Table of Contents
Watch the Interview
I was recently on the And If Love Remains podcast with host Mike Leavitt to discuss the topic of my recent debate at the Soho Forum in New York City, where I argued against the resolution “The root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the Palestinians’ rejection of Israel’s right to exist.”
I argued that, rather, the root cause of the conflict is the rejection of Palestinians’ fundamental human rights, including their right to self-determination.
I succeeded in persuading more audience members to my position than my opponent did to his, so under the Oxford-style debate rules, I was declared the winner.
Mike had me on to discuss the debate and delve more deeply into numerous of the points I made, which I could only briefly touch on because of the time limitations of the debate format.
So, if you haven’t seen it yet, be sure to watch the debate here, then join Mike and me as we explore the topic further, including with questions Mike asked to challenge my position. (The show is on YouTube and Rumble.)
Here is Mike’s description for this episode of his show:
In this compelling episode of “And If Love Remains,” host Mike Leavitt is joined by investigative journalist and recent Soho debate victor, Jeremy Hammond, for an enlightening discussion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Delving deep into historical, legal, and ethical perspectives, Hammond challenges conventional narratives surrounding the root causes of the ongoing strife. The debate focuses on whether Palestinian refusal to acknowledge Israel is the central issue or if deeper historical injustices and policy decisions play a pivotal role. Through a respectful and civil dialogue, Leavitt and Hammond explore the implications of property rights, state legitimacy, and the pursuit of peace and justice in the region. They critically analyze the roles of international actors, including the UN and the US, in shaping the conflict’s current state. This episode promises a nuanced examination of a complex issue, aiming to shed light on possible paths toward resolution.
(Note: Mike had a bit of trouble with his audio so you might need to turn your speakers up a bit higher than usual. You might also notice me swallowing a lot, which is because I was still recovering from a brief illness including the symptom of a sore throat.)
Following is a written summary of what we discussed during this episode of And If Love Remains.
Israel’s Security Concerns
Mike presented the argument that Israel has legitimate security concerns, and I pointed out that it is precisely Israel’s policies that have empowered extremists within Hamas while undermining the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the parent organization of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which officially accepted the two-state solution in 1988—which was a huge concession by the Palestinian leadership to accept a state in just 22% of their historic homeland.
Illustrating the point, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu maintained a policy of utilizing Hamas as a strategic ally to block any movement toward peace negotiations with the Palestinians.
I explained how the US-led so-called “peace process” was premised on a rejection of the applicability of international law to the conflict and thus served to block implementation of the two-state solution while Israel’s occupation and illegal settlement regime became further entrenched.
I noted how this reality is reflected in the mainstream media’s prejudicial use of language, such as the claim that Israel made enormous “concessions” at Camp David, including offering to “cede” land to the Palestinians, which was a euphemism meaning that Israel demanded the Palestinians to cede even more of their land to Israel.
The Myth of the UN Creation of Israel
I debunked myths about the origins of the conflict during the Mandate era, including the myth that the UN created Israel, that the Arabs’ rejection of the UN partition plan was unreasonable, and that the Arabs started the 1948 war after the Zionists declared the existence of the state of Israel on May 14 of that year. Here’s a transcript of this portion of the interview:
During the 1948 War, Israel conquered territory well beyond that proposed for the Jewish state under the UN partition plan, which recommended that about 56% of Palestine go to the Jews for their state. And during the war, Israel ended up conquering about 78% of the land of Palestine.
And looking at the partition plan, there’s this big myth—to touch on that real quick, a lot of people believe that the UN created Israel. But the fact is that Resolution 181, which was the partition plan resolution, the General Assembly resolution that endorsed the partition plan.
Resolution 181 neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionist leadership for their unilateral declaration of Israel’s existence on May 14, 1948, by which time a quarter million Arabs had already been ethnically cleansed.
We’re told that the Arabs started that war and that the neighboring Arab states sent in their armies to wipe Israel off the map. But first of all, Israel didn’t exist as a legally defined entity. And so what happened was that the neighboring Arab states entered Palestine to try to stop the ethnic cleansing operations and mostly failed. And Jordan managed to hang on to the West Bank while Egypt held on to the tiny Gaza Strip.
And so, again, already by the time the neighboring Arab states militarily intervened, you know, over a quarter million Arabs had already been ethnically cleansed. So who started the war? And so that was ‘48. So that is how Israel came into existence, by ethnically cleansing most of the Arab population.
Jews at the time, at the end of the Mandate, owned only about 7% of the land in Palestine, and a UN subcommittee—there was a subcommittee under what was called the UN Special Committee on Palestine, or UNSCOP, which was the committee that came up with a partition plan. The majority recommendation of that committee was the partition plan. There was also a minority recommendation that was saying that the majority recommendation actually violates the UN Charter because it’s premised on a rejection of Palestinian self-determination, which was readily admitted in the UNSCOP report. And I pointed that out, and I quoted from it in the debate, where they said that the principle of self-determination was not applied to Palestine, obviously because of the intention to make possible the Jewish National Home, which is just a euphemism for the Jewish state. So the partition plan was explicitly premised on a rejection of Palestinians right to self- determination, and the subcommittee under UNSCOP pointed out that in the proposed Jewish state itself, when you didn’t exclude the Bedouin population, Arabs were actually the majority still, and they own more land, even within the proposed Jewish state.
