Lyn Julius
Lyn Julius Interviews Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf on their book “The War of Return”
Lyn Julius - An Interview with Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf on Their Book, ‘The War of Return’
- Well, good evening from London. My name is Lyn Julius and I’m absolutely thrilled to be invited back on Lockdown University. And tonight I am equally delighted to be in the company of distinguished guests, Einat Wilf and Adi Schwartz, to discuss their highly-acclaimed book, “The War of Return,” which was published in 2020. I’ve got it here. Dr. Einat Wilf is a leading thinker on Israel Zionism, foreign policy, and education. She was a member of the Israeli parliament from 2010 to 2013 where she served as chair of the Education committee and a member of the influential Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee. She was foreign policy advisor to Shimon Peres, and she’s the author of seven books that explore key issues in Israeli societies. And the latest one is entitled “We Should All Be Zionists,” and it was published in 2022. Dr. Adi Schwartz is a researcher and author focusing on the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is a research fellow at the Misgav Institute and a postdoctoral fellow in the Ben Gurion University of the Negev. And both are joining me from Israel. So our event was planned some months ago, but in the light of the terrible events of the seventh October forcing Israel to go to war against Hamas, my conversation with Einat and Adi, two leading Israeli public intellectuals, could not be more timely. We shall discuss the book and later I shall be asking them to comment on the repercussions of the current war for Israel. Meanwhile, please do type any questions you may have in the Q&A box, and hopefully there will be an opportunity for our guests to answer them.
So the current perception is that the Palestinian leadership divides into two camps, the Islamists represented by Hamas, and the secular nationalists, represented by the P.A. or Fatah, or the PLO. There is no compromise with the first, the Islamists. They have a nihilistic and isolationist ideology. You cannot meet people halfway who want to kill you. But what about the so-called moderates of the Palestinian Authority? Can Israel do business with them? Already we have heard diplomats and politicians say that a military solution is not the answer, we need a political solution, peace based on a two-state solution. So my first question is for Einat, and what would you say to those who advocate a two-state solution?
- First, thank you for having us. I’ll take it in several directions. Broadly speaking, or in terms of the idea itself, there are two distinct peoples living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Certainly, for at least a century, the Jewish people, the Arabs, the Palestinian Arabs, I think that it is ultimately the best idea for each people to govern themselves in a separate political entity. I think the idea of self-determination, of people governing themselves, is a good idea, and certainly for my people, for the Jewish people, I want us to have our own state where we constitute a substantial majority. And for that, still, the best way to do is partition and to have two states. The caveat is, of course, that as a long time two-stater, what I discovered, especially beginning in 2000 when Palestinians walked away from a clear and distinct opportunity, and these are so-called the moderates at the time, Arafat, the PLO, Fatah. This happened again in 2008 with Abu Mazen, who’s still in control of the Palestinian Authority, is that every time they faced a clear and distinct opportunity to have their own state in the West Bank, in Gaza, with a capital in East Jerusalem, no settlements, ending the occupation, they have walked away and followed it with extreme violence and massacres. And what I’ve come to realise, and this is ultimately what the book is about, is that when it comes to the Palestinian goal, there is no extremists and moderates.
They actually are all incredibly united in their commitment that a sovereign state for the Jewish people in any border anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, is unacceptable. The only sense in which Fatah or the Palestinian Authority are moderate is that, especially as a result of their campaign of massacres during the years 2001, 2, 3, 4, which was misnamed the Second Intifada, but was really just a long campaign of brutal massacres of civilians. They realised that that level of violence has not served them well. So they have focused in the last 20 years more on trying to isolate Israel diplomatically and intellectually, and on campuses, and to promote economic boycotts, various traditional means, but less on violence. Part of it is also because Israel, as a result of its response to the massacres, is much more in control of the West Bank. So Israel is in a better position to prevent violence. But they don’t disagree with Hamas on the goal. There’s actually no Palestinian group, no Palestinian leader, who says clearly, “We recognise the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in this land. We understand the implications. It means that we don’t intend and we don’t have a right to settle in Israel,” in the name of what they call a right of return, which is neither a right nor return. “We only want to establish a state for ourselves in the West Bank of Gaza. We have absolutely no claims on Israel and its sovereign territory.” There are no Palestinian leaders or even a small NGO, for that matter, who say that. So there are no moderates in terms of the goal. There are just those who are more able to exercise violence and those who are less able to do so, or those who have come to the conclusion that it has not served the goal well, but it hasn’t led them to reassess the goal.
And can you explain what they mean by their right of return?
