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Episode 8: Prof. Alexander Yakobson on what it means to "decolonize Palestine"
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Foreign.
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Welcome to Ask Aviv. Anything. This is a bit of an odd episode, a fun episode, a bonus episode. I sat down with a teacher of mine, Professor Alexander Jakobson of Hebrew University, a scholar of Roman history. I learned how to do history from Alex, and I wanted to bring his voice to this podcast. I've often recommended his book Israel and the Family of Nations, which I think is, in the last 40 years, 50 years, maybe the best single defense of Zionism out there in Hebrew. You can buy it at any bookstore at regular price. In English, it was classified as an academic book and it sells for 100 or $140, which I don't know why that happened. I can't prove that there's a conspiracy. It's a shame. It's a shame because it's a book worth having. It takes on a lot of the tropes. It's already two decades old almost, but it takes on a lot of the tropes that our anti Zionist academics use that are sort of thrown at Israel, thrown at Zionism. What's special about him is his superpower. And you get that superpower when you sit in his class. When you learn from him, you get something of it, you see it, and therefore you know something about how to do it. And it's desperately missing from so much of Western debates, discussions about this place, but about many, many topics. It's the fearlessness of taking the other side's position seriously. You go into a debate and someone like Alex actually helps the other side make their case. I have seen him in debates, on panels, at think tanks, at the university where the other side made an argument. And then Alex chimed in and said, if you actually said this version of the argument, it would actually be more convincing because then I wouldn't be able to say this in response. You opened yourself up unnecessarily to my own. He advises the other side in real time, how to make the case. That kind of instinctive commitment to the truth means that even if you don't agree with him, even if you find him too left wing, even if you don't agree with him because he's also on the left, a critic of the left, for example, he shares my views. As far as I know, I haven't talked to him about this particular topic in a few years, that the Israeli Supreme Court is massively overpowerful and that it's unhealthy and unstable and we need judicial reform, and that the government's version of it was a disaster, but nevertheless, that that's not necessarily Substantively the same as saying that the right is wrong. Actually, the right has a point. The court really is too powerful. So this is a guy who pulls no punches for anyone, has no loyalty to party, to policy. His only loyalty is to the public good, to the country itself. And you see it. You see it. We're going to talk about a few things. I'm going to bring sections where he tackles accusations often leveled at Zionism, that it is colonialist. Anti Zionists often say the Jews are a religion, not a people. He offers a lot of perspective and you can't quite place it politically. For example, he points out that Muslims have more often and for longer periods conquered and colonized Christian lands than Christians have conquered and colonized Muslim lands. Now the Christian colonization and colonialism has been more recent, but the Muslim was more often and longer. That kind of sounds like a right leaning sort of cultural discourse. But he also points out that during the period when Palestinians started calling themselves Palestinians, an argument often made against the Palestinian national movement is that there was a period where no Arab in the land called themselves Palestinian and then suddenly they're all calling themselves Palestinian. There was a moment of invention, of self invention. And that's often on the Israeli political right. There's often heard the argument that Palestinians are fake, invented. There's of course a mainstream Palestinian argument that the Jews are somehow in some innate sense because they're a religion and not a people, usually fake and invented. And Israeli identity is artificial, except that all other Arab peoples were going through the same process at the same time. The coalescing of Palestinian nationalism, Alex points out, wasn't something that happened only to Palestinians as a response to the pressure of Zionism or Jewish immigration. It was happening to Iraqis, it was happening to Moroccans and Algerians. Well, if it was happening to other Arab peoples, there's a bit of a deeper process and a more potentially, if you're going to morally judge it, authentic process underway. So it's a serious intellectual conversation that doesn't come just to win brownie points. It actually comes to uncover the truth, to sift away some of the sand. I'm going to just stop talking here and just. Why repeat everything he says and then let you hear it? Thank you very much for joining. This episode is sponsored by an anonymous donor in Honor of Battalion 363 of the Halel Brigade, which is an infantry brigade in the IDF where the sponsor's loved one serves. I think that's a beautiful sponsorship and thank you for that. May all our sons and daughters Come home safely. Here's Alex. I often tell people the Arab world misunderstands us and always thinks that we are the arm of some patron, some other. And therefore they continue to believe that losing in a war to us doesn't mean anything. Because in fact, the only reason they lost in the war is because the Russian empire supported us or the German empire supported us, or right now the Americans support us. And so it's still worth having another war against us. And from your book, Israel and the Family of Nations, that was when I first came across the astonishing discovery that in 1948, Egypt, when it declared war on us, declared war on communist nihilism and atheism.
