A couple of weeks ago my cousin sent me a video and wanted to know my thoughts on this representation of “history” of West Asia. I watched a few minutes and realized that it was a barrage of misinformation. At first I thought I’d let it go. I sent him two excellent interviews between Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman and historians Rashid Khalidi and Ilan Pappe. But then I felt a sudden twinge of masochism and decided to watch the whole thing in order to transcribe and rebut all of the lies. I also tried to look into these characters attempting to have an intellectual conversation, Beer Biceps’ Ranveer Allahbadia (as if anyone with that brand name could be taken seriously) and Abhijit Iyer Mitra who is a pompous know nothing “defense analyst” (it’s unclear what that means and what his qualifications are) and whose claim to fame was spending a little over a month in prison in Odisha a few years ago. Neither man has an iota of experience to host a discussion on geopolitics let alone history of West Asia.
Nevertheless, on 28 November 2023 these two men say down to discuss “the Israel-Palestine war situation,” with Allahbadia ironically claiming, “Personally I think you should listen to subject experts who are qualified to speak about geopolitics.” If this ignorant young man believed that, perhaps the podcast would have some value.
[Note: All the quotations from their YouTube discussion are in red. All pages numbers from books quoted from are epub files. Most images are courtesy of Visualizing Palestine.]
I’m going to ignore all the incoherent elements of each man’s speech – which is epic – and the vagaries of each man’s language – which is sometimes so confusing it’s hard to know who or what they’re referring to. Instead, I’m going to highlight the main lies that transpire in the episode. For each of my responses I shared quotations from reputed scholars on the subject, which anyone who is actually interested in a deeper understanding of Palestine and Israel can read. Indeed many of the myths perpetrated by Mitra can be found in Israeli historian Ilan Pappe’s brilliant little book, Ten Myths About Israel.
- SETTLER COLONIALISM AND THE RIGHT TO RESIST
The interview begins with Allahbadia asking Mitra to start in “ancient times.” Here is Mitra’s response:
“But, you know, it starts off A, we will not acknowledge Israel. B, Israel is a colonial construct. We are the original inhabitants and Israel is a colonial construct. Therefore we can’t recognize it. And you are basically, it’s like asking an Indian to say, you should accept British rule of India in perpetuity. See it isn’t…So their arguments, I’ve never come across a cogent pro-Palestinian argument that is actually pro-Palestinian and anti-Hamas. There is always this equivalence. You know, I think the best thing the Palestinians can do is follow Gandhi. Because then there would be absolutely no moral equivalence.”
Leaving aside the fact that he didn’t answer the question, here is what is wrong with the answer. Israel is a colonial construct. The majority of Israelis are descended from Jewish Zionist settlers who, along with the British, violently invaded and took over Palestine from the indigenous Palestinians. Here Pappe explains how these settlers entered Palestine and how they were received until their intentions were felt by Palestinians:
“The official Israeli narrative or foundational mythology refuses to allow the Palestinians even a modicum of moral right to resist the Jewish colonization of their homeland that began in 1882. From the very beginning, Palestinian resistance was depicted as motivated by hate for Jews. It was accused of promoting a protean anti-Semitic campaign of terror that began when the first settlers arrived and continued until the creation of the state of Israel. The diaries of the early Zionists tell a different story. They are full of anecdotes revealing how the settlers were well received by the Palestinians, who offered them shelter and in many cases taught them how to cultivate the land. Only when it became clear that the settlers had not come to live alongside the native population, but in place of it, did the Palestinian resistance begin. And when that resistance started, it quickly took the form of every other anticolonialist struggle.” (Pappe, Ten Myths About Israel, pages 34-35)
Indeed it was and is an anticolonial struggle. As someone who supports Palestinians, I don’t have to repudiate Hamas or any other resistance organization. Indeed, because Israel is a colony occupying Palestinian land, Palestinians have the legal right under international law to resist, including armed resistance. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3314 from 1974 on the Definition of Aggression outlines, in Article 7, makes this fundamental right clear:
“Nothing in this Definition, and in particular article 3, could in any way prejudice the right to self-determination, freedom and independence, as derived from the Charter, of people forcibly deprived of that right and referred to in the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, particularly peoples under colonial and racist régimes or other forms of alien domination; nor the right of these peoples to struggle to that end and to seek and receive support, in accordance with the principles of the Charter and in conformity with the above-mentioned Declaration.” (UN Resolution 3314; emphasis mine)
Mitra’s paternalistic Gandhi imposition is offensive because one rarely hears anyone ask “where are the Israeli leaders who will give up massacring and destroying Palestinian life?” Israeli professor of international law, Neve Gordon, addresses that in the Israeli online publication +972 Magazine, but it’s a topic rarely engaged with. Indeed, Palestinians have always have used a variety of tactics against their colonizers just as Indians have (think Netaji and Bhagat Singh) as is their right. From the massive Palestinian strike in 1936 to the town of Beit Sahour refusing to pay Israeli taxes during the first intifada to the more recent Great March of Return in Gaza from 2018-2019, Palestinians have brilliantly exhibited non-violent forms of resistance. And just as the British brutally squashed the strike leading to the Arab Revolt, Palestinians in Gaza who sustained a weekly non-violent protest at the border of Gaza and Israel, they sustained a horrific number of deaths and injuries, including the targeting of visibly identified medical relief workers and journalists. Neve Gordon contextualizes the Great March of Return in the context of other anticolonial struggles:
“The accusation that Palestinians have failed to adopt non-violent methods of resistance, and therefore share responsibility for Israel’s ongoing subjugation and dispossession, not only completely disavows the vast asymmetry in power relations between the coloniser and colonised, but, just as importantly, fails to consider the political history of anticolonial struggles, not least the Palestinian one itself. Indeed, it completely ignores the fact that Israel’s colonial project has been upheld through attritional, protracted and widespread violence, and, despite what certain Western media outlets might present, the Palestinians have developed a robust and long-standing tradition of non-violent resistance. Moreover, the demand to adopt a non-violent ideology completely elides the history of other liberation struggles: from Algiers to Vietnam and all the way back to South Africa.”
The problem is, of course, that Israel greets non-violent protesters with brutal savagery, which I have experienced myself when I lived in the West Bank and attended a variety of protests in various villages trying to keep settlers and the Israeli army from encroaching on their land.
But since Mitra brings up Gandhi at several junctures in the conversation, let’s look at what Gandhi’s position was on Zionist conquest:
“Gandhi’s major statement on Palestine and the Jewish question appeared in his widely circulated editorial in the Harijan of November 11, 1938, in the middle of a major rebellion by the native Palestinians against the British government’s pro-Zionist policies. Gandhi began his piece by saying that all his sympathies lay with the Jews, who as a people had been subjected to inhuman treatment and persecution for centuries. But, he added,
‘My sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and in the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after their return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?’
Gandhi thus questioned the very foundational logic of political Zionism, rejecting the idea of a Jewish state in the promised land by pointing out that the “Palestine of the Biblical conception is not a geographical tract.” Thus, Gandhi disapproved of the Zionist project for both political and religious reasons. The endorsement of that project by the British government only alienated Gandhi even further. He had no doubts about who Palestine belonged to:
‘Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs … Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.’” (Pappe, Ten Myths About Israel, page 31; emphasis mine)
2. ISRAEL AND ITS NEIGHBORS
In an effort to try to portray Palestinian people as a group who no one wants – not neighboring Arab states and not Israel – Mitra suggests that Gaza has historically been part of Egypt and that the people of Gaza were so undesirable that Egypt refused to take back that strip of land:
“You look at how the Palestinians have treated their own neighbors. In 1973, when the Yom Kippur War happened and Israel seized the whole of the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula is about 2-3 times the size of Israel so Israel suddenly became a country that was 3 times its previous size, if not more. In 1979, in return for peace, they gave the entire territory back to Egypt. The one piece that was not given back was Gaza.”
First, Gaza is part of Palestine not Egypt. Daughter of Holocaust survivors and scholar of Middle East Studies, Sara Roy, shares this basic fact with readers on the first page of her book groundbreaking book, The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-deveopment:
“Since its creation, this tiny, artificial entity has known only one political reality—occupation—and two occupiers—Egypt and Israel. The Gaza Strip is the only part of Mandatory Palestine that was never incorporated into a sovereign state, and no Arab nation has ever claimed it as its own. Yet Gaza has remained a critical part of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: Gaza was where the All-Palestine Government was established in 1948, where the Palestinian uprising (intifada) began in 1987, and where limited self-rule for the occupied territories began in 1994.” (Roy, The Gaza Strip, 3; emphasis mine).
Whether or not Gaza is part of Palestine is such a ridiculous falsehood it really doesn’t warrant much discussion.
Second, it was during the 1967 war that Israel occupied the Sinai Peninsula, not the 1973 war. Then he repeats some of his earlier statements and adds to it in order to suggest that Israel is a peace-loving nation that returns land back for peace:
“So what will happen is in 1967 Israel conquered the whole of the Sinai peninsula and they conquered Gaza as well which had been Egyptian until then. And so Israel became three times its size, because Sinai plus Gaza is at least twice the size of Israel so Israel became three times its size. In 1973 after the Yom Kippur War, the Egyptians decide to start talking to the Israelis and in 1979, peace was achieved where Israel gives up 66% of the territory under its control. You tell me who gives up two thirds of their territory to make peace? Well, it wasn’t their territory, but assume it was.”
Interestingly the only war Mitra leaves out is the 1956 war that Israel initiated on Egypt with the help of Britain and France, which even the United States did not condone. In any case, his sense of what happened with the Israeli-Egyptian treaty in 1979 is completely ahistorical. Here is what really happened according to historian Rashid Khalidi’s masterpiece of a book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance:
“While American contacts were ongoing with the PLO in Beirut, President Jimmy Carter’s administration, working to hold a multilateral Middle East peace conference in Geneva, issued a joint communiqué with the USSR in October 1977. The communiqué broke ground, referring to participation of all parties to the conflict, including “those of the Palestinian people.” A statement made by Carter some months earlier, calling for a homeland for the Palestinians, signaled a different tone in Washington. However, under pressure from the newly elected Likud government in Israel, led by Menachem Begin, and from Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, the administration soon abandoned its push for a comprehensive settlement and the inclusion of the Palestinians in negotiations. Instead, it adopted the bilateral Camp David process, resulting in the separate Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979.
This process was specifically designed by Begin to freeze out the PLO, allow unimpeded colonization of the Occupied Territories occupied in 1967, and put the Palestine issue on hold, which is where it remained for over a decade. While Sadat and American officials feebly protested this sidetracking of the Palestinian issue, whose importance Carter had stressed at the outset of his presidency, in the end they acquiesced. For Sadat, the treaty restored the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. For Begin, the unilateral Egyptian peace strengthened Israel’s control of the rest of the Occupied Territories and permanently removed Egypt from the Arab-Israeli conflict. For the United States, the treaty completed Egypt’s shift from the Soviet to the American camp, defusing the most dangerous aspects of the superpower conflict in the Middle East.” (Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, pages 88-89)
In other words, the fantasy of Israel holding land to negotiate for peace is not true. Because Mitra’s lack of sense of chronology, he meanders into an incoherent, confused set of statements about Jordan and Lebanon:
“In Jordan, when the partition of Palestine happens in 1948, Jordan annexes the West Bank, what is today called the West Bank. The poor man, King Hussein, had to suffer so much trouble because of it. Because there were repeated Palestinian attempts to overthrow him, kill him, and overtake the state of Jordan to take over Jordan from its monarch. In Lebanon, people don’t want to talk about the fact how Palestinian refugees, effectively because of the demographic change it brought about in Lebanon were the cause of the civil war that shattered that country forever. Beirut used to be called the Paris of the Levant, the Paris of the East. That Paris of the East no longer exists. It wasn’t just going there and settling down. It was carrying out terror attacks. I want everybody to Google the Black September attacks in Jordan, where they attempted to overthrow the king of Jordan. Everybody needs to Google what the PLO did in Lebanon. And how has their behavior as refugees in somebody else’s country been exemplary? Should they be punished for it back home? No. But should there be introspection? Yes.”
