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The following is a debate on the topic of Israel and Palestine with Norman Finkelstein, Benny Morris, Muin Rabbani, and Stephen Bunnell, also known online as Destiny.
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Norm and Benny are historians, Wayne is a Middle East analyst, and Steven is a political commentator and streamer.
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All four have spoken and debated extensively on this topic.
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The goal for this debate was not for anyone to win or to score points.
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It wasn t to get views or likes.
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I never care about those.
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And I think there are probably much easier ways to get those things if I did care.
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The goal was to explore, together, the history, present, and future of Israel and Palestine in a free-flowing conversation, no time limits, no rules.
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There was a lot of tension in the room from the very beginning, and it only got more intense as we went along.
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And I quickly realized that this very conversation in a very real human way was a microcosm of the tensions and distance and perspectives on the topic of Israel and Palestine.
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For some debates, I will step in and moderate strictly to prevent emotion from boiling.
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For this, I saw the value in not interfering with the passion of the exchanges, because that emotion in itself spoke volumes.
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We did talk about the history and the future, but the anger, the frustration, the biting wit, and at times respect and camaraderie were all there.
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Like I said, we did it in an perhaps all too human way.
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I will do more debates and conversations on these difficult topics and I will continue to search for hope in the midst of death and destruction, to search for our common humanity in the midst of division and hate.
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This thing we have going on, human civilization, the whole of it, is beautiful.
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and it s worth figuring out how we can help it flourish together.
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I love you all.
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And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
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It s the best way to support this podcast.
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Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact.
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And now onto the full ad reads.
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As always, no ads in the middle.
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I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors.
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I enjoy their stuff.
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Maybe you will too.
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This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN.
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I use them to protect my privacy on the internet.
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I ve used them for many years.
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I ve had great conversations with several people on the podcast about the NSA and the overreach and power that s there.
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And it s really interesting to think about the value of privacy, the value of digital privacy in our lives, how much we take for granted, how much we look the other way when the product or whatever we re using is good enough and we become the product, our data becomes the product.
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It s really interesting.
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I think transparency there is required because
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While it is true all of us value privacy, we re very hypocritical on that point in many cases.
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We distrust certain things that don t violate privacy that much and we trust blindly other things that violate a huge number of privacy or at least have the capacity to.
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A lot of us use a smartphone with a camera looking at us.
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Always.
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We trust that device.
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Human psychology is fascinating.
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It worries me how easily we could be convinced at a mass scale by narratives.
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Distributed propaganda or centralized propaganda, it all works.
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and it all is terrifyingly effective.
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Something to think about.
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And you should have several layers of protection in your digital and your physical space.
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ExpressVPN, a good VPN, and that s the one I use, is something you should definitely be using.
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Go to expressvpn.com slash lexpod for an extra three months free.
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This episode is also brought to you by Babbel, an app and website that gets you speaking in a new language within weeks.
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They got Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, and more.
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I m doing more and more translation.
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In fact, if you are somebody that speaks fluently in Russian and professionally does translation,
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I just did a very lengthy podcast where both me and the guest speak russian and i m looking for translation from russian to english.
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professionally done, like really, really well done.
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This is actually a very difficult task.
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And then also for hopefully the same person, but not necessarily to do the voiceovers in English.
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Given how fast the other person speaks that I interviewed, it s actually a pretty tricky thing.
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But all that is to say that I deeply care about breaking down the barriers that language creates.
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I think a lot of those barriers are artificial.
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They hide from ourselves the common humanity that s obviously there.
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There s differences, of course, in culture, in the music of a people, in the music of a language, but underneath it all, it s all the same fears, the same hopes, the same excitements, the same dynamics, the same things we care about, family and food and simple joy, big joy, chasing dreams, all that kind of stuff.
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Anyway, I use Babbel more to learn languages I don t know that well.
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Sometimes I ll use it for Russian just for fun practice, getting the rust off, but I m learning Spanish now.
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Also, I took French in high school and I m very rusty, so I m using Babbel to, again, get some of the rust off.
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And one day I hope to get better at German and Italian.
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I ve traveled to Italy a couple of times.
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It would be very helpful to be able to speak the language so that I could, you know, navigate the streets with grace and skill.
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Anyway, for a limited time, you can get 50% off a one-time payment for a lifetime Babbel subscription at babbel.com slash lexpod.
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That s 50% off at babbel.com slash lexpod, spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash lexpod.
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Rules and restrictions apply.
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This episode is also brought to you by Policy Genius, a marketplace for insurance, all kinds, life insurance, auto, home, disability.
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And I apologize for the heaviness of my tone in this few minutes that we get to spend together here.
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This episode was a difficult one.
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And perhaps this is a good moment to mention why.
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Because it s human beings talking about other human beings who are suffering.
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Human beings sitting in the comfort of a room that s not getting bombed, that s not getting shot at.
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A room that s surrounded by other rooms and other buildings that are safe in the way that
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Most places in America are safe, meaning even when there s a crime, the rule of law applies.
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But the raw aspects of human nature, of the destruction and death involved in wars, seems out of this world.
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It is difficult to really hold inside your mind.
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the things I ve seen in Ukraine, the hate I ve seen in people s eyes when I traveled to the West Bank.
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There was a lot of love there, but there was also a lot of hate.
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And there s a heaviness that comes with conversations like this.
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Of course, I really, really tried to bring out the humanity.
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Even moments of joy, the camaraderie, I tried.
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I ll continue to try.
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Anyway, this is about Policy Genius.
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That s policygenius.com slash lex.
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This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep and Spot Three Cover.
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Another thing that I get to enjoy in life
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and others don t.
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I ve always been able to find joy in the simplest of things.
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In the absence of material possessions, I always saw beauty.
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Every moment has the capacity to create contentment, to create real happiness.
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Just this feeling of gratitude to be alive.
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It s a real feeling.
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Again, when I was in Ukraine, people that lost their home, they lost their family, there was still a kind of joy there, humor there.
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Again, a camaraderie there.
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That s hard to explain.
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I think because when everything is stripped away,
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you re still grateful to be alive and the people that you love that are still there, you re grateful for them and for those moments that you share.
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That s the foundation of all of it, that s the only thing that matters.
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All this bullshit that we buy and own, all that is just a beautiful icing on the cake.
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Where the cake is just the very essence of existence, the very fact that we re alive.
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alive and are able to love each other and hold on to each other.
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And to experience moments together, which is when we just look and see, you know, see each other.
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Like we re on this earth for a short time and we re in this together.
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And we ll lose each other one day, but today we re together.
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It s, I don t know, that s the most important thing.
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Everything else is just icing.
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But, you know, it s nice to have things.
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It s nice to have things you can enjoy together.
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I do want to... It definitely is nice to have a bed to sleep on.
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And to have modern technology.
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And to have a bed that cools itself is like ridiculous.
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I love it.
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It s like, it doesn t... It doesn t make any sense.
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But it s one of the things that just brings me happiness.
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You can check it out and get special savings when you go to asleep.com slash flex.
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here s Norman Finkelstein, Benny Morris, Muiyan Rabbani, and Stephen Bunnell.
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First question is about 1948.
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For Israelis, 1948 is the establishment of the State of Israel and the War of Independence.
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For Palestinians, 1948 is the Nakba, which means catastrophe, or the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes as a consequence of the war.
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What to you is important to understand about the events of 1948 and the period around there, 47, 49,
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that helps us understand what s going on today, and maybe helps us understand the roots of all of this that started even before 1948.
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I was hoping that Norm could speak first, and Benny, and Wayne, and then Steve.
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Norm?
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After World War II, the British decided that they didn t want to deal with the Palestine question anymore, and the ball was thrown into the court of the United Nations.
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Now, as I read the record, the UN was not attempting to arbitrate or adjudicate rights and wrongs.
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It was confronting a very practical problem.
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There were two national communities in Palestine.
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and there were irreconcilable differences on fundamental questions, most importantly looking at the historic record on the question of immigration and associated with the question of immigration, the question of land.
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The UN Special Committee on Palestine, which came into being before the UN 181 partition resolution,
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The UN Special Committee recommended two states in Palestine.
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There was a minority position represented by Iran, India, Yugoslavia.
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They supported one state, but they believed
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that if forced to, the two communities would figure out some sort of modus vivendi and live together.
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The United Nations General Assembly supported partition between what it called a Jewish state and an Arab state.
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Now,
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In my reading of the record, and I understand there s new scholarship on the subject, which I ve not read, but so far as I ve read the record, there s no clarity on what the United Nations General Assembly meant by a Jewish state and an Arab state, except for the fact that the Jewish state would be demographically, the majority would be Jewish,
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and the Arab state demographically would be Arab.
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The UNSCOP, the UN Special Committee on Palestine, it was very clear, and it was reiterated many times, that in recommending two states, each state, the Arab state and the Jewish state,
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would have to guarantee full equality of all citizens with regard to political, civil, and religious matters.
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Now that does raise the question, if there is absolute, full equality of all citizens, both in the Jewish state and the Arab state, with regard to political rights, civil rights, and religious rights, apart from the demographic majority, it s very unclear what it meant to call a state Jewish or call a state Arab.
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In my view, the partition resolution was the correct decision.
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I do not believe that the Arab and Jewish communities could, at that point, be made to live together.
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I disagree with the minority position of India, Iran, and Yugoslavia.
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and that not being a practical option, two states was the only other option.
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In this regard, I would want to pay tribute to what was probably the most moving speech at the UN General Assembly proceedings by the Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko.
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I was very tempted to quote it at length,
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but I recognized that would be taking too much time.
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So I asked a young friend, Jamie Stern Weiner, to edit
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it and just get the essence of what Foreign Minister Gromyko had to say.
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During the last war, Gromyko said, the Jewish people underwent exceptional sorrow and suffering.
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Without any exaggeration, this sorrow and suffering are indescribable.
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Hundreds of thousands of Jews are wandering about in various countries of Europe in search of means of existence and in search of shelter.
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The United Nations cannot and must not regard this situation with indifference.
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Past experience, particularly during the Second World War, shows that no Western European state was able to provide adequate assistance for the Jewish people in defending its rights and its very existence from the violence of the Hitlerites and their allies.
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This is an unpleasant fact.
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But unfortunately, like all other facts, it must be admitted.
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Gromyko went on to say,
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In principle, he supports one state, or the Soviet Union supports one state, but he said if relations between the Jewish and Arab populations of Palestine proved to be so bad that it would be impossible to reconcile them and to ensure the peaceful coexistence of the Arabs and the Jews, the Soviet Union would support
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two states.
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I personally am not convinced that the two states would have been unsustainable in the long term if, and this is a big if, the Zionist movement had been faithful to the position it proclaimed during the UNSCOP public hearings.
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At the time, Ben-Gurion testified
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Quote, I want to express what we mean by a Jewish state.
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We mean by a Jewish state, simply a state where the majority of the people are Jews, not a state where a Jew has in any way, any privilege more than anyone else.
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A Jewish state means a state based on absolute equality of all her citizens and on democracy.
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Alas, this was not to be.
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As Professor Morris has written, quote, Zionist ideology and practice were necessarily and elementally expansionist.
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And then he wrote in another book, transfer, the euphemism for expulsion, transfer was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism because it sought to transform a land which was Arab into a Jewish state.
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and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab population.
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And because this aim automatically produced resistance among the Arabs,
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which in turn persuaded the Yishuv s leaders, the Yishuv being the Jewish community, the Yishuv s leaders that a hostile Arab majority or a large minority could not remain in place if a Jewish state was to arise or safely endure.
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Or, as Professor Morris retrospectively put it, quote,
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a removing of a population was needed.
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Without a population expulsion, a Jewish state would not have been established. 
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Unquote.
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The Arab side rejected outright the partition resolution.
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I won t play games with that.
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I know a lot of people tried to prove it s not true.
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It clearly, in my view, is true.
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The Arab side rejected outright the partition resolution.
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While Israeli leaders, acting under compulsions, inevitable and inbuilt
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into Zionism found the pretext in the course of the first Arab-Israeli war to expel the indigenous population and expand its borders.
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I therefore conclude that neither side was committed to the letter of the partition resolution and both sides aborted it.
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Thank you, Norm.
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Norm asked that you make a lengthy statement in the beginning.
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Benny, I hope it s okay to call everybody by their first name in the name of camaraderie.
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Norm has quoted several things you said.
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Perhaps you can comment broadly on the question of 1948 and maybe respond to the things that Norm said.
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Yeah.
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UNSCOP, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, recommended
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partition, the majority of UNESCO recommended partition, which was accepted by the UN General Assembly in November 1947.
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Essentially, looking back to the Peel Commission in 1937, 10 years earlier, a British commission had looked at the problem of Palestine, the two warring national groups who refused to live together, if you like, or
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consolidate a unitary state between them.
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And Peel said there should be two states.
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That s the principle.
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The country must be partitioned into two states.
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This would give a modicum of justice to both sides, if not all their demands, of course.
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and the United Nations followed suit.
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The United Nations, UNESCO, and then the UN General Assembly, representing the will of the international community, said two states is the just solution in this complex situation.
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The problem was that immediately with the passage of the resolution, the Arab states and the Arabs of Palestine said no, as Norman Finkelstein said,
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They said no, they rejected the partition idea, the principle of partition, not just the idea of what percentage which side should get, but the principle of partition they said no to, the Jews should not have any part of Palestine for their sovereign territory.
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Maybe Jews could live as a minority in Palestine, that also was problematic in the eyes of the Palestinian Arab leadership.
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Husseini had said only Jews who were there before 1917 could actually get citizenship and continue to live there.
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But the Arabs rejected partition and the Arabs of Palestine launched, in a very disorganized fashion, war against the resolution, against the implementation of the resolution, against the Jewish community in Palestine.
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and this was their defeat in that civil war between the two communities while the British were withdrawing from Palestine, led to the Arab invasion, the invasion by the Arab states in May 1948 of the country.
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Again, basically with the idea of eradicating or preventing the emergence of a Jewish state in line with the United Nations decision and the will of the international community.
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Norman said that the Zionist enterprise, and he quoted me, meant from the beginning to transfer or expel the Arabs of Palestine or some of the Arabs of Palestine.
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And I think he s sort of quoting out of context.
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The context in which the statements were made that the Jewish state could only emerge if there was a transfer of Arab population was
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preceded in the way I wrote it and the way it actually happened by Arab resistance and hostilities towards the Jewish community.
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Had the Arabs accepted partition, there would have been a large Arab minority in the Jewish state, which emerged in 48, 47.
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And in fact, Jewish economists and state builders took into account that there would be a large Arab minority and its needs would be cared for, etc.
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But this was not to be because the Arabs
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attacked.
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And had they not attacked, perhaps a Jewish state of the large Arab minority could have emerged, but this didn t happen.
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They went to war, the Jews resisted, and in the course of that war, Arab populations were
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driven out, some were expelled, some left because Arab leaders advised them to leave or ordered them to leave.
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And at the end of the war, Israel said they can t return because they just tried to destroy the Jewish state.
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And that s the basic reality of what happened in 1948.
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The Jews created a state.
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The Palestinian Arabs never bothered to even try to create a state before 48 and in the course of the 1948 war.
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And for that reason, they have no state to this day.
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The Jews do have a state because they prepared to establish a state, fought for it, and established it hopefully lastingly.
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when you say hostility, in case people are not familiar, there was a full-on war where Arab states invaded and Israel won that war.
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Let me just add, to clarify, the war had two parts to it.
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The first part was the Arab community in Palestine, its militiamen, attacked the Jews from November 1947.
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In other words, from the day after the UN partition resolution,
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It was passed, Arab gunmen were busy shooting up Jews, and that snowballed into a full-scale civil war between the two communities in Palestine.
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In May 1948, a second stage began in the war in which the Arab states invaded the new state, attacked the new state, and they too were defeated, and thus a state of Israel emerged.
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In the course of this two-stage war, a vast Palestinian refugee problem
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occurred.
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And so after that, the transfer, the expulsion, the thing that people call the Nakba happened.
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Muin, could you speak to 1948 and the historical significance of it?
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Sure.
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There s a lot to unpack here.
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I ll try to limit myself to just a few points regarding Zionism and transfer.
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I think Haim Weizmann, the head of the World Zionist Organization, had it exactly right when he said that the objective of Zionism is to make Palestine as Jewish as England is English or France is French.
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In other words, as Norman explained, a Jewish state requires Jewish
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political, demographic, and territorial supremacy.
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Without those three elements, the state would be Jewish in name only.
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And I think what distinguishes Zionism is its insistence, supremacy, and exclusivity.
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That would be my first point.
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The second point is I think what the Soviet foreign minister at the time, Andrei Gromyko, said is exactly right with one reservation.
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Gromyko was describing a European savagery unleashed against Europe s Jews.
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At the time, it wasn t Palestinians or Arabs.
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The savages and the barbarians were European to the core.
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had nothing to do with developments in Palestine or the Middle East.
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Secondly, at the time that Gromyko was speaking, those Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and others who were in need of safe haven were still overwhelmingly on the European continent and not on Palestine, not in Palestine.
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And I think given the scale of the savagery, I don t think that any one state or country should have borne the responsibility for addressing this crisis.
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I think it should have been an international responsibility.
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The Soviet Union could have contributed.
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Germany certainly could and should have contributed.
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the United Kingdom and the United States, which slammed their doors shut to the persecuted Jews of Europe as the Nazis were rising to power.
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They certainly should have played a role.
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But instead, what passed for the international community at the time, decided to partition Palestine.
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And here I think we need to judge the partition resolution against the realities that obtained at the time.
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Two-thirds of the population of Palestine was Arab.
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the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, constituted about one third of the total population and controlled even less of the land within Palestine.
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As a preeminent Palestinian historian, Walid al-Khalidi has pointed out, the partition resolution in giving roughly 55% of Palestine to the Jewish community
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and I think 41, 42% to the Arab community, to the Palestinians, did not preserve the position of each community or even favor one community at the expense of the others.
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Rather, it thoroughly inverted and revolutionized the relationship between the two communities.
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And
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As many have written, the Nakba was the inevitable consequence of partition, given the nature of Zionism.
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given the territorial disposition, given the weakness of the Palestinian community whose leadership had been largely decimated during a major revolt at the end of the 1930s, given that the Arab states were still very much under French and British influence.
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The Nakba was inevitable, the inevitable product
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of the partition resolution.
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And one last point also about the UN s partition resolution is, yes, formally that is what the international community decided on the 29th of November 1947.
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It s not a resolution that could ever have gotten through the UN General Assembly today for a very simple reason.
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It was a very different General Assembly.
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Most African, most Asian states were not yet independent.
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Were the resolution to be placed before the international community today, and I find it telling that the minority opinion was led by India, Iran, and Yugoslavia, I think they would have represented
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the clear majority.
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So partition, given what we know about Zionism, given that it was entirely predictable, what would happen, given the realities on the ground in Palestine, was deeply unjust.
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And the idea that either the Palestinians or the Arab states could have accepted
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such a resolution is, I think, an illusion.
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That was in 1947.
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We saw what happened in 48 and 49.
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Palestinian society was essentially destroyed.
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Over 80%, I believe, of Palestinians resident in the territory that became the state of Israel.
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were either expelled or fled and ultimately were ethnically cleansed because ethnic cleansing consists of two components.
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It s not just forcing people into refuge or expelling them, it s just as importantly preventing their return.
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And here, and Benny Morris has written, I think, an article about Josef Weiz and the transfer committees.
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There was a very detailed initiative to prevent their return and it consisted of
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raising hundreds of Palestinian villages to the ground, which was systematically implemented and so on.
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And so Palestinians became a stateless people.
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Now, what is the most important reason that no Arab state was established in Palestine?
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Well, since the 1930s, the Zionist leadership and
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The Hashemite leadership of Jordan, as has been thoroughly researched and written about by the Israeli-British historian Avi Shleim, essentially colluded to prevent the establishment of an independent Arab state in Palestine in the late 1940s.
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There s much more here, but I think those are the key points I would make about 1948.
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We may talk about Zionism, Britain, UN assemblies, and all the things you mentioned, there s a lot to dig into.
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SPEAKER_03
So, again, if we can keep it to just one statement moving forward after, Steven, if you want to go a little longer.
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Also, we should acknowledge the fact that the speaking speeds of people here are different.
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Stephen speaks about 10 times faster than me.
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Stephen, do you want to comment on 1948?
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Yeah, I think it s interesting where people choose to start the history.
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I noticed a lot of people like to start at either 47 or 48 because it s the first time where they can clearly point to a catastrophe that occurs on the Arab side that they want to ascribe 100% of the blame to the
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newly emergent Israeli state to.
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But I feel like when you have this type of reading of history, it feels like the goal is to moralize everything first and then to pick and choose facts that kind of support the statements of your initial moral statement afterwards.
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Whenever people are talking about 48 or the establishment of the Arab state, I never hear about the fact that a civil war started in 47.
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It was largely instigated because of the Arab rejectionism of the 47 partition plan.
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I never hear about the fact that the majority of the land that was acquired happened by purchases from Jewish organizations of Palestinian Arabs of the Ottoman Empire before the mandatory period in 1920 even started.
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Funnily enough, King Abdullah of Jordan was quoted as saying, the Arabs are as prodigal in selling their land as they are in weeping about it.
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I never hear about the multiple times that Arabs rejected partition, rejected living with Jews, rejected any sort of state that would have even had any sort of Jewish exclusivity.
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SPEAKER_00
It s funny because it was brought up before that the partition plan was unfair and that s why the Arabs rejected it as though they rejected it because it was unfair because of the amount of land that Jews were given and not just due to the fact that Jews were given land at all as though a 30% partition or a 25% partition would have been accepted.
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I don t think that was the reality of the circumstances.
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I feel like most of the other stuff has been said but I noticed that whenever people talk about 48 or the years preceding 48, I think the worst thing that happens is there s a cherry picking of the facts where basically all of the blame is ascribed to this
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this built-in idea of Zionism that because of a handful of quotes or because of an ideology, we can say that transfer or population expulsion or basically the mandate of all of these Arabs being kicked off the land was always going to happen when I think there s a refusal sometimes as well to acknowledge that regardless of the ideas of some of the Zionist leaders, there is a political, social, and military reality on the ground that they re forced to contend with.
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And, unfortunately, the Arabs, because of their inability to engage in diplomacy and only to use tools of war to try to negotiate everything going on in mandatory Palestine, basically always gave the Jews a reason or an excuse to fight and acquire land through that way because of their refusal to negotiate on anything else, whether it was the partition plan in 47, whether it was the Lusanne Peace Conference afterwards, where Israel even offered to annex Gaza in 51, where they offered to take in 100,000 refugees.
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SPEAKER_00
Every single deal is just rejected out of hand.
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because the Arabs don t want a Jewish state anywhere in this region of the world.
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I would like to engage Professor Morris.
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If you don t mind, I m not with the first name.
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It s just not my way of relating.
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You can just call me Morris.
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You don t need the professor.
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Okay.
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There s a real problem here.
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And it s been a problem I ve had over many years of reading your work.
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Apart perhaps from as grandchild, I suspect nobody knows your work better than I do.
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I ve read it many times, not once, not twice, at least three times, everything you ve written.
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And the problem is, it s a kind of quicksilver.
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It s very hard to grasp a point and hold you to it.
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So we re going to try here.
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to see whether we can hold you to a point.
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And then you argue with me the point.
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I have no problem with that.
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Your name, please?
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Stephen Bonnell.
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Okay.
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Mr. Bonnell referred to cherry picking and handful of quotes.
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Now, it s true that when you wrote your first book on the Palestinian refugee question,
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You only had a few lines on this issue of transfer.
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Four pages.
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In the first book.
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In the first book, four pages.
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Maybe four, you know, I m not gonna quarrel.
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My memory s not clear.
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We re talking about 40 years ago.
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I read it, I read it, but then I read other things by you.
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Okay, and you were taken to task, if my memory s correct, that you hadn t adequately documented the claims of transfer.
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Allow me to finish.
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And I thought that was a reasonable challenge because it was an unusual claim for a mainstream Israeli historian to say, as you did in that first book, that from the very beginning, transfer figured prominently in Zionist thinking.
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That was an unusual, if you read Anita Shapira, you read Shabtai Tevet, that was an unusual acknowledgement by you.
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And then,
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I found it very impressive that in that revised version of your first book, you devoted 25 pages to copiously documenting the salience of transfer in Zionist thinking.
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And in fact, you used a very provocative,
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and resonant phrase.
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You said that transfer was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism.
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We re not talking about circumstantial factors, a war, Arab hostility.
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You said it s inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism.
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Now, as I said, so we won t be accused of cherry picking, those were 25 very densely argued pages.
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And then in an interview, and I could cite several quotes, but I ll choose one, you said, removing a population was needed.
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Let s look at the words.
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Without a population expulsion, a Jewish state would not have been established.
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Now, you re the one, again, I was very surprised when I read your book.
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Here I m referring to righteous victims.
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I was very surprised when I came to that page 37.
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where you wrote that territorial displacement and dispossession was the chief motor of Arab resistance to Zionism.
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Territorial displacement and dispossession were the chief motor of Arab resistance to Zionism.
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So you then went on to say,
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because the Arab population rationally feared territorial displacement and dispossession, it of course opposed Zionism.
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That s as normal as Native Americans opposing the Euro-American manifest destiny in the history of our own country, because they understood it would be at their expense.
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It was inbuilt and inevitable.
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And so now for you to come along and say that it all happened just because of the war, that otherwise the Zionists made all these plans for a happy minority to live there.
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SPEAKER_02
That simply does not gel, it does not cohere, it is not reconcilable with what you yourself have written.
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It was inevitable and inbuilt.
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SPEAKER_02
Now, in other situations you ve said,
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That s true, but I think it was a greater good to establish a Jewish state at the expense of the indigenous population.
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That s another kind of argument.
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That was Theodore Roosevelt s argument in our own country.
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He said, we don t want the whole of North America to remain a squalid refuge for these wigwams and teepees.
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We have to get rid of them and make this a great country.
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But he didn t deny that it was inbuilt and inevitable.
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SPEAKER_01
I think you ve made your point.
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First, I ll take up something that Muin said.
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He said that the Nakba was inevitable.
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As have you.
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And predictable.
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No, no, no.
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I ve never said that.
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It was inevitable and predictable only because the Arabs assaulted the Jewish community and state in 1947-48.
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Had there been no assault, there probably wouldn t have been a refugee problem.
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There s no reason for a refugee problem to have occurred, expulsions to have occurred, a dispossession, massive dispossession to occur.
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These occurred as a result of war.
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Now, Norman has said that I said that transfer was inbuilt into Zionism in one way or another.
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And this is certainly true.
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In order to buy land, the Jews bought tracts of land on which some Arabs sometimes lived.
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Sometimes they bought tracts of land.
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which there weren t Arab villages, but sometimes they bought land on which there were Arabs.
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And according to Ottoman law and the British, at least in the initial years of the British mandate, the law said that the people who bought the land could do what they liked with the people who didn t own the land, who were basically squatting on the land, which is the Arab tenant farmers, which is we re talking about a very small number, actually, of Arabs who were displaced as a result of land purchases.
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in the Ottoman period or the mandate period.
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But there was dispossession in one way.
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They didn t possess the land, they didn t own it, but they were removed from the land.
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And this did happen in Zionism.
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And there s, if you like, an inevitability in
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Zionist ideology of buying tracts of land and starting to work it yourself and settle it with your own people and so on.
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That made sense.
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But what we re really talking about is what happened in 47-48.
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And in 47-48, the Arabs started a war.
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And actually, people pay for their mistakes.
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And the Palestinians have never actually agreed to pay for their mistakes.
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They make mistakes.
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They attack
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They suffer as a result, and we see something similar going on today in the Gaza Strip.
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They do something terrible.
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They kill 1,200 Jews.
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They abduct 250 women and children and babies and old people and whatever.
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And then they start screaming, please save us from what we did because the Jews are counterattacking.
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And this is what happened then, and this is what s happening now.
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There s something fairly similar in the situation here.
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Expulsion, and this is important, Norman, you should pay attention to this.
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You didn t raise that.
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Expulsion, transfer were never policy of the Zionist movement before 47.
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It doesn t exist in Zionist platforms of the various political parties, of the Zionist organization, of the Israeli state, of the Jewish agency.
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Nobody would have actually made it into policy because it was always a large minority.
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If there were people who wanted it, always a large minority of Jewish
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politicians and leaders would have said, no, this is immoral.
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We cannot start a state on the basis of an expulsion.
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So it was never adopted and actually was never adopted as policy, even in 48, even though Ben-Gurion wanted as few Arabs in the course of the war staying in the Jewish state after they attacked it.
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He didn t want this loyal citizens staying there because they wouldn t have been loyal citizens.
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But this made sense in the war itself.
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But the movement itself and its political parties never accepted it.
2
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It s true that in 1937, when the British, as part of the proposal by the Peel Commission to divide the country into two states, one Arab, one Jewish, which the Arabs, of course, rejected, Peel also recommended that the Arabs, most of the Arabs,
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in the Jewish state to be, should be transferred.
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Because otherwise, if they stayed and were disloyal to the emergent Jewish state, this would cause endless disturbances, warfare, killing, and so on.
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So Ben-Gurion and Weizmann latched onto this proposal by the most famous democracy in the world, the British democracy, when they proposed the idea of transfer side by side with the idea of partition, because it made sense.
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And they said, well, if the British say so, we should also advocate it.
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But they never actually tried to pass it as Zionist policy.
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And they fairly quickly stopped even talking about transfer after 1938.
2
SPEAKER_03
So just to clarify, what you re saying is that 47 was an offensive war, not a defensive war.
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By the Arabs, yes.
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By the Arabs.
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And you re also saying that there was never a top down
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policy of expulsion.
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Just to clarify the point.
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If I understood you correctly, you re making the claim that transfer, expulsion, and so on was in fact a very localized phenomenon resulting from individual land purchases.
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SPEAKER_04
And if I understand you correctly, you re also making the claim
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that the idea that a Jewish state requires a removal or overwhelming reduction of the non-Jewish population was... If the Arabs are attacking you, yes.
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SPEAKER_04
But let s say prior to 1947, it would be your claim
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that the idea that a significant reduction or wholesale removal of their population was not part of Zionist thinking.
2
SPEAKER_04
Well, I think there s two problems with that.
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SPEAKER_04
I think what you re saying about localized disputes is correct, but I also think that there is a whole literature
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that demonstrates that transfer was envisioned by Zaidist leaders on a much broader scale than simply individual land purchases.
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In other words, it went way beyond
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beyond we need to remove these tenants so that we can farm this land.
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The idea was we can t have a state where all these Arabs remain and we have to get rid of them.
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And the second, I think, impediment to that view is that long before the UN General Assembly convened to address the question of Palestine, Palestinian and Arab,
3
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other leaders as well, had been warning ad infinitum that the purpose of the Zionist movement is not just to establish a Jewish state, but to establish an exclusivist Jewish state, and that transfer, forced displacement, was fundamental to that project.
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SPEAKER_03
And just responding to, sorry, was it Bunel or Dunel?
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SPEAKER_03
With a B. Yeah.
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SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
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You made the point that the problem here is that people don t recognize is that the first and last result for the Arabs is always war.
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I think there s a problem with that.
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I think you might do well to recall
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the 1936 general strike conducted by Palestinians at the beginning of the revolt, which at the time was the longest recorded general strike in history.
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You may want to consult the book published last year by Laurie Allen, A History of False Hope,
3
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which discusses in great detail the consistent engagement by Palestinians, their leaders, their elites, their diplomats, and so on, with all these international committees.
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If we look at today, the Palestinians are once again going to the International Court of Justice.
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They re consistently
3
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trying to persuade the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to do his job.
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They have launched widespread boycott campaigns.
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So of course the Palestinians have engaged in military resistance.
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But I think the suggestion that this has always been their first and last resort and that they have somehow spurned civic action, spurned diplomacy, I think really has no basis in reality.
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SPEAKER_00
I ll respond to that and then a question for Norm to take into account, I think, when he answers Benny, because I am curious.
3
SPEAKER_00
Obviously, I have fresher eyes on this and I m a newcomer to this arena versus the three of you guys, for sure.
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SPEAKER_00
A claim that gets brought up a lot has to do with the inevitability of transfer in Zionism or the idea that as soon as the Jews envisioned a state in Palestine, they knew that it would involve some mass transfer of population, perhaps a mass expulsion.
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SPEAKER_00
I m sure we ll talk about Plan Dalit or Plan D at some point.
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The issue that I run into is while you can find quotes from leaders, while you can find maybe desires expressed in diaries, I feel like it s hard to truly ever know if there would have been mass transfer in the face of Arab peace because I feel like every time there was a huge deal on the table that would have had a sizable Jewish and Arab population living together, the Arabs would reject it out of hand.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, for instance, when we say that transfer was inevitable, when we say that Zionists would have never accepted, you know, a sizable Arab population, how do you explain the acceptance of the 47 partition plan that would have had a huge Arab population living in the Jewish state?
