How Israel Won the West | The Big Picture
Al Jazeera English
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1,715,856 views Oct 25, 2024 #israel #aljazeeraenglish #documentary
The Big Picture: How Israel Won the West examines how Israel has come to occupy such a privileged and protected place in the Western world. It traces the journey of the Jewish people from biblical stories of origin through centuries of persecution and the advent of Zionism, all the way to the creation of Israel and its ensuing occupation of the Palestinian territory. Along the way, what is revealed is a process of transformation, of how Jews went from being despised by early Christians as "Christ killers" – seeding a vile anti-Judaism that would mutate into anti-Semitism – to being considered part of the white Western world, sharing a common Judeo-Christian heritage.
The film lays bare the alignment of Zionism with "Western civilisation", deliberately putting it in opposition to the people of the east – Arabs, Muslims. This would lay the foundations for an Israel where Arab Jews would be marginalised and European Ashkenazi Jews would dominate and go on to become the bedrock of support for right-wing governments and ultra-right nationalists.
What becomes apparent is the century-old policy, first outlined by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, that only force could impose Zionism and beat Palestinians into accepting the reality of colonisation.
Maintaining the imposition of this settler-colonial reality would require a "special relationship" between Israel and the United States. It would be fostered not just by US geostrategic interests in the Middle East but also facilitated by the "whitening" of Jews in the American and Western imagination, folding them into an opportunistic Judeo-Christian identity that excluded Arabs. This deliberate positioning of an "us" and a "them" has served to legitimise Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory and the massacre of Palestinian people, all under the umbrella and support of the Western world order.
The horror of Israel’s war on Gaza is clear for all the world to see. More than 40,000 people are dead, the majority of them women and children, killed in the name of “self-defence” by Israeli forces on a mission to “destroy” Hamas after the attacks of October 7, 2023. We are witnessing, in plain sight, an unfolding genocide. And yet Israel continues its war. Its mission creeping into Lebanon, where more civilians are killed as Israel targets Hezbollah. All this is playing out with the full support of the West as Israel claims to be fighting on behalf of Western civilisation and against “human animals” in a battle between the Judeo-Christian world and “barbarians” – a contrived narrative long in the making.
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Featuring:
Shaul Magid – visiting professor of modern Jewish studies, Harvard University's Divinity School
David Freidenreich – professor of Jewish studies, Colby College
Omer Bartov – professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, Brown University
Raz Segal – author, Genocide in the Carpathians
Michelle Mart – associate professor, Pennsylvania State University
Arie M Dubnov – associate professor, George Washington University
#israel #history #documentary #news #aljazeeraenglish
Transcript
Follow along using the transcript.
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요약: 시오니즘의 변화와 서구 패권의 결탁
1. 시오니즘의 기원과 서구 문명으로의 편입
시오니즘은 19세기 말 유럽의 반유대주의와 포그롬(유대인 박해)에 대한 대응으로 출현했다
2. 영국-미국의 지정학적 이익과 이스라엘의 면책특권
1917년 영국의 벨푸어 선언은 팔레스타인 원주민을 배제한 채 유대인의 민족적 고향 수립을 지원하며 영국의 제국주의적 이익과 결탁했다
3. 내부적 인종 계층화와 극우 정치의 부상
이스라엘 내부에서는 유럽계 아슈케나지 유대인 엘리트가 지배력을 행사하며, 아랍 국가 출신의 미즈라히(아랍계 유대인)를 하층 노동자로 활용하고 탈아랍화·시오니즘화 교육을 통해 차별했다
4. 100년의 무력 정책과 가자 지구의 현실
제브 자보틴스키가 1923년 제시한 <철의 장벽>(Iron Wall) 교리, 즉 원주민인 팔레스타인인을 절대적인 압도적 무력으로 굴복시켜 식민화의 현실을 받아들이게 해야 한다는 정책은 이스라엘 역대 모든 정부의 기조가 되었다
평론: '우리'와 '타자'의 변증법이 낳은 제국주의적 괴물
본 다큐멘터리 녹취록은 이스라엘-팔레스타인 분쟁을 단순한 영토 분쟁이나 종교 전쟁이 아닌, 서구 제국주의 역사와 백인 우월주의적 담론이 중동이라는 지정학적 공간에서 어떻게 재현되고 결착했는지를 보여주는 탁월한 탈식민주의적 보고서다
1. 타자화의 전도와 정체성의 기회주의적 전동
가장 섬뜩하면서도 정교한 분석은 <타자화의 전도>(inversion of othering) 메커니즘이다
여기에 제2차 세계대전 이후 서구가 느낀 집단적 부채감과 냉전기 미국의 이익이 맞물려 <유대-기독교 전통>이라는 가상의 결합 정체성이 발명된다
2. 이스라엘 내부의 인종적 모순과 우경화의 구조
본 텍스트는 이스라엘을 단일한 유대인 주체로 보지 않고, 내부의 인종적·계급적 균열을 명확히 짚어낸다
더욱 비극적인 것은, 서구 엘리트 계층에게 <아랍인 같다>고 멸시받던 미즈라히 계층의 분노가 식민주의적 구조에 대한 저항으로 나아가지 않고, 오히려 팔레스타인 아랍인에 대한 더 극단적인 증오와 무력주의로 투사되었다는 점이다
3. 국제법적 면책특권의 파열과 글로벌 사우스의 연대
텍스트의 후반부는 전후 수립된 국제 법적 질서가 홀로코스트라는 특수한 비극을 보편적 인권보다 상위에 놓음으로써 이스라엘에게 초법적 특권을 부여했다고 비판한다
그러나 2023년 10월 7일 이후 전개된 가자 지구의 참상은 서구가 구축한 면책특권 체계의 바닥을 드러내고 있다
결론
결국 <서구는 어떻게 이스라엘의 편이 되었나>라는 질문에 대한 답은 역설적이다. 서구가 이스라엘을 선택한 것이 아니라, 이스라엘이 서구의 제국주의, 정착민 식민주의, 백인 우월주의라는 유전자를 가장 완벽하게 복제하여 중동에 이식한 <서구 자신의 거울>이기 때문이다
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Transcript
0:077 seconds[Music]
0:1515 seconds[Music]
0:2121 secondsThey have flattened Gaza entirely.
0:2929 secondsThere's been targeted destruction of hospitals
0:3636 secondsof worship, schools, just eradicating the whole place.
0:4545 secondsIsrael is seen as more moral than any other state in the world. The Israeli army is the most moral in the world.
0:5757 secondsThe idea that Israel could perpetrate any crime in international law became basically unimaginable.
1:071 minute, 7 secondsImpunity for Israel is baked into the international legal system from the very beginning.
1:261 minute, 26 secondsNow Tanyao wants to make it very very clear that what Israel is doing presenting Israel as the front lines of
1:351 minute, 35 secondsthe battle against um against the Arab world against the Muslim world and this brings up this question of the west part of the
1:431 minute, 43 secondsargument that the Arab world is making is that oh Israel is just the western implant In the Muslim world,
1:521 minute, 52 secondsif you think about it historically, Jews in Europe over time were described as
1:591 minute, 59 secondsnot being of Europe, were seen as oriental, were seen as the people who came from elsewhere, who had customs and habits and beliefs that were contrary to European civilization.
2:112 minutes, 11 secondsRight? And much of the impetus for Zionism is that is that Jews were we say now otherred
2:182 minutes, 18 secondsright once they come to Palestine they start seeing themselves and even
2:272 minutes, 27 secondsbefore they come they start imagining themselves as being representatives of the west in the Orient
2:352 minutes, 35 secondsand to a certain extent they succeed in persuading the west that They are the
2:432 minutes, 43 secondssort of western island in the sea of Muslims, Arabs, all these oriental others.
2:512 minutes, 51 secondsYou're right. There is the non-western nature of the Jew that then becomes westernized in a political imperialist colonialist project called Zionism.
3:023 minutes, 2 secondsZionism tries to reconstruct a Jewish people. and it reconstructs a Jewish people because for Israel to be the
3:103 minutes, 10 secondsnational home for the Jewish people, there has to be a Jewish people.
3:143 minutes, 14 secondsBut this notion of a Jewish people is somewhat of an artificial construct. So what do you think about this idea of the Jewish people?
3:213 minutes, 21 secondsWhat happens I would say in the mid-9th century which takes you also to Zionism is the attempt to transform the Jewish
3:303 minutes, 30 secondspeople into a Jewish nation. But most modern nations today trace themselves to
3:383 minutes, 38 secondsstories that they tell, narratives that they tell. Some of which have some historical um semblance of truth and some are
3:463 minutes, 46 secondscompletely mythological. They invent a mythology. It's a myth of creation of a group. And the Jews have the same kind
3:543 minutes, 54 secondsof story that they told themselves from very early on. And people will accept that it may be a myth or may not. But
4:024 minutes, 2 secondsthey now see themselves as part of a certain unit that is distinct from all others.
