Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris

That's a good point. No, no, that's a good point. Now, some people accuse me of speaking very slowly, and they're advised on YouTube to turn up the speed twice to three times whenever I'm on. One of the reasons I speak slowly is because I attach value to every word I say.

First question is about 1948/ for Israelis, 1948 is the establishment of the state of Israel and the war of independence. For Palestinians, 1948 is the Nakba, which means catastrophe or the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes as a consequence of the war. What to you is important to understand about the events of 1948 and the period around there, '47, '49, that helps us understand what's going on today and maybe helps us understand the roots of all of this that started even before 1948. I was hoping that Norm could speak first, then Benny, then Mouin, and then Steven. Norm? After World War II, the British decided that they didn't want to deal with the Palestine question anymore and the ball was thrown into the court of the United Nations. Now, as I read the record, the UN was not attempting to arbitrate or adjudicate rights and wrongs. It was confronting a very practical problem. There were two national communities in Palestine and there were irreconcilable differences on fundamental questions, most importantly, looking at the historic record on the question of immigration, and associate with the question of immigration, the question of land.

... who he tried to cultivate. I just want to respond to a point you made earlier, which was that people expressed the rejection of the partition resolution on the grounds that it gave the majority of Palestine to the Jewish community, which formed only a third. Whereas in fact, if I understood you correctly, you're saying the Palestinians and the Arabs would have rejected any partition resolution. Yeah, a couple of things that one, they would've rejected any. Two, a lot of that land given was in the Negev. It was pretty terrible land at the time. And then three, the land that would've been partitioned to Jews I think would've been, I think I saw it was like 500,000... It would've been 500,000 Jews, 400,000 Arabs, and I think like 80,000 Bedouins would've been there. So the state would've been divided pretty close to them.

Let's move to the modern day and we'll return to history, maybe '67 and other important moments, but let's look to today, in the recent months, October 7th. Let me ask sort of a pointed question. Was October 7th attacks by Hamas on Israel genocidal? Was it an act of ethnic cleansing? Just so we lay out the moral calculus that we are engaged in, maybe- The problem with October 7th is this, the Hamas fighters who invaded Southern Israel were sent, ordered to murder, rape, and do all the nasty things that they did, and they killed some 1,200 Israelis that day and abducted them as we know, something like 250, mostly civilians, also some soldiers, took them back to dungeons in Gaza, but they were motivated not just by the words of their current leader in the Gaza Strip, but by their ideology, which is embedded in their charter from 1988, if I remember correctly, and that charter is genocidal. It says that the Jews must be eradicated basically from the land of Israel, from Palestine. The Jews are described there as sons of apes and pigs. The Jews are a base people, killers of prophets, and they should not exist in Palestine. It doesn't say that they necessarily should be murdered all around the world, the Hamas charter, but certainly the Jews should be eliminated from Palestine.

Is there a genocide going on in Gaza? Well, in several years we will have a definitive response to that question. What has happened thus far is that on the 29th of December, the Republic of South Africa instituted proceedings against Israel, pursuant to the 1948 convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide. South Africa basically accused Israel of perpetrating genocide in the Gaza Strip. On the 26th of January, the court issued its initial ruling. The court at this stage is not making a determination on whether Israel has or has not committed genocide. So, just as it has not found Israel guilty, it certainly also hasn't found Israel innocent. What the court had to do at this stage was take one of two decisions, either South Africa's case was the equivalent of a frivolous lawsuit and dismiss it and close the proceedings, or it had to determine that South Africa presented a plausible case that Israel was violating its obligations under the genocide convention and that it would on that basis hold a full hearing. Now, a lot of people have looked at the court's ruling of the 26th of January and focused on the fact that the court did not order a ceasefire. I actually wasn't expecting it to order a ceasefire, and I wasn't surprised that it didn't because in the other cases that the court has considered, most prominently Bosnia and Myanmar, it also didn't order a ceasefire, and South Africa in requesting a ceasefire also didn't ask the court to render an opinion on the legitimacy, or lack thereof, of Israel's military operation. From my perspective, the key issue on the 26th of January was whether the court would simply dismiss the case or decide to proceed with it.

So first of all, thank you for that heated discussion about the present. I would love to go back into history in a way that informs what we can look for as by way of hope for the future. So when has Israel and Palestine have we been closest to something like a peace settlement, to something that where both sides would be happy and enable the flourishing of both peoples? Well, from my knowledge of the 120 years or so of conflict, the closest I think the two sides have been to reaching some sort of settlement appears to have been in the year 2000 when Barak and then subsequently Clinton offered a two-state settlement to PLO, Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat and Arafat seemed to waver. He didn't immediately reject what was being offered, but ultimately at the end of Camp David in July 2000, he came down against the proposals. And Clinton who said he wouldn't blame him, later blamed Arafat for bringing down the summit and not reaching a solution there. But I think there on the table, certainly in the Clinton parameters of December 2000, which followed the proposals by Barak in July, the Palestinians were offered the best deal they're ever going to get from Israel unless Israel is destroyed and then there'll just be a Palestinian Arab state.

All right. Well, let me try once again, for the region and for the entirety of humanity, what gives you hope? We just heard a lot of pessimistic, cynical takes. What gives you hope? People don't like war. That's a good reason, that's hope. In other words, the fear of war, the disaster of war, should give people an impetus to try and seek peace.