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Right.
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Because we were a branch of the
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Soviet Union, that the resolution of the Egyptian parliament that the Egyptian army is going to Palestine, of course, to protect Arab Palestinians and Arab Palestine and all that, but and also to confront the destructive forces of communism and atheism. Many people on the Israeli right kind of accept this designation of the Israeli of the Zionist labor movement. That's a bit of an exaggeration. But.
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So let me start this discussion at the beginning. I have spoken. I've been on many college campuses over the last year and a half, and I've spoken to a great many college students and a great many American Jews who are very worried about the future of young people and what they think about Zionism in America. America. And we're hearing from the American left, the European left, the academic left, that Zionism is colonialism, that the Jews should be ashamed that there's something fundamentally wrong in this thing called the state of Israel. There are even scholars, Jewish scholars in American universities who are now calling themselves non Zionist, anti Zionists, trying to found a non Zionist academic movement. Why isn't Zionism colonialism? Is Zionism colonialism? How do we begin to make sense of this argument, this claim that we all, at some point or another, if we're going to be in academic spaces in the west, have to face, well,
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you know, every term, like every political term, every term that is used politically, you can argue about how to define it. And then whether you. Depending on whether you want to apply it against a particular object. Okay, you can people define communism, socialism, conservatism, bibism and Trumpism in a way. But I think if we look for a commonsensical definition of colonialism as a modern phenomenon, it is obviously a phenomenon whereby Western powers, European powers, took over large parts of what is today the Third world of Asia and Africa and colonization of the property. Proper sense means that they send their people there in order to settle them. That is, they colonize in the sense of settle. Okay, But I think more broadly, any taking over of a territory by a European power against of a non European territory populated by non European people is considered an act of colonialism. It's very usually also accompanied by settling it to a greater or larger extent. Now there, of course, so I'm stressing the. That these are European powers because of course in history is full of conquests and colonizations in the sense of settling of territories by non Western powers, of non Western territors, non Western powers, and of Europe itself, of course, by Muslim conquerors. For hundreds of years, large parts of Europe or conquered, ruled and colonized to some extent by the Ottoman Empire, by the Muslim conquerors in Spain and things like that. But that is not what is meant by anticolon discourse, just ignores this fact. And that in itself, of course means that it is very much open to criticism because there is something fundamentally dishonest about this pretense and only as if only Western powers ruled over non Western peoples. In fact, everybody who knows anything about history knows that the conquest of Christian countries and Christian peoples by Muslims was much more prevalent without any comparison and continued for much longer than the conquest of Muslim peoples by European conquerors. That is the latest develop course. Okay, we leave that aside. We speak about what is meant when people speak about.
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Just before we leave that aside, the entire Byzantine Empire is what you're talking about.
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Well, look, they of course the.
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And then we get.
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Turkey is used. Used to be my Aisha miner. Settled, conquered and settled, of course by Greeks and Romans. But at the time, at the point of time when Turks took over it and made it Turkey, of course, there was a Turkish conquest and colonization of Aisha Minor, then of Constantinople, of course, or what is today Istanbul, you know, Constantinople was actually conquered shortly before what used to be called the discovery of America. People rightly, of course, regard the history of post Colombian America as a history of European colonization. I don't argue with that. But nobody thinks of calling the history of Turkey of Turkish presence in Istanbul, or at least in the European parts of Turkey, although even the Asian parts of Turkey, of course had been conquered, but people came from what today is Mongolia or something like that original. So since it is more or less accepted that the first Homo sapiens came from Africa, more or less everyone once conquered their present territory. We speak about now Western colonialism, okay? That is to say colonialism as it is called now, there is always a European power that takes over a territory and then sends its people to that territory. And the Jews were not a European power that took over another country and sent its people to it. The Jews were often persecuted and always discriminated against minority in. In Europe and not only in Europe, but the European Jews who are accused of colonialism. They were not a power that conquered another country. They were a people in search of a national home, of a homeland which they sought to establish in their historic homeland, in their ancestral homeland. Zionism regards itself as a national movement of the Jewish people, of a homeless and persecuted people, and in a case of a people lacking a homeland and independence. And the question should be, why should the desire of this people to national dependence, why should it be regarded as less legitimate than the desire of other peoples to independence when the right of self determination is you. No, there is not a single probably a critic of Zionism who does not in principle recognize the right of peoples to self determination. It is not on any principle. You can say I disagree with it. But I don't think there is a single critic of Zionism who will say self determination nonsense. I don't recognize such a thing.
