Today. Joining us is esteemed historian Rashid Khalidi. To walk us through that history and talk a little bit about what's currently transpiring in the Gaza Strip. Professor Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies [00:00:15] at Columbia University and the author of several books focusing on the Middle East, including a book that I highly recommend everyone read. We're going to be talking about it quite a bit today, The Hundred Years War on Palestine. Professor Khalidi, thank you so much for joining us. [00:00:31] Thanks for having me on. So as much as the US media would like to have Americans believe that this war began on October 7th of this year, the truth is that the persecution and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians really started at this point, more than 100 years ago. [00:00:50] And so I know that this might take a little bit of time, but I think it's really important to start this conversation off by talking about the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. And there are a few other documents that I want to walk the audience through. [00:01:06] But let's start with that. Well, the Balfour Declaration is important because it gives the support of the greatest power in the world at the time, Great Britain. It gives the support of Great Britain to the Zionist movement, such that this small and relatively unpopular movement among among Jewish [00:01:26] communities in Eastern Europe suddenly has the patronage of the Empire, which not only is the greatest power globally but is in control of Palestine in November. British troops actually take Jerusalem in December of 2017. And by the Balfour Declaration, the British say that they look with favor [00:01:44] on the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. A national home for the Jewish people is the wording they use. The Palestinians are never mentioned, except as the non-Jewish population, who are not considered a people and who do not get national rights [00:02:01] according to the British, and get only civil and religious rights. And so the Balfour Declaration sets in train a whole series of events whereby the British give themselves a mandate for Palestine through the League of Nations, and proceed to create a Jewish para state, or the embryo of a Jewish state [00:02:20] in Palestine, with a military, with educational system, with a parliament, with a foreign ministry, with all of the appendages of a state without sovereignty. Obviously, the British are still the sovereign power under the mandate. And it is really, really important because it puts the two peoples, the Palestinians, [00:02:38] who are the overwhelming majority of the population, and the Jewish population of Palestine, which is increased over time by immigration, not on a footing of equality, but on a footing of profound inequality. One group is a people with national rights rights, two a national home. [00:02:54] The other group are just religious communities without national or political rights. And that's the system under which the British ruled Palestine for the next couple of decades. I think the distinction between human rights and political rights needs to be made, because I think a lot of people kind of conflate the two. [00:03:13] So just real quick, before we continue, can you talk about the difference? Well, very simply, under the under the mandate which which is based on the Balfour Declaration, the British give this growing Zionist [00:03:29] project in Palestine a diplomatic right. They can go to the League of Nations and petition as of right. They're a public body. They have control of various aspects of government in Palestine, like education and some others. They're allowed to vote for an assembly of their own. [00:03:45] All of these things are denied to the Palestinians. The British control Arab education. The British deny any Arab body, elected or otherwise representative capacity. In other words, the Palestinians are denied not only self-determination in their own country, which the covenant of the League [00:04:02] of Nations said they were supposed to get. But they see their country gradually being transformed into one in which this national project, the Zionist National Project, slowly but surely is taking over the country. You have an article in a Palestinian newspaper saying we're going [00:04:19] to become strangers in our own country. So one group has national and political rights. The other group is denied those rights and is entitled to only, as the mandate says, civil and religious rights. One thing that I have been kind of searching for is a better understanding [00:04:36] in regard to what motivated Arthur James Balfour, like, why did he want to establish a Jewish state? Like what was in it for him? Well, the Brits, you know, don't do anything because they love the brown eyes of subject peoples, nor Arabs nor Jews. [00:04:53] The British did what they did, essentially for strategic reasons. They wanted to reinforce the defense of the eastern frontiers of. Egypt. You know, Palestine is immediately to the east of Egypt. And they had been worried for years and years before World War One that Egypt might be threatened from the East. [00:05:08] And in fact, during the war, the Ottoman army invaded Egypt from the east and arrived on the Suez Canal. They wanted secondly to control the shortest land route between the Mediterranean and the Gulf, to ensure that they controlled all of the routes to India. They already controlled the Suez Canal through Egypt. [00:05:25] They wanted to control the shortest land route, which ran from Haifa to Basra, and where they eventually built a road. Pipelines. Air bases. During the inter-war period. So these were the strategic motivations for which they wanted Palestine. And Zionism was a useful tool to that end. [00:05:43] In the words of a British official, what we were trying to create was a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of hostile Arabs. So it was a base for Britain, a strategic base for Britain in the Middle