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118: Is Israel a settler-colonial state? A historian’s honest answer, with Alex Yakobson
01:18:37
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Foreign. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Khaliv Anything. Thank you so much for being here. I am excited to tell you that my teacher, Professor Alexander Yakovson of Hebrew University is back to the podcast. He is the research Fellow of the Kogod Research center at the Shalom Hartman Institute, Associate professor of Ancient History at the Hebrew University, a scholar of democracy, popular politics, public opinion and elections in the ancient world. But he also is a very serious thinker on the modern state of Israel, on democracy, on national identity, on nation states, on the rights of national minorities in Israel in Western democracies, on all the great problems and debates and discussions that we have on these issues. And today we're going to discuss some of the big questions that I'm often asked and that I often have to answer. And some of those answers have even been pretty popular online today. We're going to go right to the source questions of Is Israel you know, an ethno state? Was Zionism determined to it could not have ended any way but in the current impasse, in the current violence, in the current war and the current suffering of Palestinians. This is a favorite thought and idea of the anti Israel crowd, most recently articulated by Professor Omer Bartol of Zionism could not have ended any other way. But in this war, in this moment, we're going to ask that question. We're going to tackle it. We're going to talk about the Nakba displacements generally as empires fall. We're going to ask if it's unique, what makes it unique, if it is, and whether it is or not. And we're going to get to two states, one state, all of those questions. So very excited to get into it. These are fundamental, foundational questions that worry a lot of us. Before we do, let me tell you that this episode is sponsored by Howard and Darlene Wolf, who are a Jewish couple from Tampa, Florida, and they want to dedicate this episode to the millions of Americans who have an unbreakable bond with the Jewish state of Israel, including the 78 million evangelicals whose beliefs and reasons may differ from our own, but who nevertheless stand shoulder to shoulder with the Jewish state. This has become critically important as we see troubling trends at the edges of the political spectrum from those who wish to distance themselves from the Jewish state. Not so much the edges anymore, arguably, which makes it even more important. Regardless of our motivations, they write, whether religious or secular, may we hold fast to our relationship with America's most trustworthy ally and the Middle East's only democracy. Thank you so much to the Wolves for that sponsorship and for that dedication. I also would like to invite everyone to join our Patreon community and to subscribe to our substack. If you want to ask the questions that guide the topics we choose to talk about, including the questions we're going to discuss here today, that's where you join. That's where you ask those questions. And you get to take part in monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. You can join us at www.patreon.com askhavivanything
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or
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those links will be in the show. Notes Alex, how are you?
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Fine, thank you.
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Thank you for coming back. I want to tackle this. We're going to dive right into the history and the first question I want to ask is could our history have gone any other way? The settler colonial paradigm for analyzing Israel, the idea that there are societies organized around a particular kind of settlement pattern that can only end in total displacement, slash ethnic cleansing, slash genocide, could only end in, let's say, the American displacement of Native Americans, the Australian displacement of Aborigines. And the scholarship of the anti Israel scholars wants to argue that Israel is that kind of a society. It was born to, to subjugate, it was born to displace, not to carve out, you know, a small defensible place in the aftermath of empire. So I want to pose the question to you as open as possible. Could Zionism have ended any other way?
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When you say could only have ended in total displacement, this is what the theory says. You know, I'm thinking total displacement. If, if, if it, if Zionism is essentially about total displacement of the Palestinians, then it's a total failure. From the river to the sea, there are millions of Arabs that are under Israeli rule, or at least I would say in Palestinian Authority areas. They are. I would say Israel is the strongest side in the equation. Okay. And so there is of course more than a million, much more than a million Arab citizens of Israel. And then there are millions of Palestinians at the territories. And so if Zionism is about displacement and the number of Arabs in historical Palestine is more than 10 times more than 10 times more than, than the number of Arabs when the Balfour Declaration was signed, when the Zionism enterprise started, whereas during the same time the Arab Middle east was more or less totally emptied of its Jewish population that predated the Arab conquest and Islam hundreds of years, okay, at least there the Jews cannot be accused of being colonialists, you know, in, you know, in Babylon or by the way, I don't think that you could say there is something in the idea of Arab nationalism, of Arab independence, of giving Arab peoples their national dependence. There is something that inevitably leads to discrimination, persecution and displacement of non Arab and non Muslim minorities. I wouldn't say so. I think there is a lot of nastiness about Arab nationalism and should be denounced and should be condemned. But I don't think it's a reasonable claim to say that any Arab who ever thought that Arab people should be independent and perhaps united in one great Arab Federation or something like that, that there is anything wrong about the idea. Okay, so going now back to the Jewish, to the Jewish history. First of all, it is ridiculous to claim that Zionism is about total or anything like total shmoto. There are millions of Palestinian Arabs, as a matter of fact, who live in the territories which for decades is dominated militarily and politically by the entity which is allegedly about, you know, about displacement and ethnic cleansing. That is, that is simply a mathematical fact. Now of course we all talk when people speak about displacement, they think about the war of independence about 47, 48 and that is the time when actual displacement took place. Now I want to go back to the history of that period. It's usually said, yes, there was a partition plan, there was a two state solution offered by the international community and we accepted it. The Arabs didn't accept it. They went to war. All this is true. But there is another, another fact that should is worth recalling. When the, once the, the General assembly passed the famous partition plan, the Zionist movement didn't just accept it, they did something else. The Zionist, the Jewish Agency went to the Security Council. Moshe Charet Shatok at the time the future foreign Minister went in the name of the Jewish Agency to the Security Council and asked for enforcing the partition plan. Enforcing. The Security Council has a right to enforce decisions. The General assembly decisions, as you know, are recommendations. But the Security Council has a right to enforce. And they asked, we asked, the Zionist movement asked that this should include an international military force that should come to Palestine and enforce it because the British refused to enforce it. The British say we will not enforce partition because the Arabs don't agree and we will not start fighting with the Arabs in order to impose solution. They did not support it. Now the Jewish Agency said, you decided that there should be two states and the Arabs are saying they're going to fight. So please send international military force to this country in order with all kinds of, you know, international kind of what President Trump is now doing and trying to do in Gaza, kind of an International board. Now of course the Arabs said no, we want to fight. They said. The Arab representative said no, we are against it because what the General assembly voted for is merely a recommendation. We don't accept it and we want to fight. Which is what they started to do immediately and they went out doing. Now, assuming that the other side would agree to this, they could say, yeah, we did not think that partition was a fair solution. We thought all of Palestine should be ours. But now there is this international decision and we are afraid that the Jews may perhaps want to take more than their part. We're afraid that the Jews may want to get rid of the Arabs. Okay, so why don't. So it's actually a good idea now that this decision is made and the Jews are going to have a state of their own, it is a good idea to have an international force protecting the Arab population of Palestine. If this Zionist conspiracy, this muammara, were to succeed, then a, the Jewish state then would have been established exactly on the lines of the partition plan, of course. And there would be no way to take one square mile beyond the partition boundaries, which would