Season 4, Episode 10: Ilan Pappè, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic & A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Prof. Ilan Pappè, historian at Exeter University, UK, for an in-depth conversation on one of the most enduring and contentious issues of our time: the Israel-Palestine conflict. Drawing on Pappè’s powerful new books—Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic and A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Sachs and Pappè discuss the historical, political, and ideological forces that have shaped the Zionist movement and the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine.    

Together, they explore how lobbying networks in the UK and US have influenced the foreign policy of both countries, and the role of the UK and US in the Israel-Palestine conflict. They delve into the historical roots of Zionism, the legacy of British colonial rule in Mandatory Palestine, and the role of the US in the Israel-Palestine conflict from the adoption of the UN Partition Plan in 1947 until today. This episode offers listeners a deeper understanding of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine by delving into the historical processes that shaped the conflict during the past century and more. 

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org

Footnotes:

• Zionism
• Israel Palestinian Conflict
• War in Gaza
• Judaism
• Antisemitism
• History of Israel
• History of Palestine
• Settler Colonialism
• Ottoman Empire
• British Imperialism
• Lord Balfour
• Neocons
• UN Resolution 181
• UN Partition Plan for Palestine
• Patrick Wolfe - Elimination of the Local
• 2000 Camp David Summit
• 2024 Protests on University Campuses

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs. Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world. Hello, welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs. Today I am greatly honored and really thrilled to be speaking with one of the world's great historians, Ilan Pape, who is a professor at Exeter University in the United Kingdom. He's been professor at University of Haifa. He is an Oxford trained PhD in history, and he's an extraordinarily prolific uh author, especially about the history of the modern Middle East, the history of the State of Israel, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and all of the issues uh around that. His two most recent books, as far as I know, but he keeps pouring them out, so I may be a book behind, uh, are a very short history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which is a tremendous, astute, clear summary of this complex, uh long conflict uh between uh Israel and the Palestinian people. And uh, second book at the same time is a big thick uh book. That one's a short one because it's a very short history. This one is a big thick book, lobbying for Zionism on both sides of the Atlantic, uh, which is a long history of, I would say, the geopolitics of establishing the state of Israel and of uh Israel's relations, especially with its two major partners in modern history, uh the United Kingdom and the United States. Elon, thank you so much for uh joining uh Book Club. I'm I'm really thrilled to be speaking with you. Thank you, Jeffrey. We have a worldwide listenership. This is uh an initiative of a worldwide network of universities around the world, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. So people are listening from all over the world. They are, of course, aware and watching the ongoing war uh and devastation in the Middle East and especially in Gaza, in uh the West Bank now uh seemingly spreading uh to uh Lebanon and Syria and Yemen and uh elsewhere. And uh I think all the listeners are trying to make sense of this conflict. Of course, it's been a long, long story, and you've been one of the great historians of all of this. I'd like to start out with the most basic question. Your book is Lobbying for Zionism. Can you explain what is Zionism so that people around the world can get an idea of this important concept? And is it the same thing as Judaism, for example, because it's often linked, even deliberately said, to be anti-Zionist is to be anti-Jewish, for example. Are these two the same thing? What does Zionism mean?

