 Hello everyone. I'm really happy to welcome you all in person in this room and many on Zoom. We saw a webinar that will be recognized from the last, so hope nobody has any objection to that. Very happy to have the event to release the book. India Palestine, we are very grateful to the library event series for hosting us and also the so as HR history, religion and philosophy department for providing some of the science travel. Welcome to Victor Kathand, who with Amit Ranjan has edited the book. I'm welcoming him back to his alma mater. So he did his PhD here. And in fact, when he was doing his PhD, I used to teach a course on comparing India Palestine partition in 2009 for a couple of years. And so there's a very old genesis to this project, but I'm very happy to see it happen and I will introduce the book and talk about it shortly. Welcome all our speakers as well and next credentials. Can you get the next slide? Yeah. So, oh, and I welcome you all with that little discount code. So hopefully if anybody wants to buy the book, you can use the so as 34, then you order it on the community website. So, welcome to the event. Victor, I'm not going to read out everybody's credentials because they are impressive and long. And I'm so glad that they're here, but they are also here to speak. So we didn't keep more time for that. So I have that on the slides for everybody's information, but I'm not going to read out. Everybody's biographies, but they will come to Muhammad Ali Adrawi. He's joining us from Paris and people that Radbound University in the Netherlands. He's had a long publication. If you go to the next slide, oh, sorry. Yes, thank you. He's got a lot of publications looking on the Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood and people talk about his contribution to the book shortly. Our next speaker will be, should have been Ari Dabnoff. I switched it, sorry. The first is Ari Dabnoff after that, Muhammad Ali. And Ari Dabnoff is visiting us from George Washington University in the US. He's a named chair professor there. And he has published on Jewish liberal thought as well as partition in the international context. And you can see his impressive list on the slides. So very welcome here. Ari, after that we will have Victor speak again about his contribution. So not only has he ever called, but he has also written it. No, after Muhammad Ali Adrawi, yes. Sorry. I switched the introduction to the sound, but we keep that order. I mean, there is the only logic behind the order. It's the surveys. So I thought I would question it like that. And after we will have Laura, I'm very welcome. She's coming. She's here from Penn State University. And I'm very... Can you speak up, please? Oh, yeah. Thank you. I said I was welcoming Laura Robson. Professor Robson is here from Penn State University in the US as well. So very grateful to both of them making this long journey to speak to us and share their thoughts on their contribution in this book, but perhaps they can also reflect on the greater issues of comparing these partitions. After these presentations, we will next slide, we will have this condense to the book by Nandini Chatterjee. She is at Exeter University and has recently been appointed to the University of Oxford. She's worked on the broad comparative versioned field in the Indian Ocean world, law and empire, in this over the long new race from the Mughals to the modern times in India, to the 19th century India. So I'm really looking forward to her comments on the book and the different contributions. Last but not least, Professor Adith Alashir, he's at University of Westminster. He will be one of the respondents as well and he's worked on nationalism and that's science and literature and nationalism. So bringing in culture and politics as well. So welcome to all of us and to all of you for making the time to hear about the book and ask questions. We are going to try and keep the presentations within the hour and then an hour and more discussions questions. Those online can give the questions on the Q&A box or maybe the chat. And maybe when we are discussing it, you can unmute yourselves and talk. Yes. And Charles is very good at that for coordinating everything from organizing this place as well and posting the event on the webinar. So he will help us answer the questions in the question session. So I'll switch now with Adith. If you would like to join me, join us here. You're okay then? All right. When you're speaking then for the webinar, the camera will be easier here. All right. Okay. So without much ado, then I ask Victor please to share your, introduce the book to everybody. Thank you very much. I'm Rita. Good afternoon. It's a great pleasure to be back at SOAS after so many years and to contribute to you and Rita for bringing so many of us together in person. I think half the authors or half the contributors to this book are actually here. It's quite a feat with funding cuts and everything else. So that's a very impressive. So I was based at the National University of Singapore many years before I returned to the UK during the pandemic and this project began in Singapore. So it was a joint initiative by the Middle East Institute where I was based at the time as a senior research fellow and Institute of South Asian Studies where my colleague Hamid Ranjan is a fellow and it was organized in this rather beautiful room at the Asia-Europe Foundation and this kind of tropical rainforest and did it on the 70th anniversary of the partition of India. And at the time the Middle East Institute was headed by Professor Engseng Ho is a well-known historian and anthropologist based at Duke University but originally from Malaysia. And what he was trying to do at the time was to create a distinctive Middle East Institute in Singapore to make it do something different to what Middle East Institute is doing in London or in Washington DC. And so he's main area of looking at Indian Ocean diasporas and movement of people and culture between Arabia and Southeast Asia. And so we were encouraged to do comparative projects, comparative work to make it stand out to other institutes. So there were two projects I was involved with. One was comparing the legal arguments about the Vietnam war and the Arab-Israeli conflict. The second project was this one comparing partition in India in 1947 to all happening in Palestine around the same time. So the project came together. We had quite a mix of scholars. We have international historians. We have lawyers. We have political scientists. So it was a multidisciplinary if you like. So the book's published by Manchester University Press. If you click on the link on the link there, does it work? Just to give you an overview of what you might expect to see, you can click on the table on the contents. Brilliant, yeah. So the way in which the book is structured is we have some big names like revisiting their canonical work. So Ayesha Jalal, who's written a lot on Pakistan, history of Pakistan, the partition of the Punjab, was asked to revisit her work on on Muhammad Ali Juna's role. And Ian Talbot, who's done a lot of work on the vice way, Lord Mount Batten, kind of revisited his work. And then we had scholars, two of whom are with us today, looking at the partition of Palestine and then comparative work by Amrita and Professor Pyrrhus, and then we looked at consequences, but we don't see a partition of something that began and ended in 1947, or I should say the failed partition in Palestine or the forced partition of Palestine and in India, but events that continue to have repercussions and influence the politics of both regions today and some of the speakers will be saying more about this. I will point in the comparison to not say that they're identical or they're the same, but also to look at the differences. And there's the next slide. And so we did something that was different to previous scholarship. So previous work, including that by Ari and Laura, who are with us today, and older work by the Irish historian TG Fraser, tend to look at the tripartite partitions, islands, India and Palestine. But we thought it was worth focusing just on India and Palestine, principally, but not exclusively because of the time reason. So there's this particular moment in international politics when the Soviet Union emerged on the stage and influenced international relations, there was a discourse of national self-determination. There was a deep colonization in the third world, if you like, began after World War II. Whereas in the Irish case, they're still using civilizational language, it's still a white European Christian state that's articulating a claim to nationhood. It's a different historical moment. And of course, apart from the similarity in terms of the timing of the partitions, well, the fact that the colonial power was the same, the British Empire, although the status of the territories was, of course, different. Palestine being a League of Nations mandate, and India being essentially a colony of the British Empire. Returns to the next slide. And of course, if we're talking about a partition, we're talking about a subcontinent. We took looking at Punjab and Bengal and then the war of the Kashmir, whereas Palestine was really the unit or subunit of the Ottoman Empire when it was carved out after the First World War. And another big difference between the two, of course, is Palestine. It wasn't set the colonialism on the scale in India as it was in Palestine, which also affected the arguments that were advanced in favor and against partition. Then there are personalities where there's similar similarities in terms of those who are articulating or supporting or opposing partition, whether that with British colonial officials, Kuflund and others who Harry and Amrita have written about. Or whether it was views of the Muslim League, the All-Indian Muslim League, kind of opposing the partition of Palestine, articulating a claim to a majority role. Also Jinnah as well, sorry, also Jawaharlal Nehru as well, coming out at that time in opposition to the partition of Palestine, having accepted it in India. So there's some quite interesting juxtaposition work to be seen comparing why in certain cases they favored partition, but in other cases they were opposed to it. Last slide. So without much further ado, we're going to let my colleagues discuss their individual chances, and I'll discuss mine as well. I think we're going to start with Harry. Thank you. Thank you very much, Victor. First and foremost, congratulations to you and me on bringing together such a stellar collection of authors and also doing the hard, always ungrateful work of being an editor. The metaphor of cat herding is also used in that respect, and thank you, Lynn, for bringing us together. So I'll try to be brief, my two cents or ten minutes. I'll try to briefly highlight the main points of my intervention in the chapter that the chapter contributed to this volume. My chapter focuses on the 1948 war in Palestine. It tries to do a global reframing and to think about whether we can think about it in new ways by, so to speak, rebranding it or recalling it a war partition. And I'll maybe say a few words about how the backstory, how I came to write it, in a sense it grew out of a deep frustration from the existing historiography. I think that much of what the appeal project of this kind has to do with the fact that over the years, nationalist and local histories accumulated a lot of information about the local partitions. We know extremely well and extremely well detailed chronicles, of course, of the different events taking place in Palestine, very detailed analysis of what's going on in the Punjab and in other areas. But much of the historiography, especially when it comes on the Israeli side, is suffering from a heavy mythological nationalism. So it's a very naturalistic history. It reads everything from a nationalist point