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Lex Fridman Podcast

#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris

Thu, 14 Mar 2024

Description

Norman Finkelstein and Benny Morris are historians. Mouin Rabbani is a Middle East analyst. Steven Bonnell (aka Destiny) is a political livestreamer. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod to get 3 months free - Babbel: https://babbel.com/lexpod and use code Lexpod to get 55% off - Policygenius: https://policygenius.com/lex - Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/lex to get special savings Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/israel-palestine-debate-transcript EPISODE LINKS: Mouin's X: https://x.com/MouinRabbani Mouin's Podcast: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLkT5TSHWFSYKY_6vrNn_vZAmfunA_s9g - Benny's Books: https://amzn.to/3Vf7NNU - Norman's X: https://x.com/normfinkelstein Norman's Website: https://www.normanfinkelstein.com/ Norman's Books: https://amzn.to/3IqouxU Knowing Too Much (excerpt): https://jumpshare.com/v/8EUbbP40Do44ITDfJUoR - Destiny's YouTube: https://youtube.com/destiny Destiny's X: https://x.com/TheOmniLiberal Destiny's Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Destiny/ Destiny's Website: https://destiny.gg - Norman and Mouin provided additional links to supplement the discussion. See them here: https://sites.google.com/view/israel-palestine-debate/home PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (12:11) - 1948 (1:10:43) - Partition (2:15:16) - October 7 (3:09:27) - Gaza (3:36:02) - Peace (4:40:47) - Hope for the future

Audio
Transcription

0.209 - 22.22 Lex Fridman

The following is a debate on the topic of Israel and Palestine with Norman Finkelstein, Benny Morris, Muin Rabbani, and Stephen Bunnell, also known online as Destiny. Norm and Benny are historians, Muin is a Middle East analyst, and Steven is a political commentator and streamer. All four have spoken and debated extensively on this topic.

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23.101 - 48.121 Lex Fridman

The goal for this debate was not for anyone to win or to score points. It wasn't to get views or likes. I never care about those. And I think there are probably much easier ways to get those things if I did care. The goal was to explore together the history, present, and future of Israel and Palestine in a free-flowing conversation, no time limits, no rules.

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49.541 - 74.364 Lex Fridman

There was a lot of tension in the room from the very beginning, and it only got more intense as we went along. And I quickly realized that this very conversation, in a very real human way, was a microcosm of the tensions and distance and perspectives on the topic of Israel and Palestine. For some debates, I will step in and moderate strictly to prevent emotion from boiling.

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74.845 - 100.233 Lex Fridman

For this, I saw the value in not interfering with the passion of the exchanges, because that emotion in itself spoke volumes. We did talk about the history and the future, but the anger, the frustration, the biting wit, and at times, respect and camaraderie were all there. Like I said, we did it in an perhaps all too human way.

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101.433 - 129.26 Lex Fridman

I will do more debates and conversations on these difficult topics, and I will continue to search for hope in the midst of death and destruction, to search for our common humanity in the midst of division and hate. This thing we have going on, human civilization, the whole of it, is beautiful. And it's worth figuring out how we can help it flourish together. I love you all.

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131.072 - 154.008 Lex Fridman

And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got ExpressVPN for privacy, Babbel for learning new languages, Policy Genius for insurance, and 8sleep for, you guessed it, sleep. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com contact.

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155.609 - 174.457 Lex Fridman

And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the internet. I've used them for many years.

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175.197 - 207.836 Lex Fridman

I've had great conversations with several people on the podcast about the NSA and the overreach and power that's there. And it's really interesting to think about the value of privacy, the value of digital privacy in our lives, how much we take for granted How much we look the other way when the product or whatever we're using is good enough and we become the product. Our data becomes the product.

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208.776 - 234.767 Lex Fridman

It's really interesting. I think transparency there is required because While it is true all of us value privacy, we're very hypocritical on that point in many cases. We distrust certain things that don't violate privacy that much, and we trust blindly other things that violate a huge number of privacy, or at least have the capacity to. A lot of us use a smartphone with a camera looking at us.

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235.987 - 263.37 Lex Fridman

Always. We trust that device. Human psychology is fascinating. It worries me how easily we could be convinced at a mass scale by narratives. Distributed propaganda or centralized propaganda, it all works. And it all is terrifyingly effective. Something to think about. And you should have several layers of protection in your digital and your physical space.

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264.051 - 291.162 Lex Fridman

ExpressVPN, a good VPN, and that's the one I use, is something you should definitely be using. Go to expressvpn.com for an extra three months free. This episode is also brought to you by Babbel, an app and website that gets you speaking in a new language within weeks. They got Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, and more. I'm doing more and more translation.

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292.002 - 313.365 Lex Fridman

In fact, if you are somebody that speaks fluently in Russian and professionally does translation, I just did a very lengthy podcast where both me and the guest speak Russian. And I'm looking for translation from Russian to English. professionally done, like really, really well done. This is actually a very difficult task.

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313.945 - 339.236 Lex Fridman

And then also for hopefully the same person, but not necessarily to do the voiceovers in English. Given how fast the other person speaks that I interviewed, it's actually a pretty tricky thing. But all that is to say that I deeply care about breaking down the barriers that language creates. I think a lot of those barriers are artificial.

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340.558 - 365.804 Lex Fridman

They hide from ourselves the common humanity that's obviously there. There's differences, of course, in culture, in the music of a people, in the music of a language, but underneath it all, it's all the same fears, the same hopes, the same excitements, the same dynamics, the same things we care about, family and food and simple joy, big joy, chasing dreams, all that kind of stuff.

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367.389 - 392.217 Lex Fridman

Anyway, I use Babbel more to learn languages I don't know that well. Sometimes I'll use it for Russian, just for fun practice, getting the rust off. But I'm learning Spanish now. Also, I took French in high school, and I'm very rusty, so I'm using Babbel to, again, get some of the rust off. And one day, I hope to get better at German and Italian. I've traveled to Italy a couple times.

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392.237 - 421.828 Lex Fridman

It would be very helpful. to be able to speak the language, so that I could navigate the streets with grace and skill. Anyway, for a limited time, you can get 50% off a one-time payment for a lifetime Babbel subscription at babbel.com slash lexpod. That's 50% off at babbel.com slash lexpod, spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash lexpod. Rules and restrictions apply.

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423.254 - 456.34 Lex Fridman

This episode is also brought to you by Policy Genius, a marketplace for insurance, all kinds, life insurance, auto, home, disability, and I apologize for the heaviness of my tone in this few minutes that we get to spend together here. This episode was a difficult one, and perhaps this is a good moment to mention why. Because it's human beings talking about other human beings who are suffering.

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457.661 - 497.705 Lex Fridman

Human beings sitting in the comfort of a room that's not getting bombed, that's not getting shot at, a room that's surrounded by other rooms and other buildings that are safe in the way that Most places in America are safe, meaning even when there's a crime, the rule of law applies. But the raw aspects of human nature, of the destruction and death involved in wars, seems out of this world.

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498.925 - 526.013 Lex Fridman

It is difficult to really hold inside your mind. the things I've seen in Ukraine, the hate I've seen in people's eyes when I traveled to the West Bank. There was a lot of love there, but there was also a lot of hate. And there's a heaviness that comes with conversations like this. Of course, I really, really tried to bring out the humanity. Even moments of joy, the camaraderie, I tried.

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527.574 - 550.637 Lex Fridman

I'll continue to try. Anyway, this is about Policy Genius. You can find life insurance policies there that start at just $292 per year for $1 million of coverage. Head to policygenius.com slash lex or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you can save. That's policygenius.com slash lex.

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552.158 - 593.612 Lex Fridman

This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep and Spot 3 Cover. Another thing that I get to enjoy in life And others don't. I've always been able to find joy in the simplest of things. In the absence of material possessions, I always saw beauty. Every moment has the capacity to create contentment, to create real happiness. Just this feeling of gratitude to be alive. It's a real feeling.

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594.233 - 619.827 Lex Fridman

Again, when I was in Ukraine, people that lost their home, that lost their family, there was still a kind of joy there, a humor there. Again, a camaraderie there. That's hard to explain. I think because when everything is stripped away, You're still grateful to be alive and the people that you love that are still there, you're grateful for them and for those moments that you share.

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620.648 - 650.06 Lex Fridman

That's the foundation of all of it. That's the only thing that matters. All this bullshit that we buy and own. All that is just a beautiful icing on the cake. Where the cake is just the very essence of existence. The very fact that we're alive. Alive and are able to love each other and hold on to each other. And to experience moments together when we just look and see. You know, see each other.