4:074 minutes, 7 secondsIf we go back to the Bible, obviously the story of Abraham, I mean the the birth of the Jewish people is really the it's really a tribal has tribal roots.
4:164 minutes, 16 secondsIt's the birth of a family. And over the course of history, of course, that family absorbs many other peoples within
4:234 minutes, 23 secondsit. So obviously the people are not all necessarily descendants from Abraham, right? So that the very notion of a
4:324 minutes, 32 secondspeople is a fiction but it's a fiction that has certain scriptural roots and certain roots of memory and ritual.
4:424 minutes, 42 seconds[Music]
4:504 minutes, 50 secondsThe stories of Jewish people were for centuries passed down as oral history until between the 9th and 6th centuries
4:594 minutes, 59 secondsB.C.E. they were written down in the Torah, the Hebrew Bible, as the decreed word of a single creator God.
5:105 minutes, 10 secondsIn one story, the biblical God enters into a covenant with a character named Abraham.
5:165 minutes, 16 secondsGod tells Abraham to leave his home in Mesopotamia and take his family west to the land of Canaan.
5:255 minutes, 25 secondsOnce there, he was to carry out God's work and lead a great nation.
5:335 minutes, 33 secondsThey are chosen to be God's people, and this is the land that God gave them.
5:405 minutes, 40 secondsSo the land of Canaan that becomes the land of Israel is really in a certain sense seen as the promised land.
5:485 minutes, 48 secondsThe story is told in scripture and it doesn't really have much corroborating material outside of scripture.
5:555 minutes, 55 secondsThey come into the land and then they establish a kingdom basically and they build a temple eventually in Jerusalem.
6:026 minutes, 2 secondsThe temple is destroyed. The Jews are banished. 70 years later they come back.
6:076 minutes, 7 secondsThey build a second temple. That temple exists for some hundreds of years.
6:126 minutes, 12 secondsThey're eventually taken over by the Roman Empire. They begin to rebel against the Romans. The insurrection is
6:206 minutes, 20 secondsflattened. The Jews are dispersed.
6:266 minutes, 26 seconds[Music]
6:276 minutes, 27 secondsIt's important to note that the Jews never all lived in the land of Israel.
6:336 minutes, 33 secondswhen they're exiled the first time and they come back. Most of the Jews stayed in Babylonia. They didn't come back to the land.
6:416 minutes, 41 secondsBut the land of Israel became the centerpiece of what became the Jewish religion.
6:486 minutes, 48 secondsJews dispersed across the Near East and into Europe. Some through coercion, many by choice. Just as a new religion formed
6:576 minutes, 57 secondsby the followers of a preacher known as Jesus was set to change the course of Jewish history.
7:037 minutes, 3 secondsJesus's followers understood Jesus to be the long- awaited Messiah figure, the
7:117 minutes, 11 secondsone who would bring about the end of days when people finally get what they deserve.
7:197 minutes, 19 secondsWhen the righteous are rewarded, the wicked are punished.
7:257 minutes, 25 secondsJews did not. And what Christians did was not only criticize the ways in which
7:327 minutes, 32 secondsJews interpreted the Bible, they began to criticize Jews themselves. Jew becomes a slur.
7:407 minutes, 40 secondsYou have this depiction of Judaism as the negative opposite of Christianity.
7:497 minutes, 49 secondsYou have negative depictions of Jews as those who rejected Jesus, as those who
7:577 minutes, 57 secondsdemanded that Jesus be killed, ultimately as those who killed Jesus themselves.
8:068 minutes, 6 secondsNot just slurred as Christ killers, Jews were accused of murdering Christian children, using their blood for
8:138 minutes, 13 secondsceremonial ritual, the so-called blood liel. They were made to live apart as a lesser creed, subject to violence,
8:228 minutes, 22 secondsforced conversions, and expulsions whilst being excluded from almost all professions except money lending, the work opposed by Christian morality.
8:348 minutes, 34 secondsIt was a perilous existence that often relied on the whims of kings.
8:408 minutes, 40 secondsTo the extent that Jews could choose where to live, they often gravitated toward places with powerful kings.
8:488 minutes, 48 secondsBecause the king might extort money from you, might expel you, but the king will protect you from the mobs.
8:568 minutes, 56 seconds[Music]
9:009 minutesAs early Christian Europe defined itself in opposition to Judaism, the rise of an Islamic empire spreading from the Middle
9:089 minutes, 8 secondsEast to Iberia in the 7th century stirred Christendom to repurpose old scorn for a new foil.
9:179 minutes, 17 secondsChristians otherred Jews and otherred Muslims. They begin to define Muslims
9:259 minutes, 25 secondsas pagans or as heretics or as Jews.
9:319 minutes, 31 secondsIt's a slur. It's a way of criticizing those people who are your rivals, those people whose ideas you find threatening.
9:429 minutes, 42 secondsDon't be like the Muslims. They're Jewish.
9:479 minutes, 47 secondsThe Islamic Empire also subjected Jews, including Sphartic Jews of Muslim Spain, to a secondass status. But crucially,
9:569 minutes, 56 secondsthey were protected as demise, people of the covenant, not the equal of Muslims, but essentially free to contribute to
10:0410 minutes, 4 secondsthe business, art, science, and culture of a multiffaith society.
10:1010 minutes, 10 secondsAnd when Spain was reconquered by Christians, Sphartic Jews along with Muslims were forced out of Iberia with many resettling in Arab lands.
10:2110 minutes, 21 secondsThe Jewish diaspora was broadly divided between the Sephardim, spread across North Africa and the Middle East, and
10:2810 minutes, 28 secondsthe Ashkanazim, who had long been scattered in Europe.
10:3310 minutes, 33 secondsLife for Europe's Ashkanazim remained ghettoized and insecure.
10:3810 minutes, 38 secondsBut as the Middle Ages gave way to modernity, new laws began to emancipate Jews from many of the restrictions
10:4610 minutes, 46 secondsthey'd lived under. Times, it seemed, were changing.
10:5110 minutes, 51 secondsBy the 1800s, Europe's industrial revolution was restructuring economies and societies, offering new
10:5910 minutes, 59 secondsopportunities for Jews to succeed and progress. But making progress came at the cost of also making enemies.
11:1111 minutes, 11 secondsThere's now a new type of anti-Jewish animosity that comes under the label created in the 1870s of anti-semitism.
11:2411 minutes, 24 secondsSo you have a combination of thinking about Jews as those who have now become the cause of unemployment, of
11:3411 minutes, 34 secondspoverty, of lack of education, of being uprooted and still the older imagery of Jews as
11:4411 minutes, 44 secondsdemonic, Jews as different. Now on top of this, this is a period of what is called scientific racism. That is there
11:5211 minutes, 52 secondsis an idea that you can actually identify different races of man. So Africans are seen as savages, as inferior.
12:0212 minutes, 2 secondsJews are seen as a different race, but they're not simply inferior to the
12:0912 minutes, 9 secondsNordic white Germanic races. They are also subversive and dangerous to society.
12:1712 minutes, 17 secondsand they take up all those positions that give them that power. They're
12:2312 minutes, 23 secondsconspiring to take over the world. And we may not even know that they've done it.
12:3512 minutes, 35 secondsIn 1881, anti-semitism fueled pograms against Jews scapegoed for the struggles of a fading Russian empire.
12:4712 minutes, 47 secondsThousands were killed, their homes and communities destroyed in riots watched over by state authorities.
12:5812 minutes, 58 secondsThese poggrams kindled the belief among a small minority of Europe's Jews that the only way they could be safe from
13:0413 minutes, 4 secondspersecution was in a Jewish majority state.
13:1013 minutes, 10 secondsIt was at best a fringe idea, but was taken up by an Austrohungarian journalist by the name of Theodore Herzel.
13:2113 minutes, 21 secondsIn 1896, Herzel published a pamphlet called Deer Yudenat, the Jewish state.
13:2913 minutes, 29 secondsIn it, Herzel argued that Jews needed a state of their own and that its most fitting location was Palestine.
13:3913 minutes, 39 secondsThe idea of a Jewish state in Palestine is seemed to be such an outrageous and unrealizable idea.
13:4913 minutes, 49 secondsWhat does it mean for Jews who were living in Europe for a thousand years to go and move to this area of the world that was completely underdeveloped?
13:5913 minutes, 59 secondsIt didn't really have any reality to it.
