 This is a unique colonialism that we've been subjected to, where they have no use for us. The best Palestinian for them is either dead or gone. It's not that they want to exploit us or that they need to keep us there in the way of Algeria or South Africa as a subclass. Those are the words of Palestinian intellectual Edward Said in describing the condition faced by his compatriots and nation. But how should we understand the Israel-Palestine conflict today, a conflict which, while often lazily described as centuries old, is very much a product of the 20th century? And over the coming days, what is the imminent annexation of parts of the West Bank mean in historic context? Is this a new level of operations or merely the continued modus operandi of the state of Israel since 1947? With me to discuss that tonight is Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said professor of modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and author of The Hundred Years War on Palestine, a history of settler colonial conquest and resistance. Professor Khalidi, welcome to Navarra Media. Thanks so much for having me. So the state of Israel itself, it comes into being in 1947. 1947-1948 is this kind of really decisive moment, this decisive change. As we said, the book starts really in 1970 in the Balfour Declaration. But before even the Balfour Declaration is this ideology, this nationalist ideology of Zionism, a much used and abused word in contemporary political debates. For our viewers, what is Zionism? Where does it come from and what's its response to? Well, Zionism is primarily a response to European anti-Semitism. The founders of modern political Zionism were mainly Eastern European Jews. Theodore Herzl is the prime example. He's the founder of the modern political Zionism, the organizer of the first and second and third Zionist Congresses, starting in 1897. And it is a response to the savage anti-Semitism, in particular in the Russian Empire, the Tsarist Empire, and in Austria-Hungary. And generally, the persecution to which Jews were subject all over Christian Europe for millennia, really since the rise of Christianity and even before Roman times. And it is an argument that the Jews cannot find. The Jews are people, they're modern people in the national sense, not just a religious group. And they cannot find safety or security anywhere but in their ancestral homeland, the land of Israel. And that necessitates the creation of a Jewish state, which in fact was the title of a pamphlet or monograph written by Herzl in order to set out his ideas. And so it is essentially a European phenomenon, a response to European conditions, led almost entirely for the first three generations by Eastern European leaders, David Ben-Gurion, Heine Weitzman, and so on. And through the first decades of Israeli independence, in fact, all the leaders of Israel were of Eastern European descent. And it was explicitly a response to this inveterate historic anti-Semitism, but of course it became supercharged with the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s. And with the explicit exterminationist policy that the Germany under the Nazis followed, the extermination of almost six million Jews by the Nazis gave enormous impetus to Zionism and strengthened the argument that Europe was not a place that Jews could live in safely. As you've said, it's a nationalist ideology talking about, you know, a distinct people. There's obviously a broader context of nationalist ideologies in the late 19th century, the moment from which this is emerging. There's this kind of conversation right now in the UK. We saw it with the Labour leader debates. For instance, you had Keir Starmer, Rebecca Long-Bailey, Alisa Nandi, all of them actually, with the exception of Keir Starmer, sort of identified as Zionists. Even Rebecca Long-Bailey, who was the left-wing candidate. She said, well, I believe in, you know, the right-substitumination of the Jewish people. So I guess I'm a Zionist. As we're going to go on to see, actually, we could pretty get up the graphic one if that's fine, Gary. And this is from Herzl. This is in his diary in 1895. We must expropriate gently the private property in the States assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries while denying employment in our own country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly. So, you know, in distinction to Italian nationalism with the resort Gemento or German nationalism or whatever nationalism that you really see in continental Europe at that time, this is quite different, isn't it, in so much as it necessitates the widespread displacement of an indigenous population? Precisely. And I think that quote sums it up perfectly. Zionism understood itself as both a national movement and a settler colonial movement. They understood that there was a population there. The quote from Herzl makes that perfectly clear. They understood it was the overwhelming majority. At the time of the Balfour Declaration, Palestinian Arabs formed 95, 94 percent of the population of Palestine. And the early Zionists, as much as they wanted to ignore the Arabs, understood that they were there and that they would have to do something in order to create a Jewish state, which was their objective. Their objective was not to come to Palestine and live as a minority amongst an overwhelming Arab majority. Their objective was to come to Palestine and turn it into a Jewish state, a Jewish majority state, which Jews would be the ruling group. So, the problem with Zionism is not that it is an Eastern European, a typical, a nationalism typical of Eastern European nationalisms. There are many similar nationalisms the world over. The problem is that it was linked to a settler colonial movement self-described. This is not my description. This is the description of Zeb Jabotinsky, one of the early Zionist leaders. This is the description of Herzl himself. They understood that they were coming as Europeans to what they saw as their ancestral homeland, but in order to displace an indigenous population. That's the problem. The problem is I start the book with a letter from one of my ancestors to Theodore Herzl, in which he says, there's no problem with Zionism in principle. And there's no problem with the idea that there's a relationship between the Jewish people and the land of Israel. For heaven sakes, everybody accepts that. The problem is there is a people here, he tells Herzl. The problem is this is a people that will not agree to be supplanted. And so he ends up by saying, for God sakes, leave Palestine alone. And that, of course, to this day is the problem with Zionism. It establishes another people with exclusive rights, the claim to exclusive rights in a country inhabited, previously inhabited by the Palestinian people. There's