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SPEAKER_00
Is your contention that after the acceptance of that, after the establishment of that state, that Jews would have slowly started to expel all of these Arab citizens from their country?
3
SPEAKER_00
Or how do you explain that in Lusanne a couple years later that Israel was willing to formally annex the Gaza Strip and make 200,000 or so people?
3
SPEAKER_00
those citizens, but I m just curious, how do we get this idea of Zionism always means mass transfer when there were times, at least early on in the history of Israel and a little bit before it, where Israel would have accepted a state that would have had a massive Arab population in it?
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SPEAKER_00
Is your, yeah, is your idea that they would have just slowly expelled them afterwards or?
3
SPEAKER_00
Is that question to me or Norm?
3
SPEAKER_00
Either one, I m just curious for the incorporation of the answer, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_02
There s some misunderstandings here, so let s try to clarify that.
3
SPEAKER_02
Number one, it was the old historians who would point to the fact, in Professor Morris s terminology, the old historians, what he called not real historians, he called them chroniclers, not real historians.
3
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It was the old Israeli historians who denied the centrality of transfer in Zionist thinking.
3
SPEAKER_02
It was then Professor Morris, who, contrary to Israel s historian establishment, who said, now you remind me it s four pages, but it came at the end of the book, it was- No, no, it s at the beginning of the book.
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SPEAKER_02
Transfer.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah, transfer is dealt with in four pages at the beginning of my first book on the Palestinian refugee problem.
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It s a fault of my memory, but the point still stands.
3
SPEAKER_02
It was Professor Morris
3
SPEAKER_02
who introduced this idea in what you might call a big way.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but I didn t say it was central to the science experiment or experience.
3
SPEAKER_01
You re saying centrality.
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SPEAKER_01
I never said it was central.
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SPEAKER_01
I said it was their idea.
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SPEAKER_04
By the way, it s okay to respond back and forth.
3
SPEAKER_04
This is great.
3
SPEAKER_04
And also, just a quick question, if I may.
3
SPEAKER_04
you re using quotes from Benny, from Professor Morris.
3
SPEAKER_04
It s also okay to say those quotes do not reflect the full context of the- That would be fine.
3
SPEAKER_04
So if we go back to quotes we ve said in the past, and you both here have written, the three of you have written on this topic a lot, we should be careful and just admit like, well, yeah, well, that s- Just real quick, just to be clear, the contention is that Norm is quoting a part and saying that this was the entire reason for this, whereas Benny s saying it s a part of the-
3
SPEAKER_02
I m not quoting a part.
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I m quoting 25 pages where Professor Morris was at great pains to document the claim that appeared in those early four pages of his book.
3
SPEAKER_02
You say it never became part of the official Zionist platform.
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SPEAKER_02
It never became part of policy.
3
SPEAKER_00
Fine.
3
SPEAKER_00
I know what you re saying.
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SPEAKER_00
It wasn t policy.
3
SPEAKER_02
We re also asked, well, if this is true, why did that happen?
3
SPEAKER_02
Why did that happen?
3
SPEAKER_02
It s because it s a very simple fact, which everybody understands.
3
SPEAKER_02
Ideology doesn t operate in a vacuum.
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There are real world practical problems.
3
SPEAKER_02
You can t just take an ideology and superimpose it on a political reality and turn it into a fact.
3
SPEAKER_02
It was the British mandate.
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SPEAKER_02
There was significant Arab resistance to Zionism.
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and that resistance was based on the fact, as you said, the fear of territorial displacement and dispossession.
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SPEAKER_02
So you couldn t very well expect the Zionist movement to come out in neon lights and announce,
3
SPEAKER_02
we re going to be expelling you the first chance we get.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s not realistic.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, let me respond.
3
SPEAKER_01
Look, you ve said it a number of times that the Arabs from fairly early on in the conflict from the 1890s or the early 1900s said the Jews intend to expel us.
3
SPEAKER_01
This doesn t mean that it s true.
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SPEAKER_01
It means that some Arabs said this, maybe believing it was true, maybe using it as a political instrument to gain support to mobilize Arabs against the Zionist experiment.
3
SPEAKER_01
But the fact is, transfer did not occur before 1947.
3
SPEAKER_01
And Arabs later said, and since then, have said that the Jews want to build a third temple on the Temple Mount.
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as if that s what really the mainstream of Zionism has always wanted and always strived for.
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SPEAKER_01
But this is nonsense.
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It s something that Husseini used to use as a way to mobilize masses for the cause using religion as the way to get them to join him.
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SPEAKER_01
The fact that Arabs said that the Zionists wanted to dispossess us doesn t mean it s true.
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SPEAKER_01
It just means that some Arabs thought that, maybe said it sincerely and maybe insincerely.
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SPEAKER_02
Professor Morris.
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Later it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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SPEAKER_01
This is true.
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SPEAKER_02
Because the Arabs attacked the Jews.
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SPEAKER_02
Professor Morris.
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I read through your stuff.
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Even yesterday, I was looking through Righteous Victim.
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You should read other things.
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You re wasting your time.
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No, actually, no.
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I do read other things, but I don t consider it a waste of time to read you, not at all.
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You say that this wasn t inherent in Zionism.
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Now, would you agree that David Ben-Gurion was a Zionist?
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a major Zionist leader.
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Would you agree Chaim Weizmann was a Zionist?
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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I believe they were.
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I believe they took their ideology seriously.
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It was the first generation.
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Just like with the Bolsheviks, the first generation was committed to an idea.
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By the 1930s, it was just pure Realpolitik.
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The ideology went out the window.
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The first generation, I have no doubt about their convictions.
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Okay?
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They were Zionists.
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Transfer was inevitable and inbuilt in Zionism.
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You keep repeating the same thing.
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As I said then, Mr. Morris, I have a problem reconciling what you re saying.
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It either was incidental or it was deeply entrenched.
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Here, I read, it s deeply entrenched.
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Two very resonant words.
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Inevitable and inbuilt.
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Deeply entrenched?
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I never wrote that.
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Well, I m not sure.
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It s something you just invented.
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Inevitable and inbuilt.
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Let me concede something.
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The idea of transfer was there.
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Israel Zangville, a British Zionist, talked about it early on in the century.
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Even Herzl, in some way, talked about transferring population.
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According to your 25 pages, everybody talked about it.
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Hold on a sec.
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We keep bringing up this line in the 25 pages and the four pages.
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You know, we re lucky to have Benny in front of us right now.
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We don t need to go to the quotes, like we can legitimately ask how central is expulsion to Zionism in its early version of Zionism, in whatever Zionism is today,
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and how much power influence the Zionism and ideology have in Israel and influence the philosophy, the ideology of Zionism have on Israel today.
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The Zionist movement up to 1948, Zionist ideology was central to the whole Zionist experience, the whole enterprise up to 1948.
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And I think Zionist ideology was also important in the first decades of Israel s existence.
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Slowly, the hold of Zionism, if you like, like Bolshevism,
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held the Soviet Union gradually faded.
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And a lot of Israelis today think in terms of individual success and then the capitalism and all sorts of things which are nothing to do with the Zionism.
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But Zionism was very important.
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But what I m saying is that the idea of transfer wasn t the core of Zionism.
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The idea of Zionism was to save the Jews who had been vastly persecuted
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in Eastern Europe and incidentally in the Arab world, the Muslim world for centuries and eventually ending up with the Holocaust, the idea of Zionism was to save the Jewish people by establishing a state or re-establishing a Jewish state on the ancient Jewish homeland.
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which is something the Arabs today even deny, that there were Jews in Palestine or the land of Israel 2,000 years ago.
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Arafat famously said, what temple was there on Temple Mount?
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Maybe it was in Nablus, which of course is nonsense.
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they had a strong connection for thousands of years to the land to which they wanted to return and returned there.
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They found that on the land lived hundreds of thousands of Arabs and the question was how to accommodate the vision of a Jewish state in Palestine alongside the existence of these Arab masses living on, were indigenous in fact,
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to the land by that stage.
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And the idea of partition because they couldn t live together because the Arabs didn t want to live together with the Jews.
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And I think the Jews also didn t want to live together in one state with Arabs in general.
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The idea of partition was the thing which
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the Zionists accepted, okay, we can only get a small part of Palestine, the Arabs will get in 37, most of Palestine in 1947, the ratios were changed.
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But we can live side by side with each other in a partitioned Palestine.
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And this was the essence of it.
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The idea of transfer
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It was there, but it was never adopted as policy.
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But in 1947-48, the Arabs attacked trying to destroy essentially the Jewish, the Zionist enterprise and the emerging Jewish state.
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And the reaction was a transfer in some way, not as policy, but this is what happened on the battlefield.
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And this is also what Ben-Gurion at some point began to want as well.
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Well, you know, one of the first books on this issue I read when I was still in high school because my late father had it, was the diaries of Theodor Herzl.
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And I think, you know, Theodor Herzl, of course, was the founder of the contemporary Zionist movement.
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And I think if you read that, it s very clear
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For Herzl, the model upon which the Zionist movement would proceed, his model was Cecil Rhodes.
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his, I think, Rhodes, from what I recall, correct me if I m wrong, has quite a prominent place in Herzl s diaries.
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I think Herzl was also corresponding with him and seeking his support.
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Cecil Rhodes, of course, was the British colonialist after whom the former white minority regime in Rhodesia
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was named.
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And Herzl also says explicitly in his diaries that it is essential to remove the existing population from Palestine.
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Can I respond to this?
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In a moment please.
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He says we shall have to spirit the penniless population across the borders and procure employment for them elsewhere.
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And Israel Zangwill, who you mentioned, a land without a people for a people without a land.
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They knew damn well it wasn t a people, a land without a people.
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I ll continue, but please go ahead.
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There is one small diary entry in Herzl s vast diary.
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It s five volumes.
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Yeah, five volumes.
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There s one paragraph which actually mentions the idea of transfer.
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There are people who I think that Herzl was actually pointing to South America when he was talking about that.
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The Jews were going to move to Argentina and then they would try and buy out or buy off or spirit the penniless natives to make way for Jewish settlement.
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Maybe he wasn t even talking about the Arabs in that particular passage.
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That s the argument of some people.
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Maybe he was, but the point is,
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it has only a one hundredth of a one percent of the diary which is devoted to this subject.
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It s not a central idea in Herzl s thinking.
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What Herzl wanted, and this is what s important, not Rhodes, I don t think he was the model.
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Herzl wanted to create a liberal democratic western state in Palestine for the Jews.
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That was the idea, not some
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imperial enterprise, serving some imperial master, which is what Rhodes was about, but to have a Jewish state which was modeled on the Western democracies in Palestine.
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And this, incidentally, was more or less what Weizmann and Ben-Gurion wanted.
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Ben-Gurion was more of a socialist, Weizmann was more of a liberal Westerner, but they wanted to establish a social democratic or liberal state in Palestine, and they both envisioned
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through most of the years of their activity, that there would be an Arab minority in that Jewish state.
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It s true that Ben-Gurion strived to have as small as possible an Arab minority in the Jewish state, because he knew that if you want a Jewish majority state, that would be necessary.
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But it s not something which they were willing to translate into actual policy.
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Just a quick pause to mention, for people who are not familiar, Theodor Herzl, we re talking about over a century ago.
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and everything we ve been talking about has been mostly 1948 and before.
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Yes, just one clarification on Herzl s diaries.
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I mean, the other thing that I recall from those diaries is he was very preoccupied with, in fact, getting great power patronage, seeing Palestine, the Jewish state in Palestine, I think his words, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.
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In other words, very much seeing
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his project as a proxy for Western imperialism in the Middle East.
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He wanted to establish a Jewish state which would be independent.
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To get that, he hoped that he would be able to garner support from major imperial powers.
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Including the Ottoman Sultan, who he tried to cultivate.
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I just want to respond to a point you made earlier, which was that
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people expressed their rejection of the partition resolution on the grounds that it gave the majority of Palestine to the Jewish community, which formed only a third.
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Whereas, in fact, if I understood you correctly, you re saying the Palestinians and the Arabs
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would have rejected any partition resolution.
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Yeah, a couple things.
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One, they would have rejected any.
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Two, a lot of that land given was in the Negev.
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It was pretty terrible land at the time.
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And then three, the land that would have been partitioned to Jews, I think would have been, I think I saw it was like 500,000, it would have been 500,000 Jews, 400,000 Arabs, and I think like 80,000 Bedouin would have been there.
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So the state would have been divided pretty closely.
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I think you raise a valid point because I think
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the Palestinians did reject the partition of their homeland in principle.
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And I think the fact that the United Nations General Assembly then awarded the majority of their homeland to the Zionist movement only added insult to injury.
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I mean, one doesn t have to sympathize
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with the Palestinians to recognize that they have now been a stateless people for 75 years.
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Can you name any country
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yours, for example, or yours, that would be prepared to give 55%, 25%, 10% of your country to the Palestinians?
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Of course not.
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And so the issue was not the existence of Jews in Palestine.
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They had been there for centuries.
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And of course they had ties to Palestine and particularly to Jerusalem and other places going back centuries, if not millennia.
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But the idea of establishing an exclusively Jewish state at the expense of those who are already living there, I think
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It was right to reject that.
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And I don t think we can look back now, 75 years later, and say, well, you should have accepted losing 55% of your homeland because you ended up losing 78% of it, and the remaining 22% was occupied in 1967.
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That s not how things work.
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And I can imagine an American
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rejecting giving 10% of the United States to the Palestinians, and if that rejection leads to war and you lose half your country, I doubt that 50 years from now you re going to say, well, maybe I should have accepted that.
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Sure.
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I like this answer more than what I usually feel like I m hearing when it comes to the Palestinian rejection of the 47 partition plan.
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Because sometimes I feel like a weird switch happens to where the Arabs in the area are actually presented as entirely pragmatic people who are simply doing a calculation and saying like, well, we re losing 55% of our land.
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Jews are only maybe one third of the people here and we ve got 45 and now the math doesn t work basically.
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But it wasn t a math problem.
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I think like you said- It was a matter of principle.
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It was an ideology problem.
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Yeah, ideologically driven, that they, as a people, have a right to or are entitled to this land that they ve never actually had an independent state on, that they ve never had even a guarantee of an independent state on, that they ve never actually ruled a government of their own.
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That last point is actually not correct, because for all its injustice, the mandate system recognized Palestine as a class A mandate, which provisionally recognized the independence
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of that territory.
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Of what would emerge from that territory, but not of the Palestinians.
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It was provisionally recognized.
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But the territory itself was, but not of the Palestinian people to have a right or a guarantee to a government that would emerge from it.
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It was a British mandate of Palestine, not the British mandate of Israel.
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The word exclusive which you keep using is nonsense.
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The state which Ben-Gurion envisioned would be a Jewish majority state as they accepted the 1947 partition resolution as Stephen said, that included 400,000 plus Arabs in a state which would have 500,000 Jews.
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So, the idea of exclusivity wasn t anywhere in the air at all among the Zionist leaders in 47-48.
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They wanted a Jewish majority state but were willing to accept a state which had 40% Arabs.
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That s one point.
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The second thing is the Palestinians may have regarded the land of Palestine as their homeland, but so did the Jews.
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It was the homeland of the Jews as well.
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The problem was the Arabs were unable and remain to this day unable to recognize that
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for the Jews, that is their homeland as well.
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And the problem then is how do you share this homeland, either with one binational state or separate this partition into two states?
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The problem is that the Arabs have always rejected both of these ideas.
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The homeland belongs to the Jews as Jews feel as much as it does, if not more, than for the Arabs.
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I would say for the Jews, it s the Jewish people s homeland.
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I would also, real quick, I just want for both of you guys, because I haven t heard these questions answered, I really want these questions to be, I m just so curious how to make sense of them.
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It was correctly brought up that I believe that Ben-Gurion had, I think Shlomo Ben-Amin describes it as an obsession with getting validation or support from Western states, Great Britain, and then a couple of decades later it becomes… That explains the Suez War, the Suez Crisis.
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Exactly, correct.
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That was one of the major motivators, the idea to work with Britain and France on a military operation against Arabs.
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Imperial stooge.
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But then the question, again, I go back to, if that is true, if Ben-Gurion, if the early Israel saw themselves as a Western-fashioned nation, how could we possibly imagine that they would have engaged in the transfer of some 400,000 Arabs after accepting the partition plan?
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Would that not have completely and totally destroyed their legitimacy in the eyes of the entire Western world?
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Would it not have been?
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How not?
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Well, first of all, I think that
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that the Zionist leadership s acceptance of the partition resolution, and I think you may have written about this, that they accepted it because it provided international endorsement of
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the legitimacy of the principle of Jewish statehood.
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And they didn t accept the borders, and in fact, later expanded the borders.
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Second of all, they accepted the UN partition resolution, borders and all.
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That s how they accepted it.
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You can say that some of the Zionists deep in their hearts had the idea that maybe at some point they would be able to get more.
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Including their most senior leaders who said so, and I think you ve quoted them saying so.
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But they grudgingly accepted what the United Nations, the world community, had said, this is what you re going to get.
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I mean, removing dark people, darker people, it s intrinsic.
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It s intrinsic to Western history.
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So the idea that
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Americans or Brits or the French would have an issue with, I mean, French had been doing it in Algeria for decades.
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The Americans have been doing it in North America for centuries.
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So how would Israel forcibly displacing Palestinians somehow besmirch Israel in the eyes of the West?
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In the 1944 resolution of the Labor Party,
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And at the time, even Bertrand Russell was a member of the Labor Party.
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It endorsed transfer of Arabs out of Palestine.
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As Moines pointed out, that was a deeply entrenched idea in Western thinking that there was nothing, it doesn t in any way contradict or violate or breach any moral values to displace the Palestinian population.
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Now, I do believe there s a legitimate question
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Had it been the case, as you said, Professor Morris,
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that the Zionists wanted to create a happy state with a Jewish majority, but a large Jewish minority.
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And if by virtue of immigration, like in our own country, in our own country, given the current trajectories, non-whites will become the majority population in our United States quite soon.
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And according to democratic principles, we have to accept that.
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So if that were the case,
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I would say maybe there s an argument that had there been mass Jewish immigration, changed the demographic balance in Palestine, and therefore
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Jews became the majority, it can make an argument in the abstract that the indigenous Arab population should have been accepting of that, just as whites in the United States, quote unquote, whites, have to be accepting of the fact that the demographic majority is shifting to non-whites in our own country.
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But that s not what Zionism was about.
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I did write my doctoral dissertation on Zionism.
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And I don t want to get now bogged down in abstract ideas.
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But as I suspect you know, most theorists of nationalism say there are two kinds of nationalism.
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One is a nationalism based on citizenship.
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You become a citizen, you re integral to the country.
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That s sometimes called political nationalism.
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And then there s another kind of nationalism.
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And that says the state should not belong to its citizens, it should belong to an ethnic group.
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Each ethnic group should have its own state.
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It s usually called the German Romantic idea of nationalism.
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Zionism is squarely in the German Romantic idea.
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That was the whole point of Zionism.
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We don t want to be Bundists and be one more ethnic minority in Russia.
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We don t want to become citizens and just become a Jewish people in England or France.
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We want our own state.
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Like the Arab 23 states.
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No, wait, before we get to the Arabs, let s stick to the Jews for a moment, or the Zionists.
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We want our own state.
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And in that concept,
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of wanting your own state, the minority at best lives on sufferance and at worst gets expelled.
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That s the logic of the German Romantic Zionist idea of a state.
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That s why they re Zionists.
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Now, I personally have shied away from using the word Zionism ever since I finished my doctoral dissertation.
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Was that painful?
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Because as I said, I don t believe it s the operative ideology today.
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It s like talking about Bolshevism and referring to Khrushchev.
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I doubt Khrushchev could have spelled Bolshevik.
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But for the period we re talking about, they were Zionists.
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They were committed to their exclusive state with a minority living on sufferance or at worst expelled.
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That was their ideology.
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And I really feel
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There s a problem with your happy vision of these Western Democrats like Weizmann, and they wanted to live peacefully with the Arabs.
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Weizmann described the expulsion in 1948 as, quote, the miraculous clearing of the land.
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That doesn t sound like somebody shedding too many tears at the loss of the indigenous population.
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Let me just respond to the word unsufferance.
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The unsufferance I don t agree with.
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I think that s wrong.
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The Jewish state came into being in 1948.
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It had a population which was 20% Arab when it came into being after Arab refugees.
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Many of them had become refugees, but 20% remained in the country.
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20% of Israel s population at inception
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in 1949 was Arab.
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Eighty percent went missing.
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No, no, no.
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I was talking about what remained in Palestine-Israel after it was created.
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The 20 percent who lived in Israel received citizenship and all the rights of Israelis, except of course the right to serve in the army, which they didn t want to, and they have Supreme Court justices, they have Knesset members,
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They lived under emergency laws until 1966.
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At the beginning they received citizenship, could vote in elections for their own people and they were put into parliament.
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But in the first years, the Israeli, the Jewish majority suspected that maybe the Arabs would be disloyal because they had just tried to destroy the Jewish state.
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Then they dropped the military government and they became fully equal citizens.
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So if the whole idea was they must have a state without Arabs, this didn t happen in 49 and it didn t happen in the subsequent decades.
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Professor Morris, then why did you say without a population expulsion, a Jewish state would not have been established?
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Because you re missing the first section of that paragraph, which was they were being assaulted by the Arabs.
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And as a result, a Jewish state could not have come into being unless there had also been an expulsion of the population which was trying to kill.
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Norm, I m officially forbidding you referencing that again.
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I think we responded to it.
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So the main point you re making, we have to take many at his word is like there was a war and that s the reason why he made that statement.
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I think just one last point on this.
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I remember
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reading your book when it first came out, and reading one incident after the other, and one example after the other, and then getting to the conclusion where you said the nakba was a product of war, not design, I think were your example.
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And I remember reacting almost in shock to that, that I felt
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you had mobilized overwhelming evidence that it was a product of design, not war.
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And I think our discussion today very much reflects, let s say, the dissonance between the evidence and the conclusion.
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You don t feel that the research that you have conducted and published demonstrates that it was in fact inherent and built and inevitable
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And I think the point that Norm and I are making is that your own historical research, together with that of others, indisputably demonstrates that it does.
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I think that s a fundamental disagreement we re having here.
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Yeah.
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Can I actually respond to that because this is actually – I think this is emblematic of the entire conversation.
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I watched a lot of Norm s interviews and conversations in preparation for this and I hear Norm will say this all over and over and over again.
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I only deal in facts.
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I don t deal in hypotheticals.
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I only deal in facts.
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I only deal in facts.
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And that seems
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be the case except for when the facts are completely and totally contrary to the particular point you re trying to push.
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The idea that Jews would have out of hand rejected any state that had Arabs on it or always had a plan of expulsion is just betrayed by the acceptance of the 47 partition plan.
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Did I just say that there is a chasm that separates your ideology from the limits and constraints imposed by politics and reality?
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Professor Morris, I suspect would agree that the Zionist movement from fairly early on was committed to the idea of a Jewish state.
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I am aware of only one major study, probably written 40 years ago, the binational idea in Mandatory Palestine by a woman, I forgot her name now, you remember her.
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I m trying to.
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Yeah.
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OK.
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But you know the book.
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I think so.
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Yeah.
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She is the only one who tried to persuasively argue that the Zionist movement was actually, not formally, actually committed to the binational idea.
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But most historians of the subject agree the Zionist movement was committed to the idea of a Jewish state.
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having written my doctoral dissertation on the topic, I was confirmed in that idea because Professor Chomsky, who was my closest friend for about 40 years, was very committed to the idea that binationalism was the dominant trend in Zionism.
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I could not agree with, I couldn t go with him there.
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But Professor Morris, you are aware that until the Biltmore Resolution in 1942, the Zionist movement never declared it was for a Jewish state.
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Why?
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Because it was politically impossible at the moment until 1942.
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There is your ideology, there are your convictions, there are your operative plans, and there s also, separately,
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what you say in public.
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The Zionist movement couldn t say in public, we re expelling all the Arabs.
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They can t say that.
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And they couldn t even say we support a Jewish state until 1942.
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You re conflating two things.
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The Zionists wanted a Jewish state, correct?
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That didn t mean expulsion of the Arabs.
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It s not the same thing.
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They wanted a Jewish state with a Jewish majority, but they were willing, as it turned out, both in 37 and in 47, and subsequently, to have an Arab minority, a large Arab minority.
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They were willing to have a large Arab minority in the country, and they ended up with a large Arab minority in the country.
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20% of the population in 1949 was Arab, and it still is.
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They ended up for about five minutes before they were expelled.
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They agreed to wait until 47, and then they were gone by March 1949.
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What happened in between the rejection of the partition plan and the expulsion of the Arabs?
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The Arabs launched the war.
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Well, yeah, well, I mean, like, it s not it wasn t random.
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Like, there s a potential that it wasn t random.
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There was totally agree with that.
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It was by design.
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You can say that.
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You can say that.
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But in this case, the facts betray you.
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There was no Arab acceptance of anything that would have allowed for a Jewish state to exist.
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Number one, and number two, I think that it s entirely possible, given how things happen after war, that this exact same conflict could have played out and an expulsion would have happened without any ideology at play.
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That there was a people that disagreed on who had territorial rights to a land, there was a massive war afterwards, and then a bunch of their friends invaded after to reinforce the idea that the Jewish people, in this case, couldn t have a state.
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There could have been a transfer regardless.
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Anything could have been.
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That s not what history is about.
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History is about Palestinian rejectionism to any peace deal.
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As I said, over and over and over again.
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As I said, when the war was thrown into the court of the United Nations, they were faced with a practical problem.
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And I, for one, am not going to try to adjudicate the rights and wrongs from the beginning.
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I do not believe
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that if territorial displacement and dispossession was inherent in the Zionist project, I do not believe it can be a legitimate political enterprise.
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Now, you might say that s speaking from 2022 or 2020, where are we now?
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Okay, but we have to recognize
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that from nearly the beginning, for perfectly obvious reasons, having nothing to do with anti-Semitism, anti-Westernism, anti-Europeanism, but because no people
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that I am aware of would voluntarily cede its country.
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You can perfectly understand Native American resistance to Eurocolonialism.
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You can perfectly well understand it without any anti-Europeanism, anti-whitism, anti-Christianism.
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They didn t want to cede their country.
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to invaders.
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That s completely understandable.
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You re minimizing the anti-Semitic element in Arab nationalism.
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You minimize it.
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In all your books, you minimize it.
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No, no, no.
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Husseini was an anti-Semite.
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The leader of the Palestinian national movement in the 30s and 40s was an anti-Semite.
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This was one of the things which drove him and also drove him in the end
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to work in Berlin for Hitler for four years, giving Nazi propaganda to the Arab world, calling on the Arabs to murder the Jews.
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That s what he did in World War II.
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That s the leader of the Palestinian Arab National Movement.
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And he wasn t alone.
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He wasn t alone.
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Why is it that if you read your book, Righteous Victims, you can read it and read it and read it and read it, as I have,
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you will find barely a word about the Arabs being motivated by anti-Semitism.
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It exists, though.
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I didn t say it doesn t exist.
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Ah, you agree that it exists.
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Hey, I don t know a single non-Jew who doesn t harbor anti-Semitic sentiment.
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We re talking about Arabs now.
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Yeah, but I don t know anybody that s just part of the human condition.
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Anti-Semitism.
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Yes, I do.
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Husseini was a... And among the Arabs.
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So, Professor Mars, here s my problem.
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I didn t see that in your righteous victims.
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Even when you talked about the first intifada, and you talked about the second intifada, and you talked about how there was a lot of influence by Hamas, the Islamic movement, you even stated that there was a lot of anti-Semitism in those movements, but then you went on to say, but of course, at bottom, it was about the occupation.
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I ve read it.
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Yeah, but you re moving from different ages across the ages.
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I m talking about your whole book.
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The occupation began in 67, the one you re talking about.
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I looked and looked and looked for evidence of this anti-Semitism as being a chief motor of Arab resistance to Zionism.
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I didn t see it.
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Did he make that claim?
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I don t remember the word chief.
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It s one of the elements.
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It s one of the elements.
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Binary.
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Yes, binary.
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Please don t give me this post-modernism binary.
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You re the one.
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You re the one that said the chief motor.
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Do you have your book here?
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Page 137.
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You re talking in black and white concepts when history is much grayer.
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Lots of things happen because of lots of reasons, not one or the other.
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And you don t seem to see that.
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Can I ask you, because it s for them to talk to, just a very quick question.
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What do you think the ideal solution was on the Arab side from 47?
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What would they have preferred?
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And what would have happened if Jews would have lost the war in 48?
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What do you think would have happened to the Israeli population?
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I think the Palestinians and the Arabs were explicit.
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that they wanted a unitary, I think, federal state and they made their submissions to UNSCOP.
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They made their appeals at the UN General Assembly.
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What do you mean by unitary and federal?
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I don t get that.
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They wanted an Arab state.
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They wanted Palestine to be an Arab state.
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That s the word, unitary, federal.
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They wanted Palestine as an Arab and exclusively Arab state.
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No, it wasn t an exclusively Arab state.
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I think we have to distinguish between Palestinian and Arab opposition to a Jewish state in Palestine, on the one hand,
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and Palestinian and Arab attitudes to Jewish existence in Palestine.
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There s a fundamental difference.
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Well, Husseini, the leader of the movement, said that all the Jews who had come since 1917, and that s the majority of the Jews in Palestine in 1947, shouldn t be there.
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They shouldn t be citizens and they shouldn t be there.
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He did say that.
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I m not going to deny it.
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It s true.
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I can understand the sentiment, but I think it s wrong.
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But also, you guys are the ones... I want to answer your question.
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You used the words earlier that it was supremacy and exclusivity that the Zionists... Well, I want to answer your question.
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Husseini did say that, and I m sure there was a very substantial body of Palestinian Arab public opinion that endorsed that.
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But by the same token,
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I think a unitary Arab state, as you call it, or a Palestinian state could have been established with arrangements, with guarantees, to ensure the security and rights of both communities.
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How that would work in detail had
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had been discussed and proposed, but never resolved.
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And again, I think, you know, Jewish fears about what would have happened- A second Holocaust, that s what- Well, no, I think- That was the Jewish fear, a second Holocaust.
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That may well have been the Jewish fear.
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It was an unfounded Jewish fear.
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It was unfounded?
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Of course it was unfounded.
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What about like in 48 and 56- You really think,
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You really think that the Palestinians, had they won the war, were going to import ovens and crematoria from Germany?
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I don t know if it would have been that bad, but there were pogroms across in almost every single Arab state where there were Jews living after 48, after 56, after 67.
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There were always pogroms, there were always flights from Jews from those countries to Israel afterwards.
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I don t think it would be- I wouldn t say there were always pogroms in every Arab state.
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I think there was flight of...
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Arab Jews for multiple reasons.
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In some cases, for precisely the reasons you say, if you look at the Jewish community in Algeria, for example, their flight had virtually nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict.
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The issue of Algerian Jews was that the French gave them citizenship during their colonial rule of Algeria, and they increasingly became identified with French rule.
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And when Algeria became independent, and all the French ended up leaving,
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out of fear or out of disappointment or out of whatever, the Jews were identified as French rather than Algerian.
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This is a bit of a red herring.
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There were pogroms in the Arab countries, in Bahrain even, where there s almost no Jews.
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There was a pogrom in 1947.
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There was a pogrom in Aleppo in 1947.
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I m not denying any of that history.
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Killings of Jews in Iraq and Egypt in 1948-49.
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I m not denying anything.
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The Jews basically fled the Arab states, not for multiple reasons.
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They fled because they felt that the governments there and the societies amid which they had lived for hundreds of years no longer wanted them.
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Look, without getting into the details, I think we can both agree that ultimately
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a clear majority of Arab Jews who believed that after having lived in these countries for centuries, for centuries, for centuries, for centuries, if not millennia, came to the unfortunate conclusion that their situation had become untenable.
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I also think that we can both agree that this had never been an issue prior to Zionism and the emergence of the State of Israel.
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Look, I m not... The Groms didn t begin with Zionism in the Arab world.
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The issue is the point I raised, which is whether these communities had ever come to a collective conclusion that their
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position had become untenable in this part of the world.
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No, they were Arab Jews.
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Well, because untenable meant there was no alternative.
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But with the creation of Israel, there was an alternative, right?
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A place where they could go and not be discriminated against or live as second-class citizens or be subject to Arab-majority states.
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I also think it s interesting that, like, when you analyze the flight of Jewish people, and I ve seen this, it wasn t just, I agree with you, it wasn t just a mass expulsion from all the Arab states.
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There were definitely push factors.
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There were also pull factors.