14:0214 minutes, 2 secondsTraditional Jews not only didn't think of going back to their ancestral homeland. In fact, they were not
14:1014 minutes, 10 secondssupposed to because you are supposed to come back to where you were exiled from only when the Messiah arrives. And if
14:1914 minutes, 19 secondsyou go earlier than that, then you're basically going against your own theology.
14:2814 minutes, 28 secondsThis idea of Jews recreating a homeland in Palestine took on the name Zionism.
14:3414 minutes, 34 secondsZion, a biblical reference to the land of Israel.
14:4014 minutes, 40 secondsHerzel's vision had little support among European jewelry, religious and secular.
14:4614 minutes, 46 secondsBut Herzel wasn't appealing to his fellow European Jews as much as he was to Europe's leaders. An echo of
14:5314 minutes, 53 secondscenturies past when seeking the king's favor was crucial to securing Jewish interests.
15:0015 minutesIn Deerudento, Herzel aligned a Jewish state with Western civilization, claiming that a Jewish homeland in
15:0815 minutes, 8 secondsPalestine would serve as a sector of the wall of Europe against Asia and the outpost of civilization against barbarism.
15:1915 minutes, 19 secondsZionism was using the racist tropes of the white western world to dehumanize the people of the Muslim world. The same
15:2715 minutes, 27 secondstropes Christian Europe had long used to dehumanize both Muslims and Jews and in the process offered Europe an answer to its unresolved Jewish question.
15:4015 minutes, 40 secondsZionists knew that part of the success of their project was the upsurge in anti-semitism
15:4915 minutes, 49 secondsand that in fact if there was no anti-semitism, Zionism would really have no reason to exist.
15:5715 minutes, 57 secondsPerzel was going to offer a win-win situation to the anti-semites of Europe.
16:0316 minutes, 3 secondsHe said, "I have a deal for you. I can take the Jews off your hand." And a lot of European leaders said, "Yeah, that
16:1216 minutes, 12 secondssounds good. If you can solve our problem, we'll help you solve your problem." His thinking is very European.
16:2116 minutes, 21 secondsIt's progressive nationalist colonial thinking. It's about creating a European outpost in Palestine because they are European.
16:3416 minutes, 34 secondsThey are part of a European culture. but that European culture no longer wants them.
16:4016 minutes, 40 seconds[Music]
16:4616 minutes, 46 secondsThe pilgrims had convinced hundreds of thousands of Jews to leave Eastern Europe and start new lives in the United
16:5316 minutes, 53 secondsStates, but an estimated 25,000 made the move to Palestine.
17:0017 minutesThey were followed by a second wave of Jews fleeing more pgrams in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century,
17:0817 minutes, 8 secondsheading to a land of some half a million Arab Muslims living alongside small Christian and Jewish minorities, putting
17:1617 minutes, 16 secondspaid to the Zionist lie of a land without a people.
17:2317 minutes, 23 secondsBut new Jewish immigrants had already established their own farms and factories, built their own towns on land
17:3017 minutes, 30 secondsbought by elite Jewish families like the Rothschilds, whose banking riches helped finance a whole civic infrastructure set apart from the Arabs.
17:4317 minutes, 43 secondsAt that point, the Arab population begins to see something bigger is going
17:5117 minutes, 51 secondson. This is not just Jews who want to come to the land of Israel. There's some project. They were trying to build a society.
18:0218 minutes, 2 secondsThe people coming from Europe have come with an idea to create their own Jewish communities, not simply to be part of a an Ottoman society.
18:1418 minutes, 14 seconds[Music]
18:2018 minutes, 20 secondsBy 1917, with the First World War still raging, Ottoman society was on the brink of collapse. With Britain, the leading
18:2918 minutes, 29 secondsworld power, itching to seize the Ottomans Arab lands, including Palestine.
18:3618 minutes, 36 secondsBritain's imperial greed, converged with Zionist ambition.
18:4118 minutes, 41 secondsSecuring the support of wealthy European Jews, so the British thought would boost their chances of victory. And once the
18:4918 minutes, 49 secondswar was won, a friendly Jewish state planted in Palestine would be a proxy for British rule and a buffer against Arab hostility.
18:5918 minutes, 59 secondsBut the convergence went much deeper.
19:0219 minutes, 2 secondsBritish Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Foreign Secretary Arthur Balffor were both Christian Zionists.
19:1119 minutes, 11 secondsThey understood a return of Jews to a biblical homeland as a precondition for the second coming of Christ. when those
19:1919 minutes, 19 secondswho accepted Jesus as the Messiah ascended to heaven and those who didn't, most notably the Jews, were left to perish.
19:2919 minutes, 29 seconds[Music]
19:3219 minutes, 32 secondsChristian Zionism was a way to free Europe of Jews. So there's that kind of complicated relationship where
19:3919 minutes, 39 secondsanti-semitism and Zionism are working together where Zionism is a perfect answer to that problem.
19:4619 minutes, 46 secondsAnd this is all coming from a colonialist mindset where well the Middle East is just like outside of civilization. Like it doesn't matter what happens there.
19:5519 minutes, 55 secondsIn November 1917 before the war had been won, Arthur Balffor issued a declaration that
20:0320 minutes, 3 secondsannounced the British government's support for the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the
20:0920 minutes, 9 secondsJewish people, saying nothing of the Arab people already there.
20:1520 minutes, 15 secondsIt doesn't mention the Arabs. Its attempt is to say, "We're going to
20:2120 minutes, 21 secondscreate some kind of Europeanlike Jewish state in Palestine where Jews can
20:3020 minutes, 30 secondslive and flourish on a portion of their historic homeland. Not the entirety of their historic homeland, but a portion of their historic homeland.
20:4020 minutes, 40 seconds[Music]
20:4120 minutes, 41 secondsPalestine was already in the process of being hived off for the growing Ashkanazi population. But now, one of
20:4920 minutes, 49 secondsZionism's leading figures, David Bengurian, recognized the potential of what the Balffor Declaration promised
20:5720 minutes, 57 secondsand was quick to address those thirsting for more than just a part of Palestine.
21:0421 minutes, 4 secondsBengurian made a very very impassioned speech trying to convince many many Zionist
21:1121 minutes, 11 secondsdetractors who were not in favor of partition because for them they wanted from the river to the sea and Benorian
21:2021 minutes, 20 secondsconvinced them that this was the first step and we'll move on from there and this
21:2721 minutes, 27 secondswas ultimately the convincing narrative that that brought most of those ionists on board. From that point of view, the
21:3421 minutes, 34 secondsZionists are thinking, yes, there are people there, but we are coming to create our own national home. And what
21:4221 minutes, 42 secondswill happen with the people who live there? Um, that's to be seen.
21:5321 minutes, 53 secondsOne of the things that I wanted to also ask you about is on this question of orientalism and the view of the Muslim
22:0222 minutes, 2 secondsuh as other there is this division between the west and the east, the Christian world and the Arab world and
22:0922 minutes, 9 secondsthe orientalist understanding of what the Arab is both in terms of the attractiveness and also the kind of uh
22:1722 minutes, 17 secondsrejection of the idea of the the stereotype. type of the Arab. But how does how does the the anti-Muslim
22:2522 minutes, 25 secondswhich goes back to the Middle Ages and Christianity versus Islam, how does that play into the kind of Zionist project
22:3322 minutes, 33 secondskind of like reviving this medieval battle between Christianity and Islam in terms of the West and the East? I look I mean obviously um the the view of the
22:4322 minutes, 43 secondsorient in Europe uh especially later in the United States as well is a complex one u because Europe has as it does with
22:5222 minutes, 52 secondsJews it has a long history with Islam um the the going back to the reconquest of
22:5822 minutes, 58 secondsSpain uh going back to uh s such areas as Sicily taken over by Arabs and then taken over by by by Normans and so
23:0823 minutes, 8 secondsforth. uh all of those events are sort of deeply embedded I think in the European memory of their own history.
23:1523 minutes, 15 secondsNow that of course combines again with power politics that u Europeans can actually go and grab these territories
23:2323 minutes, 23 secondsor have power over them uh which is what they do at the end of World War I. Now if you add to that the way that the
23:3123 minutes, 31 secondsBalfa declaration specifically speaks about the territory of Palestine itself there in fact it does not speak about
23:4023 minutes, 40 secondsthe rest of the population which is the vast majority of the people. It only refers to the Jews as those who have
23:4823 minutes, 48 secondsparticular rights. And so Zionism says well we can self-determine as a nation.
23:5423 minutes, 54 secondsSo once they move to that land with that ethnational ideology
24:0024 minutesthey speak directly completely openly proudly of colonization. They build they
24:0924 minutes, 9 secondsbuild colonies right?
