 The Arab-Israeli conflict is something that I started to study really not to become a speaker or an educator on it at all. I really just wanted to understand for myself as best I could what was going on. Little did I know when I began that this was a far more complex subject than I had at first thought. And as somebody I had a teacher once who told me you don't take something complex and try and simplify it and expect that that will actually make it less confusing for people, it actually does the opposite. And so often times you hear speakers on this topic basically say well we can sum this up very simply as X, Y, or Z. My experience is that's not the case, yours may be different, which is fine, but my experience is actually quite different. It is a, I find, fascinating topic personally. Not just from a religious perspective, but a historical perspective, an ideological perspective, a political perspective. I find it for me as a student a work in progress. Every time I think I've got a handle on something I find more information that just enlightens me in another area. So what I'm going to try and do is give you a bit of a distillation of what is tens of thousands hours of research. And one of the things I want to try and do today, one of the takeaways that I hope you'll leave with is that in each of the three areas I'm going to speak about, the historical context, the political context and the legal context that there are really two sides to the story. I know that Jewish people and just like the Palestinian people are very passionate for obvious reasons because there's a lot at stake here. It speaks to the core issues, the things that go to the core of people's belief systems. And I want to ask you if you can to just try and suspend some of that emotion for today because we're going to take, as you can see, hopefully a critical thinking approach. And usually in issues this complex, there is always more than one side and things are often more complicated than they seem at the outset. Okay, so with that, let's begin. There's a Palestinian, was a Palestinian jurist by the name of Henry Katan who also was on one of the representatives of the Arab High Committee in the meetings that happened at the UN in 1947. He wrote a number of books. And among some of his statements in the early part of his book, he starts his whole introduction to Palestine and international law with some statements about history. And just to sum up, because there's a lot in his claims, just to sum it up in a sentence or two, basically he makes the point that the ancient Israelites were not the first inhabitants in what he calls Kanan, right? Canaan, right? The Canaanites were. And when they did come, they basically invaded a population that was already there. And even once they had invaded that their tenure there was quite short. I mean, they were only, let's say, sovereign or in control of that territory for, let's say, the total of, I don't know what his math is, but let's say a century or two, all total. And so it was a really brief period of history. His view is not just his view. It's also the general view of the Palestinian authority and their leadership, their politicians, their education system. The idea, I'm sure you've heard it before, especially of late, that the Palestinian people are the indigenous population in this territory of Kanan or Palestine or Israel. And the ancient Israelites, even though they did have a presence there, their time there was not like Jewish history says it was, like it didn't cover the amount of time that Jewish history claims it did. And once it was over that we, or the Jewish people, today are not even necessarily connected to those ancient Israelites. This is the general claim. So what is the claims of Jewish history? Because there are two stories, two narratives. So the Jewish people's narrative is they, we, the Jewish people, start our story with the patriarchs. And then we consider the ancient Israelites are the descendants of, we know the name of, everybody here knows the name Israel. According to Jewish theology and Jewish history comes from Jacob, who was given the name Israel. His sons were then called the children of Israel. Their descendants became the 12 tribes. And according to our story, the 12 tribes then settled the land of Israel after their exodus from Egypt. Everybody's familiar with the broad brushstrokes, correct? Okay, so according to Jewish history, this is where the nation of Israel sort of begins their story in the land of Israel. And then it continues through the periods of King David and Solomon, on through the Greek and Roman eras. And then shortly like thereafter after the last rebellion against the Romans in the beginning of the second century of the common area, there is a mass dispersion. And the population of the Jewish people there, maybe they'd be called the Judeans at the time since it was the Roman province of Judea, were now quite small. And then as Islam came on the world scene a few centuries later in the 7th century, within a few centuries there was an Arab Muslim majority there and it has remained so up until the 20th century when the political enterprise of Zionism then took over, okay? So there is obviously some truth to the fact, and we all know that something really remarkable in history happened. It's not comparable to any other situation where a people after a couple of millennia had an opportunity that presented and decided to basically on mass move back to an area that they felt like was their homeland, right? There is no other comparable story in human history. And it is a fact that when that time that era began in the 20th century, the Jewish people in the land of Israel, Palestine as it was called then, were a minority, a significant minority in that particular territory. We're all familiar with the broad brush dogs. What's different about the two narratives, the one I started with, Henry Catan's narrative or the narrative of the Palestinian people, and the Jewish people's narrative is this claim of an ancient connection of indigeneity, if you will, and what we have then in terms of history is these two competing historical claims. And the question is, all right, I mean, can they both be reconciled? Is there evidence that ends up supporting one over the other? So which part, let's talk just about the history and then we're going to move into the contemporary conversation in the 20th century. So the part about Catan's historical introduction in his book that's true is according to Jewish history, I mean, it would agree with what he says that when the Jewish people showed up to conquer the land of Israel, there were Canaanites there. And other peoples as well, Moabites, Hittites, Amorites, Jebusites, the list goes on and on. So that part is in no way contradictory to Jewish history and theology. The part that is different is the idea that there is a Jewish dominion there, and of course I'm not speaking now about a biblical perspective here because we understand that if we're taking the Bible as an authority, then most of what I'm saying is really it's not relevant because according to a biblical worldview, the Jewish people believe that the land belongs to them through the patriarchs, through the inheritance, through Jacob and then through his sons and