SPEAKER_00 3:22

Yeah. Again, Jeffrey, thank you so much uh for having me on the book club. And uh I want to thank anyone who's tuning in visually, audially to this uh conversation. Let us begin by a simple kind of reply to your question. Zionism is an ideology, whereas Judaism is religion. And there is a difference between ideology and religion. One is a set of ideas that people believe in, act upon these ideas, the other one is a matter of faith. As in the case of Christianity and Islam, it's such a widespread monotheistic theology that it has many more, a large number of interpretations. So people can really choose how to express their Judaism, Christianity, or Islam as we are fully aware of in our world. Whereas uh ideology is far more limited in uh in our ability to interpret it, it has uh a much narrower perception of reality. So that's in general. Now, Zionism is uh one way of interpreting Judaism, by no ways the only way of interpreting a Judaism, and historically it started as a minority view among the Jews. I suppose today it is a far more widespread interpretation that many Jews accept. But even today, I'm kind of offering a guess, nobody in fact ever examined it. I would say half of the world Jewish population sees itself as Zionist, and the other half with different degrees of antagonism or indifference, see the Judaism as disassociated from Zionism. So when we equate Judaism with Zionism, uh it's uh factually it is an inaccurate equation. Now, Zionism itself, in my book, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic, but also in a more concise way in the in the shorter book that uh you have introduced uh kindly, I mention a fact that I'm not sure many of our viewers and listeners are aware of, that Zionism began as an evangelical Christian idea before it was endorsed by a small group of Jewish intellectuals and activists in the late 19th century in Central and Eastern Europe. For evangelical Christians, of course, not all evangelical Christians, certain groups within evangelical Christianity, especially in Britain and the United States, the idea of Zionism, namely the idea that Jews should have their own state and that that state should be in Palestine, that idea was already uh advocated by evangelical Christians on both sides of the Atlantic. And it had an impact on a group of Jews uh who were looking for a way of responding to a new wave of anti-Semitism.

SPEAKER_01 6:34

So just to give some uh dates to this, uh Ilan, the early uh Christian Zionists, which is uh I think a surprise and ironic, but is the historical reality, uh, that uh Zionism as a movement of a Jewish state in modern times started with the Christian evangelicals, both in in the UK and the United States, early 19th century, uh 1800s. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_00 7:00

Absolutely. Absolutely. And and it started in the early 19th century and it caught up, if you want, with Jewish intellectual around the 1880s. So uh the evangelical Christian uh perception of the idea of Zionism predated the Jewish one by uh at least 80 years or 75 years. Uh it, you know, these things are not totally uh uh can be accurately pinpointed. What I'm trying to say is that the the Christian evangelical perception of Zionism was not the only reason that Jewish intellectual and activists in late 19th century uh Central and Eastern Europe began to think about the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine. Uh, one of the most important impulses behind it was the sense that they had, which I think was quite valid, that in many European societies, Jews will not be accepted as equal citizens. I don't think they predicted that it would go as far as genociding the Jews as happened in the Second World War, but they showed despair given the fact the Jews were trying to assimilate, were trying to be part of the non-Jewish society, and there was a sense that actually the rise of nationalism in the mid-19th century, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, but also in places such as Germany and Italy, did not allow the Jews to be fully integrated to their societies. So that was one impulse, the impulse that it it was a solution to an acute problem of racism towards Jews. What was the Christian idea? The Christian idea had much more to do with a divine scheme that people believed in, in which you a return, as they would call it, the return of the Jews to the Holy Land, namely Palestine, would precipitate the second coming of the Messiah and cause the resurrection of the dead, uh, the beginning of the end of time. So in fact, it would have been an indication that uh a certain divine scheme began with the return of the Jews, which was almost a precondition for the fulfillment of other ideas in this particular uh Christian dogma, namely, as I said before, the return of the Messiah, the resurrection of the dead, and the beginning of the end of time.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

So the Christian Zionist idea, which lives very actively in the United States till today, was not a response to anti-Semitism, for example, uh quite independent of that.

SPEAKER_00 9:38

Totally independent. In fact, I would venture and say it was anti-Semitic in many ways. Because uh the idea was, on the one hand, that we need the Jews to be in Palestine in order to trigger the end of time, but we have to add to this that part of the divine scheme is that this all could not be completed unless the Jews eventually convert to Christianity or they would be barbecued in hell. Uh, so this was not entirely philosophematic, namely, it was not out of love of Jews. And I do suspect that anti-Semitism played a role here by saying you could indirectly get rid of the Jews without saying I want to get rid of the Jews just because I hate them. I'm getting rid of the Jews because they have an historical role uh to play in Palestine.