24:1024 minutes, 10 secondsThey call them colonies. uh and that process creates what is functionally a settler colonial process and they get
24:1924 minutes, 19 secondsexactly the response that one can expect by competing over land with the people who live there. They create their own
24:2824 minutes, 28 secondsopposition. It is in that sense a profoundly dialectical process.
24:3224 minutes, 32 secondsI wanted to uh just bring up a sketch of the Jewish immigration to Palestine, the
24:3924 minutes, 39 secondsland of Israel from the mid-9th century on. And there's a community of Jews who are living mostly in Jerusalem and other
24:4724 minutes, 47 secondsplaces uh that are referred to as the old settlement Jews. And these are Jews that are mostly traditional. They have come to the land of Israel from the some
24:5424 minutes, 54 secondssome of them from the early 18th century. And they were not Zionists. In fact, they were the core of the anti-ionists who were very opposed to
25:0325 minutes, 3 secondsthe Zionist coming in the 20th century and for the most part lived in pretty good company with the majority Arab population. It's really the second
25:1125 minutes, 11 secondsimmigration 1904 to the first world war that's considered to be the first real Zionist immigration. Over 50% of them went back to Europe within 5 years. It wasn't really a successful immigration.
25:2325 minutes, 23 secondsNow, these were the people who were building colonies. These were the people who were building what later became kibbutim.
25:3025 minutes, 30 secondsMuch of the settlement of that period is funded by Jewish millionaires
25:3725 minutes, 37 secondsin Europe who are assisting uh those early colonizers to build colonies. um
25:4625 minutes, 46 secondscolonies which are based on the idea that the Jews who immigrate would uh run them and that they would have workers
25:5425 minutes, 54 secondsworking them there and those workers would be locals would be Arabs. And the the second aliyah, the second
26:0126 minutes, 1 secondimmigration are the people who come already, as you say, with more of an idealistic view of
26:0926 minutes, 9 secondsthe kind of society that they're going to create. And that group is deeply critical of the first group precisely
26:1826 minutes, 18 secondsfor issues of labor because those early colonies as I said use Arab labor to
26:2526 minutes, 25 secondsproduce uh on their own agricultural colonies. And this new group that comes in starts speaking about the conquest of
26:3426 minutes, 34 secondslabor. That is that part of the Zionist um undertaking is both to take over uh
26:4226 minutes, 42 secondswork, take over land and in the process of doing that transform themselves, become workers of the land. There is a
26:5126 minutes, 51 secondsgrowing realization within the Arab population that there's a group now that is beginning to establish cities,
26:5926 minutes, 59 secondsestablish communities, take over land, and that brings about resistance.
27:0927 minutes, 9 secondsThe Allies victory in the First World War granted Britain a mandate to administer the lands of Palestine and
27:1627 minutes, 16 secondsTrans Jordan, territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire.
27:2227 minutes, 22 secondsThe mandate was an instrument for imperial rule and at its heart was the Balffor Declaration's commitment to creating a Jewish home in Palestine.
27:3527 minutes, 35 secondsIn the early 1920s, Britain sanctioned the resettlement of thousands more Ashkanazi Jews from Eastern Europe.
27:4327 minutes, 43 secondsPalestine was dotted with new Jewish towns with separate economies that excluded indigenous Arabs who forcibly
27:5227 minutes, 52 secondsresisted what they recognized as brazen colonization.
27:5727 minutes, 57 secondsClashes between Jewish immigrants and Arabs became more intense as the Zionist project acquired new territory for a new
28:0628 minutes, 6 secondsJewish state. One that would be home to a whole new Jew. The new Jew was the suntan muscular secular kibbutznik.
28:1928 minutes, 19 secondsAnd that was basically offering a revolutionary revision of the entire tradition to create a kind of nationalistic Jew of power.
28:3128 minutes, 31 seconds[Music]
28:3428 minutes, 34 secondsThey wanted to create the kind of Jew who can escape the degradation
28:4328 minutes, 43 secondsthat built up over 2,000 years of exile from their land.
28:5028 minutes, 50 secondsThe western idea of masculinity was something that was deeply influential in rebuilding the new Jewish personality.
29:0029 minutesNow on the other side, and this is somewhat ironic, the Arab portrayed as being a feminine,
29:0929 minutes, 9 secondsa feminization of the Orient for the purposes of domination.
29:1529 minutes, 15 secondsThe Arab in the Zionist imagination becomes what the Jew was in the Christian European imagination.
29:2529 minutes, 25 secondsThe Zionist leadership headed by David Bengurian clung to the delusion that Palestinians still might welcome a
29:3329 minutes, 33 secondsJewish state despite increasingly fierce resistance. But there was a more realistic vision.
29:4129 minutes, 41 secondsIn a 1923 essay called the iron wall, Bengurian's political rival Vladimir Zev
29:4929 minutes, 49 secondsJabatinski recognized the reality of Zionism for the people of Palestine.
29:5629 minutes, 56 secondsZionism manifested itself in the settler colonial project. That is to take the land of an indigenous group, in this
30:0430 minutes, 4 secondscase Palestinians, and build a different society on it. in this case a Jewish society but really actually a white settler Jewish society.
30:1730 minutes, 17 secondsJabotiski he asks do you know of any indigenous group in the world that accepted a colonial movement and he answers of course not.
30:2930 minutes, 29 secondsJamotiski became the head of the alternative the revisionist Zionist movement. He says, "We all know
30:3830 minutes, 38 secondsthat the Arabs will not accept us here." And his idea is that they will have to do it by force. They will have to build
30:4830 minutes, 48 secondsan iron wall. They will have to show that they cannot be removed. Jabatinsky
30:5530 minutes, 55 secondsbelieved that eventually the Palestinians will give up and will accept a reality that they cannot
31:0331 minutes, 3 secondschange. And at that point, they can be welcomed and accepted as individuals with full and equal citizenship rights,
31:1031 minutes, 10 secondsbut they will not have national rights within a Jewish state in Palestine.
31:1631 minutes, 16 seconds[Music]
31:1831 minutes, 18 secondsAnd for Jabatinsky, that wasn't simply the river to the sea. He wanted to see a Jewish state in the entirety of the original British mandate of Palestine.
31:2931 minutes, 29 secondsAnd he felt that this was going to require a sense of this new Jewish personality that will not be the
31:3631 minutes, 36 secondsdefenseless Jew, but really the Jew of power.
31:4131 minutes, 41 secondsThis was the policy that was adopted, the policy of force.
31:4731 minutes, 47 secondsIn 1939, Zionist militias collaborating with British troops used brute force to help put down an Arab uprising.
31:5831 minutes, 58 secondsJews in Palestine were gaining strength just as Jews in Europe faced devastation.
32:0832 minutes, 8 secondsThe Second World War revealed the true horrors of Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler's monstrous anti-semitism
32:1732 minutes, 17 secondssteeped in the fallacies of racial science and conspiracy theories about Jewish power was to claim the lives of 6 million Jews.
32:3332 minutes, 33 seconds[Music]
32:3932 minutes, 39 secondsAt the end of World War II, there were hundreds of thousands of displaced Jews in Europe with nowhere to go.
32:4932 minutes, 49 secondsThey could not go to the United States. They could not go to Great Britain.
32:5432 minutes, 54 secondsAnother way to put it is Western powers encouraged the creation of a Jewish state so they didn't have to take in the immigrants themselves.
33:0633 minutes, 6 secondsEurope's unwanted Ashkanazi Jews were occupying more and more of Palestine that was now nearing the end of British
33:1433 minutes, 14 secondsrule. But its fate remained in the hands of Western power. At Flushing, Long Island, the General Assembly of the
33:2333 minutes, 23 secondsUnited Nations, has made its decision on Palestine. The map shows what partition means. The Jewish state colored light,
33:3033 minutes, 30 secondsthe Arab state dark, Jaffa to go to the Arabs, Jerusalem internationalized.
33:3633 minutes, 36 secondsThe 1947 United Nations partition plan was skewed in favor of the 630,000
33:4333 minutes, 43 secondsJews living in Palestine, handing them more than half of the land while leaving 1.4 4 million Arabs with the lesser share.
33:5533 minutes, 55 secondsThe resolution was adopted by circ abstinction.
34:0134 minutes, 1 second[Music]
34:0634 minutes, 6 secondsThe Jewish people had once began to celebrate the United Nations decision. The Arab reaction was to follow.
34:1334 minutes, 13 secondsPalestine's Arabs resisted the UN plan that formalized Zionist colonization.
34:2034 minutes, 20 secondsFighting between Arabs and Jews was a commonplace occurrence and there were many casualties on both sides.