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But there is a debate about whether the Jews specifically fit that category. How do I know? How do I know if the Jews deserve to fit into that? Maybe the Jews invented their nationalism. They use. They're just a religion maybe, right? This is a discourse that seems to make sense. If you think of Christianity as another kind of Abrahamic faith like Judaism, maybe Judaism and Christianity are categorically alike. And then why does Judaism have a state?
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Right, if you can, we will return to question colonialism, which is connected. But okay, you are raising very fundamental questions and I think we have some time so we will address it seriously. If you want to counter the Zionist claim that this is a legitimate movement to realize for the Jewish people the universal right, self determination. There are two ways of rejecting either you say Jews are not a people, were not a people, and therefore the principle should never have applied to them. And the second argument, possible argument to say, well, they may have been a people or to some extent a people, but it should not have applied to them. Because for them to form a. Because they were a diaspora people and for them to form a state in Palestine that was already populated by Arabs, was a majority Arab territory, was always going to conflict with the rights of the natives of the locals. Okay, so there are. So you don't even some people say, yeah, Jews were a people in some sense, but these people should not have tried to establish a State, because usually peoples, when they ask for independence, they ask for independence where they sit, where they live, okay? And then national self determination is actually another aspect of the principle of government by consent, okay? Consent of the governed. It's another way to saying that people should be ruled by their decision, not by someone else. And if there are several people, then each of them has this right to serve government. But this is the great American, among other things, principle of consent of the governed. So self determination is another aspect of the consent of the governed. But the assumption is you live in a place and then you have a right to decide how you will be governed, okay, not just by whom, but in what national framework. Now, the Jews do not fit into this perfectly because they were not sitting, they were not living in the place where they demanded independence, unlike any other case of national self determination. So in order to say that the right of self determination should not have applied to Jews because they were not living in the territory unlike any other national movement, they were not living in the territory on which they wanted to establish a state, and other people lived and objected to their coming and to their state. That it's a serious clash of. In order to say that the meaning, the practical meaning of it is that the right of self determination is denied to the people who in the nature of the case needed it more desperately than any other people. You see, when you compare Zionism with other national movements and you ask for justification, I think if you want to seriously confront the criticism. Criticism is very often malicious and hypocritical. But that doesn't mean there are no serious. There is a serious argument against Zionism, and this is a serious argument against Zionism yourself. International was always going to bring you into conflict with people who were living there and were not under any obligation to make any concessions to some other people coming from some other place. And it is not like people living and saying, we want to establish a government in our natural country. Even if there is a conflict, there's a conflict between two groups of people living in a certain place, not changing the character of a country. Okay, so that is a serious objection. But you have to understand what the implications are of accepting it. The implication, the meaning of the moral implication is that the right of self determination should not have been applied to the people who needed it more desperately by definition, because they were homeless people than any other people. Because you see, again, when you're comparing Zionism with any, with Kurdish or whatever, Basque or whatever, I was just going
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to say, why, why wouldn't that count? For any homeless people. Because specifically the Jews were persecuted at a different scale.
