Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Episode 3: Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine

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Episode 3: Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_10: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_10: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justice, and the challenges of building a decent world.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_10: In this episode, I will be speaking with Professor Rashid Khalidi, my colleague at Columbia University, and a great historian and expert on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_10: In his book, Professor Khalidi recounts both the political history and his family's personal history of the conflict.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_10: He describes in riveting detail the personal hurts and the political injustices that have characterized that conflict for more than one century.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_10: Welcome, Rashid.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_10: So great to be talking with you.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_10: Thank you so much for having me, Jeff.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_10: And just as a matter of quick background, Professor Khalidi's PhD defil is from Oxford after a BA at Yale University, and you've taught in so many distinguished settings, American University of Beirut, University of Chicago, and now thank goodness for me and for all of us at Columbia University.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_10: And you hold the Edward Said chair, and of course, Professor Edward Said was a great scholar and great public intellectual.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_10: You talk about his quotation of the permission to narrate.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_10: And I wonder if you could just explain what he meant by that and why you see that as relevant.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_09: Well, one of the saddest things about what has been happening in Palestine is that for a very large part of that time the Palestinians have been voiceless.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_09: They haven't been allowed, or they haven't been able to strongly make their voice heard.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_09: And quite frequently, this is a matter of getting permission.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_09: It's very, very hard to break through the static, to break through the censorship, to break through the hostility, and put a Palestinian narrative out there.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_09: It's much easier perhaps today than it has been in the past.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_09: But this has always been a problem.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_09: I just read about a university the other day, and they said, oh no, you cannot have a Palestinian speaker without an Israeli.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_09: Well, the idea that you would have somebody speak about slavery and have a slaveholder, or that you'd have somebody speak about gun violence and have a guy from the National Rifle Association is outrageous in an academic context.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_09: But in our context, it is standard if a voice is allowed to be heard in the first place.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_10: So I think it sums up a big part of the problem.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_10: I want to turn in our unfortunately short one hour together to a hundred years, which you call a hundred years war on Palestine.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_10: The book is divided into six declarations of war by imperial powers and by the Zionist movement on the Palestinian Arab people.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_10: And you start with this phenomenal interchange of your great-great-great-uncle, Yusuf Diya Al-Din Pasha Al-Khalidi, who corresponds with Herzl.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_10: Could you describe that?
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_10: It's amazing, absolutely amazing.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_09: Well, let me give a little background.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_09: Yusuf Diy al-Khaldi was someone who had served multiple times as mayor of Jerusalem.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_09: He'd served as deputy for Jerusalem in the first elected Ottoman parliament in the 1870s.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_09: He was a scholar.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_09: He taught and studied in Vienna at the Imperial Royal University.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_09: And he knew of Herzl.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_09: And he knew a lot about Zionism because he had been mayor of Jerusalem and the Zionist movement was growing.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_09: And he was he read the Austrian press.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_09: I know this because I found the newspapers in the family library that he subscribed to.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_09: So he was fully aware of what was happening.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_10: And by the way, just to mention, the family library is an institution in Jerusalem that reflects the collected works of your great relatives.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_09: It was founded by my grandfather to put together all the manuscripts in the family.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_09: So it has manuscripts that go back a thousand years.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_09: It has also materials from the family.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_09: So he knew of Herzl, he understood what the Zionist movement was doing, and he wrote Herzl a letter via the intermediary of the grand rabbi of France.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_09: And said to him, you know, I sympathize with Zionism in certain respects.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_09: I understand what's going on with Jews in Europe.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_09: And he concluded by saying, however, Palestine already has a population that won't agree to be superseded, and for God's sakes, leave Palestine alone.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_09: So I cite that letter and then I cite Herzl's response, which is a masterpiece of evasion.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_09: One thing he says is, this is going to be good for you.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_09: A project which Yusuf Dia knew was designed to create a Jewish state in Palestine.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_09: That was the title of Herzl's book, which had been published by this time, was going to be good for the indigenous population.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_09: He also said, we wouldn't dream of forcing you out.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_09: And Yusuf Diya, nowhere in his letter, mentioned expulsion or removal of the population.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_10: So either Herzl had a guilty conscience, or which in fact from his diaries, we knew But you mentioned in his diary that there was already discussion about how the poor Palestinians will be moved out.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_09: Spirited across the frontiers, is how it's put in the diaries.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_09: So I think that this exchange is paradigmatic.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_09: You essentially have propaganda coming back from Herzl and a refusal to engage with anything that his Palestinian interlocutor is actually saying.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_10: Could you describe that?