have meant a very different, a much smaller Jewish state than the one that we are now. Those who now accept the two state solution are asking us to go back to the green line. But that would have been much less than the green line for us, as you know. And of course there would have been no refugee problem, certainly not in substantial numbers because there is no way you, you could create a refugee problem in any, in any way when there is an international rule and international military force that is enforcing the partition plan. Now, you know, the Arabs said no. There was no, though it was not a law of nature that they had to say no. Okay, you cannot say. The founding fathers of the Zionist movement should have known that the other side would always reject a compromise and they would fight against any compromise. But that's not the only story. There is another story even more intriguing. This was the open diplomacy. But I read some years ago in the published documents of the Russian, of this ex Soviet Foreign Ministry, when those archives were open, you know, during the time of the, the liberal, liberal of, of the short lived Russian democracy, they published documents and according to those documents, the Jewish Agency not just went to the Security Council, the Jewish Agency actually went to the Soviets and to the Americans. They appealed through diplomatic channels to both superpowers that supported partition. You know, the Americans and the Soviets did not agree on anything at that time except that they both supported partition and voted for partition. So the Jewish So I read the Soviet documents of the Soviet Foreign Ministry that the Jewish Agency has asked us and they are telling us that they also have asked the Americans that they are asking both. Since the Security Council avenue was not. The British, of course supported the Brits supported the Arab, the Arab position, of course. Now the request then was made directly to the Soviet and the American governments. And so of course the Soviets said no. I assume the Americans also said no because probably they didn't want to bother. But also because at that time that was the height of the Cold War and the Soviets and the Americans were not about to be a common military force enforcing anything. But again, that was a very serious effort. Not just. You could, not just a public relations exercise. You could suspect, you know, the Zionists of being so sophisticated that they would know that the Arabs would say no and they wanted to score points. Although this is something that I don't think even the Israeli propaganda is using. I think it's my personal contribution because I think nobody remembers it. But I'm telling you this, you can find it in records. It's very. There is no question about the facts here. So, you know, so that would have been the same Zionist movement with the same Zionist ideology and with the. So, you know, but only, you know, they actually, you know, it's not that they were prepared, they were actually attempting to, to create a situation where they would not be able to take more than they partition plan boundaries or to displace their population. Now I asked a colleague of mine in the Hebrew University who is an expert on the, on the history of the, of the War of Independence. I said to him, you know, it's interesting because that meant of course, that they were prepared, really prepared to be content not just with partition, but to boundaries of partition that are horrible. The truth is they're horrible. And so this is interesting. I said to him, he said, you know, the truth is that the Zionist leadership was pleasantly surprised by the partition. Why? Because the, the, the piece of territory that the Jews were offered was much larger than what? And the peel, their terms of reference was the Peel partition, which was a minuscule part of Nan that was offered in the 30s. So they thought that was. And he said they were very happy to be given this and they were not at all sure that they would be able to hold it. Okay, because that's another distortion. People somehow assume that the Zionist was sure that they would win the war, okay? But that is nonsense and we happen to have kind of a scientific proof of that. How do we prove that? Because we know the story that when they design the future of provisional government was debating the question whether or not to proclaim the independence, you know, and the Americans were putting pressure to postpone it, okay? To postpone the declaration of independence. And you know, if we postponed it, then who knows, you know, postponing a thing like that is very dangerous. But the Americans were telling us, the American administration told Moshe Shartok before he flew back to, to this country, that if you insist, if you proclaim independence, there will be a war and we think you will lose it. And if you insist on going for independence now, don't come to us. This is what Marshall told it. Marshall was not a great or even a little. He was against the idea of Israel. He thought that Truman was wrong to support it. But he told personally Charette that, you know, if you proclaim this state and you are in trouble, don't come to us to save you, because it will be on your responsibility if you go ahead with it. Now Charette went back and Charette was so frightened that he was in favor of postponing it. And the eventual decision was made by a very small majority in that provisional state. Provisional council, provisional executive. Now we know it is described that they invited the acting chief of staff, Figal Yadin, the man who was de facto chief of staff of the future idf. Okay? And he was asked what are our chances if there is a war? And he's quoted usually as saying it is 50 50. But what he actually said, if you read the quotation, if I want to be optimistic, I will say that the chances are 50 50. But the truth is that the situation is very dire, okay? And in that situation, what Ben Gurion says, if we don't proclaim independence, we have even less chances if we go for independence. Okay? So the Zionist movement was not at all sure that they would win this war. Now I'm going back to my colleague, he told me because they, after the adoption of the, of the partition resolution, they were not at all sure that they would be able to hold this territory or even to survive if there is a war. They were willing to take it and to run away with it to entrench the partition boundaries exactly as offered. Now you. So there was nothing inevitable. At least there was nothing inevitable from the viewpoint of the Zionist movement itself, of what it's the logic of its own action about the final result. It was only made inevitable by the Arab insistence on rejecting partition. By the way, The Arabs in 47 did not just reject the partition, they also rejected the idea of the unscop, the United Nations Committee for Palestine, that recommended partition, the majority report recommended partition, but there was a minority report that recommended a federal Jewish Arab state, a binational state with an Arab state, a Jewish state and a federal government. And that was also rejected by the Arabs with exactly the same threats of war. They said, we will fight for anything except what they of course believed was the just solution. Because we are the majority. The Arabs in Palestine, they are the masters of the territory because they are the majority and they are the indigenous population. And Palestine should be an Arab state. Anything else is an aggression, an invasion of our country and we'll fight against it. So they reject it. If they, I think if the Arabs, if the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab states accepted, if they said, you know, no, partition is not, no, we reject partition. But since there is the de facto situation of that there are two people in the land, this is a premise on which both partition and the federal state are based, are built, of course, that there are two peoples and how so the Arabs, if they said, okay, but we didn't want this second people to appear, but since they're here and for the sake of peace, we accept, not partition, but we accept the minority report, a binational federal state with an autonomous Jewish state and a larger Arab state and then a federal government with an Arab majority, which would have been of course, a de facto Arab state or Arab dominated state. And the Jews would not have, as this minority report says, the Jews would not have a right to impose Jewish immigration because immigration, of course, is a sovereign decision of the federal government. Okay. You would not have a right to have Jewish immigration into your autonomous state within a larger state. Of course, that is obvious. So if they accepted this, I don't believe that. I'm not sure that there would have been a 2/3 majority in the General assembly needed to pass a partition resolution. And without this, I'm not sure whether the Soviet Union would feel it would be politically possible for them to send us the weapons that allowed us to win the war of independence. We won the war of independence not with the imperialist weapons, but with the progressive socialists weapons proved by Comet Stalin. So if anyone thinks that this is a better claim for independence, they should be happy about it. So I'm going back to the claim that all this was already predetermined by the nature, essential character and nature of the Zionist movement. Yeah, well, if you insist to fight your neighbor, if you definitely insist on fighting your neighbor despite the compromise solutions offered, then sometimes you Lose, you know, the result is not always tailor made.