It’s hard to parse this briefly because Mitra seems to be confusing and conflating events, times, and places. But in a nutshell, yes, there were Palestinians who were engaging in armed resistance from Jordan after the 1967 war after Israel occupied all of historic Palestine from the river to the sea. For anyone interested in understanding the deep collusion between the Zionists and the Jordanian monarchy, Avi Shlaim is a Jewish Arab Israeli historian who has done significant work on the subject, including The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. He discusses the events of Black September, but in the book it is within the wider context of Jordanian collusion with Israel and the United States. In Jordan, which was the base of operations for Palestinian feda’iyin (resistance fighters), over 70% of the population of the country is Palestinian, which in and of itself has always been something the Hashemite regime has struggled with. In 1970,
“In Jordan the Palestinian guerrilla organizations created a state within a state that posed a challenge to the rule of King Hussein. The king ordered his army to disarm and break the power of these organizations. In the ensuing civil war thousands of Palestinians were killed, and many more left the country. At the height of the crisis, Syrian forces invaded Jordan in what looked like a bid to help the Palestinians overthrow the monarchy.” (Shlaim, The Iron Wall, page 323).
The remaining Palestinian feda’iyin fled from Jordan to Lebanon from where they continued their guerrilla operations. But from Mitra’s telling Palestinians were the cause of the nostalgic and Orientalist view he has of Beirut. For one thing, there were many Lebanese people who joined in the resistance movement against Israel. For another, the ruination of Beirut is due to multiple factors, including the civil war, but also Israel’s brutal invasion of Lebanon in 1982:
“The invasion in 1982 was of an entirely different order in terms of its aims, scale, and duration, the heavy losses involved, and its long-range impact. Israel’s war on Lebanon had multiple objectives, but what distinguished it was its primary focus on the Palestinians and its larger goal of changing the situation inside Palestine. While the general scheme for the war was approved by Prime Minister Menachem Begin and the Israeli cabinet, they were often kept in the dark by the invasion’s architect, defense minister Ariel Sharon, regarding both his real goals and his operational plans. Although Sharon wanted to expel the PLO and Syrian forces from Lebanon and create a pliable allied government in Beirut to transform circumstances in that country, his chief objective was Palestine itself. From the perspective of proponents of Greater Israel such as Sharon, Begin, and Yitzhak Shamir, destroying the PLO militarily and eliminating its power in Lebanon would also put an end to the strength of Palestinian nationalism in the occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. These areas would thereby become far easier for Israel to control and ultimately annex. Former Israeli chief of staff Mordechai Gur, speaking to a secret session of a Knesset committee at the outset of the war, approvingly summed up its purpose: in “the Occupied Territories, in the final analysis the idea was to limit the [PLO] leadership’s influence in order to provide us with greater freedom of action.” (Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War, page 93).
It is this invasion of Lebanon, and ultimately of Beirut, including catastrophic massacres of Palestinians in the Shatila refugee camp, and its surrounding Sabra neighborhood, that brought Beirut to its knees.
3. THE SO-CALLED PEACE PROCESS
Mitra scuttles forward to 2005, or so it seems, from the 1970s to discuss the Oslo Accords:
“And then again what happens in 2005? Now, there was a government of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres who signed the deal with the PLO, with Yasser Arafat, and made what is called the Oslo peace process and everything. What happens with that, with what was meant to become the independent Palestinian state, the West Bank plus Gaza. And what ends up happening is Yitzhak Rabin is killed by a Jewish fundamentalist. He’s succeeded by his foreign minister Shimon Peres, who was crucial to making that peace. Guess who shuttled Shimon Peres? Shimon Peres was a man wedded to peace. He wanted more than anything else to see two countries at peace with each other and at peace with their neighbors. He was moving towards peace. What did the Palestinians do? They started suicide bombing of commuter busses in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in which 50, 70, 80 people would die.”
Again, the dates throw off anyone who knows anything about the subject because in 2005 Ariel Sharon was Prime Minister. Yitzhak Rabin was dead. And Shimon Peres lost an election. It seems as though he’s discussing 1993, which is when Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn. But in hindsight it’s impossible to imagine that this was ever anything but a charade. Here is Rashid Khalidi on Rabin:
“While Rabin had done something no other Israeli leader had ever done by formally conceding that there was a Palestinian people, accepting the PLO as their representative, and opening negotiations with it, obtaining in return its recognition of the state of Israel, this exchange was neither symmetrical nor reciprocal. Israel had not recognized a Palestinian state or even made a commitment to allow the creation of one. This was a peculiar transaction, whereby a national liberation movement had obtained nominal recognition from its oppressors, without achieving liberation, by trading its own recognition of the state that had colonized its homeland and continued to occupy it. This was a resounding, historic mistake, one with grave consequences for the Palestinian people.” (Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War, page 129).
On Peres, Khalidi remarks:
“This team was assembled by Shimon Peres, who was no more prepared to see the Palestinians as equals or to countenance Palestinian statehood and sovereignty than were Rabin or Shamir. The Palestinian envoys at Oslo were simply out of their league, lacking resources and training, none of them having been in occupied Palestine for decades, and having failed to study and absorb the results of our ten rounds of negotiations with Israel. The deteriorating situation of the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories after Oslo since the mid-1990s has been in large measure the result of the choice of envoys whose performance at Oslo was inept, and of ‘Arafat and his colleagues’ willingness to sign the defective agreements they drew up.” (Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War, page 129).
The end result was a war process more than a peace process. One of capitulation and bullying. Here is Pappe’s assessment:
“So, in truth, without the application of extreme pressure, there is no reason in the world why a native population would ever volunteer to partition its homeland with a settler population. And therefore we should acknowledge that the Oslo process was not a fair and equal pursuit of peace, but a compromise agreed to by a defeated, colonized people. As a result, the Palestinians were forced to seek solutions that went against their interests and endangered their very existence.
The same argument can be made about the debates concerning the “two-states solution” that was offered in Oslo. This offer should be seen for what it is: partition under a different wording. Even in this scenario, although the terms of the debate appear different, Israel would not only decide how much territory it was going to concede but also what would happen in the territory it left behind. While the promise of statehood initially proved persuasive to the world and to some Palestinians, it soon came to sound hollow. Nonetheless, these two intertwined notions of territorial withdrawal and statehood were successfully packaged as parts of a peace deal in Oslo in 1993. Yet within weeks of the joint signature“on the White House lawn, the writing was on the wall. By the end of September, the Accord’s vague principles had already been translated into a new geopolitical reality on the ground under the terms of what was called the Oslo II (or Taba) agreement. This included not just partitioning the West Bank and the Gaza Strip between “Jewish” and “Palestinian” zones, but partitioning further all the Palestinian areas into small cantons or Bantustans. The peace cartography of 1995 amounted to a bisected series of Palestinian zones that resembled, in the words of quite a few commentators, a Swiss cheese.” (Pappe, Ten Myths About Israel, page 69).
The suicide bombings about which Mitra ignorantly asks, “Why would you carry out suicide bombings against a guy who was committed to a two state solution?” emerge because the so-called peace process further entrenched the occupation and Israel refused to relent. Here is Pappe’s take on the emergence of both non-violent and violent demonstrations as a result of the worsening situation in the name of peace:
“The truth is, it was a mass demonstration of dissatisfaction at the betrayals of Oslo, compounded by the provocative actions of Ariel Sharon. In September 2000, Sharon ignited an explosion of protest when, as the leader of the opposition, he toured Haram al-Sharif, the Temple Mount, with a massive security and media presence.
The initial Palestinian anger was expressed in non-violent demonstrations that were crushed with brutal force by Israel. This callous repression led to a more desperate response—the suicide bombers who appeared as the last resort in the face of the strongest military power in the region. There is telling evidence from Israeli newspaper correspondents of how their reports on the early stages of the Intifada—as a non-violent movement crushed by the Israeli army—were shelved by their editors so as to fit the narrative of the government. One of them was a deputy editor of Yeidot Ahronoth, the main daily in the state, who wrote a book about the misinformation produced by the Israeli media in the early days of the Second Intifada.” (Pappe, Ten Myths About Israel, page 73).
Mitra would have it that the kingpin of peace was actually the same Sharon whose visit to Haram al-Sharif ignited the second intifada:
“Then who they consider the incarnation of the devil, a guy called Ariel Sharon becomes prime minister. He wants to show again his bona fides and say if you give me peace – the deal was land for peace. If you give me peace, I will give you land. And Gaza at this time had lots of Israeli kibbutzes that were the main source of employment in that region…So he [Sharon] dismantles all these collectives, Jewish collective societies, forcibly drags all of them back and he’s showing, look, I am willing to do for you what we did with Egypt in 1979, which is dismantle everything from the Gaza Strip and give you your independence. And this is now held up to the West Bank saying, look what we did for you in Gaza. We’ve given you, we’ve withdrawn everything. We’re not even negotiating about it. So you’ll keep hearing the Palestinians say, oh, they’re going on building settlements, more settlements, and they’re annexing more land. Everything is up for negotiation.”
The reality of Sharon is so far from what Mitra imagines is far from a land-for-peace deal. His blind acceptance of Israeli hasbara (propaganda) is obvious with his incessant blaming the victim. Indeed, Sharon’s use of word “withdrawal” was a calculated attempt to dupe ignorant people like Mitra. It’s more like an interim exchange of less coveted land for more coveted land as Pappe explains:
“The plan offered an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the closure of the handful of settlements there, as well as several others in the West Bank, in return for the annexation of the majority of the West Bank settlements to Israel. The Americans also knew all too well how another crucial piece fitted into this puzzle. For Sharon, the annexation of those parts of the West Bank he coveted could only be executed with the completion of the wall Israel had begun building in 2003, bisecting the Palestinian parts of the West Bank. He had not anticipated the international objection—the wall became the most iconic symbol of the occupation, to the extent that the international court of justice ruled that it constituted a human rights violation. Time will tell whether or not this was a meaningful landmark.” (Pappe, Ten Myths About Israel, page 85; emphasis mine).
Throughout this interview it’s obvious that Allahbadia struggles to grasp what Mitra is saying and he regularly seeks clarification as he does following Mitra’s ramblings about the string of so-called peace leaders in Israel:
Allahbadia: “So one thing, the solution oriented mindset is Israel’s. That’s what you’re saying.”
Mitra: “It used to be Israel’s and then the Palestinians were so intransigent that you now have Netanyahu who is not pro – in word, he is pro a two state solution, but in action he’s not pro a two state solution.”
Allahbadia: “In action what is he?
Mitra: “In action, he wants Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Well, they’re not in occupation of the West Bank technically, but he wants more and more land to be taken up by settlers.”
It’s hard to imagine that someone can say that “technically” Israel doesn’t “occupy” the West Bank. It’s like saying 2+2=5. United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 from 1967 demands the end of this military occupation, for starters. But all of the hot air coming out of Mitra’s mouth prior to this point – especially about land for peace and settlers – how do those things transpire if there isn’t already an occupation?
4. ANCIENT HISTORY
Mitra shifts from the so-called peace process to the Bronze Age because he seems intent on establishing that Palestinians are a violent and destructive people, but also a people who don’t exist. Here is how he begins to square that circle:
“1177 BC[E] is the agreed date for the Bronze Age collapse. And one of the things about the Bronze Age collapse was in the Mediterranean was there was this whole bunch of people called the Sea People who destroy civilization after civilization. Ancient Greece was destroyed by them. That is the Greece of Homer and the Iliad and Troy and all of that. They destroyed the Hittite Empire. They destroy all the Levantine states at that point of time. They almost succeed in destroying Egypt, but Egypt is the only civilization at that point that survives. One of the people out there are called the Peleset. Okay, we know them by name because of the Egyptian records. Some are called the Shardana, some are called the Peleset. The Shardana are, we think, they came from Sardinia, hence Shardana. And Peleset, we believe, are the Palestinians. And the Bible refers to them as Peleset or something like that.”