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651.461 - 676.259 Lex Fridman

Like we're on this earth for a short time and we're in this together. And we'll lose each other one day. But today we're together. It's, I don't know. That's the most important thing. Everything else is just icing. But, you know, it's nice to have things. It's nice to have things you can enjoy together.

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676.279 - 704.136 Lex Fridman

I do want to, it definitely is nice to have a bed to sleep on and to have modern technology and to have a bed that cools itself is like ridiculous. I love it. It's like, it doesn't, it doesn't make any sense. But it's one of the things that just brings me happiness. You can check it out and get special savings when you go to 8sleep.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

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704.156 - 744.023 Lex Fridman

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Norman Fickenstein, Benny Morris, Muin Rabani, and Stephen Bunnell. First question is about 1948. For Israelis, 1948 is the establishment of the State of Israel and the War of Independence. For Palestinians, 1948 is the Nakba, which means catastrophe.

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745.02 - 765.417 Lex Fridman

or the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes as a consequence of the war. What to you is important to understand about the events of 1948 and the period around there, 47, 49, that helps us understand what's going on today and maybe helps us understand the roots of all of this that started even before 1948.

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765.537 - 772.263 Lex Fridman

I was hoping that Norm could speak first, then Benny, then Muin, and then Norm.

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773.837 - 802.448 Norman Finkelstein

After World War II, the British decided that they didn't want to deal with the Palestine question anymore, and the ball was thrown into the court of the United Nations. Now, as I read the record, the UN was not attempting to arbitrate or adjudicate rights and wrongs. It was confronting a very practical problem.

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803.797 - 831.519 Norman Finkelstein

There were two national communities in Palestine, and there were irreconcilable differences on fundamental questions, most importantly looking at the historic record on the question of immigration and associated with the question of immigration, the question of land. The UN Special Committee on Palestine

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832.441 - 870.211 Norman Finkelstein

which came into being before the UN 181 Partition Resolution, the UN Special Committee recommended two states in Palestine. There was a minority position represented by Iran, India, Yugoslavia. They supported one state, but they believed that if forced to, the two communities would figure out some sort of modus vivendi and live together.

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872.272 - 902.62 Norman Finkelstein

United Nations General Assembly supported partition between what it called a Jewish state and an Arab state. In my reading of the record, and I understand there's new scholarship on the subject, which I've not read, but so far as I've read the record, there's no clarity on what the United Nations General Assembly meant by a Jewish state and an Arab state

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903.26 - 931.977 Norman Finkelstein

except for the fact that the Jewish state would be demographically Jewish, and the Arab state demographically would be Arab. The UNSCOP, the UN Special Committee on Palestine, it was very clear, and it was reiterated many times, that in recommending two states

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933.49 - 947.297 Norman Finkelstein

Each state, the Arab state and the Jewish state, would have to guarantee full equality of all citizens with regard to political, civil, and religious matters.

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948.715 - 983.917 Norman Finkelstein

Now that does raise the question, if there is absolute full equality of all citizens, both in the Jewish state and the Arab state, with regard to political rights, civil rights, and religious rights, apart from the demographic majority, it's very unclear what it meant to call a state Jewish or call the state Arab. In my view, the partition resolution was the correct decision.

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985.572 - 1013.18 Norman Finkelstein

I do not believe that the Arab and Jewish communities could at that point be made to live together. I disagree with the minority position of India, Iran, and Yugoslavia, and that not being a practical option, two states was the only other option. In this regard, I would want to pay tribute

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1014.212 - 1048.219 Norman Finkelstein

to what was probably the most moving speech at the UN General Assembly proceedings by the Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko. I was very tempted to quote it at length, but I recognized that would be taking too much time. So I asked a young friend, Jamie Stern Weiner, to edit it and just get the essence of what Foreign Minister Gromyko had to say.

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1049.96 - 1089.629 Norman Finkelstein

During the last war, Gromyko said, the Jewish people underwent exceptional sorrow and suffering without any exaggeration, This sorrow and suffering are indescribable. Hundreds of thousands of Jews are wandering about in various countries of Europe in search of means of existence and in search of shelter. The United Nations cannot and must not regard this situation with indifference.

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1091.34 - 1128.824 Norman Finkelstein

Past experience, particularly during the Second World War, shows that no Western European state was able to provide adequate assistance for the Jewish people in defending its rights and its very existence from the violence of the Hitlerites and their allies. This is an unpleasant fact. But unfortunately, like all other facts, it must be admitted." Gromyko went on to say,

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1129.975 - 1159.984 Norman Finkelstein

In principle, he supports one state, or the Soviet Union supports one state. But he said, if relations between the Jewish and Arab populations of Palestine proved to be so bad that it would be impossible to reconcile them and to ensure the peaceful coexistence of the Arabs and the Jews, the Soviet Union would support. two states.

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1162.145 - 1196.982 Norman Finkelstein

I personally am not convinced that the two states would have been unsustainable in the long term if, and this is a big if, the Zionist movement had been faithful to the position it proclaimed during the UNSCOP public hearings. At the time, Ben-Gurion testified Quote, I want to express what we mean by a Jewish state.

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1198.284 - 1243.881 Norman Finkelstein

We mean by a Jewish state simply a state where the majority of the people are Jews, not a state where a Jew has in any way any privilege more than anyone else. A Jewish state means a state based on absolute equality of all her citizens and on democracy. Alas, this was not to be. As Professor Morris has written, quote, Zionist ideology and practice were necessarily and elementally expansionist.

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1245.399 - 1276.357 Norman Finkelstein

And then he wrote in another book, transfer, the euphemism for expulsion, transfer was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism because it sought to transform a land which was Arab into a Jewish state. and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab population.

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1277.699 - 1315.449 Norman Finkelstein

And because this aim automatically produced resistance among the Arabs, which in turn persuaded the yeshuv's leaders, the yeshuv being the Jewish community, the yeshuv's leaders that a hostile Arab majority or a large minority could not remain in place if a Jewish state was to arise or safely endure. Or as Professor Morris retrospectively put it, quote, a removing of a population was needed.

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1316.67 - 1356.638 Norman Finkelstein

Without a population expulsion, a Jewish state would not have been established, unquote. The Arab side rejected outright the partition resolution. I won't play games with that. I know a lot of people tried to prove it's not true. It clearly, in my view, is true. The Arab side rejected outright the partition resolution. While Israeli leaders, acting under compulsions, inevitable and inbuilt

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1357.586 - 1383.179 Norman Finkelstein

into Zionism found the pretext in the course of the first Arab-Israeli war to expel the indigenous population and expand its borders. I therefore conclude that neither side was committed to the letter of the partition resolution and both sides aborted it.

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1383.919 - 1401.423 Lex Fridman

Thank you, Norm. Norm asked that we make a lengthy statement in the beginning. Benny, I hope it's okay to call everybody by their first name in the name of camaraderie. Norm has quoted several things you said. Perhaps you can comment broader than the question of 1948 and maybe respond to the things that Norm said.

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1402.303 - 1421.241 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Yeah. UNSCOPE, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, recommended that partition, the majority of UNESCO recommended partition, which was accepted by the UN General Assembly in November 1947, essentially looking back to the Peel Commission in 1937.

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1421.321 - 1444.194 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Ten years earlier, a British commission had looked at the problem of Palestine, the two warring national groups who refused to live together, if you like, or consolidate a unitary state between them. And Peel said there should be two states. That's the principle. The country must be partitioned into two states.

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1444.254 - 1463.824 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

This would give a modicum of justice to both sides, if not all their demands, of course. And the United Nations followed suit. The United Nations, UNSCOP, and then the UN General Assembly, representing the will of the international community, said two states is the just solution in this complex situation.

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1464.604 - 1485.458 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

The problem was that immediately with the passage of the resolution, the Arab states and the Arabs of Palestine said no, as Norman Finkelstein said. They said no, they rejected the partition idea, the principle of partition, not just the idea of what percentage which side should get, but the principle of partition.

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1485.498 - 1505.775 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

They said no to the Jews should not have any part of Palestine for their sovereign territory. Maybe Jews could live as a minority in Palestine. That also was problematic in the eyes of the Palestinian Arab leadership. Husseini had said only Jews who were there before 1917 could actually get citizenship and continue to live there.

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1506.115 - 1518.445 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

But the Arabs rejected partition and the Arabs of Palestine launched, in a very disorganized fashion, war against the resolution, against the implementation of the resolution, against the Jewish community in Palestine.

