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
It was a British mandate of Palestine, not the British mandate of Israel.
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.
Including their most senior leaders who said so, and I think you've quoted them saying so.
And second of all, I mean, removing dark people? Darker people? It's intrinsic.
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?
80% went missing.
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,
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.
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.
I think the Palestinians and the Arabs were explicit. that they wanted a unitary, I think, federal state, and they made their submissions to UNSCOP. They made their appeals at the UN General Assembly.
Yes, yes.
No, it wasn't an exclusively Arab state. I think we have to distinguish between Palestinian and Arab opposition to a Jewish state in Palestine on the one hand, and Palestinian and Arab attitudes to Jewish existence in Palestine. There's a fundamental difference.
Husseini did say that, and I'm sure there was a very substantial body of Palestinian Arab public opinion that endorsed that. But by the same token, I think a unitary Arab state, as you call it, or a Palestinian state could have been established with arrangements, with guarantees to ensure the security and rights of both communities. How that would work in detail had...
had been discussed and proposed, but never resolved. And again, I think, you know, Jewish fears about what would have happened- A second Holocaust, that's what we're talking about.
That may well have been the Jewish fear. It was an unfounded Jewish fear. It was unfounded? Of course it was unfounded.
You really think that the Palestinians, had they won the war, were going to import ovens and crematoria from Germany?
I don't think it would be... I wouldn't say there were always pogroms in every Arab state. I think there was flight of... Arab Jews for multiple reasons, in some cases for precisely the reasons you say. If you look at the Jewish community in Algeria, for example, their flight had virtually nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The issue of Algerian Jews was that the French gave them citizenship during their colonial rule of Algeria, and they increasingly became identified with French rule. And when Algeria became independent and all the French ended up leaving, out of fear or out of disappointment or out of whatever, the Jews were identified as French rather than Algerian.
I'm not denying any of that history.
Look, without getting into the details, I think we can both agree that ultimately a clear majority of Arab Jews who believe that after having lived in these countries for centuries, if not millennia, came to the unfortunate conclusion that their situation had become untenable.
Showing 41–60 of 309 · page 3 of 16
← Previous
Next →