So the partition plan was totally inequitable. And the Palestinians and the Arab leadership were absolutely within reason to reject that absurd plan. And not only that, when you look at the map of what was proposed, the Jewish state that was proposed would have been contiguous, whereas the Palestinian state was broken up into these three non-contiguous areas. It was completely absurd. And the idea that that, you know, that the Arabs were on somehow unreasonable to reject that plan is absolutely ludicrous and ahistorical, but this is an example of the type of Zionist propaganda that people are inundated with their entire lives, that we’re supposed to believe that the rejection of the UN partition plan just shows how incapable of reasoning the Palestinians are. But, you know, we just need to set the historical record straight and look at it in terms of the equal rights of both peoples.
Coming back to the point here about security, Israel’s insecurity is a consequence of its own policies and rejection of the two-state solution: they want all the land of Palestine but without the Palestinians.
It’s not a temporary occupation; it’s an illegal permanent regime of systematic discrimination and oppression, which is the definition of apartheid. It’s not possible for Israel to have security when its policies escalate the threat of terrorism and aim to keep Palestinian leadership divided.
The Zionists’ Settler-Colonial Project
Mike brought up Lake’s argument during the debate that Zionism is anti-colonialism because of the Jews’ ancient historical connection to the land. In response to this argument, I noted that people with no ancestral connection to the Middle East can convert to Judaism, that DNA studies show that Palestinians also have an ancient historical connection to the land, and that DNA is not a basis for property rights. The modern political Zionist movement was by definition a settler-colonial project.
When I said during the debate that “If Israel were a democracy, it would be called ‘Palestine’”, I was alluding to the Mandate era and the Arabs’ demand for a single democratic state. But the principle adopted by the British occupiers and the Zionists was that democracy is fine as long as Jews are a majority. The whole purpose of Britain’s occupation was to deny the Palestinians’ right to self-determination to facilitate the Zionists’ settler-colonial project.
Mike raised the argument that Arab attacks on Jews in the 1920s was a reflection of inherent anti-Semitism, and I explained that Great Britain had commissions of inquiry into the cause of each of the outbreaks of violence and determined that it wasn’t that Arabs simply hated Jews but that they were increasingly frustrated about the denial of their right to self-determination, Britain’s broken promise to support their independence after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, and the Zionists’ openly stated aim to ultimately subject and dispossess the Arabs. In short, it wasn’t anti-Semitism but anti-Zionism.
In fact, the British pointed out that Arabs and Jews had friendly relations in Palestine before the Zionist movement; and during the Mandate, friendly relations persisted in Jewish colonies where the Zionist Organization’s land policies did not apply.
Mike brought up the argument that the Israel’s existence as a “Jewish state”—and the means by which it came into existence—is justified by the Holocaust and the need for Jews made refugees in Europe or expelled from Arab states to have a homeland.
The problem with this argument, I noted, is that the right of Jews to self-determination must not prejudice that equal right of the Palestinians, which is what the Zionist project did. The Palestinians weren’t responsible for the Holocaust or the expulsion of Jews by Arab states in 1948, and they shouldn’t have been made to pay the price for those crimes against Jews by having their own rights trampled, including with the Zionists’ ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Israel’s 2005 Withdrawal from Gaza
Mike also raised the argument that Israel’s occupation is necessary because any time its heavy hand has been lifted, the result has been rocket attacks and terrorist attacks. I noted that the most frequently expressed iteration of that argument is the claim that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and got nothing but rocket fire in return. I explained that this is just another deceitful propaganda narrative:
One argument we hear all the time is that, well, look, Israel left Gaza in 2005 and all it got in return was incessant rocket fire from Hamas, which is just simply ahistorical; it is just not true. It’s not what happened.
So, first of all, the occupation of Gaza did not end in 2005. Israel remains the Occupying Power in Gaza due to its total control over the territory. It did withdraw soldiers and evacuated settlers from Gaza as part of what [Israeli Prime Minister] Ariel Sharon called his “disengagement plan”, the explicit purpose of which was essentially to enable Israel to define its own borders. That was Sharon’s aim, like forget the peace process, the so-called peace process—even though the entire peace process was really framed in favor of Israel with great prejudice toward the Palestinians, but even that was too much for Sharon, right?
Same as it’s too much for Netanyahu: even that was like “No!” because they want all the land but without the Palestinians. And so the whole idea of the disengagement plan was to basically give up on Gaza in terms of, “Okay, we’re not going to—Gaza is not going to become part of, you know, what we consider to be Israeli territory. We’re not going to settle it. We’re going to withdraw the settlements from Gaza. We’re going to focus on the West Bank, and we’re going to settle the West Bank, and we’re going to put all our energy there; including shifting military resources toward that aim and at the same time ensuring that there’s no movement towards peace negotiations with the Palestinian leadership.”