another quote, I'm not going to bring up because it's not particularly long quote, but it's from Herzl again, who writes that the prospective Jewish states, obviously, prior to the independence, the Declaration of Independence of Israel, would quote, form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia and outpost of civilization against barbarism. Now, we're all quite familiar. Many of us are familiar with the kind of civilizing mission that Europe sort of tried to explain away, particularly things like the Conference of Berlin, the Scramble for Africa, and so on. Clearly, that civilizing mission, those discourses, can't really be applied to this kind of project. Or was it, you know, when Brits went to Kenya and Tanzania, they believe or India, they believe that they were imparting something of a higher sensibility, the ability to self-govern to the natives. That doesn't appear to be a sort of constitutive part of Zionist nationalism, does it? I think it actually is, especially in this era when Zionists self-identified as colonizers. I mean, the agency that bought up most of the land that was purchased, which amounted to five or six percent of the land area of Palestine before 1948, was called the Jewish colonization agency. And it was not just self-labeling. It was a mindset. It was a colonial mindset. You can read statements by Lord Cromer or Lord Kersen or by French colonialists and set them alongside statements by people like Herzl. And there's no difference in the ideology, in the attitude of superiority to the native population. But one of the differences is somebody like a Kersen would say, you know, well, one day perhaps these people might have the ability to self-govern. They won't need us anymore. Whereas, I mean, currently if I'm incorrect here, but it does seem to me almost with Zionism, there's an eschatological element which you don't get with other nationalisms where, you know, into perpetuity, we will be different to these people. We will govern this land in an almost kind of deontological sense. And it goes above sort of human affairs. I just want to know because obviously it strikes me as very unique. I can't think of many other examples. What were they saying about, we pulled up that quote earlier on, but what were they saying about the indigenous population? Was there some recognition that some of these people would stay or, you know, we started this with the side quote at the top, right? Quite unique in that they want to get rid of us or they want to kill us. I mean, what point does that become parents' designers' project? Because at this point it's pretty speculative. Sorry. I would suggest very early on there was an understanding that a Jewish majority had to supplant the existing Arab majority. Now, whether that would take place in the Orwellian terms used by Herzl, spirit the population across the frontiers, I boot them out, force them economically to leave or otherwise induce them to leave, or that would take place via force, ethnic cleansing as happened in 1948 and happened again on a much smaller scale in 1967 was a tactical decision that depended on circumstances. Initially, I think the idea was just bringing a flood of people such that we become a majority and then we make the rules. And that's, I think, how British statesmen who engineered the Balfour Declaration and supported Zionism in the early years, people like Balfour himself, Lloyd George and Churchill, that's how they saw it, that we'd create a Jewish majority and they would rule the country at that point and only at that point would self-determination be allowed. And what they did to the Palestinians was a matter of no concern to the British, or for that matter, I think, to the Zionists. It is a unique project. It is not only a colonial project, it is a settler colonial project and in that respect, I think it can be fruitfully compared and contrasted with other settler colonial projects, France and Algeria, the British in Kenya, North America, Australia, each is different. In some cases, the intention and the result was the elimination of most of the native population. In other cases, like Algeria and East Africa, that simply was not possible. And that's also proven to be impossible in Palestine. So Palestine is somewhere in between. It's a little more like, if you want, Ireland, where you had a form of settler colonialism. But there was no possibility, in fact, no intention of entirely eliminating the indigenous Catholic Irish population, or even before they were Catholic, the indigenous Irish population before the Reformation. Because we're talking about 700 years in that case, not just one. In terms of the Balfour Declaration, again, it's one of those things people, I'm sure, will have heard about it. It's kind of this totemic moment in the history of Israel-Palestine relations. What was it? What is it a response to? Right. There are all kinds of interpretations of the Balfour Declaration. I am strongly of the opinion, and I have felt this since I started studying this topic many decades ago, that the primary, in fact, the main and central objective of the Balfour Declaration was achieving certain British strategic aims, having to do with control of Palestine. There were subsidiary aims related to the situation in World War I. But that was the primary aim, and that was always Britain's primary aim. And when Britain shifted its policy in 1939 with the White Paper, it was overarching British strategic objectives that drove that change. The Balfour Declaration said that Palestine was a country which was to be turned into a Jewish national home for the Jewish people, in which the indigenous and in that declaration, the indigenous population, 94% of the population are never mentioned, except in terms of civil and religious rights for the non-Jewish population, non-Jewish communities. What did this mean? This meant that there was one national group in Palestine, the Jewish people. There was one group with political rights in Palestine, the Jewish people, and that the rest of the population were to have only civil and religious rights. The British government did this for reasons I'm arguing that had entirely to do with the desire to have control over the area to the east of Egypt, which would connect British possessions, it was hoped, with the Gulf, which in fact is what happened with Iraq and Transjordan, and Palestine forming a British-controlled bridge across the Middle East after World War I. That was the British objective and the Balfour Declaration was a means to that end. The idea being that planting a colony of Europeans dependent on Britain would strengthen the British position in the Middle East as a whole. There's another empire which comes into this. We'll go back to the British Empire and how it helps give birth to