SPEAKER_01 10:27

And just to say that uh in the in the biblical terms, these are largely biblical literalists referring to the final book of the New Testament of uh the book of Revelation, uh that this will be the final battle and the return of Jesus uh to uh the kingdom of God, so-called dispensationalism.

SPEAKER_00 10:49

Yeah, it was never pure purely, only purely theological. Uh, some of the people who were very important in this particular theological movement also had other interests in life. For instance, in Britain, some of them were also imperialists in the sense that they wanted to expand the British Empire. So it was a fusion of their theological belief, but also of their imperialist dreams of expanding the British Empire into the heart of the Arab world, taking over areas that uh in the mid-19th century were still part of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, including Palestine.

SPEAKER_01 11:34

In the early nineteenth century, the idea being that Jews who are religious community all over the world should return to the Holy Land as in the biblical times to fulfill a biblical prophecy and maybe help the British Empire along the way, that this would be a a a good beachhead for the British Empire as it uh increasingly took control over the Ottoman lands uh from a weakening Ottoman Empire that indeed was to end in in the context of World War I. So then uh Jews picked up this idea, a few, at the end of the 19th century. I think it's quite remarkable, and you emphasize it and uh others uh such as uh Professor Yaakov uh Rabkin of University of Montreal, that when some Jews adopted this evangelical Christian and British imperial scheme, they were really a minority, and the rabbis were saying, don't do this.

SPEAKER_00 12:39

In fact, not only the rabbis, even uh what one might call secular Jews, agreed with the Zionists or the early Zionists, that there was an acute problem of anti-Semitism. They did not deny it. But some of them said the way of challenging it is not by adopting the very venom, if you want, that uh is has bitten us, namely, to decide that Judaism is nationalism because German nationalism doesn't accept you is the wrong way to go about it. And many of them became universalists. They said if the world would be a better place and more democratic, more liberal. Some of them hoped it would be more socialist. It doesn't matter. It was a universal idea. A better world is a world without anti-Semitism, a world in which Jews are part of the same kind of idea of nationalism is not necessarily a better world and does not solve the issue as they saw it. It's anti-Semitism. But you're absolutely right. We and you mentioned it, and it's important to say a lot of Jews were still very religious in the days that Zionism appeared on the map of history, and from a religious perspective, the idea that you can temper with God's will, namely, you are not waiting until there are the conditions which allow the return of the Jews. Uh, if you temper with God's will, you are actually contradicting the very basic values of Judaism. As a famous rabbi from Germany said to a Zionist delegation, you want me to substitute three thousand years of wisdom for uh a piece of land, a piece of clothes, and an anthem. And I I cannot accept that the two are equally important in our life as as Jews.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

Wow. So at the end of the 19th century, the the Jewish Zionist movement among a small group of mainly secular Jews in Vienna and Central Europe and then Eastern Europe took up this cause, the return to the biblical land. But there were uh Arabs there. There was a whole uh country. It was uh the Ottoman Empire, so Turks and Arabs, Christians, and so on. What did the early Zionists think they were doing, or how would they go about their mission? What did the named founder of the Jewish Zionist cause, Theodore Herzl, believe about moving to a place that was filled with people? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:22