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_10: Because I'm sure that many people listening in know something about it, but they don't really know enough about it.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_09: The Balfour Declaration was a statement by the British government in the name of the cabinet, saying that His Majesty's government looked with favor on the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_09: It was one sentence.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_09: There were two other clauses, one of which said that the existing non-Jewish population would have civil and religious rights, and that the status of Jews in other countries would not be affected.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_09: So what was basically being said here was that there's one people in Palestine with national and political rights, and there's not another people in Palestine.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_09: This is why I describe it as a declaration of war.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_09: 94, 95, 93% of the population of Palestine, the Arab, Muslim, and Christian population of Palestine, was essentially ignored in the Balfour Declaration.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_05: Celebrating England's approval of a Jewish homeland in Palestine in 1920, Chaim Weitzmann and other Zionist leaders welcomed the Honorable Sir Arthur Balfour, signer of the British Declaration.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_09: And Chaim Weitzmann, who at that stage was had become the head of the Zionist movement, was deeply involved, as were President Wilson, Louis Brandeis, many other people involved with the Zionist movement, in persuading the British to accept this.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_09: Of course, the British had their own reasons for doing this, which were essentially strategic and had nothing to do with Zionism or Jews or anything else.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_09: Britain wanted to control Palestine since before World War I.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_09: I describe it as a declaration of war because what it meant was, first of all, that the Palestinians don't exist.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_09: And if you look at the Mandate for Palestine, which is thereafter established by the League of Nations, it not only incorporates the Balfour Declaration, it expands on it in every respect.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_09: The Palestinians are never mentioned as the primary national community in their own country.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_09: Anywhere in either document, the Mandate for Palestine or the Balfour Declaration.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_09: And ultimately, such a setup can only be imposed by force.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_09: And the British ultimately did have to use force.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_09: It took a while, but eventually they had to bring in 100,000 troops and launch a campaign that lasted over three and a half years in the late 1930s to crush Palestinian resistance to essentially their dispossession.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_10: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_10: Describe how this fits into the broader picture of British-French imperialism after World War I, and also a little bit about the multiple promises that were given all over the place to what would become Palestine.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_10: Right.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_09: Well, Owit, I forget who it was, described Palestine as the thrice-promised land.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_09: Because the British had made commitments to the Arabs in 1915 and 1916.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_09: They had made commitments to the French.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_09: So the correspondence with the leaders of the Arab Nationalist Movement in 1915-1916 made a bunch of promises.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_09: The negotiations with the French, the so-called Sykes-Picot Accords of 1915-1916, involved another set of commitments.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_09: And finally, there was the Balfour Declaration in 1917.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_09: In each of these, the British essentially made contradictory promises.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_09: And I quote a confidential memo by Balfour, in which he essentially says, this is privately directed to his colleagues in the cabinet, we've made no statement on Palestine, which we've intended, in fact, not to keep.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_10: Exactly.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_10: And we never meant anything we said.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_10: What was the word homeland supposed to mean?
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_10: What did people interpret that as?
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_10: What did the Zionists think it was?
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_10: What did the British think it was?
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_10: Why was that term chosen?
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_09: Aaron Ross Powell Well, the Zionists meant it to be to stand in for what they wanted, which was a Jewish state in Palestine.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_09: And if you go back and you read what Herzl said and you read what was going on at the Zionist Congresses that started in Basel in 1897, it's perfectly clear that what they wanted, and Herzl makes this absolutely crystal clear, we must have sovereignty and control over immigration so that we can essentially replace the existing population by bringing in so many people.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_09: So as far as the Zionists are concerned, that's what they meant.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_09: The British government watered it down for a variety of reasons.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_09: But what Balfour, David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister, and Winston Churchill, who is an ardent Zionist, meant, they said to Weitzmann, and it's recorded in Weitzmann's diaries, we always meant this to be ultimately a state.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_09: Once you bring in enough people, then you will have your state.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_09: In other words, by keeping the doors of immigration open, by the arrival of Jews from abroad, you will ultimately have a majority, and then you will have a state.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_09: What the Arabs understood it to mean was something completely different.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_09: They assumed that what the Zionists wanted was what the British were trying to achieve, but that the British weren't honest enough to say outright, we are going to impose a Jewish state on you, even though you, the Arabs, are a majority.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_10: Of course, but at the start of this idea, this is a Palestinian-Arab country or land part of the Ottoman Empire.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_10: And here's the idea that there's going to be created a Jewish state, in essence, as you say.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_10: And the roots of that are varied.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_10: Herzl himself was not an ardently religious figure.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_10: He was a secular figure trying to find a practical solution to European anti-Semitism.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_10: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_09: And he was also a nationalist.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_09: It was not just resolution of the Jewish problem, which is the problem of Christian antisemitism.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_09: It was also that he believed that the Jews were a people and should be a modern nation, not just a people in some amorphous sense.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_09: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, at that moment of history, national determination was seen as the essence of every kind of people's rights and survival.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_10: Exactly.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_10: The British, of course, were the dominant imperial power, so the idea of British settlement wasn't exactly new.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_10: There were British settlements and conquests all over the world, so there wasn't very much compunction about that.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_10: It does strike me that probably the idols of the Crusades a thousand years before must have played some role that, you know, we have a claim to the Middle East, period, and it goes back in a great tradition.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_09: Aaron Powell In fact, the British and the French papers were full of that stuff.