the modern Israeli state. But there's another empire in the background here, which is of course the Ottoman Empire. Reading your book, it just made me realise, it compounded the realisation that the Middle East is still living, or West Asia is still living in the long shadow of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, whether it's Syria, Iraq, Palestine. How big a moment is the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War for Palestine and for the region more broadly? It's an enormous traumatic shock. We're living through an era of enormous traumatic shock right now with the pandemic and the global recession, and the speed with which opinions change and the speed with which people are forced to confront established beliefs. Today, during this pandemic, gives us a small indication of the shock of World War I and the shock of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to the populations that had lived under its rule for over 400 years. Together with the arrival of British and French imperialism in the Arab countries, as they occupied, took over and came to control different parts of the Middle East after World War I, together with the Balfour Declaration, together with the disappointment of Arab hopes for independence which had been encouraged by the British during World War I. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire was a huge traumatic shock. It came on top of enormous losses during World War I. The Ottoman Empire suffered the largest population losses of any competent in World War I. A huge proportion of its population died either due to disease or massacre and ethnic cleansing in the case of the Armenians, or as war casualties in the four years plus of World War I. And together, these events constituted an enormous collective traumatic experience for the population of Palestine and other parts of the Middle East. And then after that, you get in 1922, the British mandate for Palestine, the League of Nations, confers this responsibility onto the British Empire. Right. What does that change and why should that be viewed as, again, another really seismic moment in the history of this relationship? Right. Well, the mandate for Palestine granted to Great Britain by the League of Nations incorporated and amplified the Balfour Declaration. It basically said, this is a country in which there's one nation, the Jewish people, in which there's one group with the right, for example, to representative institutions or diplomatic representation or the support of the mandatory administration. And this is the issue of the Jewish community in Palestine, which was to be represented by what came to be called the Jewish Agency, a quasi-governmental organization established as a public body under the mandate and the likes of which the Arabs were never allowed to have. So the Balfour Declaration skewed, how shall I say, tilted the entire balance in favor of this Jewish minority, a group that remained a minority right up to the end of the mandate. Jews formed about a third of the population of Palestine in 1948 when the State of Israel took over 78 percent of the country. And it established for the Palestinians a situation of unique disadvantage. They had no rights under the mandate. They did not have the right to self-determination. They did not have the right to democratic institutions. They did not, and indeed, whereas the other community in Palestine, the Jewish community, that was growing under British patronage, had not only these, but many other rights granted to them, not just by the British, but by the League of Nations, which is why I described the Balfour Declaration and the mandate as a declaration of war on the Palestinians. It basically stated, you have no rights in your own country. These people have rights and we're going to work to their ultimate aim, which is a Jewish state in Palestine or turning Palestine into a Jewish state. And then towards the end of that mandate, in 1936-1939, right up to the the initiation of the Second World War, you have what's called the Arab Revolt. And when you look at the numbers of people involved in this, the number of fatalities, the percentage of the male Palestinian population at the time, I mean, it's a remarkable few years. Again, I'm sorry to make you go through this chronology, but for our audience, I think they're completely unfamiliar with these events. What was the Arab Revolt from 1936-1939? The Arab Revolt was a very belated response from the bottom up, not led by the traditional Palestinian leadership, which was behind the curve entirely on this. Against the Balfour Declaration, against the British, and against the Zionist project, it involved so many of the country's population that by the end of it, 10% of the adult male population of Palestine had been killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled from the country. Huge, huge casualty figures. It involved the kind of scorched earth policy that Israel later on adopted in treatment of the occupied territories, the demolition of homes on suspicion of terrorism, the execution of people for possession of one bullet, murder of captured prisoners on the battlefield. Tactics largely, in fact, drawn from Britain's experience in Ireland, in suppressing or attempted the failed suppression of the Irish War of Independence a couple of decades earlier. And its impact on the Palestinians was devastating. Leadership was exiled, arms were confiscated, the baddest and the brightest were killed or imprisoned or exiled. Many of them were not allowed to come back, many of them never were able to come back to Palestine. Others were only allowed to come back to Palestine for six or seven or eight years of exile. I talk in the book about my uncle, who was prevented from coming back from 1937 to 1943. And that was a lot of many others. So the Arab revolt ended up as probably one of the greatest anti-colonial revolts of the interwar period. It was one of the really major with Morocco and a few other places in the colonial world. It was one of the greatest uprisings against colonial rule in that entire period. But it ended up costing the Palestinians very dearly and basically cleared the field for the Zionist militias which were armed and trained and expanded as auxiliaries to the British forces and which later on became the backbone of the Israeli army for their victories in 1947-48 after partition. You talk about the tactics being learned in Ireland, but I mean it's, I mean correct me for a moment, we're talking about hundreds of people who would have been Black and Tans suppressing Irish uprising after the end of the First World War effectively into the early 1920s. A lot of the literal personnel of the people we find in Palestine over this period, isn't it? In fact, the British chandarmerie in