Speaker unverified: belief

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…talk too. Can I ask you a very quick question? What do you think the ideal solution was on the Arab side from ’47? What would they have preferred? And what would’ve happened- Well, they were explicit. And then the second one, what would’ve happened if Jews would’ve lost the war in ’48? What do you think would’ve happened to the Israeli population, the Jewish population? I think the Palestinians and the Arabs were explicit that they wanted a unitary, I think, federal state, and they made their submissions to [inaudible 01:28:09], they made their appeals at the UN General Assembly. What do you mean by unitary and federal? I don’t get that. They wanted an Arab state. They wanted Palestine to be an Arab state. Yes. Yes. Put it simply. That word, unitary, federal, they wanted Palestine as an Arab and exclusively Arab state. That’s what they wanted. No, no, it wasn’t an exclusively Arab state. I think we have to distinguish between Palestinian and Arab opposition to a Jewish state in Palestine on the one hand, and Palestinian and Arab attitudes to Jewish existence in Palestine, and there’s a fundamental difference- Well, Husseini, the leader of the movement, said that all the Jews who had come since 1917, and that’s the majority of the Jews in Palestine in 1947, shouldn’t be there. Well, he did say- They shouldn’t be citizens and they shouldn’t be there. [inaudible 01:28:59]. The PLO charter said that in ’64. I’m not going to deny it. Of course, it’s true. I can understand the sentiment, but I think it’s wrong. Also, [inaudible 01:29:11] because you had the used the words earlier, that it was supremacy and exclusivity that the Zionist state- Well, I want to answer your question. Husseini did say that, and I’m sure there was a very substantial body of Palestinian Arab public opinion that endorsed that. But by the same token, I think a unitary Arab state, as you call it, or a Palestinian state, could have been established, with arrangements, with guarantees to ensure the security and rights of both communities. How that would work in detail had been discussed and proposed, but never resolved. And again, I think Jewish fears about what would’ve happened- A second Holocaust. Well, no- That was the Jewish fear. A second Holocaust. Well, that may well have been the Jewish fear. It was an unfounded Jewish fear. It was unfounded? Of course it was unfounded. What about like in ’48 and ’56 and- You really think that the Palestinians, had they won the war, were going to import ovens and crematoria from Germany and- I don’t know about that, but in almost every single Arab state where there were Jews living, after ’48, after ’56, after ’67, there were always pogroms, there were always flights from Jews from those countries to Israel afterwards. I don’t think it would be- tate where there were Jews living, after ’48, after ’56, after ’67, there were always pogroms, there were always flights from Jews from those countries to Israel afterwards. I don’t think it would be- I wouldn’t say there were always pogroms in every Arab state. I think there was flight of Arab Jews for multiple reasons, in some cases for precisely the reasons you say. If you look at the Jewish community in Algeria, for example, their flight had virtually nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict. The issue of Algerian Jews was that the French gave them citizenship during their colonial rule of Algeria, and they increasingly became identified with French rule, when Algeria became independent and all the French ended up leaving, out of fear, or out of disappointment, or out of whatever, the Jews were identified as French rather than Algerian. This is a bit of a red herring. There were pogroms in the Arab countries. In Bahrain even, where there’s almost no Jews, there was a pogrom in 1947. There was a pogrom in Aleppo in 1947. I’m not denying any of that history. There were killings of Jews in Iraq and Egypt in 1948/49. But 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. Look, without getting into the details, I think we can both agree that ultimately a clear majority of Arab Jews who believed that after having lived in these countries for centuries- Way before the Arabs arrived there. Way before the Arabs arrived in Iraq. … for centuries, if not millennia, came to the unfortunate conclusion that their situation had become untenable. I also think that we can both agree that this had never been an issue prior to Zionism and the emergence of the state of Israel. This isn’t true. There were pogroms prior to Zionism. Look, I’m not- Pogroms didn’t begin with Zionism in the Arab world. The issue is the point I raised, which is whether these communities had ever come to a collective conclusion that their position had become untenable in this part of the world. No, they were Arab Jews. 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 when you analyze the flight of Jewish people, and I’ve seen this, 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. 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 a selective critical analysis of the- rrounding 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 a selective critical analysis of the- Again, I’m a little uncomfortable always using the term Jewish here, because it wasn’t the Jews of England or the Soviet Jews. Well, I say Jewish because prior to ’48, saying Israeli- I think it’s useful to refer to Zionists before 1948 and Israelis after ’48. We don’t need to implicate Jews of all- Well, sure, but the Jewish people that were being attacked in Arab states weren’t Zionists. They were just Jews living there, right? Okay, I need to just comment on that. I was rereading Shlomo Ben-Ami’s last book, and he does at the end discuss at some length the whole issue of the refugee question bearing on the so-called peace process. And on the question of ’48 and the Arab immigration, if you’ll allow me, let me just quote him. “Israel is particularly fond of the awkwardly false symmetry she makes between the Palestinian refugee crisis and the forced immigration of 600,000 Jews from Arab countries following the creation of the state of Israel, as if it were ‘an unplanned exchange of populations.’. And then Mr Ben-Ami, for those of you who are listening, he was Israel’s former foreign minister, and he’s an influential historian in his own right, he says, “In fact, envoys from the Mossad and the Jewish Agency worked underground in Arab countries and Iran to encourage Jews to go to Israel. More importantly, for many Jews in Arab states, the very possibility of immigrating to Israel was the combination of millennial aspirations. It represented the consummation of a dream to take part in Israel’s resurgence as a nation.” So this idea that they were all expelled after 1948, that’s one area, Professor Morris, I defer to expertise. That’s one of my credos in life. I don’t know the Israeli literature. But as it’s been translated in English, there’s very little solid scholarship on what happened in 1948 in the Arab countries which caused the Jews to leave. Arab Jews. Arab Jews, right. But Shlomo Ben-Ami knows the literature. He knows the scholarship. He’s a historian. He comes from Tangiers. He’s from Morocco. [inaudible 01:36:10] from Iraq has written on this issue as well. And the Jews in the Arab lands were not pro-Zionists. They weren’t Zionists at all. Certainly [inaudible 01:36:18] family was anti-Zionist. And [inaudible 01:36:21], when he was interviewed by Marin Rappaport, on this question he said, “You simply cannot say that the Iraqi Jews were expelled. It’s just not true.” And he was speaking as an Iraqi Jew who left with his family in 1948. They were pushed out. They weren’t expelled. That’s probably the right phrase. They were pushed out. Well, I think it’s more complex than that. Sorry, I interrupted you.…

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