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Now, I don t know how you guys feel about the Nakba, but when the analysis of the Nakba comes in, again, it s back to that, well, that was actually just a top-down expulsion.
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You know, the retreat of wealthy Arab people in the 30s didn t matter.
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Any of the messaging from the surrounding Arab states didn t matter.
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It was just an expulsion from Jewish people or people running from their lives from Jewish massacres.
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Again, it s like that.
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I feel like it s that selective, it s a selective critical analysis of the- Again, I m a little uncomfortable always using the term Jewish here because
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It wasn t the, you know, the Jews of England or the Soviets.
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I think we should, I think it s useful to say, refer to Zionists before 1948 and Israelis after 48.
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We don t need to implicate.
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Well, sure, but the Jewish people that were being attacked in Arab states weren t Zionists, they were just Jews living there, right?
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Okay, let me just comment on that.
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I was rereading Shlomo Ben-Ami s last book, and he does at the end discuss at some length the whole issue of the refugee question bearing on the so-called peace process.
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And on the question of 48 and the Arab emigration, if you ll allow me, let me just quote him.
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Israel is particularly fond of the awkwardly false symmetry she makes between the Palestinian refugee crisis and the forced emigration of 600,000 Jews from Arab countries following the creation of the State of Israel, as if it were, quote, an unplanned exchange of populations, unquote.
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And then Mr. Ben-Ami, for those of you who are listening, he was Israel s former foreign minister, and he s an influential historian in his own right.
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He says, in fact, envoys from the Mossad and the Jewish agency worked underground in Arab countries and Iran to encourage Jews to go to Israel.
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More importantly, for many Jews in Arab states, the very possibility of emigrating to Israel was the culmination of millennial aspirations.
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It represented the consummation of a dream to take part in Israel s resurgence as a nation.
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So, this idea that they were all expelled after 1948, it s,
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That s one area, Professor Morris, I defer to expertise.
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That s one of my credos in life.
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I don t know the Israeli literature, but as it s been translated in English, there s very little solid scholarship on what happened in 1948 in the Arab countries and which caused the Jews to leave.
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Shlomo Ben-Ami knows the literature, he knows the scholarship, he knows the history.
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He also comes from the Tangiers.
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He s from Morocco.
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Yif Avichlaim from Iraq has written on this issue.
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And they wrote that the Jews in the Arab lands were not pro-Zionist.
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They weren t Zionist at all.
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Certainly Avichlaim s family was anti-Zionist.
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And Avichlaim, when he was interviewed by Marin Rapoport on this question, he said, you simply cannot say that the Iraqi Jews were expelled.
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It s just not true.
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and he was speaking as an Iraqi Jew who left with his father and family in 1948.
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They were pushed out.
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They weren t expelled.
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That s probably the right phrase.
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I think it s more complex than that.
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I think it was
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Sorry, I interrupted you.
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No, you re not interrupting me, because I only know what s been translated into English, and the English literature on the subject is very small and not scholarly.
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Now, there may be Hebrew literature, I don t know, but I was surprised that even Shlomo Ben-Ami
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a stalwart of his state, fair enough.
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On this particular point, he called it false symmetry.
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No, no, Stephen is right.
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There was a pull and push mechanism in the departure of the Jews from the Arab lands post-48.
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But there was also a lot of push, a lot of push.
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That s indisputable.
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And on the point of agreement, on this one brief light of agreement, let us wrap up
6
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with this topic of history and move on to modern day.
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But before that, I m wondering if we could just say a couple of last words on this topic.
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Steven?
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Yeah, I think that when you look at the behaviors of both parties in
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In the time period around 48 or especially 48 and earlier, there s this assumption that there was this huge built-in mechanism of Zionism and that it was going to be inevitable from the inception of the first Zionist thought I guess that appeared in Herzl s mind that there would be a mass violent population transfer of Arab-Palestinians out of what would become the Israeli state.
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I understand that there are some quotes that we can find that maybe seem to possibly support an idea that looks close to that.
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But I think when you actually consult the record of what happened, when you look at the populations, the massive populations that Israel was willing to accept within what would become their state borders, their nation borders, I just don t think that the historical record agrees with the idea that Zionists would have just never been okay living alongside Arab Palestinians.
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But when you look at the other side, Arabs would out of hand reject literally any deal that apportioned any amount of that land for any state relating to Jewish people or the Israeli people.
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I think it was said even on the other end of the table that Arab-Palestinians would have never accepted – the Arabs would have never accepted any Jewish state whatsoever.
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So it s interesting that on the ideology part, where it s claimed that Zionists are people of exclusion and supremacy and expulsion, we can find that in diary entries, but we can find that expressed in very real terms on the Arab side, I think in all of their behavior around 48 and earlier, where the goal was the destruction of the Israeli state.
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It would have been the dispossession of many Jewish people.
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It probably would have been the expulsion of a lot of them back to Europe.
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And I think that very clearly plays out in the difference between the actions of the Arabs versus some diary entries of some Jewish leaders.
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Well, one thing which stood out, and I think Muin made this point, is that the Arabs had nothing to do with the Holocaust, but then the world community forced the Arabs to pay the price for the Holocaust.
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That s the traditional Arab argument.
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This is slightly distorting the reality.
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The Arabs in the 1930s did their utmost to prevent Jewish immigration from Europe and reaching Palestine, which was the only safe haven available because America, Britain, France, nobody wanted Jews anywhere and they were being persecuted in Central Europe and eventually would be massacred in large numbers.
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So the Arab efforts to pressure the British to prevent Jews reaching Palestine s safe shores contributed indirectly to the slaughter of many Jews in Europe because they couldn t get to anywhere and they couldn t get to Palestine because the Arabs were busy attacking Jews in Palestine and attacking the British to make sure they didn t allow Jews to
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reach this safe haven.
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That s important.
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The second thing is, of course, there s no point in belittling the fact that the Palestinian Arab National Movement s leader, Husseini, worked for the Nazis in the 1940s.
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He got a salary from the German foreign ministry.
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He raised
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troops among Muslims in Bosnia for the SS, and he broadcast to the Arab world calling for the murder of the Jews in the Middle East.
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This is what he did.
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And the Arabs since then have been trying to whitewash Husseini s role.
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I m not saying he was the instigator of the Holocaust, but he helped the Germans along
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in doing what they were doing and supported them in doing that.
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So this can t be removed from the fact that the Arabs, as you say, paid a price for the Holocaust, but they also participated in various ways in helping it happen.
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I ll make two points.
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The first is, you mentioned Haj Amin al-Husseini and his collaboration with the Nazis.
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entirely legitimate point to raise, but I think one can also say definitively, had Haj Amin al-Husseini never existed, the Holocaust would have played out precisely as it did.
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As far as Palestinian opposition to Jewish immigration to Palestine during the 1930s is concerned, it was of a different character than, for example, British and American
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rejection of Jewish immigration.
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They just didn t want Jews on their soil.
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Objectively, it helped the Germans kill the Jews.
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In the Palestinian case, their opposition to Jewish immigration was to prevent the transformation of their homeland into a Jewish state that would dispossess them.
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And I think that s an important distinction.
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to make.
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The other point I wanted to make is we ve spent the past several hours talking about Zionism transfer and so on, but I think there s a more fundamental aspect to this, which is that Zionism, I think,
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would have emerged and disappeared as yet one more utopian political project had it not been for the British, what the preeminent Palestinian historian, Walid Khalidi, has termed the British shield.
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Because I think without the British sponsorship, we wouldn t be having this discussion today.
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The British sponsored
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Zionism for a very simple reason, which is that during World War I, the Ottoman armies attempted to march on the Suez Canal.
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Suez Canal was the jugular vein of the British Empire between Europe and India.
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And the British came to the conclusion that they needed to secure the Suez Canal from any threat.
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And as the British have done so often in so many places, how do you deal with this?
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Well, you bring in a foreign minority, implant them amongst a hostile population and establish a protectorate over them.
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I don t think a Jewish state in Palestine had been part of British intentions in the Balfour Declaration.
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very specifically speaks about a Jewish national home in Palestine, in other words, a British protectorate.
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Things ended up taking a different course, and I think
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the most important development was World War II, and I think this had maybe less to do with the Holocaust and more to do with the effective bankruptcy of the United Kingdom during that war and its inability to sustain its global empire.
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It ended up giving up India, ended up giving up Palestine, and it s in that context, I think, that we need to see the emergence of a
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of a Jewish state in Palestine.
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And again, a Jewish state means a state in which the Jewish community enjoys not only a demographic majority, but an uncontestable demographic majority, an uncontestable territorial hegemony, and an uncontestable political supremacy.
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And that is also why, after 1948,
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the nascent Israeli state confiscated, I believe, up to 90% of lands that had been previously owned by Palestinians who became citizens of Israel.
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It is why the new Israeli state imposed a military government on its population of Palestinian citizens between 1948 and 1966.
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It is why
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the Israeli state effectively reduced the Palestinians living within the Israeli state as citizens of the Israeli state to second-class citizens, on the one hand, promoting Jewish nationalism and Jewish nationalist parties, on the other hand, doing everything within its power to suppress and eliminate Palestinian or Arab nationalist movements, and that s why today there s a consensus
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among all major human rights organizations, that Israel is an apartheid state.
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What the Israeli human rights organization, B Tselem, describes a regime of Jewish supremacy between the river and the sea.
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You re really tempting a response from the other side on the last few sentences.
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We ll talk about the claims of apartheid and so on.
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It s a fascinating discussion, we need to have it.
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Norm.
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On the question of the responsibility of the Palestinian Arabs to the Nazi Holocaust, direct or indirect, I consider that an absurd claim.
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As Gromyko said, and I quoted him, the entire Western world turned its back on the Jews to somehow
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focus on the Palestinians strikes me as completely ridiculous.
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Number two, as Muin said,
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There s a perfectly understandable reason why Palestinian Arabs wouldn t want Jews, because in their minds, and not irrationally, these Jews intended to create a Jewish state, which would quite likely have resulted in their expulsion.
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I m a very generous person.
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I ve actually taken in a homeless person for two and a half years.
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But if I knew in advance that that homeless person was going to try to turn me out of my apartment, I would think 10,000 times before I took him in.
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Okay?
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As far as the actual complicity of the Palestinian Arabs
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If you look at Raoul Hilberg s three-volume classic work, The Destruction of the European Jewry, he has in those thousand-plus pages one sentence, one sentence on the role of the mufti of Jerusalem.
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And that, I think, is probably an overstatement, but we ll leave it aside.
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The only two points I would make aside from the Holocaust point is, number one, I do think the transfer discussion is useful because it indicates that there was a rational reason behind the Arab resistance to Jewish or Zionist immigration to Palestine, the fear of territorial displacement and dispossession.
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And number two, there are two issues.
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One is the history
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And the second is being responsible for your words.
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Now, some people accuse me of speaking very slowly, and they re advised on YouTube to turn up the speed twice to three times whenever I m on.
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One of the reasons I speak slowly is because I attach value to every word I say.
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And it is discomforting, disorienting, where you have a person who s produced a voluminous corpus, rich in insights and rich in archival sources.
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who seems to disown each and every word that you pluck from that corpus by claiming that it s either out of context or it s cherry picking.
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Words count.
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And I agree with Lex.
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Everybody has the right to rescind what they ve said in the past.
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But what you cannot claim is that you didn t say what you said.
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I ll stick to the history, not the current propaganda. 1917.
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The Zionist movement began way before the British supported the Zionist movement for decades.
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In 1917, the British jumped in and issued the Balfour Declaration supporting the emergence of a Jewish national home in Palestine, which most people understood to mean eventual Jewish statehood in Palestine.
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Most people understood that in Britain and among the Zionists and among the Arabs.
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But the British declared the Balfour Declaration or issued the Balfour Declaration not only because of imperial self-interest and this is what you re basically saying.
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They had imperial interests, a buffer state which would protect the Suez Canal from the East.
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The British also were motivated by idealism.
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And this incidentally is how Balfour described the reasoning behind issuing the declaration.
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And he said, the Western world, Western Christendom owes the Jews a great debt, both for giving the world and the West, if you like, values, social values as embodied in the Bible, social justice and all sorts of other things.
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and the Christian world owes the Jews because it persecuted them for 2,000 years.
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This debt we re now beginning to repay with the 1917 declaration favoring Zionism.
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But it s also worth remembering that the Jews
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weren t proxies or attached to the British imperial endeavor.
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They were happy to receive British support in 1917 and then subsequently when the British ruled Palestine for 20-30 years,
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But they weren t part of the British imperial design or mission.
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They wanted a state for themselves, the Jews, happy to have the British support them, happy today to have the Americans support Israel.
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But it s not because we re stooges or extensions of American imperial interests.
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The British, incidentally, always described in Arab narratives or propaganda as consistent supporters of Zionism.
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They weren t.
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The first British rulers in Palestine, 1917, 1920.
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Herbert Samuel.
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No, before Herbert Samuel.
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Samuel came in 1920.
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The British ruled there for three years previously, and most of the leaders, the British generals and so on, who were in Palestine, were anti-Zionist.
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Subsequently, in the 20s and 30s, the British occasionally
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curbed Zionist immigration to Palestine and in 1939 switched horses and supported the Arab national movement and not Zionism.
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They turned anti-Zionist and basically said you Arabs will rule Palestine within the next 10 years.
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This is what we re giving you by limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine.
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But the Arabs didn t actually understand what they were being given on the silver platter, Husseini again, and he said, no, no, we can t accept the British White Paper of May 1939, which had given the Arabs everything they wanted basically, self-determination in an Arab majority state.
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So what I m saying is the British
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at some point did support the Zionist enterprise, but at other points were less consistent in the support.
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And in 1939 until 1948, when they didn t vote even for partition for Jewish statehood in Palestine in the UN resolution, they didn t support Zionism during the last decade of the mandate.
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It s worth remembering that.
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I d like to respond to that.
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I mean, speaking of propaganda,
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I find it simply impossible to accept that Balfour, who as British Prime Minister in 1905 was a chief sponsor of the Aliens Act, which was specifically.
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He changed his mind.
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Which was specifically designed.
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To keep out Jews.
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To keep persecuted Eastern European Jews out of the streets of the UK.
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And he changed his mind.
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And who was denounced as an anti-Semite by the entire British Jewish establishment.
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A decade later, all of a sudden... Changed his mind.
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People change their minds, but when the changing of the mind just coincidentally happens to coincide with the British imperial interest, I think perhaps the transformation is a little more superficial than he s being given credit for.
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It was clearly a British imperial venture, and if there had been no threat to the Suez Canal during World War I,
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Regardless of what Balfour would have thought about the Jews and their contribution to history and their persecution and so on, there would have been no Balfour Declaration.
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Can I ask a real quick question on that?
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Why did the British ever cap immigration then from Jews to that area at all?
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We re talking now about 19... Sure, but I m saying that if the whole goal was just to be an imperialist project, like there were terrorist attacks from Jewish... Yes, but I ll answer you.
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Yeah, in the 40s, yeah.
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And we re talking now about 1917, and as I mentioned earlier, I don t think the British had a Jewish state in mind.
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That s why they used the term Jewish National Home.
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I think what they wanted was a British protectorate, loyal to and dependent
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upon the British.
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I think an outstanding review of British policy towards these issues during the mandate has been done by Martin Bunton of the University of Victoria, and he basically makes the argument that once the British realized the mess they were in, certainly by the late 20s, early 30s, they recognized these
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the mess they were in, the irreconcilable differences, and basically pursued a policy of just muddling on.
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And muddling on in the context of British rule in Palestine, whose overall purpose was to serve for the development of Zionist institutions, Yeshua s economy and so on, meant,
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even if the British were not self-consciously doing this, preparing the groundwork for the eventual establishment of a Jewish state.
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I don t know if that answers your question.
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Except they did turn anti-Zionist in 1939.
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Yes, of course.
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And maintained that anti... They were being shot off by... And maintained that Zionist, no, no, before they were being shot off, but maintained that anti-Zionist posture until 1948.
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Okay.
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And if I may, just also one point.
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You mentioned Haj Amin al-Husseini during, well, entirely legitimate.
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But what I would also point out is that you had a Zionist organization, the Leahy.
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300 people.
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300 people, one of whom happened to become an Israeli prime minister, an Israeli foreign minister, a speaker of Israeli parliament.
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Maybe you should give his name.
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Yitzhak Shamir proposing an alliance with Nazi Germany in 1941.
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The Lech was an unimportant organization in the Yishuv.
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300 people versus 30,000 belong to the Haganah.
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So it was not a very important organization.
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It s true before the Holocaust actually began, they wanted allies against the British where they could find them.
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We re talking 1941 here, not 1931.
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1941 from what I recall.
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1940.
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They approached the German emissary in Istanbul or something.
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And if I may,
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proposed an alliance with Nazi Germany on what the Leahy described as on the basis of shared ideological principles.
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Well, they said they did.
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Why are you doing these things?
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Of course they said it.
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You know the statement, but you know that you know what the statement said on the basis of a shared ideology.
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Why do you say no?
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You could just… Wait, the Leahy people were Nazis.
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Is that what you re saying?
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Are you saying that?
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Forget statements.
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You like to quote things, but were they Nazis?
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Were the Lechi Nazis?
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That s what I m asking.
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What did he say?
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Did he say that the basis of the pact was their agreement on ideology?
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There wasn t any pact.
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They suggested, they proposed an agreement.
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And what did the agreement say?
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They wanted arms against the British.
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That s what they wanted.
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What did the agreement say?
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Yeah, well, that s what Khadim al-Husseini wanted also.
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That s what others in India... No, no, but they didn t... Lefty people didn t work in Berlin helping the Nazi regime.
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I mean, it s what the IRA wanted also.
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No, but this is what Khadim al-Husseini did.
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You know that he was an anti-Semite.
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You ve probably read some of his works.
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It wasn t just anti-British, it was also anti-Semitic.
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They had a common ground with Hitler.
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It s as simple as that.
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I think we can agree.
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Not every anti-Semite is a Hitlerite.
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He literally worked with the Nazis to recruit people.
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He wasn t just a guy posting.
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And he was an absolutely revolting, disgusting human being.
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There s something happening here.
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But the problem is you re saying that Husseini was his influence.
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You re saying the Mufi was- I don t even understand of all the crimes you want to ascribe to the Palestinian people, trying to blame them directly, indirectly, indirectly, or indirectly three times to move for the Nazi Holocaust is completely lunatic.
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The way there s not a he s blaming them for the Holocaust.
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He s saying that from the perspective of Jews in the region, Palestinians would have been part of the region.
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That is exactly what he said.
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I ve read him.
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You don t understand him.
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Believe me, I m a lot more literate than you, Mr. Borrelli.
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guy that wrote the stuff.
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You read what Wikipedia said.
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That s great.
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And you don t even speak Hebrew and you call yourself an Israeli historian.
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We re all here on different grounds.
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I just want, if I can just respond to you.
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Well, no, no, I m just saying that the, there were two, there were two tricks.
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That s fine.
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There were two tricks that are being played here that I think is interesting.
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One is you guys claim that the Leahy was trying to forge an alliance with Nazi Germany because of a shared
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ideology.
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That s what they said.
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Yeah, but hold on.
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No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
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It s about what you said.
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You brought that up to imply that Zionism must be inexorably linked.
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No, I m sorry.
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No, you re putting words in my mouth.
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Okay.
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Wait.
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Well then what was the purpose of saying that the Leahy claim that they delay who were small group of people that were reviled by many in Israel by everybody?
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Practically.
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They were called terrorists.
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The Zionist movement called them terrorists.
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Yes, and Shamir called himself a terrorist.
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They were so irrelevant that their leader ended up being kicked upstairs to the leader of the Israeli parliament, to the Israeli foreign minister.
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And Begin was also... Yes, you want to characterize him as irrelevant as well?
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Go ahead.
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No, characterize him as relevant or irrelevant based on what happens decades later.
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The timeline matters.
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Well, the question is, what is the point of saying that the Leahy tried to forge an alliance?
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Why is it relevant?
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It s bringing up the Mufti of Jerusalem and trying to blame the Holocaust.
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The Mufti was the leader of the Palestine Arab National Movement.
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The Leahy was 300 people.
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And he had as much to do with the Nazi Holocaust as I did.
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No, he recruited people for the SS.
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How can you get away from that?
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No, he recruited people.
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He recruited soldiers in the Balkans, mostly Kosovars, which was disgusting.
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I have no doubt about that.
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He also wrote letters to foreign ministers saying, don t let the Jews out.
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The Italian foreign minister received letters from Husseini during the Holocaust.
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During the Holocaust, don t let the Jews out.
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I m not saying he was a major architect of the Holocaust.
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He wasn t even minor.
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But if we re agreed, if we re agreed that Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, collaborated with the Nazis during World War II and actively sought their sponsorship, why is it irrelevant?
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And probably wanted the destruction of European Jewry.
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He probably wanted a lot of things.
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Okay.
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Okay.
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If that s relevant, why is it irrelevant
7
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that a prime minister of Israel… Not prime minister.
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In 1941, he wasn t prime minister of Israel.
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He was a leader of a very small terrorist group, denounced as terrorists by the mainstream of Zionists.
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Do you consider it irrelevant that many years ago Mahmoud Abbas wrote a doctoral thesis, which is basically tantamount to…
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But I didn t bring it up, you re the one who s bringing it up.
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Yes, but you consider that relevant.
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Belittling the Holocaust, that s what you re saying.
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The president of the Palestinian National Authority belittled the Holocaust and it didn t happen, or only a few Jews died.
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I think that s a fair characterization of Mahmoud Abbas.
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But I didn t bring it up.
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I brought it up.
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Yeah.
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Okay, because my question is, then why is Shamir s antecedency relevant?
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He was a terrorist leader of a very small, marginal group.
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Khadjamina Husseini was the head of the movement at the time.
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Also, the point of bringing up Husseini s stuff wasn t to say that he was a great further of the Holocaust.
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It s that he might ve been a great further in the prevention of Jews fleeing to go to Palestine to escape the Holocaust.
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That was the point.
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And I explained why I think that s not an entirely
7
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accurate characterization, but then I wanted to make another point.
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If it s legitimate to bring up his role during World War II, why is it illegitimate to bring up a man who would become Israel s Speaker of Parliament, Foreign Minister?
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40 years hence, 40 years hence.
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Yes, why is it?
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And also- He was a young terrorist.
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And was also responsible
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for the murder of the United Nations  first international envoy, Bernadotte, Foki Bernadotte.
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Why is all that irrelevant?
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I don t understand.
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I think that the reason why he was brought up was because Jewish people in this time period would have viewed it as there was a prevention of Jews leaving Europe because of the Palestinians pressuring the British to put a curb, that 75,000 immigration limit, yes.
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But it s not about them furthering the Holocaust or being an architect major or minor play in the Holocaust.
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He was a major player in that region.
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Actually, Eddie Morris made the specific claim that the Palestinians played an indirect role in the Holocaust.
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The indirect role would have been the prevention of people escaping from...
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And my response to that is, first of all, I disagree with that characterization.
7
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But second of all… How can you disagree with that?
7
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They prevented, they forced the British to prevent emigration of Jews from Europe and reaching safe shores in Palestine.
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That s what they did.
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And they knew that the Jews were being persecuted in Europe at the time.
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the only spot of land on earth?
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Yes, basically that was the problem.
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The Jews couldn t emigrate anywhere else.
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What about your great friends in Britain, the architects of the Balfour Declaration?
7
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By the late 1930s, they weren t happy to take in Jews and Americans.
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And why are Palestinians, who were not Europeans, who had zero role in the rise of Nazism,
7
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who had no relation to any of this, why are they somehow uniquely responsible for what happened in Europe and uniquely culpable?
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Because they were hoping to close the only safe haven for Jews, that s all.
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Oh really, the United States wasn t a potential safe haven.
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The only one was Palestine.
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The United States had no room
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From the Atlantic to Pacific for Jews.
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It did have room, but it didn t want Jews.
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So that wasn t the only safe haven.
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But shouldn t you be focusing your anger and outrage?
7
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America should be blamed for not letting Jews in during the 30s and 40s.
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They are blamed, but nobody blames them for the Holocaust.
7
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Well, indirectly.
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Indirectly.
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No, I ve never heard it said that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was indirectly responsible for the Holocaust.
7
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I never heard that.
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Now, maybe it s in Israeli literature because the Israelis have gone mad.
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Yes, your prime minister said the whole idea of the gas chambers came from the mufti of Jerusalem.
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That s nonsense.
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We all know that s nonsense.
7
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But we also know that Netanyahu said it, correct?
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Netanyahu says so many things which are absurd or simple lies.
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And he happens to be the longest-serving prime minister of Israel.
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I cannot be responsible for them.
7
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No, you re not responsible for them, but it is relevant that he s the longest-serving prime minister of Israel.
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It says something about the Israeli public, right?
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And he gets elected, not despite saying such things, but because he says such things.
7
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His voters don t care about Khadr Amin al-Husseini or Hitler.
7
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They know nothing about his voters.
7
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You may well be right.
7
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His base know nothing about anything.
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And he can say what he likes and they ll say yes, so they don t care if he says these things.
7
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You may well be right.
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Anyway, not to beat a dead horse, but I still don t understand.
7
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I ll just conclude by saying, I don t understand why the Mufti of Jerusalem is relevant.
7
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He is relevant, he is relevant.
7
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But Yishak Shamir is not wrong.
7
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Because Shamir wasn t the head of the national movement.
7
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He represented 100 or 200 or 300 gunmen who were considered terrorists by the Zionist movement at the time.
7
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The fact that 30 years later he becomes prime minister, that s the crux of history.
7
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But Khadim al-Husseini was the head of the Palestine Arab National Movement at the time.
7
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What can you do?
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I think we re speaking past each other, but I ll leave it there.
7
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I m talking facts.
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Let s move to the modern day and we ll return to history, maybe 67 and other important moments, but let s look to today, in the recent months, October 7th.
7
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Let me ask sort of a pointed question.
7
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Was October 7th attacks by Hamas on Israel genocidal?
7
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was it an act of ethnic cleansing?
7
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Just so we lay out the moral calculus that we are engaged in.
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I don t know, maybe you was sure.
7
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The problem with October 7th is this.
7
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The Hamas fighters who invaded southern Israel were sent to Gaza.
7
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ordered to murder, rape, and do all the nasty things that they did.
7
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And they killed some 1,200 Israelis that day.
7
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abducted, as we know, something like 250 civilians, mostly civilians, also some soldiers, took them back to Gaza, dungeons in Gaza.
7
SPEAKER_03
But they were motivated, not just by the words of their current leader in the Gaza Strip, but by their ideology, which is embedded in their charter from 1988, if I remember correctly.
7
SPEAKER_03
And that charter is genocidal.
7
SPEAKER_03
It says that the Jews must be eradicated basically from the land of Israel, from Palestine.
7
SPEAKER_03
The Jews are described there as sons of apes and pigs.
7
SPEAKER_03
The Jews are a base people, killers of prophets, and they should not exist in Palestine.
7
SPEAKER_03
It doesn t say that they necessarily should be murdered all around the world.
7
SPEAKER_03
the Hamas charter, but certainly the Jews should be eliminated from Palestine.
7
SPEAKER_03
And this is the driving ideology behind the massacre of the Jews on October 7, which brought down on the Gaza Strip.
7
SPEAKER_03
And I think with the intention by the Hamas
7
SPEAKER_03
of the Israeli counter-offensive because they knew that that counter-offensive would result in many Palestinian dead because the Hamas fighters and their weaponry and so on were embedded in the population in Gaza and they hoped to benefit from this in the eyes of world public opinion as Israel chased these Hamas people
7
SPEAKER_03
and their ammunition dumps and so on, and killed lots of Palestinian civilians in the process.
7
SPEAKER_03
All of this was understood by Sinwar, by the head of the Hamas, and he strived for that.
7
SPEAKER_03
But initially, he wanted to kill as many Jews as he could in the border areas around the Gaza Strip.
7
SPEAKER_02
I ll respond directly to the points you made, and then I ll leave it to Norm to bring in the
7
SPEAKER_02
historical context, that Hamas charter is from the 90s, I think.
7
1988.
7
SPEAKER_02
1988, so it s from the 80s.
7
SPEAKER_02
I think your characterization of that charter as anti-Semitic is indisputable.
7
SPEAKER_02
I think your characterization of that charter as genocidal
7
SPEAKER_02
is off the mark.
7
SPEAKER_04
It s implicit.
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SPEAKER_02
And more importantly, that charter has been superseded by a new charter.
7
SPEAKER_02
In fact, has been, well, there is a- There is no new charter.
7
SPEAKER_02
There is a charter.
7
SPEAKER_03
There is an explanation, a statement they made- 2018, a political statement.
7
SPEAKER_03
In 2000 and something.
7
2018.
7
SPEAKER_03
2018, supposedly clarifying things which are in the charter, but it doesn t actually step back from what the charter says.
7
SPEAKER_03
Eliminate Israel, eliminate the Jews from the land of Israel.
7
SPEAKER_02
2018, the Hamas charter, if we look at the current version of the charter… It s not a call to charter.
7
SPEAKER_02
You re calling it a charter.
7
SPEAKER_03
It wasn t.
8
SPEAKER_04
This thing called the Charter is what was issued in 1988 by Yassin himself.
8
SPEAKER_04
Anyway, it makes a clear distinction between Jews and Zionists in 2018.
8
SPEAKER_04
Now, you can choose to dismiss it, believe it, it s sincere, it s insincere, whatever.
8
SPEAKER_02
Insincere is probably the right word.
8
SPEAKER_04
Secondly, I m really unfamiliar with fighters who consult these kinds of documents before they go on.
8
SPEAKER_02
In the kindergarten, they re told, kill the Jews.
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SPEAKER_02
They practice with make-believe guns and uniforms when they re five years old in the kindergartens of the Hamas.
8
SPEAKER_04
At the instruction of the Commissioner General of UNRWA, right?
8
SPEAKER_02
I didn t say that.
8
SPEAKER_02
I said the Hamas has kindergartens and summer camps in which they train to kill Jews, children.
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SPEAKER_04
Secondly, you keep saying Jews, to which I would respond.
8
SPEAKER_04
They use the word Jews.
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SPEAKER_04
To which I would respond that Hamas does not have a record of
8
SPEAKER_04
deliberately targeting Jews who are not Israelis.
8
SPEAKER_04
And in fact, it also doesn t have a record of deliberately targeting either Jews or Israelis outside Israel and Palestine.
8
SPEAKER_04
So, you know, all this talk of... Unlike the Hezbollah, which has targeted Jews outside Palestine.
8
SPEAKER_04
We re talking about October 7th in Hamas.
8
SPEAKER_04
If you d also like to speak about Hezbollah, let s get to that separately, if you don t mind.
8
SPEAKER_04
So, again, genocidal, well, if that term is going to be discussed, my first response would be, let s talk about
8
SPEAKER_04
potentially genocidal actions against Israelis rather than against Jews for the reasons that I just mentioned.
8
SPEAKER_04
And again, I find this constant conflation of Jews, Israel, Zionism to be a bit disturbing.
8
SPEAKER_04
Secondly, I think there are quite a few indications in the factual record that raise serious questions
8
SPEAKER_04
about the accusations of the genocidal intent and genocidal practice of what happened on October 7th.
8
SPEAKER_04
And my final point would be
8
SPEAKER_04
I don t think I should take your word for it.
8
SPEAKER_04
I don t think you should take my word for it.
8
SPEAKER_04
I think what we need here is a proper, independent, international investigation.
8
SPEAKER_04
And the reason we need that, of genocide during this conflict, whether by Palestinians on October 7th or Israel thereafter, the reason that we need such an investigation is because Hamas is,
8
SPEAKER_04
There won t be any hearings on what Hamas did on October 7th at the International Court of Justice because the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide deals only with states and not with movements.
8
SPEAKER_04
I think the International Criminal Court and specifically its current prosecutor, Karim Khan, lacks any and all credibility.
8
SPEAKER_04
He s been an absolute failure at his job.
8
SPEAKER_04
He s just been sitting on his backside for years on this file.
8
SPEAKER_04
And I think I would point out that Hamas has called for independent investigations of all these allegations.
8
SPEAKER_04
Israel has categorically rejected any international investigation, of course fully supported by the United States.
8
SPEAKER_04
And I think what is required is to have credible investigations of these things.
8
SPEAKER_04
Because I don t think you re going to convince me, I don t think I m going to convince you.
8
SPEAKER_04
this is two people sitting across the table from each other.
8
SPEAKER_02
You don t even have to investigate.
8
SPEAKER_02
You know how many citizens, civilians died in the October 7th assault.
8
SPEAKER_02
You know that there are lots of allegations of rape.
8
SPEAKER_02
I don t know how persuaded you are of those.
8
SPEAKER_02
They did find bodies without heads.