of view. By saying I'm trying to move away from it, I'm not saying I am discarding the tools of nationalism studies. I think we live in that time in an age when the insights of nationalism studies is still relevant. What I mean by methodological nationalism is a tendency to read history in a very teleological way, everything, all the roads lead to Rome and all the historical processes lead to the creation of an independent state. And also lack of willingness sometimes to zoom out to see the case not only in its uniqueness, of course, every historical case is unique, but to see the certain patterns of similarity. So sort of a bearable force versus tree phenomena that is taking place there. And also by reading the source materials themselves, the primary sources I'm trained as a historian, it strikes me often to see how the documents coming from the period show, reveal historical agents that are much less parochial than we are often. They are acutely aware of the fact that they are part of an imperial setting. They are busy constantly comparing themselves to other places. They have almost some sort of a sometimes an understanding of some sort of a bodily floggy winds effect that even a development elsewhere in the empire and the remote as it may sound might have a ripple effect and will come to them. And this is part of what kind of pushed me in that direction. On a more active note, it was kind of a part of what I was trying to do is of course to follow a sequel to what I had the pleasure of working with Laura when we put the three partitions together and start talking not only about comparing them but identifying a transnational connection between them. So if we try to move beyond phrasers or older story and maybe it's really to take the imperial turn seriously and to do a transnational history that not only puts all the three cases in more than two cases side by side but saying the similarities are not coming out of nowhere. They are clear dots connecting them. So what is happening if we are starting to think about the war taking place in Palestine in 1947-8 officially starting in the official chronicles that the the war the Palestinians will call the Nakba, the Israelis will call the war of independence starts on the day after Resolution 181 is passed in the UN which is the partition resolution. So what happens if we start thinking about it as a war partition and seeing it in that in that context? So part of what I'm trying to suggest in the chapter is that many of these political actors have undermined the partitioned space and the aim of the violence is to create to turn the theory into something which is actual on the ground. The war also starts in the phase where the British are still present in Palestine. So the war starts in November 1947 the British are still there until May 1948. So part of what you see already in these immediate first phases are patterns of violence that are striking this similar to other places of partition violence. What I've also tried to do in the chapter is to scrutinize even putting more broadly discard older narrations and conceptualizations of that war. For instance there was a tendency among Salish ones both Palestinians and Israeli to call the first phase of the war a civil war. The idea of calling it a civil war was simply to allude to the fact that nominally there was still British mandatory presence and communities were starting to clash and this is something you can find both in what ladies are early works and also in historians like Benny Morris and it started as a periodization actually device to say how do I call the first phase of the war. Part of what I'm trying to argue in the in the in the chapter is that it's a bit of a misnomer. It really misses the dynamic it it's completely divorced from the way person Jewish side when they were thinking when they were employing metaphors of civil war was always an intra-Jewish debate. So these were internal strides between different brands of Zionism between fighting between the left wing Zionists and the right wing Zionists. This is where you see the historical records attempts to call it civil war but the the ethno-nationalist logic of that conflict that really makes the civil war metaphor a bit of a misnomer that that is not serving us well analytically. The second term that I tried to discard is is total war for different reasons I would not go into them now. And the last point is to argue that and that amounts to a common victory made earlier and I think is very correct and this is my cue. Partition we is not only this one big band very violent that is only about the war. Partition is an ongoing project and often partition is something that is achieved later on through bureaucrats from clerks from legal scholars that are creating sets of laws that turn the partition to reality on the ground. That's kind of the last argument of the chapter. And so my time is up. I will pass the baton to the next thank you so much. Thank you very much to all of you. Thank you to my dear brother Victor. Actually we have met at Singapore so this place that you have seen is basically where we have we have mingled for so many years. Victor and I and Tamali. So thank you very much for the invitation. I was extremely happy honored to be part of this very very very exciting project and to be here with such distinguished colleagues. So I will try to say a few words on a very very very another side of the of the partition of Palestine that India are more interested in the near and the Middle East. I'm let's say basically I was trained as a political scientist with a bit of history work dealing with the Middle East history and you can come hurry on periods and I'm within this I am let's say and if I had to describe myself I'm more interested in the fields of political Islam political Islam studies or Islamist studies and my chapter in this volume had to deal basically with how an Islamist movement and I'm going to try to give some definitions in a few seconds has tried or has de facto reacted to a coalition of a land called Palestine that was never seen as a as a territory as a as a land of course with the population in all the symbolical side of it as a land as a fact that was meant to be taken away from the Muslims Palestine Palestine with force a very strong Arab nationalistic interest importance but maybe first and foremost because we are dealing here with Islamist forces and Islamist movement the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood with a very strong super strong maybe first and foremost religious appeal religious importance so and that's my first set of remarks second one when I had to I started I mean thinking about this presentation a title came to my mind actually because of course we have no one here ignores what's going on I mean today in the Gaza Strip and beyond and has been going on actually for so many years but more apparently in the next few months I would be I would have to suggest this idea because this title could be nothing new question mark let's try to go back to the long journey what why do I use this expression nothing new it's because if we look at the the archives how this Syrian Muslim brother organization has reacted in terms of discourses in terms of mobilization in terms of actions this partition plan actually we have many similarities with what's going on today everybody knows here I presume here knows about Hamas which is a Islamist force within the Palestinian political and religious field we know about some of their let's say key strong let's say characteristics in terms of ideology in terms also of political types of mobilizations and actually we find many of these of these characteristics actually if we go back to if we start discussing and studying the issue the issue sorry of the Muslim brotherhood 60 70 80 years ago so for example just to give you to start with this what's happening here oh god I'm sorry what's happening I'm trying to so how to give you a few attempts of definitions the Muslim brotherhood is supposed or is usually described characterized as the first strong key Islamist player in the history of the Middle Eastern countries the Muslim brotherhood was founded in the late 20s in Egypt with a teacher called Hassan el benna and quite rapidly actually this movement and of course with the ideology coming with this movement it started actually to generate options across the region first and foremost and then at a global level Syria is one of the very first countries actually where the Muslim brotherhood ideology has settled and we usually consider that the mid 40s it's the time basically when the Syrian Muslim brotherhood starts to emerge so the partition plan actually comes quite quickly one or two years after the the foundation or the creation of this Islamist organization in the Syrian political religious spectrum or field and number two we usually another and I'd be happy to discuss this with my colleagues in a few minutes we usually consider actually whether it's right or wrong that nationalists have been the key force the initial original key force in the pro-Palestine and anti-partisan mobilization types of four sets of a set of mobilizations and actually we could reconsider this with by focusing and going back to the history of the Syrian Muslim brotherhood because for example right from the beginning right just before the partition plan October everybody knows here presumably that's the partition plan happened in the late in late November 1947 in early October 1947 already we have the Damascus committee which is a creation it was generation generated sorry by the Syrian Muslim brotherhood as the first committee the Damascus committee in order actually to mobilize the Syrian people and to let's say make people aware of the fact that the real danger threat I'm talking here I'm using the words that the Muslim brother that the time used to used to characterize the situation through and actually starting in October 1947 with this Damascus committee the first time of Islamist the first generation let's call it this way of Syrian Islamist reactions and mobilization started to be observed actually so right from the beginning so even a few weeks actually at some point before prior to the partition plan and be the trend from this moment onwards is going to get stronger and stronger and stronger so I would be happy to give you a few a few a few a few examples of this a few the generations for example we have the one of the main leaders of the Syrian Muslim brotherhood starting almost right from the beginning we are here now in October 1947 starting to use or to call people for violence for example I can I can say to you I can mention a few examples for example they are saying one of them a very famous Syrian Muslim brotherhood leader Muhammad Mubarak was brought right from the beginning so we have in the third October the third October 3 sorry 1947 we have a very famous speech in which he was calling for Palestine he was asking for Palestine to be defended through bloodsheds and things like that so it's going to be stronger and stronger and after the the partition plan when it was officially declared in the in November 29 1947 a few days after that another very strong type of mobilization is going to be observed in early December 1947 December 4 with the so-called first according to me at least I mean in the Syrian context the first official proclamation of jihad it was a proclamation made by not only here in this case to be honest Muslim brothers or Muslim brother leaders it was made by the League of Ulema so the League of Islamic scholars in Damascus and it was and I would be happy to tell you to give you the extract to give you the content of this so the first let's say and of course jihad we all know here I mean probably at least we should that jihad is a very diverse has generated very sometimes opposite diverse understandings but here in this case it's clearly a reference