Dan Snow's History Hit - Israel and Palestine: A Palestinian View with Yara Hawari

Episode Date: May 16, 2021

History is essential to understanding the world around us and this couldn't be more true than in the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The recent flare-up of violence in Israel-Palestine has shown that without knowing the history stretching back thousands of years it is impossible to make sense of why these two peoples, the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs, claim this land as their own. In this first of a series of programmes exploring this struggle from both sides Dr Yara Hawari joins the podcast to discuss the more recent history from the ending of the British Mandate in 1948 to the present day. Dr Yara Hawari is an academic, writer and political analyst. She finished her PhD in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter in 2018. She has since worked as Senior Analyst for Al Shabaka- a Palestinian think tank. She is also currently working on her first novella which will be published in October.

Hi everyone, welcome to the pod. I've just had major dental surgery, which is why I've got a lisp. Do you hear that? Anyway, today on the podcast, I'm overcoming that lisp because we got emergency breaking news in the world, and that is the situation in Israel-Palestine. Violence flared up initially following the decision of the Israeli state to forcibly remove Palestinians from a historic district of Jerusalem, and that seems to now have grown into full-scale warfare. Those of us that love history, when challenged, will say that history is essential to understanding the nature of the world around us. And the example that is often given is the situation in Israel-Palestine. Without understanding the history, stretching back thousands of years is impossible to understand

why these two peoples the jews and the palestinian arabs claim this land to be their own on the podcast we have addressed this before we've had avi schlame the historian we've had simon sebag montefiore talking about the history of jerusalem and the tragedy of this of this situation as he put in which two people both have valid historical claims to see this land as their own. In this podcast, I want to hear from somebody quite different. Dr. Yara Hawari is a young Palestinian academic. She's a writer, a senior policy analyst for Al-Shabaka, which is an independent think tank. And I want to discuss with Yara the slightly more recent history, history since the british left in 1948 right up to the present day over the next

few weeks we're getting from different voices from all sides and none of this struggle if you want to go and listen to back episodes of this podcast including the ones i've just mentioned you can do so at historyhit.tv. It's like Netflix for history. You've got videos there, documentaries, but importantly, we've also got the entire back catalogue of this podcast. Please go and check that out, historyhit.tv. But in the meantime, here is Dr Yara Hawari. Yara, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Dan. Let's go back a fair way to start with.

At the end of the British period of occupation of Palestine, what was the demographic makeup of the place we now refer to generally as Israel-Palestine? So sort of coming to the end of the British mandate of Palestine, Palestine still had a majority population of indigenous Palestinians, and these Palestinians were of all different faiths. What we saw happening during the British mandate, especially towards the latter part, was this massive influx of European Jews who had been inspired by the cause of Zionism to move to Palestine. And so in the last few years of the mandate, this really shot up. But on the eve of when the British pulled out, it was still a Palestinian majority country.

And obviously, the Second World War has taken place, appalling genocide against Jewish people within Europe. So the British mandate would have seemed like a safe haven. And that's how it was portrayed and sort of marketed. In the beginning, it's very interesting. At the beginning of the Zionist movement, it was actually rejected by many Jews around the world, especially Jews in Western Europe, saw themselves very much as part of the European people, as part of European culture. And Zionism was very much a fringe idea. And actually, people didn't want to move to what they considered this sort of backwater in the Middle East,

this very uncivilized place. And so what happened with World War II, obviously, with the pogroms in Europe and the Holocaust, was that it effectively gave a lot of Jews no option but to immigrate and to flee. And they saw, you know, Zionism became more and more attractive to a lot of people. So we really saw Jewish settler moves to Palestine increase in those latter years. Under the British, how was land apportioned? All these new people arriving, were they buying land? Were they taking land? What was the process before 1948?

So the relationship between the British mandate and Palestinians and Jewish immigrants is incredibly important to look at. The British made a lot of promises to the Arabs in the region, including the Palestinians. And actually, the mandate was set up supposedly to lay the way for Palestinian sovereignty. It was a very colonial term, but they were supposed to be helping the locals establish some kind of country. At the same time, they were facilitating Jewish immigration, and they were actually integrating Jewish immigrants into their administrative system. So Jewish immigrants in that period had quite high up positions within the British administration and had quite a lot of access

to all different kinds of things, including sensitive intelligence. And this was because, quite frankly, of very racist notions that Palestinians were not quite of European standard and couldn't be trusted and certainly weren't civilised enough to take part in the British mandate on that level. So the British mandate was integrating Jewish settlers very much into that system. And so they were in some areas, buying land, but they were also taking a lot of land. Palestinians obviously lived in Palestine for centuries. And the way that they managed and had land was based very much on familial connections. They didn't necessarily have all these papers and title deeds because these lands have been in our families for centuries and we know who owns what land. We didn't need all these title deeds. That's not to say Palestinians don't have title deeds. Many of them do. So there was

this combination of sort of buying up some land which was facilitated through the British mandate, through these higher-up positions that they were gaining, but also, for a large part, theft. As the British come to the end of their imperial journey at 1948, what happens when the British leave? So a lot of Palestinians describe this quite simply as the British handed over the keys and the weapons to the Zionists and the Zionist militias.

