Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 8: Prof. Alexander Yakobson on what it means to "decolonize Palestine"

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

Is Zionism colonialism? Are Jews an authentic people, or merely a religion? What about Palestinians? What are Zionism’s moral costs, and what are those of opposing Zionism?I asked one of my teachers, Hebrew University historian Prof. Alexander Yakobson, some of the great questions now being advanced in Western academic and progressive discourses about Israel.Alex has that special fearlessness of an intellectual who takes the other side's position seriously. It makes his answers all the more valuable.This episode was sponsored by an anonymous donor in honor of Battalion 363 of the Harel Brigade, which is an infantry brigade in the IDF where the sponsor’s loved one serves. May all our sons and daughters come home safely.Please join me on Patreon to support this project: ⁠ www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything⁠ If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at ⁠[e-mail]⁠.A podcast by Haviv Rettig Gur

Hello, folks. Welcome to Ask Kaviv Anything. This is a bit of an odd episode, a fun episode, a bonus episode. I sat down with a teacher of mine, Professor Alexander Jakobson of Hebrew University, a scholar of Roman history. I learned how to do history from Alex. And I wanted to bring his voice to this podcast. I've often recommended his book, Israel and the family of history. nations, which I think is in the last 40 years, 50 years, maybe the best single defense of Zionism out there. In Hebrew, you can buy it at any bookstore at regular price. In English, it was classified

as an academic book and it sells for $100 or $140, which I don't know why that happened. I can't prove that there's a conspiracy, but it's a shame. It's a shame because it's a book worth having. It takes on a lot of the tropes. It's already two decades old almost, but it takes on a lot of the the tropes that are anti-Zionist academics use, that are sort of thrown at Israel, thrown in Zionism. What's special about him is his superpower. And you get that superpower when you learn, when you sit in his class, when you learn from him, you get something of it. You see it and therefore you know something about how to do it. And it's desperately missing from so much of Western debates, discussions about this place, but about many, many topics. It's the fearlessness of taking the other

side's position seriously. You go into a debate and someone like Alex actually helps the other side make their case. I have seen him in debates on panels at think tanks at the university where the other side made an argument and then Alex chimed in and said, you know, if you actually said, you know, this version of the argument, it would actually be more convincing because then I wouldn't be able to say this in response. You opened yourself up unnecessarily to my own, right? He advises the other side in real time how to make the case. That kind of instinctive commitment to the truth means that even if you don't agree with him, even if you find him to left wing, even if you don't agree with him because he's also on the left, a critic of the left. For example, he shares my views, as far as I know,

I haven't talked to him about it, this particular topic in a few years, that the Israeli Supreme Court is massively overpowerful and that it's unhealthy and unstable and we need judicial reform. and that the government's version of it was a disaster. But nevertheless, that that's not necessarily substantively the same as saying that the right is wrong. Actually, the right has a point. The court really is too powerful. So this is a guy who pulls no punches for anyone, has no loyalty to party, to policy. His only loyalty is to the public good, to the country itself.

And you see it. You see it. We're going to talk about a few things. I'm going to bring sections where he tackles accusations often leveled at Zionism, that it is colonialist. Anti-Zionists often say the Jews are a religion, not a people. He offers a lot of perspective, and you can't quite place it politically. For example, he points out that Muslims have more often, and for longer periods,

conquered and colonized Christian lands than Christians have conquered and colonized Muslim lands. Now, the Christian colonization, and colonialism has been more recent, but the Muslim was more often and longer. That kind of sounds like a right-leaning sort of cultural discourse. But he also points out that during the period when Palestinians started calling themselves Palestinians, an argument often made against the Palestinian National Movement is that there was a period where no Arab in the land called themselves Palestinian. And then suddenly they're all calling themselves Palestinian.

there was a moment of invention, of self-invention. And that's often on the Israeli political right, there's often heard the argument that Palestinians are fake, invented. There's, of course, a mainstream Palestinian argument that the Jews are somehow in some innate sense, because they're a religion and not a people usually, fake and invented, and Israeli identity is artificial. Except that all other Arab peoples

were going through the same process at the same time. The coalescing of Palestinian nationalism, Alex points out, wasn't something that happened only to Palestinians as a response to the pressure of Zionism or Jewish immigration. It was happening to Iraqis. It was happening to Moroccans and Algerians. Well, if it was happening to other Arab peoples, there's a bit of a deeper process and a more potentially, if you're going to morally judge it, authentic process underway. So it's a serious intellectual conversation that doesn't come just to win Brown. points. It actually comes to uncover the truth to sift away some of the sand. I'm going to just stop talking here and just why repeat everything he says and then let you hear it. Thank you very much for joining. This episode is sponsored by an anonymous donor in honor of Battalion 363 of the