then his descendants, which Jewish people believe they are. That's the Jewish story. What I'm describing now are more the facts of when you go extra biblical outside the Bible, what history will also support. And as we move into Greek and Roman history and through Babylonian and Assyrian or epigraphic material, what's different about the narrative of Catan and Jewish history is that there is a Jewish presence continual in that territory for millennia. And not only that, but the challenge with the Palestinian Arab claim is that there is a big gap. One can make a claim, an assertion, that they are the indigenous population. The question is then what happens then if you say, alright, there's this ancient people called the Palestinians back 3,000 years ago and then you fast forward to the 20th century with people who identify as Palestinians. The question is now where's the information in between? How do you then, I mean, someone can make that claim, but where are the links? Where's the chain that validates the statement, the assertion? And what's different about the Jewish historical narrative is there are, you know, through hundreds of generations, through a millennia of time, a list of names of Jewish leaders. We have their writings, we have their sayings, we have their statements up through the Talmudic era in almost every century from, let's say biblical era right up till today. And so it's a little bit more of a challenging claim if somebody is going to claim indigenousness, that's even a word, without filling in gaps. And that's really when you compare those two historical claims that ends up becoming challenging for somebody from the outside to put them at equal weight. Does that make sense? Because according to Jewish history, I mean, there's Phil, right? There's a chain of transmission, there's a chain of tradition that goes from 1300 before that, let's say 1900 before the common era, right up until today, well over 3,000 years, closer to 4,000 years. Okay, so we have these competing historical claims and what I was just trying to do there is show you that, you know, one of the things when I was exploring this that I tried not to take for granted, whatever it was emotionally that I had been taught or that I wanted to believe, I really just wanted to understand for myself what evidence exists to support each of these claims, right, if I really wanted to understand what they were resting on for myself. Okay, so now fast forward. There really wasn't a big debate that I'm aware of in the public arena like there is today about whose history is true. The things that I just summarized for you, the Palestinian Arabs say X about history and being the indigenous population versus the Jewish people that say Y, that they're the other thing, I don't know why the question, but that say that they're the indigenous population, these things didn't happen in a public forum. I'm not even sure they happened at all until the 20th century. It's the events of the late 19th and 20th century that ended up creating these whole debates in the first place. You don't see a lot in Islamic theology that I'm aware of or Islamic history questions that there was a Jewish people on the land of Israel for, you know, at the time of Biblical era or even the onset of Islam, these aren't really arguments or questions. They only come on the world scene when there becomes now a political confrontation. And the political confrontation and the political controversy happened beginning in the late 19th century with the advent or the birth of two nationalist movements. One is the Arab nationalism and these were offshoots of European nationalism and the second, a Jewish nationalism and the Jewish nationalism basically became known as Zionism. And it's around shortly after this time as the Jewish people started to migrate back to Palestine, to Israel that then you start to see some of the controversial back and forth start to appear. Okay, so I want to talk about these two major events, not so much the first one, mostly the second one, that happened in the 20th century and how they then created the story, the events, the current events that we're sitting in right now. Okay, and the two things I'm talking about are what I just mentioned, Jewish and Arab nationalism and World War I. Okay, just a very quick one-sentence background because I'm sure a lot of people here are already familiar with the story. There was a conference in Basel, Switzerland in 1897. A Jewish journalist named Theodore Herzl had managed to organize an event that approximately 200 delegates, Jewish delegates from around the world attended and they basically came out of there with an aim to try and found a Jewish state in the land of Erich Yisrael, ancient land of Israel. Now Palestine. Around the same time, shortly thereafter, there was also a political movement by the Arabs. It started in Lebanon in the Arab intellectual circles. There was this emotional desire to try and create this pan-Arab entity. And these two parallel nationalistic movements, political movements, were going to move side by side. Quite remarkable because there hadn't really been anything like either of these two things, although Jewish people had always been Zionistic. It had always been a longing for the land of Israel, to return to the land of Israel. But from a political point of view, there really wasn't an opportunity. All of a sudden, in the late 19th century, these opportunities start to present because of the world history. And all of a sudden now, if either one of these things had happened 50 or 100 years before the other, we wouldn't be having a conversation today. But the way the events unfolded, they happened at the same time, and here we are. Okay, so if it wasn't for World War I, which started in 1914, there's a likelihood that also these two nationalistic movements would not be any part of anybody's conversation today. They might still be in the back rooms having their meetings about what they're trying to accomplish, and maybe nothing would have ended up evolving. But again, the incredible, the way world history works, especially the fascinating part about this world history, is that it was the combination of these two political movements timing out at the same time as this great war, the First World War, that created an opportunity for both the Arab people and the Jewish people to realize some chance of having self-determination in lands that they wanted. All right, so this is a map of the Arab world in 1914, the various colors. So you can see that much of it is under colonization by European powers. Okay, so France in the orange, Italian in pink, Britain in purple, mostly in a lot of places where oil interests were. And then the Ottoman Empire, the Turks, where this green color is, this horseshoe area. And what happens in World War I is that the Arabs now become an important population for the Allied powers. Britain, France, and Italy against the Central Powers, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and the Turks. Had Turkey, the Ottoman Empire, opted to join the Allied powers, we also likely wouldn't be having a conversation right now. But they chose the side that ended up losing the war. And what happened after that was lands then got divided. So you can see that the land of