And that's, you know, it's a common story, but it's pretty much what happened. The British had a very speedy exit indeed. There was no handover notes on the country. There was no, you know, sort of making sure that everything was okay. They notes on the country. There was no, you know, sort of making sure that everything was okay. They quite literally pulled out. They couldn't handle the situation and they didn't want to handle the situation. So they pulled out. But as they pulled out, because as I mentioned earlier, you know, a lot of the Zionists and Jewish immigrants were already well integrated into that system. They already had access to the resources and they had also access to a lot of military arsenal.

Just to give you an example, a lot of the aerial bombardments in 1948 done by the Zionists were done with British planes that they had left, including my village of Tarshih. My village was bombed by Zionists using British planes, and there was a massacre in my village. So it just goes to show that that bias during the mandate period was a major factor in helping the Zionists win that war and establish Israel. Was there also an embrace of de facto partition here that the Jewish state, which was declared the day the British left, should have the coastal strip, sort of what we now call Western Israel, whilst the Brits encouraged Transjordan Jordan to occupy the East Bank and to take the quote-unquote Arab parts of Palestine under their wing?

This is really sort of commonly thrown back in the Palestinian space, you know, why didn't you accept partition? You could have had so much more than what you had. And there are two sort of important points to note in response to that question. Firstly, you're asking an indigenous population who have lived there for centuries to part with more than half of their land. This isn't, you know, sort of dividing a cake between two people and saying fair is fair, you take half, the other people will take half. These are basically indigenous people who are being told we're going to take away more than half of your country and give it to people who have just arrived. So the rejection of the partition plan by the

Palestinians and by the Arabs in general was very, very natural. It was a very natural response to someone saying, we're going to take away your land and give it to someone else. Now, the second important point is that the Zionists would not have stopped at that portion. We know through their correspondence in the military archives, we know simply because of the ideology of Zionism, that they wanted the whole of Palestine. And in hindsight, we can see that now. We can see that Israel really is the only sovereign entity from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. They're continually annexing more and more Palestinian land.

So I think on the Zionist side, it was never within their interests or their stated goals to stop at that partitioned Jewish state. to stop at that partitioned Jewish state. The war in 1948 sees a vast number of Palestinians expelled or flee before the advancing Israeli army. And this refugee problem has been at the heart of Middle East peace ever since. Can you just talk a little bit more about that? Can you just talk a little bit more about that?

So in 1948, also in 1947, there was a huge flight of Palestinians from historical Palestine. The estimates are somewhere between 750,000 to 800,000. And that's a huge chunk of the population. That's the majority of the population. And these people fled to neighbouring countries. They fled to Lebanon in a huge amount. They fled to were subsequently destroyed, wiped out by Zionist forces. And these refugees today live, you know, they live in these host countries. They also have obviously expanded all over the world. And they number in their millions now because, of course, you know, their descendants are also considered refugees. There was a special UN agency that was set up to deal with these refugees called UNRWA,

the UN Refugee Works Agency, specifically for Palestinian refugees that was set up in the early 1950s. And they manage the sort of affairs, the refugee camps, the services. And for the listeners, this might be a sort of a recognisable name because Donald Trump cut the US funding to this UN body during his term. And these refugees are denied the right of return. This is a right that's enshrined in international law that refugees have the right to return to their homelands, to their countries of origin, to their homes of origin. And they are also entitled to due compensation if their homes and properties have been taken or destroyed. Now, we're looking at over sort of 70 years on from

the 1948 ethnic cleansing, which Palestinians called the Nakba and those refugees have not returned to their homes they are as I said they're in their million I think about seven million now and many of them are actually stateless they do not have citizenship they do not have the right to return to Palestine and this is at the crux of the the Palestinian issue and this is one of the Palestinian issue. And this is one of the things that Palestinians world over will say is fundamental to any kind of just peace, any kind of future. Now, Israeli advocates will say at this point that 300,000 Jewish people were forced out of neighbouring Middle East states and ended up in Israel, in what they describe as a sort of reflection of what is also going on in Israel. But that's not the responsibility of Palestinians.