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_09: When the French conquered Damascus in 1920, when the British conquered Jerusalem in 1917, there's all kinds of crusader imagery in the papers in France and in Britain.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_10: And then there is the Jewish religious idea that this is a land given by God to the Jewish people.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_10: What strikes me as interesting about that, also, by the way, aside from claiming land 2,000 years afterwards, where someone else lives, is that the Jewish religious claim itself was itself a settler claim, because the Jews are told, we will allow you to conquer someone else's land.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_10: So it's directly in the Bible that this is not our ancient homeland, this is our land to conquer.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_10: So the book of Joshua is a book of genocides, actually.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_09: One of the ironies of Zionism is that the religious connection and the sense that the land of Israel had been given to the Jewish people by, as it were, God's land deed, was something that religious Jews understood as something that would only be actuated at the end of days.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_09: The secular attempts to change this situation were impious and heretical and absolutely unacceptable, whence the extremely strong religious hostility to Zionism in this era, that is to say, at the turn of the 20th century, and in fact right up until the 21st century.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_09: For many, many, many pious religious Jews, this is not something that's supposed to be done with guns or via conquest, Allah Joshua.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_09: But is rather something that, you know, God is going to restore the Jewish people to the land of Israel in his good time.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_10: Let me bring us through a lot of history that I urge people read the book so that you can get the detailed facts.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_10: But this first beginning of the settler Zionism comes to what you call the second declaration of war, which is really pivotal after World War II, 1947, 1948, and the partition under the UN General Assembly, and then the declaration of Israel, and then the war and the Nakbah, the disaster of Palestinian expulsion.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_10: Could you talk about that period?
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_10: I talk about this as a declaration of war.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_09: I mean, again, it it's a matter of an established narrative, which is obviously partly true but largely false.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_09: The established narrative is that the miraculous resurrection of the Jewish people in their homeland after the Holocaust was an entirely good thing.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_09: And given what had happened in Nazi Germany before and during World War II culminating in the Holocaust, this was understandable and necessary and right.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_09: The problem with that narrative is that it ignores the fact that the Palestinians were still a majority of this country.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_09: And when the UN General Assembly in November 1947 partitioned the country, it gave 57% of the country to a minority and gave the rest to the majority of the people.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_09: The other aspect of this is that both the Charter of the United Nations and the Covenant of the League of Nations had talked about self-determination.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_09: The Palestinians had been prevented by the British from achieving self-determination in the entirety of their own country because of this international commitment to Zionism.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_09: And so, in effect, what the UN General Assembly was doing, at the impulsion mainly of the United States and the Soviet Union, who bulldozed this resolution through the General Assembly in 1947, was to give the bulk of the country to a minority which was perfectly prepared to take over as much of it as they could, and they proceeded to do that.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_09: You mentioned the war.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_09: The war actually started before the establishment of the state.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_03: At flushing Long Island, the General Assembly of the United Nations has made its decision on Palestine.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_03: The map shows what partition means.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_03: The Jewish state colored light, the Arab state dark, or Jaffa to go to the Arabs, Jerusalem internationalized.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_03: Then Senor Arania of Brazil presiding for calls on the nations to vote and announces holiday vote.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_04: The resolution of the Dutch Committee for Palestine was adopted by 33 votes, 13 against 10 abstention.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, and I think this is uh actually a very important point that I didn't know also.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_10: It's one of the many things I had to unlearn and learn.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_10: Right.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_10: Uh but can you describe after the partition, then the violence actually starts even before the declaration of Israel's independence and any formal war.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_10: The chronology is important.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_09: November 29, 1947, General Assembly votes for partition.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_09: Within weeks, there's fighting in different parts of Palestine.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_09: By the early spring, the well-organized, well-armed militias of the Zionist movement are overrunning Arab villages.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_09: And by April, they're overrunning Arab cities.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_09: Before the State of Israel is established, in the middle of May, when the British leave of 1948, almost the entire Arab population of Jaffa, the entire Arab population of Haifa, 60,000 people in each case, and about 30,000 people living in the Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem, are driven from their homes.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_09: So about 150,000 people in the cities and another 150,000 people in villages are driven from their homes as these areas are conquered.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_09: The United Nations does nothing to stop this.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_09: An Arab state was supposed to be established.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_09: Many of these areas that are overrun, like Jaffa, were to have been part of the Arab state.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_10: To understand this, the usual narrative is there's a partition, the Arabs reject it, the Palestinians reject it, Israel declares independence, and then there's a war.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_10: But the chronology is quite different.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_10: The chronology is that there is a partition, and before anything happens politically, the war starts from the Zionist side.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_10: But from both sides.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_10: From both sides.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_10: But the expulsions of the Palestinians take place in large numbers before May 1948.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_09: About 40% of the Palestinians who are expelled or flee their homes do so before May 15, 1948.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_09: Something like 300,000 of the 750,000, maybe 350,000 of the 750,000 who are driven ultimately from their homes by 1949, leave before the State of Israel is established, before the Arab armies enter.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_09: In fact, this is one of the main reasons the Arab armies enter.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_09: They were very reluctant to do so.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_09: They knew that the Zionist movement was stronger than them.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_09: They had the Arab chiefs of staff had said, these people are well-armed, well organized, well trained, they're going to win.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_09: And we have to come across miles of desert, we're not very well equipped, don't do it.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_09: And the political leaders are driven to do it.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_10: The other important question to what extent were these expulsions uh more or less planned and ready?