Because Mitra is neither well read nor a scholar, he obviously doesn’t follow scholarship so he is unaware that the sea people theory has been displaced. Nur Masalha, whose historical scholarship was some of the earliest to reveal the reality of Zionist history, shares some of the latest research about who the Peleset were in his recent volume Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History:
“A cognate of the name Palestine, ‘Peleset’, is found on five inscriptions as referring to the settlement of a seafaring people along the southern Palestinian coast from the mid-12th century BC during the reigns of Ramesses II and III of the nineteenth Egyptian dynasty. The 3200-year-old documents from Ramesses III, including an inscription dated c. 1150 BC, at the Mortuary Temple of Ramesses III at the Medinat Habu Temple in Luxor – one of the best-preserved temples of Egypt – refers to the Peleset among those who fought against Ramesses III, who reigned from 1186 to 1155 BC. Ramesses III’s war against the so-called ‘sea peoples’ (1181‒1175 BC) placed Peleset, geographically, in the land of Djahi, that is Palestine. In fact, new archaeological discoveries from a 3000-year-old Philistine graveyard in Ascalon have resulted in a new paradigm on the origins of the Philistines, firmly suggesting that they were not marauding Aegean invaders of the southern Levant or ‘sea peoples’ that appeared in Palestine in the course of the Late Bronze Age, but an indigenous population of the Near East.” (Masalha, Palestine, page 49; emphasis mine).
Jumping from sea to hill people, Mitra begins talking about what seems to be another group of people who are further inland near Jerusalem, but his vague language about people and their territories makes it hard to pinpoint:
“And it was culturally very different to the hill tribes that were living there at that time. They had a very different pottery culture. They used to eat copious quantities of pork. And you had the hill culture around what is today called Jerusalem where they did not eat pork, where the pottery culture was also slightly different. But then slowly cross-pollination happened, and the people of the hills ultimately ended up conquering the entire area. And after it was conquered, or some kind of political unity somehow was achieved, there was a split between the north and the south. Before it was the coast and the hills, then it became after sort of cultural unity or conquering or whatever was achieved, there was a north-south split.”
Contrast Mitra with Masalha’s discussion of the Philistia and the problem of using the Bible to draw a straight line between an ancient text and a modern people:
“Philistia of the late Bronze Age and Iron Age was dominated by the Philistines and evolved into a distinct geo-political entity with strong international trade links, a distinct economy and a sophisticated urban environment. The Philistines – a highly advanced people who, according to the Old Testament, ruled five famed Pentapoli of Philistia: Gaza, Ascalon, Ashdod, Ekron and Gath – have, for centuries, suffered under the weight of their relentlessly negative portrayal in the books and stories of the Old Testament. From Goliath to Delilah, they have personified the intrinsically evil Other in the burgeoning narrative myth of the nation of Israel. In the Old Testament, the Philistines were constructed as a typical ideological scapegoat. Modern European racism and biblical constructs and prejudices towards the Philistines have survived in the derogatory and offensive connotation of the modern Western term: ‘a philistine is a person ignorant of, or smugly hostile to, culture’.” (Masalha, Palestine, pages 54-55).
Masalha’s research on who the Philistia were and where they resided and how they’ve been negatively portrayed contrasts with Zionists who use the Tanakh to map out relationships between then and now. Unsurprisingly this is precisely what this interview does:
Allahbadia: “This is geographical Israel.”
Mitra: “This is geographical Israel. We’re just talking about Israel right now.”
Allahbadia: “All these people were not Jewish.”
Mitra: “In those days, even the Jews weren’t Jewish. They were just people living up in the hills near Jerusalem. Because see, Judaism itself, we’ll discuss how it comes about. At this point they were all polytheist pagans. The Bible will tell you that there was a Moses and Moses around the same time, actually 200 years before this, about 1400 BC[E], he defeated Pharaoh and took Israel from captivity in the land of Egypt. You know, 10 commandments and all of that going. He parts the Red Sea and brings them all to Israel. All the anthropological studies show you that the people we call Israelis today have always been in Israel, ethnically. There’s no ethnic variation out there, right?”
In the above exchange, these two men conflate geography, history, religion, and ethnicity. First of all, there was no such thing as geographical Israel in the time period they’re discussing. Second of all, Judaism is a religion not an ethnicity. There are shared cultural and linguistic features among Jewish people but we are not all descended from the same people. Like any other religious group, Jewish people have moved and converted and intermarried. There are Jews and Israelis who are Ethiopian, Iraqi, Spanish, French, Indian and everything in between. Finally, I don’t know how he squares the circle of the creation of Israel itself being almost entirely dependent upon European immigration, especially in its pre-state days. Pappe describes the first two waves of colonization, which Zionists call aliyah (Hebrew for ascending):
“Independently at first, a group of Eastern European Jews developed similar notions about the solution for the Jewish question in Europe, and they did not wait for international recognition. They began to settle in Palestine in 1882, after preparing the ground by working in communes in their home countries. In the Zionist jargon they are called the First Aliyah—the first wave of Zionist immigration lasting to 1904. The second wave (1905–14) was different, since it mainly included frustrated communists and socialists who now saw Zionism not only as a solution for the Jewish problem but also as spearheading communism and socialism through collective settlement in Palestine. In both waves, however, the majority preferred to settle in Palestinian towns, with only a smaller number attempting to cultivate land they bought from Palestinians and absentee Arab landowners, at first relying on Jewish industrialists in Europe to sustain them, before seeking a more independent economic existence.” (Pappe, Ten Myths About Israel, pages 21-22).
Allahbadia, still confused, continues with his questioning around the identity of Israelis:
Allahbadia: “Who do we call Israelis? Because the world assumes that Israelis are actually immigrants from Europe.”
Mitra: “Yeah exactly and you know, that’s not true. There has been a significant admixture of European blood, but the fundamental, the core DNA apparently remains the same.”
Allahbadia: “So a lot of Israelis, modern Israelis, their families have been living…”
Mitra: “You can trace the mitochondrial DNA back to what was there before. But they weren’t Jews. I mean, they want you to believe by this time that they were very religious Jews who were worshipping one God. They were worshipping many gods at this point in time. Yahweh, Jehovah, who’s the God now, was one of the gods. He had a wife who used to be worshipped and several other gods used to be worshipped. And they were just as polytheist. So it wasn’t, you know, Moses goes up to the hill and gets the 10 commandments and he sees that Saul has built this golden calf and he destroys it. And this never happened. They were worshipping several different gods and goddesses at that point of time, just as many as the so-called Palestinians at the Peleset – let’s call them what they are Peleset – did. And the word in Hebrew at that point of time for enemy, invader, becomes Peleset, hence Palestinian.”
Mitra continues with a long discussion of the Assyrian Empire, which he suggests is the moment when Jewish identity is formed, confusing religion with identity. His take on the Assyrian Empire is generally correct, albeit a vague Wikipedia version of it. The bigger problem is how he begins and ends this monologue with this notion that there is some unbroken lineage of the Jews from Moses to the Israelis of today is as pseudoscientific as eugenics. Here is Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, in his book The Invention of the Jewish People, explaining why it’s ridiculous to claim there is some kind of Jewish DNA:
“After exhausting all the historical arguments, several critics have seized on genetics. The same people who maintain that the Zionists never referred to a race conclude their argument by evoking a common Jewish gene. Their thinking can be summed up as follows: “We are not a pure race, but we are a race just the same.” In the 1950s there was research in Israel on characteristic Jewish fingerprints, and from the 1970s, biologists in their laboratories (sometimes also in the USA) have sought a genetic marker common to all Jews. I reviewed in my book their lack of data, the frequent slipperiness of their conclusions, and their ethno-nationalist ardor, which is unsupported by any serious scientific findings. This attempt to justify Zionism through genetics is reminiscent of the procedures of late nineteenth-century anthropologists who very scientifically set out to discover the specific characteristics of Europeans.
As of today, no study based on anonymous DNA samples has succeeded in identifying a genetic marker specific to Jews, and it is not likely that any study ever will. It is a bitter irony to see the descendants of Holocaust survivors set out to find a biological Jewish identity: Hitler would certainly have been very pleased! And it is all the more repulsive that this kind of research should be conducted in a state that has waged for years a declared policy of “Judaization of the country” in which even today a Jew is not allowed to marry a non-Jew.” (Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, page 214; emphasis mine).
If there were no ethnic variation among Jewish people, there wouldn’t be people who believe in the Jewish religion who are varied ethnically as an Iraqi, an Ethiopian, a Ukrainian, or a Spaniard. Religion, identity, and ethnicity are not interchangeable. From here Mitra glosses over a lot of Jewish history, which the slides from my Judaism class, from Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, offer a much clearer chronology, through the various empires that ruled West Asia from 539 BCE to 73 CE. Mitra finally gets into some details about Jews during the Roman Empire worth discussing:
“Similarly for the Jew, he believes that there was a Moses. He doesn’t even have to believe that, but that is his foundational myth. So 72 May after the dispersal and everything, the Romans then start allowing them back. They come back, come back and they build the temple again. But then another rebellion breaks out in 138 or 148, I forget, and that’s called the Bar Kochba Rebellion. And this is a very nasty rebellion. It’s actually a lot worse than the 72 AD rebellion. And it’s worse for 1 very simple reason. We have these letters from Bar Kochba, which show him to be a very nasty character. He’s not a nice person. He’s not even nice to his own people. But what complicates things is there’s this very famous rabbi at that time called Rabbi Akiva who declares that this guy is the descendent of David and he’s the rightful king of Israel. Now you have declared a king in opposition to the Roman emperor this time, that’s not going to go down well. They will forgive a lot. They will not forgive you overthrowing the Roman Emperor. And so this time the destruction is absolute, it is complete. And they are dispersed to different parts of the empire and they are not allowed back under any circumstances. So this is where the depopulation happens. But remember as we’ve discussed, after 700 BC[E], the identity has crystallized. It crystallizes over several hundred years. They now have a feeling of what is their home. They are a nation in their mind. They are a common people connected by common thoughts and everything. Of course wherever they go, they intermarry and things. Tell me one community which doesn’t intermarry when it becomes a diaspora?”
Firstly, as he mentioned earlier, he believes there is specific Jewish DNA. How exactly would that be maintained over the centuries if he also thinks there was intermarriage (which there was although it is forbidden)? Secondly, the perception about Romans exiling the Jewish people is unsubstantiated. Here again is Shlomo Sand:
“It must first of all be emphasized that the Romans never deported entire peoples. We might add that neither did the Assyrians and Babylonians move entire populations from the countries they conquered. It did not pay to uproot the people of the land, the cultivators of produce, the taxpayers. But even the efficient policy of deportation practiced by the Assyrian, and later the Babylonian, empire—in which whole sections of local administrative and cultural elites were deported—was not followed by the Roman Empire. Here and there in the western Mediterranean countries, local farming communities were displaced to make room for the settling of Roman soldiers, but this exceptional policy was not applied in the Near East. Roman rulers could be utterly ruthless in suppressing rebellious subject populations: they executed fighters, took captives and sold them into slavery, and sometimes exiled kings and princes. But they definitely did not deport whole populations in the countries they conquered in the East, nor did they have the means to do so—none of the trucks, trains or great ships available in the modern world.” (Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, page 94; emphasis mine).