Israel, Palestine, is actually sitting right in one of the areas that is under control of the Ottoman Empire. And during World War I there were a number of pledges that were made about the Ottoman territories by primarily Britain and France. And what were those pledges? So we're going to talk about two of them were pledges and one of them was a secret negotiation. The first one, the McMahon-Hussein correspondence was a promise made to the Arab people. The second one was a negotiation, a secret negotiation between Britain and France. And the third one, something that I'm sure everybody's heard of here, the Balfour Declaration. So let's take a look at them. The two principal characters involved in the correspondence were a personality by the name of Hussein bin Ali, the sheriff of Mecca. This was considered the most noble position in the Arab Islamic world. They claimed direct descendancy from the Islamic prophet Muhammad and the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Henry McMahon. So basically I'm going to sum up what was a series of seven letters that went back and forth over the course of a number of months into one key relevant point for our purposes today. That is that probably the clearest correspondence has maybe ever been written about this land and its borders was written by the sheriff of Mecca to McMahon about the territory that he wanted for a pan-Arab state. Remember I told you just a minute ago that in Beirut a movement had started to try and unite the Arab people and have one big Arab state. He wanted that Arab state, he described these borders from what you could see, what would be just north, like Syria, the Mercen-Adana line, down for what is now Iraq to the Persian Gulf and then the Indian Ocean, so the Arabian Peninsula, the Sinai and then up the coast of the Mediterranean. That whole chunk of land is what he requested for the Arab state. And McMahon wrote him back a letter that basically said we can give you pretty much everything you asked for with the exception of this small strip of territory along the Mediterranean coast. So the sheriff of Mecca wrote back that he wasn't all too pleased about McMahon's delimitation but he said they would discuss it further after the war. He felt that that area was also Arab. And so the question is, well, why did Britain need to even have that delimitation? What was the big deal to them? Now, one other thing to note that's important is that there was a question mark as to how far the delimitation actually went. In the Ottoman Empire there are sub-districts called viliets. And how far down the viliet of Beirut went would also become a question later in terms of what land the British had left out of this promise and what land was promised and so on and so forth. So a couple of important things. I'll talk about, first of all, the McMahon-Hussain correspondence and its status in international law and second, the McMahon-Hussain correspondence according to how the Arab people viewed it and still view it. In international law, the correspondence carries no weight. At best, it's the pledge of one government to a people who wasn't a state and probably obligates Britain. They made a pledge. But in terms of the international community and international law, it doesn't have any standing in international law. The international community didn't back this. It's just a promise made by Britain. The Arabs view this as the promise of their Pan-Arab state and they take it seriously and they see a betrayal in Britain in having delimited that area and creating this separate entity called Palestine. So as these letters were going back and forth between the sheriff of Mecca and the British High Commissioner, there was a secret negotiation going on called the Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France. And what I want to speak to about this particular agreement is that even though it doesn't look exactly like the states that are now in the Middle East, what you could see, if you look closely, is this carving up of the Middle East into these different zones. So if you look at the orangey type of area and the bluish areas, so there's a light and a dark in each of them. So the darker areas were areas that were going to be under direct control by the various governments of France and Britain respectively, the French up in the north and Britain down near the Persian Gulf. And then there were going to be zones of influence by each of them. And if you look, the area which was to become Palestine-Israel was going to be this condominium, meaning a shared area internationally by the world. It was going to belong to nobody. And this is how the Britain and France had decided they were going to carve it up. Why? Because this part of the Mediterranean coast was always an important part of French history. And for Britain, this was important for oil interests. So they basically were carving up the land or spoke about carving up the land to serve what was their national interest. And while all this was going on, there was a third series of negotiations or conversations which became known as the Balfour Declaration. This coming year is the hundredth year, marks the hundredth year anniversary of the Balfour Declaration that people have seen the news the last couple of days that Abou Mazin, Mahmoud Abbas, is speaking about suing the British government for the Balfour Declaration. Okay, I'm sure everybody's familiar with this and has heard this before. His Majesty's government, view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object of being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in other countries. So for another lecture maybe, we could pick this document apart for the language and what we're going to be, potential future controversies. For example, this phrase national home was never used before. There was an issue. They felt that using the word state might be problematic. And then the next other problematic thing was that there were going to be civil and religious rights for the non-Jewish communities in Palestine but not political rights. Those political rights, speaking primarily of the Arabs, were going to be given to them in the rest of the Middle East. So you can already see things setting up for a potential problem down the road in terms of the Arab people or this particular leader, Hussein, was requesting, you saw what he requested for their pan-Arab state, what he considered Arab and that there was an Arab majority in that whole land mass. And then you've got now the European powers who are recognizing that the Jewish people should have a right to this territory, some kind of right. It's going to become a little bit more clear in a few minutes what that right was going to entail. You can see it's setting up now for some potential problems. So the Balfour Declaration also doesn't have huge standing in international law. It also was the promise of the British government to representatives of a people, this Zionist organization. And it's really one government's pledge. Now what is going to give it a little bit more weight in international law is its provisions are going to be incorporated into a treaty within, okay, this is in 1917, so two years approximately, a little about two years later, a year and a half later, the provisions of this letter