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1520.726 - 1545.893 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Their defeat in that civil war between the two communities while the British were withdrawing from Palestine led to the Arab invasion, the invasion by the Arab states in May 1948 of the country. Again, basically with the idea of eradicating or preventing the emergence of a Jewish state in line with the United Nations decision and the will of the international community.

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1547.033 - 1574.183 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Norman said that the Zionist enterprise, and he quoted me, meant from the beginning to transfer or expel the Arabs of Palestine or some of the Arabs of Palestine. And I think he's sort of quoting out of context. The context in which the statements were made that the Jewish state could only emerge if there was a transfer of Arab population was interesting.

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1574.423 - 1600.981 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

preceded in the way I wrote it and the way it actually happened by Arab resistance and hostilities towards the Jewish community. Had the Arabs accepted partition, there would have been a large Arab minority in the Jewish state, which emerged in 47. And in fact, Jewish economists and state builders took into account that there would be a large Arab minority and its needs would be cared for, etc.

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1604.783 - 1626.389 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

And had they not attacked, perhaps a Jewish state with a large Arab minority could have emerged. But this didn't happen. They went to war. The Jews resisted. And in the course of that war, Arab populations were devastated. driven out, some were expelled, some left because Arab leaders advised them to leave or ordered them to leave.

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1626.81 - 1649.588 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

And at the end of the war, Israel said they can't return because they just tried to destroy the Jewish state. And that's the basic reality of what happened in 1948. The Jews created a state. The Palestinian Arabs never bothered to even try to create a state before 1948 and in the course of the 1948 war. And for that reason, they have no state to this day.

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1650.268 - 1659.792 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

The Jews do have a state because they prepared to establish a state, fought for it, and established it, hopefully, lastingly.

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1660.438 - 1672.285 Lex Fridman

when you say hostility, in case people are not familiar, there was a full-on war where Arab states invaded, and Israel won that war.

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1672.905 - 1698.2 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Let me just add, to clarify, the war had two parts to it. The first part was the Arab community in Palestine, its militiamen, attacked the Jews from November 1947. In other words, from the day after the UN partition resolution It was passed, Arab gunmen were busy shooting up Jews, and that snowballed into a full-scale civil war between the two communities in Palestine.

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1698.7 - 1719.792 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

In May 1948, a second stage began in the war in which the Arab states invaded the new state, attacked the new state. and they too were defeated, and thus a state of Israel emerged. In the course of this two-stage war, a vast Palestinian refugee problem occurred.

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1720.432 - 1732.217 Lex Fridman

And so after that, the transfer, the expulsion, the thing that people call the Nakba happened. William, could you speak to 1948 and the historical significance of it?

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1732.538 - 1764.4 Mouin Rabbani

Sure. There's a lot to unpack here. I'll try to limit myself to just a few points. Regarding Zionism and transfer, I think Chaim Weizmann, the head of the World Zionist Organization, had it exactly right when he said that the objective of Zionism is to make Palestine as Jewish as England is English or France is French. In other words, as...

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1765.817 - 1795.194 Mouin Rabbani

As Norman explained, a Jewish state requires Jewish political, demographic, and territorial supremacy. Without those three elements, the state would be Jewish in name only. And I think what distinguishes Zionism is its insistence, supremacy, and exclusivity. That would be my first point.

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1795.714 - 1831.685 Mouin Rabbani

The second point is I think what the Soviet foreign minister at the time, Andrei Gromyko, said is exactly right with one reservation. Gromyko was describing a European savagery unleashed against Europe's Jews. At the time, it wasn't Palestinians or Arabs. The savages and the barbarians were European to the core. had nothing to do with developments in Palestine or the Middle East.

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1832.865 - 1869.293 Mouin Rabbani

Secondly, at the time that Gromyka was speaking, those Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and others who were in need of safe haven were still overwhelmingly on the European continent and not in Palestine. And I think given the scale of the savagery, I don't think that any one state or country should have borne the responsibility for addressing this crisis.

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1869.373 - 1894.238 Mouin Rabbani

I think it should have been an international responsibility. The Soviet Union could have contributed. Germany certainly could and should have contributed. the United Kingdom and the United States, which slammed their doors shut to the persecuted Jews of Europe as the Nazis were rising to power. They certainly should have played a role.

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1895.059 - 1915.439 Mouin Rabbani

But instead, what passed for the international community at the time decided to partition Palestine. And here I think we need to judge the partition resolution against the realities that obtained at the time. two-thirds of the population of Palestine was Arab.

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1917.125 - 1945.315 Mouin Rabbani

the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, constituted about one-third of the total population and controlled even less of the land within Palestine. As a preeminent Palestinian historian, Walid al-Khalidi has pointed out, the partition resolution in giving roughly 55% of Palestine to the Jewish community

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1946.767 - 1974.434 Mouin Rabbani

And I think 41, 42% to the Arab community, to the Palestinians, did not preserve the position of each community or even favor one community at the expense of the others. Rather, it thoroughly inverted and revolutionized the relationship between the two communities. And

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1975.481 - 2004.315 Mouin Rabbani

As many have written, the Nakba was the inevitable consequence of partition, given the nature of Zionism, given the territorial disposition, given the weakness of the Palestinian community, whose leadership had been largely decimated during a major revolt at the end of the 1930s, given that the Arab states were still very much under French and British influence,

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2006.156 - 2036.832 Mouin Rabbani

The Nakba was inevitable, the inevitable product of the partition resolution. And one last point also about the UN's partition resolution is, yes, formally that is what the international community decided on the 29th of November 1947. It's not a resolution that could ever have gotten through the UN General Assembly today for a very simple reason. It was a very different General Assembly.

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2037.312 - 2060.641 Mouin Rabbani

Most African, most Asian states were not yet independent. Were the resolution to be placed before the international community today, and I find it telling that the minority opinion was led by India, Iran, and Yugoslavia, I think they would have represented the clear majority.

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2060.681 - 2099 Mouin Rabbani

So partition, given what we know about Zionism, given that it was entirely predictable what would happen, given the realities on the ground in Palestine, was deeply unjust. And the idea that either the Palestinians or the Arab states could have accepted such a resolution is, I think, an illusion. That was in 1947. We saw what happened in 48 and 49. Palestinian society was essentially destroyed.

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2099.6 - 2121.833 Mouin Rabbani

Over 80%, I believe, of Palestinians resident in the territory that became the state of Israel were either expelled or fled and ultimately were ethnically cleansed because ethnic cleansing consists of two components. It's not just forcing people into refuge or expelling them, it's just as importantly preventing their return.

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2121.953 - 2143.502 Mouin Rabbani

And here, and Benny Morris has written, I think, an article about Joseph Leitz and the transfer committees, there was a very detailed initiative to prevent their return, and it consisted of raising hundreds of Palestinian villages to the ground, which was systematically implemented and so on. And so Palestinians became a stateless people.

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2143.582 - 2178.993 Mouin Rabbani

Now, what is the most important reason that no Arab state was established in Palestine? Well, since the 1930s, the Zionist leadership and The Hashemite leadership of Jordan, as it's been thoroughly researched and written about by the Israeli-British historian Avi Schleim, essentially colluded to prevent the establishment of an independent Arab state in Palestine in the late 1940s.

0
💬 0

2181.235 - 2187.619 Mouin Rabbani

There's much more here, but I think those are the key points I would make about 1948.

0
💬 0

2188.74 - 2211.136 Lex Fridman

We may talk about Zionism, Britain, UN Assemblies, and all the things you mentioned, there's a lot to dig into. So, again, if we can keep it to just one statement moving forward after Stephen, if you want to go a little longer. Also, we should acknowledge the fact that the speaking speeds of people here are different. Stephen speaks about 10 times faster than me.

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💬 0

2211.616 - 2213.157 Lex Fridman

Stephen, do you want to comment on 1948?

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💬 0

2213.378 - 2232.413 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Yeah, I think it's interesting where people choose to start the history. I noticed a lot of people like to start at either 47 or 48 because it's the first time where they can clearly point to a catastrophe that occurs on the Arab side that they want to ascribe 100% of the blame to the newly emergent Israeli state to.

0
💬 0

2233.554 - 2253.112 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

But I feel like when you have this type of reading of history, it feels like the goal is to moralize everything first and then to pick and choose facts that kind of support the statements of your initial moral statement afterwards. Whenever people are talking about 48 or the establishment of the Arab state, I never hear about the fact that a civil war started in 47.