Secondly, Mitra’s conflation of words like people, ethnicity, nation are anachronistic. And given the ignorance of his interlocutor, and by extension, I imagine, the entire audience of this podcast, using a word like nation and home and people as if they were used then as they are today is deeply confusing and troubling. Compare this with how Shlomo Sand defines his terms:
“Like many other abstract terms, however, concepts such as “people,” “race,” ethnos, “nation,” “nationalism,” “country,” and “homeland” have, over the course of history, been given countless meanings—at times contradictory, at times complementary, always problematic. The term “nation” was translated into modern Hebrew as le’om or umah, both words derived, like so many others, from the rich biblical lexicon. But before taking the discussion to the crucial “national” issue, and trying to define “nation,” which still very reluctantly submits to an unequivocal definition, we should stop to consider two other problematic concepts that keep tripping up the clumsy feet of professional scholars.
Almost all history books published in Israel use the word am (people) as a synonym for le’om (nation). Am is also a biblical word, the Hebrew equivalent of the Russian Narod, the German Volk, the French peuple, and the English “people.” But in modern Israeli Hebrew, the word am does not have a direct association with the word “people” in a pluralistic sense, such as we find in various European languages; rather it implies an indivisible unity. In any case, the am in ancient Hebrew, as well as in other languages, is a very fluid term, and its ideological use, which has unfortunately remained very sloppy, makes it difficult to include it in any meaningful discourse.” (Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, page 27).
Mitra’s next move is to help the perplexed Allahbadia figure out, again, how this relates to “geographical Israel” (which I assume he means from the river to the sea). He mentions various aspects of the Romanization of the Levant, relying especially upon changes to place names to suggest that the short lived nature of Palestina, along with no famous Palestinian leaders he’s heard of, means that Palestinians are neither a people nor do they belong to a homeland the way he suggests Jewish people do. It’s ironic because so much of Mitra’s hot air is dedicated to discussing the mythological nature of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), but he relies upon that same mythological text to argue for ethnically cohesive Jewish people always belonging to that same land.
“Now they look back at what is the Jewish word for invader. And it becomes the province of Palestina. And that is the first time in history that it is called Palestine. Now this province of Palestine, it only exists as long as the Romans exist. Because once the Byzantines take over, now the Byzantines, basically the Romans become Christian, and the Christians have huge problems with the Jews as we discussed, the blood libel and the killing of Christ and all that nonsense. So they’re even more intolerant to the Jews out there. Jerusalem is their sacred spot. Jews can’t come out there. They’re maintained. So the temple becomes a church and all of that, but Jews aren’t allowed there. Then it becomes Muslim because the Muslim conquest starts. So 600 AD, the Prophet Muhammad appears. The Arab conquests begin. The Christian church is converted to a mosque, which is that blue building with the golden thing called the Dome of the Rock and things like that. And here’s the problem.
The province of Palestine, the Roman province of Palestine, was very short lived because it was split up several times and if you look at the history of that area, it has never been historically called Palestine except briefly under Roman rule. It was called various different things – the province of Syria, the province of Antioch, the province of Palmyra, this and that. Under the Turks, when they came, it was called the Eyalet, it was divided up. So there were different divisions of the Ottoman Empire, for example. So it would be a Mutasarrifate was direct rule from Istanbul, and Eyalet or Bayer Beylik was kind of a governor appointed. It was Hama, Aleppo, the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem, or as they call it, Al Quds, and things. It was never called Palestine.
Even a Palestinian identity – I challenge anybody viewing this to tell me one Arab leader before the 20th century who’s been identified as Palestinian. You know, we know, for example, Salahuddin, the great hero of the Crusades and whatever, Salahuddin Ayyubi was a Kurd. He was Kurdish. And Salahuddin is very big in Anglophone literature, but the big guy in Arab literature is a guy called Baybars. Qutubuddin Baybars Bandukdari. Apparently the first Arab to own a gun, hence Bandukdari, apparently. This guy is a Turk. He isn’t even an Arab. And this is where we need to understand there is a Palestinian story. Again you remember how we discussed there’s a lot of BS that comes out. They will tell you that Israelis aren’t native. They’ve all become European or they’re Turks because there was a Turkish khanate in the northern Crimea which became Jewish and these are all essentially Ukrainians who have come down to – Ukrainian Turks – Ukrainian Turkish admixture who have come down. They’re not native Arabs. But guess what? The native Arabs aren’t native Arabs either. Because the one thing about Islam is only 200 years of the 1,400 years of Islam are Arab. The remaining 1,200 years of Muslim history are Turkish history. Turkic history not Turkish, Turkic, which is to say the Kyrgyz, the Uzbeks, the Turkmens, and all of those Central Asian tribes.”
The identity of a people is not dependent upon the infamy of its leaders. Nor does it necessarily – and certainly throughout most of history – depend upon a nation state. My identity as a Jewish person exists with or without (or indeed in spite of) the existence of a Jewish state. The very Orientalist nature of Mitra’s “history” leaves out a great deal through the numerous lacunae of his “knowledge.” Here is where the ur-Palestinian scholar and his ur-text cam be quite helpful. This is Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine:
“For Palestine has always played a special role in the imagination and in the political will of the West, which is where by common agreement modern Zionism also originated. Palestine is a place of causes and pilgrimages It was the prize of the Crusades, as well as a place whose very name (and the endless historical naming and renaming of the place) has been an issue of doctrinal importance. As I said above, to call the place Palestine and not, say, Israel or Zin, is already an act of political will. This in part explains the insistence in much pro-Zionist writing on the dubious assertion that Palestine was used only as an administrative designation in the Roman Empire, and never since—except of course during the British Mandate period after 1922. The point there has been to show that Palestine too is also an interpretation, one with much less continuity and prestige than Israel. But here we see another instance of the same mechanism employed by [Alphonse de] Lamartine: using a future or past dream to obliterate the realities lying between past and future. The truth is, of course, that if one were to read geographers, historians, philosophers, and poets who wrote in Arabic from the eighth century on, one would find references to Palestine; to say nothing of innumerable references to Palestine in European literature from the Middle Ages to the present. The point may be a small one, but it serves to show how epistemologically the name of, and of course the very presence of bodies, in Palestine are—because Palestine carries so heavy an imaginative and doctrinal freight—transmuted from a reality into a nonreality, from a presence into an absence.” (Said, The Question of Palestine, pages 9-10).
Like many people who want to be experts on a subject they have no business discussing, Mitra clearly is not only lacking scholarly abilities but also linguistic ones. He doesn’t even realize that there are libraries full of texts talking about Palestine and its people in libraries all over the Arab world and Europe.
5. THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
Mitra’s next move is to talk about migration in West Asia by condensing and collapsing centuries of Islamic history, which I’m ignoring because it’s a digression from my purpose here and because it contains too much meandering, which he uses ultimately, to argue that Arabs are not really Arabs because they have been conquered and they intermarried. Here’s a taste of his garbled rant:
“The Ottoman Empire was a Central Asian Empire which didn’t look Central Asian anymore because they married into all the local populations and things like that. And this entire period, for 1,400 years almost there is no political entity called Palestine. There is no king of Palestine. There has never been a king of Palestine. There has never been a ruler of Palestine because it was variously called different province names by different things. It wasn’t. The first mention of Palestine – now let’s fast forward to the 20th century – say about 1860 when the Tanzimat reforms happened. I’m not going to go into the Tanzimat reforms, but they are the governmental reforms of the Ottoman Empire. Because at this time the Ottomans have ruled that area for about 300 years. There is no such thing as a Syrian identity. There is no such thing as a Lebanese identity. There is no such thing as a Jordanian entity. There is no such thing as a Saudi identity. There is no such thing as a Palestinian identity. There is an Egyptian identity because Egypt always retained a memory of being separate. It was always considered the – it was always named the province of Egypt – it was always mentally, they always thought of themselves as Egyptian. So what happens is the Ottomans, it’s split up into the Mutasarrifate of Al Quds, which is under direct rule, which is to say Jerusalem under direct rule, from the Ottoman Empire. And the rest are Hama, the province of Hama, the province of Aleppo, the province of Lebanon, they did create a province of Lebanon. The Lebanese considered themselves Lebanon [sic] if you look at that Lebanon it’s actually different from the Lebanon we know today. A little bit of overlap but not much. And you have this sort of – there is no Jordan even at this point of time. There is no name called Jordan. Jordan incidentally in Arabic is the same as Urdu. It’s al Urdun. The camps. The language of the camps, the camps so al Urdun. Jordan. And what ends up happening is this reformed Ottoman Empire joins the Second World War as an ally of Germany. The First World War, sorry, as an ally of Germany. And we know in the First World War Germany, Austria, Hungary, there were three allies at that time. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. They’re crushed. And the Ottoman Empire is divided up. And this is the first time in 2,000 years that Palestine is renamed Palestine.”
So Mitra’s logic, once again, is that because there was no king or political entity of Palestine then the place and its people do not exist. Only Egypt has an identity in his illogical rhetoric because their history and the way they thought of themselves dates back farther in his Westernized imagination (re-read Said above on this). I’m not exactly sure what Mitra is trying to suggest here, but I think a more articulate and historically grounded sense of the Ottoman Empire is one delivered by historian Ussama Makdisi in his wonderful book, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World:
“The Ottoman Empire was religiously diverse, and the discrimination between Muslim and non-Muslim was a defining paradigm of Ottoman rule. Even the most cursory reading of Ottoman chronicles such as the Book of Travels reflects a world imagined by the Ottomans to be divided between believers and infidels, and an imperial landscape marked by piety and unbelief, obedience and rebellion, benevolence and punishment. The superiority of Islam over Christianity and Judaism was a central tenet of an imperial Ottoman ideology. As Evliya’s description of the extirpation of the Yezidis indicates, the empire was both multiethnic and multireligious. Since difference rather than uniformity defined Ottoman subjecthood, diversity was not something to be feared or celebrated. It was simply assumed. Evliya’s writings repeatedly emphasized the importance of locality, recognizing how the diversity of foods, crafts, manners, and geography defined the social and political fabric of the empire every bit as much as its grand administrative religious delineations. The empire is often referred to as a “mosaic” in the sense that distinct and separate religious and ethnic communities composed a whole. A tapestry might be an equally apt metaphor: the various communities were knotted together in intricate patterns whose colors occasionally bled into one another. As we shall see, the empire could fray at its edges without necessarily unraveling.” (Makdisi, Age of Coexistence, pages 30-31).
In a nutshell, under Ottoman Rule the people identified as Ottoman. And within that empire there were sanjak (like provinces) because it was easier to organize and administer a large swath of territory that way. What they were named in English or Arabic is inconsequential. But naming for Mitra seems critical, even when he contradicts himself as he does when discussing the Ottoman Empire’s breakup after World War One.
“They didn’t intentionally name it Palestine. So I’ll tell you how this comes about. Now they’ve decided at this point that Turkey is going to be – the Ottoman Empire is going to be reduced to what we know as the modern state of Turkey today. And there is a lot of trouble going on there because Turkey is fighting with the Greeks and there is a whole sort of population exchange and all of that happening. But this part, the Levant, is completely separated. And the Europeans have their own idea of nationstate and things like that. So they decide to create four separate countries if you want to really call it that but essentially provinces. They call it mandates. They set up something called the League of Nations which is the precursor of the UN and they call these mandates. And what happens is the north which Lebanon and Syria go to France. France takes this old term Lebanon and decides to carve an artificial Christian majority out of Syria, which is overwhelmingly Muslim. So Lebanon is as artificial a creation as say Pakistan, a Muslim minority carved out of India called Pakistan. Or an oil minority carved out of Iraq called Kuwait. And the British get the southern half of the Levant, which is modern day Jordan and Israel. Now remember all modern European states they consider Latin to be the language of learning at this point. This is still classical education. Like you know, I mean you’ve been to American and Britain and things – why is it that all public buildings are Latin? Because they love to see themselves as, you know, Roman Empire. Everything is back to Roman Empire. What did the Romans call this place? Palestine. We’re going to call it Palestine again. This is where this Palestine is created. Now the problem is this is where the Palestinian identity comes.The notion that there is a Palestine out here. And it is a conference called the San Remo Conference which is where these mandates are decided. The French mandate of Syria and Lebanon. The British mandate of Jordan and Palestine. And that is where they decide to create new countries and new provinces like they did, like you know, 90% of the borders in Africa are apparently straight lines because they were carved by Europeans on a map and that is why these lines are also carved up their geography. There’s the Jordan River running here so this is Cisjordan and this is Transjordan. So the Transjordan becomes Palestine and etc. etc. Syria has long straight borders. If you actually go to the map and check, Iraq and Syria have long straight borders. Iraq and Saudi Arabia have long straight borders. Who created all of these? The colonial powers.”