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Usually peoples, peoples remain a people when they have a. Not all of them live in the country, but they at least have a territorial base. Jews have. There was some Jews in this country, but that was a very small minority of the Jewish people that have purged of this country. The Jews were basically nearly 100% outside their historical homeland. And it is not an easy thing to say that it was legitimate for them to reclaim it or even a part of it while other people are living there. We have to address this. But the opponents of Zionism need to address the moral implications of denying Zionism. I'm going back now to the basic dilemma. The difference between Zionism and other peoples, other people's territorial or mainly territorial peoples. I would say there are common traits and then there is a plus and a minus. Zionism in some sense is less justified than other national movements. And in some sense it is more justified than other national movements. And the plus and the minus are basically two sides of the same coin. They both result from the historical tragedy of the Jews that the Jews lost not just their independence. This is trivial, more or less every people except the Chinese or no, even more or less basically, most people certainly lost at some point of history their independence. But Jews lost not just their independence, they lost their homeland itself. Okay? They were a homeless people. And being a homeless people, they also faced the challenges that homeless people without a home to protect them, you know, and also for some specific reasons of hostility to Jews in Europe and not only in Europe now. So a homeless people needs a national home more than the people who live in their home, but just want to change the political regime, okay? So they need it more than the usual peoples. But by demanding this, they also inevitably clash with the rights of other people, okay? Because they cannot by definition homeless people cannot establish a home, a national home where they live. They need to colonize in the sense of settle another territory and it is not empty. So you have to. Then you have to decide what is even worse, what is more immoral, okay? To settle. And we have to understand that it is not an easy thing. Of course many Jews didn't want to think about it. Naturally, many Zionists didn't want to face this problem. But the anti Zionists don't want to face the opposite question. To say that the right of self determination should not have applied to the Jews in this situation is to make a claim that is much more blatantly immoral than the claim of the Zionists of the Zionist movement to establish a Jewish national home in this country, even when it was clear from the beginning that it was about to provoke a conflict of their. But I think at the same time that if you. The Zionist demand should always have included a readiness to accept also the legitimacy of the national demands of the other side. I think in the case of the Zionist movement, while I think that the denial of Zionism is much more immoral than Zionism, okay, Therefore Zionism is moral in this sense that denying it is much more problematic morally than affirming it. But I think that a just, a fair person who wanted to be a Zionist to make this claim should always have been prepared to say, yeah, this creates a conflict, this comes at a price. And we are willing to have, not just to recognize personal rights of the other side, but we are willing to accept the legitimacy of the national claim of the other side. I have to say that historically the Zionist movement was not every Zionist, not every group, but the mainstream. The leadership of the Zionist movement of course was prepared. And while it was of course mainly for pragmatic reasons, there is no lack of Zionist rhetoric that acknowledged famously. One of the most famous examples was Chaim Weizmann, a very important person in the. In the Zionist movement. And he said famously that the conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine was not a conflict between justice and injustice, but it was a conflict between two sorts of justice. Two sorts of justice. You don't hear, you know, Greeks in Cyprus saying that the conflict between the Greek, the Turkish claim on part of Cyprus and the Greek claim that the Greek majority should rule all of Cyprus. There is a, that it's a clash between two kinds of justice. Both sides think that their demand is just, then they may or may not compromise. But I think it was of course always the case. And that has always been my view that in a situation like that, you know, if you read Jabotinsky, if you go to the Zionist right, not to the Zionist center left, if you read Jabotinsky's Iron Wall, the famous article that is the paper that is, he more or less launched the revisionist right wing Zionism by writing. If you read it, you know it is famous for the hawkish militant headline Iron Wall. This is what people remember and it doesn't appear there by mistake. He was a very good journalist. He knew that the headline is of course a very large part of the whole impact of it. But if you read the text, if you read the text, you understand that he is perfectly aware that Arab opposition to Zionism was natural because for them it was a natural reaction of any population. Doesn't matter if at that point they guarded themselves as a separate. They did not regard at that point themselves as a separate people from other Arab people. That is a notion that came later, not just for Palestinians. It's a notion that took over all of the Arab world. It's not the, the idea that Arabs are peoples is not something that was invented polemically against Zionism. It is a development that all the Arab world underwent. And I don't think there is any sense in us arguing with it because we cannot dictate the national identity of the hundreds of millions of Arabs just because it's convenient for us to say that they're all one people. This is nonsense. But even before Palestinian Arabs claimed that they are dissident people. If you read this text, he says clearly for Palestinian Arabs, Palestine is their homeland and they don't want to give it up or even a part of it. And therefore his conclusion is that there is no hope