0
💬 0

2254.353 - 2272.097 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

That was largely instigated because of the Arab rejectionism of the 47 partition plan. I never hear about the fact that the majority of the land that was acquired happened by purchases from Jewish organizations of Palestinian Arabs of the Ottoman Empire before the mandatory period in 1920 even started.

0
💬 0

2273.037 - 2292.541 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Funnily enough, King Abdullah of Jordan was quoted as saying, the Arabs are as prodigal in selling their land as they are in weeping about it. I never hear about the multiple times that Arabs rejected partition, rejected living with Jews, rejected any sort of state that would have even had any sort of Jewish exclusivity.

0
💬 0

2292.581 - 2307.344 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

It's funny because it was brought up before that the partition plan was unfair, and that's why the Arabs rejected it, as though they rejected it because it was unfair, because of the amount of land that Jews were given and not just due to the fact that Jews were given land at all, as though a 30% partition or a 25% partition would have been accepted.

0
💬 0

2309.164 - 2324.449 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

when I don't think that was the reality of the circumstances. I feel like most of the other stuff has been said, but I noticed that whenever people talk about 48 or the years preceding 48, I think the worst thing that happens is there's a cherry picking of the facts where basically all of the blame is ascribed to this

0
💬 0

2325.429 - 2347.721 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

This built-in idea of Zionism that because of a handful of quotes or because of an ideology, we can say that transfer or population expulsion or basically the mandate of all of these Arabs being kicked off the land was always going to happen when I think there's a refusal sometimes as well to acknowledge that regardless of the ideas of some of the Zionist leaders, there is a political, social, and military reality on the ground that they're forced to contend with.

0
💬 0

2348.261 - 2367.164 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

And unfortunately, the Arabs, because of their inability to engage in diplomacy and only to use tools of war to try to negotiate everything going on in mandatory Palestine, basically always gave the Jews a reason or an excuse to fight and acquire land through that way because of their refusal to negotiate on anything else, whether it was the partition plan of 47, whether it was the

0
💬 0

2367.905 - 2380.392 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

The Hussein Peace Conference afterwards, where Israel even offered to annex Gaza in 51, where they offered to take in 100,000 refugees. Every single deal is just rejected out of hand because the Arabs don't want a Jewish state anywhere in this region of the world.

0
💬 0

2380.892 - 2404.817 Norman Finkelstein

I would like to engage Professor Morris. If you don't mind, I'm not with the first name. It's just not my way of relating. You can just call me Morris. You don't need the professor. Okay. There's a real problem here, and it's been a problem I've had over many years of reading your work, apart perhaps from as grandchild, I suspect nobody knows your work better than I do.

0
💬 0

2405.897 - 2436.982 Norman Finkelstein

I've read it many times, not once, not twice, at least three times, everything you've written. And the problem is it's a kind of quicksilver. It's very hard to grasp a point and hold you to it. So we're going to try here to see whether we can hold you to a point. And then you argue with me the point. I have no problem with that. Your name, please?

0
💬 0

2437.502 - 2438.163 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Stephen Bonnell.

0
💬 0

2438.483 - 2465.872 Norman Finkelstein

Okay. Mr. Bonnell referred to cherry-picking and handful of quotes. Now, it's true that when you wrote your first book on the Palestinian refugee question, You only had a few lines on this issue of transfer. Four pages. In the first book. In the first book, four pages. Maybe four. You know, I'm not going to quarrel. My memory is not clear. We're talking about 40 years ago.

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💬 0

2466.032 - 2481.176 Norman Finkelstein

I read it, I read it, but then I read other things by you. Okay. And you were taken to task, if my memory is correct, that you hadn't adequately documented the claims of transfer. Allow me to finish.

0
💬 0

2482.441 - 2511.261 Norman Finkelstein

And I thought that was a reasonable challenge because it was an unusual claim for a mainstream Israeli historian to say, as you did in that first book, that from the very beginning, transfer figured prominently in Zionist thinking. That was an unusual, if you read Anita Shapiro, you read Shabtai Tevit, that was an unusual acknowledgement by you. And then,

0
💬 0

2512.6 - 2562.118 Norman Finkelstein

I found it very impressive that in that revised version of your first book, you devoted 25 pages to copiously documenting the salience of transfer in Zionist thinking. And in fact, you used a very provocative and resonant phrase. You said that transfer was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism. We're not talking about circumstantial factors, a war, Arab hostility.

0
💬 0

2562.818 - 2609.337 Norman Finkelstein

You said it's inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism. Now, as I said, so we won't be accused of cherry picking, those were 25 very densely argued pages. And then in an interview, and I could cite several quotes, but I'll choose one, you said, removing a population was needed. Let's look at the words. Without a population expulsion, a Jewish state would not have been established.

0
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2610.677 - 2651.316 Norman Finkelstein

Now, you're the one, again, I was very surprised when I read your book. Here I'm referring to righteous victims. I was very surprised when I came to that page 37. where you wrote that territorial displacement and dispossession was the chief motor of Arab resistance to Zionism. Territorial displacement and dispossession were the chief motor of Arab resistance to Zionism. So you then went on to say

0
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2652.421 - 2683.874 Norman Finkelstein

because the Arab population rationally feared territorial displacement and dispossession, it of course opposed Zionism. That's as normal as Native Americans opposing the Euro-American manifest destiny in the history of our own country, because they understood it would be at their expense It was inbuilt and inevitable.

0
💬 0

2685.015 - 2721.671 Norman Finkelstein

And so now for you to come along and say that it all happened just because of the war, that otherwise the Zionists made all these plans for a happy minority to live there, That simply does not gel. It does not cohere. It is not reconcilable with what you yourself have written. It was inevitable and inbuilt. Now, in other situations you've said, that's true, but I think it was a greater good.

0
💬 0

2722.577 - 2753.761 Norman Finkelstein

to establish a Jewish state at the expense of the indigenous population. That's another kind of argument. That was Theodore Roosevelt's argument in our own country. He said, we don't want the whole of North America to remain a squalid refuge for these wigwams and teepees. We have to get rid of them and make this a great country. But he didn't deny it. that it was inbuilt and inevitable.

0
💬 0

2753.901 - 2761.117 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

I think you've made your point. First, I'll take up something that Muin said. He said that the Nakba was inevitable.

0
💬 0

2761.972 - 2762.492 Mouin Rabbani

As have you.

0
💬 0

2762.592 - 2786.001 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

And predictable. No, no, no. I've never said that. It was inevitable and predictable only because the Arabs assaulted the Jewish community and state in 1947-48. Had there been no assault, there probably wouldn't have been a refugee problem. There's no reason for a refugee problem to have occurred, expulsions to have occurred, a dispossession, massive dispossession to occur.

0
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2786.301 - 2811.47 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

These occurred as a result of war. Now, Norman has said that I said that transfer was inbuilt into Zionism in one way or another. And this is certainly true. In order to buy land, the Jews bought tracts of land on which some Arabs sometimes lived. Sometimes they bought tracts of land. which there weren't Arab villages, but sometimes they bought land on which there were Arabs.

0
💬 0

2811.75 - 2834.182 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

And according to Ottoman law and the British, at least in the initial years of the British mandate, the law said that the people who bought the land could do what they liked with the people who didn't own the land, who were basically squatting on the land, which is the Arab tenant farmers, which is we're talking about a very small number actually of Arabs who were displaced as a result of land purchases

0
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2834.722 - 2858.45 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

in the Ottoman period or the Mandate period. But there was dispossession in one way. They didn't possess the land, they didn't own it, but they were removed from the land. And this did happen in Zionism. And there's, if you like, an inevitability in Zionist ideology of buying tracts of land and starting to work it yourself and settle it with your own people and so on. That made sense.

0
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2858.81 - 2883.421 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

But what we're really talking about is what happened in 47-48. And in 47-48, the Arabs started a war. And actually, people pay for their mistakes. And the Palestinians have never actually agreed to pay for their mistakes. They make mistakes. They attack. They suffer as a result. And we see something similar going on today in the Gaza Strip. They do something terrible. They kill 1,200 Jews.

0
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2883.461 - 2906.629 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

They abduct 250 women and children and babies and old people and whatever. And then they start screaming, please save us from what we did because the Jews are counterattacking. And this is what happened then. And this is what's happening now. There's something fairly similar in the situation here. Expulsion, and this is important. Norman, you should pay attention to this. You didn't raise that.