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I want to, you know, I often go to college campuses, I often get asked by students who hear that Zionism is colonialism. Basically, Zionism is colonialism. Unless you're vaguely interested in actual history. Because when you're interested in actual history, there are a few differences between Zionism and colonialism. For example, the refugee nature of the people coming in. Many colonialist projects absorb refugees. Exceedingly few were founded by refugee populations. There's no metropole, there's no founding country that sent out those, those people. Ancient tradition of belonging to the place, one thing after another. That makes Zionism. If it is colonialism, it's such a weird outlier that the word is no longer diagnostically useful. You're just, it's just a curse. You're just, it's an epithet. And then people come back to me and they'll say to me, ah, but it's not colonialism, it's settler colonialism. Patrick Wolfe, this scholar from Australia who wrote about this settler colonial theory in the 90s, but in fact it's a settler colonial theory that theoretically is based on the Australian experience, but actually was about Israel. And his argument was this is a special kind of colonialism of colonialists who come to stay. And it's a colonialism that is not a, not an event that displaces, that is a genocide, that is an ethnic cleansing, but a structure that inherently, slowly, over time must, it's internal logic. And settler colonialism suffers from the exact same problem. A perfectly fine theoretical model to live in abstractly off in, in your mind. But then you have to actually look at the history. And when you look at the history, you suddenly run into problems. The fact that millions of Jews had nowhere else to go on this earth, literally because all the doors of the earth were closed to them. The, the entire story of the invasion, the entire story of how a different leadership would have, would have caused a very different kind of result. Yeah, other than that, sure. It's structurally settler colonialist, whatever. Nobody has agency in history. It's white people showing up, doing what they want to do, and brown people have no thought, no theory, no politics, no decision making. The early Zionists weren't aware that things would run this way, that the 48 war would be such a success. One of the big reasons for the 48 war's success on the Georgia side, militarily speaking, was that the Arabs never managed to put together a serious military effort. They couldn't draft enough men. They were not coordinated. Those different armies. The Egyptians cut out after the Rhodes conference.
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That was not.
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And the Jews did.
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They would be able to do that. I mean, I'm not sure who would have been able to do it if not the Ben Gurions, you know, Iron Hand. And, you know, there were different militias, as we know, there are all kinds of potential for infighting. And so, yeah, there was nothing inevitable in anything. All the inevitability is. But I'd like to say a few words about Australia. Not that I'm any kind of an expert on Australia, but I want to remind us that there is also a small country called New Zealand. And the story of Maoris in New Zealand is very different from the story of Brunswick. So even in the classical settler colonial paradigm, the Australian end result is not. Is probably a result of Australian conditions, but rather another. So the endless. So there was no genocide and there was no ethnic cleansing of Maoris in Zealand and their status today. The proportions are very different. So even there, it should not be a question of some general slogan that covers anything, but you should look on the specific conditions. But as far as the Zionist movement is concerned, you know, on colonialism, we talked about that a lot. But, you know, let's ask why is colonialism so wrong? Okay, so let's start with, you know, what is it? It's not just because it's a woke dirty word. But, but, you know, why is it that you don't have to be woke in order to accept that colonialism. There is something in colonialism that is fundamentally contrary to our values as modern people who accept some basic notions of freedom, human freedom and equality. Okay, the problem with colonialism is that it is a project of European powers to dominate other peoples. In this case, of peoples of what is now called the third world beyond the seas. Okay, There was a lot of domination of European peoples by European powers. This is not called colonialism. But colonialism specifically is that European powers go around and conquer territories in the. In the non European, let's say non white world. And they think that they have a right to rule those territories because they have their notions of. Of civilization, of civilizational mission, and of that the imperial rule is for the benefit of the. Is for the benefit not just of the empire, but of the. Of the subjects of the empire. This is what all empires, European and non European, thought and said throughout history. There is nothing specifically European about it, but we are talking about the European project of modern moralist colonialism. Now, if you say that an attempt of a homeless people, of a homeless and Persecuted people to. To have a state, to have a national home is morally equivalent to the desire of Portugal to take over Angola and Mozambique. This is, this is, this is the essence of the claim. And also to settle it with. Because there are a lot of Portuguese people then who came and settled in Angola and was a big. Yeah, sure. I think this is fundamentally ridiculous. The claim is fundamentally ridiculous. The difference between Zionism and the typical classical cases of European colonialism is exactly the difference in the things that turn European colonialism into a thing that is reprehensible from our point of view. Although it was not. It was accepted during that time. But we are saying now we. We don't accept it. A lot of things, you know, were accepted in the past. You know, people in the past thought that absolute monarchy was okay. We don't think so. Okay. But, you know, because absolute monarchy and colonialism, very different things, but they. What they have in common is that they, they offend against our notion of fairness. That is, I think, for modern people, always based on freedom, on assuming that people should be free and equal. Okay? That in the words of the American Declaration of Dependence, that all men are created equal, there is some fundamental equality between people's people and hence people's national groups, because it all comes back to the fundamental equality between the human beings. There is something about a human being as such that does not allow subjecting them to a regime under which they are inferior. This is this offense against the principle that human beings are fundamentally of equal value and therefore