Palestine in the early 1920s was recruited essentially from Black and Tans auxiliaries and former royal Irish constabulary by the hundreds, six or seven hundred of the of the of the chandarms, almost all of them in fact, and later on of the of the British Palestine police who were derived from the chandarmerie were in fact themselves either Black or Tans, Black and Tans or members of the royal Irish constabulary or other other other apparatuses of British repression against the Irish during the Irish War of Independence. Yes, so it's not just the tactics or the commanders or the individuals who themselves had been involved in British colonialism in Ireland. It was also the mindset. It was also all kinds of things. I mean tying Palestinians to the front of trains to prevent the rebels from blowing the trains up. The British did the same thing in Ireland, tying members of the dial to the armored cars. Exactly the same tactics were employed in many cases by precisely the same people. And over this period, you get the growth of the Haganah, the Ergun, these kind of paramilitary organizations, which like you say, then sort of become the backbone of the of the Israeli, this kind of incipient Israeli state apparatus in the latter half of the 1940s. To what extent do you think they think, to what extent do you know that they kind of they must have been looking at the kind of impressive nature of this British imperial apparatus? Were they were they observing and modeling what these guys were doing in terms of punishment, in terms of how they are praised, etc.? It was more than that. You had people in the British military who understood that to fight a counterinsurgency, you had to do things that were quite dirty. And they were engaged in training members of these these Zionist militias to carry out these raids. So nighttime assassinations, night raids, and so on. A man named Wingate was responsible for this. They called them night squads. And so the tactics that Israeli military have used ever since were not things that they observed the British doing. There were things that they were trained by the British to do as part of the suppression of the of the Arab revolt. When Britain changed its policy in 1939 on the eve of World War II and issued the white paper out of a concern for the fact that it was about to fight World War II in the Middle East and ended up fighting World War II in North Africa and other parts of the Middle East very soon afterwards. And a concern that the hostility towards the Arab population would inflame sentiment in India among the Muslim and non-Muslim population and all over the Middle East. The Zionists then took the methods that they'd learned from the British and turned them against the British. And so the warfare waged against the British in the years after World War II, and some of the assassinations that in fact took place during World War II officials were things that had in fact been taught to the Zionist militias by people like Wingate. Yeah, I mean, because it's something that people aren't very familiar with. We're talking about the kind of the first few presidents of the state of Israel come out of these these organizations, these, you know, non-state actors, we'd call them today, these paramilitary organizations. And they do some pretty reprehensible things. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong again, but we're looking at a couple of hundred kind of assassinations of British police officers, kind of military officers. Even a diplomat was killed. Was it a UN diplomat or an Norwegian diplomat? Folk Bernadotte, the unmediated or Swedish, yeah, Swedish murdered by the Ergon, by one of these paramilitary groups, yes. Well, others too. I mean, there were assassinations in Cairo, there were Lloyd Moyne, there were assassinations in Palestine. There was the blowing up of the British headquarters in Palestine, which was located at that time in the King David Hotel. There were the blowing up of Arab hotels, there were the blowing up of markets in Arab markets. This was part of a war on the British, but also a war against the Arab population. And the Arab population replied in kind. There were there were also terrorist attacks on Jewish targets by Arab groups. The difference was that the Zionists were much better organized, much larger, much better armed, much better trained, and much better finance, but that the Arab resistance had already been broken by the British with the support of their Zionist auxiliaries in the years immediately before World War II. And so a very large number of the people who would and could have led a much more effective resistance to the takeover of Palestine by these militias and later by the Israeli army after May 15, 1948 had been killed or wounded or incapacitated in the repression of 1936-39. Whereas just to finish, whereas on the other side a Jewish brigade was established within the British army, whereas on the other side you had had arming and training of thousands and thousands of people in the issue of in the Jewish community in Palestine as part of the repression of 1936-39. And there's an interesting mirroring going on here. So just as you get the kind of the long shadow of the Balfour Declaration, the mandate coming out of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, obviously post-war period, particularly after it's clear India is leaving, as Gandhi says in 1942, once India goes, the whole empire will follow and broadly correct. What does it look like after 47 as the British are now pulling out? Can you briefly explain the kind of, I mean I suppose it must be hard for us really to even conjure our minds, the kind of anarchy mayhem that prevailed that wasn't really clear what state agencies were in charge. It was really a scramble for sovereignty effectively. What did that look like as the British left? Well, let me put this within a larger context because the most important thing that's happening here, in my view, or one of the most important things that's happening here, is that the Zionist movement responded very adroitly to the loss of British support or what it perceived as the loss of British support after the White Paper of 1939, which curtailed Britain's commitments to the Zionist movement. It measurably curtailed them. It limited immigration. It said that Palestine would be independent after 10 years, meaning you'd probably have an Arab majority. All these things were anathema to the Zionists. Their adroit and rapid response was to cultivate an alternative metropole. This is a settler-colonial movement that cannot operate without external support. Israel wasn't established by the Zionist movement. The Zionist movement inspired it and did all the most of the dirty work, but it could not possibly have been established without British