Norman Finkelstein
speaker
305 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard Mar 2024
Norman Finkelstein’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
On the Palestinian national home, he wouldn't go as far as a Palestinian state. I'm not going to go into the details of that. I don't think realistically, given the political balance of forces, that was going to happen, but that's a separate issue. Okay. Let's get to the issue at hand, namely what is the obstacle or what has been the obstacle since the early 1970s.
Since roughly 1974, the Palestinians have accepted the two-state settlement on the June 1967 border. Now,
As more pressure was exerted on Israel because the Palestinians seemed reasonable, the Israelis, to quote the Israeli political scientist Avner Yaniv, he since passed from the scene, Yaniv in his book Dilemmas of Security, he said that the big Israeli fear was what he called the Palestinian peace offensive. That was their worry, that the Palestinians were becoming too moderate.
And unless you understand that, you can't understand the June 1982 Lebanon War. The purpose of the June 1982 Lebanon War was to liquidate the PLO in southern Lebanon because they were too moderate, the Palestinian peace offensive. I'm going to have to fast forward. There are many events.
There's the First Intifada, then there's the Oslo Accord, and let's now go to the heart of the issue, namely the 2000-2001 negotiations. The negotiations are divided into three parts for the sake of listeners. There's Camp David in July 2000, there are the Clinton parameters in December 2000, and then there are negotiations in Taba in Egypt in 2001. Those are the three phases.
Now, I have studied the record probably to the point of insanity, because there are so many details you have to master. I'll vouch for that, the insanity part. Actually, I will vouch for it. I will personally vouch for it.
There is one extensive record from that whole period from 2000 to, you could say, 2007, and that is what came to be called the Palestine Papers, which are about 15,000 pages of all the records of the negotiations. I have read through all of them, every single page. And this is what I find. If you look at Shlomo Ben-Ami's book, which I have with me, Prophets Without Honor, it's his last book.
He says, going into Camp David, that means July, going into Camp David, July 2000, he said the Israelis were willing to return about, not return, but will withdraw from, relinquish, 92% of the West Bank.
Yeah. He was at Taba. Oh, yeah, he was also at Camp David. Yeah. They wanted, Israel wanted to keep all the major settlement blocks. It wanted to keep roughly 8% of the West Bank. They were allowing for, you put it at 84 to 90% in your books. They put it at roughly 92%. Israel was willing to give up.
It also depends what stage Camp David, because there were two weeks. I'll get to that.
Israel wants to keep all the major settlement blocks. It means the border area of the West Bank. Well, not the border. We have Ariel. We have Male Adumim. We have a Condoleezza Rice called Ariel. She said it was a dagger into the heart of the West Bank. They want to keep 8% of the land. They want to keep the settlement blocks. They want to keep 80% of the settlers.
They will not budge an inch on the question of refugees. To quote Ehud Barak in the article he co-authored with you in the New York Review of Books, we will accept, and I think the quote's accurate, no moral, legal, or historical responsibility for what happened to the refugees. So forget about even allowing refugees to return.
We accept no moral, legal, or historical responsibility for the refugees. And on Jerusalem, they wanted to keep large parts of Jerusalem. Now, how do we judge who is reasonable and who is not? Then Ami says, I think the Israeli offer was reasonable. That's how he sees it. But what is the standard of reasonable? My standard is, what does international law say?
International law says the settlements are illegal. Israel wants to keep all the settlement blocks. 15 judges, all 15, in the war decision in 2004, in July 2004, all 15 judges, including the American Judge Bergenthal, ruled the settlements are illegal under international law. They want to keep 80% of the settlers. Under international law, all the settlers are illegal in the West Bank.
They want to keep large parts of East Jerusalem. But under international law, East Jerusalem is occupied Palestinian territory. That's what the international... No, not Palestinian, because there was no Palestine.
How could it be Palestinian? I listen patiently to you.
Under international law, if you read the decision... All territory, the 2004 wall decision, all territory beyond the Green Line, which includes East Jerusalem, is occupied Palestinian territory.
The designated unit, according to the International Court of Justice, the designated unit for Palestinian self-determination. And they deny any right whatsoever on the right of return. The maximum, I don't want to go into the details now, the maximum formal offer was by Ehud Omar in 2008. He offered 5,000 refugees could return under what was called family reunification, 5,000
in the course of five years and no recognition of any Israeli responsibility. So if you use as the baseline what the UN General Assembly has said and what the International Court of Justice has said, if you use that baseline international law, by that baseline, all the concessions came from the Palestinian side. Every single concession came from the Palestinian side.
None came from the Israeli side. They may have accepted less than what they wanted, but it was still beyond what international law allocated to them.
Showing 201–220 of 305 · page 11 of 16
← Previous
Next →