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_10: Uh these were operations designed to do this removal of populations, do you think?
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_09: One of the very contentious points about what happens in 1948 is to what extent were these expulsions planned?
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_09: The conquests were planned.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_09: We have the various plans of the general staff of the Haganah, Alif Gemil Dalet, and so on and so forth.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_09: The most important of which was the Plan Dalet, which led to many of the conquests that I'm talking about.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_09: And each of these was accompanied by attacks on civilians or psychological warfare to drive them out.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_09: So it was it was intended.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_09: To what extent was it planned?
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_09: Well, we don't actually have.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_09: The historians who have done work on this have actually not found uh the document that says you will drive every single person out of their homes.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_09: And in fact, not every single person was driven out.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_09: Most people were, some a few stayed.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_09: And in other areas later on, many more people stayed.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_09: So you end up having 150,000 Arabs who become citizens of the State of Israel later on.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_09: But the overwhelming majority, 750,000, are driven out.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_09: This was intentional.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_09: This was clearly part of the objective.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_09: You could not have created a Jewish state in a majority Arab country without this demographic transformation.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_09: And this is something that had been welcomed by the Zionist movement since the British first mooted what they called population transfer in 1937.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_09: Ben Gurion was ecstatic.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_09: He says this gives us the opportunity to move these people.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_09: Exactly as Herzl had said in his diaries.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_09: We have to move these people across the frontiers.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_09: You can't have a Jewish state in a majority Arab country otherwise.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_09: It's an absolute necessity.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_09: So it was intentional.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_09: Is there a specific plan?
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_09: No historian seems to have been able to find a specific plan which says, yes, we will expel everybody on these dates.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_04: Today in the Near East, a suffering people, the Palestine Arab refugees, are struggling for survival.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_04: Three-quarters of a million displaced human beings are dependent upon charity for their very existence.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_04: This is one of the dozens of camps in which these refugees huddle in.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_04: No place except for desert.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_04: No home other than a tent for caves.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_04: No food other than that which is donated to them.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_04: In these camps of misery, live the scores of thousands whose native land was for centuries Palestine.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_10: What was happening to your family at this point?
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_10: And your father was at this point already working with the UN, or do I have the dates wrong?