In fact Ariel Sharon’s top advisor, Dov Weisglass, was explicit about that, and he described the disengagement plan as the “formaldehyde”—he described it as “formaldehyde” that kind of puts, you know, that basically makes a corpse out of the so-called peace process, so that it ensures that there won’t be any kind of peace negotiations with the Palestinians and therefore Israel can just define its own borders. It can settle the land that it wants and essentially de facto annex the territory that it wants. So that that was the disengagement plan.
And so under the disengagement plan, Israel did withdraw soldiers and settlers from Gaza, but as I mentioned, it maintained its status as Occupying Power under international law because it retained control over Gaza. It controls the land crossings, Gaza’s territorial waters, Gaza’s airspace; it retained administrative functions over Gaza, and under international law, Israel is obligated to provide for the population of the Occupied Territory. That means Israel is responsible, is obligated to make sure that the people living in Palestine have sufficient goods and services, like food.
You know, what happened—and so that was the withdrawal in 2005—at the same time, in 2004 in 2005, Hamas started participating in elections. In early 2004—this is really important context to debunk this whole narrative—in January 2004, Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin announced a shift in Hamas policy where he said that Hamas would be willing to accept a Palestinian state alongside Israel along the pre-June 1967 lines.
So he was calling for an end to the occupation, saying we can accept 22% of historic Palestine for a Palestinian state, with a long term truce with Israel to establish mutual intent. So this was a policy shift from Hamas, and Israel’s response to that offer was to assassinate Sheikh Yassin and then his successor—like within a month after that, his successor was also assassinated by Israel, which of course had the effect of kind of sidelining the more moderate elements within Hamas and empowering more extremist elements within Hamas.
But nevertheless Hamas maintained that position for years and years afterwards. There are all kinds of quotes from Hamas officials where they’re repeating that offer, saying we can accept the Palestinian state alongside Israel on the 1967 borders with a long-term truce to establish mutual intent, and without prejudice toward the right of Palestinian refugees to return.
In 2017, they issued a policy document that The Guardian and other Western media described as a “new charter” where they explicitly stated that their conflict isn’t with Jews because they’re Jewish, because of their religion or their race, it’s with Zionism because of the fact that the Zionist project since its early implementation, starting after World War I, has always denied the Palestinians their right to self-determination. So they had this policy document that was explicitly anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic.
And so you’ve had these moves from Hamas toward, you know, kind of moving away from armed conflict toward diplomacy, toward engagement in the political process. And to that end, Hamas announced that it would cease fire, a unilateral ceasefire. It was going to not launch any rockets or launch any attacks while it participated in Palestinian elections. And so in 2004 and 2005, in keeping with this new policy declaration, Hamas participated in municipal elections and in in numerous cases defeated Fatah, which is the party of [Palestinian Authority President] Mahmoud Abbas, the party of Yasser Arafat, taking over control of local councils.
And then in 2006, there was a parliamentary election, and Hamas defeated Fatah in that election. And so the result was a Hamas-led Palestinian government in the Occupied Territories.
Israel’s response to that, and the US’s response to that, was to do everything it could to undermine the new government; and, in fact, they conspired with Fatah to try to overthrow the democratically elected government. And so this is what is referred to in the media—we hear that there was “a violent Hamas coup”, and that’s how Hamas took power in Gaza, which actually like inverts reality because the truth is that it was an attempted coup supported by Israel and the US to overthrow the elected government.
And that is why to this day you have this divided leadership between the PA and the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza. It’s a direct consequence of Israel’s own policies.
Instead of encouraging this evolution of Hamas away from, you know, armed conflict to engagement in the political process—it could have encouraged that shift just like the PLO before it; the PLO had been recognized as a terrorist organization, then Arafat became recognized as a legitimate partner for peace, renouncing terrorism, accepting the two-state solution. And that was the threat. That was the threat from Hamas, that Hamas was going to become more moderate, just like the PLO before it had, and accept the two-state solution and become a peace partner.
And the last thing that Israel wanted was for Hamas to become a peace partner. So Israel did everything in its power through its policies to ensure that Hamas remained a radical terrorist organization.
I explained further how Israel and the US tried to interfere in the Palestinian elections to throw the results toward Fatah.
The Truth about the So-Called ‘Peace Process’
We then talked more about the so-called “peace process”, and I explained that the rejection of the two-state solution by the US and Israel is a matter of public record, with both countries voting “No” in an annual vote at the UN General Assembly expressing the virtual international consensus in favor of the two-state solution, as well as in an annual vote on a short resolution simply affirming that the Palestinians have a right to self-determination.
So who are the rejectionists? It is Israel and the US. And the entire US-led so-called “peace process” has always been the means by which Israel and its superpower benefactor blocked implementation of the two-state solution.
Because there’s a deception about the peace process we’re supposed to believe, that the US declares and Israel declares that they accepted [UN Security Council] Resolution 242 as the basis for peace negotiations.
That’s a big deception because Resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw from the Occupied Territories in accordance with the principle of international law that the acquisition of territory by war is inadmissible. And the Security Council’s explicitly stated intent—you can go back to the UN meeting records—the explicit intent of the Security Council was that Israel must fully and immediately withdraw to the armistice lines, the pre-June 5th 1967 lines.