are going to be incorporated into an international legal instrument. And so its provisions become imbued with legal status, but the actual Balfour Declaration itself doesn't carry much legal weight, okay. And same thing, just like the Arabs viewed the McMahon-Hussain correspondence as a promise that they wanted honored, the Jewish people also viewed the Balfour Declaration as a promise that they wanted honored. So now you have these three different negotiations going on and the water is getting a little bit muddied, okay. So World War I ends and the leaders of the various states led by the United States decide that, you know, that war cannot happen again. Unfortunately, you know, we know all too well that another World War did happen shortly thereafter, just a couple of decades later. But what they hope to do is to prevent a tragedy of this kind of proportions from ever happening again in human history. They weren't successful, but that was their goal. So tens of thousands of people met in Paris. It basically became the world's government and the world's supreme court for this period in 1919. Now just prior to the conference, representatives of the Arab and Jewish people, the Amir Faizal, who was the son of the sheriff of Mecca and Chaim Weitzman, who had kind of taken over the baton from Herzl as the leader of the Zionist organization representing Jewish interests, met and they forged an agreement. I'm just going to highlight some of the things because the language is quite remarkable. Many of you might have seen it before, but for those that haven't, I'm always marveled at, you know, the phrasing of this agreement. If only today, you know, the communication could be in this kind of tone, right? Mindful of the racial kinship and ancient bonds existing between the Arabs and the Jewish people and realizing that the surest means of working out the consummation of their national aspirations, it's through the closest possible collaboration of the development of the Arab state and Palestine, right? Very cordial. The Arab state and Palestine in all their relations and undertaking shall be controlled by the most cordial goodwill and understanding, which guarantees for carrying into effect the British government's declaration the 2nd of November, 1917, that would be the Balfour Declaration. Recognition is given to the right of large-scale Jewish immigration into Palestine. So what's important to understand from these negotiations is even though Faisal, we couldn't say that Faisal was speaking on behalf of all Arabs, right? Just like any of our leaders, prime ministers or presidents, on behalf of all of us, we have to abide by their decisions generally, but not all of us agree with the things that they say. But there were six Arab chiefs when this whole process of Arab nationalism started that actually came to Faisal, and so you've got quite a mass of people that he is speaking for. He's just not speaking for everybody. So just think it's important to understand that. He is representing, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, but not necessarily the Arabs in Palestine. Okay? And it's obvious why, because they're not necessarily going to agree in all likelihood with some of his terms. But what we do know from this document is that there was no surprise, right, in the Arab world, right? There was full disclosure. This was quite public disagreement, right? And these meetings were quite public. So it's quite clear to a significant portion of the Arab leadership that there is going to be massive immigration, Jewish immigration into Palestine, and that the Balfour Declaration, the provisions of the Balfour Declaration are, it's expected, that they're going to be forwarded. They're going to have a progression to them. So here are some three points to understand from the meetings between Faisal and Weitzman and their agreement. Because it said Arab state and Palestine, it's clear from that wording that Palestine is not going to be an Arab state, right? There's going to be one, the goal is to have that one big pan Arab state and that Palestine is not going to be included in that state. And the other thing is, the Balfour Declaration are going to be implemented with Faisal's support and the other Arab chiefs who were on board with him. Now remember, I said these meetings happened before the peace conference. So at the peace conference, what you have is basically a world government, a world supreme court called the Supreme Council of the Allied Powers, right? The victorious, the leaders of the victorious nations. And they're going to hold court and in addition to trying to come up with some kind of penalty for Germany, which was obviously quite punitive and ended up leading to the Second World War, they're also going to settle land issues and try and come up with some borders that allow people who otherwise who should have self-determination who haven't up until this point in history an opportunity to govern themselves, to control their own destiny. And a number of peoples show up at Paris and make petitions to the Supreme Council for land, the Slovaks, the Vietnamese in addition to the Arab and Jewish people. It's a world conference. It's not just Arabs and Jews that are making petitions for land. So on February 6, 1919 Faisal, representing the Arab delegation makes his petitions to the Supreme Court and you've already seen what they're going to ask for. They're going to ask for that chunk of that Pan-Arab state but with the delimitation for Palestine for the Jewish national home because him and white men have already met and they've already come to an agreement. And on February 27, three weeks later Nahum Sakalov representing the Zionist organization makes his submissions and the territory that he asks for is close to what people would recognize with those dashed lines you see are the borders today, the territory today. Those weren't there before. So they ask for territory roughly the equivalent of what would be Israel and also the territories plus territory as you'll note on the east side of the Jordan River. Why? Because remember this map I showed you early on that I spoke about in terms of the Jewish historical narrative and what Jewish theology and Jewish history believes this was the land that was in possession of the Jewish people the ancient, the 12 tribes of Israel. So this is the land that they requested. So something important to understand in terms of the legal story. We're looking at both the different claims of both sides both from a historical point of view from a legal point of view and also from a political point of view. The legal and political are kind of going hand in hand. But there's an important thing to understand that came out of the meetings in Paris that is an important part of the puzzle. And that is the Covenant of the League of Nations Article 22 which created this mandate system. And I'm going to read you just a little bit of this. To those colonies and territories which is a consequence of the late war that have seized to be under the sovereignty of the states which formerly governed them. Now this includes Europe and the Middle East. There was a world war and powers were defeated and now there were people who had no government who had no authority. And these places