8
SPEAKER_04
There were no beheadings of infants.
8
SPEAKER_02
There were some beheadings, apparently.
8
SPEAKER_03
The Israelis didn t even claim that in the document they submitted before the ICJ.
8
SPEAKER_03
Go read what your government submitted.
8
SPEAKER_03
It never mentioned beheadings.
8
SPEAKER_02
Well, as far as I know, there were some people who were beheaded.
8
SPEAKER_02
We could bring it up right now.
8
SPEAKER_03
You also denied that there were rapes there.
8
SPEAKER_03
I didn t deny.
8
SPEAKER_03
I said I ve not seen convincing evidence that confirms it.
8
SPEAKER_03
I ve said that from day one, and I ll say it today, four and a half months later.
8
SPEAKER_03
Do you know that they killed 800 or 900 civilians?
8
SPEAKER_03
Absolutely.
8
SPEAKER_03
That seems to me indisputable.
8
SPEAKER_03
Oh, okay.
8
SPEAKER_03
Well, I m glad that you re conceding something.
8
SPEAKER_03
I ve said that from day one.
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, to be clear, you haven t.
8
SPEAKER_00
You did a debate.
8
SPEAKER_03
I don t remember the talk show, but you seem to imply that there was a lot of crossfire and that it might have been the IDF that killed a lot of... I said that there is no question, because the names were published in Haaretz, there is no question that roughly of the 1,200 people killed, 800 of them were civilians.
8
SPEAKER_03
850.
8
SPEAKER_03
850, fine.
8
SPEAKER_03
So I never said that, but then I said, no, we don t know exactly how they were killed, but 800 civilians killed?
8
850?
8
SPEAKER_03
No question there.
8
SPEAKER_03
And I also said, on repeat occasions, there cannot be any doubt, in my opinion, as of now, with the available evidence, that Hamas was responsible for significant atrocities.
8
SPEAKER_03
And I made sure to include the plural.
8
SPEAKER_00
There s a lot of tricky language being employed here.
8
SPEAKER_00
Do you think of the 850?
8
SPEAKER_03
It s called attaching value to words and not talking like a motor mouth.
8
SPEAKER_03
I am very careful about qualifying because that s what language is about.
8
SPEAKER_00
That s great.
8
SPEAKER_00
Then let me just ask a clarifying question.
8
SPEAKER_00
Do you firmly believe that the majority of the 850 civilians were killed by Hamas?
8
SPEAKER_03
My view is even if it were half,
8
SPEAKER_03
400 is a huge number by any reckoning.
8
SPEAKER_00
Professor Morris, I don t know.
8
SPEAKER_00
I agree with
8
SPEAKER_03
Muin Rabbani, I m not sure if he concedes the 400.
8
SPEAKER_03
I ll say... Why 400?
8
SPEAKER_02
Who ever thought up the 400?
8
SPEAKER_02
800 of the 850 were slaughtered by Hamas.
8
SPEAKER_02
Maybe a couple of individuals were killed in the Israeli action.
8
SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
8
SPEAKER_00
You re saying from day one you believe this particular thing, and you clearly don t.
8
SPEAKER_00
You clearly don t believe this thing.
8
SPEAKER_03
You said people died.
8
SPEAKER_03
That s not controversial.
8
SPEAKER_00
Wait, hold on, hold on.
8
SPEAKER_03
That s not controversial.
8
SPEAKER_03
Mr. Bunnell, I attach value to words.
8
SPEAKER_03
said that when I when I was Mr. Brunel, please slow down the speech and attempt to listen.
8
SPEAKER_03
When I was explicitly asked by Pierce Morgan, I said there can be no question that Hamas committed atrocities.
8
SPEAKER_03
I ve heard this on October 7th.
8
SPEAKER_03
If you want me to pin down a number, I can t do that and ask you to put out a number.
8
SPEAKER_00
You can listen to what I m asking.
8
SPEAKER_00
No, my question is, I ll ask you a very precise.
8
SPEAKER_00
Sorry.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s a very easy question.
8
SPEAKER_04
If I understood your question correctly.
8
SPEAKER_00
My question is, do you think the majority of the people that were killed on October 7th, the civilians, were killed by Hamas, or are we subscribing to the idea that the IDF killed hundreds, four or five hundred?
8
SPEAKER_04
No, but let me explain why that s a difficult question to answer.
8
SPEAKER_04
The total number of civilians killed was 800, 850.
8
SPEAKER_04
We know that Hamas is responsible probably for the majority of those killings.
8
SPEAKER_04
We also know that there were killings by Islamic Jihad.
8
SPEAKER_02
We also know... We re bunching together the Islamic Jihad and the Hamas.
8
SPEAKER_02
That s splitting hairs now.
8
SPEAKER_00
No, but he means the raiders.
8
SPEAKER_00
I m speaking in opposition to the conspiracy theory that people like
8
SPEAKER_00
Do you prefer Norm or Professor Frankelstein?
8
SPEAKER_00
I don t know, how do you prefer to be addressed?
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, it s not a conspiracy theory.
8
SPEAKER_00
The conspiracy theory is the idea that the IDF killed the majority of them.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s not a conspiracy theory.
8
SPEAKER_00
There s also a theory that, as Norm pointed out on the show that he was on, that he thought that it was very strange that given how reputable Israeli services are when it comes to sending ambulances,
8
SPEAKER_00
retrieving bodies.
8
SPEAKER_00
He thought it was very strange that that number was continually being adjusted.
8
SPEAKER_00
So when you say that in combination with, well, I m not sure how many were killed.
8
SPEAKER_04
Well, do you know why the number went down?
8
SPEAKER_04
The number went down because the Israeli authorities were in possession of 200 corpses that were burned to a crisp that they assumed were Israelis who had been killed on October 7th.
8
SPEAKER_04
They later determined that these were in fact Palestinian fighters.
8
SPEAKER_04
Now how does a Palestinian fighter get burned to a crisp?
8
SPEAKER_02
No, you re mixing two things.
8
SPEAKER_02
Some of the bodies they weren t able to identify and eventually they ruled that some of them were actually Arab marauders rather than Israeli victims.
8
SPEAKER_02
Some, a few of them also, of the Jews, were burnt to a crisp.
8
SPEAKER_02
And it took them time to work this out.
8
SPEAKER_02
And they came out initially with a slightly higher figure, 1,400 dead, and eventually reduced it to 1,200 dead Israelis.
8
SPEAKER_04
And the reason is that a proportion of Israeli civilians killed on October 7th, I don t believe it was a majority,
8
SPEAKER_04
we don t know how many.
8
SPEAKER_04
Some were killed in crossfire, some were killed by Israeli shell fire, helicopter fire, and so on.
8
SPEAKER_04
And the majority were killed by Palestinians.
8
SPEAKER_04
And of that majority, we don t know
8
SPEAKER_04
I mean, again, I understood your question as referring specifically to Hamas, which is why I tried to answer it that way.
8
SPEAKER_04
But if you meant generically Palestinians, yes.
8
SPEAKER_04
If you mean specifically Hamas, we don t have a clear breakdown of how many were- No, I don t mean specifically Hamas.
8
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
8
SPEAKER_00
But I just think when you use the word some, that s doing a lot of heavy lifting.
8
SPEAKER_00
Who used some?
8
SPEAKER_00
That s fine, but some can mean anywhere from 1% to 49%.
8
SPEAKER_00
But we don t know.
8
SPEAKER_01
So the numbers here and the details are interesting and important almost from a legal perspective, but if we zoom out the moral perspective, are Palestinians from Gaza justified in violent resistance?
8
SPEAKER_04
Well, Palestinians have the right to resistance.
8
SPEAKER_04
Palestinian, that right includes the right to armed resistance.
8
SPEAKER_04
At the same time, armed resistance is subject to the laws of war, and there are very clear regulations that separate legitimate acts of armed resistance
8
SPEAKER_04
from acts of armed resistance that are not legitimate.
8
SPEAKER_01
And the attacks of October 7th, where did they land for you?
8
SPEAKER_04
There s been almost exclusive focus on the attacks on civilian population centers and the killings of civilians on October 7th.
8
SPEAKER_04
What is much less discussed to the point of amnesia is that there were
8
SPEAKER_04
very extensive attacks on Israeli military and intelligence facilities on October 7th.
8
SPEAKER_04
I would make a very clear distinction between those two.
8
SPEAKER_04
And secondly, I m not sure that I would characterize the efforts by Palestinians on October 7th to seize Israeli territory and Israeli population centers
8
SPEAKER_04
as in and of themselves illegitimate.
8
SPEAKER_04
I think what you had on October 7th was an effort by Hamas to seize Israeli territory and population centers.
8
SPEAKER_02
That s not what I said.
8
SPEAKER_04
What I said is I think I would not describe the effort to seize Israeli territory as in and of itself illegitimate, as a separate issue from the killing of Israeli civilians in those cases where they had been deliberately targeted.
8
SPEAKER_04
That s very clearly illegitimate.
8
SPEAKER_02
whole families were slaughtered in kibbutz.
8
SPEAKER_02
Many of them left wingers, incidentally, who helped Palestinians go to hospitals in Israel and so on, even drove Palestinian cancer patients to hospitals.
8
SPEAKER_04
Again, I m making a distinction here.
8
SPEAKER_02
But you don t seem to be very condemnatory of what the Hamas did.
8
SPEAKER_04
Well, I don t do selective condemnation.
8
SPEAKER_02
I m not talking about selective, I m talking about specific condemnation of this specific assault on civilians.
8
SPEAKER_02
I would, for example, condemn Israeli assaults on civilians, deliberate assaults on civilians.
8
SPEAKER_02
I would condemn them, but you re not doing that with the Hamas.
8
SPEAKER_04
You know what the issue is?
8
SPEAKER_04
I ve been speaking in public now, I would say since the late 1980s and interviewed and so on.
8
SPEAKER_04
I have never on one occasion ever been asked to condemn any Israeli act.
8
SPEAKER_04
When I ve been in group discussions, those supporting the Israeli action or perspective, I have never encountered an example where these individuals are asked to condemn what Israel is doing.
8
SPEAKER_04
The demand and obligation of condemnation is exclusively applied
8
SPEAKER_04
And my personal experience over decades is exclusively applied to Palestinians.
8
SPEAKER_02
Israel is condemned day and night on every television channel and has been for the last decades.
8
SPEAKER_00
I m telling you about a personal experience lasting decades.
8
SPEAKER_03
I m trying to quote what you just said.
8
SPEAKER_03
I shouldn t have said anything at any point.
8
SPEAKER_03
You should say, Professor Morris, you just said, I would condemn any time Israel deliberately attacks civilians, okay?
8
SPEAKER_03
The problem, Professor Morris, is over and over again, you claim in the face of overwhelming evidence
8
SPEAKER_03
that they didn t attack civilians.
8
SPEAKER_02
That s not true.
8
SPEAKER_02
I ve said Israel has attacked civilians.
8
SPEAKER_02
In Kibia, Israel attacks civilians.
8
SPEAKER_02
And I ve written extensively about it.
8
SPEAKER_02
I know that.
8
SPEAKER_02
In Kafr Qasim, they kill civilians.
8
SPEAKER_02
So you re just eliminating.
8
SPEAKER_02
You re selecting.
8
SPEAKER_02
Stephen says you cherry-picked.
8
SPEAKER_03
You cherry-picked.
8
SPEAKER_03
Let s fast forward when you were an adult.
8
SPEAKER_03
What did you say about the 1982 Lebanon War?
8
SPEAKER_03
What did I say?
8
SPEAKER_03
You don t remember?
8
SPEAKER_03
Okay.
8
SPEAKER_03
Allow me.
8
SPEAKER_03
Uh-oh.
8
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
8
SPEAKER_03
So, it happens that I was not at all by any… I had no interest in the Israel-Palestine conflict as a young man until the… This is true.
8
SPEAKER_03
Until the 1982 Lebanon War.
8
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_03
Lost the passage.
8
SPEAKER_03
I ll find it.
8
SPEAKER_00
Okay, real quick while he s searching for that.
8
SPEAKER_00
You bring up something that s really important that a lot of people don t draw distinction between in that there is just causes for war and there is just ways to act within a war.
8
SPEAKER_00
And these two things principally do have a distinction from one another.
8
SPEAKER_00
However, while I appreciate the recognition of the distinction, the idea that the cause for war that Hamas was engaged in, I don t believe if we look at their actions in war or the statements that they ve made, it doesn t seem like it had to do with territorial acquisition.
8
SPEAKER_00
No, no, no.
8
SPEAKER_04
No, the point I was making was...
8
SPEAKER_04
what was Hamas trying to achieve militarily on October 7th?
8
SPEAKER_04
And I was pointing out that the focus has been very much on Hamas attacks on civilians and atrocities and so on.
8
SPEAKER_04
And I m not saying those things should be ignored.
8
SPEAKER_04
What I m saying is that what s getting lost in the shuffle is that there were extensive attacks on military and intelligence facilities.
8
SPEAKER_04
And as far as the, let s say, the other aspects are concerned, because I think either you or Lex asked me about the legitimacy of these attacks, I said, I m unclear whether, you know,
8
SPEAKER_04
efforts by Hamas to seize Israeli population centers in and of themselves are illegitimate as opposed to actions that either deliberately targeted Israeli civilians or actions that should reasonably have been expected to result in the killings of Israeli civilians.
8
SPEAKER_04
Those, strike me, is by definition illegitimate.
8
SPEAKER_04
and I want to be very clear about that.
8
SPEAKER_04
I have where I. Illegitimate means you condemn them.
8
SPEAKER_04
Illegitimate means they are not legitimate.
8
SPEAKER_04
I have a problem.
8
SPEAKER_02
Condemning your side, yes.
8
SPEAKER_04
No, not condemning my side.
8
SPEAKER_04
I have a problem with selective outrage, and I have a problem with selective condemnation, and as I explained to you a few minutes ago, in my decades of appearing in public and being interviewed, I have never seen,
9
SPEAKER_01
I ve never been asked to condemn an Israeli action.
9
SPEAKER_01
I ve never been asked for a moral judgment on an Israeli action.
9
SPEAKER_01
Exclusive request for condemnation has to do with what Palestinians do.
9
SPEAKER_01
And just as importantly, I m sure if you watch BBC or CNN, when is the last time an Israeli spokesperson has been asked to condemn an Israeli act?
9
SPEAKER_01
I ve never seen it.
9
SPEAKER_00
I don t think we condemn the Arab side either, though, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
I don t think there was any condemnation.
9
SPEAKER_01
No, but now that we re talking about Israeli victims, all of a sudden, morality is central.
9
SPEAKER_00
Well, I think the reason why it comes up is because there s no shortage of international condemnation for Israel.
9
SPEAKER_00
As Norm will point out a million times, that there are 50 billion UN resolutions.
9
SPEAKER_00
You ve got Amnesty International.
9
SPEAKER_00
You ve got multiple bodies of the UN.
9
SPEAKER_00
You ve got, now this case, for the ICJ.
9
SPEAKER_00
So there s no question of if there s condemnation for Israel.
9
SPEAKER_00
Sorry, if I can interrupt you.
9
SPEAKER_00
In 1948, the entire world stood behind
9
SPEAKER_01
the establishment of a Jewish state, and the entire world.
9
SPEAKER_03
No, no, except the Arab states and the Muslim states.
9
SPEAKER_03
Well.
9
SPEAKER_03
Not the entire world.
9
SPEAKER_01
Okay, but I think you know what I mean by that.
9
SPEAKER_03
The Western democracies, that s what you re saying.
9
SPEAKER_03
Well, and then also, it s my quick question.
9
SPEAKER_03
Western democracies supported the establishment of Israel.
9
SPEAKER_00
My quick question was, you said that you believe that, this is a very short one, you don t have to, it s just, you think that there s an argument to be made that the people in Gaza, that Hamas and Islamic Jihad, whoever participated, had a just cause for war.
9
SPEAKER_00
Maybe they didn t do it in the correct way, but they maybe had a just cause for war.
9
SPEAKER_01
I don t think there s a maybe there.
9
SPEAKER_00
Okay, you think they absolutely had a just cause for it.
9
SPEAKER_00
Do you think that Israel has a just cause for Operation Swords of Iron?
9
SPEAKER_00
No, of course not.
9
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
9
SPEAKER_02
All right.
9
SPEAKER_00
You can say your quote.
9
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
9
SPEAKER_02
First of all, on this issue of double standards, which is the one that irks or irritates Muin, you said that you are not a person of double standards, unlike people like Muin.
9
SPEAKER_02
you hold high a single standard and you condemn deliberate Israeli attacks on civilians.
9
SPEAKER_02
And I would say that s true for the period up till 1967, and I think it s accurate, your account of the First Intifada.
9
SPEAKER_02
There, it seems to me, you were in conformity with most mainstream accounts, and the case of the First Intifada
9
SPEAKER_02
You also used, surprisingly, he used Arab human rights sources like al-Haqq, which I think Muin worked for during the first intifada.
9
SPEAKER_02
That s true.
9
SPEAKER_02
But then something very strange happens.
9
SPEAKER_02
So let s illustrate it.
9
SPEAKER_03
Wait, there s something strange that s happened is the Arabs rejected the Oslo peace offers.
9
SPEAKER_03
That s what happened.
9
SPEAKER_01
By accepting the Oslo agreements.
9
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_02
By rejecting each time a Camp David and Taliban.
9
SPEAKER_02
If we have time,
9
SPEAKER_02
I know the record very well.
9
SPEAKER_02
I d be very happy to go through it with you.
9
SPEAKER_02
But let s get to those double standards.
9
SPEAKER_02
So this is what you have to say about Israel s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
9
SPEAKER_02
You said Israel was reluctant to harm civilians, sought to avoid casualties on both sides, and took care
9
SPEAKER_02
not to harm Lebanese and Palestinian civilians.
9
SPEAKER_02
You then went on to acknowledge the massive use of IDF firepower against civilians during the siege of Beirut, which traumatized Israeli society.
9
SPEAKER_02
Morris quickly enters the caveat that Israel, quote, tried to pinpoint military targets, but inevitably many civilians were hit.
9
SPEAKER_02
That s your description of the Lebanon War.
9
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As I say, that s when I first got involved in the conflict.
9
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I am a voracious reader.
9
SPEAKER_02
I read everything on the Lebanon War.
9
SPEAKER_02
I would say there s not a single account of the Lebanon War in which the estimates are between 15 and 20,000 Palestinian Lebanese were killed, overwhelmingly civilians.
9
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The biggest bloodletting until the current Gaza,
9
SPEAKER_02
genocide, biggest bloodletting, I would say I can t think of a single mainstream account that remotely approximates what you just said.
9
SPEAKER_02
So, leaving aside, I can name the books, voluminous, huge volumes.
9
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I ll just take one example.
9
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Now, you will remember, because I think you served in Lebanon in 1882, am I correct on that?
9
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_02
So you will remember that Dov Yarmia kept the war diary.
9
SPEAKER_02
So, with your permission, allow me to describe what he wrote during his diary.
9
SPEAKER_02
So he writes, the war machine of the IDF is galloping and trampling over the conquered territory, demonstrating a total insensitivity to the fate of the Arabs who are found in its path.
9
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A PLO-run hospital suffered a direct hit.
9
SPEAKER_02
Thousands of refugees are returning to the city.
9
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When they arrive at their homes, many of which have been destroyed or damaged, you hear their cries of pain and their howls over the deaths of their loved ones.
9
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The air is permeated with the smell of corpses.
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Destruction and death are continuing.
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SPEAKER_02
Does that sound like your description of the Lebanon
9
SPEAKER_03
Forget my description.
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SPEAKER_03
Forget it?
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SPEAKER_03
Words are in print.
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SPEAKER_03
We can t just forget them.
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SPEAKER_03
Let me just finish my sentence.
9
SPEAKER_03
The point you re making, which you somehow forget, is that there are Israelis who strongly criticize their own side and describe how Israelis are doing things which they regard as immoral.
9
SPEAKER_03
You don t find that on the Arab side.
9
SPEAKER_02
I m talking about you.
9
SPEAKER_02
You don t find that.
9
SPEAKER_02
Mr. Morris, I m not talking about Dev Jarmi.
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SPEAKER_02
I m talking about you, the historian.
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SPEAKER_02
How did you depict the Lebanon war?
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SPEAKER_03
Because I believe that the Israeli military tried to avoid committing a civilian casualty.
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SPEAKER_02
So Dev Jarmi, all the accounts by Robert Fisk and pity the nation.
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SPEAKER_02
Robert Fisk is anti-Zionist.
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SPEAKER_02
I know, I know, has always been right.
9
SPEAKER_02
So that s why that s why you can say with such confidence that you don t commit, you don t condemn deliberate Israeli attacks.
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SPEAKER_02
There weren t any, because there weren t any.
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SPEAKER_02
No, I didn t say they weren t.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah, you didn t.
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SPEAKER_02
You agreed that I have condemned Israeli attacks on civilians.
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SPEAKER_02
I never quarrel with facts.
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SPEAKER_02
Your description of the 1982 war is so shocking, it makes my innards writhe.
9
SPEAKER_02
And then your description of the Second Intifada?
9
SPEAKER_02
Your description of defensive shield, they are worse than apologetics.
9
SPEAKER_02
That s like the stonest tool of falsification.
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SPEAKER_03
When Arabs suicide bombers were destroying Jews in masses in buses and in restaurants.
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SPEAKER_03
That s the Second Intifada.
9
SPEAKER_02
Do you remember that?
9
SPEAKER_03
Suicide bombers in Jerusalem s buses and restaurants.
9
SPEAKER_02
I am completely aware of that.
9
SPEAKER_02
But if you forgot the numbers, it was three to one.
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SPEAKER_02
They killed mostly armed Palestinian government.
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SPEAKER_02
That s what you say in your book.
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SPEAKER_03
That s what I say.
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SPEAKER_02
But that s not what Amnesty International said.
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SPEAKER_02
That s not what Human Rights Watch said.
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SPEAKER_02
I don t remember what they said.
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SPEAKER_02
I do.
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SPEAKER_02
I don t know whether their figures are right.
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SPEAKER_03
My figures are right.
9
SPEAKER_03
In the Second Intifada, some 4,000 Palestinians were killed, most of them armed people, and a thousand Israelis were killed, almost all of them civilians.
9
SPEAKER_02
Professor Morris, fantasy, but I m not going to argue with here.
9
SPEAKER_02
Here s a simple challenge.
9
SPEAKER_02
You said not to look at the camera.
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SPEAKER_02
It scares the people.
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SPEAKER_02
I ll make the open challenge.
9
SPEAKER_02
You are going to scare them.
9
SPEAKER_02
No, Professor Morris, words are in print.
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SPEAKER_02
I wrote 50 pages analyzing all of your work.
9
SPEAKER_02
I quote, some will say cherry pick, but I think accurately quote you.
9
SPEAKER_02
Here s a simple challenge.
9
SPEAKER_02
Answer me in print.
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SPEAKER_02
answer what I wrote and show where I m making things up.
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SPEAKER_02
Answer me.
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SPEAKER_02
I m sorry.
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SPEAKER_02
I m not familiar.
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SPEAKER_02
That s no problem.
9
SPEAKER_02
You re a busy man.
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SPEAKER_02
You re an important historian.
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SPEAKER_02
You don t have to know everything that s in print, especially by modest publishers.
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SPEAKER_02
But now you know.
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SPEAKER_02
And so here s the public challenge.
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SPEAKER_02
You answer and show where I cherry-picked, where I misrepresented.
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SPEAKER_02
Send me the article.
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SPEAKER_02
I will explain.
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SPEAKER_02
And then we can have a civil scholarly discussion.
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SPEAKER_02
I m not sure we will agree.
9
SPEAKER_03
We don t have to agree.
9
SPEAKER_02
It s for the reader.
9
SPEAKER_02
to decide, looking at both sides, where this truth stands.
9
SPEAKER_04
And if I may ask, it s good to discuss ideas that are in the air now, as opposed to citing literature that was written in the past, as much as possible, because listeners were not familiar with the literature.
9
SPEAKER_04
So whatever was written, just express it, condense the key idea, and then we can debate the ideas.
9
SPEAKER_02
No, there are two aspects.
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SPEAKER_02
There s the public debate, but there s also
9
SPEAKER_02
written words.
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SPEAKER_04
Yes, I m just telling you that you, as an academic historian, put a lot of value in the written word, and I think it is valuable.
9
SPEAKER_03
He s incidentally not the only historian who puts value to words.
9
SPEAKER_03
I also do, actually.
9
SPEAKER_04
More than just one or two sentences at a time.
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SPEAKER_04
But in this context, just for the educational purpose of teaching people.
9
SPEAKER_02
The educational purpose is, why would people commit what I have to acknowledge, because I am faithful to the facts,
9
SPEAKER_02
massive atrocities on October 7th.
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SPEAKER_02
Why did that happen?
9
SPEAKER_02
And I think that s the problem.
9
SPEAKER_02
The past is erased.
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SPEAKER_02
And we suddenly went from 1948 to October 7th, 2023.
9
SPEAKER_02
And there is a problem there.
9
SPEAKER_04
So first of all, you have complete freedom to backtrack and we ll go there with you.
9
SPEAKER_04
Obviously, we can t cover every single year, every single event, but there s probably critical moments in time.
9
SPEAKER_00
Can I respond to something relating to the Lebanon War?
9
SPEAKER_00
I looked at the book that he got this from and what the quote was from.
9
SPEAKER_00
It sounds cold to say it, but war is tragic and civilians die.
9
SPEAKER_00
There is no war that this has not happened in the history of all of humankind.
9
SPEAKER_00
The statement that Israel might take care not to target civilians is not incompatible with a diary entry from someone who said they saw civilians getting killed.
9
SPEAKER_00
I think that sometimes we do a lot of weird games when we talk about international humanitarian law or laws that govern conflict where we say things like civilians dying is a war crime or civilian homes or hospitals getting destroyed is necessarily a war crime or is necessarily somebody intentionally targeting civilians without making distinctions between military targets or civilian ones.
9
SPEAKER_00
I think that when we analyze different attacks or when we talk about the conduct of the military, I think it s important to understand
9
SPEAKER_00
perspectively, from the unit of analysis of the actual military committing the acts, what s happening and what are the decisions being made, rather than just saying retrospectively, oh, well, a lot of civilians died, not very many military people died, comparatively speaking.
9
SPEAKER_00
It must have been war crimes, especially when you ve got another side.
9
SPEAKER_00
I ll fast forward to Hamas that intentionally attempts to induce those same civilian numbers because Hamas is guilty of any war crime that you would potentially accuse.
9
SPEAKER_00
And this is according to Amnesty International, people that Norm loves to cite.
9
SPEAKER_00
Hamas is guilty of all of these same war crimes, of them failing to take care of the civilian population, of them essentially utilizing human shields to try to fire rockets free from attack.
9
SPEAKER_00
Essentially, yes.
9
SPEAKER_00
I m just saying that, essentially, in terms of how international law defines it, not how Amnesty International defines it, but Amnesty International describes times of human shielding, but they don t actually apply the correct international legal standard.
9
SPEAKER_02
You don t know what s the correct international law.
9
SPEAKER_00
I know, absolutely.
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SPEAKER_00
You haven t the course.
9
SPEAKER_00
I absolutely don t, Norm.
9
SPEAKER_00
You haven t the course.
9
SPEAKER_00
I absolutely don t.
9
SPEAKER_00
But you can t find it on Wikipedia.
9
SPEAKER_00
I m just saying, believe it or not, Norm,
9
SPEAKER_00
The entire Geneva Convention is all on Wikipedia.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s a wonderful website.
9
SPEAKER_00
But I m just saying that on the Hamas side, if there s an attempt to induce this type of military activity, attempt to induce civilian harm, that it s not just enough to say like, well, here s a diary entry where a guy talks about how tragic these attacks are.
9
SPEAKER_01
I think the problem with your statement
9
SPEAKER_01
is that if you go back and listen to it, the first part of it is war is hell, civilians die, it s a fact of life.
9
SPEAKER_01
And you state that in a very factual matter.
9
SPEAKER_01
Then when you start talking about Hamas, all of a sudden you ve discovered morality, and you ve discovered condemnation, and you ve discovered intent, and you are unfortunately far from alone in this.
9
SPEAKER_01
I ll give you, I ll give you, you know who for me is a perfect example.
9
SPEAKER_00
Wait, hold on.
9
SPEAKER_00
We don t need examples.
9
SPEAKER_00
The false equivalency of the two sides is astounding.
9
SPEAKER_00
When Hamas kills civilians in a surprise attack on October 7th, this isn t because they are attempting to target military targets and they happen to stumble into a giant festival of people.
9
SPEAKER_00
Well, they did happen to stumble into it.
9
SPEAKER_00
They did, but when they stumbled into it, it wasn t an issue of trying to figure out a military target or not.
9
SPEAKER_00
They weren t failing in distinction.
9
SPEAKER_00
There wasn t a proportionality assessment done.
9
SPEAKER_00
It was just to kill civilians.
9
SPEAKER_01
Even the Amnesty International in 2008 and in 2014, and even today, will continue to say that these types of attacks- I don t think you ll find anyone who will deny that Hamas has targeted civilians.
9
SPEAKER_01
Sure.
9
SPEAKER_01
You gave the example of- But there s a difference.
9
SPEAKER_01
of suicide bombings during the Second Intifada.
9
SPEAKER_01
I mean, facts are facts.
9
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
9
SPEAKER_00
But I m saying that the Hamas targeting of its civilians is different than the incidental loss of life that occurs when Israel does... How, you know, genocide is the intentional mass murder.
9
SPEAKER_00
Genocide is an entirely separate claim.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but the idea that Israel is not in the business of intentionally targeting civilians, I know that s what we re supposed to believe, but the historical record stands very clearly.
9
SPEAKER_00
No, no, it doesn t.
9
SPEAKER_01
I don t believe it does.
9
SPEAKER_01
You ve written about it yourself.
9
SPEAKER_00
When you say historical, do you mean like in the 40s to the 60s, or do you mean like over the past like thousand years?
9
SPEAKER_01
I would say from the 30s of the last century to the 20s of this century.
9
SPEAKER_01
I just like to make, you know,
9
SPEAKER_01
The way you characterized it, I think the best example of that I ve come across during this specific conflict is John Kirby, the White House spokesman.
9
SPEAKER_01
I ve named him Tyr s tosterone for a very good reason.
9
SPEAKER_01
When he s talking about Palestinian civilian deaths, war is hell, it s a fact of life, get used to it.
9
SPEAKER_01
When he was confronted with Israeli civilian deaths on October 7th, he literally broke down in tears in public.
9
SPEAKER_01
But he understood that one is deliberate and one isn t.
9
SPEAKER_01
He understood that.
9
SPEAKER_01
No, that s what he tried to make us understand.
9
SPEAKER_03
No, no, he was speaking facts.
9
SPEAKER_03
The Hamas guys who attacked the kibbutzim, apart from the attacks on the military sites, when they attacked the kibbutzim, were out to kill civilians.
9
SPEAKER_03
And they killed family after family, house after house.
9
SPEAKER_03
The Israeli attacks on Hamas installations.
9
SPEAKER_00
You know better.
9
SPEAKER_03
I don t know better.
9
SPEAKER_03
No, you don t know Israeli pilots.
9
SPEAKER_03
That s the problem.
9
SPEAKER_03
Thank God.
9
SPEAKER_03
No, you don t know Israeli pilots.
9
SPEAKER_03
They believe that they are killing Hamas sneaks.
9
SPEAKER_03
They re given certain objectives and that s what they attack.
9
SPEAKER_02
And if the Hamas is hiding behind civilians, civilians die.
9
SPEAKER_02
Every time they target a kid, I m sure they believe it s Hamas.
9
SPEAKER_02
When they killed the four kids on the wall, I know they believed it, even though they were of diminutive size.
9
SPEAKER_02
You don t see the size.
9
SPEAKER_00
Let s see the size.
9
SPEAKER_00
You ve lied about this particular instance in the past.
9
SPEAKER_00
Those kids weren t just on the beaches as often stated in articles.
9
SPEAKER_00
Those kids were literally coming out of a previously identified Hamas compound that they had operated from.
9
SPEAKER_02
Mr. Borelli, with all due respect, you re such a fantastic moron.
9
SPEAKER_02
It s terrifying.
9
SPEAKER_02
That wharf was filled with journalists.
9
SPEAKER_02
There were tens scores of journalists.
9
SPEAKER_02
That was an old fisherman s shack.
9
SPEAKER_02
What are you talking about?
9
SPEAKER_02
It s so painful.
9
SPEAKER_02
It s so painful to listen to this idiocy.
9
SPEAKER_00
And to be clear, on the other side, you re implying that a strike was okayed on the Israeli side where they said, we re just going to kill four Palestinian children today for no reason.