But Israel has its own unilateral interpretation of 242. So, under Israel’s unilateral interpretation, which has no validity under international law—under its alternative interpretation, the Palestinians must negotiate with their oppressors, with the Occupying Power, over how much of their own land they can keep and maybe someday exercise some kind of limited autonomy over, while Israel continues to prejudice the outcome of those negotiations with its persistent, continued illegal settlement regime in the Occupied Territory, which is completely incompatible with principles of international law.
But that is the framework that the US adopted as the basis the foundation for the “peace process”. So the two-state solution is distinct from a two-state solution that you hear US and Israeli officials talk about. They’re two completely different things.
The two-state solution, in favor of which there is a virtual international consensus and has been since the early 70s—the two-state solution is premised on the applicability of international law to the conflict, whereas the entire US-led so-called “peace process” was premised on a rejection of the applicability of international law to the conflict.
And this prejudice is again observable in Western media reporting when they say things like Israel has offered “concessions”. Israel has offered to “cede” land. Well, none of the land is Israel’s to cede, and, again, the “generous offer” [at Camp David] was Israel demanding the Palestinians to cede Palestinian land to Israel.
So this was the entire nature of the “peace process”. It was the means by which essentially the US helped Israel to block implementation of the two-state solution and the implementation of Resolution 242.
So the US policy essentially prolonged the occupation, supported the occupation, supported the settlement regime, as well, despite rhetoric, you know, where US officials sometimes have—the title of my book Obstacle to Peace is taken in part from this, where they have, you know, US officials sometimes describe the settlements as an “obstacle to peace”; alternatively, that phrase has been used to describe the Palestinian leadership, you know, Arafat being an “obstacle to peace”, for example.
So I’m borrowing the title of my book from those two applications of the term. So, you know, you hear this phrase used to describe the settlements sometimes, but, you know, actions are more important than words when determining what is the policy. And you can just look at the UN, the US record in the Security Council of protecting Israel against international censure for its ongoing settlement regime, for its ongoing occupation, for its essentially apartheid regime.
Mike asked about the legality of the settlement regime, and I explained how the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2004 issued an advisory opinion affirming that all of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are occupied Palestinian territory, and that the settlement regime and separation wall constructed by Israel through the West Bank are a violation of international law.
Ancient Historical Connections to Palestine
Mike next brought up Lake’s argument during the debate that there are two people with legitimate and competing claims to the land. I responded by saying that there is no equivalence between Arab rights to the land and property claims of Jewish immigrants.
This returned us to the reliance on the Jewish people’s ancient historical connection to the land, and I noted again that Palestinians, too, have an ancient historical connection and that, moreover, neither DNA nor religion are a basis for property rights.
So this goes back to the question of property rights. And so if you can show legal title to a piece of property from which, you know, your ancestors were expelled and show that you are the legal inheritor of that property, that you have legitimate title to that because, you know, that land was illegitimately expropriated, then you have a right to reclaim that property.
So time itself serves as a kind of statute of limitations because the further you go back in history to the original claim, the harder it is to show current, modern legal title over that property.
And so you have a situation where people argue that, oh, well, there was a kingdom of Israel, you know, in the 12th century BC, you know, because thousands of years ago, there was a kingdom of Israel there—and then, you know, also a Jewish presence in the land up through the Roman era.
And we hear that, you know, there was the rebellion, the temple was destroyed in 70 BCE—I’m sorry, 70 CE, Common Era—and also the Bar Kohkba revolt after that, in which there was a huge depopulation, either through extermination or flight of Jews. But there was a persistent Jewish presence still in the Galilee, for example, in Samaria. They weren’t all expelled. And so there were, you know, Jews who had kind of maintained a presence in the land since time immemorial.
And I pointed this out in the debate, that there were indigenous Jews living in Palestine during the Mandate era, just as there were indigenous Palestinians. You know, much of the Biblical narrative is not supported by archeological evidence, and a really important example is the idea that the Israelites were foreigners, outsiders who violently conquered Canaan, including through genocide of Canaanite tribes.
Actually, the DNA evidence shows that this is not true, that [instead] Israelites were Canaanites. They were indigenous to that area. They weren’t foreigners. They didn’t invade the land from outside.
And in fact, you know, archeologists today distinguish Canaanites from Israelites not through, like, genetic distance, but because of the Israelites’ own different self-identity. They didn’t identify as being one of the Canaanite tribes. But genetically, that’s where they they were from—as are Palestinians.
Palestinians are also descended—they have a very strong genetic connection to the Levant, and they are descended from Canaanites. So Arabs and Jews are actually ancestrally brothers and sisters. And in fact, the people most closely related to Jewish groups in the world are the Palestinians, the Druze, and the Bedouin. So they’re both, you know, they both have an ancient historical connection to the land of Palestine.
The Correct Application of Property Rights
I noted at this point in the interview that some years ago, I debated Rafi Farber, one of the authors of a paper arguing that the Jews had a right to take Palestine because of their ancient historical connection, on the question of the legitimacy of the means by which Israel was created.