0
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2907.149 - 2931.305 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Expulsion, transfer, whenever policy of the Zionist movement before 47, it doesn't exist in Zionist platforms of the various political parties, of the Zionist organization, of the Israeli state, of the Jewish agency. Nobody would have actually made it into policy because it was always a large minority. If there were people who wanted it, always a large minority of Jewish people

0
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2931.485 - 2949.31 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

politicians and leaders would have said, no, this is immoral. We cannot start a state on the basis of an expulsion. So it was never adopted and actually was never adopted as policy, even in 48, even though Ben-Gurion wanted as few Arabs in the course of the war staying in the Jewish state after they attacked it.

0
💬 0

2949.63 - 2974.964 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

He didn't want disloyal citizens staying there because they wouldn't have been loyal citizens. But this made sense in the war itself. But the movement itself and its political parties never accepted it. It's true that in 1937, when the British, as part of the proposal by the Peel Commission to divide the country into two states, one Arab, one Jewish, which the Arabs, of course, rejected.

0
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2975.724 - 2991.85 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Peel also recommended that the Arabs, most of the Arabs in the Jewish state to be, should be transferred, because otherwise, if they stayed and were disloyal to the emerging Jewish state, this would cause endless disturbances, warfare, killing, and so on.

0
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2992.97 - 3016.266 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

So Ben-Gurion and Weizmann latched onto this proposal by the most famous democracy in the world, the British democracy, when they proposed the idea of transfer side by side with the idea of partition, because it made sense. And they said, well, if the British say so, we should also advocate it. But they never actually tried to pass it as Zionist policy.

0
💬 0

3016.526 - 3020.148 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

And they fairly quickly stopped even talking about transfer after 1938.

0
💬 0

3021.069 - 3029.996 Lex Fridman

So just to clarify, what you're saying is that 47 was an offensive war, not a defensive war.

0
💬 0

3030.176 - 3031.017 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

By the Arabs, yes.

0
💬 0

3031.057 - 3040.084 Lex Fridman

By the Arabs. And you're also saying that there was never a top-down policy of expulsion. Yes. Just to clarify the point.

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3040.164 - 3080.083 Mouin Rabbani

If I understood you correctly... you're making the claim that transfer, expulsion, and so on was in fact a very localized phenomenon resulting from individual land purchases. And that, if I understand you correctly, you're also making the claim that the idea that a Jewish state requires a removal or overwhelming reduction of the non-Jewish population was... If the Arabs are attacking you, yes.

0
💬 0

3080.183 - 3111.072 Mouin Rabbani

But let's say prior to 1947, it would be your claim... that the idea that a significant reduction or wholesale removal of their population was not part of Zionist thinking. Well, I think there's two problems with that. I think what you're saying about localized disputes is correct, but I also think that there is a whole literature

0
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3112.032 - 3136.875 Mouin Rabbani

that demonstrates that transfer was envisioned by Zionist leaders on a much broader scale than simply individual land purchases. In other words, it went way beyond, we need to remove these tenants so that we can farm this land. The idea was we can't have a state where all these Arabs remain and we have to get rid of them.

0
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3137.056 - 3164.046 Mouin Rabbani

And the second, I think, impediment to that view is that long before the UN General Assembly convened to address the question of Palestine, Palestinian and Arab and other leaders as well had been warning ad infinitum that the purpose of the Zionist movement is not just to establish a Jewish state, but to establish an exclusivist Jewish state.

0
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3164.666 - 3200.357 Mouin Rabbani

And that transfer, forced displacement, was fundamental to that project. And just responding to, sorry, was it Bonnell or Donnell? With a B. Yeah. Yeah. You made the point that the problem here is that people don't recognize is that the first and last result for the Arabs is always war. I think there's a problem with that. I think you might do well to recall

0
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3201.858 - 3221.052 Mouin Rabbani

the 1936 general strike conducted by Palestinians at the beginning of the revolt, which at the time was the longest recorded general strike in history. You may want to consult the book published last year by Laurie Allen, A History of False Hope.

0
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3221.852 - 3251.168 Mouin Rabbani

which discusses in great detail the consistent engagement by Palestinians, their leaders, their elites, their diplomats, and so on, with all these international committees. If we look at today, the Palestinians are once again going to the International Court of Justice. They're consistently trying to persuade the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to do his job.

0
💬 0

3252.069 - 3275.846 Mouin Rabbani

They have launched widespread boycott campaigns. So, of course, the Palestinians have engaged in military resistance. But I think the suggestion that this has always been their first and last resort and that they have somehow spurned civic action, spurned diplomacy, I think really has no basis in reality.

0
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3276.366 - 3285.89 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

I'll respond to that and then a question for Norm to take into account, I think, when he answers Bennett. Because I am curious, obviously, I have fresher eyes on this and I'm a newcomer to this arena versus the three of you guys for sure.

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3287.111 - 3303.929 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

A claim that gets brought up a lot has to do with the inevitability of transfer in Zionism or the idea that as soon as the Jews envisioned a state in Palestine, they knew that it would involve some mass transfer of population, perhaps a mass expulsion. I'm sure we'll talk about Plan Dalit or Plan D at some point.

0
💬 0

3304.87 - 3326.887 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

The issue that I run into is while you can find quotes from leaders, while you can find maybe desires expressed in diaries, I feel like it's hard to truly ever know if there would have been mass transfer in the face of Arab peace because I feel like every time there was a huge deal on the table that would have had a sizable Jewish and Arab population living together, the Arabs would reject it out of hand.

0
💬 0

3327.367 - 3339.915 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

So, for instance, when we say that transfer was inevitable, when we say that Zionists would have never accepted, you know, a sizable Arab population, how do you explain the acceptance of the 47 partition plan that would have had a huge Arab population living in the Jewish state?

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3340.276 - 3358.388 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Is your contention that after the acceptance of that, after the establishment of that state, that Jews would have slowly started to expel all of these Arab citizens from their country? Or how do you explain that in Lusan, a couple years later, that Israel was willing to formally annex the Gaza Strip and make 200,000 or so people? those citizens.

0
💬 0

3358.868 - 3379.522 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

But I'm just curious, how do we get this idea of Zionism always means mass transfer when there were times, at least early on in the history of Israel and a little bit before it, where Israel would have accepted a state that would have had a massive Arab population in it? Yeah, is your idea that they would have just slowly expelled them afterwards? Is that question to me or Norm? Either one.

0
💬 0

3379.542 - 3381.543 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

I'm just curious for the incorporation of the answer, yeah.

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3382.524 - 3413.696 Norman Finkelstein

There's some misunderstandings here. So let's try to clarify that. Number one, it was the old historians who would point to the fact, in Professor Morris's terminology, the old historians, what he called not real historians, he called them chroniclers, not real historians. It was the old Israeli historians who denied the centrality of transfer in Zionist thinking.

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3415.04 - 3440.239 Norman Finkelstein

It was then Professor Morris who, contrary to Israel's historian establishment, who said, now you remind me it's four pages, but it came at the end of the book. It was- No, no, it's at the beginning of the book. Transfer. Yes, transfer is dealt with in four pages at the beginning of my first book on the Palestinian refugee problem. It's a fault of my memory, but the point still stands.

0
💬 0

3440.299 - 3445.904 Norman Finkelstein

It was Professor Morris who introduced this idea in what you might call a big way.

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3446.064 - 3456.334 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Yeah, but I didn't say it was central to the Zionist experimental experience. You're saying centrality. I never said it was central. I said it was there, the idea.

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3456.634 - 3465.802 Lex Fridman

By the way, it's okay to respond back and forth. This is great. And also just a quick question, if I may. Mm-hmm. you're using quotes from, from Benny, from professor Morris.

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3465.822 - 3489.682 Lex Fridman

Uh, it's also okay to say those quotes do not reflect the full context of the, so like, if we go back, if you know, to quotes we've said in the past and you've both here have written the three, you have written on this topic a lot is we should be careful and just admit like, well, yeah, well, that's just real quick, just to be clear that the contention is that Norm is quoting a part and saying that this was the entire reason for this.

0
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3489.702 - 3491.003 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Whereas Benny's saying it's a part of the,

0
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3491.263 - 3520.861 Norman Finkelstein

I'm not quoting a part, I'm quoting 25 pages where Professor Morris was at great pains to document the claim that appeared in those early four pages of his book. You say it never became part of the official Zionist platform. It never became part of policy.

0
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3521.041 - 3523.844 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Fine. I know what you're saying. It wasn't policy.