for an agreement, not forever, but as long as we are not strong enough. And then they will compromise with it. If we are not in a position of strength, there will be no compromise. Then he says there will be a compromise. So the question then, which kind of a compromise? But it is a national compromise. And he was prepared, by the way, if you read, if you know his true views, he was not in favor of partition, but he was prepared to offer to Arabs in Palestine not just civic rights that was never impatient, but collective rights, you know, much, much more far reaching collective rights than I am prepared to offer them. I'm in favor of partition, but my Jewish state is less of a binational state than Jabotinsky Jewish state, if you know what he was actually proposing, because it is a national compromise, not just respecting individual right. So I think there was no lack of understanding. It is unfair to the Zionist movement to claim that Zionism was blind to the moral dilemma that was created by Zionist settlement of Palestine. The truth is that the opponents of Zionism were always blind to the moral dilemma of, of rejecting Zionism. Of course, Palestinian Arabs were always blind to the dilemma of their claim against, of their refusal to recognize any kind of a Jewish natural home. But worse, you could say Palestinian Arabs, you can. They are personally affected in a way that you couldn't. Jabotinsky thought that one couldn't expect them to accept. He really thought that it was unrealistic to expect them to accept it. But other people who are not involved collectively or directly, who pretend to be Fair minded, who to pretend to be in favor of equal justice for all, of justice to both sides or justice to people regardless of their ethnicity and religion. These people, what they're actually saying, the Jews, because history deprived them not just of their independence, but of the ground under their feet, of the home itself. And because were lacking a home, they were persecuted in the way that they were persecuted. Not just their cultural, collective, cultural identity was in danger. It was in danger, but their basic rights, their human dignity and in the end their physical survival was in danger. And other countries did not want to accept them because they were regarded them as aliens, as another people. Anti Semites of, but always regarded us as a people. The modern anti Semites never doubted that we were a people. And in a situation like that, the Jews should have not have been offered a national home of their own. So the people who needed a homeland, a national home more than any other people should have been denied this thing. Of course, and we also know what it would have meant practically in terms of the 20th century history. But Zionism didn't start with the Nazis, with the danger of genocide. It started with the antisemitism of late 19th century. But if you ask, you know, if you say, you know, if you compare Zionism with, you know, with Sargimento, with the national, the movement for liberating Italy from foreign rule and uniting it into Garibaldi's classical case of a progressive, universal, recognized, progressive national movement, you could say, what was the danger to the Italian people if there wouldn't be a united Italy? Well, they would be living under Franz Joseph and the Austrian emperor and some of them would be maybe living in some separate papal state. It wouldn't stay. Why? There would be no Italians. There would be no Italian language, there would be no Italian culture. There would be no country called Italy. There would be no, there wouldn't be a United States called Italy. Okay, okay. So people more or less universally accept that that was a code worth fighting for. Okay, for the Italians to become an independent nation. And so you ask, you compare the need of Italians of the state with the need of the Jews to the state. That is serious comparison. That is not a comparison, that's a joke. So I would say that the Jewish claim for self determination is not unproblematic, but denying it is much more problematic than affirming it. And because it is problematic, inevitably problematic, I think it should always have come with a readiness to make a compromise. And I still think so. But there is, the other question is whether the other side is willing to Compromise. And that is a question of fact. You know, you shouldn't take it as an article of faith that if there is no compromise, it must be because the Jews and the Israelis and Zionists are not willing to compromise. You should seriously and honestly ask yourself whether the other side was and is and what part of it is willing to compromise. That's not an easy thing. Now we go to the question whether the Jews are a people, okay? Whether the whole comparison is valid. Because if it's just a religious sect, then of course all those notions don't apply to it. But it's not really a serious claim. First of all, to say that the Jews are not a people but a religion is a kind of a joke. Because anyone who knows anything about the Jewish religion, anyone who read a one page of the text of this religion knows that the content of this religion says that we are a people, okay? It is a very large part of the Jewish religion that we are a people connected with certain country with a vision of restoring what used to be the Jewish state, Jewish kingdom, Jewish rule in the land of Israel. So to say that the Jews are religion and not a people, you can say that seriously if you have no idea what is the content of the Jewish religion, okay? And that is the culture, the tradition culture of the Jewish people. So the Jews have always. They did need herzltus. It is not true that the Zionists claim that Jews are a people, whereas the traditional religious Jews did not. Of course, traditional religion always regarded them, called themselves people. All those words in Hebrew that denoted. There was, you know, in late 19th century in Europe a large Jewish national movement called the Bundle. No, it was defeated by history because its basis was Yiddish speaking European Jews who were simply murdered by the Nazis. Okay? So it's tragic. They lost their fight in a very tragic way. Now they defined themselves as a national movement of the Jewish people. They were strongly