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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And the Arabs since then have been trying to whitewash Husseini's role. I'm not saying he was the instigator of the Holocaust, but he helped the Germans along in doing what they were doing and supported them in doing that. So this can't be removed from the fact that the Arabs, as you say, paid a price for the Holocaust, but they also participated in various ways in helping it happen.
I'll stick to the history, not the current propaganda. 1917. The Zionist movement began way before the British supported the Zionist movement for decades. In 1917, the British jumped in and issued the Balfour Declaration supporting the emergence of a Jewish national home in Palestine, which most people understood to mean eventual Jewish statehood in Palestine.
Most people understood that in Britain and among the Zionists and among the Arabs. But the British declared the Balfour Declaration, or issued the Balfour Declaration, not only because of imperial self-interest, and this is what you're basically saying. They had imperial interests, a buffer state which would protect the Suez Canal from the East. the British also were motivated by idealism.
This, incidentally, is how Balfour described the reasoning behind issuing the Declaration. He said the Western world, Western Christendom owes the Jews a great debt, both for giving the world and the West, if you like, social values as embodied in the Bible, social justice and all sorts of other things. And the Christian world owes the Jews because it persecuted them for 2,000 years.
This debt we're now beginning to repay with the 1917 declaration favoring Zionism. But it's also worth remembering that the Jews weren't proxies or attached to the British imperial endeavor. They were happy to receive British support in 1917. And then subsequently, when the British ruled Palestine for decades, 20, 30 years, but they weren't part of the British imperial design or mission.
They wanted a state for themselves. The Jews, happy to have the British support them, happy today to have the Americans support Israel. But it's not because we're stooges or extensions of American imperial interests. The British, incidentally, always described in Arab narratives of propaganda as consistent supporters of Zionism. They weren't.
The first British rulers in Palestine, 1917, 1920- Herbert Samuel. No, before Herbert Samuel. Samuel came in 1920. The British ruled there for three years previously, and most of the leaders, the British generals and so on who were in Palestine, were anti-Zionist. Subsequently, in the 20s and 30s, the British occasionally-
curbed Zionist immigration to Palestine, and in 1939 switched horses and supported the Arab national movement and not Zionism. They turned anti-Zionist and basically said, you Arabs will rule Palestine within the next 10 years. This is what we're giving you by limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine.
But the Arabs didn't actually understand what they were being given on the silver platter, Husseini again. And he said, no, no, we can't accept the British White Paper of May 1939, which had given the Arabs everything they wanted, basically, self-determination in an Arab majority state. So what I'm saying is the British...
at some point did support the Zionist enterprise, but at other points were less consistent in the support. In 1939, until 1948, when they didn't vote even for partition for Jewish statehood in Palestine in the UN resolution, they didn't support Zionism during the last decade of the mandate. It's worth remembering that.
Real quick, there's a question on that. Why did the British ever cap immigration then from Jews to that area at all?
We're talking now about... Sure, but I'm saying that if the whole goal was just to be an imperialist project, like there were terrorist attacks from Jewish... Yes, but I'll answer you.
Except they did turn anti-Zionist in 1939.
They were being shot off by... And maintained that Zionist... No, no, before they were being shot off, but maintained that anti-Zionist posture until 1948. Okay.
The Lech was an unimportant organization in the Yishuv. 300 people versus 30,000 belong to the Haganah. So it was not a very important organization. It's true before the Holocaust actually began, they wanted allies against the British where they could find them.
Why are you doing these things?
No, are you saying that? Forget statements. You like to quote things, but were they Nazis? Were the Lehi Nazis? That's what I'm asking.
Right. And what did the agreement say? They wanted arms against the British.
No, no, but the Lehi people didn't work in Berlin helping the Nazi regime. I mean, it's what the IRA wanted also. No, but this is what Haj Amin al-Husseini did. You know that he was an anti-Semite. You've probably read some of his works. It wasn't just anti-British. It was also anti-Semitic. They had a common ground with Hitler. It's as simple as that.
But the problem is you're saying I don't believe that.
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