Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…quote it at length, but I recognized that would be taking too much time. So I asked a young friend, Jamie Stern-Weiner to edit it and just get the essence of what Foreign Minister Gromyko had to say. ” During the last war,” Gromyko said, “The Jewish people underwent exceptional sorrow and suffering. Without any exaggeration, this sorrow and suffering are indescribable. Hundreds of thousands of Jews are wandering about in various countries of Europe in search of means of existence and in search of shelter. The United Nations cannot and must not regard this situation with indifference. Past experience, particularly during the Second World War, shows that no Western European state was able to provide adequate assistance for the Jewish people in defending its rights and its very existence from the violence of the Hitlerites and their allies. This is an unpleasant fact. But unfortunately, like all other facts, it must be admitted.” Gromyko went on to say, in principle, he supports one state, or the Soviet Union supports one state. But he said, ” If relations between the Jewish and Arab populations of Palestine proved to be so bad that would be impossible to reconcile them and to ensure the peaceful coexistence of the Arabs and the Jews, the Soviet Union would support two states. I personally am not convinced that the two states would have been unsustainable in the long term if, and this is big if, the Zionist movement had been faithful to the position that proclaimed during the UNSCOP public hearings.” At the time Ben-Gurion testified, “I want to express what we mean by a Jewish state. We mean by a Jewish state, simply a state where the majority of the people are Jews, not a state where a Jew has in any way any privilege more than anyone else. A Jewish state means a state based on absolute equality of all her citizens and on democracy. Alas, this was not to be.” As Professor Morris has written, “Zionist ideology and practice were necessarily an elementally expansionist.” And then he wrote in another book, “Transfer…” The euphemism for expulsion, “Transfer was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism because it sought to transform a land which was Arab into a Jewish state. And a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab population. And because this aim automatically produced resistance among the Arabs, which in turn persuade the Yishuv’s leaders,” the Yishuv being the Jewish community, “The Yishuv’s leaders, that a hostile Arab majority or a large minority could not remain in place if a Jewish state was to arise or safely endure.” v’s leaders,” the Yishuv being the Jewish community, “The Yishuv’s leaders, that a hostile Arab majority or a large minority could not remain in place if a Jewish state was to arise or safely endure.” Or as Professor Morris retrospectively put it, “A removing of a population was needed. Without a population expulsion, a Jewish state would not have been established.” The Arab side rejected outright the partition resolution. I won’t play games with that. I know a lot of people try to prove it’s not true. It clearly, in my view, is true. The Arab side rejected outright the partition resolution. While Israeli leaders acting on the compulsions inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism, found the pretext in the course of the first Arab-Israeli war to expel the indigenous population and expand its borders. I therefore conclude that neither side was committed to the letter of the partition resolution and both sides aborted it. Thank you, Norm. Norm asked that you make a lengthy statement in the beginning. Benny, I hope it’s okay to call everybody by their first name in the name of camaraderie. Norm has quoted several things you said. Perhaps you can comment broadly on the question of 1948 and maybe respond to the things that Norm said.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.