm writing a story about something that's also shifting right at this moment where this production and these narratives are emerging and I think it's, you know, it's not just an Israeli phenomenon but it's, you know, it's on steroids everything. The current moment and settler nation is on steroids in Israel in very particular ways because it's a it's a state. You know, nothing is settled about the state right the borders aren't settled. It's different in that sense from Canada or Australia I mean the other thing to go back to the cold hard thing is, it's easy for Australia and the US to say okay or Canada to engage in the symbolic reparations because they don't have any self doubt about their own power and, and legitimacy in the world and interestingly the is I mean obviously the Israeli state is getting more anxious than it used to be I mean but I always, you know I found it almost amusing the amount of effort that has gone into stopping them, you know, for example the anthropology association the US wanting to boycott Israel it's like nobody in the US knows who an anthropologist is they could have ignored us and frankly, then we would have had no but they're so worried about their own status and legitimacy, exactly that that unsettledness brings a very different dynamic thing you get in the US and Australia or Canada. I have a last question but I've been trying to figure out what what it's trying to say can you imagine that there are Israelis who wanted an Israeli state but not at the expense of expulsion of the Palestinians how many might they number or a percentage can you posit what's what some of these desire to see a return of expelled Palestinians, what logic is there to bury the fact that you have mentioned which have already been published like the bridge and spy capture I just don't understand the question but in a sense, it's probably a hypothetical question. There were binationalists who at some point realize that they did not want to found the state on the grounds of expulsion and that was the binationalist ideology, I would say two things about that it. It still didn't never the binationalist never questioned the imperial presumption that Jews had a right to settle in Palestine, right under mandatory authority. They came. So it was still colonial but yes there was a moment of recognizing you can't do it this way. So can we have a binational state, but they were pretty small and insignificant in number. And that's what I would say of course there's a small I mean as alive these some of the people stuff I work there is the small number. I mean I can't give you a percentage, but there are Israelis who are open to the question of return and reparations but it's not, it's not a significant political movement or voice it's very small and many of those people have gone into themselves right. So there's nothing on the horizon in the future I can I can see where that would be a large political position amongst Israeli Jews. Now, I'm not, I'm not the social scientists who likes to predict the future but it would be one heck of a radical shift in surprise. I've got a comment at the question. First of all, to say thank you so much. Congratulations for a brilliant talk. Can you send us the text of her brilliant, brilliant lecture so that we can post if she doesn't mind. Would you mind doing that and ask. I think I would rather. Sorry, go ahead. Maybe you could tell us more about the book project you mentioned at the beginning of which this lecture would be part. So maybe that would be something that we can look forward to and, you know, if you cannot send us the text, then maybe you could tell us a bit more about the book but just to say thank you. I'd be happy to send the text was a little more polished and thought through but so I, I'm, I'm going to do I mean the book project is probably going to be a series of essays, trying to think about. I mean this is one piece of it to think what we do with history and, and how we might rethink and intellectual productions you're saying and what is going on. One of it I think is going to think precisely to get back to the cold hard question of, you know, there's again the sense that, you know, suddenly I don't know in this in the younger generation Palestine settler colonial state of course it's not a new conversation, although sometimes it seems to be written as if it is and I want to sort of revisit the longer standing conversation around Israel settler colony in relation to different models of thinking about settler colonialism right in the 60s and 70s imperialism was huge, you couldn't write about Israel settler colony without thinking about the imperial formation, when one's drawing on what is an indigenous studies conversation. And settler colonial model that draws on indigenous studies in Australia, US and Canada where a lot of it is it's a very different frame. So I also want to think about that political translation a bit, and I actually want to think about and write about because I also think it's a very hard conversation to have because the right of return is so central to the Palestinian political project. But I think we need to think about reparations. As a, you know, as a political project and what, what would that be and what would its relationship be to the right of return and you know of course there's this growing conversation is really side about reparations but if that reparations for Mizrahi Jews. So I want to sort of also those are the three pieces of the essays that probably a series of essays sounds fantastic. We look forward to that. And with this, we're coming to the end. You know, it's been really amazing. Very challenging but also thought provoking. And we're really privileged to have you today so thank you. Thank you. No, thank you so much and thanks so much for the questions and I honestly, you're asked, I mean I know. They're really good questions that I'm going to think through and I know I need to think for. Thank you so much for having me and hopefully next time I will see you in person. Yes, we ever get out of coven. There's, there's a last question coming up. I don't know who. I think just people saying, will the recording be made available. Yes, we will we will do that and we'll post it on our website so you could listen to it at your leisure. Nadia, have a good evening and a good weekend and thanks and everyone else and bye and thanks for all your right. Thank you. Bye bye. Thanks.