to a very violent form of jihad in order to defend Palestine which is no longer here described and led to be defended on behalf of some nationalistic scores or symbols or narratives here clearly of course I mean they had a very very famous nationalistic I mean very important nationalistic I mean motivation but also maybe first and foremost we have here right from the beginning in this period of time in early December 1947 a kind of Islamization of this call of this of this of this motivation of keeping Palestine away from the Zionist forces so I'd be happy here to I'm happy here to give you some extract of this very famous proclamation so quotes in quotes so here we have a very famous Muslim brother being part of this League of Scholars who is speaking here the Palestine question today occupies the Arabic and Islamic words so only the Arabic words the Arabic and Islamic words every Arab and every Muslim prepares himself to fulfill his duty against the fallen Zionist perium which is supported by the great imperialist power with all their force and influence having considered the seriousness of the situation in Palestine the League of Lulema scholars Islamic scholars finds it is it's duty to declare the necessity of jihad in money and source for the restoration of the unity of Palestine and its Arab structure Islam which by nature tends towards peace does not accept aggression and any transgression and cannot stand still before slavery and injustice in such a case Islam requires each capable person capable person to fulfill his duty in jihad until God makes him a martyr or the Almighty gives okay all the Almighty gives a victory and success to his country and I could go on and on and on so this idea for example that nationalism had prevailed in the beginning can be discussed I mean um by focusing and studying I mean the importance of the Muslim Brotherhood base or design types of mobilizations and I would like to end up on my idea and I hope to be too long it's if we one once again one more time goes to this long journey necessity we can also figure out actually the idea that Palestine the Palestine Palestinian cause the Palestinian struggle the struggle for Palestine Palestine has also in the long term be key driving force both ideologically but also maybe also we tend to forget that and I'd be happy to give you more evidence of this sociologically in the rise consolidation of Islamist forces throughout the Middle East for so many decades and I'd be happy to give you more examples but we know that we are in Palestine that's one of the ideas I would be happy to defend here and to discuss of course that without the Palestinian factor Islamism would have probably not been framed or shaped the same the same way it is or it has been in the last or for the last thinking so thank you very much for your attention thank you very much speaking here here from Ari and Muhammad Ali so my chapter looks at there's a comparison between the the politicians of India and Palestine and I argue that this notion of majority rule this idea that it's whether the majority population of a given unit to determine their political destiny emerges from the debates in opposition to attempts by the United Nations to partition Palestine and also discussions amongst muslim leaders who are opposed to partition initially opposed to partition in in India and the old indians are the favorite form of majority rule but only in the areas where muslims formed the majority of the population and you can imagine why in it if in it they were worried about what they called it a Hindu Raj that they were worried about the communal they would be a minority in a single unitary state and therefore they would be a federal structure and was more suitable following the departure of the British but it looked at the debate it looked at attempts by the muslim all India muslim need to challenge a British colonial policy in Palestine including debates and going to what was called the permanent court of international justice just before world war two and I draw comparisons to a later attempt by Ethiopia and Liberia to bring us to use a similar clause and another treaty to challenge apartheid in South Africa I look at the role of a Muhammad Zafrullah Khan who was a judge on the federal court of India a prominent leader of the Muslim League and the foreign minister first foreign minister of Pakistan and then a judge and president of the international court of justice and I draw attention to the fact that they came out against the Pakistan scheme as early as 1940 then I Palestine scheme the Pakistan scheme they came out opposed to partition I'll show you a slide shortly in 1940 and so it kind of feeds into what IH Jalal argues that Jinnah always succumbed to partition because he was placed under tremendous pressure to accept it in the final hour but they preferred the cabinet admission plan I've been shot out both Pakistan and India when it became members of the United Nations both voted against the United Nations partition plan for Palestine and again in opposition they were articulating language and discourse based on this idea that self national self determination meant majority rule and then I explained how that idea then feeds into debates against minority rule in in southern Africa from the struggle against the Pakistan so what one of the issue that I highlight in the chapter is this attempt to challenge British colonial policy during the the mandate which hasn't received much attention in the literature this is a picture of Chaudhry Kallukah Zaman who was a very senior member of the All-Indian Muslim League he travels to London in 19 so 1939 some of you will know the British essentially abandoned the Balfour Declaration in the famous white paper and prior to that there was a meeting around table meeting with the leaders of the Arab world what's not so well known is that the All-Indian Muslim League despite not being invited turned up and were advising the Arabs from behind the scene it's quite interesting actually I'd advise the Palestinians that to accept the white paper because it's in the Brits would never would never would never if you accept it eventually they will leave and you'll have majority rule in any event but anyway the Palestinians rejected it and but during during the sidelines of this discussion there were discussions they made a formal complaint to the British colonial office about a legal complaint based on this notion of sacred Shasta civilization in the League of Nations covenants and they also spoke to a League of Nations officials in Geneva about trying to bring a case I don't think they would have succeeded in bringing that case for various reasons I won't go into but the fact that they were sinking along the lines of bringing using the dispute settlement clause in the mandate to challenge the policies of the colonial power was absolutely fascinating if you're a lawyer because they said exactly the same way in which South Africa is a apartheid political challenge in Namibia so next slide and so it's also quite intriguing to keep another key figure was this gentleman Muhammad Sifrullah Khan and he was very close to Jinnah and he again came out opposing population transfers you know he posed this idea of creating a sovereign Pakistan state because he knew there were as many if not more Muslims living in in other parts of India as they were in in the Punjab and the northwest frontier between Punjab Bengal and other places and so they actually implored them to abandon what they call the Pakistan scheme because it would be utterly impractical and would result in nothing but misery and suffering and can therefore make no contribution towards the solution of India's problems quite intriguing given some people claim that the Muslim League wanted a wanted partition but but what's key to understand is that they favored nationhood in those areas where they were the where the population was the majority and of course the partition was done a form of majority rule dividing tessels between majority Muslim and non-Muslim populations and then that led to at the old know the horrors of the India of a Holocaust and India subcontinent and a massive movement of of people suffering until this day so during this time during the in the in the aftermath of the Second World War when India India and Pakistan become independent states the Palestine issue returns or is placed on the agenda of the United Nations General Assembly and we have a photograph here of Muhammad Khan was essentially becoming Faisal and Egyptian leaders and they were they were he was advising them as a very prominent lawyer and he was advising them essentially how to to deal with the imperial powers being very skilled and familiar with these issues themselves so he did it as an extremely powerful and eloquent speech if you haven't seen it I think you watched on the on the UN website now explaining why the partition plan was madness because it was a according sovereignty to large parts of Palestine where the Arabs continued to be either the majority population or the majority of landowners and explain why this is completely contrary to his self-determination that had just been proclaimed by the United Nations maybe let's the last slide I then explain how these arguments based on majority rule coming out of these debates in the Indian subcontinent coming out of the debates on the partition of Palestine plus the movement that the independence of a lot of North African countries in the and in Indonesia in like 1940s and early 1950s results in this articulation that that democracy means majority rule such as lord interpretation of course but but there's kind of powerful a nationalistic a notion of self-determination then it feeds I also show how it feeds into discrediting apartheid in South Africa which initially began at the debates about the status of individuals of Indian origin it was never just about one man one vote or based on complete non-discrimination initially the UN I'm talking about the official diplomatic structures was focused on on the status of individuals or Indian salvation this sense but what happened in 1952 is this this new agenda is brought to the General Assembly it's lettered by mostly movement majority countries is written and they for the first thing break that focus purely on individuals of South Asian origin and say no apartheid is wrong because it discriminates against all non-white South Africans so I draw those links and that's how I kind of end and end the chapter thank you very much thank you very much well thank you all so much for coming I'm really delighted to be here thank you for bringing us together which is a remarkable accomplishment I think and and to Victor for editing this wonderful volume I have very fond memories of the conference in Singapore which was a lovely gathering and and the conversation that has continued you know over the subsequent years and I'm really delighted to have this volume appearing as kind of the manifestation of that conversation so this is a volume that talks about partition as a tool of various kinds of enterprises as a tool of empire as a tool of nationalism as a tool of Islamism and the chapter that I contributed to this book talks about partition as a tool of the kind of emerging internationalism and I'm going to put that term in quotes for reasons that I think you'll see and so it did this by focusing in on a particular moment in 1947 when the very new novel indeed in some ways United Nations put together what it called a special commission on Palestine UNSCOP sent it to the region to to figure out a quote-unquote solution to the problem of Palestine and came up with two different proposals one of which is known as the majority the majority proposal and I think that the use of that term is an interesting one as well which proposed partition and was put to the vote in in the General Assembly in November of 1947 and