34:2634 minutes, 26 secondsIn the midst of intense Arab resistance, the Zionist paramilitary group Hagana began clearing the way for a new Jewish state.
34:3634 minutes, 36 secondsThey launch an operation in April of 1948 of opening the access of transportation.
34:4334 minutes, 43 secondsAnd they do that by attacking villages.
34:4834 minutes, 48 secondsTheir policy by and large is to empty those villages.
34:5334 minutes, 53 secondsThey do that by intimidation. They do that by force. They do that by killing.
34:5934 minutes, 59 secondsIn one of those cases, there is the notorious case of Dirasin near Jerusalem.
35:0635 minutes, 6 secondsIt's a massacre. Women and children are killed there.
35:1235 minutes, 12 secondsand news of that massacre travels quickly to other Palestinian villages and people are terrified. And so there's
35:2135 minutes, 21 secondsalso uh large numbers of Palestinians who flee from their villages whenever they hear a rumor that Jewish forces are
35:3035 minutes, 30 secondson the way because they're afraid of massacres.
35:3935 minutes, 39 secondsOn the 14th of May 1948, at the official end of the British mandate, David Bengurian declared the birth of
35:4835 minutes, 48 secondsthe independent Jewish state of Israel.
35:5735 minutes, 57 secondsThe death and destruction and forced dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians in the creation of Israel
36:0636 minutes, 6 secondswould be known as al- Nakba, the catastrophe.
36:1336 minutes, 13 secondsIsrael's dark truth forever to be denied.
36:1836 minutes, 18 secondsNakba denial becomes a foundational issue in Israel of course but also in the west.
36:2536 minutes, 25 secondsIt's very important to understand the origins. In 1948 we have the genocide convention. The immediate background of
36:3436 minutes, 34 secondsthe genocide convention of course is the Holocaust.
36:3836 minutes, 38 seconds[Music]
36:4036 minutes, 40 secondsThe Nazi assault against Jews is perceived as a unique phenomena. in order to detach Nazi Germany and Nazism
36:4936 minutes, 49 secondsand the Nazi assault on Jews from colonial genocide.
36:5336 minutes, 53 secondsWhat this does is create a hierarchy, meaning that what we now call the Holocaust is perceived as worse and more terrible than genocide.
37:0537 minutes, 5 secondsthat this also creates another hierarchy because Israel which emerges as the state of Holocaust survivors is
37:1437 minutes, 14 secondsimmediately placed as more moral than any other state in the world. And this is the origins of this idea that the
37:2337 minutes, 23 secondsIsraeli army is the most moral in the world.
37:2837 minutes, 28 secondsSo from the very beginning we have these kinds of what really are Jewish supremacist ideas that meant that the
37:3537 minutes, 35 secondsidea that Israel could perpetrate any crime in international law. Not to mention genocide became basically
37:4237 minutes, 42 secondsunimaginable which of course immediately necessitated Nakba denial. And Nakba denial therefore
37:5037 minutes, 50 secondsbecomes a structural element of the postwar international legal system.
37:5637 minutes, 56 secondsIt means that impunity for Israel is baked into the international legal system from the very beginning.
38:0638 minutes, 6 seconds[Music]
38:0938 minutes, 9 secondsThe beginning of Israel triggered an immediate war with its Arab neighbors.
38:1838 minutes, 18 secondsWhen a UN brokered ceasefire brought fighting to an end, Israel had gained control of 78% of historic Palestine.
38:2838 minutes, 28 secondsWhat remained for the Palestinians was split in two, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, with Jerusalem divided
38:3738 minutes, 37 secondsbetween an Arab East and an Israeli West.
38:4138 minutes, 41 secondsThe Nagba had vanquished the vast majority of Palestine's Arabs and stripped them of any right to return to
38:4938 minutes, 49 secondstheir homes. A minority remained in the new expanded state of Israel, full
38:5538 minutes, 55 secondscitizens of a country that saw itself as morally superior and saw them as a racially inferior enemy within.
39:0639 minutes, 6 secondsBut Israel's new labor government needed a new labor force.
39:1139 minutes, 11 secondsnew people to do the essential manual jobs unattractive to many European Ashkanazi.
39:1839 minutes, 18 secondsAnd so it turned to the Sephardic Jews in the Arab world.
39:2439 minutes, 24 secondsThose Jews that were living in the Arab countries generally were not Zionist.
39:2739 minutes, 27 secondsZionist was really a European phenomenon. But their lives were now in danger in many cases.
39:3439 minutes, 34 secondsThere is a particular case of a pogram against Jews in Baghdad. But there are also attempts by the Zionists to uh
39:4339 minutes, 43 secondsincite anti-Jewish sentiment in Iraq so as to persuade people to leave.
39:5139 minutes, 51 secondsBut when those populations arrive, then they're seen by much of the European population, Jewish European population
39:5939 minutes, 59 secondsthere as Arabs. And the Arabs, of course, were the enemy.
40:0440 minutes, 4 secondsThey were called the Misra, the Jews from the east. and they were being used as menial labor.
40:1140 minutes, 11 secondsThe Ashkanazi Jewish elites regarded Misraim as less than, as inferior, as uneducated.
40:2140 minutes, 21 secondsThey're scene is not fully Jewish. They're not fully uh civilized.
40:2840 minutes, 28 secondsThe rhetoric is to civilize them.
40:3240 minutes, 32 secondsIt is a dearabization which meant to Europeanize them which meant to Zionize them.
40:3940 minutes, 39 secondsWhat actually happens is that many of those immigrants become basically a secondass group within Israeli society.
40:5140 minutes, 51 seconds[Music]
40:5340 minutes, 53 secondsIsrael was building racial inequalities into its new society. But its existence in the Middle East remained precarious.
41:0241 minutes, 2 secondsSurrounded by hostile enemies, Israel, like Jews in the Middle Ages, was looking for the support of a powerful ruler.
41:1341 minutes, 13 secondsIn the middle of the 20th century, the United States of America was the most powerful nation on Earth
41:2141 minutes, 21 secondsand looking to assert itself in a cold war with the Soviet Union, its communist nemesis.
41:3041 minutes, 30 secondsA really important way of asserting how different we in America are from those
41:3741 minutes, 37 secondsgodless communists is that we are religious and that we value our religious heritage under this broader umbrella of Judeo-Christian.
41:4941 minutes, 49 secondsAnd by saying Judeo-Christian, we embrace all people who have inherited
41:5641 minutes, 56 secondsthis western religious tradition. And that we accept Jews under this umbrella
42:0342 minutes, 3 secondstoo because they share the same basic starting culture, religious culture.
42:1142 minutes, 11 secondsIsrael's early years coincided with America's opportunistic embrace of a contrived Judeo-Christian identity that
42:2142 minutes, 21 secondsconveniently whitewashed America's own anti-semitism by folding Jews into a white western civilization.
42:3042 minutes, 30 secondsThere is no way to understand that embrace without understanding the
42:3742 minutes, 37 secondssymbiotic relationship between the embrace of Israelis as Westerners as
42:4442 minutes, 44 secondsJudeo-Christians as white and the rejection of Arabs and Muslims
42:5442 minutes, 54 secondsas different as other as outside of our sphere.
42:5942 minutes, 59 secondsAn inescapable conclusion is that Jews and Israelis came to be seen as
43:0943 minutes, 9 secondsinsiders, as people who were like other Americans and like the United States.
43:1743 minutes, 17 secondsThe United States gathered Israel into its fold just as events were about to bring the two countries even closer together.
43:2943 minutes, 29 secondsIn 1967, Israeli air strikes triggered an all-out war with Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.
43:3943 minutes, 39 seconds[Music]
43:4043 minutes, 40 secondsThe Arab armies were defeated in just 6 days.
43:4643 minutes, 46 secondsThere's a certain kind of pride in that victory and a certain sense of invincibility.
43:5343 minutes, 53 secondsThe Jews go from being the disempowered, weak victims of the Holocaust to being almost like a super nation. But the dark
44:0344 minutes, 3 secondsside is that is also the beginning of the occupation.
44:0744 minutes, 7 secondsIsrael captures all of historic Palestine and beyond which includes the
44:1444 minutes, 14 secondsGaza Strip. And the area that is most of greatest interest for settlers is the
44:2244 minutes, 22 secondsWest Bank. This the beginning of settlement of those occupied territories.
44:2944 minutes, 29 secondsIf we think about Jabotinski, that was the Iron War. Israel said, "We are here.
44:3444 minutes, 34 secondsWe can defeat you. Now is the time to finally reach a final arrangement."
44:4444 minutes, 44 secondsBut with the tasting comes the appetite and Israel does not do that.
44:5144 minutes, 51 secondsAnd a new movement is created in Israel of a greater Israel.