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_09: No, he was already working with the UN as a broadcaster initially.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_09: And later on uh in human rights, he had various jobs at the UN.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_09: My father was in Palestine.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_09: In 1947, and actually was in Amen meeting with Amir Abdallah, the later King Abdallah, the first of Jordan, the day that partition was announced.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_09: But Abdullah was not very concerned about the Palestinian plague.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_09: Quite the contrary.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_09: My father was sent by his older brother, who was the uh one of the members of the Arab Higher Committee in Jerusalem in 1947 to tell Abdallah that the Palestinians did not want his protectorship, his guardianship.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_09: He was very angry.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_09: At that moment, somebody came in and announced that the BBC had just broadcast that partition had been passed by the General Assembly.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_09: He gets up, and at that point the audience ends.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_09: When the Amir gets up, everybody gets up.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_09: And he turns to my father and he says, You Palestinians have refused my offer.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_09: You deserve what's going to happen to you.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_09: So my father told me this story, and I realized it's important, and I remembered it, and I wrote it down.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_09: And uh later on I was talking to an Israeli historian friend of mine, and he said, Oh, that explains why suddenly the tone of Goldemayr and Moshe Sharet later, uh, who had been meeting with Abdallah changes at this point because Abdullah had thought he had the Palestinians in his pocket, and it's after your father's message that he realized he didn't.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_10: Aaron Powell The third conflict is the Six-Day War.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_10: Right.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_10: Tell us about that.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_09: Aaron Ross Powell, I talk about the war, uh, which is, again, one of the things that is misremembered and misunderstood by the grand American public and by many people the world over, because there is an assumption that the Arab countries were on the verge of overrunning Israel and that another Holocaust was possible.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_09: One of the things I show from American documents, and also some Israeli documents, is that everybody who knew anything about the military situation knew that Israel would crush the Arab armies even if they attacked first.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_09: And that Israel was planning a preemptive strike and was going to crush them even more decisively.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_10: And fascinatingly, came and asked for permission to do that.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_09: Well, that's the White House.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_09: This was not an Israeli war.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_09: This was an Israeli war with American permission.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_09: Secretary McNamara, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, President Johnson both meet with the Israeli envoy, who is the head of the of the Mossad, Ahmad Mayer Amit.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_09: And they basically tell him, yes, go ahead and do it.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_09: You're gonna win anyway, but yes, you know, whatever, fine.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_09: So I argue this is, in a sense, a joint war.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_09: And the declaration of war is not just the war itself, but more importantly, the UN Security Council resolution, which is adopted in November of 1967, and which basically buries the Palestine question.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_09: All the issues opened by the 1948 war.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_09: Not for the first time.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_09: Not for the first time.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_09: The issue of refugees, the return of refugees, which the United Nations had mandated in a resolution in December 1948.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_09: It said refugees have the right to return and compensation, buried in 242.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_09: All 242 says is a just solution of the refugee problem.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_09: They didn't even dig deign to mention the Palestinian refugee problem or how it is to be solved by return and compensation, which up till that point had been the UN and the American position on refugees.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_10: So this was actually a retrogression even from the 1948 period.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_10: Precisely.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_09: It's essentially drafted by the Americans and the Israelis and the British.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_09: Lord Carradin, the British permanent representative, is the one whose name was on the resolution, but essentially it was Dean Rusk, Ambassador Goldberg, and a bunch of other people, together with Aba Iban, the Israeli Foreign Minister, who laid down the essential lines of 242.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_09: So I talk about it as a declaration of war on the Palestinians because they're not even mentioned in the resolution.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_09: The word Palestine doesn't exist in 242.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_09: Palestinians.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_09: It's sort of like the Balfour Declaration, sort of like the mandate for Palestinian.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_09: The mandate.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_10: Exactly.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_10: It's repeatedly the same point that there is only one political nation and everyone else happens to be there.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_10: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_09: We still have those two scales.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_09: You know, Israel's security in American political parlance is on a level, you know, close to God.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_09: Whereas the security of the Palestinians, yes, of course they should have, but it's not, it hasn't got the same sancrosanct quality.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_09: Israeli rights, uh the existence of Israel.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_09: These are these are sancrosanct in American political discourse.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_09: What about the Palestinians' right to exist?
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_09: Palestine's right to exist?
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_09: Why is this one pounded home by every politician on every uh stump and by every American diplomat?
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_09: And the other one is barely mentioned, or if it's mentioned, it's in a it's in a subordinate position.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_10: You enter the story uh now as a scholar and increasingly a a diplomat yourself starting in 1982 onwards.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_10: So you call 1982 the fourth declaration of war.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_10: Right.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_10: You're in Beirut at that point, I think.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_10: Right.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_10: And Mona, your wife, our dear friend, is pregnant at the time and working in the Palestinian news agency.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_10: Correct.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_10: And suddenly the bombings start.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_10: It's an incredibly harrowing account.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_10: Can you describe that for people?
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_10: I would it was just shocking.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_09: Right.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_09: Well, I describe it as the fourth declaration of war, because just as in 67, Israel sends an envoy to Washington who gets approval from Washington for what it's about to do.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_09: So Ariel Sharon comes to Washington, meets with Secretary of State Haig, who gives him a green light.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_09: That then started, I believe it was the 4th of June or the 6th of June, with an aerial bombardment that targeted the area where the PLO offices were, including the office where my wife was working.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_09: And I was at the American University of Beirut at the time, and our two daughters, my wife was pregnant with our third child, and our two daughters were in two separate schools.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_09: So I was worried about my wife, who I knew was under bombardment that afternoon.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_09: I was worried about my two kids who were in two separate places.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_09: You have to have lived under aerial bombardment to know how terrifying it is to hear the sound, not just of the bombs, but of the planes, the fighter bombers making their passes, screeching.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_09: And we were all hearing this all over Beirut, even though where I was at the AUB wasn't actually being targeted at the time.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_09: And of course, the kids were undoubtedly terrified in their schools.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_09: So I described what happened that afternoon, which anybody who's been in a war zone has been through again and again and again and again.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_10: Rasheed, isn't it right to think of this as uh one grad lie leading to the next in the sense that if you start with the premise we're going to have a new state or a new homeland and ignore the people that are there, then those peoples are uh expelled in significant numbers.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_10: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_09: Well, first they resist.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_09: And then that resistance is then described as banditism or terrorism or whatever.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_09: I mean, the British arrive in Ireland and the Irish resist.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_09: And of course, the Irish are are slandered by the British for resisting British settler colonialism.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_09: And that's what happens in Palestine.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_09: The first thing is they resist, and then that is an excuse for their expulsion.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_10: So in this case, there's resistance, expulsion, formation of a political consciousness and movement outside of Israel in Beirut.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_10: But that almost inevitably, in the minds of this project, leads to this war because you have to go after the resistance wherever it is.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_10: Exactly.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_10: Is that fair to say?