anti Zionist. They rejected Zionists. They did not want to have and independent state in Palestine. They wanted to have national autonomy, cultural autonomy mainly in the East European in where the millions of Jews lived. There were millions of Jews who lived in Eastern Europe. They spoke, the overwhelming majority of them spoke a language that made them different from other peoples. Nobody in Eastern Europe, where by the way, most Jews lived, okay? In the 19th century, no one doubted that in an area where there are Russians, Ukrainians, Poles and Jews that the Jews are one of the peoples of the Russian and Austrian Empire. No one seriously doubted it. And if only because they did have a national language that made them different from us. That is the basic definition of being a people. That you have a distinct. Not always, but usually you have a distinct plan. Now, there isn't a religion that has. Whose millions of believers speak a language that is different from their neighbors. The religions don't work like you have a liturgical language sometimes which you pray. People compare it with Latin. This is nonsense. But there was a whole culture, including the language of millions of people, many of whom were not religious. Some of them were Zionists, some of them were all kinds of things. Some of them were communists, some of them were ultra. But many of them. I'm speaking about the Bund and there were some other groups. The Bund was national. They believed that the Jews are a people. They were non religious, I think were atheist, really, and non Zionist, actually anti Zionist. And the national language of the Jewish people for them was Yiddish rather than Hebrew. And they did not want to go to Palestine. They wanted to have Jewish autonomy in where the millions of Jews live. Now you call them, what you call them a religious sect. Those Marxist atheist people who were based. They were the movement of Jewish working class. That was a large group. Okay, you call them, you say that these people are. These people are a religious sect that invents itself as a people. It's simply not a serious argument. By the way, I want to remind you as someone who was born in the Soviet Union, that the Bolsheviks, who opposed Zionism and the Bund, and they accused them of nationalism because basically because they wanted Jews to choose revolution, Russian revolution rather than narrow national causes. When the Soviet Union, when they came to power and the Soviet Union was established and it constituted itself as a multinational state, as a state of many nationalities. Now, of course, they recognize Jews as a nationality. The Soviet government wrote Jewish nationality. Nationality in the sense of ethno national affiliation. That is the meaning of nationality in Eastern Europe and in Israel. Okay? So the Jewish national affiliation is written in my Soviet birth card, not because they were. It was not religion. They didn't care about religion. They said in the Soviet Union there are Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, Armenians, Kazakhs, Lithuanians and Jews, okay? And that was one of the officially recognized nationalities of the multinational Soviet Union, which was of course supposed to be a happy family of brotherly peoples and building socialism together. And they did not just define Jews as a nationality. They also recognized Yiddish as the popular national language of the Jews. And millions of Jews spoke. Before the Holocaust, millions of Jews spoke Yiddish as their native language. The Soviet Union also established schools in Hebrew and theaters in Hebrew. Okay? So they were for a long time they were quite consistent. They even established a quasi autonomous area, Perobidian, that was supposed to give this Soviet nationality a national home of its own. Of course, very few Jews went there, but the idea was that since all Soviet nationalities have either a republic or autonomous region, the Jews should have an autonomous region. Okay, so these people did not recognize anyone's religion. Religion was at best your personal matter. There was no collective recognition of any religion. So to say that the Jews were merely a religion, not from the viewpoint of religious Jews and certainly not from the viewpoint of non religious Jews and not from the viewpoint of their neighbors who regarded them as another people and not from the viewpoint of the international community that recognized them as a people. And so this is just, you know, this is just nonsense. This is just, this is really dishonest. This is a thoroughly dishonest claim.
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How is it that serious people commonly heard among elites, it's growing among, among influencers and, and scholars and thinkers. You meet it in the Middle east departments of elite universities. In the west, the Jews are religion and other people. There's some kind of a simple dichotomy there that you can just pick and choose. And the Zionists did this bad thing of peopling them and then that turned into the evils of Zionism or a Zionism without a metropole. A Zionism that came to the land as refugees in desperate need is nevertheless colonialism, or just one thing after another. Or the very idea that after the 20th century, when every other kind of Jew in the Eastern hemisphere is dead, apologies to French Jewry, they're 90% Sephardi. They're very much a product of the ethnic cleansing of all Jews, even if they're still around. How do you just ignore all that fundamental history, all that clear and direct and obvious stuff and just run with these things, run with these ideas in academia, these are majority views, at least in the elite academia that we're exposed to in the Arab world. These are majority arguments. And all of the ideologies of the present day left. This is common stuff. And it's so utterly and stupidly ahistorical. I find as I go to fancy American universities, Ivy League universities, somebody comes to me and says to me, everyone I know is anti Zionist. And then I say, what the heck's an anti Zionist? Every Jew is dead. And there's no answer. They don't grapple with it. It is a moral identity rather than any kind of argument. What is that ahistoricity? Why is it so obvious? And simple. And still they don't get it.