44:5744 minutes, 57 secondsA greater Israel meant the whole of historic Palestine and possibly beyond.
45:0345 minutes, 3 secondsAn overwhelming military victory proved Israel's strength to its Arab enemies and proved to the United States that it
45:1145 minutes, 11 secondscould be a useful proxy in a region vital to American interests.
45:1645 minutes, 16 seconds1967 helps to usher in this idea of this military alliance.
45:2445 minutes, 24 secondsIsrael became the western democracy that was connected to these global powers in terms of interests that had to
45:3345 minutes, 33 secondsdo with everything from oil to labor to technology.
45:4145 minutes, 41 secondsIsrael became the American footprint in the Middle East.
45:4845 minutes, 48 secondsI would say on this invention of the Judeo-Christian uh universe, the Judeo-Christian
45:5745 minutes, 57 secondsideology um within the European context and you can talk more to the American one. uh it
46:0546 minutes, 5 secondsis completely a creature of the post World War II post holocaust attitude of
46:1246 minutes, 12 secondsEuropeans uh toward what happened in Europe uh during the Holocaust and then rethinking uh the tradition uh centuries
46:2246 minutes, 22 secondsof uh European anti-Jewish animosity and European anti-semitism that is that Christianity as a religion
46:3146 minutes, 31 secondsplayed a role in um uh describing Jews is outside of our moral universe,
46:3746 minutes, 37 secondsright? And um when you try to apply that to attitudes toward Israel, it becomes
46:4546 minutes, 45 secondsvery interesting because Israel in a sense is the answer to the problem that Christian Europe now plays a role in
46:5446 minutes, 54 secondscreating a Jewish state uh and therefore fulfilling its moral obligation to the
47:0047 minutesJews that it had uh betrayed uh during the Holocaust. And so in a sense it's
47:0747 minutes, 7 secondsinverting uh anti-Jewish attitudes into an invention of this kind of moral universe where we are all on the same
47:1547 minutes, 15 secondspage. We always were but we have this burden of guilt of anti-Jewish attitudes that had led to the Holocaust. Uh I
47:2447 minutes, 24 secondsthink in the American case it's somewhat different.
47:2747 minutes, 27 secondsI think it is different. Um, you have something called the trifaith America movement in the 1930s where you have a I
47:3547 minutes, 35 secondscan't remember the names, a priest, a pastor and a rabbi go around the country preaching uh coexistence between
47:4447 minutes, 44 secondsJudaism, Christianity, Judaism, Catholicism or Protestantism, which is an interesting again play given the fact that the Jews make up a tiny percentage
47:5147 minutes, 51 secondsof the population that they're they're included in that trifaith America. And then the Judeo-Christian tradition really in a certain sense and here I'm
48:0048 minutesvery influenced by this essay in 1969 by Arthur Cohen called the myth of the Judeo-Christian tradition that basically the Judeo-Christian tradition just
48:0848 minutes, 8 secondsreally means the Christian tradition and the Judeo already latinized and Christianized in in its articulation just becomes subsumed in Christianity.
48:1848 minutes, 18 secondsSo with an expression of generosity, it's actually another form of supersessionism.
48:2448 minutes, 24 secondsHowever, it's now ubiquitous in the halls of Congress. People will get up and talk about the Judeo-Christian tradition. And post 911, it really has
48:3348 minutes, 33 secondstaken on a veillance of anti-Muslim tradition, right? That Islam Judeo-Christian tradition becomes a weapon against Islam.
48:4348 minutes, 43 secondsI don't think it's a very provocative thing to say that Israel changes after 1967. The Six Day War is over. Israel
48:5148 minutes, 51 secondsincreases its territory by about onethird. and not only increased its territory but now has dominion over populations in the Gaza Strip which is
48:5948 minutes, 59 secondsEgypt, the West Bank which was Jordan and the Golden Heights which was uh which was Syria. It was first seen as the liberation of territories and then
49:0849 minutes, 8 secondsbecomes the occupation and they can't easily annex the territories to become part of the state because then the
49:1549 minutes, 15 secondsJewish majority which is kind of the razondetra of Zionism would be undermined. So they they get involved in
49:2349 minutes, 23 secondsa situation that seems to me to be one uh where nobody really has a plan and yet what becomes a settler movement.
49:3249 minutes, 32 secondsThey do have a plan and the plan is kind of greater Israel territorial maximalism. This is seen as something messianic. Palestinians were now
49:4049 minutes, 40 secondsconsidered to be ironically as in Europe the Jews were were considered to be the enemy within. The Palestinians are now
49:4749 minutes, 47 secondsconsidered to be the enemy within the trajectory of uh Israeli policies,
49:5649 minutes, 56 secondsbut not just policies of Israeli aspirations of returning to the historic lands of where the Israelites were. They
50:0450 minutes, 4 secondsthey weren't living in Tel Aviv. They were living in in Nablus. They were living in Hebron. They were they conquered Jericho. And suddenly all
50:1250 minutes, 12 secondsthese places are under Israeli rule. The trajectory is how do we keep it? Isra
50:1950 minutes, 19 secondswants the territories and its problem is what to do with the people living in them. Another thing that happens after
50:2650 minutes, 26 seconds67 which is on the sort of geopolitical level is that after 67 the United States sees that Israel is a potent military power and it starts investing in that.
50:3950 minutes, 39 secondsAnd the third thing that I would mention, Israel changes, the country itself changes. It becomes a much more
50:4650 minutes, 46 secondscosmopolitan society. It opens up to the west. Uh people travel more. Uh there's
50:5350 minutes, 53 secondsmore media coming in. It opens up to the world. And at the same time, it increasingly becomes a country much of
51:0251 minutes, 2 secondswhose occupation is managing an occupation. And so it becomes a society that on the one hand is increasingly
51:1151 minutes, 11 secondsmodernized and open and cosmopolitan and less conservative and at the same time is preoccupied with how do you hold
51:2051 minutes, 20 secondsdown half of the population under your control.
51:2651 minutes, 26 seconds[Music]
51:2851 minutes, 28 secondsIsrael's victory in the 1967 6-day war brought with it a military occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
51:3851 minutes, 38 secondsBut instead of being condemned, Israel consolidated its place within Western power with Jews embraced as part of a white Judeo-Christian world order.
51:5051 minutes, 50 secondsThe United States increased its military and economic aid to Israel to unprecedented levels while turning a blind eye to the plight of Palestinians.
52:0152 minutes, 1 secondThe people outside of the white western fold.
52:0652 minutes, 6 secondsAn armed struggle against the occupation now grew more intense.
52:1052 minutes, 10 secondsA vicious act of sabotage which killed 11 people in a Jewish market in Jerusalem. Political violence against Israel by groups such as the Palestinian
52:1952 minutes, 19 secondsLiberation Organization was avenged by the Israeli state through assassinations and more repression in the occupied territories.
52:3052 minutes, 30 secondsAnd then in October 1973 on the Jewish festival of Yom Kapor,
52:3852 minutes, 38 secondsa coalition led by Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack.
52:4452 minutes, 44 secondsThe Arab armies made shockingly early gains against an Israeli military that would eventually reclaim the upper hand.
52:5352 minutes, 53 seconds[Music]
52:5552 minutes, 55 secondsBut Israel's initial failures were damning. Its sense of invincibility now lost.
53:0353 minutes, 3 secondsThe Labour Prime Minister Golden resigned.
53:0853 minutes, 8 secondsThree years later in 1977, the Lakud Party headed by Manim Bean, once the leader of a Jewish terror group, was elected to power.
53:2053 minutes, 20 secondsFor the first time, Israel had a right-wing party in government with an avowed disciple of the hard-right
53:2753 minutes, 27 secondsideologue Zev Jabotinski as prime minister.
53:3353 minutes, 33 secondsBut Likood's rise wasn't just rooted in the failings of the 1973 war.
53:4153 minutes, 41 secondsIt was fueled by the rage of Israel's Arab Jews.
53:4653 minutes, 46 secondsThe followers of the revisionist. That's the party that was established by Zev Jabotinski and is now in 1977 led by Manahim begging.
53:5853 minutes, 58 secondsThe people who elect him are the mizim.
54:0254 minutes, 2 secondsthe people or the children of the people who came from North Africa and the Middle East, the people who had deep
54:1054 minutes, 10 secondshatred for the Ashkanazi establishment, the ongoing resentment of how they were
54:1754 minutes, 17 secondstreated as secondclass citizens, how they were treated like Arabs.