Certainly. A quick word. The broad process of the 20th century is the transition from multi-ethnic, multilingual empires, into nation-states based on the principle of self-determination for groups who share a sense of common history, ethnicity, sometimes background, religion, and language. That’s when they’re lucky, when they’re unlucky, the empire just draws some borders, throws in three ethnic groups and tells them, “You’re now a state,” and then they descend into civil war and dictatorship for the next 70 years. But when they’re lucky, they’re self-determined. They have a certain coherence of a people in the state. Now, this transition from multi-ethnic empires to nation-states has been a bloody one. It involved two world wars, numerous regional wars, civil wars, and it has been accompanied, as the empires disintegrated and new states were established, new borders were drawn. Basically you had tens of millions of refugees created as a result of those wars. The Middle East, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, is no different. And what is different is that, whereas in all other conflicts from that era, refugees who fled, typically, they would flee across newly-created borders to places that had a more similar ethnic composition to theirs. The message to all those tens of millions of refugees, Bulgarians, and Greeks, and Turks, and Poles, and Ukrainians, and Germans, and Hindus, and Muslims, was basically, “Look, this is tragic, this is tough, but you move on.” There was an understanding, globally, that in the most fundamental sense, there’s no going back. There’s no going back physically, and there’s no going back in time.
There was an understanding that if you go back, it’s going to be endless war. So you move forward. One exception, the Arabs of the land, as a result of the war of 1948, which the Arabs waged with the view that a Jewish state is unacceptable. Again, this is their persistent and permanent view. They fail to achieve their goal of no Jewish state, and as a result, there were refugees. And it’s important to say there were also a lot of Jewish refugees. About a quarter of the population of Jews became refugees, they were just absorbed by Israel. And so you don’t have them today saying they are refugees. You also had, of course, and this is your expertise, the Jews from the various Arab countries who, in complete revenge and in contradiction to the Arab claim that the Jews are not a people and that they have nothing against Jews, it’s only against Zionism, basically engaged in a complete ethnic cleansing of the Jewish people. And again, a vast majority of those Jews were absorbed by Israel, and they are not refugees.
In fact, the only difference between Europe in the 1930s, and the Arab world in the 1950s, that Israel existed. So Europe could have only had an ethnic cleansing of the Jews if Arab violence had not prevented Israel from emerging in the 1930s, when it was already ready to be independent. And we can see it because in the 1950s, when the Arabs engaged in similar ethnic cleansing like the Europeans, this time there was Israel. So the one place where the Jews could defend themselves, they were not ethnically cleansed. The Arab refugees from the war refused resettlement, and for a variety of reasons, some of them having to do with the Cold War, with the importance of oil, with violence, the West basically caved in. And the West agreed, unlike any other case of the time, complete contradiction, complete exception, to allow the Arab refugees, who by now become known as Palestinians, to become a singular people not absorbed into the surrounding, newly-created countries of Jordan, and Syria, and Lebanon, and Egypt, and Iraq, and to become a nation that is marked by the belief that they possess a right to settle inside Israel, what they call the right of return. They believe this right is superior to Israeli sovereignty, breaches Israeli sovereignty, and it is the mechanism by which they still hope to undo the war of 1948. The right of return, from the Palestinian perspective, was never innocent, it was always the means by which they hoped to continue the war of 1948. It’s actually the main mechanism by which they basically say, “As far as we’re concerned, the war of 1948 is not over, and we still expect to win it one day and to make the Jewish state, which should have never existed, disappear.”
Right. And this question is for you, Adi, the subtitle of your book is “How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace.” In what way has the refugee issue become an insuperable obstacle and why has the West never taken it seriously?
So just to continue, what Einat just said is that the Arab world, the Palestinians, but not only the Palestinians together with the rest of the Arab world, tried to avoid or to prevent the creation of the Jewish state in 1948, and continued to do so, continued to, they did not want to recognise Israel, and continued fighting it 67-73. And as we know, through these days, big portions of the Arab world still wage war against the state of Israel. So we can understand why the Arab world was adamant to keep the refugee problem alive. But the question, the very good question that you’re posing is, so why did the West collaborate with that? What was the interest of the West? So to understand this, we have to go back a little bit to the end of the 40s and the beginning of the 50s, which, as we all know, was the time of the Cold War. And the time of the Cold War, the main interest of the West, especially the United States of America, was to prevent Soviets, in the beginning, Stalinist, but later on… Control of the Middle East. So the idea was that the West must have very good relationship with Arab countries, with the Palestinians themselves, but more broadly with the Middle East, in order to prevent it from falling in the hands of the Soviet Union. You have to remember that the oil production was even more important than today. The transport of oil from the Gulf area through the Switz Canal… Relationship between the United States of America and the Arab countries was very important. Now, as we mentioned in the book, there were even negotiations. The Americans, very early in the 50s, understood that this is a no-brainer. They created a United Nations agency, which is called UNRRA. Beginning, it was a temporary agency which was supposed to work 18 months.