Haleel Brigade, which is an infantry brigade in the IDF where the sponsor's loved one serves. I think that's a beautiful sponsorship, and thank you for that. May all our sons and daughters come home safely. Here's Alex. I often tell people the Arab world misunderstands us and always thinks that we are the arm of some patron, some other, right? And therefore, they continue to believe that losing in a war to us doesn't mean anything because, in fact, the only reason they lost in the war is because the Russian Empire supported us

or the German Empire support us, or right now the Americans support us. And so it's still worth having another war against us. And from your book, Israel and the Family of Nations, that was when I first came across the astonishing discovery that in 1948, Egypt, when it declared war on us, declared war on communist nihilism and atheism, right? Because we were a branch of the Soviet Union. That is the resolution of the Egyptian parliament,

that the Egyptian army is going to Palestine, of course, to protect Arab Palestinians and Arabians. Palestine and all that, but also to confront the destructive forces of communism and atheism. Many people on the Israeli right kind of accept this designation of the Israeli of the Zionist labor movement. That's a bit of an exaggeration. So let me start this discussion at the beginning. I have spoken, I've been on many college campuses over the last year and a half,

and I've spoken to a great many college students and a great many American Jews are very worried about the future of young people and what they think about Zionism in America. And we're hearing from the American left, the European left, the academic left, that Zionism is colonialism, that the Jews should be ashamed, that there's something fundamentally wrong in this thing called the State of Israel. There are even scholars, Jewish scholars, in American universities who are now calling themselves non-Zionist, anti-Zionist, trying to found a non-Zionist academic movement.

Why isn't Zionism colonialism? Is Zionism colonialism colonialism? How do we begin to make sense of this argument, this claim that we all, at some point or another, if we're going to be in academic spaces in the West, have to face? Well, you know, every term like every political term, every term that is used political, you can argue about how to define it and then depending on whether you want to apply it against a particular object. Okay, you can people define communism, socialism, socialism, conservatism,

Bibism and Trumpism in a way that, but I think if we look for a common-sensical definition of colonialism as a modern phenomenon, it is obviously a phenomenon whereby Western powers, European powers, took over large parts of what is today the third world of Asia and Africa. And colonization of the proper sense means that they think they send their people there in order to settle them. That is they colonize in the sense of settle. Okay. But I think more broadly any taking over of a territory by a European power against,

of a non-European territories populated by non-European people, is considered an act of colonialism. It's very usually also accompanied by settling it to a greater or larger extent. Now, there are, of course. So I'm stressing that these are European. European powers because of course in history is full of conquests and colonizations in the sense of settling of territories by non-Western powers, of non-Western territories by non-Western powers and of Europe itself, of course, by Muslim conquerors. Hundreds of years, large parts of Europe were conquered, ruled and colonized to some extent by the Ottoman Empire, by the Muslim conquerors. in Spain and things like that.

But that is not what is meant by Anticalon Discord just ignores this fact. And that in itself, of course, means that it is very much open to criticism because there is something fundamentally dishonest about this pretends, and only as if only Western powers ruled over non-Western people. In fact, everybody who knows anything about history knows that the conquest of Christian countries and Christian peoples by Muslims was much more prevalent without any comparison and continued for much longer than the conquest of of Muslim peoples by European conquerors. That is the latest level, of course.

Okay, we leave that aside. We speak about what is meant when people speak about. Just before we leave that aside, the entire Byzantine Empire is what you're talking about. Well, look, of course, the, uh, and then we did this talk Turkey is they used to be my Aisha Minor, settled with conquered and settled of course by Greeks and Romans, but at the time, at the point of time when Turks took over it and made it Turkey, of course, there was a Turkish conquest and colonization of Aisha Minor, then of Constantinople, of course, or what is today, Istanbul, You know, Constantinople was actually conquered shortly before what used to be called the discovery of America.