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_10: Exactly.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_09: This is par for the course for other wars waged by colonial powers against their opponents.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_09: The French are attacking Morocco and Tunisia when the FLN sets up bases there as part of the Algerian War of National Independence.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_09: South Africans are attacking Mozambique and attacking other neighboring countries in order to root out the ANC.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_09: And so Israel comes into Lebanon as part of exactly the process that you're talking about in 1982 and occupies much of the country.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_09: And so that's what I describe in that chapter.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_09: As well at the end as the Sabra and Shatila massacres, for which I use as a source the previously unpublished confidential annexes to the Israeli report on these massacres, which show the extent of collaboration not just between Israel and the right-wing Lebanese militias that actually carry out the massacres, but also the degree of responsibility of the United States for what happens after the PLO forces are obliged to leave in August and early September of 1982.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_13: When you take a poisonous snake and put it into the bed of your baby, you cannot pretend that you did not know what was going to happen.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_13: It is widely known that the massacre that the Pharanges are a gang of cataracts as far as the Palestinians are concerned, have committed the most atrocious uh massacres in the past, uh one of which was mentioned yesterday by Mr.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_13: Sharon in the Knesset.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_13: Whoever decided, and I say whoever I mean Mr.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_13: Sharon, when Mr.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_13: Sharon decided to put the Pharanges into the camp, it means that he was condoning a massacre.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_13: He couldn't know how big it would be.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_13: But if the intent was to terrorize the Palestinians into leaving Lebanon, to my mind there can be no reasonable doubt.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_10: What is so depressing in history is that the authors of the massacre, the main author, goes on to become prime minister.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_10: In other words, the accountability is not only zero, it's contrary.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_10: Right.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_10: So repeated.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_10: Well, the next phase of this is what many of us thought was the breakthrough, and you were part of that, you saw it close up, and you expressed a great unhappiness about the whole process.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_10: And I'm referring, of course, to the Oslo Accord and the peace negotiations, which in the 1990s seemed like it was going to lead finally to some kind of settlement.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_10: And I wonder, since you were one of the advisors to the Palestinian side at that point, you watched the diplomacy, you participated in a close-up.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_10: What did you see?
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_10: And why was it ever hopeful, and why did it end up collapsing?
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_09: I was involved as an advisor to the Palestinian side in the negotiations that started at Madrid in October of 1991, and I continued to do that until the summer of 93.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_09: Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the PLO in Israel had opened up a direct channel, which ultimately led to the OSLA Courts, about which we didn't know until September when they were revealed, and the accords were signed on the White House lawn.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_09: In the almost two years, year and a half, almost two years that I was involved as an advisor, one of the things I realized I had not when I first started this, was that there was a ceiling to the negotiations imposed by the Israelis and the Americans, which ultimately prevented any possibility of statehood, self-determination, sovereignty for the Palestinians.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_09: A precooked ceiling, basically.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_09: Exactly.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_09: And it went right back to the 1978 Camp David Accords that Begin said that and President Carter assigned for Palestinian autonomy.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_09: There was also a peace treaty with Egypt that came out of that.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_09: But the Palestinian autonomy, part of that, was essentially the ceiling.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_09: Begin wanted to settle the entirety of the land of Israel.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_09: As far as Begin was concerned, all of it belonged to Israel.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_09: And as far as Begin was concerned, nothing would be accepted that in any way limited the colonization and the settlement and the absorption of the entirety of Palestine.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_09: And that's the thing that was the same.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_09: Or what we call the West Bank, for example, now.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_09: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_09: The West Bank and East Jerusalem in particular were his focus.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_09: I mean, they at that stage he they hoped to keep Gaza, ultimately they decided they couldn't.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_09: But the West Bank in particular, and Jerusalem, most importantly, as far as Begin were concerned, were vitally important.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_02: This framework concerns the principles and some specifics in the most substantive way, which will govern a comprehensive peace settlement.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_02: It deals specifically with the future of the West Bank in Gaza and the need to resolve the Palestinian problem in all its aspects.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_02: The framework document proposes a five-year transitional period in the West Bank in Gaza, during which the Israeli military government will be withdrawn and a self-governing authority will be elected with full autonomy.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_02: It also provides for Israeli forces to remain in specified locations during this period to protect Israel's security.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_02: The Palestinians will have the right to participate in the determination of their own future, in negotiations which will resolve the final status of the West Bank in Gaza, and then to produce an Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_09: And that ceiling was retained even by Prime Minister Rabian when he came in in 1992.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_09: Unfortunately, people have said, well, you know, he he agreed to accept that the Palestinians are a people.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_09: Correct.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_09: He agreed to negotiate directly with the PLO.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_09: Correct.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_09: He made major changes.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_09: Israel had never accepted that the Palestinians had any legitimacy as a as a group.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_09: So Rabin accepted that.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_09: And he accepted that the PLO was a legitimate interlocutor, and he negotiated with them.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_09: But he never never went farther than that to say the Palestinians have a national right in this country, that they have a right to self-determination, they have a right to statehood, they have a right to sovereignty.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_09: He never fully accepted that.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_09: His last speech, which I quote in the book, said they'll have something much less than that before he was assassinated by somebody who thought he'd already gone too far, a right winger who thought he'd already.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_09: So what we realized in the course of the negotiations was that the Americans and the Israelis had a preset ceiling which they imposed on us, and which ultimately, through the Oslo Accords, was intended essentially to perpetuate the status quo.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_10: What happened at the end with Clinton?