passed and a minority proposal which had a different vision for what could happen to Palestine and proposed something more akin to a federal state that would incorporate both Jews and Arabs and I think importantly would assign Palestine's quote-unquote holy places to the event directly so I want to know just a couple of major things about this moment one is just a kind of straightforward historiographical point which is that this federal minority proposal that was put forward by certain members of UNSCOP is very in is insufficiently investigated in the literature right and we would think that in a field like Palestine Israel which is so oversubscribed and perhaps even kind of um overwritten in in so many respects that something like this would have received a great deal of attention and it is not right so I just want to kind of flag that I think we could think about why that might be um but in fact it's a very interesting document and it represents a remarkable and wide-ranging set of dissenting opinions on the legitimacy and the viability of the idea of partition but also about the scope and the nature of the political authority that is being proposed for the new united nations right um and so I think that this is this is a straightforward point there is more to be written about this moment about these set of ideas about the ways in which there was considerable dissent not just about partition itself but also about the kind of role that the UN could be expected to play in the making of those colonial states so that leads me to the second major point here which has to do with the UN's own self-prescribed role in the making of the kind of decolonial world and I think Palestine in 1947 and not for the first time offered an opportunity for people interested in concepts of what they thought of as internationalism to declare their institutions to be the arbiter of things like borders of populations of territories of sovereignty in the post-1945 world just as empires had been in the pre-1945 world and it's important I think you know it's easy to look back on this moment we all know what what came of it right and to see this as a kind of inevitability but I think it is really crucial to remember that in 1948 nothing about this was a foregone conclusion not what happened in Palestine and not what the UN became right not what not the kinds of claims that had been that had eventually made um the kind of institutions that eventually came to comprise right none of this had been established yet right this is a moment of negotiation so I think that's quite an important point to make that this investigation about this federal proposal can um can lead us towards so just to draw out a few of the details I won't go into this in kind of great depth but um first of all a little bit of background I'm sure that most of you know um that the first proposal for the partition of Palestine official proposal came from the 1937 appeal commission which imagined the segregation of the territory into a Jewish state and excuse me an Arab territory that would be joined in some unspecified way to transform and I think I'll note in passing that I think this aspect of non-statehood for the Palestinian Arab peace of the partition proposal is actually quite important particularly as it was repeated by unscop in 1947 and in fact I think it's arguable that there was never a partition plan in these decades that represented any sort of vision for actual sovereignty for the Palestinian part of the occupation and in any case the appeal commission had proposed that this plan would be accomplished via forcible transfer um and anticipated something like 300 000 Arabs needing to be moved and about 12 150 Jews needing to be moved out of their respective areas to create what it saw as an appropriate demographic majority in the Jewish state when this question of partition was raised once again in 1947 as the British were planning to leave their mandatory territory in Palestine unscop produced its part its partition report which is called the majority report um again here I think Victor talked about this a little bit but I think these terms the idea of a minority and majority in this political context as well as in the context under investigation is notable um the majority report proposed partition on the grounds of the unworkability of pluralism as a political principle and it proposed to the UN as the keeper of what it called international obligations surrounding the nature of territorial sovereignty in these two arenas and what are called minority rights which is a term that comes out of the League of Nations in the emerging states um now unscop was operating in a context of a near absolute boycott of its proceedings by the Palestinians this is something that other scholars have investigated um they objected to its presence and its task on the grounds that the UN had no jurisdiction over Palestine and argued for the most part that the question should be submitted to some kind of international court so I won't go into this further here but I it is worth noting the extent to which this majority report that proposed partition acceded essentially to the basic philosophical and political claims of the Zionist leadership about no nationalism as the primary basis for statehood and also about the political legal perhaps even ethical impossibility of ceding any political rights to Arabs in the context of Jewish claims so there was a secondary minority report that was supported by three states India Iran and Yugoslavia we might note that two of those would eventually be subject to partition as well that proposed linking the Jewish and Arab communities into a federal state giving the UN control over the region's religious sites on the grounds that the mandate had failed in its self-prescribed task of preparing these communities for self-government and that as such any continuation of the mandate in any form including the idea of an independent Jewish state under international protection would bring the UN into disrepute right so the new UN would be non viable from its beginning because it would be permanently associated with the cause of empire it also included considerable commentary about how political coexistence between these two communities might indeed be possible once the destructive oversight of the mandatory power was gone so it refused this report refused to accept the impossibility of pluralism right and and instead envisioned a situation where once the imperial framing had been removed it might be possible to come up with some kind of alternative solution so just to finish up here what do we make about this of this moment I think a couple of things and I'll be very quick one is that debate about Palestine was not only or maybe mostly about what was happening in Palestine right it was about the United Nations it was about what would happen to empire it was about the nature of this quote unquote internationalism that was emerging in very inchoate and uncertain ways in this particular moment and I think Palestine becomes a kind of laboratory for figuring out modes of control and modes of political authority that could be cast as internationalist cast as cooperative while also reserving the power to make or break states and to some extent we can say that of the federalist model as well right because the federalist model was imagining a role for the un rather than an outcome from Palestine as both a mediator and as one where it would take an active and interventionist role in particular parts of Palestinian territory so I want to close by saying that I don't think this is a story about how we had a better idea on the table and it was rejected in favor of a worse one but rather this is a story about the profound uncertainties surrounding the purpose the direction the nature of internationalist power in this moment and that these two different ways of imagining that international authority in Palestine in the aftermath of formal empire actually shared a vision of taking active control of international active control over borders and populations and to some extent actual territory as well so I'll close there thank you very much thank you all for all your presentations and I invite Nandini to look at the strategy to talk to us about the book and but I will also switch places with others and then people just call that it's a it's really a privilege to be part of this conversation and I do apologize for not being part of it physically because I'm teaching in Exeter I was teaching in Exeter this afternoon and I have to teach early morning tomorrow as well when when Amrita invite told me about this book in the first instance and this then invited me to be part of this conversation I thought it would be really difficult for me to actually engage in this conversation beyond the level perhaps of an undergraduate seminar where I for instance happen to teach a module on British Empire and law and what in one of the sessions we talk about Mandate Palestine but I have so far been cowardly and stepped back from the precise moment that you have been talking about an instead talk of the period of creation of legal institutions and the work of different groups of lawyers following us at Likowski's work for instance during the mandatory period because I wasn't sure what exactly I can add to that conversation but I think what they're having listened to your conversation and having actually read this book in detail what I can share with you is the delight that I took in reading this book and I'll tell you why I was delighted I started off by thinking that this is a work in comparative history which is about the mid 20th century a period of human history that I did like the most and also it's in the fields of international relations sociological theory political science all of which are deeply disciplinary fields which I have very little expertise in so I felt there was very little I could say about it in fact reading the book and then actually listening to now it's just slipped my mind but was it Victor who said that or Arya in the beginning of your conversations that what really inspired you were the connections rather than the comparisons and indeed as it happened reading the book it's the connections part that had like several aha moments for me some part of it is really about the pleasure in narrative I was really interested to hear how for example the grand movie of Jerusalem was deliberately trying to port Indian Muslim interest by among other things doing various religious ritual things such as offering the possibility of burial in a holy Muslim site and so on but a lot of this can be a delight in narrative and not necessarily perhaps add much more to what we already know for instance about Indo-Muslim transnationalism and things of that kind however I think actually reading the book helped me re-evaluate many things fundamentally and for that I thank you and I'll point to three things that I think changed in my mind as a result of reading this book I think first of all I had in fact been guilty of methodological nationalism in learning and teaching and reading about the Indian partition and so I had not thought of partition as a tool as a tool of imperial governance in the first place but having discovered that and that was relatively easy to recognize because if you belong to a post-colonial society perhaps you have or have association with it perhaps you have heard this joke before wherever there's a problem across the world you can possibly find the British imperial history in it so at that kind of level of course like one could see it as a tool of imperial governance all bit clumsy and destructive forms of governance but in thinking of partition as a tool beyond imperial governance to also thinking of it as a tool of nationalism and as deliberately a tool of nationalism not a natural outgrowth of nationalism on the first part leading to very specific and violent forms