The idea was that in 18 months, the international community would be able to resettle, reintegrate, and offer new lives for these people. And as Einat just said before, move on. This is, by the way, what happened in Korea. In Korea there was a war between 1950 and 1953, by the way, a much more, with much more casualties, dead, wounded, larger number of refugees. And in a few years, by 1957, the refugee problem in Korea was over. Again, if you remember the Marshall Plan, United States of America invested large sums of money in Europe, which was certainly devastated after World War II. And as we know, western Europe was already talking of a miracle, right in the 50s. So they were optimistic. United States and western countries were optimistic about the Palestinians. They had a reason to think that in only 18 months they would be able to solve this problem. However, as Einat just mentioned, the only problem was that the Palestinians never wanted to actually be resettled. They never wanted to actually move on, because for them it was a tool to continue the war in Israel. So in the beginning it was called war politics that mentioned or caused the United States to continue and pour money on UNRRA. And this continued in the 50s and the 60s, we found so many cables running back and forth from Washington to Cairo, to Beirut, to Aman, saying, “Listen guys, nobody’s cooperating with us. The Arabs are not doing anything. They’re just using our money and nothing good comes out of it.”
And there was a political decision by the United States to say, “Okay, nothing good is going to happen out of UNRRA. We understand that we are not moving forward, but for political reasons, we don’t want to upset the Arab world.” Now, this is the beginning of UNRRA. This is how UNRRA became a negative force, a United Nation agency, which instead of taking care, resettling, improving the lives of Palestinians, then did everything that it could to perpetuate the problem, right? So from 750,000 refugees, registered refugees, that we had in 1949, we now have almost 6 million Palestinian refugees. Of course, this is the fourth or the fifth generation. We are not talking anymore about the original refugees because 95% of them don’t live anymore. And this is the product of UNRRA. So the West has done a very poor job in creating the infrastructure, or better, to create the circumstances which will help alleviating the problem and solving the problem. Instead, the creation of the problem and sustaining it, perpetuating it, makes solving the problem very difficult. And one more thing, which is very important for the Palestinians, or let me start otherwise. People in the West might think, or think that UNRRA and pouring money into the problem of the Palestinian refugees is a humanitarian issue. “Oh, look, they’re so poor. They need our money. They need education services, they need health services,” et cetera, et cetera. But this is a complete misunderstanding of the situation. For the Palestinians, the humanitarian issue is not important at all. For the Palestinians, the only thing which is important is the political aspect. For them, UNRRA and the refugee status, which means that the United Nations recognises them as refugees.
Now, what does it mean? By the way, if we go very specifically to the issues regarding the Gaza Strip, what does it mean when a baby is born in 2023, right now, as we speak, somewhere in the Gaza Strip, in Khan Yunis, and automatically, immediately receives a stamp by the United Nations, which is the international community, telling him, telling this baby and his entire family, for 75 years, “You are a refugee.” This is what’s happening. All Palestinians in Gaza automatically receive the status of refugee. Now, what does it mean? It means that this is not his home. It means that the international community recognises it, that the Khan Yunis, for example, is not his home. So let me ask the question, where is his home? Where does the international community think that this baby’s home is? Well, Palestinians know very well, and they say, right, they say it’s inside the state of Israel. It’s Ashkelon, it’s the Rehovot, it’s Beerseba, it’s Ashdod, it’s all the villages that they infiltrated, right? The territory of Israel, and massacred and raped people. And this is why they’re doing it, because in their minds, this is their land. So I think that the message that the international community, and to your question, how does the West obstruct the way of peace, or the path to peace, is exactly this, by conveying a very twisted and unproductive message telling the Palestinians, “Well, you know what? We actually kind of support your view. We support your vision that the state of Israel should not exist because one day you’re supposed to go there and return there.” And what we are suggesting is that, to put an end to all this, we are suggesting to send a complete reversal of the message, sending a clear message that that’s it. Whoever lives now in Gaza will stay in Gaza. He is no going back anywhere, move on. Just as Einat said, move on. We can help you. We can build your life. You can build your life in the Gaza Strip, but not inside of the state of Israel.
Right. And there’s always been this tendency, hasn’t there? That when they say “Yes, we believe in two states,” they always assume that it includes the right of return. And this sort of, they’ve been, as you say in your book, you know, they’ve never been shy of actually stating their goal, but the West has never really taken it as more than a rhetoric. Is that correct? Would you say, Einat?
Certainly that’s… Let’s say this, in the 1990s, when there was this whole global euphoria, the Soviet Union had just collapsed, apartheid in South Africa came to an end, and the Good Friday Agreement was signed in Northern Ireland. One could be, I think, excused for believing that the Palestinians had finally moved on because everyone is moving on. And that the whole notion of refugees and the right of return is a bargaining chip, okay? The moment that they’ll have a state, they will bargain away this whole right of return thing in order to actually have a state, freedom, independence, end of the occupation. But what we saw is that, when they faced that choice, and ultimately people’s characters, as well as national characters, are determined by the choices you make, by the decisions you make. So when they faced the choice, bargain away this idea of return, which really means accept the Jewish state, or keep fighting. What they did is that they bargained away the state they could have had, in order to keep fighting for return and from the river to the sea. So I think in the 90s you could have believed that it’s a bargaining chip, but by now it’s clearly not a bargaining chip. They have faced the choice again and again, and have repeated the same choice again and again, better to keep fighting for all of it rather than have a state on part of the land, if the Jews get to keep the other part. And what you said is exactly that. During all those years when Palestinians said, “We support a two-state solution,” and nobody actually bothered to ask them, but if you asked them about the idea of return, they would tell you, “Oh, that’s sacred, that’s holy, that’s non-negotiable. That belongs to every individual in perpetuity.” They made up a whole theology around that. So if you put two and two together, the two states they only ever imagined was the Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, and another Palestinian state to replace Israel through the mechanism of return. There was actually never, in the last century, a moment when Palestinian leaders or their people ever had a vision of peace where there’s a Jewish state anywhere.