People rightly, of course, regard the history of post-Columbian America as a history of European colonization. I don't argue with that, but nobody thinks of calling the history of Turkey, of Turkish presence in Istanbul, or at least in the European parts of Turkey, although even also the Asian parts of Turkey, of course, had been conquered. but people who came from what today is, you know, Mongolia or something like that, originally. So, you know, since it is more or less accepted that the first homo sapiens came from Africa, the moralists everyone once conquered their present territory. We speak about now Western colonialism, okay? That is to say, colonialism, it is, as it is called. Now, there are always, there is always a European power that takes over a territory, and then since

its people to that territory, and the Jews were not a European power that took over another country and sent its people to it. The Jews were often persecuted and always discriminated against minority in Europe, and not only in Europe, but the European Jews who are accused of colonialism. They were not a power that conquered another country. They were a people in search of a national home, of a homeland, which they sought to establish in their historic homeland, their ancestral homeland. Zionism regards itself as a national movement of the Jewish people, of a homeless and

prosecuted people, and in a case of a people lacking a homeland and independence. And the question should be, why should the desire of this people to national dependence, Why should it be regarded as less legitimate than the desire of other peoples to independence? When the right of self-determination is you know there is not a single, probably a critic of Zionism who does not in principle recognize the right of peoples to self-determination. It does not know any principle you can say I disagree with it. I don't think there is a single critic of Zionism will say self-determination, no nonsense. I don't recognize such a thing.

But there is a debate about whether the Jews specifically, fit that category. How do I know? How do I know if the Jews deserve to fit into that? Maybe the Jews invented their nationalism. They're just a religion. Maybe, right? This is a discourse that seems to make sense if you think of Christianity as another kind of Abrahamic faith like Judaism. Maybe Judaism and Christianity are categorically alike. And then why does Judaism have a state, right? If you can, we will return to question of colonialism, which is connected, but, okay, you are raising very fundamental questions. And I think we have. have some time, so we will address it seriously.

If you want to counter the Zionist claim that this is a legitimate movement to realize for the Jewish people, the universal rights of determination, there are two ways of rejecting them. Either you say Jews are not a people, who are not a people, and therefore the principle should never have applied to them. And the second argument, possible argument, to say, well, they may have been a people or to some extent the people, but it should not have applied to them because for them to form a, because they were a diaspora people and for them to form a state in Palestine that was

already populated by Arabs, it was a majority Arab territory, was always going to conflict with the rights of the natives, of the locals, okay? So there are, you don't even, some people say, yeah, Jews were people in some sense, but these people should have, should not have tried to establish a state because usually people, when they ask for independence, they ask for independence where they sit, where they live, okay? And then national sole determination is actually another aspect of the principle of government by consent, okay, consent of the governed.

It's also, it's another way to saying that, that people should be ruled by their decision, not by someone else. And if there are several people, then each of them has this right to serve government. But this is the great American, among other things, principle of consent of the governed. So self-determination is another aspect of the consent of the government, but the assumption is you live in a place and then you have the right to decide how you will be governed, okay? Not just by whom, by in what national framework. Now, the Jews do not fit into this perfectly because they were not sitting, they were not living in the place, okay, where they demanded independence, unlike any other case of national

self-determination. So in order to say that the right of self-determination should not have applied to Jews because they were not living in the territory, unlike any other national movement, they were not living in the territory that in on which they were. wanted to establish a state, and other people lived and objected to their coming and to their state. That is a serious question. In order to say that, the meaning, the practical meaning of it is that the right of self-determination

is denied to the people who, in the nature of the case, needed it more desperately than any other people. You see, when you compare Zionism with other national movements and you are a lot of people, and you ask for justification, I think if you want to seriously confront the criticism is very often malicious and hypocritical, but that doesn't mean, there are no serious. There is a serious argument against Zionism. And this is a serious argument against Zionism. Your self-determination was always going to bring you into conflict with people who were living there and were not under any obligation to make any concessions to some other people coming from some other place. And it is not like

people living and saying we want to establish a government in our natural country. Even if there is a conflict, there's a conflict between two groups of people living in a certain place, not changing the character of a country. So that is a serious objection. But you have to understand what the implications are of accepting it. The implication, the meaning of the moral implication is that the right of self-determination should not have been applied to the people who needed it more desperately by definition because they were homeless people than any other people. Because you see when you again, when you comparing Zionism

with any with Kurdish or whatever, Basque or whatever. I was just going to say, why wouldn't that count for any homeless people? Because specifically the Jews were persecuted at a different scale? Usually people's, people remain a people when they have a, not all of them live in a country, but they at least have a territorial base. Jews have, there was some Jews in this country, but that was a very small minority of the Jewish people and of the bunch of this country. The Jews were basically nearly 100% outside their historical home. And it is not an easy thing to say that it was legitimate for them to reclaim it or even

a part of it while other people are living there. We have to address this. But the opponents of Zionism need to address the moral implications of denying Zionism. of denying Zionism. And I'm going back now to the basic dilemma. The difference between Zionism and other people's, other people's territorial, or mainly territorial peoples, I would say there are common traits,

and then there is a plus and the minus. Zionism, in some sense, is less justified than other national movements, and in some sense it is more justified than other national movements. and the plus and the minus are basically two sides of the same coin. They both result from the historical tragedy of the Jews. The Jews lost not just their independence.