are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world. There should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization. The world what they said in the League of Nations said in their Covenant the leaders of the world, the world powers backed by the other 50 members, the 50 something members of the League of Nations at the time said something has to be done to look after these people who don't have a government or else there's going to be chaos. And we believe that that should be a sacred trust of civilization and what they said is that the tutelage of such peoples should be entrusted to advanced nations, people who knew how to build a country as mandatories on behalf of the League. In other words they were going to be trusteeships for certain world powers were going to hand hold these peoples until they could self-govern. And it also said that in different territories the peoples were at different levels stages of their readiness to self-govern. Some could pretty much be ready almost immediately and others it would take time. In addition to the creation of the mandate system there were a number of treaties that came out of Paris like Trianon and Versailles. And the treaty of Trianon basically busted up the Austrian, Hungarian empire and created countries like Romania Slovakia and Yugoslavia. These places never existed before. So these governments needed to now have an opportunity to form. There were different peoples there. But people let's say prior to the war who found themselves Hungarian when the war started would now be Romanian after the war ended. And you can now understand why there's been some strife in Europe also different peoples trying to make their claims for self-determination to try and write I guess different borders that were created. The map of Europe basically changed and the decisions made by the Allied Powers the Supreme Council of the Allied Powers in Paris became law. In other words the countries abided by these decisions. It didn't always go perfectly as I said. There were local conflicts. People striving for their own autonomy. But basically in terms of international law the decisions made in Paris were recognized by the international community as law and that's how things moved forward. Well what about the former Ottoman Empire and their lands? So a year later a year what happened is the leaders in San Remo it got long and they had to go home they were they were away from their governing positions for months and months and they had to go back and they reconvened a year later in April of 1920 in this beautiful Italian Riviera town of San Remo. These powers the Supreme Council of the Allied Powers these leaders who met in Paris some of them had changed some of them were still the same some of them there was a new Prime Minister in France and but the British Prime Minister was still the same they met they meet in this town and they basically decide what's going to happen now with the Ottoman territories. Europe had been decided in Paris and now they're going to create these mandates for the Middle East and they created three of them one called the mandate for Syria another one called the mandate for Mesopotamia, Iraq and the third one called the mandate for Palestine. So I want to talk about the mandate for Palestine because it had some unique elements to it and remember I said to you that when the mandate system was created it said that each one was going to have its unique properties so the mandate for Palestine had unique properties. What were those unique properties? In the other two mandates the mandate for Syria and the mandate for Iraq the beneficiaries of that sacred trust remember the sacred trust of civilization we spoke about the beneficiaries at sacred trust were the people that were living in those lands the majority population the Arab Muslim population that was living in those territories. The mandate for Palestine was unique what was unique about it the beneficiaries of that sacred trust were the Jewish people worldwide not just the Jewish people living in this area of Palestine at the time now why is that why do you think that was well the answer is obvious if you think about numbers. First of all there really was no point in creating these political rights for a people that was in a minority and had it been put to a vote it would have been voted down the second it would have been put in meaning if there is 150 or 200,000 Arabs in the territory and 30 or 40,000 Jews I'm just picking a number would have been about a 6 to 1 ratio let's say 300,000 300,000 to 50,000 around this time maybe a little bit more because there had been some waves of Aliyah but a roughly 6 to 1 ratio and this was put to a vote then if the Arabs had gotten political rights the people like within those boundaries had gotten political rights then the whole experiment would have been a waste of time everybody see that the numbers just wouldn't make sense all those in favor say I so the Jewish minority say I again say nay and the Arab majority would have voted it down and the whole thing would have been just an exercise in futility but something more important than that what was being recognized by the world at the time was the fact that this people who was making a claim that they had been dispersed for two millennia needed recognizing this people has a right to have an opportunity to go back should they choose now at the time that they put this in place I don't believe that anybody really knew whether the Jewish people were going to choose to go back to or not but they had to give it a chance it wasn't going to happen in five minutes there were roughly 14 million Jewish people worldwide there were let's say roughly 60,000 at the time of the mandate somewhere around there living in the Palestine borders at the time and they needed to see whether Jewish people if the opportunity was given to them would go back and so the beneficiaries of the sacred trust were the 14 million Jewish people worldwide and the Arab argument on the other side is this is completely unjust and illegitimate are we not going to recognize a Balfour Declaration we are not going to recognize the mandate for Palestine and what was decided there we consider it a travesty of justice because the majority population there should have been according to them the beneficiaries of that sacred trust of the mandate they're the ones that should have received the rights to self-determine in the area they were the majority but that's not what the spirit of the mandate was the spirit of the law was it was for 14 million people Jewish people living around the world so the numbers are really 14 million if you look at it in terms of the spirit of the law to a few hundred thousand not a few hundred thousand to fifty thousand does that make sense right so but according to but if you look at it from the Arab position that's their argument so you understand their positioning Palestine basically also had echoed like the what you read in the Faisal Weitzman agreement that the provisions of the Balfour Declaration were now incorporated into this international document which is recognized in international law it's a treaty which was ratified by fifty one member states an international law treaty is the strongest form of international law and the more