Mm-hmm, right. And of course, UNRRA is the main obstacle to the resettlement of the Palestinian refugees. Surely, you advocate the dismantlement of UNRRA so that the Palestinians no longer become refugees in perpetuity. But what is the alternative, Einat? If it is resettlement in Arab countries, the prospects don’t seem to be very great. We saw just recently that Egypt was not even willing to open its borders to Palestinians displaced from northern Gaza.
The good news is that even the refugee issue, the whole idea of return, is symbolically the biggest issue for the Palestinians. It actually defines the Palestinian ethos. The idea to negate the Jewish state, to return, to be a perpetual refugee, is the core of the Palestinian identity. But that’s on the symbolic level. On the practical level, almost no Palestinians are refugees, so there’s no need for resettlement. About 40% of them live in the West Bank and Gaza. So that’s it. Where they are is where they need to stay. They just need to accept that that’s where they need to stay. One of the reasons that Gaza is such a hotbed of terrorism, as Adi said, is because the vast majority of the people who live in Gaza continue to believe, after five generations, that Gaza is a temporary place that they inhabit as a launchpad for which to liberate Palestine from the river to the sea. So you don’t, the people of Gaza don’t need to resettle anywhere. They just need to finally accept that Gaza is their home and that’s where they’ll stay. The same for the West Bank. In Jordan, another 40%, they’re citizens of Jordan. They are registered as refugees. Nowhere in the world are citizens of a country, born in that country, never displaced by war, into the fifth generation, are refugees from some other country. So there’s no need to do anything with the other 40% that live in Jordan.
They’re there, they’re Jordanian citizens. There’s no need to do anything. The other million or so are still registered in Syria and Lebanon, but we know from recent data, most of them have left and they’ve become citizens of European countries, other places. My favourite refugee is the father, the Playboy, the multimillionaire, the American citizen, father of supermodels Gigi and Bella Hadid. It’s not exactly what you think of when you think of a refugee, and yet he still registered on the books because he was born in Syria and was registered in UNRRA. And UNRRA never takes anyone off the books, even if they become a multimillionaire citizen of the United States. So what we’re really left with is about 250,000 who live in Lebanon and Syria, the vast majority of them by now are not the original refugees. So, under international standards, they would be classified as stateless because Syria and Lebanon refused to give them citizenship, but they’re not refugees. So you have about 250,000 stateless people from whom maybe 10, 20, 30,000 are the original refugees, people who really escaped war and crossed the border. That’s it. 250,000 are numbers that the real UN agency for refugees, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, knows to deal with. So it finds resettlement in other countries or helps them settle in place. But the actual refugee problem is very small. The symbolic issue is huge because it is derivative of the Palestinian denial of the Jewish right to self-determination. But in terms of practically solving the issue, that’s actually not a problem.
Right. Good to hear it. Okay, Adi, you talk about how every refugee problem in the last century has been solved. For instance, 10 million Germans fled Eastern Europe, and Chinese fled to Hong Kong, and 14 million refugees were created as a result of the Indian-Pakistan partition in 1947. And you do refer to Jews from Arab countries, 850,000 of them who fled the Arab world. More Jews made refugees than Palestinians. There was a defacto exchange of populations. So why does this argument not figure more prominently in your book? I know this is an issue as close to your heart as it is to mine.
So first of all, it would probably be the subject of one of my next books. But I think that… Of course, it’s completely true. And I think that there are many issues which are very relevant to the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But there are a few differences which I think are important. And what happened in 1948, 1949, was a war. The Arabs of Palestine, the Palestinians, which were later called, opened a war against the state of Israel. Israel was recognised, and there was a United Nations resolution recognising or commending the creation of a Jewish state. And the Arabs together with the Arabs of Palestine rejected that and opened up a war. So what we call today, the Palestinian refugee problem, is a result of war which the Palestinians themselves opened, right? And whereas the situation of Jews from Arab countries, in my view, is very different. They were very peaceful citizens, they didn’t harm anyone, they didn’t open a war. On the contrary, they were a minority in Arab countries, in Iraq, in Egypt, in many other places, Syria, et cetera, et cetera, Libya. And they were attacked by the majority, whether the government or the population. So I think the circumstances are very different. And I think in a way it doesn’t make… It doesn’t make justice to the Jews themselves, who were victims of, you know, they didn’t open a war, they didn’t reject any UN resolution.