of social engineering and then finally because of Laura's unbelievably important chapter for me at least and I'm sorry to not be able to give equal attention to all the chapters although all of them actually contributed to my understanding as a tool of internationalism as well really has made me think of partition as something much more deliberate much more comparable in the sense exactly of being this tool of social and geographical engineering and if you like and I'm not sure what where I would go with that but just that has been again enough for me to which I had then another thought which was about migration which once again I had thought of as almost an unfortunate but natural if you like and here is a warning to of course any reflexive historian and whenever you think of any enormous human process as natural there it probably isn't and I should have examined it but your book has helped me to examine it better so I thought of the mass migration associated with the partition in the Indian subcontinent as something natural in a sense of a natural outgrowth of the escalation of sectarian tensions and violence but also of the simple fact of collapse of administration and the possibility of predatory behavior on each other what I hadn't thought about of is of migration as also a tool of social engineering and a question that came to mind and here is where I start moving to questions if that is also okay because I find I think I would find it difficult to separate the questions necessarily from my response so I was actually wondering when I was reading Laura's chapter as in whether there were in fact thoughts of compulsory population transfers in the district level divisions that happened in the Indian case and if not why not what did they think would happen and and and here is where you do kind of fall back into comparative history it's a connected story but then there is possibility comparison for the dog that did not bark as in why was that not one of those thoughts or am I missing something was there a thought on this as well the other thought that actually appears across several of the articles including of course most importantly victor's work who leads with that concept but I also found it again and again in Ari's work as well as in majority role on the one hand and apparently democratizing concept and indeed I kept thinking about of the South African case recently and and so many things feel so prescient about your book which was of course conceived before the events before the very unfortunate events that were escalated since October so this idea of majority rule and how do you actually create conditions for majority rule once again I have thought of as extremely naturalized in the sense that all you need to do is cluster those territories which is the whole Federation alternative if you like and majority rule will follow and of course majority rule was also refused in a sense by Hindu politicians of Bengal who chose partition instead so that they would not have majority rule by Muslims but this point about majority rule once again like made me think that I had not actually thought of majority rule in this tool driven way and the things and the social engineering that is actually required in order to make majority rule a possibility and I'm thinking of it more in that kind of interventionist way there is one thought and I'll sum up with this thought I feel I've been quite in quite actually in my thoughts rather than give you a structured response because the book itself is very structured but it's deeply moving and that is how I've responded to it my last point really is am I wrong in thinking that there is there is something absolutely egregious about the complete denial of agency to Palestinians in the decisions that have continued to affect them until date because the Indian partition was of course a dreadful event but if we for one moment step back and think comparatively the level of Indian input into the process seems to be disproportionately greater than what the Palestinians ever got to say about their own lands and futures and why was that the case I mean there's obviously the demographic perhaps the simple size of the number of people and so on but there is something particularly pointed I think about the an poignant about the Palestinian experience which maybe also and my absolute finishing point is also something which is the reason which I invite you to reflect upon is why the Palestinian case egregious as it is and I apologize for calling it a case but I think this kind of instance of human experience why it has been internationalized in a way that for instance Kashmir has not as in all of you in this room of course know about Kashmir and know about the comparability of it and of course the differences however Kashmir continues to be nationalized and and retained between this kind of bilateral conflict paradigm that Palestine has not remained confined to and here is where I'm actually thinking of Muhammad Ali's work as in there is something about the internationalization of the Palestinian cause effectively or otherwise history well the future will show us which does not seem to have happened in the Indian case and I wonder why thank you once again for having me in this conversation. Thanks very much Nandini I think it's we won't respond immediately we'll wait for Adif's response and then we respond with some of my questions you raised. Thank you so much for inviting me to respond to this wonderful work I'm very glad to do so although I feel a little bit very unpolyified because it's my field is Arabic literature, Palestinian writing but nonetheless I have read Victor work before the first book that we published which I thought was amazing and thought me a lot and this one too really thought me a lot so I feel more like a student of this book rather than somebody who really knows the details of everything and can talk about it confidently but nonetheless I was struck by a few things in the book which is for example the first chapter which we've discussed some elements of it already the first chapter in the book I think it's by Talbot talks about partition as somehow really something the outer growth of the local aspect the anti-colonial struggle and the massacre in the Bengal region rather than something that is imposed by the British it's something and not the British have imposed it's actually was something locally organically grown from there and that the bone of the book from there on actually takes a contradictory sort of turn because most of the chapters after that highlight actually the international particularly the imperial British role in the partition in the partition element and there's quite a strong evidence for this for this so so I was quite surprised by the first chapter being where it is and the other chapter is speaking to something else which is mainly how the British orchestrated the partition in India and Palestine I was also struck by Victor's chapter where he's talking which is exactly the point that Emmett is just raised actually that you have such agency shown in the case of it seems like an embossed agency in some ways in the case of the Indians so for example the leader of backstand Muhammad Ali Jinnah was kind of often seen as somebody who wanted the partition or accepted the partition but actually seems to have been sorry that was my mistake that's all right yeah it seems to have been imposed on on on rather than something that he he wanted so the agency in this case is imposed but what we see we have a lot of statements a lot of deliberations and particularly in the sense of the way Lord Lord Mountbatten others I don't talk like a specialist because really I'm not but I'm just it raises some questions the sense that how that agency of the Indian leaders and Pakistani leaders came about and it seems like in the case of the case of Palestine and I speak as somebody who's from Gaza you know so you can imagine the horror of thinking about that situation now how that agency somehow was given but it's also kind of limited agency it's a kind of imposed agency or within the constraints of what the imperial power once in back once in that region some of any words in the case of the Palestinians agency is really almost not existent it's others speaking for the Palestinians and implementing this plan and then once the Palestinian rejected the 1947 plan the partition plan they're blamed later and ever since for not accepting that plan even though the conditions at that time and the logic of the situation so just why should they accept such a plan because it's kind of you know minority given much more land than the majority who owns the land so I was struck by these sort of contradiction as I was also interested in areas where he's talking about I think you talked about point that is not often discussed which is the confederation aspect and you refer to Laila Khalil's work which I haven't looked at it's quite interesting and until today nowadays in Palestine the two existing mainstream sort of discussion about Palestine as to how to solve it it's either a two-state solution according to the resolution 242 or one-state solution which is immediately discussed because the existing more powerful paradigm in terms of the U.S. and other powers that are in the game is the one-state solution that is not as much discussed but it's there but this idea of confederation it's among it has remained among sort of scholarly debate but even widely so and I was interested as why do you think this is it's perhaps a question why this is not not sort of discussed enough and also I was interested in your chapter Muhammad it's really quite interesting because you talk about the Muslim brotherhood and somehow the discourse becoming more religious and Islam being put you know at the forefront of the discussion when it comes to the case of Palestine and as the tone of opposition to the partition becomes more Islamic um and I was what I what I was intrigued by you did for you know Muhammad Misla's work 1982 82 and he talks about Palestinian nationalism it's actually Palestine until that point it's sort of regarded as you know what we call just my Janup Surya you know the south of the south of Syria um and you know it's it's it seems and and there is a Dinal Qasam also which is of course you don't discuss him I was expecting more discussion of that of that of that figure but also it's it's uh because the discourse or much the conflict around that time it's around the Hebrew the Mosque in Hebrew or around Jerusalem so therefore there's quite um by the very nature of it there is Islamic discourse but it doesn't suggest it didn't seem to me from reading other literature that this was the predominant discourse at that time there was also nationalist course in fact it has continued to be the case in Palestine except for the 60s 70s and 80s when you have a more secular discourse being more predominant but from that time you have almost a competition of the Muslim brotherhood discourse which has just came off from Egypt in 1928 as in Lebanon and so on and so forth and and more of the nationalist secular discourse which more which more goes with the spirit of the times as well I'm not sure where I'm rambling with this but yeah you can get that my drift I guess and and really finally I have some questions too which is considering where we are now in Palestine um it looks dismal doesn't it I mean it's really bad and so this is partition what is is is um it first actually I will speak to the point that I mean which is actually quite interesting because the Palestinians are totally divested of of of agency in this case they are nobody from the Palestinians now uh is allowed to say as to what should how the solution how how they should be incorporated into the Israeli saying Binyamin Netanyahu particularly is in his dreams or whatever fantasy land he wants to impose a solution on the Palestinians not a