people that sign off on it the stronger it is and then it says you know it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which by prejudice civil and religious rights of these non-Jewish communities in Palestine and the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country we spoke about that and you can see where this was going to be problematic right and it'll come into play later I'll just mention it now we may not I don't know that we're gonna have time to deal with it today maybe it'll come up with a question and answer period check our time because I want to leave time for you to ask questions but you can see that if Israel identifies itself as a democratic state where this is going to be a challenge right everybody see the potential problem with that especially if there's not a Jewish majority right how do you have a democracy if you don't have a majority okay and then this last part of the preamble which is much different than the Balfour Declaration says whereas recognition is thereby been given to the historical connection the Jewish people with Palestine and the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country okay so now we have incorporated into an international legal document the world basically saying that we recognize that the Jewish people today meaning in 1920s be the equivalent of the Jewish people now have a connection to these ancient Israelites that were there and we believe that this people should they choose have an opportunity to reconstitute to put back a situation that happened in world history that through no choice of their own ended up causing their dispersion for thousands of years and if you look at that and through the lens of human history it's unprecedented and so if you look at that through a Jewish lens it's unprecedented in a remarkable way and if you look at it through an Arab lens it's unprecedented in an absolutely ridiculous way right what are you kidding me I mean these people don't speak a language they don't look like us right they don't look like they're native to the area and claim that after 2000 years they should have a right to come back here so from our perspective it's the Jewish perspective it's wow and from an Arab perspective it's like you gotta be joking right we are not going to recognize that as legitimate at all now just so I can make a point here that whatever the two sides happen to feel right it doesn't matter in terms of the law right the law is the law I mean there are processes for changing the law if you don't like it but what the Jewish people might feel or believe emotionally and what the Arab people might feel and believe emotionally is somewhat irrelevant really maybe not from a moral perspective in that conversation but from a legal perspective the law has made their decision and this law by the way is still intact this is the legal precedent for the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean what the Israeli government decides to do with it is up to the Israeli government but in terms of the precedence and we'll talk a little bit about the gray areas in the second but the mandate for Palestine the provisions of the mandate for Palestine and who really is sovereign in that territory from a political perspective right those rights belong to the Jewish people according to the mandate for Palestine which is still the legal precedent and the Jewish people now really not anybody in this room but the government of Israel really speaks for the Jewish people now okay so the law is the law what people feel about it I mean people can have their different opinions but you know that's irrespective of what the status of the law is okay so these pictures up here which you also have in your handout are pictures of land distributions for them I want you to really focus not necessarily on all the mandates but primarily the mandate for Palestine the original one as you can see does not look like the shape of how people recognize the shape of Israel including what is today the West Bank and the Gaza Strip today the map on the left is a much bigger territory so what happened in 1921 and 1922 is the British government amended the Palestine mandate and created an article in the document which allowed them to take some liberties with the territory on the east side of the Jordan River why did they do that when the French came in and took over the mandate for Syria they kicked out Faisal who was given that territory and then his brother Abdullah who was given Iraq threatened to go to war and the British government and really nobody really wanted to see another war they'd all just come out of the first world war and so they said okay just be patient and we'll figure out a solution and the solution they figured out was to lop off the territory they added an article number 25 into the mandate which said that they could take liberties with the eastern territory should they so choose so they took the territory on the east side of the Jordan River and created Transjordan which is now the state of Jordan and this area that became Palestine was really the western portion of Palestine under the Palestine mandate okay so what happened during that mandate era is also a whole history lesson in itself but these are kind of the broad brush strokes the Jewish people start making they start immigrating in waves into Palestine in the tens of thousands and as there are these waves of immigration aliyot the Arab people each time get a little bit more anxious right the Arab people in Palestine I'm speaking of get a little bit more anxious because and primarily at first it's really the leadership but also the local population because they see their opportunities slipping away sometimes because land has been sold and they're in dire straits they need the money they sell off their land and so they're having to change from a rural agricultural society to a more urban society and there is frustration at what's going on okay they also you know they also see these masses of Jewish people coming from European countries with far more skills in terms of far more organization far more skills in terms of building an infrastructure and they feel like Britain is giving the Jewish people advantages that they don't have and at the end of the day what happens is there are Arab revolts usually violent against Jewish people sometimes against the British and these happen in the 20s and the 30s and eventually what happens is is Britain who now really is primarily just interested for the most part in appeasing an Arab population which is much greater in size in the region than the Jewish people are and much more of a threat should they decide to get upset than they are about honoring their pledges and obligations in the Balfour Declaration so they meet and they decide that the best solution to solve this problem is to partition the mandated area of Palestine again so again meaning first time to create Transjordan and then again to create another Arab entity from the territory between now the Jordan River and the Mediterranean and a Jewish state so an Arab state and a Jewish state so this partition plan known as the Peo Partition Plan the orange area was going to be the area allotted to the Jewish state and the yellow area the lightest yellow area was going to be the area