So I don’t think that it’s very good to compare the situation. It is true that when you look at the overall situation, there was indeed an exchange of population in which the Palestinians left Jewish areas. And in the process of immigration, or Aliyah, as we call it in Israel, Jews from our countries arrived to Israel. But there’s a difference between the exodus, if you want, of Jews from Arab countries. And I think it doesn’t make them enough justice to, you know, put them all together and say that it’s some kind, you know, quid pro quo, or something that happens simultaneously. I don’t think it does justice to the Jews.
But can it not help to say that these Jews who are, you know, genuine refugees in the sense that they can’t go back to their original countries, that we can’t we say the same for the Palestinian refugees and say they can’t go back to their original countries. So let’s call it quit and solve the refugee problem that way.1396384413963844
Yeah. So, well, I’ll explain where I think the issue of Jews from Arab countries is extremely important. And that also goes to present day where we hear, for the last decade or so, perhaps even more, and certainly in these days, that actually Israel is a colonialist, imperialist, a whatever, foreign entity that has been somehow planted into the Middle East on the guns or the, you know, the British Empire, which put the Jews there. The Jews are white, the Jews are European. They brought with them the problem of antisemitism from Christian Europe. And you can hear it so many times that, “You know what, go back to Russia, go back to Poland,” right? This is not our problem. You had the Holocaust in Germany or in Europe, but why do we have to pay the price for the problems Ashkenazi Jews had in Europe? This is a very, very strong case that the Palestine… Not very strong, but this is how the Palestinians put it. And actually, when you think of it, half of the population of the state of Israel does not come from Europe. They come from the Middle East, from North Africa, what we call Africa and Asia, again, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, all the countries that we know are here in the region. Now, these communities, in some cases, are here much before Islam.
They go back, you know, 2,500 years. But 1,000 years before Mohammed came out of the Arabian Peninsula, so in what sense? I don’t think, by the way, that Ashkenazi Jews are foreign as well, because I think that the state or the land of Israel is the ancestral land of all the Jews. But let’s… Even if you take out the Ashkenazi Jews, are Jews who came to Tel Aviv from Aleppo, or from Baghdad, or from Cairo, to that matter, or from Sanah, are they imperialists? Are they colonialists people who ran away, people who were kicked out from Egypt or from Iran. Can they be imperialists? Can they be colonialists? And if you go into the issue of… I know Americans like that, it’s not a very Israeli issue, but I know that Americans are obsessed with the issue of race. They’re very much obsessed with the issue of who is white and who is brown and who is black. This is a very American terminology. It has nothing to do with of Israel.
Yeah.
So into that brown issue. So Yemeni Jews, who are very brown, if you look at their complexion, so are they colonialists when they’re in Israel?
Yeah.
So I think that this is where it’s extremely important to highlight the fact that half of this population were actually kicked out of Israel. And another question, where they were supposed to go? So when they-
Exactly.
Had Iraq in 1950 or 1951, where? To go to Germany as well, to go to Poland as well?
I know it’s a very powerful argument, as you say. I’d like to actually turn to current events and ask you both about how you see the day after in Gaza, once Israel has achieved victory. And in that, I was very interested to see that, what you tweeted the other day, you said the tragedy of the Palestinian people is that they’ve been made to serve as the receptacle of the world’s failed ideologies, from Nazism to Soviet communism, from Jihad and Iranian Islamism to western left-wing extremism. Can you elaborate a bit about that and the importance of ideology?
Certainly, I think it’s very clear that if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were ever just the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, just two groups on a small piece of land, duking it out again in the process of a receding empire, you would’ve had, I mean, that conflict was over in April, 1948. At this point, the Jews and Arabs are pretty much settled. Blinds are set. It’s a minor, it’s a small conflict, but of course it never is contained at that level because Ruth Weiss once said that, to understand antisemitism, well, you need to understand its usefulness as the political organisation against the Jews. That what antisemitism enables is to create political coalitions that otherwise would not hold together if it were not for the ability to redirect anger towards the Jews. And this is why a failed ideologies latch onto the Jews. Because if you’re not a failure, you don’t need to blame anything on the Jews, you’re fine. If you are a successful society, you’re also likely to be one that is welcoming to Jews. Failed societies need to redirect the anger of their people away from their failures and the Jews are the historical scapegoat. So it’s not a coincidence that all these failed ideologies from Nazism to Soviet communism, to pan-Arabism to the, both the Sunni and the Shia Jihadism, to now the Wokes, the left-wing extremism, they’re all failures. And their only way of diverting attention from their failure has been, historically, to scapegoat the Jews. Now, the Palestinians, who were the people that were on the front lines of being against the establishment of the Jewish state, were just too useful for all these failed ideologies. And you had essentially a kind of synergy between the Palestinian or the Arab desire to prevent a Jewish state, and all these broadly failed ideologies that latched onto the Palestinians as part of their global struggle, ultimately extending the conflict generation after generation. So a conflict that was small in scope and small in territory, and could have been over fairly quickly became this theological existential struggle because it was about the Jews.