solution it's a destruction of some sort going on the Palestinians without any consideration to the local population he wants some spies some collaborators to work with him towards an aim where they don't have a voice and it's quite interesting that this persistence of denial of a voice to the Palestinians until today which is interesting uh and disturbing uh very very disturbing indeed as if we have not moved from that historical moment performed on that historical time in 1948 and actually long before that when the British middle dimension Palestine um but the question is has partition worked whether in the case of India and this is really the question for the panel has it worked in the case of India could it work in the case in the case of India and Pakistan um maybe this is a rhetorical question because these entities India and Pakistan exist do you have Kashmir in the middle two nuclear states it's quite a situation there and then Palestine can partition work um is it is it still is it still a tool of international order that exists that can can advance the solution there um and that's perhaps is really my my main my main my main question that regarding Palestine and India whether it's it can work or not basically thank you maybe we can respond to Nandini and ask this questions briefly from the panel and then open each other audience um I guess I think primarily in that law maybe if you talk about internationalism and the rule of empire the meaning of partition maybe start with Laura and then everyone can teach you how to be like yeah there's so much to think about thank you both for these really wonderful comments which I think are profoundly generative I have thought so often about this question of why Palestinian agency is stripped away and I actually want to say that I think you know this long predates 1940 right I I think that this is one of the things about Palestinian history in the 20th century is how you can see this process unfolding from the moment of British occupation right and this is a question within the scholarship within the historiography and also within the kind of political conversations surrounding Palestine right about how how this happened could it be reversed what are the mechanisms through which it has been enforced through these different political regimes right that we have seen a variety of political regimes you know from 1917 forward that all have the same outcome essentially right um I don't have an absolute answer but I will kind of throw some of some of the plots that I have had about how this happens and why Palestine becomes a space that is internationalized which I think is a really crucial point right that it becomes you know it becomes a space in which all kinds of other claims are adjudicated without respect to what is the population that is already there on the ground right um so I I think that the answer is different in different moments but that they these answers build on one another in the first instance I think that Jerusalem as a space because of its place in Christianity and particularly in western Protestantism right in the 19th century becomes a space where imperial agencies can imagine a civilization a civilizational claim that translates into a territorial right and that this unlike most other forms of imperial possession this has support in the metropolis at some very basic levels right um and so the use of kind of biblical language surrounding Palestine and especially Jerusalem which is actually not particularly characteristic of Zionism in its early years um it becomes characteristic later but in in its early stages it's not it comes from from Protestantism right it comes from European Protestant traditions and I think that that buttresses the British claim to Palestine and the kind of broader western understanding as Jerusalem of Palestine and Jerusalem as a space that somehow belongs to Christendom right um and that this is it is not the only explanation but it is an element that differentiates Palestine from other spaces like South Asia now the other thing that I think happens that builds on this point is that throughout the first half of the 20th century and then particularly after 1945 Palestine becomes or rather Israel becomes a solution for what has long been regarded as Europe's Jewish problem right and this has a number of manifestations in the interwar period as well right there are people who imagine Zionism you know people in Britain and France and even in in Germany in Russia right who imagine Zionism as a kind of solution to the issue of the Jewish presence in Europe that takes on an entirely new valence after the Second World War right in 1945 when the UN is brand new and it's trying to figure out what to do with the remainder of the quote-unquote displaced persons who are still in camps across Europe right who will be there I think the last some of you can probably correct me I think the last EP camp closes in 1957 is that right something like that so it lasts for ages it just goes on and on and on right why does it last so long because nobody wants to take these survivors in right the Europe doesn't want them the US doesn't want them and so Israel as a state as an established place becomes a solution for Europe's issues right and so I think that is also an element here that partially explains why this becomes an internationalized space and why the agency of the Palestinians which has already been stripped away over a number of decades now you know becomes essentially meaningless in the international sphere um so I think we have a long history of multiple explanations that build on each other but it is truly remarkable I think that we could see Palestine as a space through the 20th century where these questions of global political authority are litigated through a very small space and very small populations right in ways that really do manage to um almost entirely strip local populations of of not just agency but but kind of the acknowledgement of political rights of any kind right um and it is it is a remarkable story that I and clearly we're seeing some of the consequences of that story now you really have fondness for that and I'll jump in thank you and it's um and and of course we all wrote our chapters way before it over seven but we are in a moment in which you know uh for good and for bad we're living in a moment that's only people are interested in bodies and scholars all these topics have to do have to say suddenly people understand the relevance I use it the model for my chapter a quote from Howard Brenton's play uh uh uh growing the line uh exactly about the birth the partition of India that are the lack of logic and there's a sentence that it says uh uh that um scar tissue left by empire dangerous scar tissue in the sun can flare up we're definitely now in a moment of that scar layering up I think that so much of what we see now sadly uh uh strengthens the impression or the argument that many of us had that partition as opposed to the older literature that thought of its event it has a beginning it has an end it may be a painful and traumatic event but it has a clear ending day it's actually not the way to understand it as a political project it's an ongoing you you constantly need to make sure if partition is about engineering space making sure there's a major organization and taking place in order to create this majority it's you need you bring not only the tools of weaponry of military but legal tools and so on so it's an ongoing project and this is why uh these kind of partition spaces are are these scar tissues that tend to flare up um and and I also have very you know half big thought about why kind of the Palestinian voice is so often and muted right and how comparison that seemed to us now after doing this research oh it makes sense are not very prevent yes some activists are making drawing the connection between Kushner and Gaza but it's more of the activists here not very a lot of scholarly work are following this and and and panning it out and and and very good suggestions I mean there are several things that were were I would add to the equation not contradict just to add um that in the interwar period in the 40s uh the way it was still difficult to conceptualize Palestinians as a distinct group in a nation not by the Palestinians themselves but to sell so to speak to to the metro ball um um do you have relatively small numbers of very erudite and and and and usually Cambridge trained or oxford Cambridge trained Palestinians that can speak to power you do have this you have very influential Palestinian intellectual Jordan Tonya in the 1937 you have of course the Iranian and others but but the great masses are not here they're they're um and and and the way in which of course the movie is seen as an enemy not only of designers it's seen as an enemy of the empire it's clear why you prefer to you know in the metro ball would mute that and that kind of ties indirectly your comment and the double sort of boycott when Palestinians boycott these international forums they gain but they also lost they rendered themselves also slightly muted in these things that changed over since is kind of now also something that was backing in in the 2030s and 40s is a Palestinian diaspora nationalist president now you do have Palestinian voices in the diaspora it's not something you can read that but it's very not not you know these are sketchy answers and I think that you answered you asked about confederation and I thank you for putting the finger on it and and yes absolutely I mean I am torn here and it's connected to one of the comments that Laura also made when often we in this kind of research we uh the metaphor you know why I'm often using and sorry for repeating myself as as we're going to the garbage bit of history and we're finding plans that did not pan out right uh so confederation was one of them and I'm torn between two contradictory sentiments so to speak one is a bit of a romantic sentiment that I'm not the only one uh to to be uh to be accused of it of um romanticism abroad no taken oh if they would have chosen that alternative path everything would have been rosy and kumbaya and nothing and and history would take a different path and it is at the at the same time in the other sentiment is that actually when you think about these plans not because that was a premeditated idea often they started preparing the ground to some way of imagining not partition fully but segregation and separation you start marking some territories as majority muslim or majority jewish or majority christian so they are also stepping stones towards the partition so historically they actually play this double world world so um and it's part of the the the equation that is there and I think that nowadays when we're thinking about alternatives so we need to go back to these alternative to the majority reports fields alternative but with a very critical um um come with with a critical mindset not just say oh if that was an alternative plan and it didn't work probably for for sure now we have a different blueprint because then we end up with the same logical top-down engineering that uh that did not benefit the region anybody yeah do you want to come in Mohammed Ali no since you first met um yes I picked up with some of the points that Laura mentioned um and sponsored and Dean's question about why was Palestine internationalized in a way that that Kashmir was not so I think one of them is it's holy places as Laura mentioned and it's quite intriguing to know that and the connection between holy places and great powers so every great power in the west claims russians the french the brits and others claimed an interest italians uh in in the holy places in Palestine actually when they first came up with their first partition plan the famous Sykes-Picot agreement Palestine was given a brown color it was to have an international administration