Yeah. First of all, it's interesting that one of the early uh delegation of Zionists that came to Palestine in the late 19th century wrote back home that the bride is beautiful but belongs to another man. Namely, it is occupied by another people. So in fact, none of them thought that the land was empty. However, there were two uh ways that they dealt with this challenge. And both of them were actually quite typical of colonialist uh movements. In this respect, they were not exceptional. One was uh to, in a way, dehumanize the local population and regarded as a group of people who would never have the same ambition as the Zionist settlers would have, namely to have their own nation state, uh to have a modern state, and and therefore, as Herzl put it, they would either move because he thought most of them were nomads, or uh they would uh stay behind but would not form any serious challenge to the movement. So that was one aspect. Because quite a few of the early Zionists were also socialists, in fact, some of them were even uh, I would say, communist in many ways, uh, very early on, uh, they believed that they are bringing, uh, if you want, the white person's uh burden with them, uh, and that it would benefit the local population that a Jewish state would be created there. That kind of more benevolent idea, if you want, disappeared the moment it became clear that the local population is not excited about the idea of a Jewish state instead of their own country. And then, of course, different kinds of perceptions would develop about what should be done with the uh local population. About Herzl, just one sentence. Again, people don't, I think, always know about that. He never thought that Zionism was a solution necessarily for Jews in Britain or America or even in Germany. He thought mostly about the East European Jews who were poor, who were really the victims at his lifetime of anti-Semitism. And he himself only visited Palestine once for a very short period, fell ill, didn't like that much the country. And that when the main reason he went there was his hope to visit to meet uh the German Kaiser Wilhelm, uh, because he was unable to meet him in Germany. And he knew that he was coming for a trip. And he met him for half an hour, which didn't help the Zionist uh project. That's when Herzl understood that the hope for a Zionist state lay in London, not in Berlin. So this is also important to understand. But definitely there was a sense that the land is not empty, but it's not really full of people like us or people that would be a challenge uh from a colonialist perspective or a settler colonial perspective to create a Jewish state.

SPEAKER_01 18:42

I think this is uh so interesting for key reasons that your your book is all about, which is that in the end, Israel comes about as a project, of course, driven by Zionists, but largely uh through the British and the United States. And the the British philosophy was that settler colonialism is the normal way to organize the world. Uh Britain had been doing it for centuries, uh, whether it was uh uh in Africa or in uh Australia or in the United States, originally the British colonies of North America. But of course, uh the United States itself was the epitome of settler colonialism. Uh the whole ideology was we can move in to a place. It has people, but not really civilized people. Uh John Locke said they're not using the land right, they don't really have the right to it. Uh they don't really have ownership because they don't till the land properly. They're not like us. So settler colonialism recognizes that there are people there, but not really people, if I could put it there with a capital P. Absolutely. The real people are us. And this is a very deep Anglo-Saxon idea, it seems to me, of meaning a British and American idea. So turning to the British and the United States as the place where this vision would be realized was a rather natural turn of events.

SPEAKER_00 20:14

Absolutely. And I think there's something here, a lesson to us today, which is beyond the question of Zionism. This is Europe of the Enlightenment. This is Europe that develops already a very clear value system of humanity, of how humans should interact with each other, how authority and state should interact with citizens, but they never apply it to the new colonies, to the new possessions outside of Europe. And uh this uh almost uh seems like they can really be themselves without the burden of enlightenment outside of Europe or outside the United States, or when they establish the United States. And this is also in the case of Zionism. Zionism or the ideologues of Zionism really believed that they also subscribe to universal values, in their case, much more towards socialism than liberalism to begin with. And yet, from a perspective of socialism, they should have treated all the people as equals. But as you said, they didn't think about the Palestinians as people, as normal people, and therefore universal values were not applying to them.

SPEAKER_01 21:28

It is an amazing thing, actually, to look back at the Enlightenment great philosophers who were invented the idea of universalism, uh secular universalism, let's say. Uh and Immanuel Kant, for example, the great philosopher of Germany at the end of the 18th century, he was a true universalist, but an outright racist at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 21:53

Even Karl Marx had been affected by every every person is, of course, a person. And of his own period, and you cannot escape it in many ways. But I think it's important to realize it because even today, and you and I talked about it in a different occasion, there is in the global south still today suspicion that when the global north is talking about universalism, it doesn't really include the whole world, but rather Europe, Western secular universalism, which uh they don't feel always treats them in a just way.