So how do you envisage a sort of programme of denazification or… I mean, what do you think should happen once Hamas is defeated?
Certainly. So my answer to the question “Who should rule Gaza?” is I say, I’m not asking who, I’m asking what. Because my question is, what are the ideas? What is the ideology? What is the programme of those who rule Gaza? And that’s the reason also that neither Adi nor I, I mean, we were, of course, surprised and devastated by the scale of October 7th, by the brutality. But neither Adi nor me were ever surprised by the intention. I mean, we were the ones who, for years, kept on going to Israeli authorities and telling them, you know, “As long as the people in Gaza want to liberate Palestine from the river to the sea, every dollar that goes to Gaza will go into turning Gaza into a war machine.” We published an essay five years ago, saying, you know, “Any money that goes into Gaza is going to make Gaza into a war machine because they want Palestine from the river to the sea.” They want return, they’re actually not interested in using global aid in order to turn Gaza into this prosperous place. So this means that, before anyone can rule Gaza, they need to have different ideas. And that’s where what you talked about denazification. I’m also studying now the case of Japan after World War II. Those were some pretty intense, harsh, and I would say visionary programmes.
Because, I mean, what’s quite remarkable is to understand that the allies, after World War II, they actually had a positive radical vision for Germany and Japan. You know, they looked at all the devastation and they said those could become peace-loving nations. That will be pillars of a peaceful world order. How crazy is that, right? I mean, think of what Nazi Germany did, think of what Imperial Japan did, and you have the allies saying, “No, those could become peaceful countries.” So they had a radical positive vision, and they were actually very intense and very thorough in carrying it through. And my argument is that we need something of that scale, of that level. And Adi and I are currently talking about it. And the problem is that we recognise that, you know, unlike the case of Japan and Germany, the Palestinians have a lot of allies. They’re very useful for a lot of failed ideologies. We’re seeing how global woke is exhilarated by what’s going on right now. They’re latching onto that. So we understand that we are a bit more alone than the allies after World War II, but still, I still insist that this should be the plan, if for no other reason that nothing else will do. I mean it, we just can’t, we can’t allow anyone that believes that Gaza should be a launching pad to liberate Palestine, to rule Gaza. I mean, it’s just, we can’t have that happen again. So I would be super harsh. I mean, I call it the cruel to be kind. I would make every dollar, every sack of rice, for example, once the war is over, people who are now in southern Gaza, they want to go back to the north. I believe that every such movement should be dependent on the person themselves, the Palestinian themselves, signing a declaration, a video declaration, saying, “By returning to Northern Gaza, I hereby declare that I understand that I’m not a refugee from Palestine. Gaza is my home. I don’t have a right of return. I only want to invest and build Gaza for its inhabitants. I recognise the right of the Jewish people to self-determination. I want to live next to the Jewish state of Israel, and not instead of it.” And only once they sign and declare it in their face in a video, can they move up north. And only once we begin to have leaders and organisations that begin to say that on a substantial scale, they can rule Gaza. But the question is not who, the question is what,
Gosh, Adi, would you agree with that? And perhaps you could ask also another question I have, which is about the Arab Street. The Arab Street seems to have come to the streets of London, of Berlin, of Montreal. How can we deal with this sort of shocking lack of sympathy with Israel in the West, given that the students of today will be the leaders of tomorrow?
Well, I think that as we just talked a little bit before we started the recording, and this is perhaps optimistic, that perhaps there is, sorry, a silent majority who perhaps we don’t see on the streets, but perhaps, you know, looks at the TV and sees all the atrocities, and is telling to himself, “This is not right. We know where we are, we know who’s the good guy here, and we know who’s the bad guy.” So I hope there is a silent majority who is still rational and still, you know, people you can talk to. It is true that the question is when and what should happen for this silent majority to go out and make himself more vocal? And, you know, some kind of rein in everything that we see. I’ll give you an example. People are walking in the streets of London and shouting, “Global Intifada, from the river to the sea.” And all these slogans even, you know, “Kill the Jews,” which are more explicit. And then you open up the press, or you watch it, the Sky News or the BBC, and you see, “Well, these were peaceful, largely peaceful,” as they say, “Largely peaceful demonstration.” No, these are not peaceful demonstrations. When you say “From the river to the sea,” you have to understand what does that mean, It means that Einat, for example, and Adi, which are right now talking to you, will not have their own state, will be subjects of a Muslim, Palestinian state.