0
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3523.864 - 3552.252 Norman Finkelstein

We're also asked, well, if this is true, why did that happen? Why did that happen? It's because it's a very simple fact, which everybody understands. Ideology doesn't operate in a vacuum. There are real-world practical problems. You can't just take an ideology and superimpose it on a political reality and turn it into a fact. It was the British mandate.

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3553.852 - 3584.35 Norman Finkelstein

There was significant Arab resistance to Zionism. and that resistance was based on the fact, as you said, the fear of territorial displacement and dispossession. So you couldn't very well expect the Zionist movement to come out in neon lights and announce, hey, We're going to be expelling you the first chance we get. That's not realistic.

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3584.831 - 3611.534 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Let me respond. Look, you've said it a number of times that the Arabs from fairly early on in the conflict from the 1890s or the early 1900s said the Jews intend to expel us. This doesn't mean that it's true. It means that some Arabs said this, maybe believing it was true, maybe using it as a political instrument to gain support to mobilize Arabs against the Zionist experiment.

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3611.854 - 3632.649 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

But the fact is, transfer did not occur before 1947. And Arabs later said, and since then, have said that the Jews want to build a third temple on the Temple Mount. as if that's what really the mainstream of Zionism has always wanted and always strived for. But this is nonsense.

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3632.729 - 3656.844 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

It's something that Husseini used to use as a way to mobilize masses for the cause, using religion as the way to get them to join him. The fact that Arabs said that the Zionists want to dispossess us doesn't mean it's true. It just means that some Arabs thought that and maybe said it sincerely and maybe insincerely.

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3658.384 - 3687.722 Norman Finkelstein

Later it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is true because the Arabs attacked the Jews. I read through your stuff. Even yesterday, I was looking through Righteous Victim. You should read other things. You're wasting your time. No, no. Actually, no. I do read other things, but I don't consider it a waste of time to read you. Not at all. You say that this wasn't inherent in Zionism.

0
💬 0

3688.463 - 3691.765 Norman Finkelstein

Now, would you agree that David Ben-Gurion was a Zionist?

0
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3693.272 - 3694.552 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

A major Zionist leader.

0
💬 0

3694.612 - 3721.259 Norman Finkelstein

Right. Would you agree Chaim Weizmann was a Zionist? Yeah. Okay. I believe they were. I believe they took their ideology seriously. It was the first generation. Just like with the Bolsheviks, the first generation was committed to an idea. By the 1930s, it was just pure realpolitik. The ideology went out the window. The first generation, I have no doubt about their convictions. Okay?

0
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3721.539 - 3751.929 Norman Finkelstein

They were Zionists. transfer was inevitable and inbuilt in Zionism. You keep repeating the same thing. As I said then, Mr. Morris, I have a problem reconciling what you're saying. It either was incidental or it was deeply entrenched. Here I read, it's deeply entrenched. Two very resonant words. Inevitable and inbuilt.

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3752.509 - 3775.759 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Deeply entrenched, I never wrote. Well, I'm not sure. It's something you just invented. Inevitable and inbuilt. Let me concede something. The idea of transfer was there. Israel Zangvill, a British Zionist, talked about it early on in the century. Even Herzl in some way talked about transferring population.

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💬 0

3775.799 - 3779.301 Norman Finkelstein

According to your 25 pages, everybody talked about it.

0
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3779.321 - 3801.292 Lex Fridman

We keep bringing up this line in the 25 pages and the 4 pages. We're lucky to have Benny in front of us right now. We don't need to go to the quotes. We can legitimately ask how central is expulsion to Zionism in its early version of Zionism and whatever Zionism is today

0
💬 0

3802.413 - 3814.498 Lex Fridman

and how much power, influence the Zionism and ideology have in Israel, and the influence, the philosophy, the ideology Zionism have on Israel today.

0
💬 0

3815.342 - 3843.838 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

The Zionist movement up to 1948, Zionist ideology was central to the whole Zionist experience, the whole enterprise up to 1948. And I think Zionist ideology was also important in the first decades of Israel's existence. Slowly the hold of Zionism, if you like, like Bolshevism, held the Soviet Union gradually faded.

0
💬 0

3843.898 - 3864.271 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

And a lot of Israelis today think in terms of individual success and then the capitalism and all sorts of things which are nothing to do with Zionism. But Zionism was very important. But what I'm saying is that the idea of transfer wasn't the core of Zionism. The idea of Zionism was to save the Jews who had been vastly persecuted

0
💬 0

3865.832 - 3889.464 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

in Eastern Europe and incidentally in the Arab world, the Muslim world for centuries, and eventually ending up with the Holocaust, the idea of Zionism was to save the Jewish people by establishing a state or re-establishing a Jewish state on the ancient Jewish homeland. which is something the Arabs today even deny, that there were Jews in Palestine or the land of Israel 2,000 years ago.

0
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3889.904 - 3908.256 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Arafat famously said, what temple was there on Temple Mount? Maybe it was in Nablus, which of course is nonsense. They had a strong connection for thousands of years to the land to which they wanted to return and returned there. They found that on the land lived hundreds of thousands of Arabs.

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3908.296 - 3928.615 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

And the question was how to accommodate the vision of a Jewish state in Palestine alongside the existence of these Arab masses living on, who were indigenous, in fact. to the land by that stage. And the idea of partition, because they couldn't live together because the Arabs didn't want to live together with the Jews.

0
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3928.835 - 3954.816 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

And I think the Jews also didn't want to live together in one state with Arabs in general. The idea of partition was the thing which... The Zionists accepted, okay, we can only get a small part of Palestine. The Arabs will get in 37, most of Palestine. In 1947, the ratios were changed, but we can live side by side with each other in a partitioned Palestine. And this was the essence of it.

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3955.436 - 3981.29 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

The idea of transfer... It was there, but it was never adopted as policy. But in 1947-48, the Arabs attacked, trying to destroy essentially the Jewish, the Zionist enterprise and the emerging Jewish state. And the reaction was a transfer in some way, not as policy, but this is what happened on the battlefield. And this is also what Ben-Gurion at some point began to want as well.

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3982.291 - 4015.046 Mouin Rabbani

Well, one of the first books on this issue I read when I was still in high school, because my late father had it, was The Diaries of Theodor Herzl. And I think Theodor Herzl, of course, was the founder of the contemporary Zionist movement. And I think if you read that, it's very clear. For Herzl, the model upon which the Zionist movement would proceed, his model was Cecil Rhodes.

0
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4017.075 - 4040.987 Mouin Rabbani

I think Rhodes, from what I recall, correct me if I'm wrong, has quite a prominent place in Herzl's diaries. I think Herzl was also corresponding with him and seeking his support. Cecil Rhodes, of course, was the British colonialist after whom the former white minority regime in Rhodesia existed.

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4041.987 - 4069.374 Mouin Rabbani

uh was named and herzel also says explicitly in his diaries that it is essential um to remove uh the existing population from palestine in a moment please he says we shall have to spirit the penniless population across the borders and procure employment for them elsewhere And Israel Zangwill, who you mentioned, a land without a people for a people without a land.

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4069.735 - 4076.762 Mouin Rabbani

They knew damn well it wasn't a people, a land without a people. I'll continue, but please go ahead.

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4077.262 - 4093.451 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

There is one small diary entry in Herzl's vast... It's five volumes. Yeah, five volumes. There's one paragraph which actually mentions the idea of transfer. There are people who I think that Herzl was actually pointing to South America when he was talking about that.

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4093.491 - 4120.382 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

The Jews were going to move to Argentina, and then they would try and buy out or buy off or spirit the penniless natives to make way for Jewish settlement. Maybe he wasn't even talking about the Arabs in that particular passage. That's the argument of some people. Maybe he was, but the point is... It has only one percent of the diary, which is devoted to this subject.

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4120.442 - 4139.493 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

It's not a central idea in Herzl's thinking. What Herzl wanted, and this is what's important, not Rhodes. I don't think he was the model. Herzl wanted to create a liberal, democratic, Western state in Palestine for the Jews. That was the idea, not some...

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4140.093 - 4159.101 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Imperial enterprise serving some imperial master, which is what Rhodes was about, but to have a Jewish state which was modeled on the Western democracies in Palestine. And this incidentally was more or less what Weizmann and Ben-Gurion wanted. Ben-Gurion was more of a socialist, Weizmann was more of a liberal.

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4160.481 - 4173.808 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

a westerner, but they wanted to establish a social democratic or liberal state in Palestine. And they both envisioned through most of the years of their activity that there would be an Arab minority in that Jewish state.