9
SPEAKER_00
Do you believe that?
9
SPEAKER_00
Here we go.
9
SPEAKER_00
We ll never answer that.
9
SPEAKER_00
I will answer the question.
9
SPEAKER_00
I was a drone strike.
9
SPEAKER_00
It was approved.
10
SPEAKER_00
We re going to kill children today.
10
SPEAKER_00
We re going to kill Palestinian children today.
10
SPEAKER_01
You want me to answer or do you want your motor mouth to go?
10
SPEAKER_01
OK, answer.
10
SPEAKER_01
In 2018, there was the Great March of Return in Gaza.
10
SPEAKER_01
by all reckonings of human rights organizations and journalists who were there, it was overwhelmingly nonviolent.
10
SPEAKER_01
It was- Organized by the Hamas.
10
SPEAKER_01
Whoever organized it- It was organized by Satan, let s start with that.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, Hamas.
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay, Satan.
10
SPEAKER_01
I agree.
10
SPEAKER_01
Let s go for the big one, the big Megillah.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s Satan, okay?
10
SPEAKER_01
Overwhelmingly nonviolent.
10
SPEAKER_01
resembled at the beginning the first intifada.
10
SPEAKER_01
They threw bombs here and there.
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay, not bombs.
10
SPEAKER_01
They tried to make holes in the fence, obviously.
10
SPEAKER_01
Let s continue.
10
SPEAKER_02
But I m not sure Israel behaved morally in that respect.
10
SPEAKER_02
No, no, no.
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait.
10
SPEAKER_02
I m willing to grant you this.
10
SPEAKER_02
Please, please.
10
SPEAKER_02
I m willing to grant you this.
10
SPEAKER_01
You don t have to pursue it.
10
SPEAKER_01
Allow me to finish.
10
SPEAKER_03
I don t know anything about this.
10
SPEAKER_03
I d like to hear it.
10
SPEAKER_01
As you know, along the Gaza perimeter, there was Israel s best-trained snipers.
10
SPEAKER_01
Correct?
10
SPEAKER_01
I don t know best-trained.
10
SPEAKER_01
They were snipers.
10
SPEAKER_01
Fine.
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_01
All right?
10
SPEAKER_01
Because, hey, laugh.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s hilarious.
10
SPEAKER_01
The story is so funny.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s so funny.
10
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_00
You see, the problem, Mr. Morelli, is you don t know the English language.
10
SPEAKER_00
I can read from the U.N.
10
SPEAKER_00
website itself.
10
SPEAKER_00
In regards to the Great March of Return, they said, while the vast majority of protesters have acted in a peaceful manner, during most protests dozens have approached the fence attempting to damage it with burning fires, throwing stones and Molotov cocktails towards Israeli forces and flying incendiary kites and balloons into Israeli territory.
10
SPEAKER_00
The latter resulted in extensive damage to agricultural land and nature reserves inside Israel.
10
SPEAKER_00
risk the lives of Israeli civilians, some in the shooting and throwing explosives.
10
SPEAKER_01
Talk fast.
10
SPEAKER_01
Talk fast.
10
SPEAKER_01
People think that you re coherent.
10
SPEAKER_00
I m just reading from the U.N.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but you see, you got the months wrong.
10
SPEAKER_01
You got the months wrong.
10
SPEAKER_01
We re talking about the beginning in March 30th, 2018.
10
SPEAKER_01
You just described that March as mostly peaceful.
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay, allow me to finish.
10
SPEAKER_01
So there were the snipers.
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_01
Now you find it so far-fetched.
10
SPEAKER_01
Israelis
10
SPEAKER_01
Purposely, deliberately targeting civilians?
10
SPEAKER_01
That s such a far-fetched idea.
10
SPEAKER_01
An overwhelmingly non-violent march.
10
SPEAKER_01
What did the international investigation— What was a march?
10
SPEAKER_01
It was a campaign, which went on for months.
10
SPEAKER_01
Whatever you want to call it.
10
SPEAKER_01
For months.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
What did the UN investigation find?
10
SPEAKER_01
Well, he just registered— I read the report.
10
SPEAKER_01
I don t read things off of those machines.
10
SPEAKER_01
I read the report.
10
SPEAKER_01
What did it find?
10
SPEAKER_01
Brace yourself.
10
SPEAKER_01
You thought it was so funny, the idea of IDF targeting civilians.
10
SPEAKER_01
It found, go look this up on your machine.
10
SPEAKER_00
I already know what you re going to say.
10
SPEAKER_00
You re going to say it found that only one or two of them were justified killings.
10
SPEAKER_01
Targeted children, targeted journalists.
10
SPEAKER_01
targeted medics, and here s the funniest one of all, it s so hilarious, they targeted disabled people who were 300 meters away from the fence and just standing by trees.
10
SPEAKER_01
This is true, if what you re saying is true.
10
SPEAKER_01
If it s true.
10
SPEAKER_04
By the way, just a quick pause.
10
SPEAKER_04
I think everything was fascinating to listen to except the mention of hilarious.
10
SPEAKER_04
Nobody finds any of this hilarious.
10
SPEAKER_04
And if any of us are laughing, it s not at the suffering of civilians or suffering of anyone.
10
SPEAKER_04
It s at the obvious joyful camaraderie in the room.
10
SPEAKER_04
So I m enjoying it and also the joy of learning.
10
SPEAKER_04
So thank you.
10
SPEAKER_00
Can we talk about the targeting civilian thing a little bit?
10
SPEAKER_00
I think there s like an important underlying, not necessarily that.
10
SPEAKER_00
I just, I think it s important to understand.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
I think it s important to understand there s like three different things here that we need to think about.
10
SPEAKER_00
So one is a policy of killing civilians.
10
SPEAKER_00
Do we, so I would ask the other side, I m going to ask all three, cause I know there won t be a short answer.
10
SPEAKER_00
Do you think there is a policy top down from the IDF to target civilians?
10
SPEAKER_00
That s one thing.
10
SPEAKER_00
A second thing is when I, yeah, sure.
10
SPEAKER_00
But then the second thing is, or there s two distinctions I want to draw between.
10
SPEAKER_00
I think Benny would say this.
10
SPEAKER_00
I would say this.
10
SPEAKER_00
I m sure undoubtedly there have been cases where IDF soldiers for no good reason have targeted and killed Palestinians that they should not have done.
10
SPEAKER_00
That would it be prosecutable as war crimes as defined by the Rome Statute and the ICC.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and I m absolutely sure- According to you and your practically non- I m sure, I m sure, I m sure- According to you and your practically non- I m sure, I m sure that we would all agree for soldiers that that happens, but I think that it s important-
10
SPEAKER_00
I think that it s important that when we talk about military strikes, when we talk about things especially involving bombings or drone attacks, these are things that are signed off by multiple different layers of command, by multiple people involved in an operation, including intelligence gathering, including weaponeering, and there also have typically lawyers involved.
10
SPEAKER_00
When you make the claim that an IDF soldier shot a Palestinian, those three people, the three hostages that came up with white flags and something horrible happened, I think that s a fair statement to make, and I think a lot of criticism is deserved.
10
SPEAKER_00
But when you make the statement that four children were killed by a strike,
10
SPEAKER_00
The claim that you re making, yeah, the claim that you re making, the claim that you re making is that multiple levels of the IDF signed off on just killing- I have no idea what- That s right.
10
SPEAKER_00
If you don t understand the process, then let me educate you.
10
SPEAKER_00
I can tell you.
10
SPEAKER_00
I do understand the process.
10
SPEAKER_00
I m telling you.
10
SPEAKER_00
I m trying to explain to you right now.
10
SPEAKER_00
You re studying the IDF?
10
SPEAKER_00
You re studying the IDF?
10
SPEAKER_00
Aside from Wikipedia, can you tell me what your knowledge of the IDF is?
10
SPEAKER_00
Apart from Wikipedia, what s your knowledge of the IDF?
10
SPEAKER_00
up.
10
SPEAKER_00
Do you think that, do you think that, do you think that bombing and strikes are decided by one person in the field?
10
SPEAKER_00
Do you think one person is a drone strike?
10
SPEAKER_00
Yes, strike cells have entire apparatuses that are designed to figure out how to strike and who to strike.
10
SPEAKER_00
So when you say that four children are targeted, you re saying that a whole apparatus is trying to murder four Palestinian children, which is a ridiculous argument.
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that it s impossible at the command level.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s impossible at the command level.
10
SPEAKER_01
But you said that they couldn t have done it at the bottom if it weren t also at the top.
10
SPEAKER_00
You don t understand the strength of the claim that you re making.
10
SPEAKER_01
You re saying that from a top-down level that lawyers, multiple commanders, all these people signed off on killing four Palestinians.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s true.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s true.
10
SPEAKER_01
I don t spend my nights on Wikipedia.
10
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I read books.
10
SPEAKER_01
I admit that as a signal.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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I know books are a waste of time with all due regard.
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I completely respect the fact.
10
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And I ll say it on the air, as much as I find totally disgusting what s come of your politics, a lot of the books are excellent.
10
SPEAKER_01
And I ll even tell you, because I m not afraid of saying it, whenever I have to check on a basic fact, the equivalent of going to the Britannica,
10
SPEAKER_01
I go to your books.
10
SPEAKER_01
I know you got a lot of the facts right.
10
SPEAKER_04
Benny Moore s books for the listener.
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I would never say books are a waste of time, and it s regrettable to you that you got strapped with a partner who thinks that all the wisdom... He didn t say they re a waste of time.
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SPEAKER_03
I d like to respond to what you were saying.
10
SPEAKER_03
I think the question that we re trying to answer, I think... I think you don t understand Israel, you know?
10
SPEAKER_02
Neither really understands Israel.
10
SPEAKER_03
Let me finish, please.
10
SPEAKER_03
I think we re all agreed that Palestinians have deliberately targeted civilians.
10
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whether we re talking about Hamas and Islamic Jihad today or previously... I prefer the word murdered and raped rather than targeted.
10
SPEAKER_02
Targeted is too soft for what the Hamas did.
10
SPEAKER_03
I m not talking about... I m talking about this now.
10
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, but I m trying to answer his question.
10
SPEAKER_03
Historically, there is substantial evidence that Palestinians have targeted civilians, whether it s been incidental or systematic is a different discussion.
10
SPEAKER_03
I don t want to get into that now.
10
SPEAKER_03
For some reason, there seems to be a huge debate about whether
10
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any Israeli has ever sunk so low as to target a civilian.
10
SPEAKER_02
I don t know.
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SPEAKER_02
No, we ve agreed both.
10
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We just agreed.
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We ve just said that this has happened here and there.
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And I think... We ve agreed on that.
10
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
10
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I think... What we re saying is it s not policy, which is what you guys are implying, that they kill civilians deliberately.
10
SPEAKER_03
If I understand you correctly, you re basically making the claim
10
SPEAKER_03
that none of these attacks could have happened without going through an entire chain of command.
10
SPEAKER_00
For strike cells that are involved in like drone attacks or plane attacks or, yes.
10
SPEAKER_03
My understanding of the Israeli military, and you could perhaps, you ve served in it, you would know better.
10
SPEAKER_03
It s actually a fairly chaotic organization.
10
SPEAKER_02
No, no, that s not true.
10
SPEAKER_02
Especially not the Air Force.
10
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Extremely, extremely organized.
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The Air Force works in a very organized fashion, as he says, with lawyers, a chain of command, and ultimately the pilot drops the bomb where he s told to drop it.
10
SPEAKER_00
Was that 200 strikes in like 60 seconds, I think?
10
SPEAKER_00
I think at the opening of Protective Edge?
10
SPEAKER_00
Like, yeah, the coordination between the military and everything.
10
SPEAKER_00
You re talking about 2008.
10
SPEAKER_00
I think Protective Edge was 2014.
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SPEAKER_00
But I m just saying that the coordination in the military is
10
SPEAKER_03
pretty quiet.
10
SPEAKER_03
Well, my understanding of the Israeli military is that it s quite chaotic and there s also a lot of testimonies from Israel, but be that as it may.
10
SPEAKER_03
Okay, I m prepared to accept both of your contentions that it s a highly organized and disciplined force.
10
SPEAKER_03
Air Force under any scenario is going to be more organized than the other branches.
10
SPEAKER_03
And you re saying such a strike would have been inconceivable.
10
SPEAKER_00
Well, I m not necessarily saying Angus Dewey, I m just saying that that would have required murderous intent from somebody below.
10
SPEAKER_00
I don t think good evidence has been presented to say that that s the case.
10
SPEAKER_03
Your basic claim is that it would be fair to assume that such a strike could have only been carried out with multiple levels of authorization and signing off.
10
SPEAKER_03
Okay, let s accept that for the sake of argument.
10
SPEAKER_03
We have now seen
10
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incident after incident after incident after incident where entire families are vaporized in single strikes.
10
SPEAKER_02
Who is in the families?
10
SPEAKER_02
Who lives in the house?
10
SPEAKER_02
Family members.
10
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Inside?
10
SPEAKER_02
No.
10
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Family members.
10
SPEAKER_02
Or next to the house in which these families are killed.
10
SPEAKER_02
We have seen incident after… Do you know that Hamasniks weren t in that house?
10
SPEAKER_02
Do you know that their ammunition dumps weren t in those houses?
10
SPEAKER_03
Why do I have to prove a negative?
10
SPEAKER_02
You re saying that they deliberately targeted families.
10
SPEAKER_02
If Israel wanted to kill civilians in Gaza, they could have killed 500,000 by now with the number of strikes they ve done.
10
SPEAKER_02
And the fact that they ve only killed a certain small number in proportion.
10
SPEAKER_02
30,000 is a small number.
10
SPEAKER_02
You consider 30,000 a small number?
10
SPEAKER_02
Small number in proportion over four months probably is an indication that it s targeted and that there are Hamas targets in these places.
10
SPEAKER_03
12,000 children is only
10
SPEAKER_01
And if that s the case, why is it... Yeah, you said only.
10
SPEAKER_01
Only.
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Professor Morris, here s a question for you.
10
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If we take every combat zone in the world for the past three years, every combat zone in the world.
10
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In Vietnam, the Americans killed a million people.
10
SPEAKER_01
I m not talking about Vietnam.
10
SPEAKER_01
Well, they could have killed 40 million.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I was in the anti-war movement.
10
SPEAKER_01
So don t distract me.
10
SPEAKER_01
The Americans killed a million people in Vietnam.
10
SPEAKER_01
Fine, fine.
10
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And 30 million Russians were killed during World War II, so everything else is irrelevant.
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_01
Here s the question.
10
SPEAKER_01
Professor Mars, here s the question.
10
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It s very perplexing.
10
SPEAKER_01
If you take every combat zone in the world for the past three years and you multiply the number of children killed by four, every combat zone in the world, you get Gaza.
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay?
10
SPEAKER_01
So when you say- What is that supposed to prove?
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay, I m going to tell you.
10
SPEAKER_01
Just shut up.
10
SPEAKER_02
You re relying on Hamas numbers.
10
SPEAKER_01
No, I m not relying.
10
SPEAKER_01
Hamas numbers are not necessarily true.
10
SPEAKER_01
I m relying on the numbers of everybody else.
10
SPEAKER_02
Even if we take the numbers though, what does that prove?
10
SPEAKER_02
Those are Hamas numbers, which may not be true.
10
SPEAKER_02
They could invent anything because you know that they are a mendacious organization.
10
SPEAKER_01
I know mendacious.
10
SPEAKER_01
Believe me.
10
SPEAKER_01
Mendacious as in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_01
So here s the thing.
10
SPEAKER_01
You say they could have killed 500,000, but they only killed only, that s your word.
10
SPEAKER_01
They only killed 30,000.
10
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I m saying that if you believe that they deliberately target civilians, they would have killed many, many more.
10
SPEAKER_01
The fact is that they don t deliberately target civilians.
10
SPEAKER_01
For a historian, I don t want to understand Israeli society.
10
SPEAKER_01
You want to know the truth?
10
SPEAKER_01
I don t want to.
10
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I don t want to get inside their heads.
10
SPEAKER_01
That s the problem.
10
SPEAKER_01
A good historian tries to get into the heads of the various protagonists.
10
SPEAKER_01
There s a limit.
10
SPEAKER_01
When 90% of Israelis think that Israel is using enough or too little force in Gaza, I don t want to get inside that head.
10
SPEAKER_01
40% think that Israel is using insufficient force in Gaza.
10
SPEAKER_01
I don t want to get inside that head.
10
SPEAKER_01
I don t want to get inside the head of people who think
10
SPEAKER_01
They re using insufficient force against the population, half of which is children.
10
SPEAKER_01
I don t want to get inside that head.
10
SPEAKER_01
But here s the point, because your partner wants to know the point.
10
SPEAKER_01
You don t understand political constraints.
10
SPEAKER_01
One of your ministers said, let s drop an atomic bomb on Gaza.
10
SPEAKER_01
The famed, justifiably famed, Benny Morris thinks we should be dropping nuclear weapons on Iran.
10
SPEAKER_02
Iran has for years, its leaders for years have said we should destroy Israel.
10
SPEAKER_02
You agree with that?
10
SPEAKER_02
They ve said we should destroy Israel.
10
SPEAKER_02
Israel must be destroyed.
10
SPEAKER_02
Is that correct?
10
SPEAKER_02
This is what the Iranian leaders have been saying since Khomeini.
10
SPEAKER_01
I would say Iranian leaders have said mixed messages.
10
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_02
But some of them have said, including Khamenei and Khomeini.
10
SPEAKER_01
If you don t know the evidence, if you don t know the evidence, why are you laughing?
10
SPEAKER_01
This skepticism is very funny.
10
SPEAKER_01
Iran supports Hezbollah and the Houthis and Hamas even if they want Israel destroyed.
10
SPEAKER_01
To the extent that the Houthis are trying to stop the genocide in Gaza, I support the Houthis.
10
SPEAKER_00
I know I selectively support international law when it agrees with you, and then when it doesn t, you decide to throw international law to the wind.
10
SPEAKER_04
If you like, let me read what you said.
10
SPEAKER_04
Norm, Norm, stop, please.
10
SPEAKER_04
Norm, just for me, please, just give me a second.
10
SPEAKER_04
You said that there s no genocide going on in Gaza.
10
SPEAKER_04
Let me ask that clear question, the same question I asked on the Hamas attacks.
10
SPEAKER_04
Is there, from a legal, philosophical, moral perspective, is there genocide going on in Gaza today?
10
SPEAKER_03
Is there a genocide going on in Gaza?
10
SPEAKER_03
Well, in several years, we will have a definitive response to that question.
10
SPEAKER_03
What has happened thus far is that on the 29th of December,
10
SPEAKER_03
the Republic of South Africa instituted proceedings against Israel pursuant to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
10
SPEAKER_03
South Africa basically accused Israel of perpetrating genocide in the Gaza Strip.
10
SPEAKER_03
On the 26th of January, the,
10
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the court issued its initial ruling.
10
SPEAKER_03
The court at this stage is not making a determination on whether Israel has or has not committed genocide.
10
SPEAKER_03
So just as it has not found Israel guilty, it certainly also hasn t found Israel innocent.
10
SPEAKER_03
What the court had to do at this stage was take one of two decisions.
10
SPEAKER_03
Either South Africa s case was
10
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the equivalent of a frivolous lawsuit and dismiss it and close the proceedings, or it had to determine that South Africa presented a plausible case that Israel was violating its obligations.
11
SPEAKER_02
under the Genocide Convention and that it would on that basis hold a full hearing.
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Now a lot of people
11
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have looked at the court s ruling of the 26th of January and focused on the fact that the court did not order a ceasefire.
11
SPEAKER_02
I actually wasn t expecting it to order a ceasefire, and I wasn t surprised that it didn t, because in the other cases that the court has considered, most prominently Bosnia and Myanmar, it also didn t order a ceasefire.
11
SPEAKER_02
And South Africa, in requesting a ceasefire, also didn t ask the court to render an opinion on the legitimacy or lack thereof of Israel s military operation.
11
SPEAKER_02
From my perspective, the key issue on the 26th of January was whether the court would simply dismiss the case or decide to proceed with it.
11
SPEAKER_03
And it decided to proceed.
11
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And it decided to proceed.
11
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And I think that s enormously, I think that s enormously significant.
11
SPEAKER_03
But you said they committed genocide.
11
SPEAKER_03
You already said they committed genocide.
11
SPEAKER_01
It s committing genocide.
11
SPEAKER_01
But if I could just... Allow me, allow me... Use that word.
11
SPEAKER_01
That s correct.
11
SPEAKER_01
Now, I don t run away.
11
SPEAKER_01
So Norman, you did say Israel is committing genocide.
11
SPEAKER_02
Can you let Moyad finish?
11
SPEAKER_02
Well, the end of the story is you specifically asked whether I think Israel is committing genocide.
11
SPEAKER_02
I explained formally, there is no finding.
11
SPEAKER_02
And as you said, we won t know for a number of years.
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SPEAKER_02
And I think there s legitimate questions to be raised.
11
SPEAKER_02
I mean, in the Bosnia case, which I think all four of us would agree was clearly a case of genocide.
11
SPEAKER_02
the court determined by the Serbs.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
11
SPEAKER_02
And in the Bosnia case, the court determined that of all the evidence placed before them, only Srebrenica qualified as genocide and all the other atrocities committed did not qualify as genocide.
11
SPEAKER_02
You know, international law is a developing organism.
11
SPEAKER_02
I don t know how the court is going to respond in this case, so I wouldn t take it as a foregone conclusion how the court is going to respond.
11
SPEAKER_03
But Norman has determined already.
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I have too, because you re asking my personal opinion.
11
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So as a matter of law, I want to state very clearly, it has not been determined and won t be determined for several years.
11
SPEAKER_02
Based on my
11
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observations and the evidence before me, I would say it s indisputable that Israel is engaged in a genocidal assault against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.
11
SPEAKER_01
Which is the PLO line.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, with the program.
11
SPEAKER_01
The PLO is long past.
11
SPEAKER_02
Okay, the Palestinian Authority.
11
SPEAKER_02
As you were saying, genocide is not a body count.
11
SPEAKER_02
Genocide consists of two elements, the destruction of a people in whole or in part.
11
SPEAKER_02
So in other words, you can commit genocide by killing 30,000 people.
11
SPEAKER_02
It doesn t have, well, five probably is below the threshold.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yes, but I think 30,000 crosses the threshold.
11
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and not reaching 500,000 is probably irrelevant.
11
SPEAKER_02
And the second element is there has to be an intent.
11
SPEAKER_02
In other words.
11
SPEAKER_02
And you believe there s an intent?
11
SPEAKER_02
Yes, I think if there is any other plausible reason for why all these people are being murdered, it s not genocide.
11
SPEAKER_02
And as far as intent is concerned... What about hiding behind a human shield?
11
SPEAKER_02
You don t think that s the reason for them being killed?
11
SPEAKER_02
Well, let s get the intent part out of the way first.
11
SPEAKER_02
South Africa s... Forget South Africa.
11
SPEAKER_03
I d like to finish.
11
SPEAKER_02
They re just pro-Hamas government.
11
SPEAKER_02
That s got nothing to do with anything.
11
SPEAKER_02
I think they re pro-Satan as well last time I checked.
11
SPEAKER_02
No, they re pro-Hamas.
11
SPEAKER_02
You know, for some reason, you don t have a problem with people being pro-Israeli at the time of this, but if they support Palestinians  right to life or self-determination, they get demonized and delegitimized as pro-Hamas.
11
SPEAKER_03
They supported an organization which murdered 1,200 people deliberately.
11
SPEAKER_02
But supporting a state that has murdered 30,000.
11
SPEAKER_03
But they haven t because these are 30,000 are basically human shields used by the Hamas in which the Hamas wanted killed.
11
SPEAKER_02
They wanted them killed.
11
SPEAKER_03
Hamas wanted these people killed.
11
SPEAKER_03
You don t think they wanted them killed?
11
SPEAKER_02
No, I don t.
11
SPEAKER_03
They don t provide them with shelters.
11
SPEAKER_03
They build tunnels for their fighters, but not one shelter for their own civilians.
11
SPEAKER_02
You asked me about intent.
11
SPEAKER_02
Of course they want them killed.
11
SPEAKER_02
You asked me about intent, and the reason that I bought in the South African application is because it is actually exceptionally detailed.
11
SPEAKER_02
on intent by quoting numerous... All sorts of idiotic ministers in Israel.
11
SPEAKER_02
Well, yeah, including the prime minister, the defense minister, the chief of staff... Didn t say genocide, the chief of staff... No, he said Amalek.
11
SPEAKER_03
According to Asa Kasher... Use the word Amalek, because the Hamas are a really evil organization, if I may.
11
SPEAKER_01
According to Asa Kasher, the philosopher of the IDF, he said that Netanyahu was avowing genocide.
11
SPEAKER_01
Now, he s an idiot?
11
SPEAKER_02
He didn t say he s an idiot, but he passed it.
11
SPEAKER_02
So the reason I raised the South African application is twofold, Hamas or no Hamas.
11
SPEAKER_02
It s exceptionally detailed on the question of intent.
11
SPEAKER_02
And secondly, when the International Court of Justice issues a ruling, individual justices have the right, can give their own opinion.
11
SPEAKER_02
And I found the German one to be the most interesting on this specific question, because he was basically saying that he didn t think South Africa presented a persuasive case.
11
SPEAKER_02
But he said,
11
SPEAKER_02
their section on intent was so overpowering that he felt he was left with no choice but to vote with the majority.
11
SPEAKER_02
So I think that answers the intent part of your question.
11
SPEAKER_00
So for the ICJ case that South Africa s brought, I think there s a couple things that need to be mentioned.
11
SPEAKER_00
One is, and I saw you two talk at length about this,
11
SPEAKER_00
The plausibility standard is incredibly low.
11
SPEAKER_00
The only thing we re looking for is a basic presentation of facts that make it conceivable, possible, plausible, which legally this is obviously below criminal conviction, below – yeah, below –
11
SPEAKER_00
Sure, possibly, maybe even a lower level than even an indictment.
11
SPEAKER_00
So plausibility is an incredibly low standard, number one.
11
SPEAKER_00
Number two, if you actually go through and you read the complaint that South Africa filed, I would say that if you go through the quotes and you even follow through to the source of the quotes, the misrepresentation that South Africa does and their case about all of these horrendous quotes, in my opinion, borders on criminal.
11
SPEAKER_00
Well, 16 ICJ judges disagree.
11
SPEAKER_00
That s fine if 16 ICJ judges disagree.
11
SPEAKER_00
They must be awful incompetent.
11
SPEAKER_00
You know, they could be.
11
SPEAKER_01
Even the American judge, she must have been awful incompetent if she was unable to see the misrepresentations that Mr. Burnell, based on his Wikipedia entry, was able to find.
11
SPEAKER_00
This is based on the official ICJ report that was released.
11
SPEAKER_00
I m not sure if you read the entire thing or not.
11
SPEAKER_00
I read every aspect.
11
SPEAKER_00
Okay, that s great.
11
SPEAKER_00
Did you go through and actually identify any of the sources for the underlying quotes?
11
SPEAKER_01
Actually, brace yourself for this, and Muin could confirm it.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yaniv Kogan, an Israeli, and Jamie Stern-Weiner, half-Israeli, they checked every single quote in the Hebrew original, and Yaniv Kogan, love the guy, he has terrifying powers of concentration, he checked every single quote.
11
SPEAKER_01
Is that correct, Muin?
11
SPEAKER_01
And Jamie checked every single quote in the English
11
SPEAKER_01
in the context, and where there were any contextual questions, they told us.
11
SPEAKER_02
I think they found one.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think they found one.
11
SPEAKER_01
So I do not believe that those 15 judges, it was 15 to two.
11
SPEAKER_01
16 to two, I think.
11
SPEAKER_01
They re 15 in the court plus two, so it s 17, so it s 15 to two.
11
SPEAKER_01
I don t think those 15 judges were incompetent
11
SPEAKER_01
And I certainly don t believe the president of the court, an American, would allow herself to be duped.
11
SPEAKER_00
Because you might recall Mr. Perreault.
11
SPEAKER_00
Mr. Perreault.
11
SPEAKER_00
Sure, so this was taken from the South African complaint.
11
SPEAKER_00
There s tons of these, but so here s one.
11
SPEAKER_00
In the complaint for the ICJ, they said that on the 12th of October, 2023, President Isaac Herzog made clear that Israel was not distinguishing between militants and civilians in Gaza, stating in a press conference to foreign media in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, over one million of whom are children, quote,
11
SPEAKER_00
Quote, it s an entire nation out there that is responsible.
11
SPEAKER_00
It is not true.
11
SPEAKER_00
This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved.
11
SPEAKER_00
I saw that.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s absolutely not true.
11
SPEAKER_00
And we will fight until we break their backbone.
11
SPEAKER_00
End quote.
11
SPEAKER_00
If you actually go to the news article that they even state, they even link it in their complaint,
11
SPEAKER_00
The full context for the quote was, quote, it is an entire nation out there that is responsible.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s absolutely not true.
11
SPEAKER_00
They could have risen up.
11
SPEAKER_00
They could have fought against that evil regime, which took over Gaza in a coup d etat.
11
SPEAKER_00
But we are at war.
11
SPEAKER_00
We are defending our homes.
11
SPEAKER_00
We are protecting our homes.
11
SPEAKER_00
That s the truth.
11
SPEAKER_00
And when a nation protects its home, it fights and we will fight until we break their backbone.
11
SPEAKER_00
He acknowledged that many Gazans had nothing to do with Hamas, but was adamant that others did.
11
SPEAKER_00
This is not the same as saying there s no distinction between militants and civilians in Gaza.
11
SPEAKER_00
His statement here is actually fully compliant with international law to the letter, because if you are storing military supplies in civilian areas, these things become military targets and you re allowed to do proportionality assessments afterwards.
11
SPEAKER_00
So this is supposed to be one of many quotes that they ve shown that is supposed to demonstrate genocidal intent, but it is very easily explained by military intent or by a conflict between two parties.
11
SPEAKER_00
I saw that press conference.
11
SPEAKER_03
Wait, let me just say something.
11
SPEAKER_03
All of this talk is a bit irrelevant because it may sound to the listeners that the court in The Hague has ruled that Israel is committing genocide.
11
SPEAKER_03
No, I think… It hasn t.
11
SPEAKER_03
It s just going in the next few years to look at the whole subject.
11
SPEAKER_03
There has been no determination at all.
11
SPEAKER_03
And as Stephen says, some of the quotes are not exactly accurate quotes or taken out of context.
11
SPEAKER_03
Total discharacterization.
11
SPEAKER_01
It is correct, as Muin put it, that it ll be several years before the court makes a determination.
11
SPEAKER_01
And my guess is that it will determine there was no genocide.
11
SPEAKER_01
That s my guess.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yes, I m just giving you my guess.
11
SPEAKER_01
I can t predict.
11
SPEAKER_01
I got it all wrong, actually, as Muin will attest.
11
SPEAKER_01
I got it all wrong the first time.
11
SPEAKER_01
I never thought the American judge would vote in favor of plausibility.
11
SPEAKER_01
So you admit that you were wrong?
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, of course.
11
SPEAKER_01
I think I tell Muin twice a day, I was wrong about this and I was wrong about that.
11
SPEAKER_01
I m not wrong about the facts.
11
SPEAKER_01
I try not to be, but my speculations, they can be wrong.
11
SPEAKER_01
Okay, leaving that aside.
11
SPEAKER_01
First of all, as Muin pointed out, there s a difference between the legal decision by the ruling and an independent judgment.
11
SPEAKER_01
Now, South Africa was not filing a frivolous case.
11
SPEAKER_01
That was 84 pages.
11
SPEAKER_01
It was single, even 84 pages can be pretty frivolous.
11
SPEAKER_00
It takes an hour and a half to read.
11
SPEAKER_00
It was not a massive case.
11
SPEAKER_01
It was single-spaced and it had literally hundreds of footnotes.
11
SPEAKER_01
It can still be frivolous.
11
SPEAKER_01
It s possible.
11
SPEAKER_02
Of course, but this one wasn t.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I read the report.
11
SPEAKER_01
To tell you the truth, I followed very closely everything that s been happening to October 7th.
11
SPEAKER_01
I was mesmerized.
11
SPEAKER_01
I couldn t believe the comprehensiveness of that particular report.
11
SPEAKER_01
Number two, there are two quite respected judges, excuse me, there were two quite respected experts of international law sitting on the South African panel, John Dugard and Vaughan Low.
11
SPEAKER_01
Vaughan Low, as you might know, he argued the war case in 2004 before the International Court of Justice.
11
SPEAKER_01
Now, they were not
11
SPEAKER_01
they were alleging genocide, which in their view means the evidence in their minds, we re not yet at the court, the evidence in their minds compels the conclusion that genocide is being committed.