SPEAKER_01 22:32

It's also, if I may, just say one more word about this. I think one of the, of course, greatest scientists of modernity, and also a great humanist, Charles Darwin, also shockingly speaks about the savages and how they they will go extinct. Yes, they're part of the human species, but not quite. There's a hierarchy. And uh the hierarchy will be driven by natural selection. And so this is very deep, and it therefore makes it possible to have a colonial settler project that is at the same time ideologically self-professed to be universal, but at the same time extraordinarily particular. Yeah. Absolutely. So I want to bring us to the 20th century and uh to the birth of uh first a Jewish homeland in Palestine and what was the Ottoman lands, uh, but then became British imperial territory after World War I, and then to uh the uh emergence of Israel as an independent state in in 1948, uh fulfillment of the Zionist idea. And you described, of course, the central role of uh the British Empire in uh the birth of all of this, with the Balfour Declaration being uh perhaps uh the key moment. Could you describe what happens and what are the motivations of the lobbyists and what are the motivations of the British Empire, the imperialists, uh, in saying, yes, we will back the Zionist project?

SPEAKER_00 24:14

Yes. I I think the moment we are getting closer to the First World War, it is clear to uh those in the British political elite who always dreamt of expending the British Empire into the areas that were part of the Ottoman Empire. It was very clear that Turkey would not be neutral in the First World War, which would give an excuse to uh turn uh the Ottoman provinces of the Middle East into an arena, a battle, a battle arena or a front in the uh developing war. And uh that meant that the that already before the outbreak of the First World War, uh Britain, together with other allies who faced Turkey, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Germany were already contemplating how to divide the spoils between them. And this is why already in 1916, before the war ends, in May 1916, uh the two uh director generals of the uh foreign office uh in Britain and the uh foreign ministry in France meet in order to divide what today we would call the Eastern Mediterranean, or at that time was called the Levant, into spheres of influence. And what is interesting that at that point in May 1916, the British still do not regard Palestine as necessarily part of the British sphere of influence. They are interested uh in Iraq, they're interested in Egypt, of course, and the Saudi peninsula, but Palestine doesn't look to them from a strategic point of view, a very important asset. And that's when the Zionist lobby has to come in. It has to do two things from May 1916. First of all, to convince Britain that it would be important that Palestine would be part of the British sphere of influence, and not as was done in that uh famous uh agreement in May 1916, to leave it as something international for both sides or many more powers to be involved in running the place. And secondly, to convince them that Palestine should not only be British, but it's much better for Britain than it would be also a Jewish Palestine. So you have here the building of a coalition of people who are convinced that Palestine should be part of the British Empire. But some of them, like the famous Lawrence of Arabia, I'm sure some of our listeners and uh viewers know the name, the Lawrence of Arabia, say yes, Palestine should be part of the British Empire, but it should be Arab. Why should it be Jewish? And the majority of the people in Palestine are Arabs. So he overwhelming majority. Overwhelmingly. So he didn't understand why at all the idea of considering it as a Jewish Palestine comes up at all. But that's where the lobby comes in. The lobby succeeds in creating a coalition, a very weird coalition, if you think about it. A very important person is uh Arthur Balfour, Lord Balfour, uh the British Foreign Secretary, who is an a non-anti-Semite, uh who in 1906 kind of initiated legislation that was meant to prevent Jews from Romania and Russia from coming into England. But he sees suddenly the connection. He says, if we create a Jewish state in Palestine, it will be easier. They won't come. Exactly. Exactly. So he's very important. And then you have Anglo-Jewish aristocrats like um Herbert Samuel, some of members of the Rothschild uh family and the Montague family and the Redding family, all Jews who, by the way, defeat in a way the idea of Zionism because they are very prominent Jews in Britain. They show actually that Jews are not discriminated in Britain, but who also, like Balfour, but without saying it loud, are also not very enthusiastic about the waves of Jews who are running away from anti-Semitism coming to London. Some of them, of course, wanted to go to the United States, but quite a few of them stayed in London. And some of them came with revolutionary ideas, which of course frightened these uh aristocrats. So they are also part of that alliance, and they succeed together with the imperialists, if you want, among the government, to already in 1915, I think, to create a consensus among policymakers in Britain that Palestine should be part of the Empire and uh should be a British Palestine, and they still have some work to do. As we said in 1916, Britain still did not officially adopt it. As I write in the book, a relatively successful, the last successful Turkish military action actually in the First World War was almost to succeed and go from Palestine and attack the Suez Canal in Egypt. And that I think played also a very important role in convincing a lot of British policymakers that actually Palestine has a strategic value as defending the political. Yes. And um, altogether that created that kind of alliance. So it was a mixture of the old evangelical Christians, imperialism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism. It's a weird coalition that explains why today that coalition is also struggling to make sense of what unites it when it comes and supports the state of Israel. Because some of the members of that global alliance, if you want, have contradictory interests themselves, but all agree that for their own purposes, a Palestine that is not Arab, a Palestine that is Jewish or Zionist, serves their interests.

