We're going to be talking about it quite a bit today. The Hundred Years War on Palestine. Professor Kalidi, thank you so much for joining

us. Thanks for having

me, Anak. So as much as the US media would like to have Americans believe that this war began on October 7th of this year, the truth is that the persecution and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians really started at this point more than 100 years ago. And so I know this might take a little bit of time, but I think it's really important to start this conversation off by talking about the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. And there are a few other documents that I want to walk the audience through, but let's start with that.

Well, the Balfour Declaration is important because it gives the support of the greatest power in the world at the time, Great Britain. It gives the support of Great Britain to the Zionist movement. The such that this small and relatively unpopular movement among Jewish communities in Eastern Europe suddenly has the patronage of the empire, which not only is the greatest power globally, but is in control of Palestine in November. British troops actually take Jerusalem in December of 2017. And by the Balfour Declaration, the British say that they look with favor on the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, a national home for the Jewish people is the wording they use. The Palestinians are never mentioned, except as the non-Jewish population who are not considered a people and who do not get national rights according to the British and get only civil and religious rights. And so the Balfour Declaration sets and trains a whole series of events whereby the British give themselves a mandate for Palestine through the League of Nations and proceed to create a Jewish parastate or the embryo of a Jewish state in Palestine with a military, with educational system, with a parliament, with a foreign ministry, with all of the appendages of a state without sovereignty, obviously. The British are still the sovereign power under the mandate. And it is really, really important because it puts the two peoples, the Palestinians who were the overwhelming majority of the population and the Jewish population of Palestine, which is increased over time by immigration, not on a footing of equality, but on a footing of profound inequality. One group is a people with national rights, rights to a national home. The other group are just religious communities without national or political rights. And that's the system under which the British rule Palestine for the next couple of

decades. I think the distinction between human rights and political rights needs to be made because I think a lot of people kind of conflate the two. So just real quick before we continue, can you talk about the difference?

Well, very simply, under the mandate, which is based on the Balfour Declaration, the British give this growing Zionist project in Palestine a diplomatic rights. They can go to the League of Nations and petition as of right. They're a public body. They have control of various aspects of government in Palestine, like education and some others. They're allowed to vote for an assembly of their own. All of these things are denied to the Palestinians. The British control Arab education. The British deny any Arab body elected or otherwise a representative capacity. In other words, the Palestinians are denied not only self-determination in their own country, which the Covenant of the League of Nations said they were supposed to get, but they see their country gradually being transformed into one in which this national project, the Zionist National Project slowly, but surely is taking over the country. You have an article in a Palestinian newspaper saying we're going to become strangers in our own country. So one group has national and political rights. The other group is denied those rights. And is entitled to only as the mandate says, civil and religious

rights. One thing that I have been kind of searching for is a better understanding in regard to what motivated Arthur James Ball for. Like why did he want to establish a Jewish state? Like what was in it for him?

Well, the Brits don't do anything because they love the brown eyes of subject peoples, nor Arabs nor Jews. The British did what they did essentially for strategic reasons. They wanted to reinforce the defense of the Eastern Frontiers of Egypt. Palestine is immediately to the east of Egypt and they had been worried for years and years before World War I that Egypt might be threatened from the east. And in fact, during the war, the Ottoman army invaded Egypt from the east and arrived on the Suez Canal. They wanted secondly to control the shortest land route between the Mediterranean and the Gulf to ensure that they control all of the routes to India. They already controlled the Suez Canal through Egypt. They wanted to control the shortest land route which ran from Haifa to Basa and where they eventually built the road, pipelines, air bases during the interwar period. So these were the strategic motivations for which they wanted Palestine and Zionism was a useful tool to that end. In the words of a British official, what we were trying to create was a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of hostile Arabs. So it was a base for Britain, a strategic base for Britain in the Middle East that Britain was coming to dominate almost completely at this time.

Now what followed the Ball 4 declaration was Article 22 of the Convention of the League of Nations, which is an incredibly important moment in the establishment of Israel. So this happened in June of 1919. Can you talk a little bit about what that was and how the Palestinian people were not included in this?

Yeah, the Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations declared that the Arab areas of which had formerly been part of the Ottoman Empire were provisionally independent states. And this was the basis on which they were to be made mandates of European powers with a view to their eventually becoming independent. That's what the Covenant said. And that's what was eventually done in Iraq, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Jordan by the League of Nations through the British and French Magnetories. That was not done in Palestine. In Palestine, the Palestinians who are the overwhelming majority of the population never received self-determination, never received self-government. Right up to the very end, the British ruled Palestine directly while leaving self-government and the building of a embryonic state to the Zionist movement. So the Palestinians were denied what under Article 22 of the Covenant was allowed to every other Arab state under European mandate.

I want to just read a statement. It was part of a private memo that Arthur James Balfour sent to his cabinet members back in August of 1919. Because I think this is the kind of stuff that most Americans have been kind of shielded from knowing about, from learning about. And it tells you the intentions from the very beginning by the very people who tried to create this Jewish state. So Balfour said in August of 1919 to his cabinet, it was a private memo that actually wasn't published until I believe the 1950s if I'm not mistaken. That's correct. He said Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes of greater import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that land. I mean, it's just so transparent, so clear, the candor is incredible there. Yet, there's this denialism all the way to modern times, to today, where there seems to be this rejection of what actually happened in history and why it is that the Palestinian people have been resisting the taking of their land, the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state. And so, look, we're in a difficult situation now because I don't think that you can just dismantle Israel and I'm not a proponent of that. However, I do want to ask you, following the 1948 Nakhba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, okay? What happens after that? Because what we keep hearing over and over again by supporters of Israel and everything the Israeli government wants to do is, well, the Palestinians were offered peace deals. They were offered their own state. But is that really true? Can you walk us through that and what the reality of these offers were? Sure.

I mean, one of these great myths has to do with the partition plan of 1947. The British changed their policy at the end of the 30s. They eventually turn against the Zionist movement and the Zionist movement turns against them. There's terrorist attacks on the British. The British are forced out, basically. In 1947, they throw a whole problem over to the UN and the UN decides the UN General Assembly decides to partition Palestine. Now, in 1947, the overwhelming majority of the population of Palestine were Arabs over two-thirds. And the charter of the United Nations, much like the covenant of the League of Nations, talks about self-determination. So the Palestinians said, well, we're the majority. It's our country. We want to be independent in our country. That's not what the United Nations decides. It has the same kind of biased approach to this that the League of Nations did for different reasons. And we're talking about a different era. And we're talking about different powers, essentially to the United States and the Soviet Union, that back the partition resolution of Bahind 47. What does that resolution do? It gives most of a country, most of which is owned by Arabs and which has an overwhelming Arab majority to a putative Jewish state. So 55% of Palestine, including most of the fertile land, most of which is owned by Arabs and about half of whose population would have been Arabs, it gives that 55% of Palestine to the Jewish minority for a Jewish state. And it gives a little over 43% to the Palestinians who are, as I've said, two-thirds of the population. The Palestinians naturally reject this. They say, it's our country. We're entitled by the Charter of the United Nations to self-determination. We don't accept that most of our country be given to this minority, most of whom are immigrants to this country recently. And the result is the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. There is no way to create a majority Jewish state in a majority Arab country without reducing that majority. And that is done in 1948 by the process that Palestinians describe as the NACWA, which is the expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians and eventually the destruction of most of their villages, which are then the lands are then given over to Jewish settlements, which are established in the decades that follow.

Now, you were involved

in peace negotiations. You tried to broker a deal for a two state solution. And I'm curious what that experience was like. What kind of obstacles stood in the way of accomplishing those

goals?