that was the original the original idea it was Jerusalem but also other other holy places and other parts um of the country and then the other reason I think Palestine has been internationalized because because it was after the first world war there's this idea of setting up the mandate leaving nations mandates and Palestine being part of the Ottoman empire was seen as it was a time where of international relations when there was hierarchy and there was difference and some people were considered more civilized than others so but in that pecking order Palestine was what they call a class mandate it was always judged about the civilization in a sense of european civilization raising the standards to to to europe um and because of that that mandate status after after the second world war the establishment of the united nations it maintained that distinction there were two choices independence or UN um UN trusteeship um Palestine went they went for a partition but as a result ever since 1947 it's been on the agenda of the united nations as a problem so it's been you know again the jewish problem in europe then becomes the united nations palestine problem and in between all of this of course is the fact that the mandate itself was a was a project or an experiment that lord balfour used to call it a social what we call social and demographic engineering using modern expression the idea was to encourage jewish migration from europe to palestine so the mandate made it much easier for individuals who were of jewish faith to become citizens of of of palestine in terms of residency residency requirements and they quoted us and they they were they were counting uh and encouraging uh immigration uh and this is up you know as a result of the absurdity of anti-semitism and then over the whole of course all these horrors happening and yet yet they are still even after the second world war there's still this this encouragement to to to to favor immigration uh to palestine and the united states from australia and canada are maintaining the vk as well uh restrictions so for all these reasons the united states as what was happening in europe at the time holy places and the fact that kashmir was a princely state and there was this big dispute over you know whether they were over the session to to india um that is kind of it was framed or as a domestic problem although i know kashmir was on the un security council uh in the late 1940s and it's not clear to me why it's still not it's not widely discussed maybe others who are more knowledgeable that this can can explain but that's one reason why palestine i think are holy places and its international status and the links to europe and the west in terms of the culture and the population of the people and then activism and everything else uh if one reason why i think i think that palestine issue gets more more attention i think demig can i just because it's quite interesting this point just a little point but mahmoud darwish the famous palestinian government really makes this very apt point to what you was just saying which is that there's a lot of interest in palestine and he said it very clearly because there's interest in what was described in europe as the jewish question so the interest is not exactly really in the palestinians but actually on the other side although the receiving end of suffering are palestinian and you see that an appeal partition plan this is a crazy quote where they're talking about the europeans as a culture of europe they go they go to opera italian opera they're like us and then the then the arabs they're asian they have asian civilization they listen to asiatic literature and culture which we don't really understand so that that kind of cultural discourse is now the israeli ministers you know when they're talking about the palestinian this barbarism human animals language the total dehumanization of the palestinians is very very i just to jump in as i was like it's it as you said it is post ottoman conquest so really the league of nations is supposedly to end all conquests but it does now as laura has argued that it is an imperial project in despite it being considered an internationalist cooperative and to recognize it is what i'm about to say i mean i'm trying to articulate a few ideas but don't take it for a super well-designed dreamer i want a super interested actually in my colleagues actually because for example i was of course i'm more interested first and foremost your political islam but i was trying to articulate this with your presentation all of your year and actually i was wondering for example about i was um questioning myself about the possible specificity of what we call islamism or political islam for example using these categories of nationalism internationalism uh imperialism actually islamism does fit with all this it is a kind of very nationalist mobilization in the sense that we need to define so that's why by the way i'm going to answer a bit of your question picturing and not because there is immaculate least we are wrong in we're doing wrong actually we are mistaken in confusing or in let's say that's in uh separating by definition islamism and arabism because actually in terms both of sociological careers and as well as in terms of ideology you have a lot of similarities i mean for example we were before the country before the other start we were mentioning the case of nasa who used to be a mason brother yasser al-fatt was a mason brother um the leader of the mason brother within Egypt used to be a communist for example i mean the one one of the one who is now surviving i mean that in the prisons so all these ideas of having clear perfectly well designed well defined i mean categories we should give up on this and i think in my view at least we should then say try to find boundaries in terms of sorry bridges in terms of of comparisons but also in terms of internationalism because islamic thinkers and and and sympathizers they have been calling for a sort of trans-arab or inter-arab let's say type of mobilization that today is missing at least at the state level but not at the people's level we all have seen the workup for example of course it's just an event but the workup has been extremely interesting in terms of understanding let's say the how should i call it the survival uh the ongoing let's say a palestinian throw palestine feelings in the Arab countries as well as imperialism to let's forget that islamism is also built on a desire to restore something called the caliphate so is it this kind of imperialistic dream or not but it may have some let's say the eco i think to this um uh palislamic dream designed by hasn't been that i was referring to in the beginning and also it's also islamism has to be seen or maybe seen as an anti-imperialist mobilization because do not forget that all these people were also anti-gress anti-french now anti-us so i mean look at how i mean this diversity of scopes or diversity of categories through which to which we can put with islamism so if you consider islamism as a third word third word is sorry type of mobilization it also fit with this anti-western in so called imperial power or imperialist powers i mean mobilizations now let me go back to this issue of partition which is one of the key key issue addressed in the book and i was completely i mean i was fascinating when you were when you were saying that it's an ongoing process ongoing project but look for example at the comparison we can make between for example now the ongoing split or rising split between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank some people actually went Hamas to power less than nearly 20 years ago and when we started seeing and observing this discrepancy uh some people actually i remember reading things on the possible comparison between Pakistan on the one hand and Bangladesh on the other hand so partition is not let's say a one two three six month affair of issue it's something which is designed something it is uh something which is intentional if you look for example at the the famous official speech speeches made by Netanyahu saying that i need Hamas i need Hamas to enforce my policy uh my divided imperium i mean policy in terms of because we can't forget sorry divided rule divided rule policy so which means basically that the main enemy of Netanyahu is not Hamas it's the two state solution that's what it means basically um so this always ongoing the rendering processes in terms of territories rearranging the territories the populations and so on and so forth we are still in 2024 living under a partition plan paradigm i mean at least in this regard as well as you were you were saying this um and i'm going to end about what to be too long but about this possible specificity of Palestine which if i look at this through this political Islam lens which is completely acting something that i would um that i would um uh support because for example um if i have written on these issues i mean why in Palestine is so important for Islamists so i think that at least to be clear on this we need to focus on who is saying what and have different groups of Zionists the Christian Zionists for example the the Jewish Zionists the the western democracies the Arab states the third world kettwin we should that we should look at having every specificity on each side but on the Islamic side clearly i mean because of what Victor has just said in terms of the the centrality of some holy sites uh you were mentioning for example i mean azab azam is a palestinian for those who do who he's a palestinian the palestinian founder of al-qaida basically and do not forget that jihadism has been at a large degree in the last 30 40 50 years has been probably know of some very jihadi famous jihadi thinkers like abu qatada al-palestini abu qatada the palestinians abu maqdisi abu muhammad al-maqdisi you know zarkawi for example zarkawi was raised educated in the in a very sorry i know he's from zarkawi in georgia in georgia he was raised with palestinians so it's not only about ideology also in terms of sociology i mean qotbsi qotb has written a famous book in 1950 maqdisi abu qatada al-maqdisi abu muhammad al-maqdisi so our struggled with the jews so in in which he's one of the very first maybe the first very important islamic thinker to adopt this anti-jewish narrative so it's is it because of the holy sites i think it plays a role but also it's also a nationalist i mean agenda because palestinian it's an arab country an arab population and to not forget that in the 40s and the 50s al-jurya egypt starts to be uh sorry seems to be um monarchy and starts to become a republic al-jurya morocco tunisia all these countries are doing in 46 Syria becomes independent so on and so forth so i don't want to be too long but i mean all these ideas needs to be need to be articulated i think in order to progress in terms of understanding thank you very much that was excellent and i think because we have only about 15 minutes left we take quite a few like three or four questions before we get responses from the kind of um yeah there's one in the back and then you oh the genuinely so first yeah yeah okay i i i'm just just to comment on jewsland i i think i don't don't just think it's uh important so it's hilarious it's it's very important for muslim generally i didn't realize the significance of jewsland until i went there religiously and kashmir doesn't have anything in comparison that's that's the truth of the matter that's why um then you know people will fight over that come on you like a lot i just want to start before i make my contribution a quick answer to our Palestinian colleague um that would i mean if you talked to my grandfather's generation who were in east bengal immediately after partition they knew what a bloody mistake it was within a year within a year and they actually chose to go into pakistan because there was and one of the things