support initially and later on without the support of the other two powers that the shrewd diplomacy of the Zionist movement mobilized the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States starts to browbeat. The Americans start to browbeat the British immediately after World War II as soon as Truman comes into office. Unlike Roosevelt, who had a broader vision of the Middle East and understood a need to balance as between Zionism and Arab nationalism, Truman considered domestic concerns only. He said it himself. I quote him in the book. His pressure on the British was unrelenting from World War II onwards. It culminates in 1947 in American Soviet support. In fact, the Americans in the Soviet pushed through the United Nations General Assembly through browbeating and arm-twisting up the partition resolution, which gave most of Palestine to the Zionist movement, which represented a minority of the population at that time and basically denied the Palestinian majority self-determination in its own country. That's the background against which this chaos in Palestine was taking place. And why would the USSR and the United States collaborate in such a way? Obviously, that was very rare at the time. It was. It was the dawn of the Cold War and it was an unusual collaboration and they were to collaborate over the Middle East twice then and at the time of Suez in 1956. Each for its own reasons. As far as the United States was concerned, this had to do with supplanting Britain in the region. The United States was traditionally an anti-colonialist power, although it had its own colonies in the Caribbean and in the Philippines and Hawaii. It had to do, as I suggested, with Truman's obsession with his domestic base. He was very concerned. He said he said he wants to a group of American diplomats. I'm sorry, gentlemen. I can't follow the policy you're suggesting. I have a lot of people, a lot of constituents who are concerned for the successive Zionism and I don't have many who are concerned for the Arabs. I'm paraphrasing what Truman said. And it also had to do, I think, with a desire to compete with the Soviets, not let the Soviets be the only ones to be supporting the Zionist movement. Stalin had different objectives. Stalin also wanted to supplant the British. But Stalin had the delusion that the Zionist movement and the state that would emerge might be allied with the Soviet Union because of its ostensibly socialist nature of some of the leading parties within the issue of what became the state of Israel, the Labour Party and so on. He had been obsessed with Britain ever since the Russian Civil War, when Churchill was his opponent, as it were. He was in charge of the southern part of the Soviet Union. Britain had launched and supported anti-revolutionary forces in Russia and he had been obsessed with Britain to the exclusion, I think, of a concern for the United States. And so to him getting the British out of Palestine was a paramount objective. He had other objectives, I think, as well. So can you explain what happens after? You talk about the broader sort of geopolitical context, the collapse of the British Empire, these two new great powers. We hear this word in Nakba. What was it? And how did it come about? The Nakba was the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in which more than half of the Palestinian population is uprooted from its homes. And the region which is ethnically cleansed becomes the new state of Israel in 78% of the territory of historic Palestine. This is a result of Palestinian Arab weakness. This is a result of once the Arab countries intervene after May 15, 1948 after the establishment of the State of Israel and the end of the British mandate and removal of British troops. This is a result of the weakness of the newly independent Arab states. And it's a result of the strength of the Israeli military which had already been established many, many years before. I mean, it becomes the Israeli army in May 15th of 1948, but the brigades were there, staff was there, the logistics were there, the arms were there even before. And in fact, these militias had massive superiority on the battlefield in the fighting with the Palestinians before May 15, 1948, and then were ultimately able to prevail against the Arab armies even though they were initially at a disadvantage after some of the Arab armies entered Palestine after May 15. But it's also a result of the support of the two superpowers. Britain was supporting the Jordanian and Iraqi and Egyptian armies, but the United States and the Soviet Union were discreetly arming Israel through Czech arms and through American arms that were surreptitiously channeled to Israel. Israel fought the 1948 war essentially with weapons provided by the United States and the Soviet Union, whereas the Arab armies fought that war with weapons provided by Britain. So it was a sort of a proxy war going on, but there was a difference. Britain instructed its clients in the region, which say Jordan and Iraq, under no circumstances to allow their forces to go beyond the boundaries allotted to the Arab state under partition. And that rule was rigorously evade by King Abdullah's so-called Arab Legion, which was commended entirely by British officers, almost entirely by British officers, and by the Iraqi army, which was under Jordan's control. So whereas the Egyptian army entered the territory allotted to the Jewish state in the southern part of Palestine immediately after May 15, the Jordanian and Iraqi armies never did anything, but fight within the area that was to have been allotted to the Arab state under partition. They ended up being able to retain a part of that, much of it was taken over by the Israeli army, which was on the offensive pretty much from the beginning against the Jordanians. And we're talking about a huge number of people being displaced. What was the global response to this? Because obviously if this was today, the great powers might not do very much, but clearly public opinion would say, well, this is really unacceptable, generally speaking. What was public opinion like in Europe, Britain, America? Well, you have to remember this is in the wake of the Holocaust. In a situation where most Americans and Europeans have a fully justified sense of guilt about their inaction, insofar as preventing the Holocaust or rescuing people before the Holocaust, or doing anything about those remnants of the Jewish populations in Europe that survived the death camps and were in displaced persons camps all over Europe. That's the first circumstance. So the concern for Israel as a refuge for these people who had miraculously survived, very small number of people who had survived the Holocaust, was a much more important consideration. Secondly, the response was essentially