Mouin Rabbani
speaker
309 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard Mar 2024
Mouin Rabbani’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's much more here, but I think those are the key points I would make about 1948.
As have you.
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.
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
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.
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