The two other authors of that paper were Walter Block and Alan Futerman, the latter of whom I also debated this past October on the question of whether Israel’s assault on the civilian population of Gaza is justified.
It has to come back to legitimate property rights. And so I actually debated, this [Soho Forum debate] was my third ever debate, actually, the two previous debates were both also on Israel-Palestine on Tom Woods’ show. And I debated the question of property rights.
Walter Block and Rafi Farber and Alan Futerman had written a paper in which they claimed that because of their ancient historical connection, that that Jews had legal title ownership to the land of Palestine. It was their land, and they had a right to take it back, including by force if necessary. So they made that argument in this paper years back.
I think, you know, well, through your own argument, a libertarian principle of what property rights means is you have to actually be able to trace legal title of specific individual Jews back 2,000 years ago or 3,000 years ago, and to be able to trace those property rights to specific individual Jews live alive today; and Farber acknowledged—the debate kind of continued on our blogs afterwards and on Twitter—and he acknowledged that they’re not capable of doing that.
In fact, in the paper itself that they published, they acknowledge that they can’t actually do that. And they acknowledge that they’re departing from libertarian principles in making their argument.
At the same time, they try to maintain that they’re making the libertarian case for Israel, so it’s kind of a self-contradiction. But this is the case. Whereas you have Palestinians who in much more recent history, you know, within the last 100 years, who within just a few generations, you have Palestinians who still hold the keys to the homes that they were expelled from back in ’48, where you do have the ability of Palestinians to trace property rights to areas in in what is now Israel.
Although, you know, over 400 villages were literally wiped off the map during the ‘48 war to make sure that Palestinians had no homes to return to.
In that context, reminded of another argument Lake made during the debate, I also pointed out that Yasser Arafat at Camp David wasn’t expecting that all Palestinian refugees would return to what is now Israel. He recognized that that would be impracticable, and while he insisted on recognition of their right to return, he made the concession that this shouldn’t threaten Israel’s identity as a demographically “Jewish state”, with the idea being that most refugees would be resettled either in the Palestinian state or other states, with a compensation program for lost property.
The Jewish Supremacist State
Our discussion next segued into the issue of Israel’s institutionalized discrimination against Palestinians not only in the Occupied Territory but also within the boundaries of what is recognized as the state of Israel.
Israel exists unashamedly as a Jewish supremacist state, and there are many laws on the books in Israel—so it’s not just, you know, when it’s referred to as an apartheid regime, it’s not just looking at the occupied territories and the systematic violation of Palestinians rights in the territories. It’s also within Israel itself where you have all kinds of laws on the books that are greatly prejudicial to Arabs.
Arab inhabitants of Israel, Arab citizens, for example—we always hear that, “Oh, well, Israel is a democracy, and Arabs can run for the Knesset and participate in the government.” Well, that’s true but on the precondition that they accept, essentially, their status as second-class citizens. They have to—no party can run for political office in Israel under the law if the candidates or the party takes a position that there should be full equality between all citizens.
That’s in the law of Israel. There’s the Jewish Nation State Law, which was 2017 I think [2018, actually]—was passed, upheld by the Israeli Supreme Court, which literally defines self-determination in the territory under Israel’s control as a right that’s exclusive to Jews. So it’s not a democracy.
Let’s end this whole charade, this whole façade that Israel is a democracy. It’s not a democratic form of government.
I think so many people see it as a modern government, therefore must be democracy. And there’s elections and there’s a parliament—the Knesset is Israel’s legislature—and so people have this view and, yeah, Arabs can run for office, and there’s Arab members of the Knesset, and these arguments are used to try to uphold this claim that Israel is a democracy.
But, again, you know, looking at the democratic solution that was proposed by the Arabs after World War I and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, this is what I mean when I say, “If Israel were a democracy, it would be called Palestine.” Because the democratic solution was proposed by the Arabs but was explicitly rejected by the Zionists and the British.
So Israel exists as a “Jewish state” precisely because of its undemocratic nature. Because if Israel were a democracy and Palestinians living within the territory under his control had a right to vote and participate in the government, guess what would happen?
Why Israel Has No ‘Right to Exist’
One of the key points I made during the Soho Forum debate is that there is no such thing as the “right” of a state “to exist”, which point I reiterated during my discussion with Mike.
Arbitrarily defined political entities do not have rights. Individual human beings have rights, and individuals have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The sole legitimate purpose of a state government is to protect the rights of the individuals living within its legally defined territory.
And so when people exercise their right to liberty collectively by working together to create a government for the purpose of protecting their rights, this is known in international law as the right to self-determination. So this is the proper framework for discussion: not the right of this or that state to exist, but the right of all peoples—of both Jews and Arabs—to self-determination.
Governments derive just powers only from the consent of the governed. So, if we believe in these principles, you know, if we believe in the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the and the ideals upon which the United States was founded—setting aside, you know, obviously the hypocrisy of continued slavery and the ethnic cleansing and genocide of native populations; there’s plenty of sins in the US government’s creation and establishment—but there were lofty ideals expressed by Thomas Jefferson and others about what it means.