humanitarian. There was no political response. Nobody internationally said anything about, well, what about the Arab state that was supposed to be established under partition? The Israelis are overrunning it. Aren't we supposed to do something about this? Before the Arab armies come in, the Arab areas of Haifa, the entire Arab city of Haifa, the Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem are overrun by these militias as are Bishan and other towns and cities. Several hundred thousand Palestinians are already being expelled or fleeing in terror from their homes before May 15th, before the British army has fully withdrawn, before the state of Israel is established, before the Arab armies come in. The world does nothing to implement a general assembly resolution 181, the partition resolution of November 1947, which called for the establishment of an Arab state in about 45% of Palestine. That state is strangled at birth partly by these Israeli, by these advances by Zionist militias and later the Israeli army, and also by a kind of collusion between Israel and Jordan, which is supported in this by Britain. None of these three actors wanted the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state, and the world does absolutely nothing. So there's a humanitarian response, relief for the refugees, leading ultimately to the creation a couple of years later of honor one, United Nations Relief and Works Agency. But there's no political response whatsoever. And then in the several decades that come after that, we're looking at the 1967 conflict, obviously, and 1982, the war in South Lebanon. What changes? Because obviously at this point, the United States and the USSR are both kind of patrons of this new Israeli state. By 67, you're looking at a really, a technologically advanced army, very coherent nation state. It's a huge sort of conflict we saw after 47. So 6782 changing. Well, both of these wars, the 1967 war and the 1982 war, take place in the shadow of the Cold War. And in a situation where the United States is increasingly aligned with Israel. In fact, the 67 war seals the American-Israeli alliance as a central factor in the Middle East. The United States had always supported Israel. But under previous presidents, even Truman, but also Eisenhower and Kennedy, they were nowhere near as close as they came to be under President Johnson and thereafter. And so the 67 war is fought with a green light from the United States. And as far as the United States is concerned, this is not as with Britain in 1917. This is not the brown eyes of the Israelis and some kind of phylocemitism or phylozionism that's driving American policy. It's cold strategic calculation. These guys will knock out Soviet proxies. Therefore, we support them, period. And this is the argument that Sharon in 1982, then Defense Minister Sharon, brings to Washington to then Secretary of State, Alexander Haig. We will knock out Soviet proxies. We will defeat the Lebanese national movement. We will drive Syrian troops out of Lebanon. These people are aligned with the Soviets, and we will eliminate the PLO from Lebanon. All of these things will help the United States in the Middle East in terms of the Cold War. So both of these wars are fought with a bright green light from the United States. Israeli officials come to Washington, get permission, and go ahead with what I describe. I describe both of these things as declarations of war on the Palestinians in the sense that it's not just the Israelis. It's permission from the United States, which is essential to what the Israelis do. In 1967, they recalled that they had not gotten American permission to launch the Suez War together with Britain and France, and they paid a price for it, and they weren't going to make the same mistake. Nor did they make that mistake in 1982. I guess what changes before 1982, obviously, of the Iranian Revolution in 79, until 79, the United States, as these two allies, Israel and Iran, after 79, it's just Israel. Now, if you talk about regional relations... And Saudi Arabia. Never forget Saudi Arabia. So as a military power, but that's changed now, of course, with Yemen and so on. At that point, the two generally intervention... These were countries that had deployed in other sovereign states. I'm thinking of the Shah. This is very niche. You tell me, I think they go to Amman, don't they? Or they get involved? Iranian troops are involved in putting down the revolution, absolutely. So these two states are very much kind of extensions of Western power. At the same time, Israel is helping to defeat the Yemeni revolution, or tries to help the British in the United States to defeat the Yemeni Revolution after 1962. So Iran and Israel are both acting as proxies for the West in the Arabian Peninsula. But this is a really important point to make, I think, because if you ever talk about... I mean, today it's Israel. At that point, it was Israel and Iran. If you talk about there was an extension of Western influence or American influence in the region, people said, well, this is being conspiratorial. But this is objectively observing basic empiricism, looking at documents, transcripts, conversations, policy decisions. This was very much about an extension of American Imperium in the region. Right, right. Well, I mean, one has to ignore the facts. One has to ignore the documents. One has to ignore the historical consensus about 1947-48 when the Defense Department and the oil industry come to see that Israel can in fact be helpful to them rather than a problem. 1967, the deliberations of President Johnson and his Secretary of State and his Secretary of Defense. Again, talk about the fact that the Israelis are going to whip the Arabs no matter what happens. If the Arabs attack first, they're going to defeat them. It'll be a matter of a couple more days. That's the assessment of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That's the assessment of the CIA before the 1967 war. That means we will have a powerful proxy on our side in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. You have exactly the same calculations in the book. I go through the diplomatic documents that are published for 1967 foreign relations of the United States. I go through discoveries in some cases about my own students in American documents which show the role of Secretary Hague and others in the Reagan administration in greenlighting the Israeli invasion of 1982. This is indisputable, unless you choose to ignore the facts and live in a fantasy created by Israeli propaganda. And Sharon, Ariel Sharon, obviously, we know he becomes Prime Minister later on. Is he guilty of war crimes in 1982 in South Lebanon? I suggest that anybody who doesn't believe that's the case look at the documents that I cite in my book from the