should be equal as far as their rights are concerned. Obviously, the Zionist movement was an attempt to make Jews equal and make the Jewish people equal, to attain for them. To attain for them what the separate. If you go back to the American Declaration of Independence, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature of God entitled them. Because the idea that peoples have an equal right to dependence was already there in the late 19th century. Okay? So the Zionists were a bunch of people who said, we want for our people, for the Jewish people, We want for them the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature, natures, God, entitle all peoples. And the Israeli Declaration of Independence says that it is a right, it is a natural right of the Jewish people to be like all other peoples. Omed be' shut hazmobindi NATO eboni to be sovereign in their own independent state. Actually, you put those two phrases, they are very complementary. So of course, this then created a conflict with the Arabs of Palestine. Of course it did. Because when homeless people insist on having a national home, by definition they cannot have it. They cannot have it in the Ukraine or in Poland, okay, Or in Morocco or in Iraq. They then want to have it in the historic homeland. And then there is a conflict between them and the people who live in that historic. Because the historic homeland, unsurprisingly, has not stayed empty. Countries don't usually stay empty. Okay, so there is a tragic conflict and then has to be resolved. But before we even discuss how exactly establish. Because those who speak of a binational solution or binational state also think in terms of a solution between two peoples. Okay, but before we even discuss what is the just and what is the realistic solution to this problem, to say that the Zionist movement is fundamentally something that is analogous to the Portuguese or British or French imperialism and colonialism that, by the way, did many useful things. But you know, absolute monarchs also did many useful things. None of. We don't accept absolute monarchy as a legitimate form of government and we don't accept foreign domination as a legitimate form. By the way, you know those countries that were colonialist, don't you think that of course most of them had been under foreign domination before the colon. The colonial empires were not the, of course, you know, most peoples that were colonized or most people. I can tell you from, from Roman history that most peoples conquered by the Roman Empire had been under someone else's rule before the Romans took them over. This is the, this is the character of the international, okay? The pre modern area that if you're not an empire, you are, you will soon become a part of some other empire. And if you are not part of this empire, another emperor will take you. But so, so, but what we say now, our intuition is that you cannot impose one people's rule over another people. And doesn't matter whether these are more developed or less developed. All those is immaterial because we fundamentally do not accept that any group of people should enjoy the kind of superiority and supremacy that is implied in the idea of an imperial, including colonial rule. And to say that the desire of the Jews to have a national home of their own is analogous to this, to the idea of one of the European empire dominating an African on Asian people is morally ridiculous. The claim is ridiculous, okay? And all the rest is propaganda.
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I want to move on to a new question that I'm often asked on college campuses. And the question is simple. Is the nakba a unique crime, a terrible rupture in history? It is usually the student gets up and they think they Know the, that they think they have something very powerful and they're going to defeat the Israeli speaker. And they say, well, what do you have to say about the Nakba? That that's it, they're now I'm destroyed. And it is often compared to the Holocaust. One was this formative trauma of one people, the other was a formative trauma of another people. And the comparison is made basically to say the Holocaust is not special. The Palestinians had a nakba and their nakba, as we've heard very recently from all kinds of political leaders, is ongoing. Their nakba continues to this very day. Is the nakba an experience experienced by many others. You have the fall of empire, you have the rise out of empire of dozens of nation states and you have mass displacement everywhere, right?
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When there is a national conflict of this kind, a violent national conflict with the all out war between two national groups over the same territory, in the same territory, a displacement is the rule rather than the exception. That doesn't mean that it's not a tragedy for the people involved. And objectively, from the human viewpoint, and it's not a trauma. And it does not mean that this trauma does not influence the Palestinian mindset and the Arab attitude. That doesn't. You know, many horrible things are very common. And it doesn't even mean necessarily that Israel should be criticized. That's a link. I will refer to it. I'm not dodging it. But you know, in any case, when you have a conflict between two national groups over a single piece of territory, you will virtually always have a massive refugee problem in the end. And this does not mean that it's not a tragedy, okay? And it doesn't even necessarily mean that it's not a crime. That should be looked at. The circumstances then should be looked into. But to say that there is anything exceptional and to compare it with genocide, which is a, with the Holocaust, which is an ideological genocide, there was no conflict of any kind. There was no armed conflict between the German state and the Jews of Germany or of Poland or anywhere. It was an ideological decision to wipe out a group, totally wipe out a specific group, because it is this specific group that will be wiped out. So it's a really stupid and dishonest comparison. But this is nothing like the Holocaust doesn't make it not a tragedy. And now we have to discuss the circumstances of this particular tragedy. If you want to compare it, the most reasonable comparison, the closest comparison is Cyprus, that's a very close, A small country just near us, where they had a conflict between Greeks and Turks. This is a binational, an island populated by two national communities not very friendly with each other. National, ethnic and also religious. And it often is. Those two things very often go together. Of course. And by the way, the conflict in Cyprus was nothing like the conflict in this country from the viewpoint of intensity. But the result was that there are no Greeks in the Turkish part of Cyprus and there are no Turks in the Greek part of Cyprus.
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And we should just say there were something like 200,000 displaced and it persists and they're not allowed to return.