11
SPEAKER_01
I am willing, because I happen to know Mr. Dugard personally, and I ve corresponded with Vaughn Lowe, I ve heard their claim, I ve read the report, I would say they make a very strong case.
11
SPEAKER_01
But let s agree, plausible.
11
SPEAKER_01
Now, here s a question.
11
SPEAKER_01
If somebody qualifies for an Olympic team, let s say a regional person qualifies for an Olympic team, it doesn t mean they re going to be on the Olympic team.
11
SPEAKER_01
It doesn t mean they re going to win a gold medal, a silver medal, or a bronze medal.
11
SPEAKER_03
But they can swim.
11
SPEAKER_03
That s what you re saying.
11
SPEAKER_01
No, I would say that s a very high bar.
11
SPEAKER_01
You re saying they can swim.
11
SPEAKER_01
To even qualify.
11
SPEAKER_02
They can swim well enough to have a realistic prospect of winning a medal.
11
SPEAKER_01
So to even make it to plausible.
11
SPEAKER_01
That is not true.
11
SPEAKER_00
That is not what plausible means.
11
SPEAKER_00
It is absolutely not.
11
SPEAKER_00
You re dead wrong.
11
SPEAKER_01
Mr. Borelli, please don t teach me about the English language.
11
SPEAKER_00
So the declaration of Judge Point said that the court is not asked at this present phase of the proceedings to determine whether South Africa s allegations of genocide are well-founded.
11
SPEAKER_00
They re not well-founded.
11
SPEAKER_00
They re not even well-founded.
11
SPEAKER_00
You said that plausible was a high standard.
11
SPEAKER_00
It is absolutely not.
11
SPEAKER_00
It is a misrepresentation of the strength of the case against Israel, just like the majority of the quotes they have in this case are.
11
SPEAKER_00
And also, you said it was an extremely well-founded case.
11
SPEAKER_00
They spend like one fourth of all of the quotations, some even pulled from the Goldstone report, that actually deal with the intent part.
11
SPEAKER_00
Which is, by the way, I think you guys, I don t know if you use the phrase, the dolo specialis, that the intentional part of genocide.
11
SPEAKER_00
I don t know that term.
11
SPEAKER_00
I think it s called dolo specialis.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s the most important part of genocide, which is proving the special, it is a highly special intent to commit genocide.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s possible that Israel could- That s mens reum.
11
SPEAKER_00
No.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yes, I understand the state of mind, but for genocide, it s called dola specialis.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s a highly special intent.
11
SPEAKER_00
Did you read the case?
11
SPEAKER_00
It is a highly special intent to be convicted of genocide.
11
SPEAKER_00
I m going to ask you again.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
11
SPEAKER_01
Please stop displaying your imbecility.
11
SPEAKER_01
Okay, I m sorry if you think the declaration of the judge is imbecile.
11
SPEAKER_01
Don t put on public display that you re a moron.
11
SPEAKER_01
At least have the self-possession to shut up.
11
SPEAKER_01
Did I read the case?
11
SPEAKER_01
I m comfortable putting my display on camera.
11
SPEAKER_00
You re comfortable putting yours in books, okay?
11
SPEAKER_01
I read the case around four times.
11
SPEAKER_01
I read all of the majority opinion, the declarations.
11
SPEAKER_01
I read Aaron Barak s declaration.
11
SPEAKER_01
Then why are you lying and saying plausibles are by standard?
11
SPEAKER_01
Even reaching the benchmark of plausibility is a very high standard in the world.
11
SPEAKER_01
It s the equivalent of a regional player qualifying for an Olympics.
11
SPEAKER_01
It s still two steps removed.
11
SPEAKER_01
You may not be on the team.
11
SPEAKER_01
and you may not get a medal, but to get qualified, which in this context is the equivalent of plausible, you must be doing something pretty horrible.
11
SPEAKER_01
And as it happens, as it happens, there was no... That s what the court will rule.
11
SPEAKER_01
Remember what I just told you.
11
SPEAKER_01
I don t expect to be even around when the court reaches its final decision.
11
SPEAKER_01
Why?
11
SPEAKER_01
It ll take a long, long time.
11
SPEAKER_01
Two years.
11
SPEAKER_01
No, I don t think it ll take two or three years.
11
SPEAKER_02
Bosnia, which was admittedly a special type of case because they were accusing Serbia of sponsoring the Bosnian Serbs, that took I think 17 years.
11
SPEAKER_03
from 90... I assume they ll take two or three years.
11
SPEAKER_01
But the point you re making... I m saying that something horrible must be happening to even achieve... It s horrible, it s a war.
11
SPEAKER_01
It s true, yes.
11
SPEAKER_01
They weren t rendering a ruling on the war, they were rendering a ruling on the genocide.
11
SPEAKER_01
And I think the suggestion...
12
SPEAKER_00
They also said it s plausible that Israel is committing a military operation as well.
12
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, but I think the problem with your characterization is you re saying in so many words that South Africans basically only have to show up in court with a coherent statement.
12
SPEAKER_01
That is correct.
12
SPEAKER_01
In today s atmosphere, that s probably correct.
12
SPEAKER_03
They needed to do a lot more.
12
SPEAKER_03
Not much more.
12
SPEAKER_01
The American judge?
12
SPEAKER_01
The American judge?
12
SPEAKER_01
Today s atmosphere, judges go according to what the majority want to hear.
12
SPEAKER_01
Who is the president?
12
SPEAKER_03
They needed to persuade the court that it was worth investing several years of their time in hearing this case.
12
SPEAKER_03
They re well paid whether they take this case or not.
12
SPEAKER_03
I mean, you know, they have a full docket, whether they accept or reject this case.
12
SPEAKER_01
And I think, I don t think we should... Remember what I just said, they won t rule there was genocide.
12
SPEAKER_01
Remember what I said.
12
SPEAKER_00
Also, I recommend people actually read the case and follow through a lot of the quotes, that they just don t show genocidal intent.
12
SPEAKER_00
The Israeli Minister of Finance on the 8th of October, 2023, this is taken from the ICJ, this is from South African submission, Bezalel Smotrik, I can t read this, stated, there you go, okay, at a meeting of the Israeli cabinet that, quote, we need to deal a blow that hasn t been seen in 50 years and take down Gaza, end quote.
12
SPEAKER_00
But again, if you click through and you read the source, their own linked source, it says, as per this own source,
12
SPEAKER_00
Quote, the powerful finance minister, settler leader, Besalel Smotrik, I can t pronounce his name, demanded at the cabinet meeting late Saturday that the army, quote, hit Hamas brutally and not take the matter of the captives into significant consideration, end quote.
12
SPEAKER_00
Quote, in war, as in war, you have to be brutal, end quote.
12
SPEAKER_00
He was quoted as saying, quote, we need to deal a blow that hasn t been seen in 50 years and take down Gaza, end quote.
12
SPEAKER_00
You can t strip the quotation of Hamas, an entity you have war with, and then pretend that there s genocidal intent.
12
SPEAKER_01
That s not how it was.
12
SPEAKER_01
That s not genocide.
12
SPEAKER_00
When the Ukraine says we need to defeat Russia, that s not genocidal.
12
SPEAKER_00
No.
12
SPEAKER_00
When Ukraine says we need to defeat Russia, is that genocidal?
12
SPEAKER_00
Does that mean killing all Russian citizens?
12
SPEAKER_02
Professor Morris, here s another one.
12
SPEAKER_02
It s ridiculous.
12
SPEAKER_02
When the defense, yeah, ridiculous.
12
SPEAKER_02
Yes, ridiculous.
12
SPEAKER_02
The American judge.
12
SPEAKER_02
He also doesn t determine policy.
12
SPEAKER_01
The American judge.
12
SPEAKER_02
The American judge.
12
SPEAKER_02
read, you are holding the American judge to, you know, he was the president authority when it agrees with him and we won t deal with the actual facts of the matter.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
12
SPEAKER_02
The American judge read several of the quotes.
12
SPEAKER_02
Look at the American Supreme Court today.
12
SPEAKER_02
They may support Trump.
12
SPEAKER_02
It shows you.
12
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
12
SPEAKER_02
Professor Mars, without going too far afield, if you heard a statement by the defense minister, the defense minister said,
12
SPEAKER_02
we are going to prevent any food, water, fuel, or electricity from entering Gaza.
12
SPEAKER_02
Did Israel do that?
12
SPEAKER_02
Okay, no, I m wondering, I m asking you, but we re talking about statements now, intent.
12
SPEAKER_02
How would you interpret that?
12
SPEAKER_01
After 1,200 of your citizens are murdered the way they were, I would expect extreme statements by lots of politicians.
12
SPEAKER_01
By lots of politicians.
12
SPEAKER_04
But you don t accept extreme Palestinian... But that s not Israeli policy.
12
SPEAKER_01
But you don t accept... What he said isn t Israeli policy.
12
SPEAKER_01
But you don t believe... They let in water, they let in gas, they let in electricity.
12
SPEAKER_03
But you don t accept extreme Palestinian statements after they lost their entire country, not just 1,200 people.
12
SPEAKER_03
That s a good point.
12
SPEAKER_03
No, no, it s a good point.
12
SPEAKER_03
And on that...
12
SPEAKER_05
On that moment, brief moment of agreement, let s just take a quick pause.
12
SPEAKER_05
We need a smoke break, we need a water break, we need a bathroom break.
12
SPEAKER_02
Take down Gaza is not a genocide.
12
SPEAKER_00
To defeat Russia is a genocide statement.
12
SPEAKER_00
What does take down Gaza mean?
12
SPEAKER_00
When we went to war with Iraq and we wanted to destroy Iraq, that was a genocidal statement.
12
SPEAKER_00
There s a reason why genocide is such an importantly guarded concept, and it s not to condemn every nation that goes to war.
12
SPEAKER_02
Well, you do know how to pronounce my name.
12
SPEAKER_01
Are you mispronouncing it intentionally?
12
SPEAKER_02
I m so touched by your solicitude for international law.
12
SPEAKER_00
You should try learning it sometime.
12
SPEAKER_00
It would help you sort out a lot of the civilian deaths.
12
SPEAKER_02
Unfortunately, 15 judges... You could keep citing the judges.
12
SPEAKER_00
You should actually try reading the actual statements.
12
SPEAKER_01
This is tiring.
12
SPEAKER_01
You ve invited us to a tiring session.
12
SPEAKER_05
Yeah, there you go.
12
SPEAKER_05
How are you guys doing?
12
SPEAKER_05
Okay, okay.
12
SPEAKER_01
There are major things to discuss here, not just what some court is doing and going to judge in two years  time.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yes, okay.
12
SPEAKER_00
So what you just said is my whole... One of the reasons why I feel so strongly about this particular conflict is because there are really important things to discuss, but they will never be discussed.
12
SPEAKER_00
We re not going to talk about like Area A, B, and C, or what a transference of territory... Instead, we re going to talk about apartheid.
12
SPEAKER_00
We re not going to talk about the differences in how you conduct war in an urban environment.
12
SPEAKER_00
We re just going to talk about genocide.
12
SPEAKER_00
We re not going to talk about what s a good solution for the Palestinians.
12
SPEAKER_00
We re just going to say ethnic cleansing.
12
SPEAKER_05
Is it possible to be productive over the next two hours and talk about solutions?
12
SPEAKER_01
About solutions, I have no idea what to say.
12
SPEAKER_01
I don t see any solutions.
12
SPEAKER_01
If you wanted a positive end to this discussion, which is what you said at the beginning, I can t contribute to that because I m pessimistic.
12
SPEAKER_01
I don t see any way forward here.
12
SPEAKER_00
But the solution is easy.
12
SPEAKER_00
The reason why the solution is hard is because the histories and the myths are completely, there s a different factual record, right?
12
SPEAKER_05
One of the things that would be good to talk about solutions with the future is going back in all the times it has failed.
12
SPEAKER_00
But even at that, we re probably not going to agree.
12
SPEAKER_00
He s going to say, you could write that, I can predict the whole line.
12
SPEAKER_00
He s going to say from 93 to 99, he s going to say Israel didn t adhere to the Oslo Accords ever.
12
SPEAKER_00
Settlement expansion continued.
12
SPEAKER_00
Raids happened into the West Bank that there was never a legitimate, that Netanyahu came in and
12
SPEAKER_00
violated the Y memorandum, the transparency.
12
SPEAKER_00
He s going to say all of this, and he s not going to bring up any of the Palestinians.
12
SPEAKER_00
And then for Camp David, he s going to say that, yeah, that Arafat was trying, that the maps and the territorial exchange wasn t good enough, that they were asking Palestinians to make all the concessions that Israel would have made.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_05
Well, lay it all out.
12
SPEAKER_05
Lay it out.
12
SPEAKER_05
You do it so quickly.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I know.
12
SPEAKER_01
Anyhow, my future book should interest you guys.
12
SPEAKER_01
Oh, what are you working on?
12
SPEAKER_01
No, not working on, it s actually going to come out.
12
SPEAKER_01
Ah.
12
SPEAKER_01
It deals with Israeli and Arab atrocities, war crimes, I call them, in the 48th war.
12
SPEAKER_01
Oh, really?
12
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
Just deals with that subject.
12
SPEAKER_03
Is this, because I know you ve also
12
SPEAKER_03
talked about the closure of the archives and stuff?
12
SPEAKER_01
Well, it s marginal.
12
SPEAKER_01
It deals with that as well, but they have tried to seal off documents which had already used and seen.
12
SPEAKER_01
So now they don t let people see them.
12
SPEAKER_01
That s happened, but it s marginal in terms of its effect on production of historiography.
12
SPEAKER_01
Were the British archives useful for you for this new book?
12
SPEAKER_01
For this list, it s mostly Israeli archives.
12
SPEAKER_01
The British and the Americans and the UN did deal with these subjects, but not as well as Israeli documents.
12
SPEAKER_03
What s your casualty count for Deir Yassin?
12
SPEAKER_01
It s about 100.
12
SPEAKER_01
I think there s agreement on that by Israelis and Arabs.
12
100, 105.
12
SPEAKER_01
They used to say 245 or 254.
12
SPEAKER_01
Those were the figures the British and the Arabs and the Haganah agreed on at the beginning.
12
SPEAKER_03
Because the Red Cross, I think, was the one that first put out that number.
12
SPEAKER_01
I don t remember, maybe it was, what s his name, Jacques de Rainier, or maybe.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, maybe he came up with that number.
12
SPEAKER_01
But it was just, he didn t count.
12
SPEAKER_01
They didn t count bodies.
12
SPEAKER_01
They just threw the number out, and everybody was happy to blame the Irgun and the Lehi for killing more Arabs than actually were.
12
SPEAKER_03
Well, and they put it to good use as well.
12
SPEAKER_01
Well, they said that it helped precipitate more evacuations, so they were happy.
12
SPEAKER_03
I think Begin and his memoirs.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, yeah, they also used that number, yeah.
12
SPEAKER_05
So first of all, thank you for that heated discussion about the present.
12
SPEAKER_05
I would love to go back into history in a way that informs what we can look for by way of hope for the future.
12
SPEAKER_05
So when has, in Israel and Palestine, have we been closest to something like a peace settlement?
12
SPEAKER_05
to something where both sides would be happy and enable the flourishing of both peoples?
12
SPEAKER_01
Well, from my knowledge of the 120 years or so of conflict, the closest I think the two sides have been to reaching some sort of settlement
12
SPEAKER_01
appears to have been in the year 2000 when Barack and then subsequently Clinton offered a two-state settlement to PLO Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat.
12
SPEAKER_01
And Arafat seemed to waver.
12
SPEAKER_01
He didn t immediately reject what was being offered.
12
SPEAKER_01
But ultimately, he came down at the end of Camp David in July 2000.
12
SPEAKER_01
He came down against the proposals.
12
SPEAKER_01
And Clinton, who said he wouldn t blame him, later blamed Arafat for bringing down the summit.
12
SPEAKER_01
not reaching a solution there.
12
SPEAKER_01
But I think there on the table, certainly in the Clinton parameters of December 2000, which followed the proposals by Barack in July, the Palestinians were offered the best deal they re ever going to get from Israel, unless Israel is destroyed and then there ll just be a Palestinian Arab state.
12
SPEAKER_01
But the best deal that Israel could ever offer them, they were offered.
12
SPEAKER_01
which essentially was 95% of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, half of the Old City of Jerusalem, some sort of joint control of the Temple Mount and the Gaza Strip, of course, in full.
12
SPEAKER_01
And the Palestinians said no to this deal.
12
SPEAKER_01
And nobody really knows why Arafat said no.
12
SPEAKER_01
That is, some people think he was trying to hold out for slightly better terms.
12
SPEAKER_01
But my reading is that he was
12
SPEAKER_01
constitutionally, psychologically incapable of signing off on a two-state deal, meaning acceptance of the existence of a Jewish state.
12
SPEAKER_01
This was really the problem.
12
SPEAKER_03
Of Israel or of a Jewish state?
12
SPEAKER_01
Of a Jewish state.
12
SPEAKER_01
The Jewish state of Israel.
12
SPEAKER_01
He wasn t willing to share Palestine with the Jews and put his name to that.
12
SPEAKER_01
I think he just couldn t do it.
12
SPEAKER_01
That s my reading, but some people say it was because the terms were insufficient and he was willing, but was waiting for slightly better terms.
12
SPEAKER_01
I don t buy that, I don t think so.
12
SPEAKER_01
But other people disagree with me on this.
12
SPEAKER_05
What do you think?
12
SPEAKER_03
Well, just briefly in response, Arafat formally recognized
12
SPEAKER_03
Israel in 1993.
12
SPEAKER_03
I don t think actually that in 2000-2001 a genuine resolution was on offer because I think the maximum Israel was prepared to offer admittedly more than it had been prepared to offer in the past,
12
SPEAKER_03
fell short of the minimum that the Palestinians considered to be a reasonable two-state settlement, bearing in mind that as of 1949, Israel controlled 78% of the British mandate of Palestine.
12
SPEAKER_03
The Palestinians were seeking a state on the remaining 22%, and this was apparently
12
SPEAKER_03
too much for Israel.
12
SPEAKER_01
My response to your question would be... Wait, wait, they were being offered something like 22 or 21 percent.
12
SPEAKER_03
They were being offered, I think, less than a withdrawal to the 1967 borders with mutual and minor and reciprocal land swaps and the just resolution of
12
SPEAKER_03
The refugee problem was one of the problems.
12
SPEAKER_03
Yes.
12
SPEAKER_03
You know, I worked for a number of years with International Crisis Group, and my boss at the time was Rob Malley, who was one of the American officials present at Camp David.
12
SPEAKER_01
He was recently thrown out of the State Department or whatever.
12
SPEAKER_03
The point I want to make about Rob was he wrote, I think, a very perceptive article in 2001 in the New York Review of Books.
12
SPEAKER_03
I know that you and Ehud Barak
12
SPEAKER_03
have had a debate with them, but I think he gives a very compelling reason of why and how Camp David failed.
12
SPEAKER_01
But rather than going into that, I ll just... He wrote that together with Hussein Ara.
12
SPEAKER_03
Hussein Ara, yes, who was not at Camp David.
12
SPEAKER_03
But in response to your question, I think there could have been
12
SPEAKER_03
a real possibility of Israeli-Palestinian and Arab-Israeli peace in the mid-1970s in the wake of the 1973 October War.
12
SPEAKER_03
I ll recall that in 1971,
12
SPEAKER_03
Moshe Dayan, Israel s defense minister at the time, full of triumphalism about Israel s victory in 1967, speaking to a group of Israeli military veterans, stated, you know, if I had to choose between Sharm el-Sheikh without peace or peace without Sharm el-Sheikh, this is referring to the resort
12
SPEAKER_03
in Egyptian Sinai, which was then under Israeli occupation, Dayan said, I will choose for Sharm el-Sheikh without peace.
12
SPEAKER_03
Then the 1973 war came along, and I think Israeli calculations began to change very significantly, and I think it was in that context that had there been a joint effort
12
SPEAKER_03
US-Soviet push for an Arab-Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian resolution that incorporated both an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines and the establishment of a Palestinian state.
12
SPEAKER_03
in the occupied territories.
12
SPEAKER_03
I think there was a very reasonable prospect for that being achieved.
12
SPEAKER_03
It ended up being aborted, I think, for several reasons, and ultimately, the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, decided
12
SPEAKER_03
for reasons we can discuss later, to launch a separate unilateral initiative for Israeli-Egyptian rather than Arab-Israeli peace.
12
SPEAKER_03
And I think once that s set in motion,
12
SPEAKER_03
the prospects disappeared because Israel essentially saw its most powerful adversary removed from the equation and felt that this would give it a free hand in the occupied territories, also in Lebanon to get rid of the PLO and so on.
12
SPEAKER_03
So, you know, and you ask when were we closest.
12
SPEAKER_03
And I can t give you an answer of when we were closest.
12
SPEAKER_03
I can only tell you when I think we could have been close, and that was a lost opportunity.
12
SPEAKER_03
If we look at the situation today, there s been a lot of discussion.
12
SPEAKER_03
about a two-state settlement.
12
SPEAKER_03
My own view, and I ve written about this, I don t buy the arguments of the naysayers that we have passed the so-called point of no return with respect to a two-state settlement.
12
SPEAKER_03
Certainly, if you look at the Israeli position,
12
SPEAKER_03
in the occupied territories.
12
SPEAKER_03
I would argue it s more tenuous than was the French position in Algeria in 1954, than was the British position in Ireland in 1916, than was the Ethiopian position in Eritrea in 1990.
12
SPEAKER_03
And so as a matter of practicality, as a matter of principle,
12
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I do think the establishment of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories remains realistic.
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I think the question that we now need to ask ourselves, it s one I m certainly asking myself, since October 7th, and looking at Israel s genocidal campaign, but also looking at larger questions, is it desirable, can you have
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peace with what increasingly appears to be an irrational, genocidal state that seeks to confront and resolve each and every political challenge with violence, and that reacts to its failure to achieve
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solutions to political challenges with violence by applying even more violence that has an insatiable lust for Palestinian territory, a genocidal apartheid state that seems increasingly incapable of even conceiving of peaceful coexistence with the other people on that planet.
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land.
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So I m very pessimistic that a solution is possible.
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I look at, I grew up in Western Europe in the long shadow of the Second World War.
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I think we can all agree that there could have been no peace in Europe had certain regimes on that continent not been removed from power.
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I look at Southeast Asia in the late 1970s
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And I think we re all agreed that there could not have been peace in that region had the Khmer Rouge not been ousted.
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I look at Southern Africa during the 1990s, and I think we can all be agreed that had the white minority regimes that ruled Zimbabwe and South Africa not been dismantled, there could not have been peace in that region.
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And although I think it s worth having a discussion, I do think it s now a legitimate question to ask.
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can there be peace without dismantling the Zionist regime?
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And I make a very clear distinction between the Israeli state and its institutions on the one hand, and the Israeli people, who I think, regardless of our discussion about the history, I think you can now talk about an Israeli people and a people that have developed rights over time.
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and a formula for peaceful coexistence with them will need to be found, which is a separate matter from dismantling the Israeli state and its institutions.
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And again, I haven t reached clear conclusions about this, except to say, as a practical matter, I think a two-state settlement remains feasible, but I think there are very legitimate questions
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about its desirability and about whether peace can be achieved in the Middle East with the persistence of an irrational, genocidal, apartheid regime, particularly because Israeli society is beginning to develop more and more
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many extremely, extremely distasteful, supremacist, dehumanizing aspects that I think also stand in the way of coexistence that are being fed by this regime.
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So if you look back into history, when were we closest to peace?
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And do you draw any hope from any of them?
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I feel like in 2000, I feel like the deal that was present at least at the end of the Taba summit, I think in terms of what Israel I think had the appetite to give and what the Palestinians would have gotten would have definitely been the most agreeable between the two parties.
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I don t know if in 73, I m not sure if the appetite would have ever been there for the Arab states to negotiate alongside the Palestinians.
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I know that in Jordan, there was no love for the Palestinians after 1970, after Black September.
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I know that Sadat had no love for the Palestinians.
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due to their association with the Muslim Brotherhoods, attempted assassinations in Egypt.
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Sorry, which?
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PLO and the Muslim Brotherhood?
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Sadat was upset because there were attempted assassinations by people in, oh no, an assassination.
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It was a personal friend of his, Yusuf al-Sibai, I can t pronounce that.
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He was assassinated in Cyprus by a Palestinian spy.
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He was killed by the Abu Nidal organization, which was not part of the PLO, had nothing to do with the Muslim Brotherhood.
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Admittedly, yeah, he says as much, belongs to a Sunni group, not PLO directly, but I think that,
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There was a history of the Palestinians sometimes fighting with their neighboring states that were hosting them if they weren t getting the political concessions they wanted.
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The assassination of the Jordanian king in 51 might be another example of that in Jordan.
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It feels like over a long period of time, it feels like
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The Palestinians have been kind of told from the neighboring Arab states that if they just continue to enact violence, whether in Israel or abroad, that eventually a state will materialize somehow.
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I don t think it s gotten them any closer to a state.
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If anything, I think it s taken them farther and farther and farther away from one.
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And I think as long as the hyperbolic language is continually employed internationally, the idea that Israel is committing a genocide, the idea that there is an apartheid, the idea that they live in a concentration camp,
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all of these words I think further the narrative for the Palestinians that Israel is an evil state that needs to be dismantled.
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I mean you said as much about the institution at least of the Zionist government.
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Israel s government is probably not going anywhere.
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All of the other surrounding Arab states have accepted that or at least most of them down in the Gulf, Egypt and Jordan have accepted that.
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The Palestinians need to accept it too.
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The
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Israeli state where the state apparatus is not going anywhere and at some point they need to realize like hey We need a leader that s going to come out and represent us represent all of us is willing to take political risks is willing to Negotiate some lasting peace for us and it s not going to be the international community or some Invocation of international law or some invocation of morality or justice that s going to extricate us from this conflict It s going to take some actual difficult political maneuvering on the ground of accepting Israel of accepting Israel.
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Yeah, they formally did in 1993
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which they formally did in 1993, yeah, but then no lasting peace came after that in 2000.
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No, because 1993 was not a peace agreement.
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Sure, the Oslo Accords didn t have a final solution.
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Were an interim agreement.
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And Palestinians actually began clamoring for commencing the permanent status resolutions on schedule
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and the Israelis kept delaying them.
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In fact, they only began, I believe, in 99 under American pressure on the Israelis.
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I think you re being a bit one-sided.
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Both sides didn t fulfill
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The promise of Oslo and the steps needed for Oslo, there was Palestinian terrorism which accompanied Israel s expansion of settlements and other things.
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The two things fed each other and led to what happened in 2000 which was a breakdown of the talks altogether when the Palestinians said no.
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But I don t agree, incidentally, with this definition of Israel or the Israeli state as apartheid.
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It s not.
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There is some sort of apartheid going on in the West Bank.
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The Israeli regime itself is not an apartheid regime.
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That is nonsense.
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By any definition of apartheid, which… Well, by the formal definition, I think it qualifies.
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No, it doesn t qualify.
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Apartheid is a race-based distinction between different segments of the population, and some of them don t have any representation at all, like the blacks in South Africa.
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No rights at all.
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In Israel itself, the minority, the Arabs, do have representation, do have rights, and so on.
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I don t think Israel is also genocidal.
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I don t think it s been genocidal.
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It wasn t so in 1948, it wasn t so in 1967, and it hasn t been recently, in my view.
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And talk about dismantling Israel, and that s what you re talking about, is, I think Stephen said it correctly, is counterproductive.
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It just pushes Israelis further away from willing to give Palestinians anything.
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Please, Norm, tell me you have something optimistic to say.
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Even though I agree, I ve thought about it a lot, and I agree with Muin s analysis.
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I m not really in the business of punditry.
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I d rather look at the historical record where I feel more comfortable, and I feel on terra firma.
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So I d like to just go through that.
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I don t quite—I agree and I disagree with Muin on the 1973 issue.
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After the 1973 war, it was clear that Israel was surprised by what happened during the war, and it took a big hit.
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The estimates are—I don t know what numbers you use, but I hear between 2,000 and 3,000 Israeli soldiers were killed during the 1970s.
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It was 2,500?
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I read different numbers.
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That s a very large number of Israelis who were killed.
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There were moments at the beginning of the war where there was a fear that this might be it.
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Everybody forgets Israel s atomic weaponry.
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So how could they have been defeated?
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Didn t Dayan talk about the collapse of the Third Temple?
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He did, but it was hysterical and silly because Israel had atomic weapons.
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They wanted to stop the Syrians or the Egyptians.
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But we re talking about perceptions here.
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I can t tell you if he was hysterical or not.
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No, he was.
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I wasn t in the same room with him.
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But I m just saying, let s not bog down on that.
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The war is over, and when President Carter comes into power, Carter was an extremely smart guy, Jimmy Carter, extremely smart guy, and he was very fixed on details.
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He was probably the most impressive of modern American presidents, in my opinion, by a wide margin.
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And he was determined to resolve the conflict,
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on a big scale, on the Arab-Israeli scale.
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On the Palestinian issue, he wouldn t go past what he called a Palestinian homeland.
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He wouldn t accept- Palestinian national home.
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On the Palestinian national home, he wouldn t go as far as a Palestinian state.
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I m not going to go into the details of that.
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I don t think realistically, given the political balance of forces, that was going to happen, but that s a separate issue.
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Let s get to the issue at hand, namely what is the obstacle or what has been the obstacle since the early 1970s.
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Since roughly 1974, the Palestinians have accepted the two-state settlement on the June 1967 border.
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Now,
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As more pressure was exerted on Israel because the Palestinians seemed reasonable, the Israelis, to quote the Israeli political scientist Avner Yaniv, he s since passed from the scene, he said, Yaniv in his book, Dilemmas of Security, he said that the big Israeli fear was what he called the Palestinian peace offensive.
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That was their worry, that the Palestinians were becoming too moderate.
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And unless you understand that, you can t understand the June 1982 Lebanon War.
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The purpose of the June 1982 Lebanon War was to liquidate the PLO in Southern Lebanon because they were too moderate, the Palestinian peace offensive.
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I m going to have to fast forward.
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There are many events.
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There s the first Intifada, then there s the Oslo Accord, and let s now go to the heart of the issue, namely the 2000-2001 negotiations.
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The negotiations are divided into three parts for the sake of listeners.
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There s Camp David in July 2000, there are the Clinton parameters in December 2000, and then there are negotiations in Taba in Egypt in 2001.
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Those are the three phases.
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Now, I have studied the record probably to the point of insanity, because there are so many details you have to master.
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I ll vouch for that, the insanity part.
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Actually, I will vouch for it.
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I will personally vouch for it.
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There is one extensive record from that whole period from 2000 to, you could say, 2007, and that is what came to be called the Palestine Papers, which are about 15,000 pages of all the records of the negotiations.
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I have read through all of them, every single page.
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And this is what I find.
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If you look at Shlomo Ben-Ami s book, which I have with me, Prophets Without Honor, it s his last book.
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He says, going into Camp David, that means July, going into Camp David, July 2000, he said the Israelis were willing to return about, not return, but withdraw from 90, relinquish, 92% of the West Bank.
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Ben-Ami was at Camp David.
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Yeah, Ben-Ami, he was at Taba.
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Oh yeah, he was also at Camp David.
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They wanted, Israel wanted to keep all the major settlement blocks.
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It wanted to keep roughly 8% of the West Bank.
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They were allowing for, you put it at 84 to 90% in your books.
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They put it at roughly 92%.
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It also depends how you calculate.
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It also depends what stage Camp David, because there were two weeks.
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I ll get to that.
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Proposals change during those two weeks.
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Israel wants to keep all the major settlement blocks.
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It means the border area of the West Bank.
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Well, not the border.
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We have Ariel.
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We have Maale Adumim.
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We have as Condoleezza Rice called Ariel.
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She said it was a dagger into the heart of the West Bank.
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They want to keep 8% of the land.
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They want to keep the settlement blocks.
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They want to keep 80% of the settlers.
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They will not budge an inch on the question of refugees.
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To quote Ehud Barak in the article he co-authored with you in the New York Review of Books, we will accept, and I think the quote s accurate, no moral, legal, or historical responsibility for what happened to the refugees.
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So forget about even allowing refugees to return.
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We accept no moral, legal, or historical responsibility for the refugees.
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And on Jerusalem, they wanted to keep large parts of Jerusalem.
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Now, how do we judge who is reasonable and who is not?
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Ben-Ami says, I think the Israeli offer was reasonable.
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That s how he sees it.
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But what is the standard of reasonable?
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My standard is, what does international law say?
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International law says the settlements are illegal.
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Israel wants to keep all the settlement blocks.
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15 judges, all 15, in the Wu decision in 2004, in July 2004, all 15 judges, including the American judge Burgenthal, ruled the settlements are illegal under international law.