SPEAKER_01 30:21

It is an extraordinary uh story, uh you can't make it up story, uh this bizarre coalition. And I think it's stunning. It extends through the 20th century until today. If you look at the United States, which is the staunch backer of Israel, and you look at the Zionist lobby in the United States, tens of millions of voters are evangelical Christians waiting for Armageddon and uh the fulfillment of uh the prophecies of the book of Revelation. Some are the so-called neocons who are absolute out and out imperialists for the United States Empire, not the British Empire, but the idea of the U.S. as the global hegemon, succeeding Britain as the global hegemon after World War II. Some are secular Jews who, for whatever reason, like the wealthy Jews of uh England uh in 1917, push uh the Zionist cause. Some are religious Jews, though the religious Jewish community, at least in my city of New York, is deeply divided uh with the active protest by part of the uh the religious uh Jewish community, uh part of the community demonstrating against Israel, saying it's against the Jewish faith to uh have a state of Israel. But this coalition built in Britain actually is similar in a way structurally to the coalition in the United States.

SPEAKER_00 31:58

Yes, definitely. It moves beyond, of course, the Second World War. One should add that the Holocaust played an important role in uh adding some more, I would say more genuine supporter of the idea. It was easier to say, you see, the Jews have no future after the Holocaust. And although most of those who survived the Holocaust actually opted to live in Britain and the United States rather than coming to Palestine, nonetheless, ideologically, you could see how this particular moment in history gives some sort of moral validity, if you want, for a very short while, to my mind, for this uh global alliance. And then people sort of wake up and say, all right, there was definitely a problem there, but is the solution colonizing Palestine, oppressing the Palestinians? Can it be done without oppressing the Palestinians? Can the whole idea of building a Jewish state at the heart of the Arab world at the expense of the indigenous native people of Palestine be done without force, without violence? And unfortunately, the answer is no. No, you you need violence to build it, and you need violence to sustain it. And of course, the violence is met by violence of the indigenous national resistance movement, which triggers more violence, and we are we can see this cycle today. But it's not surprising that today some of the best friends of Israel are populist right-wing leaders like Urban in Hungary, uh, right-wing, uh, extreme right-wing leaders in parties in France and Belgium, uh, and even in Germany. These are Israel's best friends today. And again, I think this is almost like recycling this idea that there is an unholy alliance between anti-Semites who don't want to see the Jews in Europe, and a Zionist ideology that says we also don't want to see the Jews in Europe, we want to see them in Israel. And that is that is very disturbing. It's very disturbing because it brings back the question: is this really the solution to anti-Semitism? Because none of those I know who are discussing genuinely what is problematic with Israel today, or why they think that Zionism has negative aspects? None of those I know that are engaged in this debate deny the fact that there is anti-Semitism or deny the historical fact that Jews were facing huge hardships and becoming Europeans. The question they raise: was this the solution? Was this the right way to go about it? Didn't Europe have to find a better way of dealing with racism towards Judaism, rather than saying, yes, because we are racist, you should really go out and build a state in the Arab world. If you think about it, morally and practically, it's not a very reasonable European. I forget about the Jews. It's not a reasonable European perception of what is wrong with racism, not only towards Jews, but in racism in general.