This is trivial, more or less every people, well, except the Chinese or no, even more or less, basically, most people certainly lost at some point of history their independence, but Jews lost, not just their independence. they lost the homeland itself. Okay, there were a homeless people, and being a homeless people, they also face the challenges that homeless people without a home to protect them, you know, and also for some specific reasons of hostility to Jews in Europe, but not only in Europe. Now, so a homeless people needs a national home more than a people who live in their home,

but just want to change the political, political regime, okay? So they need it more than the usual peoples, but by demanding this, they also inevitably clash with the rights of other people, okay, because they cannot, by definition, a homeless people cannot establish a home, a national home where they live. They need to colonize in the sense of settle another territory, and it is not empty. So you have to, then you have to decide what is even worse, what is more immoral, okay, to settle, and we have to understand that it is not an easy thing. Of course many Jews didn't want to think about it, naturally. Many Zionists didn't want to face this problem. But the anti-Zionists don't want to face the opposite question.

To say that the right of self-determination should not have applied to the Jews in this situation, is to make a claim that is much more blatantly immoral than the claim of the Zionists of the Zionist movement to establish a Jewish national home in this country, even at the when it was clear from the beginning that it was about to provoke a conflict of the air, but I think at the same time that if you, the Zionist demand should always have included a readiness to accept also the legitimacy of the national demands of the other side. I think in the case of the Zionist movement, while I think that the denial of Zionism is much more immoral than Zionism, okay, therefore Zionism is moral in this sense,

that denying it is much more problematic morally than affirming it. But I think that just a fair person who wanted to be a Zionist, make this claim should always have been prepared to say, yeah, this creates a conflict, this comes at a price, and we are willing to have a, not just to recognize personal rights of the other side, but we are willing to accept the legitimacy of the national claim of the other side. I have to say that historically, the Zionist movement was not every Zionist, not every group with a, but the mainstream, the leadership of the Zionist movement, of course, was prepared. And while it was, of course, mainly for pragmatic reasons, there is no lack of Zionist rhetoric

that acknowledged the famously, one of the most famous examples was Chaim Weizmann, a very important person in the Zionist movement. And he said famously that the conflict between Jews and Arabs and Palestine was not a conflict between justice and injustice, but it was a conflict between two sorts of justice. Two sorts of justice. You don't hear, you know, Greeks in Cyprus saying that the conflict between the Greek, the Turkish claim on part of Cyprus and the Greek claim that the Greek majority should rule all of Cyprus, there is a, that it's a clash between two kinds of justice. Both sides think that their demand is just. then they may or may not compromise.

But I think it was, of course, always the case, and that has always been my view, that in a situation like that, you know, if you read Jabotinsky, if you go to the Zionist right, not to the Zionist center left, if you read Jabotinsky's Iron Wall, the famous article that is the paper, that is, he more or less launched the revisionist, the right-wing Zionism by writing. If you read it, you know, it is famous for the hawkish militant headline, Iron Wall. This is what people remember. And it doesn't appear by mistake. He was a very good journalist. He knew that the headline is, of course, a very large part of the whole impact of it. But if you read the text, if you read the text, you understand that he is perfectly aware that Arab opposition to Zionism was natural because for them,

it was a natural reaction of any population doesn't matter if they at that point they regarded themselves as a separate, they did not regard at that point themselves as a separate people from other Arab people. That is a notion that came later, not just for Palestinians. It's a notion that took over all of the Arab world. It's not the idea that Arabs are peoples is not something that was invented polemically against Zionism. It is a development that all the Arab world underwent and don't think there's any

any sense in us arguing with it, because we cannot dictate the national identity of the hundreds of millions of Arabs just because it's convenient for us to say that they are all one people. This is nonsense. But even before Palestinian Arabs claim that they are dissident people, if you read this text, he says clearly for Palestinian Arabs, Palestine is their homeland, and they don't want to give it up, or even a part of it. And therefore, his conclusion is that there is no, there is no homeland. for an agreement, not forever, but as long as we are not strong enough, and then they will