allotted for the Arab state of Palestine or whatever it was to be called and the red area in the middle where you see where Jerusalem is that was going to be an international zone meaning owned by nobody so if you're the Jewish people you're now looking at the mandated area as having shrunk considerably to less than 10% of what was originally promised for the national home if you're the Arab people in Palestine who feel that any Jewish entity any place where the Jewish people have sovereignty over Arabs is not just this is their view they weren't prepared to accept any such place they rejected the plan the Jewish leaders did accept the plan I'm sure not all too happy with the new deal but they accepted it but the Arabs rejected it the Arab leaders rejected it again for the reasons I just explained so the Peo Partition Plan was gone fast forward now 10 years this is now after the Second World War we all know what happened in the Second World War and largely because of British policies in terms of their restrictions on immigration one could say that I think a significant amount of lives that were lost in the Holocaust would have likely been saved had those people had an opportunity to go to Palestine but they did not have that opportunity because the British government put in a quota of just a few thousand Jews allowed in and now was facing not only hostility from from not only were they coming out of they had war fatigue coming out of Second World War and they were quite cash strapped but they were also facing enormous hostility from both Jewish and Arab militias and people in this area of Palestine and they wanted help I don't believe they really wanted to totally give up their control of the mandate but they went to the UN the newly created United Nations was created in 1945 and said we need some help so the United Nations said fine we'll take it off your hands and the United Nations sent a committee to Palestine to investigate to decide what to do Resolution 181 was a General Assembly Resolution General Assembly Resolutions are not actually binding in international law Security Council Resolutions are binding so Resolution 181 was a General Assembly Resolution meaning it wasn't binding on the parties it was really just a deal that was put on the table for another partition plan and this time how they decided to break the territory up was the white area was the area proposed for the Jewish state and the yellowy orangey area was the area proposed for the Arab state and then this little area in the center here of the orange was going to be the area proposed as an international zone that was owned by nobody but surrounded by the Arab state again the Jewish leadership I believe feeling some duress and also understanding that there were 100,000 persons in this place persons camp and needing to make a decision accepted the partition resolution and the Arab states again feeling that any Jewish entity in this territory was not legitimate and that they were not prepared to recognize turned down the partition plan and walked away from the table and then afterwards afterwards what happened ended up triggering a civil what became a civil war why? when the what was now the Jewish leadership in the community that's known as the Yeshua pre-Israel saw that there was not going to be any chance that the Arab states and the Arab leadership was ever going to accept a Jewish entity took the initiative well actually what happened was after the rejection of the partition plan Arab militias went to attack Jewish settlements and then the response from the Jewish leadership was and the Haganah was to now try and go on the offensive and take control over the territory that was allotted to them according to this security council resolution so there in effect became civil war even prior to not even prior to the invasion of the Arab countries with the intent of Jewish forces trying to secure the area allotted to them and Arab forces particularly Palestinian Arab forces trying to prevent that from happening and then in May so this all happened starting after November when the when the partition plan happened those different that civil war started hostility started and then in May of 48 few months later when Britain packed up and left they took their armed forces the next day Israel declared their independence and then there was an Arab invasion of the five Arab states attacked Israel it ended in 49 with armistice agreements and you could see that the territory then held by what was now the Jewish state was greater than the territory allotted for them under the partition plan another thing from the air perspective that they were upset about but they had started the war and this again one thing really important to remember like whatever you hear about the events of 48 one overriding thing to understand about that time in history is that it was a war I mean whatever you hear stories from the Arab side about atrocities committed by Jewish forces you hear stories from the Jewish side about atrocities committed by Arab forces civil wars are notoriously ugly I mean just look at the American civil war I mean if you want the French civil war and so on and so forth and this was a civil war right so at the end of the hostilities the territory held by the Jewish state was different than the allotments in the partition plan Egypt had this thin strip of territory which has now become known as the Gaza Strip and Jordan was now sitting in territory on the west side of the Jordan River which now became known as the West Bank formally Judea and Samaria now the West Bank because it's territory on the West Bank of the Jordan River and even though there were hostilities in the 50s this land these land holdings remain kind of status quo until the 60s okay in 67 there is what is the third Arab-Israeli war I mean the Sinai campaign in 56 really considered the second so after 48 these are the territorial holdings and then after 67 what happens is Israel takes over control of that area that was called the West Bank they take over the Gaza Strip they take over the Sinai Peninsula and they also take the Golan Heights okay and this really is what leads us into the current events and the situation that we're in now these territories that were captured in 67 put the Israeli government in a difficult situation they did not feel that they could return to the pre 67 lines because at its narrowest point the state of Israel was only 9 miles wide and they didn't feel that that was defensible considering their experience with their neighbors in the region right they didn't feel that they could go forward with and protect their country and yet they also didn't want to be in charge of a population significant population hundreds of thousands of Arab people who did not want to be governed by them so they had a dilemma what do you do when you have a population that doesn't want to be governed by you but you can't retreat back to lines that you feel are indefensible so Israel proceeded on a security first policy we need to hold on to the territory that will give us the best chance of survival and then that created a problem with the international community so Israel's security decisions were affected by a meeting that took place shortly after the 67 hostilities in Khartoum when the