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They want to keep 80% of the settlers.
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Under international law, all the settlers are illegal in the West Bank.
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They want to keep large parts of East Jerusalem.
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But under international law, East Jerusalem is occupied Palestinian territory.
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That s what the international.
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That s, excuse me.
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There s never been a Palestinian state.
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How could it be Palestinian?
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I listened patiently to you.
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Sorry.
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Under international law, if you read the decision,
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all territory beyond the Green Line, which includes East Jerusalem, is occupied Palestinian territory.
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The designated unit, according to the International Court of Justice, the designated unit for Palestinian self-determination.
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and they deny any right whatsoever on the right of return.
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I don t want to go into the details now.
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The maximum formal offer was by Ehud Omar in 2008.
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He offered 5,000 refugees could return under what was called family reunification, 5,000
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in the course of five years and no recognition of any Israeli responsibility.
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So, if you use as the baseline what the UN General Assembly has said and what the International Court of Justice has said, if you use that baseline, international law, by that baseline, all the concessions came
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from the Palestinian side.
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Every single concession came from the Palestinian side.
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None came from the Israeli side.
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They may have accepted less than what they wanted, but it was still beyond what international law allocated to them.
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Now, you ll say- Allocated to the Palestinians.
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Allocated to the Palestinians, yes.
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Thank you for the clarification.
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Now, about Arafat.
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Like the mufti, never like the guy.
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I think that was one of the only disagreements Muin and I had when Arafat passed.
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You were a little sentimental.
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I was not.
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Never like the guy.
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But politics, you don t have to like the guy.
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There was no question, nobody argues it, that whenever the negotiations started up, the Palestinians just kept saying the same things.
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No.
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No.
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They kept saying no.
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No.
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Professor Morris, with due respect, incorrect.
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They kept saying international legitimacy, international law, UN resolutions.
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They said, we already gave you what the law required.
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We gave that in 1988, November, 1988, and then ratified again at Oslo in 1993.
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And they said, now we want what was promised us under international law.
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And that was the one point where everybody on the other side agreed.
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Clinton, don t talk to me about international law.
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Livni during the Omar administration, she said, I studied international law.
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I don t believe in international law.
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Every single member on the other side, they didn t want to hear from international law.
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And to my thinking,
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that that is the only reasonable baseline for trying to resolve the conflict.
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And Israel has, along with the U.S.
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— When has international law been relevant to any conflict, basically, in the world over the last 150 years?
14
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That s why the Palestinians have to recognize Israel, because that s international law.
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But international law is meaningless.
14
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That was U.N.
14
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Resolution 242.
14
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Conflicts are not solved by international law or in accordance with international law.
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Professor Morris, for argument s sake, let s agree on that.
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Strictly for argument s sake.
14
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What s the alternative?
14
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Dennis Ross said, we re going to decide who gets what on the basis of needs.
14
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So he says, Israel needs this, Israel needs that, Israel needs that.
14
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Dennis Ross decide to be the philosopher king.
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He s going to decide on the basis of needs.
14
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Well, if you asked me, since Gaza is one of the densest places on earth, it needs a good chunk.
14
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It needs part of Sinai.
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It needs a nice big chunk.
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Of Sinai.
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That s what it actually needs.
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Okay, I don t even want to go there.
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It needs a nice big chunk, but I have to accept international law says no.
14
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International law is irrelevant.
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Now, Ben-Ami says, I think the Israeli offer was reasonable.
14
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And he s a reasonable guy.
14
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You know that.
14
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Okay, I don t want to go there.
14
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I ve debated him and partly agree with you.
14
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But who decides what s reasonable?
14
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I think the international community in its political incarnation, the General Assembly, the Security Council, all those UN Security Council resolutions saying the settlements are illegal, annexation of East Jerusalem is null and void.
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and the International Court of Justice.
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That, to me, is a reasonable standard.
14
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And by that standard, the Palestinians were asked to make concessions, which I consider unreasonable, or the international community considers unreasonable.
14
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I think that the issue is when you apply international law or international standards, I wouldn t say what Benny Moore says that they re irrelevant,
14
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But I think that these have to be seen as informing the conversation.
14
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I don t think these are the final shape of the conversation.
14
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I don t think historically Israel has ever negotiated within the strict bounds of whether we re talking resolution 242, whether we re talking about any general assembly resolutions.
14
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That s just not how these negotiations tend to go.
14
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You might consider international opinion on things, but at the end of the day, it s the bilateral negotiations, oftentimes historically started in secret, independent of the international community, that end up shaping what the final agreements look like.
14
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I think the issue with this broad appeal to international law is, again, going back to my earlier point about all of the euphemistic words, all it simply does is drive Palestinian expectations up to a level that is never going to be satisfied.
14
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For instance, you can throw that ICJ opinion all you want, it was an advisory opinion, that came in 2004.
14
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How Palestinians gained more or less land since that 2004 advisory opinion was issued.
14
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I don t think- So what would your standard be then?
14
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Both sides have to have a delegation that confronts each other and they assess the realistic conditions on the ground and they try to figure out within the confines of international law and then what both sides are reasonable for.
14
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But like for instance, this statement of like full retreat from the West Bank, what is it, 400,000 settlers?
14
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How many settlers live in the West Bank now?
14
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Probably half a million.
14
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Depends if you include the Jerusalem suburbs or not.
14
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Yeah, four or five hundred thousand people are never... I think it s seven hundred thousand.
14
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With the Jerusalem suburbs, perhaps.
14
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Sure.
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Yeah.
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It is now called... Half a million people are... Jerusalem, not settlements.
14
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I know that, but that s not what the law, the law calls it null and void.
14
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We can say whatever we want until we re blue in the face, but like there s half a million Israeli people are not being expelled, which is not going to happen.
14
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My response, you re basically saying, if I understand correctly,
14
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there s only one way to resolve this, and that is through direct bilateral negotiation.
14
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Probably, yeah.
14
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Okay.
14
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So... Or ideally, but... I ve taken over your house, okay?
14
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You re not gonna go to the police because, you know, the law is only of limited value.
14
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So you come over
14
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and sit in what is now my living room that used to be your living room and we negotiate.
14
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The problem there is that you re not gonna get anything unless I agree to it.
14
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And standards and norms and law and all the rest of it be damned.
14
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So you need to take into account that when you re advocating bilateral negotiations that effectively that gives each of the parties veto power.
14
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In the current circumstances, the Palestinians have already recognized Israel.
14
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They have... You keep bringing that up like it s a significant concession.
14
SPEAKER_00
It s not true.
14
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It s not even true.
14
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The recognition from Palestine isn t doing anything for... Hamas totally rejects it.
14
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I m not talking about Hamas.
14
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Hamas is the majority among the Palestinian people.
14
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They won the elections in 2006.
14
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Actually, they won a majority of the seats.
14
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Yes, exactly.
14
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They didn t win a majority of the votes.
14
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Every opinion poll today says the majority of Palestinians support the Hamas.
14
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Hamas absolutely rejects Israel.
14
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So if Arafat in 1993 or whatever issued a sort of recognition of Israel.
14
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It wasn t a sort of recognition.
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Okay, a recognition of Israel.
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It s meaningless.
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It s meaningless.
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It s meaningless.
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And anyhow, I don t believe that Arafat was sincere about it.
14
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Does it matter what you or I think about what we felt?
14
SPEAKER_04
Well, most Israelis do and that does matter.
14
SPEAKER_03
Okay.
14
SPEAKER_04
That does matter.
14
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But Hamas says no and Hamas is the majority.
14
SPEAKER_03
So for years, so for years, the Israeli
14
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and U.S.
14
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demand was that the Palestinians recognize 242 and 338.
14
SPEAKER_03
They did, but you re saying, okay, we demanded that they do this, but it was meaningless when they did it.
14
SPEAKER_03
Then the demand was that- It was a tactical thing, yes.
14
SPEAKER_03
Then the demand was that the PLO recognize Israel.
14
SPEAKER_03
Tactical.
14
SPEAKER_03
Okay, we demanded that they did this, and they did it, but it s meaningless.
14
SPEAKER_04
And they never changed their chart of the PLO.
14
SPEAKER_04
You may remember that.
14
SPEAKER_04
In fact, they supposedly abrogated the old charter, but never came up with a new one.
14
SPEAKER_03
No, there was no new charter.
14
SPEAKER_04
But in 1996... And Farouk Khadoumi said, of course, the old charter is still in force.
14
SPEAKER_03
Yes.
14
SPEAKER_03
But the point is, you know, the Palestinians  demands are constantly made of them.
14
SPEAKER_03
And when they exceed to those demands, they re then told actually what you did is meaningless.
14
SPEAKER_03
So here s a new set of demands.
14
SPEAKER_03
I mean, you know, it s like a hamster.
14
SPEAKER_03
It s like a hamster stuck in a wheel that will be told if you run fast enough, you ll get out of the cage.
14
SPEAKER_04
No, no.
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The bottom line is that
14
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Israel would like a Palestinian Sadat.
14
SPEAKER_04
It wants the Palestinians.
14
SPEAKER_04
This is really a worst case scenario.
14
SPEAKER_04
Okay, let me just, because they shot Sadat.
14
SPEAKER_04
But anyhow, the Israelis want the Palestinians, Israelis want the Palestinians to actually accept the legitimacy of the state of Israel and the Zionist project, and then live side by side with them in two states.
14
SPEAKER_04
That s what the Israelis,
14
SPEAKER_04
I don t even know if it s true.
14
SPEAKER_04
I don t even know if that s true today.
14
SPEAKER_03
And what is the formal position of this Israeli government?
14
SPEAKER_04
No, no, I m saying I don t know if it exists today.
14
SPEAKER_03
Okay, it s predecessor, and it s predecessor, and it s predecessor.
14
SPEAKER_03
Come on.
14
SPEAKER_04
That s what Israelis want.
14
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They want a change of psyche among the Palestinians.
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SPEAKER_04
And if that doesn t happen, there won t be a Palestinian state.
14
SPEAKER_02
Muin has an interesting point.
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I know you want to forget it, just like you want to forget the genocide charge.
14
SPEAKER_02
I know you want to forget that.
14
SPEAKER_00
Well, the Palestinians want to forget it too, and it doesn t suit them as well.
14
SPEAKER_02
But here s the problem, and it s exactly the problem that Muin just brought up.
14
SPEAKER_02
Now I read carefully your book, One State, Two States.
14
SPEAKER_02
With all due respect, absolutely a disgrace.
14
SPEAKER_02
Coming from you, coming from you.
14
SPEAKER_02
Most reviewers didn t agree with you.
14
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, coming from you was like you wrote it in your sleep.
14
SPEAKER_02
It s nothing compared to what you wrote before.
14
SPEAKER_02
I don t know why you did it.
14
SPEAKER_02
In my opinion, you ruined your reputation.
14
SPEAKER_02
Not totally, but you undermined it with that book.
14
SPEAKER_02
But let s get to the issue that Muin wrote.
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SPEAKER_02
Here s what you said.
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SPEAKER_02
You said, formally, you said, yes, it s true.
14
SPEAKER_02
The Palestinians recognize Israel.
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SPEAKER_02
But then you said, viscerally, in their hearts, they didn t really recognize Israel.
14
SPEAKER_02
So I thought to myself, how does Professor Morrison know what s in the hearts of Palestinians?
14
SPEAKER_02
I don t know.
14
SPEAKER_02
I was surprised as a historian you would be talking about what s lurking in the hearts of Palestinians.
14
SPEAKER_02
But then you said something which was really interesting.
14
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You said, even if in their hearts they accepted Israel, you said, quote, rationally, they could never accept Israel because they got nothing.
14
SPEAKER_02
They had this beautiful Palestine, and now they re reduced to just a few pieces, a few parcels of land.
14
SPEAKER_02
So they will never accept it.
14
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
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SPEAKER_02
There s no way they can accept that.
14
SPEAKER_04
I would say that as well.
14
SPEAKER_02
The two-state solution, as proposed, doesn t make any sense.
14
SPEAKER_02
Exactly as Muin said, you keep moving the goalposts until we reach the point where we realize, according to Benny Morris, there can t be a solution.
14
SPEAKER_02
So why don t you just say that outright?
14
SPEAKER_02
Why don t you say it outright?
14
SPEAKER_02
According to you, the Palestinians can never be reasonable because according to you... They want all of Palestine.
14
SPEAKER_02
According to you, they couldn t possibly agree to a two-state settlement because it s such a lousy settlement.
14
SPEAKER_02
Because they want all of Palestine.
14
SPEAKER_02
But you said rationally, they couldn t accept it.
14
SPEAKER_02
Not their feelings.
14
SPEAKER_02
It s both.
14
SPEAKER_02
You said rational.
14
SPEAKER_02
You went from formally, viscerally, rationally.
14
SPEAKER_02
So now we re reaching the point where, according to Benny Morris,
14
SPEAKER_02
The Palestinians can t be reasonable because reasonably they have to reject two states.
14
SPEAKER_02
They want all of Palestine.
14
SPEAKER_02
Absolutely correct.
14
SPEAKER_02
There s no way to resolve the problem according to your logic.
14
SPEAKER_04
They want all of Palestine.
14
SPEAKER_04
He said that himself.
14
SPEAKER_04
He said they should dismantle Israel.
14
SPEAKER_03
That s what he s saying.
14
SPEAKER_03
What I said and I ve written.
14
SPEAKER_02
I m glad you didn t deny it.
14
SPEAKER_03
I ve written extensively on this issue, on why a two-state settlement is still feasible, and I came out in support of that proposition.
14
SPEAKER_03
Perhaps in my heart, you can see that I was just bullshitting, but that s what I actually wrote.
14
SPEAKER_03
That was a number of years ago, and just as a matter of historical record,
14
SPEAKER_03
Beginning in the early 1970s, there was fierce debate within the Palestinian National Movement about whether to accept or reject, and there were three schools of thought.
14
SPEAKER_03
There was one that would accept nothing less than the total liberation of Palestine,
14
SPEAKER_03
There was a second that accepted what was called the establishment of a fighting national authority on Palestinian soil, which they saw as a springboard for the total liberation of Palestine.
14
SPEAKER_03
And there was a third school that believed that under current dynamics and so on, that they should go for a two-state settlement.
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SPEAKER_03
And our
14
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friend and correspondent, Gauter Lohrse, has written a very perceptive article on when the PLO, already in 1976, came out in open support of a two-state resolution at the Security Council.
14
SPEAKER_03
PLO accepted it, Israel, of course, rejected it, but the resolution didn t pass because the US and the UK vetoed it.
14
SPEAKER_03
It was both of them.
14
SPEAKER_02
I think it was nine to five.
14
SPEAKER_03
Ah, okay, yeah.
14
SPEAKER_03
The fact of the matter is that the PLO came to accept a two-state settlement.
14
SPEAKER_03
Why they did it, I think is irrelevant.
14
SPEAKER_03
And subsequently, the PLO acted on the basis of seeking to achieve a two-state settlement.
14
SPEAKER_03
The reason, I think, and I think, Norm, you ve written about this, the reason that Arafat was so insistent on getting minimally acceptable terms for a two-state settlement at Camp David and afterwards was precisely because he knew that once he signed, that was all the Palestinians were going to get.
14
SPEAKER_03
If his intention had been, you know, I m not accepting Israel, I simply want to springboard, he would have accepted a Palestinian state in Jericho.
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SPEAKER_03
But he didn t.
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SPEAKER_04
That s something I ve never understood.
14
SPEAKER_04
He should have logically accepted the springboard and then from there launched his next stage.
14
SPEAKER_02
He should have done that.
14
SPEAKER_02
International law would put a real constraint on him.
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SPEAKER_02
Once he accepted, it was over.
14
SPEAKER_04
Constitutionally, he was incapable of signing.
14
SPEAKER_04
I don t know that.
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SPEAKER_03
I m not his analyst.
14
SPEAKER_03
He should have accepted it.
14
SPEAKER_03
But if you re correct, okay, that he was really out to eliminate Israel, then
14
SPEAKER_03
he wouldn t have cared about the borders, he wouldn t have cared about what the thing said about refugees, he would have gotten a sovereign state and used that to achieve that purpose.
14
SPEAKER_03
But I think it was precisely because he recognized that he was not negotiating for a springboard, he was negotiating permanent status, that he was such a stickler about the details.
14
SPEAKER_02
Just as a factual matter, he wasn t such a stickler
14
SPEAKER_02
when they asked him how many refugees, the numbers... It was the principle rather than the numbers.
14
SPEAKER_02
The principle.
14
SPEAKER_02
He said I would be pragmatic about it.
14
SPEAKER_02
Yes, and the numbers that were used at Annapolis
14
SPEAKER_02
were between 100,000 and 250,000 refugees over 10 years.
14
SPEAKER_02
That was the number.
14
SPEAKER_02
Arafat, when he was asked at Camp David, he kept saying, I care about the Lebanese, the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, which came to about 300,000.
14
SPEAKER_02
which was a large concession, whether you accept the number or not, that he wasn t talking about 6 million.
14
SPEAKER_02
He was talking about between 100,000 and 250,000 over 10 years.
14
SPEAKER_02
Now, the best offer that came from the Palestinians, excuse me, the best offer that came from Israel was the Olmert offer.
14
SPEAKER_01
Can we just pretend like we didn t all lay out the exceptionally pessimistic view of a two-state, hold on a second, two-state solution.
14
SPEAKER_01
Let s pretend that in five years, in 10 years, a two-state peace settlement is reached.
15
SPEAKER_00
And as historians, you ll still be here writing about it 20 years from now.
15
SPEAKER_00
How would it have happened?
15
SPEAKER_04
I think that historically, I think that the big issue is, I think that both sides have had their own internal motivations to fight because they feel like they have something to gain from it.
15
SPEAKER_04
But I think as time has gone on, unfortunately, the record proves that the Palestinian side is delusional.
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SPEAKER_04
The longer that the conflict endures, the worse position they ll be in.
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SPEAKER_04
But for some reason, they ve never had a leader that convinced them of that as much.
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SPEAKER_04
that Arafat thought that if he held on, there was always a better deal around the corner.
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SPEAKER_04
Abbas is more concerned with trying to maintain any legitimacy amongst Palestinians than actually trying to negotiate anything realistic with Israel, that Palestinians are always incentivized to feel like as long as they keep fighting, either the international community is going to save them with the
15
SPEAKER_04
five millionth UN resolution condemning whatever, that another ICJ advisory opinion is finally going to lead to the expulsion of half a million Jews from the West Bank, or that some other international body, the ICJ and the genocide charge is gonna come and save the Palestinians.
15
SPEAKER_04
As long as they, in their mind, feel like somebody is coming to save them, then they feel like they re going to have the ability to get something better in the future.
15
SPEAKER_04
But the reality is, is all of the good partners for peace that the Palestinians had, have completely and utterly abandoned them.
15
SPEAKER_04
Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf states, whether you re talking bilateral peace or the Abraham Accords, most of the Arab leaders in negotiating peace with Israel have just not had as much of an interest in maintaining the rights and the representations of what the Palestinian people want and the only people they have today to
15
SPEAKER_04
draw legitimacy from or to have on their side to argue with them are people that, I guess, write books or tweet or people in the international community that do resolutions or amnesty international reports.
15
SPEAKER_04
And the reality is we can scream until we re blue in the face on these things.
15
SPEAKER_04
None of it has gotten any closer to helping the Palestinians in any sense of the word.
15
SPEAKER_04
The condition has only gotten worse.
15
SPEAKER_04
The settlements only continue to expand.
15
SPEAKER_04
The military operations are only to get more brutal.
15
SPEAKER_04
The blockade is going to continue to have worse effects.
15
SPEAKER_04
As long as we use international law as the basis and there isn t a strong, a Sadat-like Palestinian leader that s willing to come up and confront Israel with the brave peaceful negotiations to force them to acquiesce, nothing is going to happen.
15
SPEAKER_04
And I think that the issue you come up with is, you know, whether it s people like Norm that talk about how brave the October 7th attacks were or how much respect they have for those fighters.
15
SPEAKER_04
Israel, in a way, and I think people have said as much about Netanyahu, the right wants violence from the Palestinians because it always gives them a perpetual excuse to further the conflict.
15
SPEAKER_04
Well, we have to go in on October 7th and we ve got to remove Hamas, but we can t trust these people in the West.
15
SPEAKER_04
We have to do the night raids because, you know, the second Intifada, you know, made us feel like the Palestinian people didn t want to trust with us.
15
SPEAKER_04
I feel like the
15
SPEAKER_04
The biggest thing that would force Israel to change its path would be an actual – a real – not for like two weeks but an actual peaceful Palestinian leader, somebody committed to peace that is able to apply those standards and hold the entire region of Palestine to those standards.
15
SPEAKER_04
Because I think over time, the mounting pressure from without the international community and
15
SPEAKER_04
mounting pressure from within because Israel hosts a lot of its own criticism.
15
SPEAKER_04
If we talk about B Tselem, we talk about Horetz, like Israel will host a lot of its own criticism.
15
SPEAKER_04
I think that that pressure would force Israel towards an actual peace agreement, but it s never going to come through violence.
15
SPEAKER_04
Historically, it hasn t.
15
SPEAKER_04
And in the modern day, violence has just hurt the Palestinians more and more.
15
SPEAKER_00
If you paint a picture of the future, now s a good moment for both Palestine and Israel to get new leadership.
15
SPEAKER_00
Netanyahu s on the way out, Hamas possibly is on the way out.
15
SPEAKER_00
Who should rise to the top such that a peaceful settlement can be reached?
15
SPEAKER_04
The problem is, like Benny said, it s difficult because Hamas enjoys so much widespread support.
15
SPEAKER_04
amongst the Palestinian people.
15
SPEAKER_04
I think that the, well, I don t know, there s opinions on whether democracy or pushing them towards elections was the right or wrong idea, but with like an Islamic fundamentalist government for Hamas, I don t know if a negotiation with Israel ever happens there.
15
SPEAKER_04
And then when the international pressure is always, you know, 67 borders, infinite right of return for refugees, and a total withdrawal of Israel from all these lands to even start negotiations, I just don t see realistically, on the Palestinian side, no negotiations are ever gonna start in a place that Israel s willing to accept.
15
SPEAKER_01
If you want to dismiss international law, that s fine, but then you have to do it consistently.
15
SPEAKER_01
You can t set standards for the Palestinians, but reject applying those standards to Israel.
15
SPEAKER_01
If we re gonna have the law of the jungle, then we can all be beasts, and not only some of us.
15
SPEAKER_01
And I think, so it s either that,
15
SPEAKER_01
or you have certain agreed standards that are intended to regulate our conduct, all of our conduct, not just some of us.
15
SPEAKER_01
So that s a fundamental thing.
15
SPEAKER_04
Well, what are the standards you think I m saying to abandon?
15
SPEAKER_01
Well, you re saying, you know, international law and the millionth UN resolution, you re being very dismissive about all these things.
15
SPEAKER_01
And that s fine, but then you have to be dismissive across the board.
15
SPEAKER_04
For instance, like 242, that was a chapter six resolution, that s non-binding.
15
SPEAKER_04
But 242 is binding.
15
SPEAKER_02
What is binding?
15
SPEAKER_02
Do you know anything about how the UN system works?
15
SPEAKER_04
If you read the language of the resolution, binding is typically if it commits you to upholding a particular international law or if it establishes a chapter off.
15
SPEAKER_02
You just throw out words.
15
SPEAKER_02
You hear binding.
15
SPEAKER_05
Does 242 mention a Palestinian state?
15
SPEAKER_02
No.
15
SPEAKER_02
Of course not.
15
SPEAKER_02
That s part of the problem.
15
SPEAKER_02
That was the reason why the Palestinians didn t want to recognize 242 because they re only referred at the very end.
15
SPEAKER_04
But the PLO recognized 181 and 242.
15
SPEAKER_01
Hold on, hold on.
15
SPEAKER_01
Every United Nations Security Council resolution, irrespective of under which chapter it was adopted, is by definition binding.
15
SPEAKER_01
Binding not only on the members of the Security Council, but on every member state of the UN.
15
SPEAKER_01
Read the UN Charter.
15
SPEAKER_01
It s black and white.
15
SPEAKER_04
The language even of 242 is kept intentionally vague such that it doesn t actually provide again the final concourse.
15
SPEAKER_01
It s actually not that vague because the term land for peace
15
SPEAKER_01
originates in 242.
15
SPEAKER_01
The idea is... Sure, but the part about territorial acquisition and Israel s need to give it up was kept vague.
15
SPEAKER_04
That s why in 79, Israel saw that they could fulfill their obligations under 242 in terms of withdrawal.
15
SPEAKER_02
Allow me points of information.
15
SPEAKER_02
The first principle in UN Resolution 242 is the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force.
15
SPEAKER_02
Which is meaningless.
15
SPEAKER_02
It may be meaningless to you, Mr. Bernal.
15
SPEAKER_02
It was meaningless to everyone in the region.
15
SPEAKER_02
That principle was adopted by the Friendly Nations Resolution, the UN General Assembly in 1970.
15
SPEAKER_02
That resolution was then reiterated in the International Court of Justice ruling advisory opinion in 2004.
15
SPEAKER_02
That was the basis of the coalition against Iraq when it acquired Kuwait and then declared it a province of Kuwait.
15
SPEAKER_02
Which Arafat supported.
15
SPEAKER_02
That s what s called.
15
SPEAKER_02
That s what s called.
15
SPEAKER_02
That s true.
15
SPEAKER_02
Arafat did support it.
15
SPEAKER_02
It s not accurate.
15
SPEAKER_02
I m not going to go there.
15
SPEAKER_02
I m not going to go there.
15
SPEAKER_05
It s not accurate that Arafat endorsed.
15
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
15
SPEAKER_02
I m not going to go there.
15
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
15
SPEAKER_02
Uh, it s called under international law, use Kogan s or peremptory norms of international law, the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.
15
SPEAKER_02
That is not controversial.
15
SPEAKER_02
It s not vague.
15
SPEAKER_02
You couldn t put it more succinctly.
15
SPEAKER_02
You can not acquire territory by force under international law on the way.
15
SPEAKER_05
That is for seven.
15
SPEAKER_05
Who has a strip before 67?
15
SPEAKER_05
Mr.
15
SPEAKER_02
But no, don t change the subject.
15
SPEAKER_02
If you don t know what you re talking about, at least have the humility.
15
SPEAKER_02
You talk about Chapter 6.
15
SPEAKER_02
You don t know Chapter 6 from Tweet 5.
15
SPEAKER_02
You have no idea what you re talking about.
15
SPEAKER_02
It s just so embarrassing.
15
SPEAKER_02
At least have some humility.
15
SPEAKER_02
Between us, we ve read maybe 10,000 books on the topic, and you ve read two Wikipedia entries, and you start talking about chapter six.
15
SPEAKER_02
Do you know what chapter seven is?
15
SPEAKER_02
You know what chapter seven is?
15
SPEAKER_04
Answer me a question.
15
SPEAKER_04
How close has 242 gotten the Palestinians to a state?
15
SPEAKER_04
How close has the 2004 advisory opinion gotten the West Bank settlement?
15
SPEAKER_04
What s your alternative?
15
SPEAKER_04
The alternative is, is, is, is not this, whatever this making money off the conflict is the, the actual alternative, the actual alternative.
15
SPEAKER_04
You should talk about making money off of idiocy.
15
SPEAKER_05
You go and talk to 50 million different people about your awesome solutions.
15
SPEAKER_03
But he has a point there.
15
SPEAKER_03
The issue is you have to negotiate.
15
SPEAKER_03
All these resolutions have gotten the Palestinians no closer to a state.
15
SPEAKER_02
Because they haven t been enforced because of the US veto.
15
SPEAKER_03
They re not going to be enforced.
15
SPEAKER_02
Well, wait, wait, wait, wait.
15
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
15
SPEAKER_02
If I may.
15
SPEAKER_02
Professor Morris, because of your logic, and I m not disputing it,
15
SPEAKER_02
That s why October 7 happened.
15
SPEAKER_02
Oh my God.
15
SPEAKER_02
Because there was no options left for those people.
15
SPEAKER_02
Exactly what Muin said.
15
SPEAKER_03
And now what options are left?
15
SPEAKER_03
After October 7, what s the options left?
15
SPEAKER_02
The only option is conflict.
15
SPEAKER_02
The only option is combat.
15
SPEAKER_02
Mr. Bonnell is now an expert on Palestinian mentality.
15
SPEAKER_02
Hold on.
15
SPEAKER_02
You re contradicting yourself.
15
SPEAKER_02
I only deal with facts.
15
SPEAKER_02
I only deal with facts.
15
SPEAKER_05
You re contradicting yourself.
15
SPEAKER_05
On the one hand, you re saying all the Palestinians do is fight and violence and terrorism and all the rest of it.
15
SPEAKER_05
But on the other hand, you re saying they re expecting salvation from from U. N. Resolutions and international court.
15
SPEAKER_01
Those aren t violent.
15
SPEAKER_01
No, but it s part of me.
15
SPEAKER_04
It s the it s the continual putting off of negotiating.
15
SPEAKER_04
They need a solution.
15
SPEAKER_04
They ve negotiated.
15
SPEAKER_05
I think when I think he said to respond, I think all over the world.
15
SPEAKER_05
Yes, I put in the conflict.
15
SPEAKER_02
I accept the two states in nineteen seventy five.
15
SPEAKER_02
You can quote Arafat talking about how he s lying and he s just going to use a 94 and a 95 when he s making trips around the world.
15
SPEAKER_03
Starting ground.
15
SPEAKER_03
I m sorry.
15
SPEAKER_03
I can also, you can watch YouTube videos, slow it down to 0.5 speed if you don t understand what I m saying.
15
SPEAKER_01
Let me, there s a very lengthy history of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
15
SPEAKER_01
You want to deny that those negotiations took place.
15
SPEAKER_05
Where it feels like there was a good faith effort, where there was a good faith effort, where it was a good faith effort.
15
SPEAKER_02
We have a written record.
15
SPEAKER_04
With all due respect, Mr. Pop Historian, you can t even read the written records.
15
SPEAKER_04
I don t know why you re referring to it.
15
SPEAKER_02
I just said there are 15,000 pages on Annapolis.
15
SPEAKER_05
And I m sure you cherry picked your favorite quote from all of them.
15
SPEAKER_05
Okay.
15
SPEAKER_02
That s great.
15
SPEAKER_02
That s great.
15
SPEAKER_02
At least I had a quote to cherry pick.
15
SPEAKER_05
All you have is Wikipedia.
15
SPEAKER_05
I gave you quotes.
15
SPEAKER_05
All you have is Wikipedia.
15
SPEAKER_05
Find me the information that shows the Palestinian cause has been furthered by any international law.
15
SPEAKER_01
You can t do it.
15
SPEAKER_01
I think the problem is different, okay?
15
SPEAKER_01
You want to say the Palestinians were only fighting, and then when I point out they ve also gone to the court and the UN and say, well, all they do then is these things, and they should be negotiating.
15
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demonstrate that there was a lengthy record of negotiations and said, yeah, but they didn t go in good faith.
15
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Again, you re placing the hamster in the wheel and telling him if he runs fast enough, maybe one day he ll get out of the cage.
15
SPEAKER_05
What was the best good faith negotiation?
15
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If I could just finish.
15
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I think the fundamental problem here
15
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is not what the Palestinians have and haven t done, and it s perfectly legitimate to have a discussion about whether they could have been more effective.
15
SPEAKER_01
Of course they could have been more effective.
15
SPEAKER_01
Everyone could have always been more effective.
15
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The fundamental
15
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issue here is that Israel has never been prepared to concede the legitimacy of Palestinian national rights in the land of the former British mandate of Palestine.
15
SPEAKER_04
How do you explain Taba summit?
15
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How do you explain the Camp David?
15
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How do you explain the legitimacy of Palestinian demands?
15
SPEAKER_03
They didn t want to give the Palestinians all of Palestine, that s all.
15
SPEAKER_01
no all of palestine all of palestine you mean all of the occupied territories you re talking about all of palestine wait what is the occupied what is the occupied territories the occupied territories all of israel the occupied territories are those territories that israel occupied in june of 1967 often use that term to define the whole of palestine show me not just the west bank could you show me professor maris
15
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In all the negotiations, all the negotiations, and all the accounts that have been written, can you show me one?
15
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where the Palestinians in the negotiations, because that s what we were talking about, wanted all of Israel.
15
SPEAKER_02
The maximum- They can t say that because international community won t accept it.
15
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So they didn t say it, they didn t ask for it.
15
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No, Hamas did.
15
SPEAKER_03
Hamas always said all of it.
15
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Hamas only negotiated with Israel about prisoner exchanges.
15
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I know, but they represent a lot of the Palestinian people, you will agree.