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_10: Was there anything there, an opportunity with the Clinton at the last.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_09: Why this had not happened in 1998, 97, 96, 1995, 1994, 1993 is inconceivable to me, except that, you know, he got distracted by other things, and he obviously didn't think it was that important.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_09: Whatever the reason, Clinton was in a terrible position to negotiate a settlement.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_09: Moreover, Arafat had lost support because people had seen over seven years how bad the Oslo Accords were.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_09: And Baak was already losing his legitimacy in Israel.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_09: He had lost a no-confidence vote in the Knesset.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_09: He was also a lame duck.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_09: So bringing these three together in the fall of 2000, just before the American elections, in which Al-Gore lost, was a sort of last-ditch effort, and it had no hope of achieving a transformation of the situation.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_10: The last war is part of an American crusade in the Middle East.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_10: 9-11 comes the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and later the wars in Syria and Libya, in which the U.S.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_10: is uh deeply involved as protagonist.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_10: It's the rise of the religious right at the core of American politics, which surely plays a role in this also, because probably even stronger than Jewish support for Israel is the uh evangelical Christian right support for Israel as true.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_10: Very weird period.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_10: But could you briefly describe that, you know, bring us up to where we are right now?
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I focus on a couple things in the last part of the book.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_09: I focus on um the wars on Gaza, which are not uh even-handed conflicts.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_09: I mean, one of the things I'm trying to shatter in this in this book overall is this idea that there are two more or less equal protagonists.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_09: There are not.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_09: There is a dominant protagonist massively supported by external powers.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_10: By the two leading empires of the last two centuries, uh, Britain and the U.S.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_09: And there is a people that is trying to resist this settler colonial takeover of their country.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_09: And the last episode of this in terms of war is the wars on Gaza of 2008, 2009, 2012, and most brutally 2014.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_09: And I go in great detail uh through what actually happened in these wars and the degree of American support for this, and the degree to which this is a violation of American law in terms of arms sales.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_09: I mean, American arms are only supposed to be sold under the Defense Procurement Act uh for defensive purposes.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_09: And the killing of 1,500 or 1,600 Palestinian civilians in Gaza in 2014, um, including 500 children, it cannot possibly be described as defensive purposes.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_09: You look at the casualty tolls, most of the Israeli casualties are Israeli soldiers who were trying to who were attacking Gaza, who were inside Gaza, fighting in Gaza, and a few civilians.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_09: And you have 1,500 Palestinians.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: On the 17th of July 2014, Israel launched a major ground offensive into the Gaza Strip in a bid to stop rockets being fired by Palestinian militants and to destroy a network of tunnels used by Hamas and other factions.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: By the time they left, some 2,200 Palestinians would be dead, including a significant number of civilians.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now, for the first time, Israeli soldiers have described the orders they received for fighting in civilian areas.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: Orders that treated any Palestinian as a threat.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_09: Now they were.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_09: They were firing rockets, there's no question.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_09: But what we're seeing here is the last episode of a war which is intended to crush the Palestinians and ultimately establish this state in the entirety of Palestine.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_09: And the United States is party to this.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_09: I described the last several wars from 67 onward as joint operations between Israel and the United States.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_09: And the culminating element of this is the Trump plan, now perhaps uh superseded, in which the U.S.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_09: government under Trump essentially gives Israel, these the Netanyahu government, everything it wants.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_09: You want Jerusalem, you got it.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_09: You want the Golan Heights, you got it.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_09: You want settlements to be described as legal, you got it.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_09: You want annexation, you got it.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_09: Whether that will continue to be American policy is another another issue.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_06: Well, thank you very much.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_06: It's great to be with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel and his representatives.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_06: Obviously, we have much to discuss.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_06: Uh the Prime Minister was just thanking me again for what we did in Jerusalem with respect to the embassy.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_06: That's been something that I guess was controversial, but it's turned out to be very positive in many ways, and uh a lot of progress has been made in many other areas.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_06: We're talking trade, we're talking military, we're talking defense, and we are very much in favor of what Israel is doing as far as their defense is concerned.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, they're aggressive and they have no choice but to be aggressive.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_06: It's a very difficult part of the world.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_06: So I just want to let Benjamin let all of the people know, let Bibi know that uh we are with you, we are with Israel.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_06: 100%.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_06: Thank you, Bibi.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_06: Thank you.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_06: Thank you.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_10: So, Rasheed, in our remaining two minutes, I'm sorry to say, can there be justice in this world?