compromise with it. If we are not in a position of strength, there will be no compromise. Then he says there will be a compromise. Now I have, so the question, and which kind of a compromise, but it is a national compromise. And he was prepared, by the way, if you read, if you know his true views, he was, he was not in favor of partition, but he was prepared to offer to Arabs and Palestine, not just civic rights. That was never in purchase. But collective rights, you know, much, much more far-reaching collective rights than I am prepared to offer them. I'm in favor of partition. But my Jewish state is less

of a binational state than Jabotinsky Jewish state, if you know what he was actually proposing. Because it is a national compromise, not just respecting individual rights. So I think there was no lack of understanding. It is unfair to the then. movement to claim that Zionism was blind to the moral dilemma that was created by Zionist settlement of Palestine. The truth is that the opponents of Zionism were always blind to the moral dilemma of rejecting Zionism. Of course, Palestinian Arabs were always blind to the dilemma of their claim against, of their

refusal to recognize any kind of a Jewish natural home. But worse, you could say Palestinian Arab, you can be they are personally effective. in a way that you couldn't. Jabutinsky thought that one couldn't expect them to accept. He really thought that it was unrealistic to expect them to accept it. But other people who are not involved collectively or directly, who pretend to be fair-minded, who to pretend to be in favor of equal justice for all, of justice to both sides, or justice to people regardless of their ethnicity and religion, these people, what they're actually

actually saying the Jews because they history deprived them, not just of their independence, but of the ground under their feet, of the home itself. And because lacking a home, they were persecuted in the way that they were persecuted, not just their cultural, collective cultural identity was endangered, it wasn't danger. But their basic rights, their human dignity, and in the end their physical survival was in danger, and other countries did not want to accept them because they were regarded them as aliens, as another people. Anti-Semites always regarded others as a people.

The modern anti-Semites never doubted that were a people. And in a situation like that, the Jews should have not have been offered a national home of their own. So the people who needed a homeland, a national home, more. than any other people should have been denied this thing. Of course, and we also know what it would have meant practically in terms of the 20th century history, but Zionism didn't start with the Nazi, with the danger of genocide. It started with the anti-Semitism of late 19th century. But if you ask, you know, if you say, you know, if you compare Zionism with the, you know,

with the surgemental, with the national, with the movement for your liberate, you know, the liberation creating Italy from foreign rule and uniting it into Garibaldi's classical case of a progressive universal record as a progressive national movement. You could say what was the danger to the Italian people if there wouldn't be a united Italy. Well, they would be living under Franz Josef, the Austrian emperor and some of them would be maybe living in a, in some separate, I mean, the papal state, it wouldn't stay a papal. What, why, there would be no Italians, there would be no Italian language, there would be no Italian culture, there would be no country called Italy, there would be no, there wouldn't be a

United States called Italy, okay, okay. So, so people more or less universally accept that that was a code worth fighting for, okay, for the Italians to become an independent nation. And so you ask, you should compare the need of Italians to the state with the need of the Jews to the state. Yeah, that is a serious comparison. That is not a comparison. That's a joke.

So I would say that the Jewish claim for self-determination is not unproblematic, but denying it is much more problematic than affirming it. And because it is problematic, inevitably problematic, I think it should always have come with the readiness to make a compromise. But that, and I still think so, but there is the other question is whether the other side is willing to compromise. And that is a question of fact, you know, you shouldn't take it as an article of faith that if there is no compromise, it must be because the Jews and the Israelis and Zionists are not willing to compromise. You should seriously and honestly ask yourself whether the other side was and is and what part of it is willing to compromise. And that's not an easy thing.

Now we go to the question whether the Jews are a people, okay, whether the whole. comparison is valid because if it's just a religious sect, then of course all those notions don't apply to it. But it's not really a serious claim. To say about, first of all, to say that the Jews are not a people, but a religion is a kind of a joke because anyone who knows anything about the Jewish religion, anyone who read a one page of the text of this religion knows that the content of this religion says that we are a people. It is a very large part. It is a very large part of the Jewish religion, that were a people connected with a certain country with a vision of restoring what used to be the Jewish state, Jewish kingdom, Jewish rule in the land of Israel.

So to say that the Jews are religion and not a people, you can say that seriously if you have no idea what is the content of the Jewish religion. Okay, and that is the culture, the traditional culture of the Jewish people. So the Jews have always, they did need Herzl to, it is not true that Zionists claims that Jews are people, whereas the traditional religious Jews did, of course, traditional religious always regarded them, called themselves people, all those words in Hebrew that denoted. There was, you know, in late 19th century, in Europe, a large Jewish national movement called

the Bund. Now, it's, it was defeated by history. because its basis was Yiddish-speaking European Jews who was simply murdered by the Nazis. So it's a tragic. They lost their fight in a very tragic way. Now, they defined themselves as a national movement of the Jewish people. They were strongly anti-Zionists. They rejected Zionists.