SPEAKER_01 35:13

It raises a big question, Mark, and uh it's uh something I know needs hours and hours to discuss, but I'm going to be completely unfair and ask you to uh explain uh a basic point in any way that you can in a short period of time because you're a master of it. In 1947, at the newly created UN, there was the idea of some kind of solution, at least that uh the mandatory region of Palestine, that is the region of Palestine under British mandate, so-called under the League of Nations uh from 1921 to that point, should be divided between the Palestinians uh and the Jewish Zionists. And at least there would be some way for two peoples to live, whether that was fair or not fair to the original inhabitants, whether the partition was done right or too much subject to uh the Zionist lobbying, or however one sees it, at least there was an idea dating back 78 years that okay, we're in a mess, very complicated. We need a practical way out. One practical way out is to divide the turf and uh have for two peoples broadly speaking, two areas adjacent to each other and ostensibly living in peace. Seventy-eight years onward, most of the world at a rhetorical level still says yes, that's the solution, the so-called two-state solution. Seventy-eight years onward, it never was brought to being. Your book describes at great length uh and enormous insight how the Zionist lobby oppose that at every stage. It raises two fundamental questions. First, on an ideological level, perhaps, uh or practical level or whatever level. Why wouldn't the Zionist cause say, let's make the best of it and find an answer, other than just lobbying to prevent a Palestinian cause? And second, given that this outcome, 78 years, has been so much war, so much bloodshed, so much suffering, so much insecurity, and now today, as we talk massacres and terrible destruction and shocking killing uh by the state of Israel and Gaza of uh innocent civilians, why does the United States uh, or how does the lobby succeed? Uh why is it considered success? So it's uh basically also the first question: what is the idea of the current prevailing Zionist cause, or for the last 78 years, the Zionist cause that said, no, we won't find that kind of practical compromise. We will insist through our political weight that there be only one state, and that would be uh the Zionist state.

SPEAKER_00 38:27

Yeah. I think the logic of any settler colonial project, as the late Patrick Wolf put it, was the logic of the elimination of the native. Now, elimination does not always mean genocide, does not mean total physical removal. Uh, it can mean ethnic cleansing, as the Zionist movement attempted to do and partly succeeded in 1948. It can be incremental ethnic cleansing, as the State of Israel uh has been doing since uh 1967, and unfortunately, it can also be genocide as we are witnessing today in the Gaza Strip. I think what the world misunderstood is how what one could call the liberal Zionists or the more pragmatic Zionists view the idea of partition or the idea of a two-state solution, if you want. They saw it as another means of elimination rather than means of peace and reconciliation. Namely, if I cannot expel the people of the West Bank, I can at least enclave them. I can imprison them in two enclaves, one in the West Bank and one in the Gaza Strip, and I can even divide the enclave in the West Bank into some areas. Unlike the kind of politicians that are now running Israel, the pragmatic Zionists said, I don't care if you call it a state. Now, on the Palestinian side, they wanted at least some sort of sovereignty, some sort of uh content to the idea of the state that not one of the Zionist leaders in the last 78 years really offered them. And I think that the misunderstanding, and that's a very great success of the lobby, is to succeed in convincing Western politicians and intellectuals that actually what the Israelis see as uh an indirect way of rule and dealing with elimination through enclave, through demarcation rather than through expulsion, is really a generous peace proposal. And then they were surprised that the Palestinians did not eventually accept it. And the history of the Palestinian response, as some books lately has shown, is really in a way, uh, I mean, I'm not every Palestinian accepted it, but those Palestinians who were willing to discuss a two-state solution, including the late uh Yasser Arafat, the chairman of uh the PLO, and later the the first president of the Palestinian Authority, they come with the slogan of two states, they come to this dialogue, really thinking that, as you would put it, that some sort of statehood is on offer, some sort of Palestinian self-determination is on the agenda. Only to find out that when these slogans are translated into reality, what matters are not the documents of peace, but the balance of power. And the balance of power allows the Israelis to uh enter the presidential uh residence in Ramallah and arrest the Palestinian president whenever they want to, without trial, even.