They did advance the idea of liberty and freedom beyond, you know, you saw the Magna Carta where it was kind of an end of [the idea of] divine right of kings to rule, and the founding fathers of the United States did—it was innovative and it was a new form of government, and for all is failings, it is in my opinion still one of the best governments out there. As much as I criticize it, you know, I personally wouldn’t want to live anywhere else other than the United States. It’s my home. I think it’s a great country, setting aside the problems with the government.
But we have these ideals of what it means to be civilized and what it means to have freedom and what it means to have a democratic form of government—obviously not pure democracy because the founding fathers were against pure democracy—you know, Republican form of government, which is sometimes called representative democracy, as opposed to a pure democracy, which was “mob rule” or, as Benjamin Franklin described it, two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner. That’s democracy. So they were opposed to pure democracy.
But point being, yes, we are supposed to have these ideas about what it means to be civilized, and we’re just—we’re so far from being civilized as a society. I really—this is kind of my aim in everything I do is: let’s get there, right? Let’s do better. Let’s improve it.
The UN’s Complicity in Creating the Conflict
Our discussion then returned to the late Mandate era, and I emphasized the point that Great Britain, the US, the League of Nations, and its successor organization the United Nations were all complicit in perpetrating a crime against humanity and creating the tragic conflict that persists to this day.
I also pointed out [during the Soho Forum debate] that not only the British—you know, the historical significance of the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917 is that it put Great Britain on a policy course that ultimately facilitated the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
The League of Nations was complicit in instituting a mandate over Palestine that was directly contrary to the League of Nations’ own charter because the whole purpose of the mandatory system under the charter was to “tutor” the peoples of formerly Ottoman territories in their exercise of political independence and in the exercise of their right to self-determination. So this was the whole purpose of the mandate system under the League of Nations charter. And yet the Palestinians were denied that right. The whole purpose of the mandate, specifically in the territory of Palestine, was to deny that right to the Palestinians. So the League of Nations was complicit.
And when the League of Nations was replaced by the UN system, the UN was complicit. The partition plan was utilized by the Zionists; it was that resolution—181 was cited in their unilateral declaration of the existence of the state of Israel as though that resolution conferred some kind of legal authority to the Zionists for their declaration, in which they didn’t define their borders. They just said that the Jewish state now exists here in the place of this place called Palestine, which was obviously intentional because they wanted all the land, and they weren’t willing—even though they expressed acceptance of the partition plan, they had designs on all of the territory of Palestine; all of Eretz Yisrael, which is the Land of Israel, which you know in the mind of the of the Zionist was from the river to the sea minimally; minimally from the river to the sea because you had the more extreme Zionists, the Jabotinsky breed of Zionist, who also saw Jordan, Transjordan, as part of Eretz Yisrael.
And so you had—the UN was complicit because it they had this partition plan that was utilized by the Zionist to try to lend legitimacy to territorial conquest by war, which was contrary to the UN Charter, and you had the UN admitting Israel as a member state despite lacking legally defined borders, which is one of the criteria for membership; internationally recognized borders is a criteria for membership.
You had Israel manifestly not being a “peace-loving” state. It was literally created by ethnically cleansing most of the Arab population—around 750,000 Arabs made refugees—so how could Israel be described as a “peace-loving” state when that’s how it was literally created? So it manifestly didn’t meet that criteria for membership.
And the Israeli leadership absolutely refused to allow refugees to return to their homes upon the cessation of hostilities despite the right of return being internationally recognized in UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 1948. You had Israel openly defying and objecting to the idea of it meeting its obligations under the UN Charter, which is another requirement for admission, for membership in the UN.
So the UN admitting Israel as a member in this situation, when Israel manifestly failed to meet the criteria for membership, was incredibly prejudicial to the Palestinians because the UN was basically giving its rubber stamp of approval to the territorial conquest of the Zionists of 78% of historic Palestine and rejecting the Palestinians’ right of return. It was extraordinarily prejudicial against the Palestinians right to return to their homes, or if their homes had been destroyed, some kind of compensation and recompense for that violation and that injustice.
So the UN itself was complicit in this ethnic cleansing. And so, you know, there’s this whole narrative that we’re supposed to believe historically that the Palestinians were the villains. But, you know, they were just powerless victims.
And we’re told that the Arab started the war in 1948. I mean, you read Benny Morris, the preeminent Israeli historian, describing the situation; essentially, he even says, you know, like the Arabs had essentially lost the war back in the late ‘30s with the Arab revolt, 1936 to 1939, that the British violently crushed and, you know, largely disarmed the Arab population of Palestine. They were just so weak. They had no power whatsoever.
Not only they had no political power because the British denied any kind of political power to them—again, just denying their right to form an independent state of their own—they had no military power. Their militias were essentially, you know, you had villagers who had a rifle. That was their militias. And they were mainly just trying to defend their villages.
Plan Dalet, “Plan D”, in April 1948, the Zionists detailed a plan where their commanders were basically given the option of expelling villages if they met with any resistance whatsoever. They were told that they were, you know, they were authorized by the Zionist leadership to go ahead and just expel all of the villagers from the village. And Morris described—from that point forward, from April ‘48 onward—he described what the Zionists were engaged in as a “war of conquest”.