Einat is a woman, and I hope everybody here knows what is the, you know, status of women in most Arab countries. I, as a Jew, both of us as Jews, will have the same status as Jews had under Muslim rule for more than 1,000 years. This is not something that we are going to accept, right? And this is not something that should be allowed to walk in the streets of London, or Paris, or Berlin. This is simply not something that you should allow. And I saw today that someone was asking, “Would it be acceptable for the white people in South Africa to shout, you know, that? ‘From the river to the sea, we’ll have just this country for the white.” No, it’s not. So at the same time, “From the river to the sea,” meaning wiping out the Jewish state, should be unacceptable. Again, the question is, when this will be more understood for the silent majority of the British, and when and how are they going to react? My hope is that it happens sooner than later. Because one more thing that has to be understood is that just as Einat said, this wave of Palestinianism, or whatever you want to call it, rides on very failed ideologies. Wokeism won’t bring anything good to Britain. Nothing good will happen to Britain from this ideology. And as Elie Wiesel, I think, once said, “What starts with the Jews, never ends with the Jews.” So you have to understand that this is a real threat to the entire Western, and specifically British or American civilizations. the entire disdain, what you see, of the desecration of statues in America, of Benjamin Franklin or George Washington, and in the United Kingdom as well, veterans of of World War I and World War II. These are very basic, I think, notions of the British heritage, and coming out against them so clearly. I think a British reaction must be coming, and I hope sooner than later.
Einat, would you agree with that?
With which part, I mean…
I mean, what can we do about this massive wave of sympathy or antipathy, I should say, against Israel in the West?
So we need to understand where it’s coming from. It’s, you know, when the US Secretary General said that October 7th did not happen in a vacuum, I was like, “Hell yeah, that’s true. It’s just not what he said.”
Not his version, yeah.
Not his version of not… So one aspect is what Adi and I discussed so far, is the whole Palestinian negation of Jewish self-determination, and the decades of the building of an entire people around the idea that a Jewish state should not exist. But another aspect of October 7th did not happen in a vacuum is that, for decades now, we’ve had, into the west, the insertion of the, historically, the Soviet strategy of what I call the placard strategy. Because you see it on placards in anti-Israel demonstrations, where Israel, Zionism, and the star of David, are placed on one side of the placard, then you have an equation sign. And then on the other side of the placard, you just have a litany of words that are supposedly chosen because they reflect reality, which of course they don’t. They’re actually chosen because they connote evil. And the way that the placard strategy works is that it creates a refrain. The placard strategy doesn’t only work in demonstrations, it’s in the United Nations. “Zionism is racism, colonialism.” It also works in the media, you know, you see it all over social media, give an anti-Israel speaker 30 seconds, they will manage to say colonialism, apartheid, genocide, regardless of the question. And it’s a strategy that, through repetition, creates a refrain globally, that equates Israel, Zionism, and the star of David with evil. And the thing is this, once you establish that something is evil, then do you negotiate with evil? Do you divide the land with evil?
Do you engage in diplomatic relations with evil? No, you eradicate evil and you do it by any means. So, once a whole generation, if not two, has been subject to this strategy of equating Israel and Zionism with all that is evil. Once you have October 7th, the immediate response is, “They had it coming, the Jews had it coming. I mean, what do they expect? They’re evil.” And that’s why you had responses like, “What did you think decolonization is?” So those are this is why it didn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s not a question of sympathy. You know, when people tell me civilians are being killed, and the reason that I find it hard to take these claims seriously is just that they never appeared anywhere else. The civilian toll in this war, I’ve been reading up on it, civilian ratios of deaths in other wars are nine to one. Israel’s wars are always lower than that. Even this one, which is brutal, is still lower. Just that no one reports how many are Hamas competent. But if you look at the fighting-age males, and as the ratio of the total deaths, the ratio in Israel, again, is much lower than in other wars. Israel makes special efforts to ensure that it’s lower.
So when people tell me that all this outbreak of demonstrations is because of civilian deaths, I find it very, very, very hard to take it seriously in its face value, simply because you didn’t see it in any other war in context where there were both, the ratio of civilian death, was much worse, and the actual numbers of deaths were much worse, and you just didn’t see it. Yemen has been a disaster, Congo has been a disaster. Syria, I mean, there are places that have been a disaster forever and you don’t see this response. So I just, I mean, they’re pretending, this is the pretend argument, but it’s not the real argument. What’s really happening is this outburst of exhilaration after years of being told that Israel and Zionism are evil. They can now celebrate those people getting what was coming to them.
Q&A and Comments:
- Right. Well, I’m looking at the questions here, and I think you’ve already answered the one about the placard strategy. I’d rather leave aside the one about Benjamin Netanyahu after the war, 'Cause I think that probably deserves another hour.
Q: Barry Epstein asks, “Why don’t the Arab countries around Israel take in the Palestinians?”
A: I think you’ve more or less answered that, but perhaps we should ask why the European countries and South Africa take in the refugees as well. What would you say to that?