They did not want to have an independent state in Palestine. They wanted to have national autonomy, cultural autonomy mainly, in the history, European, where the millions of Jews lived. There were millions of Jews who lived in Eastern Europe. They spoke, the overwhelming majority of them, spoke a language that made them different from other peoples. Nobody in Eastern Europe, where, by the way, most Jews lived, okay, in the 19th century. No one doubted that in the area where there are Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews,

that the Jews are one of the peoples of the Russian and Austrian Empire. No one seriously doubted. And if only because they did have a national language that made them different from us. That is the basic definition of being a people that you have a distinct, not always, but usually you have a distinct language. Now, there isn't a religion that has, that, whose millions of believers speak a language that is different from their neighbors. The religions don't work like, you have a liturgical language sometimes which you pray, people compare. with letters. This is nonsense, but there was a whole culture, including the language of millions of people,

many of whom were not religious, some of them were Zionists, some of them were all kinds of things, some of them were communists, some of them of ultra-pland. But many of them. I was speaking about the Bund. There were some other groups. The Bund was national. They believed that the Jews are a people. They were non-religious, I think were atheists, really.

and non-Zionist, actually anti-Zionist, and the national language of the Jewish people, for them was Yiddish rather than Hebrew. And they did not want to go to Palestine. They wanted to have Jewish autonomy in where the millions of Jews live. Now, what? You call them what? You call them a religious sect? Those Marxist, atheist people who were, they were based, they were the movement of Jewish

working class. That was a large group, okay? You call them, you say that these people are, these people are a religious sect that invents itself as a people. It's simply not a serious argument. By the way, I want to remind you as someone who was born in the Soviet Union, that the Bolsheviks who opposed Zionism and the Bund, and they accused them of nationalism because, basically, because they wanted Jews to choose revolution, Russian revolution rather than men.

narrow national causes. When the Soviet Union, when they came to power and the Soviet Union was established, and it constitutes itself as a multinational state, as a state of many nationalities. Now, of course, they recognized Jews as a nationality. I know the Soviet government, a row Jewish nationality, nationality in the sense of ethno-national affiliation. That is the meaning of nationality in Eastern Europe and in Israel, okay. So the Jewish national affiliation is written in my Soviet birthcard.

Not because they were, it was not religion. They didn't care about religion. They said in the Soviet Union there are Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, Armenians, Kazakhs, Lithuanians, and Jews. Okay, and that was one of the officially recognized nationalities of the multinational Soviet Union, which was of course supposed to be a happy family of brotherly peoples, and building socialism together. And they did not just define Jews as a nationality.

They also recognized Edish as the popular national language of the Jews. And millions of Jews spoke before the Holocaust there. Millions of Jews spoke Yiddish as a native language. The Soviet Union also established schools in Hebrew and theaters in Hebrew. Okay, so they were for a long time they were quite consistent. They even established, you know, a quasi-autonomous area. Perubijan that was supposed to give this Soviet national home of its own, of course, very few Jews went there.

But the idea was that since all Soviet nationalities have either a republic or autonomous region, the Jews should have an autonomous region. Okay. So, so, and these people did not recognize anyone's religion. Religion was at best your personal matter. There was no collective recognition of any religion. So to say that the Jews were merely a religion, not from the viewpoint of religious Jews, and certainly not from the viewpoint of non-religious Jews, and not from the viewpoint of

their neighbors who regarded them as another people, and not from the viewpoint of the international community that recognize them as a people. And so this is just, you know, this is just nonsense. This is just a, this is really dishonest. This is a thoroughly dishonest claim. How is it that serious people commonly heard among elites, it's growing among influencers and scholars and thinkers. You meet it in the Middle East departments of elite universities in the West.