So this whole idea that it was this war started by the Arabs—it was a war of territorial conquest by the Zionists, and, again, by the end of the end of the war, they had conquered territory well beyond the partition proposal. And so you have all these kind of historical myths that are really aimed at essentially trying to manufacture consent for the US government policy of supporting Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.
Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
Our discussion segued from the US government supporting Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians to Israel’s military operation in Gaza ongoing since October 7 in retaliation for the atrocities perpetrated against Israeli civilians by Hamas terrorists.
Today, of course, the US government supplies Israel with billions annually in military aid, which serves as an effective subsidy to the military industrial complex.
We’re heading into tax season. You know, I would love to be able to protest and just not pay taxes on the grounds that I object to my hard-earned dollars being forcibly expropriated from me for the purpose of supporting a genocide. Of course, I’m a father and a husband. And so the risk to me of doing that act of civil disobedience is too great.
But we Americans need to recognize that we are funding this and we are supporting it. The US government has three times used its veto power in the UN Security Council to block ceasefire resolutions despite the entire global humanitarian community, all the human rights organizations and the humanitarian aid organizations, just a chorus from the entire community around the globe for five months now saying Palestinians are dying, Israel is using starvation as a method of warfare and, it’s just the worst humanitarian catastrophe of the century, of the 20th century [sic, I meant 21st century], and without a ceasefire tens of thousands more Palestinians are going to die.
And so there’s just a chorus from the humanitarian community around the globe saying there needs to be a ceasefire because it is really a genocidal situation.
And as the ICJ [International Court of Justice] ruled on January 26, in issuing preliminary measures because South Africa made the argument that the Palestinians can’t wait for months and months and months for the ICJ to deliberate on our case and come to some kind of ruling and decision about [the question of]: Is Israel violating the Genocide Convention? They argued that all we have to do—South Africa was arguing—all we have to do is to show that there’s a plausible case that Israel is committing genocide, and that forces the ICJ to issue preliminary measures. And so the ICJ did rule that South Africa has presented a plausible case that Israel is violating the Geneva Convention—I’m sorry, the Genocide Convention—and therefore ordered Israel to comply with the Convention, which means stop killing Palestinians indiscriminately, stop blocking humanitarian aid.
And so, you know, defenders of Israel’s military actions in Gaza try to spin the ICJ’s ruling, they like to—in fact, Eli Lake said this during the debate, he said, well, the ICJ didn’t do what South Africa asked because South Africa had asked the ICJ to order Israel to cease its military operation. The ICJ didn’t do that.
But it effectively did, and here’s why: because it ordered Israel, again, to comply with the Genocide Convention, which means it has to not just allow humanitarian aid, but [as Occupying Power] it has to itself facilitate and provide humanitarian aid to the Palestinians in Gaza.
And again, you’ve had this chorus for five months saying that the only way that we can get humanitarian aid into the strip and distribute it in such a way as to provide for the people’s needs, to stave off mass death, is if there’s a humanitarian ceasefire.
So effectively, the ICJ did call on Israel to end its military operations and accept a humanitarian ceasefire—in effect. And the US government is supporting what is happening. It’s supporting this genocide.
Israel’s 1967 War Was Not ‘Preemptive’
As we neared the end to our discussion, Mike asked me to critique myself and whether there was anything I would have done differently in the Soho Forum debate. I am very self-critical, and of course there are numerous ways in which I think I could have done better, but one point jumped immediately to mind, so our discussion turned to the June 1967 “Six Day War”.
I explained why, contrary to yet another popular myth, Israel’s surprise attack on Egypt on the morning of June 5, 1967, was not “preemptive”.
Yeah, I’m sure you know, I’m always self-critical; I would have liked to have been able to go deeper into the details on some of the points I raised because I did kind of touch on a lot of issues. I did the 1937 Peel Commission proposal, and the UN partition plan; you know, I touched on each of those things, and each one of those points could be a lengthy discussion in and of itself. So it was very challenging to try to get in the details I felt I could have gone into.
I didn’t really have the opportunity, but, you know, I could have discussed in the 1967 war more because Lake tried to make the argument that—although he acknowledged it was literally started by Israel in the morning of June 5th with a surprise attack on Egypt—but he tried to maintain the narrative that that was a “preemptive” strike because it was a war of self-defense, essentially, on the part of Israel because the Arab states had kind of genocidal intent, as if there was this imminent threat of invasion.
The argument is that Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and it expelled the UN Emergency Force, UNEF, from the [Sinai] Peninsula—so there was this UN peacekeeping force—expelled the UN peacekeeping force, and it moved its military into the Sinai Peninsula. And, so, these are kind of the key points that are made to try to sustain this narrative that Israel’s attack was preemptive, that it was a preemptive act of self-defense.
But that’s missing so much context that completely undermines the narrative.
So, first of all, why were UN peacekeeping forces there in the first place? Because Israel attacked Egypt in 1956. With the Suez Crisis. Israel invaded Egypt. So that’s why the peacekeeping forces were there.