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Hundred thousand is a. Is a very large percentage of the whole Greek population, of the whole Greek population is less than a million. So it's a very large. And the difference is that. And also the Turkish part of Cyprus simply was emptied of its Greek population. Now, doesn't matter now who. I don't know. You can argue about who exactly why the Turkish army entered, because there was some Greek provocations. If maybe our Turkish friends were right or maybe they were wrong, they invaded. And there are no Greeks in the Turkish part of Cyprus. And even before that, there had been no Turks in the Greek part of Cyprus. This is the end result. Now, the difference being that the Greek Cyprus, the Greco Cypriots, while they still insist on the right of return as much as the Palestinians, it's part of their official position. And they even. And they even have a. They have a Security Council resolution in their favor. It doesn't matter. What they didn't do is they didn't keep those people in refugee camps. They insist, they said, they. They are still saying that they have a right, should have a right of return. If there is a peace deal, they will. They need to have a right of return. But in the meantime of. They were. They became part of the, of the, of the Greek society in the Greek part of Cyprus, which is why we don't hear about this and we don't have terrorist organizations that blow up, you know, buses and pizzerias and murder Cypriots all over the world because of this refugee problem. Because it was a refugee. The refugee problem emerged, but it was, it was then. It did not stay an ongoing refugee problem. I'm emphasizing that they insist on the right of return because when we say there are Jewish refugees from Arab countries, the Palestinians tell us, but you wanted them, and so it's natural that you accommodated them. They became part of the Israeli society. Now, we don't insist on the right of return of Jews to Iraq, as you know, but the Greeks and Cyprus insist on the right of Return of Greeks to the northern part of Cyprus. But in the meantime, they don't keep them in refugee camps. They keep them as. Treat them as human beings, as fellow citizens. Okay? So that is a, that is a difference. Now what happened in this country in 47, 48 was that there was a. There was even before the Arab invasion, the invasion of Arab countries. There was, there had been for several months an ethnic civil war between rival ethnic militias. We call them, we call them gangs, but okay, these were ethnic militias of the Arabs. And against them was fighting the main ethnic militia of the Jews, which is a Gana. And the Israeli leadership then insisted on all other militias joining this and to have a unified army, which is a very large part of the reason why we want this. Now, there was a war between rival ethnic militias of two rival ethnonational groups having an all out war, okay? And it was between two peoples in the same country. But it's not just the same country. The war was within the same settlements in Jerusalem, because it was. Jerusalem itself was Jewish, Arab in Haifa, in Tel Aviv, Jaffa, between Jaffa and Tel Aviv. So it was a very large part of the fighting was in the same localities or between neighboring localities when there were Arab villages around the kibbutz, okay? And it was attacked from those villages and the war was over. The roads between localities, for example, Jerusalem was under siege. It was surrounded by Arab forces and by Arab villages in the corridor that leads from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on both sides of that corridor, when Jerusalem was under siege and eventually by the Jordanese army, the Jordanian army. So there was supplies coming to besiege Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. The famous. There are a lot of songs about that. And it is not just the Arab forces firing on them on both sides, but they were firing from the Arab villages that were on. On both sides of this corridor. Because this is the nature of the country. That it is a. That it is a mixture of Jews and Arabs. Yeah. And those villages are no longer there. This is true when you have an ethnic civil war in the same country that is really between two groups that are intermixed to the degree a small piece of land. You have to remember, it's not like British India, you know, it is a very small piece of land in which the Jews and the Arabs are intermixed in the way they were intermixed in 47. And every locality, every Alab locality is used for attacking the Jews by those Arab militias. And of course, the Jewish localities are of course used as they used for. To support. They Also were supporting. Of course they were. From there came the Jewish soldiers and they also not. I'm not now criticizing. It's not a question of. There was actually. The truth is that once you decided to have a war like that once, and that was the Arab decision, not the Jewish decision, and there was nothing inevitable about it. But once you decide that you conduct a war like this, then the massive refugee problem is totally inevitable. It is. Doesn't matter whom you may think the Arabs were, right? Because they didn't, you know, they were under no obligation to give up any part of their country in which they were a majority to another people. And they didn't. They were not obliged to think about the Jews Jewish problem and Jewish distress and the Jewish historical connection to the land and the Jewish peoplehood. They just said, it's ours. We live here. We've been living here, okay? And anyone else who wants to take over as a foreign invader, you can accept it. But having accepted it, you cannot say that a war like that could have produced any other result, okay? Doesn't mean that the war that every. We know that many we actually know. You know, Benny Morris told me the men who were started exposing the fact that, you know, many Arabs were driven out rather than just running away. And he told me that in the overwhelming majority of cases, people did run away. You know, he said the places where there was actual displacement were a very small minority of cases. I heard him and thought this is not what many people understood from what you were arguing. But this is the truth. But it is a. It is true that there were in quite a few places, there was, of course, a deliberate decision to. To remove those places that were considered and worse constituted a dire military threat. And it is also true that in the end the Israeli decision was not to allow them back. And what Benny Morris is saying, that doesn't matter. He says they were all displaced, not that they were all driven out. Most of them were. Look, when people escaped, this is of course as a result of fighting. They didn't make an ideological choice to escape. They escaped. Because of course, when you are fighting around way of this kind of fighting, you have a very good reason to run away. This is what happens in wars. There is always a wave of refugees. Question is why Israel did not allow them back. And the truth is, of course, that Israel didn't want to allow any of them back. But it is also not true that the displacement of all those who were displaced was a kind of a decision that was a result of only was. I would Say an automatic result of the Zionist ideology or of the Zionist demographic considerations that were certainly there. Because the truth is that after the fighting ended, there were negotiations, the Rodos negotiations, the truce negotiations between the sides. And under American pressure, of course, not voluntarily, the Israeli government proposed taking back 100,000 refugees. That was an Israeli position. And you have Moshe Sharad's speech in the Knesset as the. Now as foreign Minister saying, yes, we think that most of the refugee problem, we think the refugee problem is the responsibility of the Arab leaders, the Arab government and the Palestinian Arab leaders who rejected partition and tried to destroy the state of Israel. This is our view. But if there is a peaceful solution, we're willing to contribute our part to solving this problem by taking back a hundred thousand refugees. That was the Israeli offer. The Arab position was a, you take all of them back and in exchange for that, we promise that we refuse to recognize the State of Israel because it's an illegitimate state. Okay? And so that was not some tempting enough for the Israeli side, this position. But again, let us assume that the Arabs would say, no, a hundred thousand is not enough. 