Identity does not require a nation state. People have all sorts of identities that have nothing to do with the places that people draw lines in the sand. The British and French empires spread their ambitions over West Asia and under the euphemistic nomenclature of the “mandate.” The British mandate also included Iraq and Kuwait. Transjordan did not become Palestine; it became Jordan. Palestine became Palestine. Here is a more careful reading of what happened after the British and French signed the Sykes-Picot agreeement, which carved up the region for themselves, an agreement signed four years prior to the San Remo conference Mitra keeps mentioning; according to Pappe:
“Following the famous, or rather infamous, Sykes-Picot Agreement, signed in 1916 between Britain and France, the two colonial powers divided the area into new nation states. As the area was divided, a new sentiment developed: a more local variant of nationalism, named in Arabic wataniyya. As a result, Palestine began to see itself as an independent Arab state. Without the appearance of Zionism on its doorstep, Palestine would probably have gone the same way as Lebanon, Jordan, or Syria and embraced a process of modernization and growth. This had, in fact, already started by 1916, as a result of Ottoman polices in the late nineteenth century. In 1872, when the Istanbul government founded the Sanjak (administrative province) of Jerusalem, they created a cohesive geopolitical space in Palestine. For a brief moment, the powers in Istanbul even toyed with the possibility of adding to the Sanjak, encompassing much of Palestine as we know it today, as well as the sub-provinces of Nablus and Acre. Had they done this, the Ottomans would have created a geographical unit, as happened in Egypt, in which a particular nationalism might have arisen even earlier.
However, even with its administrative division into north (ruled by Beirut) and south (ruled by Jerusalem), this shift raised Palestine as a whole above its previous peripheral status, when it had been divided into small regional sub-provinces. In 1918, with the onset of British rule, the north and the south divisions became one unit. In a similar way and in the same year the British established the basis for modern Iraq when they fused the three Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra into one modern nation state. In Palestine, unlike in Iraq, familial connections and geographical boundaries (the River Litani in the north, the River Jordan in the east, the Mediterranean in the west) worked together to weld the three sub-provinces of South Beirut, Nablus, and Jerusalem into one social and cultural unit. This geopolitical space had its own major dialect and its own customs, folklore, and traditions.
By 1918, Palestine was therefore more united than in the Ottoman period, but there were to be further changes. While waiting for final international approval of Palestine’s status in 1923, the British government renegotiated the borders of the land, creating a better-defined geographical space for the national movements to struggle over, and a clearer sense of belonging for the people living in it. It was now clear what Palestine was; what was not clear was who it belonged to: the native Palestinians or the new Jewish settlers? The final irony of this administrative regime was that the reshaping of the borders helped the Zionist movement to conceptualize geographically “Eretz Israel,” the Land of Israel where only Jews had the right to the land and its resources.” (Pappe, Ten Myths About Israel, pages 15-16).
6. ZIONISM
Mitra shifts from the Sykes-Picot context to Zionism, which is a logical move, but unfortunately he begins his discussion in the wrong century. Across Europe there were Christian Zionists who were writing and discussing various means to return the Jews to Palestine. Pappe contextualizes the lead up to Herzl and the Balfour Declaration by grounding his discussion in these writings:
“The theological and religious upheavals of the Reformation from the sixteenth century onwards produced a clear association, especially among Protestants, between the notion of the end of the millennium and the conversion of the Jews and their return to Palestine. Thomas Brightman, a sixteenth-century English clergyman, represented these notions when he wrote, “Shall they return to Jerusalem again? There is nothing more certain: the prophets do everywhere confirm it and beat about it.” Brightman was not only hoping for a divine promise to be fulfilled; he also, like so many after him, wished the Jews either to convert to Christianity or to leave Europe all together. ” (Pappe, Ten Myths About Israel, page 17).
Such ideas were common and even played a role influencing the drafter of the Balfour Declaration, the letter that essentially became Israel’s birth certificate,
“As I will presently show, this dangerous blend of religious fervor and reformist zeal would lead from Shaftesbury’s efforts in the middle of the nineteenth century to the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Shaftesbury realized that it would not be enough to support the return of the Jews, and they would have to be actively assisted by Britain in their initial colonization. Such an alliance should start, he asserted, by providing material help to the Jews to travel to Ottoman Palestine. He convinced the Anglican bishopric center and cathedral in Jerusalem to provide the early funding for this project. This would probably not have happened at all had Shaftesbury not succeeded in recruiting his father in law, Britain’s foreign minister and later prime minister, Lord Palmerston, to the cause.” (Pappe, Ten Myths About Israel, page 18).
As much as Mitra enjoys jumping around historical periods and blending them together, his take on Zionism begins in the nineteenth century:
“Now during this period what has been happening is from the 1860s onwards there’s a chap called Theodor Herzl in Europe. There has been a slow increase of, they feel an increase of antisemitism and there’s an affair called they Dreyfus Affair who’s a French army officer who is scapegoated for a crime he did not commit. And they all see it as antisemitism. So sort of a Jewish need – they felt that antisemitism was over in Europe because it had already been 100 years since the emancipation of Jews where they were required to live in ghettos. They could find professions other than money lending, etc. etc. etc.”
Mitra is correct here: for Jews in the nineteenth century, the reality of antisemitism in Europe is something they must reckon with. Then Allahbadia pulls Mitra back across the sea into the Asian context again:
Allahbadia: “Let’s go back slightly a little bit to Jewish history now. So while the Ottoman Empire was ruling over the Gulf. Are there Jewish people in the Gulf?”
Mitra: “There are some in modern day Israel. There are some Jewish people. Remember the Byzantines would not let back the Jewish diaspora. The Arabs absolutely would not let back the Jewish diaspora. The Turkic rulers of that place would not let back the Jewish diaspora. Because by this time Jerusalem is holy to Muslims as well. Because it is where the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven on the white winged horse. So nobody is going to let them back.
But then because of – and by this time, parallel in Europe by the 1700s, mid 1700s, there’s an end of antisemitism in Europe because its industrializing. You need – the core component of industrialization is capital. Who has the capital? The Jews because they have money because they were the only people who were exempt from Christian and Muslim money lending laws. And so they built up banking. And so they’re funding this. And so, you know, there is a liberalization that happens because everybody, people are no longer focused on religion. They’re focused on making lives better. So there’s an emancipation of the Jews. And so 100 years after that there is another spike in antisemitism which then leads people like Theodor Herzl and because it’s accelerated by the Dreyfus Affair further down the line. They feel the need for Israel. They keep petitioning all the governments saying, look, we’re giving you so much capital, so much finance, this is where we originally came from, please build our home back there.”
Here again Mitra begins misspeaking. For one thing, as I noted above, under the Ottoman Empire (1481-1916) people identified as Ottomans. They lived and moved freely within the Empire. If a Jew in Baghdad wanted to move to Cairo or Jerusalem he or she did. And as I noted above there was never a wholesale expulsion of Jews by Romans or Babylonians. Those Jews who settled in Mesopotamia, what became Iraq, built a thriving community for themselves and most of them had no desire or intention to move to Israel. Israeli historian Avi Shlaim’s recent memoir, Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab-Jew, details his life growing up in Baghdad and the violent upheaval that befell his family as a result of Zionism:
“An alternative account, which may be termed the post-Zionist narrative, maintains that the great majority of the emigrants did not want to leave Iraq; that they had no ideological affinity with Zionism; and that they were the victims of Zionist actions designed to intimidate them into abandoning their homeland. The most serious charge levelled against the Zionist movement and Israel in this connection is that they actually instigated the bombing of Jewish targets in Baghdad in a bid to spark a mass flight of Iraqi Jews to Israel. In this understanding, Zionism, which emerged as an answer to antisemitism in Europe in the late nineteenth century, resorted to violence against the Jews of the Arab lands in order to achieve one of its other objectives, ‘the ingathering of the exiles’, or the bringing of as many Jews as possible from all corners of the earth to Zion. Although some Iraqi Jews believed in Zionism and saw Israel as their true homeland, they were a tiny minority. One estimate is that out of a total of 130,000 Iraqi Jews, no more than 2,000 belonged to the Zionist movement, that is to say 1.53 per cent.” (Shlaim, Three Worlds, page 27).
Mitra’s proclamations above are rather exaggerated (dare I say antisemitic?) regarding the role of Jews financing the industrial revolution. It’s almost as if he’s interpreting the Balfour Declaration as a quid pro quo because British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote that letter to Walter Rothschild. Third, Herzl was not driven by a link to Israel. Indeed he was looking at various places for potential colonization, here is Pappe on this topic:
“Herzl was probably more secular than the group of leaders who replaced him. This prophet of the movement seriously considered alternatives to Palestine, such as Uganda, as the promised land of Zion. He also looked at other destinations in the north and south of America and in Azerbaijan.11 With Herzl’s death in 1904, and the rise of his successors, Zionism homed in on Palestine and the Bible became even more of an asset than before as proof of a divine Jewish right to the land.” (Pappe, Ten Myths About Israel, page 87).
Allahbadia continues to seem confused so the next set of dialogue repeats the false claim that Jews were exiled by the Romans and sent “all over the world.” He repeats the bit about the Dreyfus Affair, about the demise of the Ottoman Empire, which is where I’ll rejoin Mitra:
“Now World War One ends. Ottoman Empire is defeated. Ottoman Levant, which includes modern day Israel is partitioned. And the same San Remo Conference that for the first time reestablishes a state called Palestine or rather a province called a mandate called Palestine, also accepts something called the Balfour Declaration, which is the right of the Jews to return to their homeland. So here’s the problem: when you call Israel a colonial project, sure, except it was the same colonial project that created Palestine that also accepted the right of the Jews to return. Either both are illegal or both are legal. You can’t just pick and choose what you want.
Now in line with that from the 20s to the 30s there is significant immigration from Europe to Palestine. We call it mandatory Palestine because it was given as a mandate to the British. It causes trouble out there because the Jews are bringing in capital and they’re turning the desert green. They’re getting into farming. They’re setting up jobs. They’re setting up factories. They’re setting up things. So when the Peel report comes out in the 30s, it shows that Jewish immigration is leading to an economic boom in the region. But because it threatens all the old feudal power structures who don’t want, because the moment a guy has a job to go to, he isn’t going to fight for you, he isn’t going to pay his taxes to you. Because what are you providing? The state provides everything for you because it’s a modern state. You’re paying taxes to the British. Your’e not getting money. This guy is providing you with jobs so you’re not even doing salaam to him any more. And you’re basically treating him like who the hell are you, man? Like you’re just a big, your poop doesn’t smell of roses. Both our poops smell the same. Who the hell are you? This is what industrialization does. It’s a great equalizer, right? It leads to a lot of social tension, a lot of rioting, and a lot of both way rioting. Everybody’s killing everybody else kind of thing. But what finally happens is – and this state continues for 20 years – between 1920, the San Remo Conference, to 1939-40 when the World War reaches this area. And of course we know what Hitler did to the Jews and things like that. I’m not going to go over that because that also the Holocaust itself has a kind of a Jordanian history to it. Because it was the, for a long time the Nazis were negotiating to settle, they hated Jews, they did not want Jews in Germany. They wanted Jews out of Germany and any territory they conquered. And they wanted to kick the Jews out and hopefully settle them down in Palestine.”