The Jews are religion and other people. There's some kind of a simple dichotomy there that you can just pick and choose, and a Zionist did this bad thing of peopling them, and then that turned into the evils of Zionism. Or a Zionism without a metropole, a Zionism that came to the land as refugees in desperate need, is nevertheless colonialism. Or it's just one thing after another, or the very idea that after the 20th century, when every other kind of Jew in the Eastern Hemisphere is dead, apologies to French Jewry, they're 90% Sephardi, they're very much. much a product of the ethnic cleansing of all Jews, even if they're still around. How do you just ignore all that fundamental history, all that clear and direct and obvious stuff, and just run with these things, run with these ideas. In academia, these are majority views, at least in the elite academia that we're exposed to. In the Arab world, these are majority arguments. In all of the

ideologies of the present day left, this is common stuff. And it's so utterly and stupidly a historical, I find as I go to fancy American universities, I believe universities, somebody comes to me and says to me, everyone I know is anti-Zionist. And then I say, what the heck's an anti-Zionist? Every Jew is dead. And there's no answer. They don't have, they don't grapple with it. It is a moral identity rather than any kind of argument. What is that ahistoricity? Why is it so obvious and simple and still they don't get it? If you decide to define colonialism as people from Europe settling in a non-European territory, then of course, yeah, when Jews come from Europe to Palestine, they come from Europe to Palestine,

and they don't need it. And then people say that a colonial power is not a real condition. You know, you know this story, but I want to repeat it for the benefit of the viewers. And that there is a professor of, in the Bersheva University, Ornifhtachal, who wrote a lot on Zionism being colonialism. And he doesn't really deny all kinds of arguments of us, but he says in favor of Zionism, but he says, you know, the basic fact is the physical movement from Europe to Palestine. If you decide that this is the main thing, then all other things are details. Now, we wrote, I quote him, in one of his papers, that the actual process, despite the salient differences compared with other colonial movements, you recognize that as salient differences. The actual process of European settlement in Palestine enabled Zionism to be classified, both pre-and-posed

49, 48 as a pure colonial settler movement. Okay, there are some differences, but the actual process, that is the settlement, therefore I decide that this is still, this definition still applies. Then there is a footnote, and he gives the details of those salient, salient difference. It doesn't hide anything. He gives full disclosure, and he says, so listen to how he describes, one of the main colonizers of the Zionist movement in the left-wing post-Zionist. I don't even, I'm not sure, never mind.

In the in the woke, I would say, academia. Now, what are the salient differences between Zionism and other colonial movements that do not change the fact that Zionism is basically colonialism? Zionism's nature as an ethnic and national rather than economic project. Number one, it is ethnic and national. He doesn't say the Jews are only year-eds. It doesn't say this not. He says it's a national and ethnic project and not an project of economic exploitation. One, the refugee status of most of the Jews who came to Pallister.

The loose organization of diaspora Jewish communities as opposed to well-organized colonial mother countries. And lastly, the ideal of the return to Zah, which is grounded in Jewish tradition. He knows that they so in other words, Zionism was a colonial phenomenon in all respects and fully resembled other examples of modern colonialism, apart from the fact that it was a national movement, that it was not motivated by a desire for economic gain, that it arose out of Jewish suffering and was realized by people who may be defined as refugees, that the settlers have

had no colonial mother country, and that the bond with the land of Israel was part of the traditional historic identity of the Jewish people. He doesn't ignore it. It doesn't say it was just a territory. He recognizes that, of course. But that's ignoring it. It's like reading Rashid Khalid. It's that kind of, it's a kind of admission that functions as an ignoring. But I would say in a polite way that he doesn't attach to those factors, the the due importance in a way that in my view is outrageous. It's not, it's more than outrageous.

It does something really bad to Palestinians. Because if you do figure out some kind of clever academic semantic way, right, because academics are good with words, academics have become convinced that the universe is made of nothing but words and they control the words and they control the universe. And so if you figure out this clever semantic path, finding your way through the words to being able to call Zionism colonialism, to call Israelis colonialists, to call this people, this nation colonialism, then you tell Palestinians by doing so,

you can get rid of them, you can attack them, you can weaken them through anti-colonial means. Now, if I am totally colonialist in every way that involves an epithet, that involves cursing me, that involves calling me colonial, sure, I figured out a way to call you, but I'm not colonialists, in any functional way in which an anti-colonial strategy would work on me. I don't have a metropole. That's not just a moral category. That means I have nowhere to run to if you terrorize me, right? So how am I going to react? So you have now boxed Palestinians into a vision because in reality this is ideology. This is not actually intellectually careful. They're only intellectually careful when they have to excuse and defend the ideology. Where does this ahistoricity come from? Why,

this is the majority view of the Middle Eastern Studies Departments of major American universities, of the most elite ones. Are we, am I asking you a psychology question instead of a history question? What the hell is going on? You have to take into account that in last years and decades, the post-colonial and anti-postcolonian discourse has become the mainstream discourse, not just vis-a-vis the Israel and Zionists. It is, it, it, it, it, it, it now very much defines the woke, the wokeish kind of liberalism. It's the essence of it attitude to the United States, not just to is. Now people, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the native. But they don't mean anything by it.