It's not an eye for an eye in this situation. You can't displace Palestinians because someone else displaced Jews. And this is what has happened, really, that other countries, in particular, European countries and some Arab states are not taking their historical responsibility to address anti-Semitism in their own countries. We know that anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe, but because it was never fully stamped out, and they have never taken the responsibility for Jewish refugees that were made in World War II. Now, the Jewish refugees from the Arab countries that were expelled and kicked out should absolutely, just as any other refugees in the world, should just absolutely have that right of return to their homes and are

entitled to due compensation. But Palestinians shouldn't be made to pay for the fact that other people expel Jews from their countries. It's not a morally sound argument and neither is it a legally sound argument. We're obviously just racing through here trying to give people a bit of a summary. Let's talk about the two wars, 67 and 73, in which Israel's neighbours attempt to claw back some of the territorial losses if you like the Arabs suffered in 1948. So in 1967 war which in Arabic is referred to as Naxa, saw Israel occupying capture after Arab armies invaded Israel. They saw the capture of the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and the Egyptian Sinai. And the Golan Heights, of course, are part of Syria.

This was really a crushing defeat for the Palestinians and also for the Arab region. It was a prime opportunity for Israel to expand into the West Bank and Gaza and the Golan, which to be honest, it had its sights set on from the very beginning. These are incredibly strategic areas, particularly the Jordan Valley, which is situated in the West Bank and the very beginning. These are incredibly strategic areas, particularly the Jordan Valley, which is situated in the West Bank and the Golan. Golan is this very high territory, high in elevation, and it's Syrian territory. And Israel has always seen that as its weak spot in terms of defending itself strategically from Syria. And so this gave it the perfect pretext to occupy that land and to hold on to it. And it does so to this day, and it's very much a forgotten

occupation. And as part of the West Bank, you mentioned, of course, is old Jerusalem, East Jerusalem, with the holy sites, holy both to Islam and Judaism. And that comes into Israel's possession in 1967, with great consequences for the events that we've seen the last week or two. Yeah, of course. And also to Christianity, very important holy sites to Christianity. And this really is one of the biggest issues in the question around Palestine and Israel is Jerusalem. Israel, as well as occupying East Jerusalem, it also annexed it. And what this means is that it brought it under its jurisdiction and it declared it as the undivided capital of the Jewish state of Israel. And what it did with the Palestinian residents, it, you know,

kicked some of them out and the others, it gave them permanent residency status, which is a very fancy way to say that you are simply residents and that you are temporary residents, that you can have your status here revoked at any time if we decide that you don't belong, which has happened over the many decades. And so the old city, as you mentioned, was part of that occupation and annexation. And it has faced since then this process of what we call Judaisation, in other words, the slow takeover and expulsion of Palestinians to make room for Israeli Jewish settlers. And this really came to a head in the media in the last few weeks,

even though this has been an ongoing process. But one of the areas in Jerusalem, Sheikh Shara, is facing ethnic cleansing. And the Israeli government essentially want to replace the Palestinian residents with Israeli Jewish settlers. Hi everyone, you're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. government essentially want to replace the palestinian residents with israeli jewish settlers hi everyone you're listening to dan snow's history we are talking about israel palestine and what's behind the fighting more after this land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories

that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Let's talk about the late 20th century now, the early 21st. You see the building of settlements in these occupied territories, which might sound confusing to people. They're actually communities. They're like gated communities, aren't they?

Yeah, I mean, people are very surprised, I think, when they come to the West Bank for the first time. They expect settlements to be sort of makeshift camps or to look like army barracks. And in some cases, the newer ones, the latest ones, do look like that. And that's how they start. But many of the settlements now are fully-fledged towns and cities with full infrastructure. The reason they're called illegal settlements is because international law deems them as such,

because Israel is recognised as an occupying regime, and the international community and international law recognise the West Bank, the Golan and Gaza's occupied territories. So in 1967, the Israeli government, which was a Labour government, spearheaded the settlement campaign. Now, it's important to mention that it was a Labour government because settlement policy, settlement expansionism, isn't a partisan issue it's not something that the right wing are pursuing this is actually a cross-party policy so the settlement campaign was spearheaded by the Labour government in 1967 and has since expanded all across the West Bank and it's a very devastating fact of Palestinian life in the West Bank is that

the presence of these settlers, which now number 600,000. Older listeners, listeners my age to this podcast will remember Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat representing Israel and the Palestinians shaking hands at the White House in 1993. What was that deal? And how might there have been a pathway to a lasting peace through that deal? So, Dan, believe it or not, I also remember that, even though I was... You must have been a baby. I was young, but it was such a monumental event. And I don't mean monumental necessarily in a positive way,

and I'll explain why in a minute, but it was such a monumental event that this is sort of etched in my memory. And it's a funny thing about memory. I mean, I'm pretty sure I remember it on television, but we've seen that image so many times that actually it might be a false memory. But I remember anyway, that period and the feeling and the atmosphere in that period.