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4174.108 - 4189.336 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

It's true that Ben-Gurion strived to have as small as possible an Arab minority in the Jewish state because he knew that if you want a Jewish majority state, that would be necessary. But it's not something which they were willing to translate into actual policy.

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4189.876 - 4200.567 Lex Fridman

Just a quick pause to mention that for people who are not familiar, Theodor Herzl we're talking about over a century ago. And everything we've been talking about has been mostly 1948 and before. Yes.

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4200.787 - 4228.862 Mouin Rabbani

Just one clarification on Herzl's diaries. I mean, the other thing that I recall from those diaries is he was... He was very preoccupied with, in fact, getting great power patronage, seeing Palestine, the Jewish state in Palestine, I think his words, an outpost of civilization against barbarism. In other words, very much seeing his project as a proxy for Western imperialism in the Middle East.

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4228.882 - 4239.446 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Not proxy. He wanted to establish a Jewish state which would be independent. To get that, he hoped that he would be able to garner support from major imperial powers.

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4239.586 - 4261.241 Mouin Rabbani

Including the Ottoman Sultan, who he tried to cultivate. I just want to respond to a point you made earlier, which was that People expressed their rejection of the partition resolution on the grounds that it gave the majority of Palestine to the Jewish community, which formed only a third.

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4262.242 - 4270.11 Mouin Rabbani

Whereas, in fact, if I understood you correctly, you're saying the Palestinians and the Arabs would have rejected any partition resolution.

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4270.27 - 4288.596 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Yeah, a couple of things. One, they would have rejected any. Two, a lot of that land given was in the Negev. It was pretty terrible land at the time. And then three, the land that would have been partitioned to Jews, I think would have been, I think I saw it was like 500,000, it would have been 500,000 Jews, 400,000 Arabs, and I think like 80,000 Bedouin would have been there.

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4288.636 - 4290.376 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

So the state would have been divided pretty close to them.

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4290.436 - 4313.225 Mouin Rabbani

I think you raise a valid point because I think the Palestinians did reject the partition of their homeland in principle and I think the fact that the United Nations General Assembly then awarded the majority of their homeland to the Zionist movement only added insult to injury.

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4313.825 - 4348.717 Mouin Rabbani

I mean, one doesn't have to sympathize with the Palestinians to recognize that they have now been a stateless people for 75 years. Can you name any country Yours, for example, or yours, that would be prepared to give 55%, 25%, 10% of your country to the Palestinians? Of course not. And so the issue was not the existence of Jews in Palestine. They had been there for centuries.

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4348.917 - 4371.58 Mouin Rabbani

And of course, they had ties to Palestine and particularly to Jerusalem and other places going back centuries, if not millennia. But the idea of establishing an exclusively Jewish state at the expense of those who are already living there, I think... It was right to reject that.

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4371.961 - 4384.592 Mouin Rabbani

And I don't think we can look back now, 75 years later and say, well, you should have accepted losing 55% of your homeland because you ended up losing 78% of it and the remaining 22% was occupied in 1967. That's not how things work. And I can imagine an American

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4395.089 - 4409.214 Mouin Rabbani

rejecting giving 10% of the United States to the Palestinians, and if that rejection leads to war and you lose half your country, I doubt that 50 years from now you're going to say, well, maybe I should have accepted that.

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4409.714 - 4429.429 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Sure. I like this answer more than what I usually feel like I'm hearing when it comes to the Palestinian rejection of the 47th partition plan. Because sometimes I feel like a weird switch happens to where the Arabs in the area are actually presented as entirely pragmatic people who are simply doing a calculation and saying like, well, we're losing 55% of our land.

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4429.469 - 4437.096 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Jews are only maybe one third of the people here. And we've got 45. And now the math doesn't work, basically. But it wasn't a math problem. I think, like you said.

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4437.116 - 4438.037 Mouin Rabbani

It was a matter of principle.

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4438.077 - 4452.622 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

It was an ideology problem. No, it was a matter of principle. Yeah, ideologically driven, that they as a people have a right to or are entitled to this land that they've never actually had an independent state on, that they've never had even a guarantee of an independent state on, that they've never actually ruled a government on.

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4452.642 - 4469.485 Mouin Rabbani

That last point is actually not correct because for all its injustice, the mandate system recognized Palestine as a class A mandate, which provisionally recognized the independence Of that territory.

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4469.586 - 4472.146 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Of what would emerge from that territory, but not of the Palestinian.

0
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4472.166 - 4474.287 Mouin Rabbani

It was provisionally recognized.

0
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4475.108 - 4480.91 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

But the territory itself was, but not of the Palestinian people to have a right or a guarantee to a government that would emerge from it.

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4480.93 - 4483.631 Mouin Rabbani

It was a British mandate of Palestine, not the British mandate of Israel.

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4483.991 - 4508.715 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

The word exclusive, which you keep using, is nonsense. The state which Ben-Gurion envisioned would be a Jewish majority state, as they accepted the 1947 partition resolution, as Stephen said, that included 400,000 plus Arabs in a state which would have 500,000 Jews. So the idea of exclusivity wasn't anywhere in the air at all among the Zionist leaders in 47, 48.

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4509.455 - 4530.952 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

They wanted a Jewish majority state, but were willing to accept a state which had 40% Arabs. That's one point. The second thing is that Palestinians may have regarded the land of Palestine as their homeland, but so did the Jews. It was the homeland of the Jews as well. The problem was the Arabs were unable and remain to this day unable to recognize that

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4531.152 - 4550.839 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

For the Jews, that is their homeland as well. And the problem then is how do you share this homeland, either with one binational state or partitioned into two states? The problem is that the Arabs have always rejected both of these ideas. The homeland belongs to the Jews, as Jews feel, as much as it does, if not more, than for the Arabs.

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4550.859 - 4551.8 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

I would say Zionists, not Jews.

0
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4552.64 - 4555.143 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

I would say for the Jews, it's the Jewish people's homeland.

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4555.243 - 4560.828 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Real quick, I just want for both of you guys, because I haven't heard these questions answered, I really want these questions to be, I'm just so curious how to make sense of them.

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4561.929 - 4576.343 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

It was correctly brought up that I believe that Ben-Gurion had, I think Shlomo Ben-Ami describes it as an obsession with getting validation or support from Western states, Great Britain, and then a couple of decades later it becomes- That explains the Suez War, the Suez Crisis. Exactly, correct.

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4576.363 - 4597.135 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

That was one of the major motivators, the idea to work with Britain and France on a military operation against Arabs. But then the question, again, I go back to, if that is true, if Ben-Gurion, if the early Israel saw themselves as a Western fashion nation, How could we possibly imagine that they would have engaged in the transfer of some 400,000 Arabs after accepting the partition plan?

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4597.435 - 4603.061 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Would that not have completely and totally destroyed their legitimacy in the eyes of the entire Western world? Would that not have been? How not?

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4603.582 - 4634.279 Mouin Rabbani

Well, first of all, I think that Zionist leadership's acceptance of the partition resolution And I think you may have written about this, that they accepted it because it provided international endorsement of the legitimacy of the principle of Jewish statehood. And they didn't accept the borders. And in fact, later expanded the borders. Second of all, the borders were expanded in war.

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4634.319 - 4645.971 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

They accepted the UN partition resolution, borders and all. That's how they accepted it. You can say that some of the Zionists deep in their hearts had the idea that maybe at some point they would be able to get more.

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4646.131 - 4649.895 Mouin Rabbani

Including their most senior leaders who said so, and I think you've quoted them saying so.

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4649.915 - 4655.461 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

But they grudgingly accepted what the United Nations, the world community, had said this is what you're going to get.

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4655.561 - 4660.989 Mouin Rabbani

And second of all, I mean, removing dark people? Darker people? It's intrinsic.

0
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4661.069 - 4663.755 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

It's intrinsic to Western history.

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4663.815 - 4689.999 Mouin Rabbani

So the idea that... Americans or Brits or the French would have an issue with, I mean, French had been doing it in Algeria for decades. The Americans have been doing it in North America for centuries. So how would Israel, forcibly displacing Palestinians, somehow besmirch Israel in the eyes of the West?

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4690.099 - 4718.71 Norman Finkelstein

In the 1944 resolution of the Labor Party, And at the time, even Bertrand Russell was a member of the Labor Party. It endorsed transfer of Arabs out of Palestine. As Muinz pointed out, that was a deeply entrenched idea in Western thinking that there was nothing, it doesn't in any way contradict or violate or breach any moral values to displace the Palestinian population.

