Steven Bonnell (Destiny)
speaker
516 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard Mar 2024
Steven Bonnell (Destiny)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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This built-in idea of Zionism that because of a handful of quotes or because of an ideology, we can say that transfer or population expulsion or basically the mandate of all of these Arabs being kicked off the land was always going to happen when I think there's a refusal sometimes as well to acknowledge that regardless of the ideas of some of the Zionist leaders, there is a political, social, and military reality on the ground that they're forced to contend with.
And unfortunately, the Arabs, because of their inability to engage in diplomacy and only to use tools of war to try to negotiate everything going on in mandatory Palestine, basically always gave the Jews a reason or an excuse to fight and acquire land through that way because of their refusal to negotiate on anything else, whether it was the partition plan of 47, whether it was the
The Hussein Peace Conference afterwards, where Israel even offered to annex Gaza in 51, where they offered to take in 100,000 refugees. Every single deal is just rejected out of hand because the Arabs don't want a Jewish state anywhere in this region of the world.
Stephen Bonnell.
I think you've made your point. First, I'll take up something that Muin said. He said that the Nakba was inevitable.
And predictable. No, no, no. I've never said that. It was inevitable and predictable only because the Arabs assaulted the Jewish community and state in 1947-48. Had there been no assault, there probably wouldn't have been a refugee problem. There's no reason for a refugee problem to have occurred, expulsions to have occurred, a dispossession, massive dispossession to occur.
These occurred as a result of war. Now, Norman has said that I said that transfer was inbuilt into Zionism in one way or another. And this is certainly true. In order to buy land, the Jews bought tracts of land on which some Arabs sometimes lived. Sometimes they bought tracts of land. which there weren't Arab villages, but sometimes they bought land on which there were Arabs.
And according to Ottoman law and the British, at least in the initial years of the British mandate, the law said that the people who bought the land could do what they liked with the people who didn't own the land, who were basically squatting on the land, which is the Arab tenant farmers, which is we're talking about a very small number actually of Arabs who were displaced as a result of land purchases
in the Ottoman period or the Mandate period. But there was dispossession in one way. They didn't possess the land, they didn't own it, but they were removed from the land. And this did happen in Zionism. And there's, if you like, an inevitability in Zionist ideology of buying tracts of land and starting to work it yourself and settle it with your own people and so on. That made sense.
But what we're really talking about is what happened in 47-48. And in 47-48, the Arabs started a war. And actually, people pay for their mistakes. And the Palestinians have never actually agreed to pay for their mistakes. They make mistakes. They attack. They suffer as a result. And we see something similar going on today in the Gaza Strip. They do something terrible. They kill 1,200 Jews.
They abduct 250 women and children and babies and old people and whatever. And then they start screaming, please save us from what we did because the Jews are counterattacking. And this is what happened then. And this is what's happening now. There's something fairly similar in the situation here. Expulsion, and this is important. Norman, you should pay attention to this. You didn't raise that.
Expulsion, transfer, whenever policy of the Zionist movement before 47, it doesn't exist in Zionist platforms of the various political parties, of the Zionist organization, of the Israeli state, of the Jewish agency. Nobody would have actually made it into policy because it was always a large minority. If there were people who wanted it, always a large minority of Jewish people
politicians and leaders would have said, no, this is immoral. We cannot start a state on the basis of an expulsion. So it was never adopted and actually was never adopted as policy, even in 48, even though Ben-Gurion wanted as few Arabs in the course of the war staying in the Jewish state after they attacked it.
He didn't want disloyal citizens staying there because they wouldn't have been loyal citizens. But this made sense in the war itself. But the movement itself and its political parties never accepted it. It's true that in 1937, when the British, as part of the proposal by the Peel Commission to divide the country into two states, one Arab, one Jewish, which the Arabs, of course, rejected.
Peel also recommended that the Arabs, most of the Arabs in the Jewish state to be, should be transferred, because otherwise, if they stayed and were disloyal to the emerging Jewish state, this would cause endless disturbances, warfare, killing, and so on.
So Ben-Gurion and Weizmann latched onto this proposal by the most famous democracy in the world, the British democracy, when they proposed the idea of transfer side by side with the idea of partition, because it made sense. And they said, well, if the British say so, we should also advocate it. But they never actually tried to pass it as Zionist policy.
And they fairly quickly stopped even talking about transfer after 1938.
By the Arabs, yes.
I'll respond to that and then a question for Norm to take into account, I think, when he answers Bennett. Because I am curious, obviously, I have fresher eyes on this and I'm a newcomer to this arena versus the three of you guys for sure.
A claim that gets brought up a lot has to do with the inevitability of transfer in Zionism or the idea that as soon as the Jews envisioned a state in Palestine, they knew that it would involve some mass transfer of population, perhaps a mass expulsion. I'm sure we'll talk about Plan Dalit or Plan D at some point.
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