54:2354 minutes, 23 seconds[Music]
54:2654 minutes, 26 secondsIsrael's Labor Party, made up of an Ashkanazi elite, had purged Ms. of their Arab heritage, reinforcing the racist
54:3554 minutes, 35 secondsidea of Arabs as inferior, worthy only of contempt while treating Ms. as a Jewish underclass.
54:4554 minutes, 45 secondsThe Lud party, itself dominated by Ashkanazi leaders, stoked Ms. disaection with Labour's elites while stirring hostility against Palestinian Arabs.
54:5754 minutes, 57 secondsBut a new radical figure was about to turn Arab hatred into a political movement, too extreme even for Bean's
55:0655 minutes, 6 secondsright-wing government. His name was Mayer Kahana.
55:1055 minutes, 10 secondsThe JDL in Israel has made it quite clear that it is ready, willing, and quite able to go and kill Arab terrorists.
55:2055 minutes, 20 secondsMayor Kahana is an American-born rabbi who immigrates to Israel and he begins to build a political party that becomes known as the Kak party.
55:3355 minutes, 33 secondsVery very militant, very jabotinskylike.
55:3755 minutes, 37 secondsAnd then in 1984 he wins one seat in the Knesset. And this is really a shock to
55:4655 minutes, 46 secondsthe Israeli political system because Kahana was advocating transferring the Arabs out, making them worse than
55:5355 minutes, 53 secondssecondass citizens. Any Arab who is ready to live here as a nonitizen with his personal rights and not his national
56:0156 minutes, 1 secondrights can stay here. And any Arab who is not and who looks forward to that day when Israel will become Palestine must
56:1056 minutes, 10 secondsleave. That's not racism. And that's common sense.
56:1556 minutes, 15 secondsThere's a certain kind of hatred and anger and militancy against Arabs that
56:2256 minutes, 22 secondsis even for the political right in Israel becomes frightening. There is no such thing as Jewish terror.
56:2956 minutes, 29 secondsThere is Jewish vengeance. Perhaps his rhetoric tacks on to a sense of insecurity
56:3556 minutes, 35 secondsof disorder. again latching on to people who are notazi to Mizraim.
56:4356 minutes, 43 secondsIt is a politics of resentment and of rage.
56:4756 minutes, 47 secondsI am going to the Arab village of Um Fakam in Israel, a nest of vipers and snakes, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish, and
56:5556 minutes, 55 secondsI'm going to walk through those streets just like Arabs walk through the streets of Jewish cities. And I'm going to say Kahan is here and you'll be leaving soon.
57:0557 minutes, 5 secondsAnd they also motivated to use violence because the regime itself is using violence.
57:1657 minutes, 16 secondsMayer Kahane and his followers, many of whom were Misrai, carried out deadly attacks on Arab targets
57:2457 minutes, 24 secondswhere the Israeli state strove to deny its violence against Arabs, Kahane openly celebrated it.
57:3457 minutes, 34 secondsIn 1988, his KAH party would be outlawed as a racist terror group.
57:4057 minutes, 40 secondsHe's subsequently assassinated in America some years later, but his influence continues to grow
57:4957 minutes, 49 secondsamong some of the radical factions of the settler movement.
57:5457 minutes, 54 secondsIn 1994, an American Israeli opened fire on Palestinian worshippers at a West Bank mosque.
58:0258 minutes, 2 seconds29 people were shot dead.
58:0558 minutes, 5 secondsThe following year, a Misrai Jew shot and killed Israel's then Prime Minister Yitsak Rabbin.
58:1358 minutes, 13 secondsBoth killers opposed the 1993 Oslo Accords. Both opposed the possibility of
58:2058 minutes, 20 secondsa Palestinian state. Both were devoted followers of Mayer Kahan.
58:2858 minutes, 28 secondsMayer Kahani was himself a devote of Zev Jabotinski, the architect of the iron wall doctrine and the ideological godfather of another liquid leader.
58:4258 minutes, 42 seconds[Music]
58:4358 minutes, 43 secondsIn 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu would become Israel's youngest ever prime minister.
58:5158 minutes, 51 secondsNetanyahu was steeped in Jabotinsk's ideas of forcing Palestinians into submission and in the ideal of a greater Israel that swallowed all of Palestine.
59:0459 minutes, 4 secondsThis was the ideology that Netanyahu shared with the extreme right. The same ideology that had dictated Zionist
59:1259 minutes, 12 secondspolicy since the early 20th century. The policy of all Israeli governments, labor
59:1859 minutes, 18 secondsor liquid, left or right, since Israel's creation, the policy of total conquest, of absolute force.
59:3059 minutes, 30 secondsForce was used to beat down the first and second inifadas, Palestinian uprisings, against an illegal occupation.
59:4159 minutes, 41 secondsForce was used to collectively punish Palestinians for attacks by the military wing of Hamas, the group Gazins elected to power.
59:5359 minutes, 53 secondsForce was the 100red-year policy hidden in plain sight.
1:00:001 hourAnd all the while, Israel forced through its settlement building, expanding its footprint in the West Bank,
1:00:071 hour, 7 secondslaying waste to the possibility of any viable Palestinian state.
1:00:131 hour, 13 secondsIt was Jabatinsky's iron wall made real, and its consequences would be shocking.
1:00:241 hour, 24 seconds[Music]
1:00:321 hour, 32 seconds[Music]
1:00:341 hour, 34 secondsWithin hours, the scales of the attack were unfathomable.
1:00:431 hour, 43 secondsOctober 7th was a state in collapse and a military that failed miserably in protecting Israeli citizens.
1:00:541 hour, 54 secondsThe whole project of Zionism was to prevent this from happening.
1:01:031 hour, 1 minute, 3 secondsIf you keep people caged for decades, you're brutalizing yourself and you're brutalizing them. And what can you expect will happen? They will respond.
1:01:151 hour, 1 minute, 15 secondsThere will be massacres.
1:01:181 hour, 1 minute, 18 secondsAs Jebatinsky said about the Arabs in the Iron Wall, subjugated people will rebel one way or another.
1:01:281 hour, 1 minute, 28 seconds[Music]
1:01:321 hour, 1 minute, 32 secondsThe Hamasled attacks of October 7th, 2023 against Israel resulted in the death of an estimated 1,200 people.
1:01:431 hour, 1 minute, 43 secondsIsrael's response was an allout war on the Gaza Strip.
1:01:511 hour, 1 minute, 51 seconds[Music]
1:01:531 hour, 1 minute, 53 seconds[Applause]
1:01:531 hour, 1 minute, 53 seconds[Music]
1:02:011 hour, 2 minutes, 1 secondPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu echoed the words of Zionism's founding figure, Theodore Herzel, as he reached for
1:02:091 hour, 2 minutes, 9 secondsJudeo-Christian solidarity in Europe and in the United States. This is not a clash of civilizations.
1:02:181 hour, 2 minutes, 18 secondsIt's a clash between barbarism and civilization. The response was unequivocal.
1:02:251 hour, 2 minutes, 25 secondsin Israel, we must make sure that they have what they need to protect their people today and always.
1:02:331 hour, 2 minutes, 33 secondsThere is a necessity to continue to support Israel unconditionally, to send even more weapons uh to Israel, to stand behind Israel even more.
1:02:441 hour, 2 minutes, 44 secondsWhat we're seeing here is this western identity and how if we need to really come to terms with Israel, we need to come to terms with Israeli genocide, which is a continuation of the Nakba.
1:02:561 hour, 2 minutes, 56 secondsThen we need to think about settler colonialism at the heart of the international political and legal system after World War II, which means that we
1:03:051 hour, 3 minutes, 5 secondsalso need to come to terms with settler colonialism in the US and in the West.
1:03:101 hour, 3 minutes, 10 secondsAnd who wants to do that? But we can't understand that without thinking about what sits at the heart of settler colonialism. That is white supremacy.
1:03:201 hour, 3 minutes, 20 secondsIn Israel, white supremacy manifests itself as Jewish supremacy.
1:03:261 hour, 3 minutes, 26 secondsOne could make the argument that it's a settler government at this point. And the ideology of greater Israel in the movement becomes the government itself,
1:03:351 hour, 3 minutes, 35 secondswhich is why Natanyao is very open in saying there will never be a Palestinian state.
1:03:421 hour, 3 minutes, 42 secondsIsrael has flattened Gaza entirely.
1:03:461 hour, 3 minutes, 46 secondsThere's been targeted destruction of universities, of hospitals, of places of worship,
1:03:561 hour, 3 minutes, 56 secondsschools, parliament, just eradicating the whole place,
1:04:031 hour, 4 minutes, 3 secondsmaking it impossible for them to come back because there's nothing to come back to.
