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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There is one small diary entry in Herzl's vast... It's five volumes. Yeah, five volumes. There's one paragraph which actually mentions the idea of transfer. There are people who I think that Herzl was actually pointing to South America when he was talking about that.
The Jews were going to move to Argentina, and then they would try and buy out or buy off or spirit the penniless natives to make way for Jewish settlement. Maybe he wasn't even talking about the Arabs in that particular passage. That's the argument of some people. Maybe he was, but the point is... It has only one percent of the diary, which is devoted to this subject.
It's not a central idea in Herzl's thinking. What Herzl wanted, and this is what's important, not Rhodes. I don't think he was the model. Herzl wanted to create a liberal, democratic, Western state in Palestine for the Jews. That was the idea, not some...
Imperial enterprise serving some imperial master, which is what Rhodes was about, but to have a Jewish state which was modeled on the Western democracies in Palestine. And this incidentally was more or less what Weizmann and Ben-Gurion wanted. Ben-Gurion was more of a socialist, Weizmann was more of a liberal.
a westerner, but they wanted to establish a social democratic or liberal state in Palestine. And they both envisioned through most of the years of their activity that there would be an Arab minority in that Jewish state.
It's true that Ben-Gurion strived to have as small as possible an Arab minority in the Jewish state because he knew that if you want a Jewish majority state, that would be necessary. But it's not something which they were willing to translate into actual policy.
Not proxy. He wanted to establish a Jewish state which would be independent. To get that, he hoped that he would be able to garner support from major imperial powers.
Yeah, a couple of things. One, they would have rejected any. Two, a lot of that land given was in the Negev. It was pretty terrible land at the time. And then three, the land that would have been partitioned to Jews, I think would have been, I think I saw it was like 500,000, it would have been 500,000 Jews, 400,000 Arabs, and I think like 80,000 Bedouin would have been there.
So the state would have been divided pretty close to them.
Sure. I like this answer more than what I usually feel like I'm hearing when it comes to the Palestinian rejection of the 47th partition plan. Because sometimes I feel like a weird switch happens to where the Arabs in the area are actually presented as entirely pragmatic people who are simply doing a calculation and saying like, well, we're losing 55% of our land.
Jews are only maybe one third of the people here. And we've got 45. And now the math doesn't work, basically. But it wasn't a math problem. I think, like you said.
It was an ideology problem. No, it was a matter of principle. Yeah, ideologically driven, that they as a people have a right to or are entitled to this land that they've never actually had an independent state on, that they've never had even a guarantee of an independent state on, that they've never actually ruled a government on.
Of what would emerge from that territory, but not of the Palestinian.
But the territory itself was, but not of the Palestinian people to have a right or a guarantee to a government that would emerge from it.
The word exclusive, which you keep using, is nonsense. The state which Ben-Gurion envisioned would be a Jewish majority state, as they accepted the 1947 partition resolution, as Stephen said, that included 400,000 plus Arabs in a state which would have 500,000 Jews. So the idea of exclusivity wasn't anywhere in the air at all among the Zionist leaders in 47, 48.
They wanted a Jewish majority state, but were willing to accept a state which had 40% Arabs. That's one point. The second thing is that Palestinians may have regarded the land of Palestine as their homeland, but so did the Jews. It was the homeland of the Jews as well. The problem was the Arabs were unable and remain to this day unable to recognize that
For the Jews, that is their homeland as well. And the problem then is how do you share this homeland, either with one binational state or partitioned into two states? The problem is that the Arabs have always rejected both of these ideas. The homeland belongs to the Jews, as Jews feel, as much as it does, if not more, than for the Arabs.
I would say Zionists, not Jews.
I would say for the Jews, it's the Jewish people's homeland.
Real quick, I just want for both of you guys, because I haven't heard these questions answered, I really want these questions to be, I'm just so curious how to make sense of them.
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