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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The issue that I run into is while you can find quotes from leaders, while you can find maybe desires expressed in diaries, I feel like it's hard to truly ever know if there would have been mass transfer in the face of Arab peace because I feel like every time there was a huge deal on the table that would have had a sizable Jewish and Arab population living together, the Arabs would reject it out of hand.
So, for instance, when we say that transfer was inevitable, when we say that Zionists would have never accepted, you know, a sizable Arab population, how do you explain the acceptance of the 47 partition plan that would have had a huge Arab population living in the Jewish state?
Is your contention that after the acceptance of that, after the establishment of that state, that Jews would have slowly started to expel all of these Arab citizens from their country? Or how do you explain that in Lusan, a couple years later, that Israel was willing to formally annex the Gaza Strip and make 200,000 or so people? those citizens.
But I'm just curious, how do we get this idea of Zionism always means mass transfer when there were times, at least early on in the history of Israel and a little bit before it, where Israel would have accepted a state that would have had a massive Arab population in it? Yeah, is your idea that they would have just slowly expelled them afterwards? Is that question to me or Norm? Either one.
I'm just curious for the incorporation of the answer, yeah.
Yeah, but I didn't say it was central to the Zionist experimental experience. You're saying centrality. I never said it was central. I said it was there, the idea.
Whereas Benny's saying it's a part of the,
Fine. I know what you're saying. It wasn't policy.
Let me respond. Look, you've said it a number of times that the Arabs from fairly early on in the conflict from the 1890s or the early 1900s said the Jews intend to expel us. This doesn't mean that it's true. It means that some Arabs said this, maybe believing it was true, maybe using it as a political instrument to gain support to mobilize Arabs against the Zionist experiment.
But the fact is, transfer did not occur before 1947. And Arabs later said, and since then, have said that the Jews want to build a third temple on the Temple Mount. as if that's what really the mainstream of Zionism has always wanted and always strived for. But this is nonsense.
It's something that Husseini used to use as a way to mobilize masses for the cause, using religion as the way to get them to join him. The fact that Arabs said that the Zionists want to dispossess us doesn't mean it's true. It just means that some Arabs thought that and maybe said it sincerely and maybe insincerely.
A major Zionist leader.
Deeply entrenched, I never wrote. Well, I'm not sure. It's something you just invented. Inevitable and inbuilt. Let me concede something. The idea of transfer was there. Israel Zangvill, a British Zionist, talked about it early on in the century. Even Herzl in some way talked about transferring population.
The Zionist movement up to 1948, Zionist ideology was central to the whole Zionist experience, the whole enterprise up to 1948. And I think Zionist ideology was also important in the first decades of Israel's existence. Slowly the hold of Zionism, if you like, like Bolshevism, held the Soviet Union gradually faded.
And a lot of Israelis today think in terms of individual success and then the capitalism and all sorts of things which are nothing to do with Zionism. But Zionism was very important. But what I'm saying is that the idea of transfer wasn't the core of Zionism. The idea of Zionism was to save the Jews who had been vastly persecuted
in Eastern Europe and incidentally in the Arab world, the Muslim world for centuries, and eventually ending up with the Holocaust, the idea of Zionism was to save the Jewish people by establishing a state or re-establishing a Jewish state on the ancient Jewish homeland. which is something the Arabs today even deny, that there were Jews in Palestine or the land of Israel 2,000 years ago.
Arafat famously said, what temple was there on Temple Mount? Maybe it was in Nablus, which of course is nonsense. They had a strong connection for thousands of years to the land to which they wanted to return and returned there. They found that on the land lived hundreds of thousands of Arabs.
And the question was how to accommodate the vision of a Jewish state in Palestine alongside the existence of these Arab masses living on, who were indigenous, in fact. to the land by that stage. And the idea of partition, because they couldn't live together because the Arabs didn't want to live together with the Jews.
And I think the Jews also didn't want to live together in one state with Arabs in general. The idea of partition was the thing which... The Zionists accepted, okay, we can only get a small part of Palestine. The Arabs will get in 37, most of Palestine. In 1947, the ratios were changed, but we can live side by side with each other in a partitioned Palestine. And this was the essence of it.
The idea of transfer... It was there, but it was never adopted as policy. But in 1947-48, the Arabs attacked, trying to destroy essentially the Jewish, the Zionist enterprise and the emerging Jewish state. And the reaction was a transfer in some way, not as policy, but this is what happened on the battlefield. And this is also what Ben-Gurion at some point began to want as well.
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