So much to unpack in this quotation. First, the Balfour Declaration was merely a letter. It was separate from the mandate for Palestine. And the promise of the mandate system was that the indigenous populations would eventually be allowed to rule themselves once the white man showed them how. It was not at all the same colonial project in Palestine. The British were speaking with a forked tongue and promising the same piece of land to two different populations – one European and one indigenous. We know from the correspondence between Henry McMahon and Sharif Husayn that McMahon promised independent states in exchange for joining the British fight against the Ottomans just like Balfour promised Rothschild a “national home” in Palestine. Here is Khalidi’s breaking this down:
“The British government’s intentions and objectives at the time have been amply analyzed over the past century. Among its many motivations were both a romantic, religiously derived philo-Semitic desire to “return” the Hebrews to the land of the Bible, and an anti-Semitic wish to reduce Jewish immigration to Britain, linked to a conviction that “world Jewry” had the power to keep newly revolutionary Russia fighting in the war and bring the United States into it. Beyond those impulses, Britain primarily desired control over Palestine for geopolitical strategic reasons that antedated World War I and that had only been reinforced by wartime events. However important the other motivations may have been, this was the central one: the British Empire was never motivated by altruism. Britain’s strategic interests were perfectly served by its sponsorship of the Zionist project, just as they were served by a range of regional wartime undertakings. Among them were commitments made in 1915 and 1916 promising independence to the Arabs led by Sharif Husayn of Mecca (enshrined in the Husayn-McMahon correspondence) and a secret 1916 deal with France—the Sykes-Picot Agreement—in which the two powers agreed to a colonial partition of the eastern Arab countries.” (Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, page 22).
So for Mitra to say that the the colonial project in Palestine was the same for the Jews as it was for the Palestinians is quite far from the truth. Next he floats the perennial Zionist myth that Palestine was a desert that they turned green. It’s pure fantasy to even imagine such a notion – one that most Zionists who visited Palestine in the late nineteenth century negated in their own writings. Pappe makes this crystal clear as does every credible historian on the region:
“Palestine was not an empty land. It was part of a rich and fertile eastern Mediterranean world that in the nineteenth century underwent processes of modernization and nationalization. It was not a desert waiting to come into bloom; it was a pastoral country on the verge of entering the twentieth century as a modern society, with all the benefits and ills of such a transformation. Its colonization by the Zionist movement turned this process into a disaster for the majority of the native people living there.” (Pappe, Ten Myths About Israel, page 31).
Finally, Mitra thinks that these Zionists who settled in Palestine were so generous with setting up a modernized society that they brought prosperity to the region. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Here is Pappe again refuting such a notion:
“The idea that impoverished Jews were entitled to a safe haven was not objected to by the Palestinians and those supporting them. However, this was not reciprocated by the Zionist leaders. While Palestinians offered shelter and employment to the early settlers, and did not object to working should to shoulder with them under whatever ownership, the Zionist ideologues were very clear about the need both to push the Palestinians out of the country’s labor market and to sanction those settlers who were still employing Palestinians or who worked alongside them. This was the idea of avoda aravit, (Hebrew Labor), which meant mainly the need to bring an end to avoda aravit, (Arab Labor). Gershon Shafir, in his seminal work on the Second Aliyah, the second wave of Zionist immigration (1904–14), explains well how this ideology developed and was practiced. The leader of that wave, David Ben-Gurion (who became the leader of the community and then prime minister of Israel), constantly referred to Arab labor as an illness for which the only cure was Jewish labor. In his and other settlers’ letters, Hebrew workers are characterized as the healthy blood that will immunize the nation from rottenness and death. Ben-Gurion also remarked that employing “Arabs” reminded him of the old Jewish story of a stupid man who resuscitated a dead lion that then devoured him.” (Pappe, Ten Myths About Israel, pages 15-16).
The idea of sending German Jews to Palestine did not come from Nazi Germany. It came from Zionists in Palestine. In Israeli historian Tom Segev’s The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust, he details various ways that the Zionists negotiated with Nazis in Germany soon after Hitler’s rise to power,
“Arthur Ruppin also felt well received at the Nazi foreign and finance ministries, he wrote. On the afternoon of August 7,1933, he attended a meeting in the finance ministry. The parties agreed that every Jew who emigrated to Palestine would be allowed to take £1,000 sterling (about $4,000) in foreign currency and to ship to Palestine merchandise worth 20,000 German marks (about $5,000), or even more, with the finances to be handled by Jewish and German trust companies. The sum of £1,000 was necessary to receive British permission to settle in Palestine as a “capitalist,” as this category of immigrant was called. It was a sizable sum; a family of four could then live in bourgeois comfort on less than £300 a year.
The haavara (“transfer”) agreement—the Hebrew term was used in the Nazi documents as well—was based on the complementary interests of the German government and the Zionist movement: the Nazis wanted the Jews out of Germany; the Zionists wanted them to come to Palestine. But there was no such mutuality of interests between the Zionists and German Jewry. Most German Jews would have preferred to stay in their country. The tension between the interests of the yishuv (and, in time, the State of Israel) and those of world Jewry was to become a central motif in the story of the Israelis’ attitude to the Holocaust.” (Segev, The Seventh Million, pages 19-20)
What the Zionists were up to in Nazi Germany is important because Mitra’s next move is to discuss a prominent Palestinian who also spent time there during World War Two. Hajj Amin al-Husayni is the subject below, was also known as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, an invented position intended to divide the Palestinian community. Here is Mitra’s limited understanding of him:
“So what happens is, it is the Mufti of Jerusalem who goes to Hitler and he doesn’t want, now he’s alarmed. Hitler doesn’t like Jews, but he wants to export them to my place, as it is these Jews have come and they’re providing jobs and industrial development and this thing and it’s completely upsetting the apple cart for me. I don’t want them. You don’t want them. Kill them. And people don’t realize this guy, the Mufti of Jerusalem, was a rock star in Nazi Germany. They loved him. He actually recruited lots of Bosnian Muslims to fight for the German army and things like that. Not just any German army, SS Waffen, crack, psychotic, sadistic sick troops that used to go around doing a lot of really sick shit. And this is a power equation. Remember it’s not – and at this time there is no Palestinian identity. Okay this guy is declared the king of the Arabs. He’s not even declared the king of Jordan or the king of Palestine or whatever. He fancies himself the king of the Arabs.”
Firstly, Mitra has a hyperbolic and inflated sense of al-Husayni. Like much of the Palestinian leadership, he was exiled after Lord Peel released its report in 1937, which proposed partitioning the country between Jews and Palestinians. Pappe contextualizes this man who spent some of his years in exile in Germany:
“As many readers will know, one of the common allegations propagated endlessly by the Israelis is that the Palestinian leader was a Nazi sympathizer. The mufti of Jerusalem was not an angel. At a very early age he was chosen by the notables of Palestine, and by the British, to hold the most important religious position in the community. The position, which al-Husayni held throughout the Mandatory period (1922–48), brought him political power and a high social standing. He attempted to lead the community in the face of the Zionist colonization, and when in the 1930s people such as Izz ad-Din al-Qassam pushed for an armed struggle he was able to steer the majority away from this violent option. Nevertheless, when he endorsed the idea of strikes, demonstrations, and other ways of trying to change British policy, he became the empire’s enemy, and had to escape from Jerusalem in 1938. In the circumstances he was forced into the arms of his enemy’s enemy, in this case Italy and Germany. While in political asylum in Germany for two years, he came under the influence of Nazi doctrine and confused the distinction between Judaism and Zionism. His willingness to serve as a radio commentator for the Nazis and to help recruit Muslims in the Balkans to the German war effort no doubt stains his career. But he did not act any differently from the Zionist leaders in the 1930s, who themselves sought an alliance with the Nazis against the British Empire, or from all the other anticolonialist movements who wanted rid of the Empire by way of alliances with its principal enemies.” (Pappe, Ten Myths About Israel, page 42)
Of course, this is not unlike Netaji who also sought an alliance with the enemy of the British Empire during World War Two and met with Nazi leaders as a result. This is not uncommon for anti-colonial movement leaders.
Mitra circles back on some of the same history and repeats much of the above in his next diatribe about the mufti, about whether or not there were ever any famous Palestinian leaders. And then he begins to argue why Israel’s creation was perfectly legal:
“All colonial rule comes to an end at the end of World War II. Within about 10, 15 years of World War II. Sometimes almost immediately after World War II. And just the same way India gets independence, this place is also ear marked for independence in keeping with the mandates that had draw up in the 1920s.
Now because from the 1920s to the 1940s, Jewish migration has happened, it is the same legality the Jewish migration is as legal as the creation of a mandatory Palestine. Ok remember this. There is a certain Jewish coastal majority. And just like they decide to partition India and Pakistan because there is a certain majority in the east and a certain majority in the west of Muslims, and it should be partitioned, they decide on a partition of Palestine. There is a huge chunk of the south, which is a desert, which is completely, almost completely uninhabited. If you go to the Negev you’ll see it is virtually uninhabitable. It is one of the driest parts of the desert. Of the larger Arabian desert. This is also given and it is meant to be two separate states. It is meant to be Palestine which is a Muslim majority. It is meant to be Israel, which is the local, essentially India, Pakistan – India Pakistan repeated all over again. Okay except Jerusalem which is meant to be an international mandate so it becomes an international city. That that’s the UN partition plan out here. Again, the UN votes on it. So the San Remo Conference, perfectly legal. I mean, you may not like it, but it is a legal, it is an accepted instrument of international law. And here again you have another accepted instrument of international law, which is the UN that creates these two states.
All the Arab states refuse to accept it and they invade it is declared independent. They refuse to accept a Jewish state in any form or way. Ultimately, it’s a year of fighting which the Jews win and they establish the state of Israel. It’s a moth eaten Israel. But it more or less conforms to the UN partition plan. Some less some more. Pretty much some less, some more maybe but more or less conforms to it. They don’t want to let the state live in peace. So every day there are terror attacks. Because nobody wants to recognize this new country called Israel. They constantly and these are vicious, nasty terror attacks killing people and the Israelis respond in kind sometimes going in. Mostly it’s a military response, but sometimes there are massacres of Palestinian, what is now called the Palestinian identity. And this identity is literally the identity of a Palestine is literally created overnight at this point. Like I said there is no king of Palestine.”
According to Mitra, within fifteen years of World War Two, “all colonial rule comes to an end.” That would take us to 1960. In 1960 these countries were still under foreign occupation/colonization (in parentheses is the year they became officially independent):
- Papua New Guinea (1975)
- Timor-Leste (1999)
- Singapore (1965)
- Malaysia (1963)
- Brunei – decolonized 1964
- Bangladesh (1973)
- Maldives (1975)
- People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (1967)
- Oman (1971)
- United Arab Emirates (1971)
- Kuwait (1961)
- Eritrea (1993)
- Djibouti (1977)
- Seychelles (1976)
- Comoros (1975)
- Kenya (1963)
- Tanzania (1964)
- Malawi (1964)
- Mozambique (1974)
- Swaziland (1968)
- Lesotho (1966)
- Zimbabwe (1980)
- Botswana (1966)
- Uganda (1962)
- Rwanda (1962)
- Burundi (1962
- Zambia (1964)
- Angola (1975)
- Namibia (1990)
- Equatorial Guinea (1968)
- São Tomé and Príncipe (1975)
- Sierra Leone (1961)
- Guinea Bissau (1974)
- Gambia (1965)
- Cape Verde (1975)
- Algeria (1962)
- Malta (1964)
The list and the map reveal Mitra’s hyperbole. Likewise, his sense of what happens in Palestine after World War Two is just as distorted. He frames international law as something governed by the United Nations, which was as new as the end of the war’s hostilities in 1945. Nevertheless, the UN’s study on Palestine leading up to its partition plan reveals solid statistics, as seen in the map here, designating the population differential between Palestinians and Jews; only one town in all of Palestine (not just the coastal cities), Yaffa (Jaffa), shows a majority of Jewish people in 1947.