- [39:33]
A
If you decide to define colonialism as people from Europe settling in a non European territory, okay, then of course, yeah, when Jews come from Europe to Palestine, they come from Europe to Palestine, they don't need it. And then people say that a colonial power is not a real condition. You know the story, but I want to repeat it for the benefit of the viewers that there is a professor in the Beersheva University, Orenif Tachel, who wrote a lot on Zionism being colonialism. And he doesn't really deny all kinds of arguments, but he says in favor of Zionism. But he says, you know, the basic fact is the physical movement from Europe to Palestine. If you decide that this is the main thing, then all other things are details. Now he wrote, I quote him in one of his papers, that the actual process, despite the salient differences compared with other colonial movements, they recognized that as salient differences, the actual process of European settlement in Palestine enables Zionism to be classified both Pre and post 49, 48 as a pure colonial settler movement. Okay, there are some differences, but the actual process, that is the settlement. Therefore I decide that this definition still applies. Then there is a footnote and he gives the details of those salient differences. It doesn't hide anything. He gives full disclosure and he says so listen to how he describes one of the main colonizers of the Zionist movement in the left wing post Zionist. I don't even. I'm not sure, never mind. In the woke I would say academia. Now, what are the salient differences between Zionism and other colonial movements that do not change the fact that Zionism is basically colonialism? Zionism's nature as an ethnic and national rather than economic project, number one, it is ethnic and national. It doesn't say the Jews are only here. It doesn't say there's no. He says it's a national and ethnic project and not a project economic exploitation. One, the refugee status of most of the Jews who came to Palestine, the loose organization of diaspora Jewish communities as opposed to well organized colonial mother countries. And lastly, the ideal of the return to Zion, which is grounded in Jewish tradition. He knows that. So in other words, Zionism was a colonial phenomenon in all respects and fully resembled other examples of modern colonialism. Apart from the fact that it was a national movement, that it was not motivated by a desire for economic gain, that it arose out of Jewish suffering and was realized by people who may be defined as refugees, that the settlers had no colonial mother country and that the bond with the land of Israel was part of the traditional historic identity of the Jewish people. He doesn't ignore it. He doesn't say it was just a territory. He recognizes that.
- [43:03]
B
Of course that's ignoring it. It's like reading Rashid Khalidi. It's a kind of admission that functions as an ignoring.
- [43:12]
A
But I would say in a polite way that he doesn't attach to those factors the due importance in a way that in my view is outrageous, breathtaking.
- [43:25]
B
It's more than outrageous. It does something really bad to Palestinians. Because if you do figure out some kind of clever academic semantic way, because academics are good with words, academics have become convinced that the universe is made of nothing but words and they control the words and they control the universe. And so if you figure out this clever semantic path, finding your way through the words to being able to call Zionism colonialism, to call Israelis colonialists, to call this people, this nation colonialism, then you tell Palestinians by doing so you can get rid of them, you can attack them, you can weaken them through anti colonial means. Now, if I am totally colonialist in every way that involves an epithet, that involves cursing me, that involves calling me colonialist, Sure, I figured out a way to call you, but I'm not colonialist in any functional way in which an anti colonial strategy would work on me. I don't have a metropole. That's not just a moral category. That means I have nowhere to run to if you terrorize me. So how am I going to react? So you have now boxed Palestinians into a vision because in reality this is ideology. This is not actually intellectually careful. They're only intellectually careful when they have to excuse and defend the ideology. Where does this ahistoricity come from? Why? This is the majority view of the Middle Eastern studies departments of major American universities of the most elite ones. Am I asking you a psychology question instead of a history question? What the hell's going on?
- [44:58]
A
You have to take into account that in last years and decades the post colonial, anti post colonial discourse has become the mainstream discourse, not just vis a vis Israel and Zionists, it now very much defines the wokish kind of liberalism. It's the essence of it attitude to the United States, not just to Israel. Now when people in America say, and they say it of course, that we, America is a colonial country and they, you know, when they start when they make speech and they start by acknowledging the rights of the, of the, of the native, but they don't mean anything by it.
- [45:42]
B
A land acknowledgment is fake because it's free. It does, it's not costly.