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_10: Can there be a compromise still?
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_10: Can there be a one-state solution, a two-state solution, any solution?
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_10: The Palestinian people are still there in the millions, the millions of refugees are still there, people are not going away.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_10: I'm sorry to ask it in such an absurd way with our clock ticking down, but what do you look forward to and how to move this forward?
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_10: Your narrative, I believe, is extremely important because it helps to set the foundations of truth.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_10: And I think the main point I would emphasize is until we understand the truth, we will not get a solution.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_09: What I argue in the book is that you have to have a solution, whether it's a one-state solution, a two-state solution, a cantonal solution, a bi-national solution, a regional federation.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_09: It has to be based on absolute equality of all kinds of rights.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_09: There are now two national entities there.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_09: There's an Israeli national entity.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_09: It's been created.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_09: People say, well, if you say it's a settler colonial project, how can you the United States is a settler colonial project which has created a national entity.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_09: The difference is that the Palestinians inside Palestine are as numerous, probably a little more numerous, than the Jewish population of Israel.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_09: So the population under Israel's control is a majority Arab.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_09: And then you have another several million, five or six million Palestinians forced out of Palestine and living in Jordan and other countries.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_09: Any solution has to accept that both of these groups, national groups, have to have equal rights.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_09: How you do that is, to my way of thinking, at least secondary.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_09: Confederation, cantonal, one state, two state, three states, whatever.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_09: Federation.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_09: Doesn't matter.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_09: But there has to be absolute equality of property rights, of civil rights, of religious rights.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_09: You can't say this was this belonged to us 2,000 years ago, therefore we take it over and our worship takes precedence over your worship.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_09: You can't have that.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_09: You can't say if you left your property in 1948, it now belongs to us.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_09: The kinds of things that nobody would accept for Europe after World War II are not acceptable in Palestine after 1948, whether in terms of population, whether in terms of property, whether in terms of rights, individual or collective.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_09: Now, how you get there, I don't know.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_09: You know, I'm a historian.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_09: I don't the job description of a historian does not include predicting the future.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_10: Historian and part-time diplomat and a very effective one at both of those, Rashid.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_10: Thank you so much for your great work and for the wonderful conversation.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_10: Thanks so much for having me.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_10: Bye-bye.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_10: Bye-bye now.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_10: Thanks.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_11: So where where should the Palestinians go to get accountability for what they claim to be uh problems?
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_11: To Israeli courts?
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_11: Where where where do they go?
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_07: Matt, look, we uh of course, um the United States is always going to stand up for uh human rights.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_07: Uh we're always going to stand up where do they go?
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_12: Where do they go?
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_07: Matt, that is why I think you have that is why you have heard us continue to endorse and to call for a two-state solution to this long-running conflict.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_07: Uh a two-state solution because it protects Israel's identity as a Jewish and democratic state, but also uh because uh it will give the Palestinians a viable state of their own and fulfill their legitimate uh aspirations for dignity and self-determination.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_07: Where do they go?
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_10: Next month, I will be speaking to Professor Marianu Mazukato about her recently released book, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_10: Professor Mazukato will discuss big, bold, radical ideas on how we can creatively approach the daunting challenges we face today.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_10: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_10: Please subscribe, rate, and write a review on whatever platform you listen for your podcast.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_10: I would love to hear your thoughts as we continue to develop the series.