Now, what you were referring to then is that infamous shaking of hands on the White House lawn with a very smug looking Bill Clinton. And what it was, was the Oslo Accords, frequently referred to as the Oslo Process. It was a signing of a peace agreement. And it was, was the Oslo Accords, frequently referred to as the Oslo Process. It was a signing of a peace agreement and it was celebrated all around the world as, you know, finally the end to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Very interestingly so, Edward Said, the Palestinian academic, the day after it was signed, called it a Palestinian Versailles. And he did so because he read the fine print. He looked at the details of that agreement and he recognised in it complete Palestinian capitulation. What the media reported on at the time was that this was going

to be a phased process to the development of or the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. And so it would be following along the lines of the two-state solution, with a Palestinian state and an Israeli state living side by side. In reality, what it did was it divided up the West Bank into these areas called A, B and C. Areas A would be under the Palestinian Authority control, which was a new governing body, which was also established by Oslo. It was supposed to be this interim government, but we can talk about the Palestinian Authority a bit later. Area B would be this sort of joint area of control between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli army. And then area C, which is 60% of the West Bank, which includes the Jordan

Valley, which I mentioned earlier, which is this incredibly fertile piece of land, that would be under sole Israeli military control. So what this did was it banterstonized the West Bank. It created this sort of Swiss cheese of the West Bank and where these pockets of Palestinian Authority control, which was the most densely populated areas, sort of surrounded by Area C, which were Israeli military control. So that meant that Palestinians traveling in between sort of major population zones, cities, towns, or whatever, would have to travel through Area C. And of course,

what is this in Area C is heavily militarized infrastructure, checkpoints, military barracks. So this means that at any point in time, Israel can effectively close down the West Bank, can shut Palestinians into just areas A. They can't get to each other. They can't travel. They're basically encased in their small bantustans. Further to that, the Oslo Accords also had a lot of economic provisions. And this was known as the Paris Protocol, which dictated basically the barriers of what the Palestinian economy would face. The Palestinian economy doesn't really exist. It's actually a misnomer. You can't have an economy under occupation. What the Paris Protocol did was it imposed this unequal customs union, which granted Israeli businesses direct access to the Palestinian market, but it restricted Palestinian goods entry into the Israeli one. It gave the Israeli state control over tax collection.

And then it further entrenched the use of the shekel, the Israeli currency, in the occupied territories, the West Bank and Gaza. And so this left the newly established Palestinian Authority with absolutely no means to impose fiscal control or to adopt any kind of macroeconomic policies. So in summary, this effectively meant that Israel had direct and indirect control over the levers of the Palestinian economy. And we see this very much playing out today. I just want to return briefly to Area C because it's incredibly important. Area C is, as I mentioned, 60% of the West Bank. It's under total Israeli control. It's where most of the Israeli illegal settlements are. And this includes 95%

of the Jordan Valley, which is the main area where the West Bank had their agriculture, and is now heavily cultivated by these Israeli illegal settlements. A lot of produce from Israel actually comes from the Jordan Valley, which is illegally occupied. And it's estimated that the loss of this access to Area C costs the Palestinian economy hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And so in summary, I mean, we could talk about the Oslo Accords for hours. But in summary, you know, it gave this veneer of a peace agreement, of a sort of staged interim approach to a Palestinian state. But really, it entrenched further Israeli control over Palestinian lives in the West Bank and Gaza. And Edward Said was an incredible academic who had this incredible foresight at the time.

It was indeed a Palestinian Versailles, a complete Palestinian capitulation. And the fault lies not only in the hands of the Israelis who knew what they were doing and the international mediators, but also the Palestinian leadership, which was totally, totally unprepared for these kinds of negotiations with the Israelis. In the years that followed, that Palestinian leadership, perhaps unsurprisingly, given what you lay out, found it difficult to sell that deal to the Palestinians, particularly Hamas emerges, takes control of Gaza, and Gaza starts to loom very large, certainly in the international view of Israel-Palestine. What exactly is going on in the Gaza Strip from that period to this?