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4719.45 - 4751.863 Norman Finkelstein

Now, I do believe there's a legitimate question Had it been the case, as you said, Professor Morris, that the Zionists wanted to create a happy state with a Jewish majority, but a large Jewish minority. And if by virtue of immigration, like in our own country, in our own country, given the current trajectories, non-whites will become the majority population in the United States quite soon.

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4752.563 - 4770.237 Norman Finkelstein

And according to democratic principles, we have to accept that. So if that were the case, I would say maybe there's an argument that had there been mass Jewish immigration, changed the demographic balance in Palestine, and therefore,

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4772.682 - 4798.744 Norman Finkelstein

Jews became the majority, it can make an argument in the abstract that the indigenous Arab population should have been accepting of that, just as whites in the United States, quote unquote whites, have to be accepting of the fact that the demographic majority is shifting to non-whites in our own country. But that's not what Zionism was about. I did write my doctoral dissertation on Zionism.

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4799.673 - 4820.466 Norman Finkelstein

And I don't want to get now bogged down in abstract ideas. But as I suspect you know, most theorists of nationalism say there are two kinds of nationalism. One is a nationalism based on citizenship. You become a citizen, you're integral to the country. That's sometimes called political nationalism.

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4821.307 - 4852.768 Norman Finkelstein

And then there's another kind of nationalism, and that says the state should not belong to its citizens, it should belong to an ethnic group. Each ethnic group should have its own state. It's usually called the German Romantic idea of nationalism. Zionism is squarely in the German Romantic idea. That was the whole point of Zionism.

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4853.509 - 4889.652 Norman Finkelstein

We don't want to be Bundists and be one more ethnic minority in Russia. We don't want to become citizens and just become a Jewish people in England or France. We want our own state. Like the Arabs in the 23 states. No, wait, before we get to the Arabs, let's stick to the Jews for a moment, or the Zionists. We want our own state. And in that concept...

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4890.658 - 4931.562 Norman Finkelstein

of wanting your own state, the minority at best lives on sufferance and at worst gets expelled. That's the logic of the German Romantic Zionist idea of a state. That's why they're Zionists. Now, I personally have shied away from using the word Zionism ever since I finished my doctoral dissertation, because as I said, I don't believe it's the operative ideology today.

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4932.502 - 4964.133 Norman Finkelstein

It's like talking about Bolshevism and referring to Khrushchev. I doubt Khrushchev could have spelled Bolshevik. But for the period we're talking about, they were Zionists. They were committed to their exclusive state with a minority living on sufferance or, at worst, expelled. That was their ideology. And I really feel

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4965.179 - 4993.639 Norman Finkelstein

There's a problem with your happy vision of these Western Democrats like Weizmann, and they wanted to live peacefully with the Arabs. Weizmann described the explosion in 1948 as, quote, the miraculous clearing of the land. That doesn't sound like somebody shedding too many tears at the loss of the indigenous population. Let me just respond to the word unsufferance.

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4993.679 - 5014.985 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

The unsufferance I don't agree with. I think that's wrong. The Jewish state came into being in 1948. It had a population which was 20% Arab when it came into being after Arab refugees. Many of them had become refugees, but 20% remained in the country. 20% of Israel's population at inception in 1949, was Arab.

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5015.725 - 5016.326 Mouin Rabbani

80% went missing.

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5017.026 - 5040.94 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

No, no, no. I was talking about what remained in Palestine, Israel, after it was created. The 20% who lived in Israel received citizenship and all the rights of Israelis, except, of course, the right to serve in the army, which they didn't want to. And they have Supreme Court justices. They have Knesset members. You They lived under emergency laws until 1966.

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5040.98 - 5054.055 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

For a period, sure, they lived under emergency laws. So they didn't immediately have citizenship. No, no, no, wait a second. At the beginning, it's not fantasy. At the beginning, they received citizenship, could vote in elections for their own people, and they were put into parliament.

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5055.055 - 5078.84 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

But in the first years, the Jewish majority suspected that maybe the Arabs would be disloyal because they had just tried to destroy the Jewish state. Then they dropped the military government and they became fully equal citizens. So if the whole idea was they must have a state without Arabs, this didn't happen in 49. And it didn't happen in the subsequent decades.

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5078.88 - 5090.002 Norman Finkelstein

Then why did you say... Professor Morris, then why did you say without a population expulsion, a Jewish state would not have been established?

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5090.022 - 5104.586 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Because you're missing the first section of that paragraph, which was they were being assaulted by the Arabs. And as a result, a Jewish state could not have come into being unless there had also been an expulsion of the population which was trying to kill them.

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5104.626 - 5121.012 Lex Fridman

Norm, I'm officially forbidding you referencing that again. Hold on a second, wait. We responded to it. So the main point you're making, we have to take Baniyat's word, is like there was a war and that's the reason why he made that statement.

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5121.292 - 5143.429 Mouin Rabbani

I think just one last point on this. I remember... reading your book when it first came out and reading, you know, one incident after the other and one example after the other, and then getting to the conclusion where you said the Nakba was a product of war, not design, I think we were, and I remember,

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5144.269 - 5177.747 Mouin Rabbani

reacting almost in shock to that, that I felt you had mobilized overwhelming evidence that it was a product of design, not war. And I think our discussion today very much reflects, let's say, the dissonance between the evidence and the conclusion. You don't feel that the research that you have conducted and published demonstrates that it was in fact inherent and built and inevitable.

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5178.968 - 5191.296 Mouin Rabbani

And I think the point that Norm and I are making is that your own historical research, together with that of others, indisputably demonstrates that it does. I think that's a fundamental disagreement we're having here.

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5191.772 - 5208.68 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

Can I actually respond to that? Because this is actually, I think this is emblematic of the entire conversation. I watched a lot of Norm's interviews and conversations in preparation for this. And I hear Norm will say this all over and over and over again. I only deal in facts. I don't deal in hypotheticals. I only deal in facts. I only deal in facts.

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5209.62 - 5223.457 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

And that seems to be the case, except for when the facts are completely and totally contrary to the particular point you're trying to push. The idea that Jews would have out of hand rejected any state that had Arabs on it or always had a plan of expulsion is just betrayed by the acceptance of the 47 partition plan.

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5223.537 - 5254.662 Norman Finkelstein

I don't think you understand politics. Did I just say that there is a chasm that separates your ideology from the limits and constraints imposed by politics and reality? Professor Morris, I suspect would agree that the Zionist movement from fairly early on was committed to the idea of a Jewish state.

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5255.622 - 5285.485 Norman Finkelstein

I am aware of only one major study, probably written 40 years ago, the binational idea in mandatory Palestine by a woman, I forgot her name now, you remember her, I'm trying to. Yeah. OK. Would you know the book? I think so. Yeah. She is the only one who tried to persuasively argue that the Zionist movement was actually, not formally, actually committed to the binational idea.

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5286.146 - 5312.884 Norman Finkelstein

But most historians of the subject agree the Zionist movement was committed to the idea of a Jewish state. having written my doctoral dissertation on the topic, I was confirmed in that idea because Professor Chomsky, who was my closest friend for about 40 years, was very committed to the idea that binationalism was the dominant trend in Zionism.

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5313.045 - 5341.28 Norman Finkelstein

I could not agree with, I couldn't go with him there. But Professor Morris, you are aware that until the Biltmore Resolution in 1942, the Zionist movement never declared it was for a Jewish state. Why? Because it was politically impossible at the moment until 1942. There is your ideology. There are your convictions. There are your operative plans.

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5341.641 - 5361.153 Norman Finkelstein

And there's also separately what you say in public. The Zionist movement couldn't say in public, we're expelling all the Arabs. They can't say that. And they couldn't even say we support a Jewish state until 1942. You're conflating two things.

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5361.834 - 5380.18 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

The Zionists wanted a Jewish state, correct? That didn't mean expulsion of the Arabs. It's not the same thing. They wanted a Jewish state with a Jewish majority, but they were willing, as it turned out, both in 37 and in 47, and subsequently, to have an Arab minority, a large Arab minority.

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5383.001 - 5390.028 Steven Bonnell (Destiny)

They were willing to have a large Arab minority in the country, and they ended up with a large Arab minority in the country.

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5390.188 - 5401.678 Norman Finkelstein

20% of the population in 49 was Arab. They ended up for about five minutes before they were expelled. They agreed to it until 47, and then they were gone by March 1949.

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