Arab states met and basically decided that they would not recognize the Jewish state and they would not negotiate with it and so it left Israel in a bind now from a security perspective how do we move forward well the international community took their own initiatives and this actually is a security council resolution meaning according to international law was binding on the parties and this is the first time that you actually hear with regard to the territory of Palestine or Israel this word occupied being used and what it said was and you have I think also I might have put that in your handout as well that Israel was expected to withdraw from territories they've occupied as a result of the 67 war but that they are also entitled to recognition of secure boundaries and a right to live in peace so how do the two sides view this resolution well the Arabs take the position that when Israel withdraws from all the territories that they captured in 67 we will talk about recognizing secure boundaries and their right to live in peace Israel says I don't think so when you recognize our right to have a state a Jewish state you recognize boundaries of that state and you recognize our right to live in peace then we will have a negotiation about withdrawal from whichever territories allow us to move forward and this has kind of been the stalemate since 1967 and these are the positions of almost every representative has moved forward on the idea of these pre-67 lines for a solution to this Arab-Israeli conflict so when you hear the Obama administration talk about pre-67 lines based on resolution 242 withdrawal from occupied territories and so on and so forth this is the source of that position and that policy in the 70s there is another war the 73 war which ends up being a bit of a game changer because Israel is caught by surprise and still manages to survive and the Arab states at that point in time decide I don't think we're going to beat these guys in a military confrontation we need to change our strategy the strategy change now became one of propaganda and and now they decided to first there was an oil they used oil as a weapon they turned the taps off which changed foreign policy of a lot of the western industrialized nations who depended on Arab oil from a either neutral or pro-Israel position to a not so neutral like Japan for example had completely reversed they were almost entirely dependent on Arab oil and then the Arab the Arab League made another move an organization called Fatah who I'm sure you're all familiar with it's an acronym for the Palestine Liberation Movement headed by Yasser Arafat then became recognized as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people at this time the Arab states weren't prepared to give Arafat any power Jordan actually tried and found they had a number of different difficult confrontations with Arafat and the PLO but at this meeting they decided that this was a strategy that they could be effective with in the international arena and very soon after that resolutions in the United Nations started to go from resolution 242 one could argue is somewhat ambiguously fair and the resolutions start being quite unambiguous and quite one-sided for example in 1975 before this resolution is the infamous Zionism is racism resolution passed at the UN basically reminding it or saying it is in cahoots with South African apartheid that it's racist that resolution was later rescinded but the damage was already done all of these things start to appear because the Arabs as a block of nations have a lot of power at the UN they carry a lot of weight because of their oil assets what started to happen is Israeli sediments that Israel built were in the Gush Hzeon area which were attacked viciously during the hostilities in the 48 war and so they went to rebuild those communities and then as settlements those settlements got built the UN then passed a resolution which said that the settlements have no legal validity and that they are obstruction to peace and this is something you hear quite often the reason why the Arab-Israeli conflict continues is because the Israeli government continues to build settlements in the West Bank so just a quick point to that Israel's argument in regards to that claim was probably best summed up by Golda Meir said if settlements are the problem then why did 67 then 67 shouldn't have happened how do you explain 67 there wasn't a single Jewish settlement in the West Bank and yet the Arab state still went to war against Israel what is it that was the prevention of peace at that time there were no settlements so how can you then say now that settlements are what's causing the roadblock today in July of 1980 the Knesset passed legislation to annex the eastern neighborhoods and to justify Jerusalem and then the UN followed by basic claiming that those measures were a violation of international law and following on that in the 90s appreciate your concentration we're almost done in the 90s beginning with Oslo there was a series of peace initiatives which basically were all set around the principle of trying to trade land for peace and it worked in the first part if only Israel were to withdraw from the West Bank so that a Palestinian state could be created then we could move past all these hostilities and all these negative feelings and move forward so in trying to move forward with a land for peace idea Israel decided to take a look at the West Bank and come up with a graduated plan so they divided it into different areas area A is the areas of the West Bank that had 90% of the Arab population lived in those brownish areas Israel said ok so what we'll do this is first we will withdraw from area A and turn that over to the Palestinian people in that area and then we'll see how that goes and then area B we will have a joint security control both our joint police those areas and area C will remain under Israeli control why because the hills overlooking Tel Aviv and the entire coast of Israel for security reasons were exposed those areas and Israel felt like they needed to maintain a security force there the border with Jordan and the rest of the Arab world after what happened in Gaza Israel felt like if they leave that border unattended it will just be an opportunity for missiles to flow in and they'll end up with a Gaza strip sitting in the higher area of the central hill region which they obviously were not open to given the history of the relationship with the Palestinian authority and the Arab region at large but they so the Oslo plan did move forward I mean today the West Bank is divided into these areas and if you actually travel in Israel and you see the various checkpoints you'll see that area A is by law off limits to any Israeli to enter into that area and this is kind of where we're at today this is the these areas are separated by checkpoints so that movement can be controlled and this is where you end up with the accusations against Israel from movements like BDS and so on so forth that Israel abuses human rights like the mobility rights and so on and so forth of the Arab people in the West Bank you know what was planned to try and find a staged way to move forward has ended up turning into a unfortunate propaganda situation that doesn't work in Israel's favor