A land acknowledgement is fake because it's free. It's not costly. They may feel that what they say about Israel is they apply to Israel the same standards that they apply to America, to Australia, to Canada. Now even in somehow Britain is also colonial Britain. It's crazy. Everything Western is colonial. But at least when it comes to the United States, of course, originally it was a product of European colonization of the new world. Now, when you acknowledge that America is a colonial entity, that doesn't mean really that you are

inviting anyone to fight against the existence, to fight on against the existence of the United States. There is no threat to the existence of the United States. So you can so you can very cheaply acknowledge all you want, and at best it means that you will offer maybe some compensation, some reparation or some reverse discrimination or whatever. but that is not acknowledging the the native people who the the original owners of this land there there isn't for obvious reasons nobody's going to take over to to reclaim those lands and i think that some people have thought have persuaded themselves that actually israel is in a similar situation, meaning that the claim for the whole of the historic Palestine is really a marginal

position of some radicals, whereas the mainstream of the Palestinian National Movement and the Arab world, de facto, yeah, they're not happy with anything, but they are, they have, they defecto accept Israel's existence and therefore the only real issue is whether, Israel will continue to rule the Palestinians in the territories and deny them their own determination, their independence, in order to encourage Israel and the Israeli Jews to make the necessary concessions, they do not really endanger anything because there is no real danger. In order to do that, it is good to make them feel less self-righteous about their past. Okay, say, okay, don't be so sure that you are the victims of aggression.

you are, okay, at least you, you know, you are guilty of this tragedy, at least as much as the other side, and now you have to agree to a fair arrangement. Now, many of those people would, I think at Orrinifhtel, by the way, is one of them. I spoke to him, I believe him when he says that he has no, no intention at all of giving up the state of Israel. For him, decolonization of Israel is turning Israel into a civic democracy of the American of like America. We will discuss maybe whether what exactly it means and how it could work.

But this is, it doesn't want to, for the state of Israel to disappear. His problem is that under the post-colonial notion, the colonized decide what kind of decolonization, what they ask for. He may not be in favor of this brutal, extremist radical decolonization. He may not think it's a good idea or even a moral idea given the reality of the reality on the ground, but he doesn't, he is not really able, if he accepts this discourse, the discourse, this colonial Zionism is colonial discourse. He cannot really say that if the colonized actually insist on decolonization in the sense of destroying the state of Israel, that this is

fundamentally wrong. It may say it's unrealistic, it's brutal, the methods are brutal. Now, and I think that what is obvious to, and I think the 7th of October made it clear to many people, that it is not just, in any case, you can argue about whether the PLO in Fatah, whether and to what extent they are willing or may be persuaded to be willing to accept Israel, but there is no serious debate. They could never be in any serious doubt that Hamas was never, never pretended to accept the existence of Israel. and it is obvious that Hamas was never a marginal small group among the Palestinian, just a radical

voice that should not be made too much of. Now, what we now know from the 7th of October, that for this large and powerful Palestinian movement, the destruction of the State of Israel is not just some distant future goal that they are not willing to renounce, but they amazingly, apparently thought, we know it from their documents, that in the recent years they developed an idea that this is a realistic goal. And of course, not alone, nobody could ever think that Hamas, but people when they think about Israel being much more powerful in the Palestinians, they allow themselves to ignore the fact that there is a regional power that supports Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon,

and this is Iran. And so the idea we know from Hamas documents that Sinwa's idea of bringing down the Zionist entity was, of course, not that Hamas would do it alone, but for a simultaneous attack by Hamas, by Hezbollah on the north, other elements and a Iranian rocket attack on the basis of the Israeli Air Force, okay? And so that could, he, they spoke about actual destruction of the state of Israel, but they always, they said the second best Israel will be delivered such a blow, such a horrible blow that it will start a process of disintegration. That means that Jews who are not genie of colonizers, they have no genuine connection

to the country, will just start just immigrating, leaving the country and so it will be even if not an immediate total destruction of the state, it will start the process of destruction. This is what Nasrallah said many times. And this became an operative military plan for Hamas that was realized on the 7th of October. So while in America, you can be angry with this rhetoric, it doesn't really threaten the existence of America. The difference is it that in this area, with this. these neighbors, with these forces, I think this rhetoric really encourages the worst, the most dangerous elements in the Arab Muslim world, Arab supported by a Muslim fundamentalist

power with potentially a nuclear power now. And so you are right. It is no service at all to the Palestinian people. Thank you very much, Professor Alexander Ecclinson of Hebrew University.