1:04:081 hour, 4 minutes, 8 seconds[Music]
1:04:111 hour, 4 minutes, 11 secondsThere have clearly been war crimes, crimes against humanity, and there won't be any other way to call
1:04:191 hour, 4 minutes, 19 secondsit but a genocide campaign to destroy the Palestinian people in Gaza.
1:04:271 hour, 4 minutes, 27 secondsAnd meanwhile in the West Bank under the leadership of the two extremist
1:04:341 hour, 4 minutes, 34 secondsministers, Smidge who is not only minister of finance but also minister within the ministry of defense and
1:04:421 hour, 4 minutes, 42 secondsBenville who is the minister of internal security and police. Under the leadership of these two people there is
1:04:501 hour, 4 minutes, 50 secondsa creeping ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.
1:04:541 hour, 4 minutes, 54 secondsBenjamin Netanyahu's coalition government is propped up by right-wing fanatics like Itamar Beng and Bezal's
1:05:031 hour, 5 minutes, 3 secondsMotric and
1:05:121 hour, 5 minutes, 12 secondsNetanyahu has continued the Likood strategy of appealing to far-right elements among Israel's Mizrahim for
1:05:201 hour, 5 minutes, 20 secondssupport but is beholdened to the extremists to keep him in power and out of prison as he fights charges of alleged corruption.
1:05:301 hour, 5 minutes, 30 secondsUnlike Netanyahu, Zmotric and Bengavir are religious Zionists, disciples of Mayer Kahani.
1:05:391 hour, 5 minutes, 39 secondsBut all three share a devotion to Zev Jabatinski and a commitment to his vision of an expanded greater Israel.
1:05:501 hour, 5 minutes, 50 secondsWhile our eyes are set on Gaza, what's going on in the West Bank is as alarming.
1:05:581 hour, 5 minutes, 58 secondsYou have these settler militias that are armed.
1:06:051 hour, 6 minutes, 5 secondsThere's no police. There's no law enforcement. All the red lights are flashing. Because when you have these
1:06:141 hour, 6 minutes, 14 secondsgroups that are weaponized, that's a recipe for atrocities. In extreme cases
1:06:211 hour, 6 minutes, 21 secondssuch as the uh hilltop youth, these are the kids that feel that they're reenacting some sort of a crazy biblical
1:06:291 hour, 6 minutes, 29 secondsstory uh as if they are just shepherds in the hill of Judea and avoid the fact
1:06:361 hour, 6 minutes, 36 secondsthat behind the Jewish settler there's a tank and an F-16.
1:06:471 hour, 6 minutes, 47 secondsIn the 1920s when the Zionists come and first start thinking about a state project, there was this term called the
1:06:561 hour, 6 minutes, 56 secondsArab question. How we can integrate this population or can we integrate this population into this state idea? And in
1:07:051 hour, 7 minutes, 5 secondssome very kind of horrific uh way um October 7th is like the Arab question
1:07:121 hour, 7 minutes, 12 secondscoming and like smashing the country over the head in some sense. How do you see October 7th within the larger
1:07:201 hour, 7 minutes, 20 secondshistory of this whole, you know, Zionist project from the 20th century?
1:07:251 hour, 7 minutes, 25 secondsSo, look, I mean, from the sort of Zionist and Israeli point of view, the Arab question is not the issue. The
1:07:331 hour, 7 minutes, 33 secondsissue is the Jewish question. And Zionism was created, it claimed, to solve the Jewish question. Uh, that's
1:07:411 hour, 7 minutes, 41 secondsits project. The Arab question is a footnote to resolving the Jewish question. So o over all those years of
1:07:501 hour, 7 minutes, 50 secondsIsraeli occupation from 67 to the present, one has to understand that a particular mentality in Israel had
1:07:571 hour, 7 minutes, 57 secondsdeveloped. Not only that you can manage the occupation, but also that the people that we are occupying, we don't see
1:08:051 hour, 8 minutes, 5 secondsthem. They're on the other side of the fence. They basically have undergone social death. They're removed from their jobs, from their homes, and so forth.
1:08:141 hour, 8 minutes, 14 secondsAnd people just didn't see them anymore.
1:08:161 hour, 8 minutes, 16 secondsAnd if you don't see people, then you stop thinking of them as being human beings such as yourself. And so they don't want to solve the Arab question.
1:08:251 hour, 8 minutes, 25 secondsThey want the question to go away.
1:08:271 hour, 8 minutes, 27 secondsHopefully by a miracle that the Arabs will just disappear. And that it won't be only in Gaza, but as is now being
1:08:361 hour, 8 minutes, 36 secondsimplemented, also in the West Bank. One way of making the problem go away is you make you just make Gaza uninhabitable
1:08:431 hour, 8 minutes, 43 secondsand the people go someplace else. But of course, other countries are not willing to take, you know, millions of traumatized people, just like countries
1:08:511 hour, 8 minutes, 51 secondsweren't willing to take the millions of traumatized people, Jews that after the Second World War. So, you know, I I want
1:08:581 hour, 8 minutes, 58 secondsto take us back to the beginning um and the beginning of Zionism actually uh
1:09:041 hour, 9 minutes, 4 secondswhich was a response to real oppression, discrimination, persecution.
1:09:111 hour, 9 minutes, 11 secondsAnd nowadays when you say that Palestinians are fighting against oppression, you don't have to condone
1:09:191 hour, 9 minutes, 19 secondsmassacres by Hamas. But you can say actually I think you must say that resistance to oppression is moral. It's
1:09:271 hour, 9 minutes, 27 secondsalso legal by international law. But when you say that, you are called anti-semitic.
1:09:341 hour, 9 minutes, 34 secondsAnd that to me is turning everything on its head because you have to remember that in order to liberate yourself from
1:09:411 hour, 9 minutes, 41 secondsoppression, you have to resist. The oppressor will never stop oppressing you unless you resist them.
1:09:541 hour, 9 minutes, 54 secondsThe state of Israel was an answer to centuries of Jewish persecution.
1:10:001 hour, 10 minutesBut Zionism's leaders from Theodore Herzel to Benjamin Netanyahu understood that a Jewish state in Palestine meant the removal of those already there.
1:10:121 hour, 10 minutes, 12 secondsThe Arab Palestinians and so Gaza is destroyed.
1:10:201 hour, 10 minutes, 20 secondsThousands of Palestinian children killed and Lebanon bombed. As Israel's war attempts to draw in the wider region and
1:10:301 hour, 10 minutes, 30 secondspossibly further beyond, the West continues to support a genocide.
1:10:371 hour, 10 minutes, 37 secondsBut something is beginning to shift. The legal institutions set up after the Second World War to serve the new US-led
1:10:461 hour, 10 minutes, 46 secondsworld order. institutions that have long denied Palestinians justice
1:10:531 hour, 10 minutes, 53 secondsmight at last be standing up for the Palestinian people.
1:10:581 hour, 10 minutes, 58 secondsI have reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
1:11:041 hour, 11 minutes, 4 secondsand Minister of Defense Yav Galant bear criminal responsibility for the starvation of civilians as a method of
1:11:131 hour, 11 minutes, 13 secondswarfare and intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population
1:11:191 hour, 11 minutes, 19 secondsas well as crimes against humanity of extermination andor murder.
1:11:261 hour, 11 minutes, 26 secondsBecause genocide indeed is so clear and because impunity originally is tied to the crime of genocide as it emerged. Now
1:11:331 hour, 11 minutes, 33 secondswe start seeing the cracks in Israeli impunity and that's related to the case against
1:11:411 hour, 11 minutes, 41 secondsIsrael in the International Court of Justice. It's related to a request for arrest warrants by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan.
1:11:511 hour, 11 minutes, 51 secondsThis is an accident of the system. This was never supposed to happen, but it is happening and speaks to other ways in which the international legal system has
1:12:001 hour, 12 minutesof course failed so many people around the world, primarily in the global south and what we're seeing now. It's such an
1:12:081 hour, 12 minutes, 8 secondsunprecedented moment. So, it's very difficult to say what might happen, but there is potential for significant
1:12:151 hour, 12 minutes, 15 secondschange in the international legal system.
1:12:191 hour, 12 minutes, 19 secondsThere's broader implications. We can think about dozens of millions of forcibly displaced refugee peoples around the world. And this is why the
1:12:271 hour, 12 minutes, 27 secondsglobal south has rallied around the case of Gaza because people of the global south who know who know very well that they've
1:12:361 hour, 12 minutes, 36 secondsbeen discarded by this international political and legal system, they see the potential here of transformation, of
1:12:441 hour, 12 minutes, 44 secondschange that's not only about Israel and Gaza, but through Israel and Gaza, it can happen. But the forces pushing back are incredibly powerful.
1:12:581 hour, 12 minutes, 58 seconds[Music]
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