that was mechanisms that you had in the indian partition bill was plebistines in localized areas they actually chose an area and that was all to do with jinn that come into daka and uh announcing that the state language would be undone um so there were issues of language as well there's there's another basis of nationhood it's not just religion which was important and the irony was ne'er didn't actually speak much would do himself and did set it in english and yet the majority at the time in pakistan at that point were bengalese so there was and and soon as i mean one of the legacies i think of partition was young was the unfinished business of liberation of Bangladesh the land of bengalese that was never really dealt with so one one question i would like to ask is to what extent when they talked about partition uh generally what once the british bureaucrats uh well in pakistan did they even consider another basis because it's quite clear to me one of the things i've learned today was that both the indian and pakistani representatives in the league of nations were saying no to the partition and they they they were obviously joined from the experience here's an example that the you know decoration of the boundaries was given two days after two days after independence was declared on 1415 if there's anything that would cause chaos more chaos i can't think of anything more because a lot of people didn't know which side of the border they were and where they were that that has never been taken aboard i just yeah just on that basis i would like to know what i mean one of the problems we had was that ran clear through those boundaries and he walks away from it was a similar person who did the same in in pakistan i i don't know and two i mean let's remember man batson pushed us all very for her partition of india uh forward much more quickly than was necessary um thank you did that mean did that mean the bridge from there went over course uh havoc in palestine as well was there a transfer of british bureaucrats on one place to the other and if so did they not learn some lessons at least one partition and ending sub-concern as well thanks very much um thank you so much for all the nights today i i've lived in six commonwealth countries to date i don't know what it's born in east africa and i've lived in singapore for a long time and from my personal experience i'm not a historian i see um i see connections between internationalism as you said laura and the agenda for perpetual war and um the weaponization of social engineering that comes through tools of division which uh play a divide and roll um mechanism and this is how imperialism has been working for more than a hundred years you know you can go back to the french revolution the bolton week revolution um i've witnessed uh coups first planned in places like kenya corruption which enables color revolutions uprising's funding of rebels the the common underlying um uh energy needed for all these things is is money and and we we have to instead of looking at um separate things like pakistan kishmir and india and palestine this is going to all these all these uh whether it's ukraine or you look at any conflict in the world today who is providing the money where is money coming from is the nature and definition of money changing today uh because the petro dollar is perhaps weakening maybe the the brits will come up with another alternative monetary system so it has the monopoly weighing is it is it having stage four cancer the the uh the economic and political monopoly that has waged so much destruction in the whole planet because it was funded by the petro dollar or before the petro dollar you can call it you know so that's a question yeah so look i'm just i'm just wondering if anybody can comment on on the money aspect because if we don't look at that then we don't understand how international agencies work can we take one more um thank you i'm sorry online and thanks it's been asking me fascinating to listen to all the contributions um a couple of points i just wanted to ask number one um especially uh regarding none of these questions to yourself um the link between palestine and the interest in palestine versus capture and the interest amongst the entire international community um because i came a little bit later on to the intercession has anybody in the book mentioned iqbal Ahmed um who's a very good friend of edwin's site i think he may be the intellectual bridge which might give you a bit of insight into why in the third world palestine is such a large issue beyond obviously all the excellent contributions that have been made in terms of explaining that that's number one the interest of palestine have are you aware of edwin's site iqbal Ahmed's conversations and contribution um number two i wanted to ask a very personal question to all of you how free do you feel doing this research i love the fact that it's been done the link was sent to me by my sister i'm not an academic or anything i drive trains um but what's fascinating is the link is being made i was so um pleased to see so many different connections being made which my friends and family have seen between the different issues the issue of partition since a very young age we were told oh the partition was made for x y z reasons so i wanted to ask what difficulties did you face in collecting the research and how free do you feel being able to speak here today and what challenges do you see with regards to your research given the scrutiny now on these particular subject areas so um yes thanks very much and you take that yes so the question for online is probably an extension of your and it says cashmere can be seen as nationalised because india is seen as a major operative and palestine is seen as internationalised within that concept israel is seen as a major operative is really nationalism in the area and well our support for funding israel seems to be seems complete seems to completely undermine the internationalised concept where does the panel not connect positioning and funding of nuclear bases across the world with current situation so we have i think only these questions and some of them are more common than question but if anybody wants to jump in on the panel briefly on the language yeah we actually have a chapter um by iqbal Singh Sevilla on on partitioned identities regional past and national identity in pakistan so let's say the imposition of urdu in vengal after 1948 in in quite a bit of detail so i might that might interest you um right he also asked about the whether they were something similar to the ragged cliff line uh in palestine if you're a minor i think it was united nations unstopped came up with the with the line um anybody which was their proposal and it was put in the revolution when it was voting through but but it'll never enforced the idea was to it had an enforcement mechanism that was to go to the u.n security council but as we know they were they were divided and so so the plan was never enforced in the the united states and the uk got cold feet when they realised that the soviets could have a role in in that kind of process and they didn't want to uh want them to have to have that role another question about challenges to research so this book was a project that dates in singapore which has a you know it's it's got freedom of expression issues um uh it's pretty mildly but we didn't have any problems doing this kind of research the problems i find is when you want you want to discuss more contemporary issues particularly but although i might say paradoxically since october uh since the events in garza it it feels like one can be a bit more critical than before um but definitely the organising events um definitions of anti-semitism or whatever it is has caused huge problems is organising events on campus and and there's a problem of self-censorship uh with the big issue um but doing historical i haven't personally had any problems with historical work like this it's more it's about what kind of events or or other issues um anyone want to respond to the financial and kind of money angle to international interests i think i can speak a little bit yeah and i want to connect it to something that r.a said as well money is obviously crucial to this entire story right and i i was struck by your comment about how this is an agenda for for perpetual war and i think that one of the things that happens from the league of nations onward which you know the league as an international institution what it was doing was ensuring that the channeling of resources to imperial states could continue irrespective of the political arrangements that might eventually transfer right so it was imagining a system of economic empire that could survive national independence right and the mandates i would argue are indeed an experiment right and they are an experiment in giving those empires time to figure out how this would work to accumulate resources in such a way that political transitions could not interrupt the flow of capital of goods of that of captive the kind of you know continuation of captive markets in the middle east that's particularly true for oil but there are other iterations and other places that have you know their mandates in africa for instance where mineral rights are consistent issue in mandatory documents there right and so one of the things that the mandate system does and this perhaps relates to some of the other questions about the specificity of Palestine one of the things that the mandate system does is that it puts into place procedural methods for the registration of objections by the people that the subject population that will that will by design have no outcome right so it has a petitioning system where people can put in complaints about how the mandates are not living up to their sacred trust of civilization in quotes um about how you know objections to the nature of what are after all long-term military occupations of all of these places about objection you know objections to the kind of political representation the petition the petition system at the league is a place where complaints go to die right and and it is it is designed for that and the reason it's designed for that is not just because people don't want to respond to complaints but because when you make it clear over a period of decades that there is no channel for peaceful negotiation for protest for demonstration you force violence and forcing violence on the ground is the point of this operation because then the state the empires can turn back to Geneva and to their metropolitan audiences and they can say see they need us they need us there right so violence is crucial so violence and money are the two things that the system is running on right and the violence is not accidental the violence is provoked deliberately to make sure that this process can go on and on and on to legitimize a consistent occupation over a period of decades and to give people time to figure out how to channel those resources towards the empires in ways that you know they know some form of sovereignty some form of independence is coming so what the mandates are doing is setting up systems so that when that moment comes economic empire will continue you know as normal so I think that I think that's also an important kind of point here that you know that the end Palestine is not the only mandatory state and I actually think that the non-middle eastern mandates have been sort of under represented in the literature about the league and in our conversations about internationalism but there's certainly you know not least because of the presence of oil in the region you know they are they're an operational space for these principles are being worked out. Thanks very much I know we are out of time but we can stay here in the room for a while and you can ask questions personally sorry no I said that's nice you're creating a partition