- [45:47]
A
They may feel that when what they say about Israel is they apply to Israel the same standards that they applied to America, to Australia, to Canada. Now even in somehow Britain is also colonial. In Britain it's crazy. Everything western is colonial. But at least when it comes to the United States. Of course originally it was a product of European colonization of the New World. Now when you acknowledge that America is a colonial entity, that doesn't mean really that you are inviting anyone to fight against the existence, to fight on against the existence of the United States. There is no threat to the existence of the United States. So you can very cheaply acknowledge all you want. And at best it means that you will offer maybe some compensation, some reparation or some, some reverse discrimination or whatever. But that is not acknowledging the native people who the original owners of this land there isn't, for obvious reasons, nobody's going to take over to reclaim those lands. And I think that some people have thought, have persuaded themselves that actually Israel is in a similar situation. Meaning that the claim for the whole of the historic Palestine is really is a marginal position of some radicals. Whereas the mainstream of the Palestinian national movement and the Arab world de facto they're not happy with anything, but they de facto accept Israel's existence. And therefore the only real issue is whether Israel will continue to rule the Palestinians in the territories and deny them their solitarian and the Israeli Jews to make the necessary concessions that do not really endanger anything because there is no real danger. Okay? In order to do that it is good to make them feel less self righteous about their past. Okay, Say okay. Don't be so sure that you are the victims of aggression. You are okay. At least you are guilty of this tragedy, at least as much as the other side. And now you have to agree to a fair arrangement. Now many of those people would, I think Torah Neftahalba, by the way, is one of them. I spoke to him. I believe him when he says that he has no intention at all of giving up the state of Israel. For him, decolonization of Israel is turning Israel into a civic democracy of the American like America. We will discuss maybe what exactly it means and how it could work. But this is. He doesn't want for the state of Israel to disappear. His problem is that under the post colonial notion, the colonized decide what kind of decolonization they ask for. He may not be in favor of this brutal extremist radical decolonization. He may not think it's a good idea or even a moral idea, given the realities on the ground. But he doesn't. He's not really able. If he accepts this discourse, the discourse, this colonial Zionism, this colonial discourse, he cannot really say that if the colonized actually insist on decolonization in the sense of destroying the State of Israel, that this is fundamentally wrong. You may say it's unrealistic, it's brutal, the methods are brutal now. And I think that what is obvious to And I think the 7th of October made it clear to many people that it is not just. In any case, you can argue about whether the PLO in Fatah, whether and to what extent they are willing or may be persuaded to be willing to accept Israel. But there is no serious debate. There could never be any serious doubt that Hamas never pretended to accept the existence of Israel. And it is obvious that Hamas was never a marginal small group among the Palestinians, just a radical voice that should not be made too much of. Now, what we now know from the 7th of October, that for this large and powerful Palestinian movement, the destruction of the State of Israel is not just some distant future goal. The that they are not willing to renounce, but they amazingly apparently thought, we know it from their documents, that in the recent years they developed an idea that this is a realistic goal and of course not alone. Nobody could ever think that Hamas but people, when they think about Israel being much more powerful than the Palestinians, they allow themselves to ignore the fact that there is a regional power that supports Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and this is Iran. And so the idea, we know from Hamas documents that Sinwar's idea of bringing down the Zionist entity was of course not that Hamas would do it alone, but for a simultaneous attack by Hamas, by Hezbollah on the north, other elements and Iranian rocket attack, act on the basis of the Israeli Air Force, okay? And so that could. They spoke about actual destruction of the state of Israel, but they said the second best Israel will be delivered such a blow, such a horrible blow, that it will start a process of disintegration that means the Jews who are not Genufo colonizers, they have no genuine connection to the country, will just start just immigrating, leaving the country. And so it will be, even if not an immediate total destruction of the state. It will start the process of destruction. This is what Nasrallah said many times and this became an operative military plan for Hamas that was realized on the 7th of October. So while in America you can be angry with this rhetoric, it doesn't really threaten the existence of America. The difference is that in this area, with these neighbors, with these forces, I think this rhetoric really encourages the worst, the most dangerous elements in the Arab Muslim world, Arabs supported by Muslim fundamentalist power, potentially nuclear power there. And so you are right. It is no service at all to the Palestinian people.
- [52:36]
B
Thank you very much, Professor Alexander Jacobson of Hebrew University.