It's important to make some distinctions, I think, first of all. The Palestinian Authority, which was created by Oslo, was an interim government. It is not the representation or the representative body of the Palestinian people. That is the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization. But what has happened since then is that the Palestinian Authority has subsumed the PLO and it has now become the sort of de facto ruling entity. And it has become incredibly authoritarian. It hasn't had elections for a long time and it has

become incredibly repressive. Now going back to your question about Gaza, Hamas was established sort of in the late 1980s at the beginning of the first Palestinian Intifada or uprising. And many people argue or comment that it was actually given space or even encouraged by Israel to serve as an opposition to Fatah, which was and continues to be the dominant political party in the PLO. Now, if we're going to sort of fast forward, or perhaps I should say that Hamas is an Islamist movement. It is a movement that calls for armed resistance against Israeli occupation. Now, fast forwarding to the elections of 2006,

legislative election, the Palestinian Legislative Council, the result of those elections was a victory for Hamas. Now, the international community responded to that victory in a very unsurprising way. It rejected that win, it rejected the outcome of those elections. And it led to Israel laying siege to Gaza as a sort of punishment for those elections, for the people voting for Hamas. Now, that siege continues until today. And when we're talking about military siege, we're talking about complete control, complete control over airspace, over the borders, over the sea access, over everything that comes in and goes out of Gaza is controlled by Israel. It is essentially an outdoor prison. And this is an incredibly populated piece of land. It's one of the most

densely populated pieces of land in the world. It's 2 million people, and many of whom are actually refugees from the 1948 Palestinian Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of 1948. And so bring us up to the current crisis. You, of course, are the least surprised person on earth this has flared up because this is simply a continuation of what's been going on now for decades. But what ignited the current surge in violence? The current surge in violence, I think, really was sparked by the ethnic cleansing of the Sheikh Shara neighborhood in East Jerusalem. And this is a neighborhood that has faced for many decades the threat of ethnic cleansing. In other words, the Israeli regime has been trying to forcibly displace this Palestinian community

and replace them with Jewish Israeli settlers. And this all came to a head when the Israeli regime gave them a date in May for when this would actually happen. Now, that community in Sheikh Jarrah mobilised and created this really, truly inspiring and galvanising campaign, which brought Palestinians out to the streets in their thousands, in cities, towns and villages across historic Palestine. And this included a lot of demonstrations in Jerusalem,

most notably in the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound. The Al-Aqsa Mosque is one of the holiest sites in Islam. And the Israeli army essentially laid siege to the building, which had hundreds of Palestinians trapped inside. Palestinians were fighting and resisting bullets, stun grenades, tear gas, with nothing essentially, but their bare hands. And from that siege, there were hundreds of injuries, including incredibly critical ones, such as the loss of eyes.

Elsewhere in Palestine, cities such as Nazareth and Haifa, which are within the 48 borders, Palestinians were met with beatings and arrests. And since then, there have actually been rampages of Israeli settlers lynching and assaulting Palestinians in these cities. Now, in response to the siege on Al-Aqsa, Hamas gave Israel a warning. It would have to stop its siege on the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound. Otherwise, they would launch an attack. Israel did not stop its siege on Al-Aqsa Mosque. Neither did it stop repressing the protests around Palestine, and neither has it

stopped trying to ethnically cleanse the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. So in response to that, Hamas retaliated with rockets, and these were met, of course, as we know, with a barrage of Israeli military airstrikes, which have now killed over 100 Palestinians in Gaza, including quite a lot of children. And so that's really the sort of context for the sort of more immediate context for what has been going on. But I think it's always important to remember that historical context, because unlike what a lot of the media is doing, Gaza cannot be separated from the rest

of Palestine, including Jerusalem, including the Palestinian communities that live within Israel. There is an ongoing historic context, which is one of ethnic cleansing, forcible displacement, colonization of Palestinian land, and this has all come to a head in the last few weeks. Well, thank you very much for taking us on this rampage through the last eight decades. What is happening to you and your family at the moment? It's an incredibly frightening time. My friends and family live all over historic Palestine.

I have a lot of family in the city of Haifa, which is in the 48 borders, Israel proper, where they have seen a lot of lynch mobs. And it's incredibly frightening for the Palestinian community there. They have been boarded up in their homes for fear of being assaulted and lynched. And in Jerusalem, similarly, Palestinians are pretty terrified of what's going on. But I have to say, in spite of this fear, and in spite of the real sort of danger and violence we're facing, there has been really incredible mobilization of Palestinians, especially the youth across historic Palestine. And this is really, if we want to take something hopeful

from this particular period, Israel has been trying to fragment us in our sort of small pockets and communities in our Bantustans. And this latest uprising proves that they haven't been successful, that Palestinians still recognise and identify in the Palestinian struggle against colonisation. Yara Hawari, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. I feel we have the history on our shoulders.

All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all work on and finish. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, a bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money, makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, that law of the jungle out there, and I need all

the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.