Speaker unverified: evaluation

Transcript context

…we keep bringing up this line from the 25 pages and the four pages. We’re lucky to have Benny in front of us right now. We don’t need to go to the quotes. We can legitimately ask, how central is expulsion to Zionism in its early version of Zionism and whatever Zionism is today, and how much power influence does Zionism and ideology have in Israel and the influence, the philosophy, the ideology of Zionism have on Israel today? The Zionist movement up to 1948, Zionist ideology was central to the whole Zionist experience, the whole enterprise up to 1948. And I think Zionist ideology was also important in the first decades of Israel’s existence. Slowly, the hold of Zionism, if you like, like Bolshevism held the Soviet Union gradually faded, and a lot of Israelis today think in terms of individual success and then the capitalism and all sorts of things, which had nothing to do with Zionism, but Zionism was very important. But what I’m saying is that the idea of transfer wasn’t the core of Zionism. The idea of Zionism was to save the Jews who had been vastly persecuted in Eastern Europe, and incidentally in the Arab world, the Muslim world for centuries, and eventually ending up with the Holocaust. The idea of Zionism was to save the Jewish people by establishing a state or re-establishing a Jewish state on the ancient Jewish homeland, which is something that Arabs today even deny that there were Jews in Palestine or the land of Israel 2000 years ago. Arafat famously said, “What Temple was there on Temple Mount? Maybe it was in Nablus.” Which of course is nonsense. But they had a strong connection for thousands of years to the land to which they wanted to return and return there. They found that on the land lived hundreds of thousands of Arabs, and the question was how to accommodate the vision of a Jewish state in Palestine alongside the existence of these Arab masses living on who were indigenous, in fact, to the land by that stage. And the idea of partition because they couldn’t live together because the Arabs didn’t want to live together with the Jews. And I think the Jews also didn’t want to live together in one state with Arabs in general. The idea of partition was the thing which the Zionists accepted, okay, we can only get a small part of Palestine. The Arabs will get in 37. Most of Palestine in 1947 the ratios were changed, but we can live side by side with each other in a partitioned Palestine. And this was the essence of it. The idea of transfer was there, but it was never adopted as policy. But in 1947/48, the Arabs attacked trying to destroy essentially the Zionist enterprise and the emerging Jewish state. And the reaction was transfer in some way, not as policy, but this is what happened on the battlefield. And this is also what Ben-Gurion at some point began to want as well. One of the first books on this issue I read when I was still in high school because my late father had it, was “The Diaries of Theodor Herzl. ” And I think Theodor Herzl, of course, was the founder of the contemporary Zionist movement. And I think if you read that, it’s very clear for Herzl the model upon which the Zionist movement would proceed. His model was Cecil Rhodes. urse, was the founder of the contemporary Zionist movement. And I think if you read that, it’s very clear for Herzl the model upon which the Zionist movement would proceed. His model was Cecil Rhodes. I think Rhodes, from what I recall, correct me if I’m wrong, has quite a prominent place in Herzl’s diaries. I think Herzl was also corresponding with him and seeking his support. Cecil Rhodes, of course, was the British colonialist after whom the former white minority regime in Rhodesia was named. And Herzl also says explicitly in his diaries, that it is essential to remove the existing population from Palestine. Can I respond to this- In a moment, please. He says, we shall have to spirit the penniless population across the borders and procure employment for them elsewhere or something. And Israel Zangwill who you mentioned, a land without a people for a people without a land, they knew then well it wasn’t a land without a people. I’ll continue, but please go ahead. Just to this, there is one small diary entry in Herzl’s vast- It’s five volumes. … Yeah, five volumes. There’s one paragraph which actually mentions the idea of transfer. There are people who think that Herzl was actually pointing to South America when he was talking about that the Jews were going to move to Argentina, and then they would try and buy out or buy off or spirit the penniless natives to make way for Jewish settlement. Maybe he wasn’t even talking about the Arabs in that particular passage. That’s the argument of some people. Maybe he was. But the point is it has only a 1% of the diary, which is devoted to this subject. It’s not a central idea in Herzl’s thinking. What Herzl wanted, and this is what’s important, not Rhodes, I don’t think he was the model. Herzl wanted to create a liberal democratic western state in Palestine for the Jews. That was the idea. Not some imperial enterprise serving some imperial master, which is what Rhodes was about. But to have a Jewish state, which was modeled on the western democracies in Palestine, and this incidentally was more or less what Weizmann and Ben-Gurion wanted. Ben-Gurion was more of a socialist. Weizmann was more of a liberal westerner, but they wanted to establish a social democratic or liberal state in Palestine. And they both envisioned through most of the years of their activity that there would be an Arab minority in that Jewish state. It’s true that Ben-Gurion strived to have as small as possible an Arab minority in the Jewish state because he knew that if you want a Jewish majority state, that would be necessary, but it’s not something which they were willing to translate into actual policy.…

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