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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Um, I also think, um, that we can both agree that this had never been an issue prior to Zionism and the emergence of the state of Israel. Look, I'm, I'm not, didn't begin with Zionism in the Arab world. The issue is, is, is, is the point I raised, which is whether these communities had ever come to a collective conclusion that they're, position had become untenable in this part of the world.
No, they were Arab Jews.
It wasn't the Jews of England or the Soviet Jews. I think it's useful to refer to Zionists before 1948 and Israelis after 1948.
Yeah, from Morocco. Avishlaim from Iraq has written on this issue.
I think it's more complex than that. I think it was... Sorry, I interrupted you.
That's indisputable.
I'll make two points. The first is, you mentioned Haj Amin al-Husseini and his collaboration with the Nazis. entirely legitimate point to raise, but I think one can also say definitively had Hajj Amin al-Husseini never existed, the Holocaust would have played out precisely as it did.
As far as Palestinian opposition to Jewish immigration to Palestine during the 1930s is concerned, it was of a different character than, for example, British and American rejection of Jewish immigration. They just didn't want Jews on their soil. Objectively, it helped the Germans kill the Jews.
In the Palestinian case, their opposition to Jewish immigration was to prevent the transformation of their homeland into a Jewish state that would dispossess them. And I think that's an important distinction. make.
The other point I wanted to make is we've spent the past several hours talking about Zionism transfer and so on, but I think there's a more fundamental aspect to this, which is that Zionism, I think, would have emerged and disappeared as yet one more utopian political project, had it not been for the British, what the preeminent Palestinian historian, Waleed Khalidi, has termed the British shield.
Because I think without the British sponsorship, we wouldn't be having this discussion today. The British sponsored Zionism for a very simple reason, which is that during World War I, the Ottoman armies attempted to march on the Suez Canal. Suez Canal was the jugular vein of the British Empire between Europe and India. And the British came to the conclusion that they needed to
secure the Suez Canal from any threat. And as the British have done so often in so many places, how do you deal with this? Well, you bring in a foreign minority, implant them amongst a hostile population, and establish a protectorate over them. I don't think a Jewish state in Palestine had been part of British intentions. In the Balfour Declaration,
very specifically speaks about a Jewish national home in Palestine. In other words, a British protectorate. Things ended up taking a different course. And I think the most important development was World War II. And I think this had maybe less to do with the Holocaust and more to do with the effective bankruptcy of the United Kingdom during that war and its inability to sustain its global empire.
It ended up giving up India, ended up giving up Palestine. And it's in that context, I think, that we need to see the emergence of a of a Jewish state in Palestine. And again, a Jewish state means a state in which the Jewish community enjoys not only a demographic majority, but an uncontestable demographic majority, an uncontestable territorial hegemony, and an uncontestable political supremacy.
And that is also why after 1948, the nascent Israeli state confiscated, I believe, up to 90% of lands that had been previously owned by Palestinians who became citizens of Israel. It is why the new Israeli state imposed a military government on its population of Palestinian citizens between 1948 and 1966. It is why...
the Israeli state effectively reduced the Palestinians living within the Israeli state as citizens of the Israeli state to second-class citizens, on the one hand, promoting Jewish nationalism and Jewish nationalist parties, on the other hand, doing everything within its power to suppress and eliminate Palestinian or Arab nationalist movements. And that's why today there's a consensus
among all major human rights organizations, that Israel is an apartheid state. With the Israeli human rights organization, B'Tselem describes a regime of Jewish supremacy between the river and the sea.
I'd like to respond to that. Speaking of propaganda, I find it simply impossible to accept that Balfour, who as British Prime Minister in 1905 was a chief sponsor of the Aliens Act, which was specifically designed to keep persecuted Eastern European Jews out of the streets of the UK, and who was denounced as an anti-Semite by the entire British Jewish establishment.
A decade later, all of a sudden... Changed his mind. People change their minds, but when the changing of the mind just coincidentally happens to coincide with the British imperial interest, I think perhaps the transformation is a little more superficial than he's being given credit for. It was clearly a...
British imperial venture, and if there had been no threat to the Suez Canal during World War I, regardless of what Balfour would have thought about the Jews and their contribution to history and their persecution and so on, there would have been no Balfour Declaration.
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