Likewise, the southern desert, the Naqab (Negev), was populated as the same map reveals. In 1948, there were between 65,000-100,000 Bedouin people living in the Naqab. In fact this particular Palestinian community has been dealing with an ongoing Nakba since 1948 as numerous reports reveal from Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International. The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions documents the tactics of the ongoing ethnic cleansing in the Naqab:
“Today there are some 35 “Unrecognised Villages” (and many more smaller hamlets) which are not represented on any state maps and whose localities are regarded as “empty space”. Close to 100,000 people live in these. The exact number is uncertain as the national census is not carried out in the unrecognized villages – with some important consequences for the Bedouin. The State uses strategies like home demolition, crop destruction, and denial of basic services like running water, electricity, paved roads, education and welfare to pressurise the Bedouin off the land. Demolitions are of course charged for and an increasing number of people will self-demolish to avoid the cost, the trauma, and the loss of possessions.”
Additionally, the San Remo conference, which is an event that takes place twenty-five years prior to the formation of the UN, cannot be equated with actions taken by the UN because there was no international law in 1920. Therefore there is no legal standing whatsoever in partitioning or colonizing land. European nations are just doing as they always have – confiscating land that didn’t belong to them.
And the only resemblance this partition has to the one that occurred in South Asia is the fact that the British orchestrated the upheaval and refugee crises.
Mitra’s twisted logic also prevents him from seeing that the terrorism happening in Palestine during the Nakba was the Zionist militias frightening and massacring Palestinians to get them to flee as Rashid Khalidi points out:
“In this first phase of the Nakba before May 15, 1948, a pattern of ethnic cleansing resulted in the expulsion and panicked departure of about 300,000 Palestinians overall and the devastation of many of the Arab majority’s key urban economic, political, civic, and cultural centers. The second phase followed after May 15, when the new Israeli army defeated the Arab armies that joined the war. In belatedly deciding to intervene militarily, the Arab governments were acting under intense pressure from the Arab public, which was deeply distressed by the fall of Palestine’s cities and villages one after another and the arrival of waves of destitute refugees in neighboring capitals. In the wake of the defeat of the Arab armies, and after further massacres of civilians, an even larger number of Palestinians, another 400,000, were expelled and fled from their homes, escaping to neighboring Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and the West Bank and Gaza (the latter two constituted the remaining 22 percent of Palestine that was not conquered by Israel). None were allowed to return, and most of their homes and villages were destroyed to prevent them from doing so. Still more were expelled from the new state of Israel even after the armistice agreements of 1949 were signed, while further numbers have been forced out since then. In this sense the Nakba can be understood as an ongoing process.” (Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, page 61).
Ilan Pappe also provides context on Israel’s ethnic cleansing operations in relation to the Arab armies as well as Jordanian-British collusion with the Zionists:
“How could the small Israeli army engage in large-scale ethnic cleansing operations while, from May 15, also being confronted with regular forces from the Arab world? First of all, it is noteworthy that the urban population (apart from three towns: Lydd, Ramleh, and Bir Saba) had already been cleansed before the Arab armies arrived. Second, the rural Palestinian area was already under Israeli control, and the confrontations with the Arab armies occurred on borders of these rural areas not inside them. In one case where the Jordanians could have helped the Palestinians, in Lydd and Ramleh, the British commander of the Jordanian army, Sir John Glubb, decided to withdraw his forces and avoided confrontation with the Israeli army. Finally, the Arab military effort was woefully ineffective and short lived. After some success in the first three weeks, its presence in Palestine was a shambolic story of defeat and hasty withdrawal. After a short lull towards the end of 1948, the Israeli ethnic cleansing thus continued unabated.” (Pappe, Ten Myths About Israel, pages 53-54).
7. OCCUPATION
Allahbadia leads Mitra back into a conversation about identity, repeating much of the territory they already covered, but this time he is trying to figure out Palestinian identity. In spite of the repetition I’m quoting this section of their conversation because of the offensive and racist nature of Mitra’s answer.
Allahbadia: “So what or who was behind this Palestinian identity? Was it the rest of the Arab world saying, hey, you guys there, fight, fight with the local Jews.”
Mitra: “Yes but see that doesn’t make it any less. Because see if I decide to identify as a nation, a nation is an imagined identity so that doesn’t reduce the validity of Palestine. If you believe you’re a Palestinian, you’re a Palestinian. In fact, you know the Turkish constitution, because, you know, Turks are no longer the Central Asian Turko Mongols with slanty eyes. I mean, Turks look like Greeks. You can’t really tell the difference between a Turk and a Greek and a Bulgar and a [sic] Arab technically. The Turkish definition of who is a Turk is do you feel Turkish? Then you’re a Turk. Ok so I imagine myself to be a Palestinian, therefore I am a Palestinian. There’s a perfectly legitimate foundational myth of the Palestinian state. Every state is created on a foundational myth. Egypt is also a foundational myth. India is a foundational myth. Russia is a foundational myth. America is a foundational myth. Everybody is. And there is a certain criteria [sic] for being Russian, being Indian, being whatever. It varies. Some is linguistic. Some is blood. Some is ethnicity. Some is religion. It doesn’t diminish anything.
So sure, there is a Palestinian identity that is now created. Point being, if you claim that Israel is a colonial construct, Israel being there is not the same as the British being here. Because Palestine is just as colonial as Israel is. So you know if one is legal the other is also legal.
Ok now this is up to the 1940s and the creation of Israel. So finally what happens is you constantly have wars and terror attacks and whatnot constantly happening out there. In the 67 war, Israel crushes all its Arab neighbors very, very, very decisively. It destroys them as it destroys them insanely. It captures the entire West Bank. You know before that the West Bank was annexed by Jordan because the Jordanian king had great ambitions to kick all the jews into the sea and take over and reunite Transjoran and Cisjordan. He realizes it’s foolish because all his troops get killed off. His tanks are destroyed, his entire air force is destroyed. And the whole of the West Bank of the Jordan River is captured and occupied by Israel just like the Gaza Strip is now. And this is the second part of the Palestinian identity because Gaza initially they say it as Egyptian. West Bank was initially seen as Jordanian. And they wanted to overtake the entire thing. Everybody was in it for more land for themselves. They didn’t want an independent Palestine, really. None of them wanted it. They parrot all of this out because it has to kind of stick to the UN partition plan. They didn’t. Egypt wanted to be Egyptian. Jordan wanted to be Jordanian. And you want proof of this is something called the United Arab Republic.”
Most of what needs to be refuted above has already been done so previously. Just note Mitra’s racist language and his bizarre obsession with blood and his myopic sense that somehow identity is only related to nationhood. Some of the more egregious lies he’s peddling are the notion that Gaza was Egyptian and the West Bank was Jordanian. As the maps I’ve shared here illustrate, as well as the historical references, these were parts of contiguous, historical Palestine. There aren’t even any historical texts discussing such a thing because even the most ill informed authors of this region would understand geographical and historical territories. As for the so-called “terror attacks” that led to the 1967 war, some of that is discussed above as well in relation to Palestinian feda’iyin who were engaging in an anti-colonial struggle to get their country back – no different than the Algerians or the Angolans.
For Pappe there were numerous reasons the Israelis attacked all of its Arab neighbors in 1967, including pure territorial expansion:
“Moreover, many of these politicians had been waiting since 1948 for this moment. I would go even further and say that the takeover of the West Bank in particular, with its ancient biblical sites, was a Zionist aim even before 1948 and it fitted the logic of the Zionist project as a whole. This logic can be summarized as the wish to take over as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians as possible. The consensus, the euphoria, and the historical context explain why none of the subsequent Israeli governments have ever deviated from the decisions these ministers took.” (Pappe, Ten Myths About Israel, page 65).
Once again, Mitra fixates on Arab leaders and their agendas, but if you read about Israel’s agenda, it’s clear that extending their colonial project was the objective.
Mitra quickly moves on to the 1973 war all the way through to 7 October 2023 (although I omitted his nonsense claims about Hamas videos he claims to have seen on Telegram, but if you want to see a solid analysis of Hezbollah and Hamas videos of their resistance operations, here is an article by Jon Elmer):
“The Palestinian ability to forget their own history is truly remarkable. So what ends up happening now is you – Jordan and Egypt after the 73 war and the peace mentally decide we have already created a Palestine, Palestinian identity to further our territorial ambitions which are not going to happen, we can’t crush Israel anymore. So there has to be a Palestinian state now. What is that Palestinian state going to be? It’s going to be the West Bank plus Gaza. And this is the evolution of that movement.
Now this independence could have been achieved even then because if you talk to Israeli leaders in 1967, after the victory of 1967, they always viewed these as bargaining chips. They did want the whole of Jerusalem. As in they did want to annex certain parts of the land. But it was always viewed as bargaining chips. And that is where the modern history starts off from. So you see there is no colonial project here. There is no legality or illegality. If anything is illegal, everything is illegal. If something is legal, everything is legal.
Israel has as much of a right to exist as Palestine. And Palestine does have a right to exist. The problem is you negotiate in good faith. You can’t use terror attacks. You can’t be claiming peace in English and claiming war in Arabic. You can’t be ordering attacks on busses in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. And when the Israelis have demonstrated goodwill to you over and over again, in 79 they withdraw from the entire Sinai. In 2005 they withdraw from the whole of Gaza. You can’t keep saying, oh but you keep seizing land. Yes you it’s like we spoke about negotiations. So this is where it stands.
Now again fast forward to what has happened this last week. They want to justify this entire history and say that this history gives me the right to go into Israel, kill 1,400 people, rape and torture several of these people, mostly noncombatants, there were only 200 combatants, 250 combatants, the remaining 1,150 or whatever overall noncombatants, several children.”
The most curious thing about this trajectory laid out by Misra is that he completely elides the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the first and second Intifadas. Without discussion of those events you cannot understand what led to the present moment. Nevertheless, he argues for the importance of international law and abiding by United Nations decisions above and yet somehow UN Security Council Resolution 242, which renders the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank illegal. Period. It makes it absolutely clear that this is a colonial project.
Israel never wanted to negotiate land for peace. That’s a myth. One of the many myths of Oslo that Pappe unravels in his book:
“The peace process of the 1990s was thus no such thing. The insistence on partition and the exclusion of the refugee issue from the agenda rendered the Oslo process at best a military redeployment and a rearrangement of Israeli control in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. At worst, it inaugurated a new system of control that made life for the Palestinians in the occupied territories far worse than it was before.” (Pappe, Ten Myths About Israel, page 83; emphasis mine).
And this:
“Arafat came to Camp David to change that reality while the Israelis and the Americans arrived there determined to maintain it. The Oslo process had transformed the occupied territories into a geography of disaster, which meant that the Palestinians’ quality of life was far worse after the Accord that it was before. Already in 1994, Rabin’s government forced Arafat to accept its interpretation of how the Accord would be implemented on the ground. The West Bank was divided to the infamous areas A, B, and C. Area C was directly controlled by Israel and constituted half of the West Bank. The movement between, and inside, these areas became nearly impossible, and the West Bank was cut off from the Gaza Strip. The Strip was also divided between Palestinians and Jewish settlers, who took over most of the water resources and lived in gated communities cordoned off with barbered wire. Thus the end result of this supposed peace process was a deterioration in the quality of Palestinian lives.” (Pappe, Ten Myths About Israel, page 84; emphasis mine).
As for the more recent events here are some links to articles that specifically challenge Mitra’s statements and reveal the converse of what he claims (you can also go to 7 October Fact Check for any other rumors you want refuted:
- Israel itself revised its death toll on 7 October to 1,200.
- There is no credible evidence that Hamas engaged in rape on 7 October. Here are a few examples of investigative journalism on this topics: The Intercept, Electronic Intifada (4 December | 9 January | 6 February), and Mondoweiss.
- If you go on any social media channel you can find many Israeli soldiers sharing videos of themselves degrading and abusing Palestinians in Gaza (even The New York Times published a piece on this). Here is another report on Al Jazeera (10 December |18 January) and one from Amnesty International.