Well, I think that first of all, they’re not really crazy. And second, I would say that, again, it goes very well with what Einat just said. The care here is not really about what happens to the Palestinians. When Europeans attack Israel and say, “Oh my God, look at what happens to the Palestinians, et cetera, et cetera.” It’s not because they really worry about the Palestinians. It’s not the issue itself. It’s protects to say, “Oh, we knew that the Israelis are evil, Israelis are bad, Israelis are Nazi, genocidal,” whatever. So there’s no reason for them, that’s not the point. The point is not to alleviate or to take in Palestinians. The point here is to point a finger towards Israel and say, “Oh, they’re so bad.” And that’s perhaps, you know, it makes us, perhaps, less, you know, guilty of what happened to the Jews all along the history. So they’re not really trying to help the Palestinians. They’re more interested in accusing Israel, and this is the reason why they don’t really take in any refugees.
Right, yeah. Einat, would you like to-
Yeah, no. I agree, and you are also saying, again, the issue is not the people, the issue is the ideology. So when, first of all, Palestinians across the Arab world have always been a destabilising force. They’ve been a destabilising force in Jordan, which is why they threw them out. And they’ve been a destabilising force in Lebanon, which is why the country is essentially non-existent at this point, after civil war of decades. So most countries just know better. And we’re seeing it now. We’re seeing it in western capitals. You know, you see the difference between the pro-Palestinian demonstrations and the Jewish ones. The pro-Israel ones. The pro-Israel ones that are, like, quiet, and the Jews sing, and there’s no masks. And the pro-Palestinian ones, you know, often turn violent. They always have anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, anti-Jewish signs, as I always say, it’s a feature, it’s not a bug. They always make it as if it’s by coincidence. “We just don’t know how this anti-Semitism entered into our demonstrations, boo, such a surprise.” It’s like, I mean, it’s inherent to your ideology, what did you expect? So all those countries kind of understand that they don’t want to import more of that. But also, as Adi said, it’s not the purpose. The purpose has never been about alleviating Palestinian suffering. It was always about the usefulness of the Palestinian struggle against the Jewish people. That’s the only reason it ever received so much global interest and support.
Right. Well, there’ve been quite a few questions there. I don’t think we’ll have time to actually pose them because we are sort of running out of time. So unless there’s one or two you would really like to answer…
I’m not saying I can’t follow everything. So… I know there’s something-
I want to make a point perhaps, I think it’s important because, for those who really care or, you know, look at the TV and see actually babies or Palestinian babies, you know, which are killed, or women or civilians, et cetera. So I think again, you have to put it into the more broader context. And again, I think the examples of Japan, or of Germany and World War II, are very good. Because the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. There was a lot of loss of civilian life in World War II. But in a way the destruction or the surrender of the Japanese, was the thing that offered the chance for the next generation of Japanese babies. So in a way, if you want to create a better future for both, by the way, Japanese babies, but also Korean and Chinese babies, all those people who suffered under Japan during World War II. So I think the balance looks a little bit different, right? I’m not in the business of comparing babies now in the future generations, but you have to look at it in a broader context. If you want to make our region a better area, prosperous, peaceful area, then you have to think also about the future. And for the sake of the future, there has to be a complete surrender of the current leadership and everything which is associated with it. And B, to open up the future for a different ideology, for a different set of values. And then the next generations of babies, of Palestinian babies, will have a much better chance to live better lives. So I think this is something which sometimes people miss in the entire story.
And one more thing I want to mention, because I think that people who, you know, watch the news, even over the 20 years, the last 20 years, of what’s happening in the Middle East, everything might seem, you know, incomprehensible or isolated cases. Okay, all of a sudden you have this outburst of violence in 7th of October, and then you have settlements, and then you have refugees, and you have Hamas. So nothing is understood, right? Everything seems isolated or incomprehensible. But I think that only when you take into consideration, only when you put in the understanding that the Palestinians were never, or at least until now, were never about actually committed to peace next to Israel, but only to creating the state instead of the state of Israel. I think that all the missing pieces fall in the right place because you start to understand the whole narrative, everything makes sense. They rejected all peace proposals. Even now, I just seen today a new survey of how many people support Hamas. Even today, after the atrocities of 7th of October and what’s happening currently in Gaza, there are more people who support Hamas in the West Bank. So they actually look at everything-
Adi! Adi! I was saying it’s not even today, it’s actually thanks to the atrocities, Hamas has more support.
No, I’m just, yeah, I understand. But I’m just saying for the outside observer, you know, who might be bewildered. So they look at what’s happening in Gaza, right? They see the abduction of children, of toddlers, the raping of women, and they say, “Oh, I quite like it, that looks quite good.” So this just goes to show you the level of, or the enormity of the problem that we are facing. That was my last remark.
Okay, well, I think, for all those who would like to know more about this subject, I can only recommend the book, which is absolutely brilliant, has to be read by everyone who’s interested in the Arab-Israeli conflict, especially people who work for UNRRA, and the EU, and the UN. And I know you’ve been going around making presentations to all these people, and I do hope that you get somewhere with them. So it’s been absolutely fascinating talking to you. Thank you very much for joining us, and I wish you all the best. May we have good news in Israel, and keep safe, and thank you, everybody, for joining us.