once confidential annexes to the Khan Commission report on the sovereign Shatina massacres which include about, I would say, 10 or 11 months of transcripts of meetings between Sharon and other Israeli senior Israeli officials and leaders of the Lebanese forces and talk about the massive atrocities committed by these auxiliaries to the Israeli army all over Lebanon with the consent and approval of the Israelis. Of course Israel directly, in terms of its killing of 17,000 mainly civilians in Lebanon during the 1982 war and by extension through its support with arms and funding. They talk in these transcripts about how much money Israel has given to these Lebanese forces and militias. Is guilty of a massive array of war crimes in Lebanon? There's no question. And it's in the documents. I'm not saying this. They condemn themselves out of their own mouths. And the Khan Commission just to complete this. Yeah, no, it's important. Never came to such blunt conclusions. And in fact, the documents that they had amassed were never released publicly. I use them in the book because I obtained copies of them. But even the Khan Commission recommended the dismissal of most of the Lebanese, sorry, of the Israeli officers and ministers. And many of them did were forced to leave the leave office. And then I suppose the sort of the good news story in the Western imagination is Oslo in the early 1990s. What was Oslo? Because obviously the way it was pitched to us when I'm being a kid and watching, oh, wow, peace in the Middle East, fantastic. But what was an accurate description of Oslo? What interests were pushing it? And was it really offering meaningful sovereignty to the people of Palestine? To understand Oslo, I suggest in my book that one has to go back to the Camp David agreements of 1978 and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty brokered by President Carter at the time because that was a deal in which Egypt got back occupied territories in return for Egypt and the United States giving Israel a free hand in Palestine. And the understandings and agreements and treaties and letters of understanding secret at the time, some of them, between the parties indicate that Israel got Egyptian and American approval for an approach to the occupied territories which denied self-determination, denied sovereignty, denied control over land to the Palestinians, and gave Israel a free hand to continue to colonize the occupied West Bank and at the time the Gaza Strip and obviously East Jerusalem. That was the base and that was an understanding between the United States and Israel. And that has formed the basis of American and Israeli policy from 1978 until today. Self-determination, statehood, sovereignty for the Palestinians is not and never was on the table as far as Israel and the United States were concerned. This is not just the Beginn government or the Shamir government or the Netanyahu government for that matter. This is the Rabin government. Rabin gave a speech just before he's assassinated in which he basically said the Palestinians will not have sovereignty, they will not have full statehood. We will retain security control. And that has been the policy of Israel ever since. So I was engaged in some of the negotiations before Oslo. And we came to understand that that was the absolute ceiling that Israel and its American allies would allow. Some form of autonomy for the people, no control over land, over subterranean resources like water, of airspace, of borders, of entry, of exit, of the population register, in other words of anything important. And various other elements were part of this American-Israeli understanding. So while people thought that Oslo meant a possibility of peace in the Middle East or peace in Palestine, because you had peace between Egypt and Israel and soon after Oslo, you had peace between Egypt and Jordan, while people thought it meant the end of the conflict in Palestine, it did not. It meant an extension of the conflict. It exacerbated the conflict by ensuring such a low ceiling that the Palestinians would continue to remain under occupation, that the process of settlement, colonization, and expulsion of the Palestinians from their own lands would continue unabated with American support. That's what Oslo meant and that a so-called Palestinian authority would be created, which was envisioned by the Israelis essentially as an extension of their security control over the occupied territories. So do you think it's written into the DNA of the modern Israeli state that a viable Palestinian state is an impossibility then? If that's the closest that you've come to seeing it since 1947-48? Yeah, I wouldn't say that it's in the DNA of the Israeli state. It's in the DNA of Zionism. Zionism argues for an exclusive Jewish right to Palestine. It doesn't say there are two peoples here. It says there's one people here and there's some others, and they may be here or they may not be here, but they don't have the same absolute, God-given national right to sovereignty and domination over the entirety of the land of Israel. That's the core of Zionism. Now, there are some Zionists who believe that that can be reconciled with self-determination for the Palestinians. They've never been in power in Israel. Could Israel change? Yes. Could it modify Zionism and its entire approach to the Palestinians? Yes. So I wouldn't say it's in the DNA. I wouldn't use that metaphor, but I would say that you've never had a Zionist leader, certainly since Israel was an Israeli leader, I should say, who ever saw the Palestinians as equal, who saw that they had inaliable national rights in their own homeland, that they were the native population of the country, and that those rights included absolute sovereignty, self-determination, and statehood. No Israeli leader, to my knowledge, has ever accepted that. The most conciliatory approaches, whether by Prime Minister Omer or by Rabin or by others, never included absolute sovereignty, never included Palestinian security control of Palestinian territories, never included, for example, Palestinian control of their own borders or control over who could enter their country. Could any Palestinian come to Palestine? No. No. The Palestine that was envisaged was essentially a subject state or a subject entity to Israel by every Israeli leader, by every Israeli government. And I guess in that context, it's good to ask a question about annexation. Obviously, the next few days we're going to see probably significant annexation of the West Bank. Can you just talk about what that means? Is that in any way an escalation of Israel-Palestine relations, or is it really just business as usual continuation of the modus operandi? Well, we may not see quite the dramatic steps that some people have talked about on July 1st or