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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They knew damn well it wasn't a people, a land without a people. I'll continue, but please go ahead.
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.
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.
Whereas, in fact, if I understood you correctly, you're saying the Palestinians and the Arabs would have rejected any partition resolution.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
It was a matter of principle.
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.
It was provisionally recognized.
Showing 21–40 of 309 · page 2 of 16
← Previous
Next →