300,000 and then we have a peace. We have a peace on the Green Line, okay? A peace treaty. That was then the possibility to have a peace treaty because Israel was actually negotiating with Jordan and was willing to sign a peace treaty with recognizing Jordanian sovereignty over the west bank and over East Jerusalem. So if the Arab League said, okay, we had a war, we tried to prevent this, but it's now it's a fact. Israel is a member state of the United nations now we have to get the best possible deal for, for, for the refugees, for those poor people who are victims of, let us say they're victims of war, okay? And they of course are victims of their, their decision to fight. But let's say they're victims of the circumstances. So let's try to get the best possible deal for them. The Jews are saying we will take back a hundred thousand, but we don't have to accept the first offer, okay? We say 300,000. So we know what would have happened. There would have been then a peace treaty signed with Israel accepting 150,000, okay? A Palestinian. That would have doubled the Arab minority in Israel, okay? Because the Arab minority in Israel by the end of fighting was more or less 150,000 people. And if that happened then, then I think Israel, Israel within the Green Line would have been, if maybe not a, a full fledged binational state, but I would say it would then be much less of a Jewish state than it is now. And certainly it would not be a purely Jewish state, which is allegedly the whole point of Zionism, which is a joke because there is nothing pure. Anyone who knows anything about Israel knows that it is, it is even as it is, okay? It is very far from being anything like a pure Jewish state. It is a state with a very large Arab national minority, whereas the Arab states in the Middle east are the ones without the Jewish substantial or any Jewish minority. Okay? So but again, you know, when you think about what could have happened, there is nothing unrealistic about what I'm my hypothetical there is a war and we are defeated. And yeah, now we want to make the best possible deal. You know, this very often happens, okay? And so that was quite often, quite so there was no ideological decision of Israel saying since we want. Of course the truth is that we didn't want to take any refugees back because for both, because we wanted to have a. We didn't want. We were afraid that the Jewish majority would be undermined and because they of course, naturally they were suspected of being the potential fifth column. Naturally in a situation like that. But if the Arabs say okay, now there is now time for peace has come, we are accepting this. We don't have to accept retrospectively that you were right and nothing like that. We are trying to get the best possible deal what is now. This is what Egypt did in the end, okay? Got its territories and signed a peace to it. So if The Arabs in 49 accepted the Israeli offer, but they didn't have to accept it as is they of course they were expected to improve on it. Those, you know, when Israel accepted the hundred thousand and this number, they fully expected the other side then to ask for more. This is what happens in negotiations and try to imagine how it could have. So what would then have happened to the alleged ethnic purity, which is a joke in itself, you know, the exclusively jury stated purely Jew all this childish nonsense, what would have happened to it? Even as it is, it is nothing. There is nothing pure or exclusive. The truth is that there are Jews, certainly there are Jews who have an ideology of Jewish supremacy and Jewish exclusivity. Yeah, sure, this only proves that we are a people like other peoples because you know, this is a very common occurrence.
- [55:39]
A
But the key point is that if you're an Israeli and you look at this history and you listen to these theories about just how evil Zionism is and why it's evil and what kinds of structural frameworks academia tries to teach, you have to ignore the entire experience Every Arab decision ever made. And so you had, you know, in the fall of the Ottoman Empire, you had, and you touched on this with Cyprus, but the 1923 treaty between Greece and Turkey, in which 2 million people switched sides by force, ethnically displaced from places where they had lived in the Muslim case in Greece for centuries, in the Greek case in Anatolia for millennia. And it's compulsory and they have to move and it was even considered peaceful. We're not talking about the horrific 2 million death toll of the 20 million displaced when British India collapsed into Pakistan and India and Hindus and Muslims switch sides in these mass migrations.
- [56:38]
B
We could have a whole episode on British India because I think it's a very interesting analogy because there, there was a partition that was accepted that the Indian, the Hindu, the Indian National Movement that was Hindu majority, accepted partition, although it thought, just as the Arabs in Palestine thought, that it was a great injustice. They did not accept it because they thought it was something fair that there are two people. They did not accept the idea that Muslims were a separate nation. So they said that this is a British colonial conspiracy against the freedom of India and unity of India. They thought it was a great injustice, but they accepted it because they said that was the only way to prevent a war. They accepted it for the sake of peace. And then there was this thing that you refer to that was a result of a. There was not an all out war, but there was local fighting. And this being India, this local fighting led to the disaster that you have mentioned, the millions of refugees. And there are different assessments, but it's up to two, from half a million to two people who were killed, who were killed in the. That's a lot of people even in the British India. Okay, so when you say those who say the Zionist movement, there was something morally wrong about the Zionist movement because the Zionist could have predicted or should have predicted, should have understood that their desire to have a national home in Palestine would lead to the kind of Arab opposition. It was natural and therefore they should not have gone for it because they, and they are responsible for the result because they could have predicted it. I want to tell you that you can say by the same token that those who, that Mahatma