One of the reasons that Nasser, [Egyptian] President Nasser, expelled the peacekeeping force is because he was coming under such criticism from Jordan and Syria for supposedly hiding behind peacekeeping forces while Syria and Jordan were dealing with Israel’s military on their borders; and, of course, Jordan at the time was administrating the West Bank.
And so you had, for example, the Israeli attack on the village of Samu, which was to collectively punish this the civilian population of this village for an attack by Fatah—I think it was a mining of a Jeep or something—in which Israeli soldiers were killed along the armistice line. And so to collectively punish the local civilian population, they attacked this village of Samu in the West Bank. So Jordan was enraged.
They looked at Egypt and were criticizing Nasser for hiding behind the UN peacekeeping forces while, you know, the Jordanian-administered West Bank was under attack and so on. And so this was a face-saving measure on the part of Nasser, for one.
Secondly, the proposal was made to restation the UN peacekeeping forces on Israel’s side of the border, and guess what? Israel refused. What does that tell you about Israel’s intentions?
And, finally, you have, you know, the CIA looked at the troop movements into the Sinai by Egypt, and it observed that Egypt had taken up defensive positions; and the CIA told President Johnson that war did appear likely but that if war did break out, it would be started by Israel.
So they were accurate in that prediction, and they assessed that Israel had such vast qualitative military superiority that it would defeat the combined Arab armies—because, of course, Egypt and Jordan and Syria had this alliance—it would defeat the combined Arab armies within a matter of weeks; and it took Israel six days.
And before Israel attacked, Israel’s own intelligence had assessed that Nassar had no intention of invading Israel. And they had a really good reason for coming to that conclusion. They judged that he wasn’t insane because to the attack Israel, in their view, he would have to be insane.
And then you have, years later, you had actually, in 1968, Yitzhak Rabin, later prime minister, but at the time, you know, member of the military, saying in 1968 that, you know, the troop movements into Egypt don’t show that Nasser intended to attack us. Menachem Begin in 1982 admitted that the troop movements don’t show that Egypt was going to attack; we must be honest with ourselves, he said, we decided to attack him.
You know, so that this whole narrative of 1967 being this “preemptive” war is just another element of the Zionist propaganda version of history, and so that’s one area I would have loved to be able to have had time to delve into because it’s so important. It’s such a watershed event for understanding what’s happening today.
During the debate, I provided the exact quotes from Rabin and Begin, which, respectively, are:
- “I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to the Sinai in May would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.” — Yitzhak Rabin, Chief of Staff to the Israeli Army General and later Prime Minister, Le Monde, February 29, 1968
- “The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.” — Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, 1982
The Need to End US Support for Israel’s Crimes
Mike then raised the question of whether the two-state solution was even feasible any more, and I expressed my view that, whatever else must happen after, a necessary first step is to end the US government policy of supporting Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.
You have a lot of advocates of a single state solution, a single democratic state, with equal rights for all peoples living in the territory, from the river to the sea. And this is—you know, I’m sure there are anti-Semites who use this slogan “from the river to the sea” to make the point even of inciting genocide; there are anti-Semites in the world—but what most political activists mean when they say, “Free Palestine from the river to the sea”, that’s what they’re advocating. They’re advocating the one-state solution.
They’re not advocating the elimination of Jews or, you know, expelling, pushing Jews into the sea or something. They’re simply advocating a single-state solution, a single democratic state. And so, you know, in my view, that is the ideal solution. But the question, of course, is, how do you get there?
And I do think it is possible, but as a first step—it’s almost kind of like pointless to even have that discussion about, like, what would it take, what would the steps be, as long as the US government continues to prolong the conflict and escalate the conflict with its policy of supporting Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians—that must come to an end, as a first step.
And until we get there, you know, that that’s just it: it’s almost kind of pointless to even have an academic discussion about it, right? Because until that happens, Israel has no incentive to negotiate or to roll back its discriminatory policies, its oppressive, institutionalized policies of oppression.
Without US support, Israel could not continue to violate the Palestinians’ human rights this way, systematically. It’s because of US support that Israel is able to do that with impunity. And, so, end the impunity and start having accountability, including for war crimes on both sides.
One other benefit of South Africa’s case at the ICJ is that it puts pressure on the International Criminal Court, the ICC, which is a separate body, to end the impunity by using its power of prosecution—the ICJ has no means of enforcing its advisory opinion, but the ICC can prosecute war crimes, which should happen; war crimes committed by both Palestinian armed groups, including Hamas, and the Israeli military.
So there needs to be an end to the impunity, and there needs to be accountability. And that’s just, that’s a first step. Like, that’s a necessary first step. And if we can get there, then there’s going to be incredibly great hope for a just peace, a permanent peaceful resolution to the conflict. But we have to get there.
And so people need to recognize that this is the US government’s policy, that the US government is not a neutral mediator. It’s not an honest broker. It has since the beginning of the existence of Israel supported the Zionist project to reconstitute Palestine into a demographically Jewish state, and all of the prejudices against the rights of Palestinians that that entails. You know, for the entire history of Israel’s existence, that’s been the case.
And so, particularly after 1967, the US became, you know, a very enthusiastic supporter of the Israeli government. And, of course, the billions in military aid has to end. And that’s going to be our hope for a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Let’s get to that point.
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