15
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The only place I saw pieces of Israel were the land swaps.
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and the land swaps accounted for about two to 5% of Israel.
15
SPEAKER_02
Nobody asked for all of Israel.
15
SPEAKER_05
Why do you say things like that?
15
SPEAKER_05
What do you mean?
15
SPEAKER_05
They asked for all of Israel in 48.
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They asked for all of Israel in 67.
15
SPEAKER_05
What do you think those wars were about?
15
SPEAKER_05
You re not going to respond to anything I m saying because you have no answer.
15
SPEAKER_05
I ll respond to you.
15
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That s correct.
15
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Okay.
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Mr. Bonnell, we were talking about the diplomatic negotiations
15
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beginning with 2000, 2001.
15
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He went back, he went back.
15
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It was through war.
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You don t know what you re talking about.
15
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Is the international law argument ever going to get the Palestinians closer to state?
15
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Is the Israeli state ever going to be dismantled?
15
SPEAKER_04
Do you think that s like realistic coming up ever in the next 20 years?
15
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Again, I m posing a question.
15
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And the question is,
15
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regardless of what s feasible or realistic today, the question I m posing is, can you have peace in the Middle East with this militant, irrational, genocidal, apartheid state and power?
15
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I don t think so, no.
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Okay, and the question I m asking is, can you have peace with this regime, or does this regime and its institutions
15
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need to be dismantled, similar to what the examples I gave of Europe and Southern Africa.
15
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How do you contend with the fact that most of the surrounding Arab states seem to agree that you can?
15
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you re correct.
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Several of them, most importantly Egypt, Jordan, have made their peace with Israel.
15
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I should add that Israel s conduct since then has placed these relations under strain.
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I had very little
15
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I didn t take the reports of a Saudi-Israeli rapprochement particularly seriously before October 7th, the reason being that it was really a Saudi-Israeli-U.S.
15
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deal, which committed the U.S.
15
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to make certain commitments to Saudi Arabia that would probably never get through Congress.
15
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Do you not consider the Egypt-Israeli peace deal legitimate then, since the United States made a great financial contribution to Egypt?
15
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I don t think the question is whether that deal is legitimate or not.
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I think that deal exists.
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But the point is whether, you know, the core of this conflict
15
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is not between Israel and Egypt.
15
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The core of this conflict is between Israel and the Palestinian people.
15
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And the reason that Israel agreed to relinquish the occupied Egyptian Sinai, and the reason that Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty was signed in 1979 is because Israel in 1973
15
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recognized that its military superiority was ultimately no match for Egypt s determination to recover its occupied territories and that there would come a point when Egypt would find a way to extract an unbearable price.
15
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Maybe just the Israelis wanted peace.
15
SPEAKER_03
Well, the Israelis wanted... Not just because they were afraid of what Egypt might do at some point.
15
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If you re talking about the average Israeli citizen, I think that s a fair characterization.
15
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If you re talking about the Israeli leadership, I think they looked at it in more strategic terms.
15
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How do you remove the most powerful Arab military state from the equation?
15
SPEAKER_01
Two points.
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Simple points.
15
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What was the terms of that Egypt-Israel peace treaty?
15
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International law.
15
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Egypt demanded every single
16
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Nobody talked about international law.
16
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Begin and Carter and Sadat talked about the reality.
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Professor Morris, I know the record.
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They demanded, as you know, because you ve written about it,
16
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They demanded every square inch.
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As you know, they demanded the oil fields be dismantled.
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The airfields be dismantled.
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No, not dismantled.
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They wanted the oil fields.
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And they wanted the settlements dismantled.
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SPEAKER_02
They wanted the settlements dismantled.
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SPEAKER_02
The settlements, the oil fields, and the airfield.
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They demanded all three back.
16
SPEAKER_02
You can t have... What do you mean back?
16
SPEAKER_02
The airfields weren t there when the Egyptians were there.
16
SPEAKER_02
Okay, that s incorrect.
16
SPEAKER_02
You re incorrect.
16
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They built an airfield.
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The Israelis built an airfield in the occupied Sinai and they wanted it back.
16
SPEAKER_02
They didn t want it back.
16
SPEAKER_02
It wasn t theirs.
16
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They wanted the territory in which Israel had built back.
16
SPEAKER_02
The oil fields, the airfields, the settlements had to be dismantled.
16
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Yes.
16
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Begin said, I don t want to be the first prime minister to dismantle a settlement.
16
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But he did.
16
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Why?
16
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Because of the law.
16
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No, it was because of peace.
16
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It was normalization of the law.
16
SPEAKER_03
The law had nothing to do with anything.
16
SPEAKER_03
It was a negotiation between two states, each of which wanted certain things.
16
SPEAKER_02
The law had nothing to do with anything.
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SPEAKER_02
You re not listening.
16
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You re missing one point.
16
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I ve read the negotiations.
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There are two foreign relations of U.S.
16
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volumes on it.
16
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Nobody cares about the law.
16
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The Palestinians kept saying, we want exactly... Forget the Palestinians, they weren t there.
16
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Allow me to finish.
16
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The Palestinians kept saying, we want what Egypt got.
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We want what Egypt got.
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Egypt got everything back.
16
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It s nothing to do with the law.
16
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Okay.
16
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And number two, I m not saying it s the whole picture, but as Foreign Minister Moishe Dayan said at the time, he said, if a car has four wheels,
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and you remove one wheel, the car can t move.
16
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And for them, removing Egypt from the Arab front would then remove any Arab military threat to Israel.
16
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No, the first part did.
16
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And that s what the Palestinians kept saying.
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We want what Egypt got from the settlement.
16
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, that s true, but forget international law.
16
SPEAKER_02
And by the way, one last thing, on a personal note, the quote about Sharm el-Sheikh without peace, that s the only thing you ever cited from a book of mine.
16
SPEAKER_02
I cited your book?
16
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Yes.
16
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I was absolutely shocked at your betrayal of your people.
16
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That was pure treason.
16
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I apologize for that.
16
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I apologize.
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I accept.
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SPEAKER_00
All right.
16
SPEAKER_00
Well, let me try once again for the region and for just entirety of humanity.
16
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What gives you hope?
16
SPEAKER_00
We just heard a lot of pessimistic, cynical takes.
16
SPEAKER_00
What gives you hope?
16
SPEAKER_03
People don t like war.
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That s a good reason.
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That s hope.
16
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In other words, the fear of war, the disaster of war should give people an impetus to try and seek peace.
16
SPEAKER_00
When you look at people in Gaza and people in the West Bank, people in Israel, fundamentally they hate war.
16
SPEAKER_03
Yes, I think so.
16
SPEAKER_00
What gives you hope?
16
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There is no hope, no.
16
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It s an extreme... No, I m... Hey!
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I m not happy to say that.
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Of course you are.
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It s a... It s a very bleak moment right now.
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Because... That I agree with, I agree with that.
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Israel believes...
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it has to restore what it calls its deterrence capability.
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I think you ve written about it, actually, I just realized.
16
SPEAKER_02
Israel has to restore its deterrence capability.
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And after the catastrophe of October 7th, restoring its deterrence capacity means this part you didn t write about, the annihilation of Gaza and then moving on to the Hezbollah.
16
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So the Israelis are
16
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dead set on restoring that deterrence capability.
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On the Arab side, and I know Muin and I have disagreed on it, and we re allowed to disagree.
16
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I think the Arab side, the lesson they learned from October 7th is Israelis aren t as strong as we thought they were.
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And they think that there is a military option now.
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And I think that it s a zero-sum game at this point.
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And it s very, very bleak.
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And I m not going to lie about that.
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Now, I will admit my
16
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predictive capacities are not perfect, are limited, but for the moment it s a very bleak situation.
16
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And I don t see right now a way out.
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However, at the very minimum
16
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permanent ceasefire and the inhuman and illegal blockade of Gaza and… Why is it illegal?
16
SPEAKER_03
They were shooting rockets at Israel for 20 years.
16
SPEAKER_03
Why is that illegal to blockade Gaza?
16
SPEAKER_02
Why is it illegal?
16
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I ll tell you why.
16
SPEAKER_02
You don t rocket your neighbor.
16
SPEAKER_02
You rocket your neighbor.
16
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Expect consequences.
16
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I ll tell you why.
16
SPEAKER_02
Expect consequences.
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But that works both ways.
16
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I know, and I expect that.
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It works both ways.
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I ll tell you why.
16
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because every human rights humanitarian and UN organization in the world has said that the blockade is a form of collective punishment, which is illegal under international law.
16
SPEAKER_02
You think a blockade… You don t understand the way the world works.
16
SPEAKER_02
These things are irrelevant.
16
SPEAKER_02
And you think confining
16
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because that s the blockade.
16
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Confining a million children in what the economist called a human rubbish sheep.
16
SPEAKER_03
The economist supported Israel in this war and continues to support Israel.
16
SPEAKER_02
What the International Committee of the Red Cross called a sinking ship
16
SPEAKER_02
what the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called a toxic slum, you think... It is a slum, of course it s a slum.
16
SPEAKER_02
But it s caused by the commas.
16
SPEAKER_02
You think it s legitimate to... Forget the law.
16
SPEAKER_02
I know you want to forget the law.
16
SPEAKER_02
What about morality?
16
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It s what every Israeli fears the most.
16
SPEAKER_02
What?
16
SPEAKER_02
The law.
16
SPEAKER_02
No, no, no.
16
SPEAKER_02
As Tzipi Litny said, I studied international law.
16
SPEAKER_02
I oppose international law.
16
SPEAKER_02
Of course you don t want to hear about the law.
16
SPEAKER_02
That has got nothing to do with anything.
16
SPEAKER_02
Okay, so here s the thing.
16
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
16
SPEAKER_02
Then don t complain about October 7th.
16
SPEAKER_02
If you want to say, forget about the law, then there is no international humanitarian law.
16
SPEAKER_02
There s no distinction between civilians and combatants.
16
SPEAKER_02
There should be.
16
SPEAKER_02
Now you re doing what Maureen said.
16
SPEAKER_02
You re becoming very selective about the law.
16
SPEAKER_02
If you want to forget about the law, Hamas had every right to do what it did.
16
SPEAKER_02
It had every right to do what it did, according to you, not to me, because you want to forget the law.
16
SPEAKER_04
Do you still support the Houthis shooting random ships?
16
SPEAKER_04
Absolutely.
16
SPEAKER_04
Okay, that s a violation of international law, so you play the same game.
16
SPEAKER_02
Absolutely.
16
SPEAKER_02
And were there a power during World War II who had the courage of the Houthis, were there a power
16
SPEAKER_02
to have that kind of courage.
16
SPEAKER_04
So courageous to be bombing merchant ships while tens of thousands of people die of actual starvation.
16
SPEAKER_04
Not the starvation that exists in the Gaza Strip where people before October 7th don t die of starvation.
16
SPEAKER_04
Not the concentration camps.
16
SPEAKER_04
What about starvation in Yemen?
16
SPEAKER_03
Don t they have something better to do?
16
SPEAKER_03
Yes, I know.
16
SPEAKER_03
Don t they have anything better to do?
16
SPEAKER_03
Shouldn t they be feeding the Yemenis?
16
SPEAKER_03
Why fight the Western powers in Israel when you should be taking care of your problems at home?
16
SPEAKER_03
The Houthis.
16
SPEAKER_01
The only allies of the dispossessed are those who experience similar circumstances.
16
SPEAKER_03
Don t you think that they should take care of the Yemeni problems?
16
SPEAKER_02
I m very happy they re helping out the Palestinians.
16
SPEAKER_02
It s at the expense of the enemies.
16
SPEAKER_02
They ll pay for it.
16
SPEAKER_02
Anybody who comes to the aid of those suffering the genocide, half of whom are children, according to the most current UN reports as of today,
16
SPEAKER_02
one quarter of the population of Gaza is starving.
16
SPEAKER_02
That means 500,000 children are starving, are on the verge of famine.
16
SPEAKER_02
They keep saying on the verge.
16
SPEAKER_03
I have not, I have not seen, I have not seen one Palestinian die of starvation in these last four months.
16
SPEAKER_01
Not one.
16
SPEAKER_01
They re always on the verge.
16
SPEAKER_01
They re on the verge.
16
SPEAKER_01
There have been documented cases.
16
SPEAKER_03
I haven t seen them.
16
SPEAKER_04
Yesterday Al Jazeera said six and the day before that they said two.
16
SPEAKER_04
So those are the two.
16
SPEAKER_03
That number probably dies in Israel of starvation also.
16
SPEAKER_01
I don t think there s famine in Israel.
16
SPEAKER_03
There isn t.
16
SPEAKER_03
There isn t in the Gaza Strip either.
16
SPEAKER_03
It s something which is produced for the West.
16
SPEAKER_01
There are infants dying due to an engineered lack of access to food and nutrition.
16
SPEAKER_03
I don t think it s engineered.
16
SPEAKER_03
I think the Hamas stopped shooting, perhaps.
16
SPEAKER_01
As you said, engineered.
16
SPEAKER_02
I think, excuse me, Human Rights Watch called it using starvation as a weapon.
16
SPEAKER_02
That s called engineering.
16
SPEAKER_04
That s what they did.
16
SPEAKER_04
But you were pushed on this by Coleman Hughes to bring up like an example of why is the Gaza Strip, like by what metric are they starving?
16
SPEAKER_04
By what metric is it so behind the rest of the world?
16
SPEAKER_04
You know, if we re going to bring up, um, I want to hear an answer to that because he didn t answer it.
16
SPEAKER_02
I m happy to answer it.
16
SPEAKER_04
Yeah.
16
SPEAKER_02
I just called you from the humanitarian organizations.
16
SPEAKER_02
They said one quarter of the population of Gaza is now verging on famine for October seven.
16
SPEAKER_04
Okay.
16
SPEAKER_02
Before I m not going before.
16
SPEAKER_04
That s what you use that as justification for Hamas fighting.
16
SPEAKER_04
You say the conditions were unlivable.
16
SPEAKER_04
They had, I said to him, so my question is what made it unlivable prior to October seven.
16
SPEAKER_04
What are the, what are the metrics that you re using?
16
SPEAKER_02
There were about five, six or seven reports
16
SPEAKER_02
issued by UNCTAD, issued by the World Bank, issued by the International Monetary Fund.
16
SPEAKER_02
And they all said, that s why.
16
SPEAKER_02
That s why.
16
SPEAKER_02
Why did they say why?
16
SPEAKER_02
Why did they say that?
16
SPEAKER_02
That s why The Economist, not a radical periodical, described Gaza as a human rubbish.
16
SPEAKER_02
So tell me by what metrics?
16
SPEAKER_04
If you re a historian, if you do all this work to get into things, tell me what they said.
16
SPEAKER_02
Don t just tell me a sentence.
16
SPEAKER_04
Tell me by what metric.
16
SPEAKER_04
He s not going to answer again.
16
SPEAKER_02
I don t think I ve avoided any of your questions, except when they breached a threshold of complete imbecility.
16
SPEAKER_02
You re about to tell me by what metric the Gaza Strip is a humanitarian crisis.
16
SPEAKER_02
You remember what I said a moment ago?
16
SPEAKER_02
I said to Professor Morris, I defer to expertise.
16
SPEAKER_02
I look at what the organizations say.
16
SPEAKER_02
I look at what the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights says.
16
SPEAKER_04
Just say in more words that you don t know.
16
SPEAKER_04
You don t know, but you don t care.
16
SPEAKER_02
I don t know.
16
SPEAKER_02
I don t know.
16
SPEAKER_02
Do you know how complicated, have you ever investigated how complicated is the metric for hunger, starvation, and famine?
16
SPEAKER_02
It is such a complicated metric they figured out.
16
SPEAKER_02
If you asked me to repeat it now, I couldn t do it.
16
SPEAKER_02
And yet we have a Human Development Index where we
16
SPEAKER_04
rank countries that we can still measure infant mortality, life expectancy.
16
SPEAKER_04
Yeah, we can measure all of these things.
16
SPEAKER_00
Maureen, I m holding out for you here.
16
SPEAKER_00
You still didn t answer the hope question.
16
SPEAKER_00
What gives you a source of hope about the region?
16
SPEAKER_01
Well, first of all, I would agree with Benny Morris and Norman Finkelstein that the current situation is bleak and
16
SPEAKER_01
I think it would be unreasonable to expect it to not get even bleaker in the coming weeks and months.
16
SPEAKER_01
And we now, this conflict really, it originated in the late 19th century.
16
SPEAKER_01
It s been a more or less active conflict since the 1920s, 1930s.
16
SPEAKER_01
And it has produced a tremendous amount of suffering and regional conflict and geopolitical complications and all of that.
16
SPEAKER_01
But what gives me hope is that throughout their entire ordeal, the Palestinian people have never surrendered.
16
SPEAKER_01
And I believe they never will surrender.
16
SPEAKER_01
to overwhelming force and violence.
16
SPEAKER_01
They have taken everything that Israel has thrown at them.
16
SPEAKER_01
They have taken everything that the West has thrown at them.
16
SPEAKER_01
They have taken everything that those who are supposed to be their natural allies have on occasion thrown at them.
16
SPEAKER_01
But this is a people that never has and I believe never will surrender.
16
SPEAKER_01
And at a certain point, I think,
16
SPEAKER_01
Israel and its leaders will have to come to the realization that by hook or by crook, these people are going to achieve their inalienable and legitimate national rights.
16
SPEAKER_01
And that is going to be a reality.
16
SPEAKER_01
I, as I was- What do you mean by that?
16
SPEAKER_03
You mean all of Palestine?
16
SPEAKER_03
Is that what you mean?
16
SPEAKER_01
No, and- From the river to the sea.
16
SPEAKER_01
Well, ideally, of course, yes.
16
SPEAKER_03
And what I was- Those are inalienable rights.
16
SPEAKER_01
No, what I was saying earlier, and then the discussion got sidetracked, is that I did believe that a two-state settlement, a partition of Palestine,
16
SPEAKER_01
along the 1967 boundaries would have been a reasonable solution because I think it also would have opened pathways to further.
16
SPEAKER_01
But now you believe what?
16
SPEAKER_01
Further non-violent engagement between Israel and the Palestinians that could
16
SPEAKER_01
create other forms of coexistence in a federal or binational or other... What do you think about refugees in regards to that?
16
SPEAKER_01
Do you think there has to be a resettlement of the five or six million, whoever wants to lay claim to being descendants of... I think there has to be an explicit acknowledgement
16
SPEAKER_01
of the responsibility and of the rights.
16
SPEAKER_01
I think that in the framework of a two-state settlement, I think a formula would need to be found that does not undermine the foundations of a two-state settlement.
16
SPEAKER_01
And I don t think
16
SPEAKER_01
it would be that difficult because I suspect that there are probably large numbers of Palestinian refugees who, once their rights are acknowledged, will find it exceptionally distasteful to have to live among the kind of sentiments that we ve heard around this table today, to be quite frank.
16
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I heard, I was previously unfamiliar with you.
16
SPEAKER_01
and I watched one of your preparation videos.
16
SPEAKER_01
Very disconcerting stuff, I have to say.
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SPEAKER_01
You were explaining two days ago in the discussion about apartheid and how absurd it was, that in your view, Jim Crow was not apartheid.
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SPEAKER_01
Jim Crow was not apartheid.
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SPEAKER_01
But Arab states not giving citizenship to Palestinian refugees is apartheid.
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SPEAKER_04
That s what I meant with my earlier comments about white supremacy.
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SPEAKER_04
Let me respond.
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SPEAKER_04
My issue is that I feel like we have jumped on this euphemistic treadmill, and I think that s part of the reason why this conflict will never get solved.
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SPEAKER_04
It s because on one end, you ve got a people who are now convinced internationally that they re victims of apartheid, genocide, concentration camp conditions, ethnic cleansing.
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SPEAKER_04
They re forced to live in an open-air prison with all of these things that are stacked against them, all of these terms that are highly specific, that refer to very precise things.
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SPEAKER_04
And then when people
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SPEAKER_01
I would expect nothing less from someone who doesn t think Jim Crow is apartheid.
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SPEAKER_01
But who does think that Arab states are not giving- The problem is you re morally loading.
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SPEAKER_04
For you, apartheid is when racists do bad things.
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SPEAKER_01
No, no.
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SPEAKER_01
There s a definition of apartheid.
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SPEAKER_04
That s great.
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SPEAKER_01
There s a very clear definition of apartheid.
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SPEAKER_04
But the specific top-down racial domination enacted through top-down federal legislative policies or whatever means that I don t know if
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SPEAKER_04
I don t know if Jim Crow would have qualified for apartheid.
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SPEAKER_00
That doesn t make it any less.
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SPEAKER_00
Excuse me, Finkelstein.
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SPEAKER_00
I m talking right now.
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SPEAKER_00
Excuse me.
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SPEAKER_04
Excuse me, Finkelstein.
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SPEAKER_04
I m talking to your friend over here.
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SPEAKER_04
I don t know if it would have qualified as the crime of apartheid, just like if Israel were to literally nuke the Gaza Strip
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SPEAKER_01
killed two million people.
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SPEAKER_01
I don t know if that would qualify for the crime of genocide.
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SPEAKER_04
In your eyes, probably not.
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SPEAKER_01
I don t.
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SPEAKER_01
Well, yeah, but because genocide requires a special intent.
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SPEAKER_01
I think the issue is instead of and I think this conversation actually is emblematic of the entire conversation.
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SPEAKER_01
I don t think anything.
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SPEAKER_01
Let me finish answering Jenny Morris s question.
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SPEAKER_01
Well, sure, but you accused me of supporting racism.
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SPEAKER_01
So, yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
You did.
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SPEAKER_01
And you are.
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SPEAKER_01
I did.
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SPEAKER_01
Do you think I support Jim Crow laws?
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SPEAKER_01
Look, when the fact that you can t even answer that, honestly, it doesn t matter what say that 800 civilians were killed by Hamas.
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SPEAKER_01
You said, well, maybe 400 were killed by Israel.
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SPEAKER_01
No, I don t know the number.
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SPEAKER_01
Maybe you said 400.
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SPEAKER_01
I didn t see you co-sign the opinion.
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SPEAKER_01
No, I didn t.
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SPEAKER_01
No, I didn t.
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SPEAKER_01
Well, wait, how many, what do you, I think the word was some, that s what I heard.
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SPEAKER_01
No, well, you weren t listening.
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SPEAKER_01
How many people do you think approximately if you had to ballpark, if you had to ballpark it, how many do you think were killed by Hamas?
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SPEAKER_04
I think it s pretty clear that the majority of civilians that were killed... 51% or 90%?
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SPEAKER_04
Don t ask me to put a number on something I don t know.
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SPEAKER_04
First of all, when you say Hamas, do you mean Palestinians or do you mean Hamas specifically?
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SPEAKER_01
I mean the invading Palestinian force.
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SPEAKER_01
I don t want to say Palestinians because I don t think all Palestinian civilians were involved.
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SPEAKER_01
I ll say Hamas, Islamic Jihad, whatever.
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SPEAKER_04
But that s how this discussion started.
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SPEAKER_04
You said Hamas and I began to answer that.
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SPEAKER_04
And then Benny Morris said, actually, he means Hamas in addition to Jihad and the others.
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SPEAKER_01
So of the invading Palestinian force.
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SPEAKER_01
How many do you think killed civilians versus the IDF?
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SPEAKER_01
What do you think, the ballpark, the percentage?
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SPEAKER_04
Well, the figures we have are that about a third of the casualties on October 7th were military.
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SPEAKER_04
That s not what I asked at all.
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SPEAKER_04
What s your question?
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SPEAKER_01
What percentage of civilians do you think were killed by the invading force?
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SPEAKER_04
I think a clear majority, but I can t give you a specific figure.
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SPEAKER_01
If you thought it was closer to 51% or 99% were killed by...
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SPEAKER_01
It s because it s interesting to actually stake out a position.
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SPEAKER_01
If you want to be completely, totally agnostic on it, that s fine.
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SPEAKER_05
They start complete ignorance because we don t know.
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SPEAKER_05
Professor Morris doesn t know.
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SPEAKER_05
Muin Rabbani doesn t know.
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SPEAKER_01
And yet you can speak with absolute certainty that the IDF is targeting and murdering Palestinian children intentionally.
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SPEAKER_01
Do you see the double standard?
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SPEAKER_05
No, I don t.
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SPEAKER_01
You see- I know you don t.
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SPEAKER_01
That was a rhetorical question.
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SPEAKER_01
Obviously you don t.
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SPEAKER_01
I don t see it.
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SPEAKER_05
You know why?
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SPEAKER_05
Because- Because you re uneducated on the matter.
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SPEAKER_05
I looked at the UN report.
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SPEAKER_05
I looked at the UN- The Goldstone report?
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SPEAKER_05
No.
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SPEAKER_05
the Great March of Return in 2018, and they said that the snipers were targeting children, medics, journalists, and disabled people.
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SPEAKER_04
Just as they are now in this conflict.
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SPEAKER_04
Exactly.
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SPEAKER_04
More journalists have been killed in the last several months in Gaza than in any other conflict.
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SPEAKER_01
Do you acknowledge that Hamas?
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SPEAKER_01
Hamas is not killing journalists in the Gaza Strip.
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SPEAKER_01
Do you agree that they operate in civilian uniforms, that their goal is to induce that confusion, that that s the way that they conduct themselves militarily?
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SPEAKER_01
Let me finish my point.
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SPEAKER_01
More journalists have been, more U.S.
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SPEAKER_05
He doesn t want to hear it.
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SPEAKER_05
It s so boring.
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SPEAKER_05
It is virtue signaling.
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SPEAKER_02
Yes, like when you say children over and over again, that s virtue signaling.
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SPEAKER_05
Talking about how many Israelis were killed, that s not virtue signaling because that s human life.
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SPEAKER_05
I don t care about it.
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SPEAKER_05
I don t care if you just interrogate him 51% the question.
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SPEAKER_02
Yes.
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SPEAKER_02
That s not the number.
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SPEAKER_02
That s the responsibility norm.
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SPEAKER_05
Then Muin, Muin mentions that more journalists were killed in Gaza than in all of world war two.
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SPEAKER_05
It doesn t get it.
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SPEAKER_05
That doesn t, are there any part of more medics were killed?
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SPEAKER_05
That s silly.
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SPEAKER_05
And then he says it s virtue scenario.
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SPEAKER_05
But when Israelis get killed, that s serious.
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SPEAKER_02
I never said it s serious on both sides.
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SPEAKER_01
I m asking a substantive question of who do you assign blame to?
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SPEAKER_01
Or do you play into Norm Finkelstein s conspiracies that the ambulance should have known immediately who was dead, that the numbers were changed because they were fake, or that maybe 51% of the people were killed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but 49% were killed by IAF helicopters.
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SPEAKER_04
You asked me a direct question and you got a direct answer.
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SPEAKER_01
I didn t.
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SPEAKER_04
I got majority, which could be.
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SPEAKER_04
I said a clear, a clear majority.
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SPEAKER_06
What percent is a clear majority as opposed to majority?
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SPEAKER_04
A clear majority, in my view, is well over 50 percent.
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SPEAKER_04
Please don t ask me to be more precise because I could say 80, 90, 90.
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SPEAKER_04
If I knew that, I would say it.
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SPEAKER_04
I think it s reasonable.
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SPEAKER_05
It s a reasonable.
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SPEAKER_04
Perhaps it is.
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SPEAKER_05
But you re not the best person to be asking that question.
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SPEAKER_05
You know, I read when you wrote up and described Operation Defensive Shield, and you said a few dozen homes were destroyed.
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SPEAKER_05
You re talking about what happened in the Jenin refugee camp.
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SPEAKER_06
No, the Arabs said 500.
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SPEAKER_06
You guys said 500 Palestinians were killed in Jenin.
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SPEAKER_05
I never said that.
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SPEAKER_06
No, but that was the statement of the PLO, the Palestinian Authority.
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SPEAKER_05
And that there were massacres there.
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SPEAKER_05
Yes, a few dozen homes.
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SPEAKER_05
That s right.
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SPEAKER_05
Well, it turned out 140 buildings were destroyed, 5,000 people were left homeless.
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SPEAKER_05
How many were killed?
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5,000.
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SPEAKER_05
How many were killed?
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SPEAKER_05
No, I m talking about homes destroyed.
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SPEAKER_05
So you re not the best person to be criticizing what Mouin says when he says, clear majority, but he can t say more.
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SPEAKER_05
You know why he can t say more?
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SPEAKER_05
He doesn t know.
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SPEAKER_05
He doesn t know.
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SPEAKER_05
Yeah, I understand that.
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SPEAKER_04
If I was trying to belittle, I would give you a very different answer.
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SPEAKER_04
I would just say, I don t know.
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SPEAKER_04
I do know that some were shot.
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SPEAKER_06
Do you know what the right phrase there would be?
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SPEAKER_06
The overwhelming majority were killed by Arab gunmen and very small number were killed by Israelis by accident or whatever.
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SPEAKER_04
That s probably true.
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SPEAKER_04
That s probably true.
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SPEAKER_04
I can state with confidence a clear majority.
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SPEAKER_04
overwhelming majority.
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SPEAKER_04
You may be correct, but I can t state that with certainty.
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SPEAKER_04
I think there s a very easy way to find out, is to have an independent... Forget independence.
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SPEAKER_04
Well, of course you forget independence.
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SPEAKER_06
Forget the law.
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SPEAKER_06
Forget the law.
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SPEAKER_06
Independent is UN High Commission for Human Rights.
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SPEAKER_04
Not necessarily.
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SPEAKER_06
Just repeat the numbers.
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SPEAKER_06
Just repeat these numbers.
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SPEAKER_06
Assyrian was the head of the UN Commission for Human Rights.
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SPEAKER_04
But if it was an Israeli, it would have been okay.
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SPEAKER_04
he certainly would have been more honest than a Syrian.
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SPEAKER_04
From your perspective.
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SPEAKER_00
Well, to disagree with Stephen, I thought this was extremely valuable.
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SPEAKER_00
At times, really, the view of history, the passion.
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SPEAKER_00
I m really grateful that you would spend your really valuable time.
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SPEAKER_00
And just one more question, since we have two historians here.
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SPEAKER_00
Well, just briefly,
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SPEAKER_00
from a history perspective, what do you hope your legacy as historians, Benny and Norm, will be of the work that you ve put out there?
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SPEAKER_00
Maybe Norm, you can go first and try to just say briefly.
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SPEAKER_05
I think there s a value to preserving the record.
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SPEAKER_05
I m not optimistic about where things are going to end up.
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SPEAKER_05
There was a very nice book written by a woman named Helen Hunt Jackson at the end of the 19th century describing what was done to the Native Americans.
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SPEAKER_05
She called it a century of dishonor, and she described in vivid, poignant detail what was done to the Native Americans.
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SPEAKER_05
Did it save them?
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SPEAKER_05
No.
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SPEAKER_05
Did it help them?
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SPEAKER_05
Probably not.
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SPEAKER_05
it preserve their memory?
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SPEAKER_05
Yes, and I think there s a value to that.
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SPEAKER_05
There was a famous film by Sergei Eisenstein.
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SPEAKER_05
It was either Battleship Potemkin or Mother, I can t remember which one.
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SPEAKER_05
The last scene was
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SPEAKER_05
The czar s troops mowing down all the Russian people.
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SPEAKER_05
He pans the scene.
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SPEAKER_05
Not all the Russian people, just a few.
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SPEAKER_05
Yeah, but he pans the massacre.
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SPEAKER_05
He pans the massacre.
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SPEAKER_04
But he could have killed a lot more.
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SPEAKER_05
And the last words of the movie were, proletarians, exclamation point, remember, exclamation point.
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SPEAKER_05
And I ve seen it as my life s work to preserve the memory and to remember.
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SPEAKER_05
I didn t expect that anyone would read my book on Gaza.
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SPEAKER_05
It s very dense.
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SPEAKER_05
It gives me even a bit of a headache to read at least one of the chapters.
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SPEAKER_05
You wrote a book on Gaza.
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SPEAKER_05
But I thought that the memory deserves to be preserved.
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SPEAKER_05
Amen.
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SPEAKER_06
Well, I would just say very briefly, unlike my colleague, I think writing the truth about what happened in history, in various periods of history, if I ve done a little bit of that, I m happy.
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SPEAKER_00
Thank you, Norm.
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SPEAKER_00
Thank you, Benny.
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SPEAKER_00
Thank you, Stephen.
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SPEAKER_00
Thank you, Maureen.
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SPEAKER_00
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Norman Finklestein, Benny Morris, Maureen Rabbani, and Stephen Bunnell.
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SPEAKER_00
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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SPEAKER_00
And now, let me leave you with some words from Lyndon B. Johnson.
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SPEAKER_00
Peace is a journey of a thousand miles, and it must be taken one step at a time.
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SPEAKER_00
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.