Gandhi should have known that demanding independence for British India, for India was bound to lead to this horrific bloodshed between Hindus and Muslims. And why is it reasonable to say that too should have predicted it because the British were telling him that this is what happened. Sir Winston Churchill, personally, who was an imperialist, as we know he was against giving independence and he said, he said that independence to India means the greatest massacre in human history. This is what he predicted. It was not the greatest because there was an agreement, but it was bad enough, okay. He said if we leave India, if Britain leaves India, the horror that will unfold there will be such that we will leave. The voices of the slaughtered and the tortured will reach us to London, all the way to London. And we will know that we have betrayed our responsibility, our responsibility as the responsible adult who will prevent Muslims. No, never mind whether we accept or not accept the imperial logic, but it is obvious it could have been predicted, that it was predicted. Does anyone say the idea of Indian independence was wrong? Because it inevitably led to this? Does anyone say that the idea of Greek independence, the Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire, this is the first liberation, modern war of national liberation with massacres and with ethnic cleansing, all the good things that accompany national wars. But does anyone say that the idea of freedom for Greece, the one that Lord Byron fought for and many other good people, was wrong? Because it was, it could have been expected and it was predicted, of course by many reasonable people that it. We eventually it will lead to all those. The collapse of empires, okay? But also, you know, in Greece and also in Turkey itself that was populated by Greeks because the transfer, the famous infamous transfer between Greeks and Turks was a result of the fact that over hundreds of years the Ottoman Empire was ruling areas populated by Greeks. And surprise, surprise, the result of it was that there was a high mixture of population in Europe and in Asia. And in the end those two groups came to fighting and then what happened? So does anyone say that the idea of Greek independence was wrong? And by the same token of the idea of Turkish independence, because Ataturk was fighting for a nation state for the ones which he said we don't have an empire, but we do with very much insist on having independent Turkish nation. Do we say that Greek independence. I mentioned Cyprus, but Greek independence, you know, any, any imperial situation, you. Not any, but I would say that it's a very common thing that when empires collapse there is infighting between peoples, subject peoples, if only because it is almost impossible to have strict ethnonational boundaries between peoples who are under one imperial rule. Doesn't make sense. It never happens. And when the empire collapses, it is very likely that these people will fight over the. At least over the boundaries. So to say you can. None of this excludes criticizing the historical Zionist movement or the Israeli state or the various Israeli governments. These are very different, okay? There is not one Israeli state and one Israeli government or one Israeli position on this. You can argue, you can none of this, that you are a national movement in a nation state doesn't mean that you're a nice guy. Not at all that you are nice guys, nice people. But to say that the desire of the Jewish people for independence is fundamentally flawed is fundamentally immoral. Because it could have been predicted that it would lead to the things that happen almost always when empires collapse and people gain their independence and their neighbors then argue with them about exact boundaries is, you know, it's not. It pretends to be. It poses as a universal moral, kind of a perfectionist moral precept, but in fact it is something special invented specially for the Jews. Okay? There is nothing, there is nothing universal about this rule that I'm trying to formulate. You know, if you wanted to formulate some kind of a universal rule, now this rule, it is nobody wants, nobody tries to apply it universally. It is a specific kind of an exception, a bill of attainder, something that has been specifically tailor made for the Jewish people. It is only the Jewish desire for independence that is wrong, not any other desire for independence. And it is only nationalism in the sense of nationalism. You know, in Hebrew, nationalism is. There are. Sometimes it's pejorative, sometimes it's not. But the idea that people should have a right to national independence and that my people should have this right and we are asking for it and we're willing to fight for it if necessary. If there is no other way, if this is wrong for the Jewish. Those who say it's wrong for the Jewish people don't think that it is wrong for any other people, whatever the results that come from it. So I don't accept it as any kind of a radical. It's not a radical universalism. It pretends to be a radical universalism, but it is actually, it's an anti Jewish particularism.
- [65:00]
A
You take all of that history, you add to it the other unique things with the Israeli Palestinian situation, which is the institutional design, that of unra, where refugee status is inherited, where integration is something that is rejected on moral grounds. Palestinians have to live in Lebanon for five generations, for most of that time legally not allowed to own real estate so that God forbid they don't end up becoming simply settled Lebanese. You add to that the complete silence on the question of Jewish refugees right from the Arab world. You add to that all the cases of refugeehood nobody thinks need to be reversed from the Germans in Europe after the war. You add to that the whole story of the Ottoman Empire's collapse where it's the Greeks, it's the Armenians, it's the Jews throughout the Arab world, throughout the Ottoman former Ottoman Empire who take the brunt of that collapse. Because what replaces the Ottoman Empire are these either nationalist ideas or very exclusivist nationalist ideas or Islamic ideas. And so all the non Islamic minorities suddenly face these returns or expulsions or all of that situation. And the Palestinians are set aside as a unique case. You know, people who listen to this podcast will know because it was just a few episodes ago where we talked about Jordan after 48 annexing the West bank, claiming it as Jordan. The reason it's called the west bank is that they were sitting in Amman and they looked at it and it looked like the west bank of. They were the east bank of the Jordan river and they're the west bank of. It's a Jordanian name for a territory they claim for Greater Jordan. And the Palestinian elites in the Jericho conference accepted that Jordanian citizenship accepted the Jordanian king. And nobody thought this was a bad thing. Well, I mean obviously there were some ideologues, but most people didn't think this was a bad thing right up until 67 where it had to be a Palestinian nationalism, it had to be Palestinian independence. The idea that you would be ruled by anybody other than Palestinians ruling Palestinians was a catastrophe. I happen to think Palestinians have to rule themselves.
- [67:06]
B
But you know, since you introduced me as some kind, in some sense a leftist, I would admit that I'm. I'm not a leftist.
- [67:15]
A
You've been accused.