Allahbadia then feigns empathy, suggesting that perhaps Palestinians, because of their growing up under a brutal apartheid regime (unsurprisingly neither man ever utters the word apartheid during their entire conversation even though Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem have all released thorough documentation of the reality of apartheid existing in Palestine – of course numerous Palestinian human rights organizations had already been documenting this for years).
Allahbadia: “One of the arguments that pro Palestine civilians have all over the world is that even the Hamas is made out of Palestinians who grew up in a very violent, very atrocity struck land. They were basically bullied by the Jews throughout their life. And that’s what’s forced them into a – into whatever they’re doing right now. Do you also sense that narrative?”
Mitra: “I get a lot of that narrative and I’ll tell you why that’s wrong. Because I’ve been to Israel some 14, 15 times now. I’ve been to the West Bank some seven, eight times at least. I’ve been to Gaza for about 10 days. Sure 10 days isn’t enough, but trust me for one quarter of Delhi I think, you can cover a lot of at least South Delhi, you can cover in – or South Sobo as you chaps call it here in Bombay – you can cover in 10 days. Not anthropologically or sociologically, sure, but you get a sense of the place. Sure you don’t understand everything, but you get a sense of the place.
Is there brutalization? Is there the humiliation of occupation? Is there troubles? Yes. Have you ever thought why? You can’t go around killing people who are offering you jobs. In fact, this particular attack on the 7th and 8th of September [sic] it was so precise, the Hamas terrorists knew exactly where to go and who to kill. Why? Because they were Gazans who were given jobs out there agricultural and industrial jobs who used to go back every evening to Gaza and provide intelligence of who, what, where, how to Hamas. And that is how they were able to plan this to absolute perfection. Somebody is giving you a job and you essentially plan, home invade them rape and kill their daughter, torture, rape, and kill their daughter, what exactly are they going to do to you? You know at some point you have to cut off. Israel is a country that runs internally by the rule of laws. And this is where there is a need for Gandhism.”
Essentially Mitra is blaming the victim in his response. It’s true that a small number of Palestinians from Gaza (17,000 out of a population of 2 million people) had work permits to work in Israel. Whether or not those laborers were also involved in Hamas hasn’t been reported as far as I’ve read. Regardless, as I show above, Palestinians have a right to resist including using violence if they so choose. As I demonstrated above, too, the rape and torture arguments are unfounded and debunked. As for Israeli hostages and how they’re treated, I recommend judging by their own accounts of how Hamas treated them. As for his incessant claim about Gandhism, please see above comments on Palestinian non-violent resistance as well as read up on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (I am a founding member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel). It is a growing movement around the world that terrifies Israel and that’s why they have been resorting to scare tactics that include criminalizing this activity wherever they can around the world. For example, here Ramzy Baroud highlights their concern:
“For years, the Israeli government has viewed the boycott movement as a real, tangible threat. Some Israeli officials went as far as perceiving the ‘delegitimization’ resulting from the boycott campaign as the primary threat faced by Israel at the present time. Well attended conferences were held in Las Vegas, Brussels, Jerusalem and elsewhere, hundreds of millions of dollars raised, fiery speeches delivered, while politicians and ‘philanthropists’ lined up at many occasions, vowing their undying allegiance to Israel and accusing anyone who dare criticize the ‘Jewish State’ as ‘antisemitic’.”
Mitra doubles down on his theory that Palestinians using Gandhian tactics would be transformative:
“If the Palestinians adopted civil disobedience and nonviolence, that would be their nightmare come true. The problem is Hamas, and people like Hamas, are the best friends of Jewish extremists. The worst fears on the Jewish side are validated by Hamas. This is why I say supporting Hamas, refusing to condemn Hamas is the most Islamophobic thing you can do because at least Israel is doing it to somebody else. These people are doing it to their own people. These guys are next level nasty. There’s really no words to describe these people. They are the most sadistic, sick, horrible people you can imagine who use their own captive population as human shields.”
In actuality, there have been credible reports of Israel using Palestinians – even small children – as human shields for decades. Most recently Defense for Children International reported on a most recent instance of this that included toddlers! In fact, in this current genocidal campaign Israel is conducting in Gaza, it is using the accusation of human shields as a strategy according to Israeli scholar Neve Gordon:
“This is a strategy “repeatedly deployed by the Israeli military and government to legitimise attacks on life-sustaining and saving infrastructure and shift the blame onto the Palestinians themselves,” Gordon said.”
As he peddles more lies, Mitra becomes even more racist and offensive:
“Palestine is an extremely feudal, extremely violent, criminalized thug polity which terrorizes its own people into submission. They can’t really talk. There is a significant amount of radicalization and compounding all of this is the demography. You see, children are bred in Palestine for political reasons to swamp the Jews because there are about five, six million Jews, and they want a numerical majority, at which point they will demand one unified state where Muslims are in a majority. And the second reason children are bred is to be used as human shields, which is why 44% of Gaza today is children under the age of 14. So the level of human shielding, this is not just random human shielding. This is planned, disgusting, sick, psychotic planned human shielding.”
There is not any real way to debunk his claims, other what I’ve done above. I’ve lived in Palestine and taught in universities there over the course of three years. And lived in Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and spent a good chunk of time in Syria. This ignoramus, who has merely taken some trips there, and it’s doubtful how much of the context he comprehends given he probably doesn’t know Arabic and I’m going to assume he didn’t stay in people’s homes and develop deep relationships with Palestinians.
On this you just have to take my word for it: I can promise you that not one Palestinian is having children in order to generate human shields.
Instead of really digging in and understanding by actually reading dissertations or books on the subject, Mitra pulls out the “it’s complicated” hasbara tactic:
“There are literally thousands of PhDs on this and you could read all of them and you still won’t get around to understanding the situation. So how do you expect the ordinary person to comprehend this. The Israelis are willing to do a lot more research and introspection. And as a result they can bullshit a lot better. The Palestinians just don’t want to research the other side. They are academically weak and their bullshitting is transparently hollow.”
You don’t need to read much to understand what’s happening. Personally, I would start with the books I’ve quoted here if you want to really know the historical context. Here is a bibliography I created if you want to watch some films or read additional books on Palestine. But to be clear: Palestine has as high a literacy rate as Kerala. Palestinians are a highly educated people who deeply value academia as much as Indians do.
Allahbadia asks about whether or not Palestinians are experiencing ethnic cleansing now, (which they have endured on an ongoing basis since before 1948).
Allahbadia: “Is Palestine going through ethnic cleansing?”
Mitra: “No. Emphatically no. And I’ll tell you why. And this goes back to what we discussed before. Number one population exchange is an accepted legal principle of the 20th century. It happened between Greece and Turkey. It happened between India and Pakistan. It happened between North and South Cyprus. All the Jews were ethnically cleansed from Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt. There are no Jews left out there. Maybe one or two token families out of thousands, tens of thousands of Jews out there who are no longer left out there. And this is an accepted principle of international law. It is just as legal as the San Remo Accords. It is just as legal as the UN partition of Palestine resolution that you accept. It is an accepted principle of population exchange number one. Number two ethnic cleansing no. Because Israel has a million and a half Muslim citizens of Israel outside of Gaza in Israel proper. Several of them serve in the military. Several of them serve in the embassy out here, in fact, in Belandeli. I have several Israeli Muslim friends who work for the government, who serve in the Israeli military. They exist. There are Israeli Arabs and some of them are Christians, some of them are Muslim, mostly Muslim, but lots of Christians as well.”
The mere fact that the International Court of Justice – the highest court in the world and one that someone like Mitra who claims to believe in international law should think highly of. And yet he dismisses any claim about genocide or ethnic cleansing. Here is lawyer Diana Buttu on the subject:
“Israel has had in mind is two things since the beginning of this attack on Gaza. First, it has made it clear that it wants to make Gaza smaller in size, and they’ve made it clear that they want to, quote, “thin out” the population. So it’s the combination of genocide and ethnic cleansing and taking more Palestinian land. And that’s why, from the beginning, it was clear to anybody who was paying attention that Israel was going to begin in the north, but then suddenly, magically, move to the south as everybody had looked the other way. And this is precisely what’s happening.”
Buttu is referring to statements that Israeli officials have made themselves, which is precisely why the ICJ has decided to proceed with its case and investigate Israel for crimes of genocide.
Also not legal under international law – at least not after the founding of the United Nations – is population transfer. Just because it has happened in the past doesn’t mean it’s legal today. Scholar Norman G. Finkelstein offers come context of the Geneva Convention that outlawed population transfer (read: ethnic cleansing) in his book Image and Reality of the Israel Palestine Conflict:
“Israel confronted the same dilemma after occupying the West Bank and Gaza as at the dawn of the Zionist movement: it wanted the land but not the people. Expulsion, however, was no longer a viable option. In the aftermath of the brutal Nazi experiments with and plans for demographic engineering, international public opinion had ceased granting any legitimacy to forced population transfers. The landmark Fourth Geneva Convention, ratified in 1949, for the first time ‘unequivocally prohibited deportation’ of civilians under occupation (Articles 49, 147). Accordingly, after the June war Israel moved to impose the second of its two options mentioned above – apartheid. This proved to be the chief stumbling block to a diplomatic settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict.” (Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, page 14; emphasis mine).
Moreover, there was no population exchange or transfer or even ethnic cleansing of Arab Jews from their homelands in Arab countries. You may read above Avi Shlaim’s account of his family’s forced move to Israel from Baghdad. Here is another Arab Jewish memoir by Massoud Haynoun, When we were Arabs, which offers a variety of reasons for leaving one’s homeland:
“Jewish Arab colonists went to Palestine for a variety of reasons: sometimes it was out of fear of the rising animosity toward them in their homelands; sometimes it was out of a genuinely felt religious or political commitment to the Zionist project. Others were taken there in what many have called human trafficking by Zionist agents; they had no clue where they were headed when they were spirited away on buses and boats in the dead of night. Zionist agents were engaged in a multipronged effort to inspire Jewish Arabs to move to Palestine, sometimes even by firebombing Arab capitals and pitting those countries’ national security apparatus against them. In the way that the Islamic State and similar terrorist groups have relished Western Islamophobia because it supports their dualistic, clash-of-civilizations worldview and supports their drive to draw more recruits, Zionists did nothing to stop the criminalization of Jewish Arab communities. Instead, they appeared to provoke it unabashedly, despite risking Jewish Arab lives. Even long after Oscar left the Arab world, a deluge of events continued to plant a wedge between Jewish Arabs and the societies in which they lived, who began to fear and resent their very presence.” (Hayoun, When We Were Arabs, page 95; emphasis mine).
The interview concludes with Allahbadia following up and asking what Mitra’s so-called Palestinian friends say about the current situation.
Allahbadia: “What do your Muslim Israeli friends say about this whole thing?”
Mitra: “They’re split. See they know the history much better than the Palestinian side. So they’re much more nuanced in their views than, say, a Palestinian Muslim is. I don’t know. I’ve never researched the Palestinian education system, so I don’t know what the Palestinian education system says. I presume it’s like the Pakistani education system, which gives you an extremely convoluted view of history. And of course they get very hurt when they see these images. Some of them do blame Israel, but a vast majority of them are like, what the hell have you meant to do? Are we meant to just allow ourselves to get killed like this? And of course there are also people who accept the Palestinian argument and refuse to condemn Hamas.”
There is absolutely no difference between how much Palestinians know their history regardless whether they live inside Israel, the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian education system in the occupied territories is nothing like the Pakistani education system and why someone would even think that is beyond me. The history used by the West Bank and Gaza Strip is censored by Israelis and nothing goes into the curriculum that they do not approve first. Palestinians living in Israel, whether they are Christian or Muslim, are subject to similar kinds of repression as Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Since 7 October, for example, Palestinians in Israel have been rounded up in administrative detention just like Palestinians everywhere else.