immediately afterwards. It's very clear that the Trump administration and some elements within the Israeli government, including the Israeli security apparatus, the military and the intelligence community, have some doubts about wholesale, full-scale annexation of the entire Jordan River Valley, all the settlements and many other areas, as was originally laid out in the Trump plan and in Netanyahu's more ambitious statements about annexation. It seems as if there will be some modifications in that. But I don't think that's as important either the date of July 1st or exactly how much they choose to annex or in what way. I think this is significant in that it represents a step endorsed by the United States in violation of international law in a way that puts the United States completely at odds with the international consensus against and against the Security Council Resolution 242, which is against the acquisition of territory by force. What is annexation? Except the acquisition of territory by force. The Trump administration doesn't care about international law one bit, obviously, but that in fact is significant. However, I think we over-emphasize the significance of quote-unquote annexation in that Israel has been engaged in gradual annexation of the occupied territories ever since June the war ended in 1967. Decisions were made by the Israeli cabinet immediately afterwards, which started a process that has not stopped for one day of slow incorporation under Israeli law of land and people to the state of Israel that started with Jerusalem. Israelis in the settlements, the 600,000 Israelis who live in occupied Arab East Jerusalem or live in other parts of the West Bank are under Israeli law today. They're not governed by military law like the Palestinians under military occupation in the West Bank. They're full citizens of the State of Israel. They vote in Israeli elections. They're judged in Israeli courts. They pay their taxes. They get services from the State of Israel wherever they are in the occupied West Bank. So those areas have effectively already been annexed. The only question is, will Israeli law be formally extended and Israeli sovereignty formally extended? And will the United States then say, yes, and this is part of a peace plan? So I think those are the, it's partly a matter of terminology and legalisms, though I think it is important, certainly in terms of America, the United States formally endorsing this. We talked about this briefly before we started the interview that in your view, this kind of this step of recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and, you know, accepting, legitimizing potential annexation after July 1st has really put off flabbergasted kind of liberal Zionists in the United States because it's indefensible. To what extent has the conversation around Israel, Palestine changed in the United States in the last several years? The conversation today is unrecognizable. If one had gone to sleep in 1990 or 2000 and woke up in 2020, they would find a Democratic Party whose entire base has become quite sympathetic to Palestine and quite critical of Israel. That's not true of the leadership of the Democratic Party, which is as pro-Israel as it ever was, but it's certainly true of the vast, vast numbers at the base of the Democratic Party. And we see this in special elections. We see this in primary elections. I mean, the most pro-Israel number of Congress was defeated by Jim Ann Bowman in the 16th Congressional District of New York just before I was in New York at the time of the election. We went back to vote, among other things. Angle is the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He once said, I never make a move without consulting APAC. Now, he wasn't defeated only because of that, but this is a crushing defeat. And it is an example of what is happening in primary after primary across the country, Democratic primary after Democratic primary. You could see it in the platform debates in the Democratic Convention in 2016. You can see it in the candidacies of Warren and Sanders and others. You could see it in a variety of ways. And that's one important change. Another important change is what's happening within the Jewish community. Younger people are more open-minded and more critical of Israel. They understand that there's more than one narrative here. There's not just a narrative that their parents were always fed, a pro-Israeli narrative. There is another narrative. And they are angry about racism in the United States, like most Americans are. Overwhelming majority of Americans, including white Republicans, are alive to issues of discrimination and inequality. Well, they understand that there's discrimination and inequality in Palestine. And this is a matter of interest to them. Since they've always been told that Israel is important to us and Israel is this and Israel is that, they look at Israel with eyes that are not covered with propaganda. And you see this on college campuses. A lot of the support for the Palestine cause on American college campuses is coming from young Jewish students. You can see this in some of the more liberal Protestant churches. You can see it in a variety of other realms. In the fact that the mainstream media don't dominate the way in which the media covers the Middle East. Younger people don't listen to CNN. They pay no attention to the New York Times. They have 57 other sources of information. And those 57 sources are uncontrollable by the kind of means in which the media was basically coerced and convinced into taking a largely pro-Israel line. You can't coerce the social media in the way that you could coerce the New York Times or coerce ABC or NBC. So there are massive changes taking place. The debate is wide open on college campuses within the Democratic Party. Democratic Party is the majority party in the United States. Democrats got 10 million more votes than the Republicans in the 2018 midterms. They represent a growing majority of Americans. The Republican Party is mainly older white lesser educated whites in the south and the west of the United States. That is a shrinking proportion of the American population. It will at some determinate stage in the future be a minority. And the Democratic Party represents a growing majority. And that party is shifting incrementally at the base, not yet at the in terms of leadership in a direction that's very much more critical of Israel and much more open to the Palestinian narrative. Rashid, that's a great place to leave it. Thank you very much for giving us your time. It's been a pleasure to have you on the Vora Media. Thank you for having me. We will be back next week on Tuesday. You've got Tisgy Sauer on Friday. Have a good evening. My name is Aaron Bistani. This is Vora Media. Good night.