- [67:16]
B
I am not a leftist in the sense that the leftist, the left. And under the leftist definition of being a leftist, I'm not, but I'm certainly a leftist under the Israeli right wing definition of being a leftist that I am certainly guilty of. I will tell you that I think that we should not make our lives too easy, as they say in Hebrew. There must be a better English idiom for it. We should not, you know the problem? The difference between the Jordanian annexation of Judean Samaria and the Israeli non annexation or the kind of annexation that the Smutriches want to have without giving citizenship to the people who live there. Exactly this. The Jordanians annexed the West Bank. They pretended that there was some kind of a Palestinian self determination because of the Jericho conference. The Jericho conference was a fake. It was a fake. It was a fake self determination. But the Jordanian citizenship which was confirmed on the people who lived there was not fake. It was a real Jordanian citizenship. And there were Palestinians being ministers and prime Ministers of the Auschmet Kingdom. It has its own complications, but in principle, by the way, the International Committee did not recognize the annexation, but it not become a reproach of the kind that is when people say Israeli occupied because there was no Jordanian occupation because they wanted to make it part of the Jordanian state. And they knew without being great liberals or great democrats that if you want a territory to be part of your state, you give citizenship to its inhabitants. There is no other way in the modern world to rule a territory. If we were China and they were Tibet, I'm sure that even the extreme right would be would say yeah, well, in fact they don't deserve anything, but why not give them. Imagine if the proportions were like in China and Tibet. But everybody knows what the proportions are. Therefore fundamentally. And by the way, you don't even have to recognize that the Palestinians as a national group ever. I think they do have. We can discuss this. I think the principle of national self determination should apply to that. Suppose I'm wrong on that and someone claims that this principle is not a good principle or that it should not apply to them. That even then there is no way that Israel can rule those territories forever without giving them the citizenship of the state of Israel and claim that this is any kind of a legitimate rule from the viewpoint of the basic principles of the world in which we live. No, this what I said now was the leftist part of it. The difference between me and some of the people who are really leftist in Israel is that I say this is true. But while the Palestinians have a right to self determination and they even more than that they have a right not to be ruled by a country that doesn't give them a CIT. Citizenship. The difference is that I say I don't have to put my head on the block for the sake of Palestinian self determination or even of Palestinian civil equality, which is. Which is more basic. I say that as there is a I am Israel should be willing to go for it. I support a two state solution, but the other side doesn't have an automatic right to get territories and then use them in order to for another 7th of October. And as long as there is a grave danger and this is the lesson of Oslo, I supported Oslo. But the danger that a territory that you hand over to the other side then becomes a base for attacks on Israel and that those attacks can create the kind of disaster, the kind of danger that we have experienced because it's a small country. Again, it's one of. So this is the difference between me and Many people whose basic premise I accept there are two peoples, they both deserve national independence. Two states for two peoples is their just solution. But the onus of reaching this solution is not only on us. I refuse to accept that the Palestinians have an automatic right to get those territories regardless of how they can then expect it to use them. If Enoka. And by the way, it's totally universal. There is nothing, there is no kind of Jewish exceptionalism in what I am saying. No people, no country is under any obligation to hand over territory if the security risk that isn't taken is unreasonable. And I think in practical, I think unfortunately the Palestinians, not just Hamas, the Palestinian national movement during the Oslo years, proved that there are very good reasons for Israelis to fear there is what would result from giving up territory and handing it over to the Palestinians. And in practical terms, I would say that while the two state solution is and will remain, I don't see any other alternative to it. In principle this is a just solution and I'm against anything that makes it more difficult, like the settlement. But I think that the solution will become feasible. I hope it will become feasible. I think practically it may, I hope it will, maybe I think it will become. There is a good chance that it will become feasible once the Iranian. There is a regime change in Iran because as long as Israelis have a very good reason to think that any piece of territory they give up doesn't, only it is not only that they will cause us problems because after all, we are so much stronger. But there is a danger that a regional power like Iran will turn it into a kind of fortress which they created in Gaza after Israeli withdrawal. This is the problem that it's not only between us and the Palestinians. If it's only between us and the Palestinians, you could say Israel is so strong, so much stronger, then that is also questionable because you are stronger, but you are not allowed to use the strength because then you're accused of genocide. But the main problem, even worse, is that there is a regional power, has been here for decades, a regional power much more powerful and more sophisticated than any of the enemies that we had during the Arab Israeli conflict that is determined to turn any piece of territory that is close, as close as possible to Israel, to the centers of the Israeli population, into the kind of jihadi fortress that they turned Gaza into with the help of Qatari money and Iranian military support. When this, and I'm sure it will happen, but nobody can promise us exactly when I hope I saw this possible, there is a good chance for that. There is a good chance in Iran that it will emerge a government that will, at an air rate, not be hostile. Because all the Iranian Israeli hostility is just craziness on the part of the ideological craziness on the part of the ayatollahs. If this disappears, I think there is a good chance that all the, all the conditions in the Arab world would change. Because now the radicals in the Arab world, all of them rely on the Iranians and the moderates or the relative moderates on those who have a potential of becoming moderates. All of them are afraid that they will be accused of betrayal if they don't allow the jihad to proceed. So I think that if this is removed, there is, I hope, a hope. There is, I hope, a chance that it will become rational, it will become possible for a responsible Israeli government that does not want to take unreasonable security risk. And no people can be expected to take unreasonable security risk. That is say, security that means the lives of Israelis, okay? And a lot of Israelis, once there is a change and there is a, a hope that there is a more or less safe. There is never a hundred percent safety, but there is a reasonable degree of safety in giving up those territories in exchange for peace. If there is a readiness, hopefully on the other side, I think if the Iranian support is removed, there is a chance that the Palestinians in the end will accept it. They didn't. You know, all the negative experience does not prove that it will never happen. National conflicts are never eternal, but they may be very long. Okay, so there is a chance that this. I don't believe the conflict is eternal, but it has been going on for quite long, quite some time. But I think that there is a, there is a horizon, there is a prospect of a change in Tehran that may lead to a change that would make it feasible for us to start again seriously negotiating the kind of solution that is in principle the only one that is possible, given that fundamentally the land between the river and the sea fundamentally is populated by two people, us. Just a fact. It's a fundamental fact of life.
- [77:10]
A
Alex, thank you so much. We're going to end it there because it's gone an hour and a half. And at some point you got to cut an episode. We're going to get letters and they're going to range from. But how actually do you build a two state solution from, given the situation, given Palestinian politics, given everything we've seen, given October 7th, given the situation of Gaza all the way to what are you crazy? You crazy, stupid, crazy person. And we'll circle back and we'll dive in the history of two states.
- [77:42]
B
What I'm saying is crazy. All my modest objection is that the other possibilities are even crazier. And that's the best thing you can say for yourself in a situation like this.
- [77:55]
A
So we will circle back to that. Thank you so much. Part of the purpose of this podcast is to open a window into an Israeli conversation, because I'm going to tell people something crazy. Israelis know what's happening to them better than other people with strong opinions about what's happening to them. And so, Alex, you are one of the most, I have found, serious public intellectuals Israel has. And also you, you give real deep historical dives and answers to the fundamental questions. And it's an honor to have you. Thank you so much for joining me.
- [78:31]
B
Thank you very much.