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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Killings of Jews in Iraq and Egypt in 1948-49. I'm not denying it. But the Arabs, the Jews basically fled the Arab states, not for multiple reasons. They fled because they felt that the governments there and the societies amid which they had lived for hundreds of years no longer wanted them.
Well, because untenable meant there was no alternative. But with the creation of Israel, there was an alternative, right? A place where they could go and not be discriminated against or live as second class citizens or be subject to Arab majority states.
I also think it's interesting that like when you analyze the flight of Jewish people, and I've seen this, that it wasn't just, I agree with you, it wasn't just a mass expulsion from all the Arab states. There were definitely push factors. There were also pull factors.
Now, I don't know how you guys feel about the Nakba, but when the analysis of the Nakba comes in, again, it's back to that, well, that was actually just a top-down expulsion. You know, the retreat of wealthy Arab people in the 30s didn't matter. Any of the messaging from the surrounding Arab states didn't matter.
It was just an expulsion from Jewish people or people running from their lives from Jewish massacres. Again, I feel like it's that selective critical analysis of the—
We don't need to implicate. Well, sure, but the Jewish people that were being attacked in Arab states weren't Zionists, they were just Jews living there, right?
And they wrote that the Jews in the Arab lands were not pro-Zionist. They weren't Zionist at all. Certainly Avishlaim's family was anti-Zionist.
That's probably the right phrase.
No, no, Stephen is right. There was a pull and a push mechanism in the departure of the Jews from the Arab lands post-48. But there was also a lot of push, a lot of push.
Yeah, I think that when you look at the behaviors of both parties in history,
In the time period around 48, or especially 48 and earlier, there's this assumption that there was this huge built-in mechanism of Zionism and that it was going to be inevitable from the inception of the first Zionist thought, I guess, that appeared in Herzl's mind that there would be a mass violent population transfer of Arab Palestinians out of what would become the Israeli state.
I understand that there are some quotes that we can find that maybe seem to possibly support an idea that looks close to that.
But I think when you actually consult the record of what happened, when you look at the populations, the massive populations that Israel was willing to accept within what would become their state borders, their nation borders, I just don't think that the historical record agrees with the idea that Zionists would have just never been okay living alongside Arab Palestinians.
But when you look at the other side, Arabs would out of hand reject literally any deal that apportioned any amount of that land for any state relating to Jewish people or the Israeli people. I think it was said even on the other end of the table that Arab Palestinians would have never accepted, the Arabs would have never accepted any Jewish state whatsoever.
So it's interesting that on the ideology part, where it's claimed that Zionists are people of exclusion and supremacy and expulsion, we can find that in diary entries, but we can find that expressed in very real terms on the Arab side, I think in all of their behavior around 48 and earlier, where the goal was the destruction of the Israeli state.
It would have been the dispossession of many Jewish people. It probably would have been the expulsion of a lot of them back to Europe. And I think that very clearly plays out in the difference between the actions of the Arabs versus some diary entries of some Jewish leaders.
One thing which stood out, and I think Moeen made this point, is that the Arabs had nothing to do with the Holocaust, but then the world community forced the Arabs to pay the price for the Holocaust. That's the traditional Arab argument. This is slightly distorting the reality.
The Arabs in the 1930s did their utmost to prevent Jewish immigration from Europe and reaching Palestine, which was the only safe haven available because America, Britain, France, nobody wanted Jews anywhere. And they were being persecuted in Central Europe and eventually would be massacred in large numbers.
So the Arab effort to pressure the British to prevent Jews reaching Palestine's safe shores contributed indirectly to the slaughter of many Jews in Europe because they couldn't get to anywhere and they couldn't get to Palestine because the Arabs were busy attacking Jews in Palestine and attacking the British to make sure they didn't allow Jews to escape. reach this safe haven. That's important.
The second thing is, of course, there's no point in belittling the fact that the Arab, Palestinian Arab national movement's leader, Husseini, worked for the Nazis in the 1940s. He got a salary from the German foreign ministry. He raised money troops among Muslims in Bosnia for the SS, and he broadcast to the Arab world calling for the murder of the Jews in the Middle East. This is what he did.
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