East, that Britain was coming to dominate almost completely at this time. [00:05:59] Now, what followed the Balfour Declaration was article 22 of the convention of the League of Nations, which is an incredibly important moment in the establishment of Israel. So this happened in June of 1919. Can you talk a little bit about what that was and how the Palestinian people [00:06:19] were not included in this? Yeah. The article 22 of the covenant of the League of Nations declared that the Arab areas, which had formerly been part of the Ottoman Empire, were provisionally independent states, and this was the basis on which they were to be made [00:06:37] mandates of European powers with a view to their eventually becoming independent. That's what the covenant said, and that's what was eventually done in Iraq, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Jordan, by the League of Nations, through the British and French Mandataries. [00:06:52] That was not done in Palestine. In Palestine. The Palestinians, who were the overwhelming majority of the population that never received self-determination, never received self-government right up to the very end. The British ruled Palestine directly while leaving self-government [00:07:07] and the building of a of a of a embryonic state to the Zionist movement. So the Palestinians were denied what under article 22 of the covenant was allowed to every other Arab state under European mandate. [00:07:23] You know, I want to just read a statement. It was part of a private memo that Arthur James Balfour sent to his cabinet members back in August of 1919, because I think this is the kind of stuff that most Americans have been kind of shielded from knowing about, from learning [00:07:41] about, and it tells you the intentions from the very beginning by the very people who tried to create this Jewish state. So Balfour said in August of 1919 to his cabinet, it was a private memo that actually wasn't published until, I believe, the 1950s, if I'm not mistaken. [00:07:58] That's correct, he said. Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes of greater import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that land. [00:08:17] I mean, it's just so transparent, so clear. The candor is incredible there. Yet there's this denialism all the way to modern times, to today, where there seems to be this, you know, rejection of what actually happened [00:08:33] in history and why it is that the Palestinian people have been resisting, you know, the taking of their land, the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state. And so, look, I we're in a difficult situation now because I don't think [00:08:51] that you can just dismantle Israel, and I'm not a proponent of that. However, I do want to ask you, following the 1948 Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, okay, what happens after that? Because what we keep hearing over and over again by supporters of Israel [00:09:08] and everything the Israeli government wants to do is well, the Palestinians were offered peace deals. They were offered their own state. But is that really true? Can you can you walk us through that? And what the reality of these offers were? Sure. [00:09:24] I mean, one of these great myths has to do with the partition plan of 1947. The British changed their policy at the end of the 30s. They eventually turned against the Zionist movement, and the Zionist movement [00:09:41] turns against them. Terrorism attacks. There's terrorist attacks on the British. The British are forced out, basically. And 47 they throw the whole problem over to the UN and the UN decides the UN General Assembly decides to partition Palestine. Now, in 1947, the overwhelming majority of the population of Palestine were Arabs. [00:10:00] Over two thirds and the charter of the United Nations, much like the covenant of the League of Nations, talks about self-determination. And so the Palestinians said, well, we're the majority. It's our country. We want to be independent in our own country. That's not what the United Nations decides. [00:10:15] It has the same kind of biased approach to this that the League of Nations did for different reasons. And we're talking about a different era, and we're talking about different powers. Essentially, it's the United States and the Soviet Union that backed the partition resolution of 1947. What does that resolution do? [00:10:31] It gives most of a country, most of which is owned by Arabs and which has an overwhelming Arab majority to a putative Jewish state. So 55% of Palestine, including most of the fertile land, most of which is owned by Arabs and about half of whose population would have been Arabs, it gives that 55% [00:10:51] of Palestine to the Jewish minority for a Jewish state, and it gives a little over 43% to the Palestinians who are, as I've said, two thirds of the population. The Palestinians naturally reject this. They say it's our country. We're entitled by the charter of the United Nations to self-determination. [00:11:08] We don't accept that most of our country be given to this minority, most of whom are immigrants to this country recently. And the result is the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. There is no way to create a majority Jewish state in a majority Arab country [00:11:25] without reducing that majority. And that is done in 1948 by the process that Palestinians describe as the Nakba, which is the expulsion of over 350 over 750,000 Palestinians, and eventually the destruction of most of their villages, which are then. [00:11:42] The lands are then given over to Jewish settlements, which are established in the decades that follow. Thanks for watching the video, guys. We also love it if you hit the join button below, because that makes you a member. And members allow us to be independent, honest. We could be as progressive as we want, no corporate media influence. [00:11:59] And that's all because of you guys. We love doing the show with our members. Hit the join button. Become one of the Young Turks.