SPEAKER_01 41:53

It is an incredible thing when one listens to honest participants who tell what really went on in some of these so-called negotiations, like Clinton and Yasser Arafat and uh Ehud Barak, the uh then Prime Minister of Israel at Camp David in the year 2000 in the waning weeks of the Clinton administration. The Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was extraordinarily wary because he did not believe that there would actually be an offer. And Clinton, President of the United States, assured him: if this doesn't work, we will not blame you. We will just uh accept. And then, of course, there is no offer other than the enclaves. You will have uh little bits chopped up uh of uh these various neighborhoods. And when Arafat says I can't sign on something like that, immediately Clinton attacks Arafat and the Palestinians, that they never accept anything and so forth, exactly as you explained.

SPEAKER_00 43:02

Yeah, absolutely. Now, as you know, I I myself think that uh uh I can probably, unlike many Israelis, I I understand also the Palestinian rejection of the petition plan at the time in 1947. They were looking at Algeria, they were looking at Iraq, they were looking at uh Syria, and they were looking, and they said, according to the new world that President Wilson, Woodrow Wilson, helped to create, uh, the idea of an Arab nation state seems to be popular and legitimate. So Syria is for the Syrians, Jordan is for the Jordanians, and Egypt is for the Egyptians. So why isn't Palestine for the Palestinians? Why are we asked to give up half of our homeland to a group of settlers? Most of them arrived in Palestine three or four years earlier. And from their perspective, it would be like the the Algerians agreeing to partition Algeria into two states, one The French settlers and one for themselves. Not to mention the fact which we can't do, it's speculation. What would Israel would have done had the Palestinians accepted the partition plan, but we can't go into it because we don't know. But it's it does seem that the painful realization for me is, and that's not a very uh happy one, but I'm convinced that this idea of the two-state solution is reaching its uh shelf, it's kind of ending its shelf time. And uh the alternative is far more difficult, there's no doubt about it. To create a one democratic state for all is even more difficult than creating two-state solutions. However, I'm afraid we are faced now with these two options: either an apartheid state from the river to the sea, or the beginning of decolonizing it, democratizing it, and building something which is based on equality and transitional justice rather than pragmatism that uh has face in territorial partition. But I'm fully aware how how difficult it is, especially, of course, after the 7th of October, the level of mistrust in both sides is is high as it ever was, probably, and not surprisingly. And yet I do believe that uh reconciliation is done by people who can overcome on both sides these kinds of hurls.

SPEAKER_01 45:26

Yeah. We need to uh hope for uh some reconciliation after all of this time, and knowing, thanks to your remarkable historical analysis and others, uh how all of these profound difficulties uh and conflict and violence was to an extent foreseen from the start that this is uh the settler colonial idea was geared towards uh a kind of uh conflict that would be extraordinarily difficult to diffuse, and certainly on uh humane and ethical terms. And that's where we stand more than a hundred years after the Balfour Declaration. I wanted to uh close our discussion on uh one fascinating chapter which hits extremely close to home for me right now, and that is a chapter in your book on lobbying for Zionism about the Zionist lobby attack on civil society. This is, in other words, uh not only the lobbying of the U.S. Congress or the President of the United States, which, as you explain and demonstrate, has been so successful by bringing this remarkable coalition together of evangelicals and imperialists and uh the rest. But the attack has turned on civil society and including the universities, of course. The the main charge against my university, Columbia University, and others is that protesting Zionism is anti-Semitic. So it's exactly where we started this false claim that criticizing the behavior of a state, especially the violent behavior, and criticizing the ideology of uh nationalism in this context or colonial settlerism is the same thing as anti-Semitism. How does this work, actually? You know, from uh because I'm stunned at at how uh low level it is, but how effective it is.

SPEAKER_00 47:27

Yeah. Yes, and and uh uh if if you add to this the fact that uh in the continent, in Europe, for instance, places like Germany and France, you have intellectuals who subscribe to this idea that if you criticize Zionism, you're an anti-Semite or a Holocaust uh denier. People who otherwise are worth listening to and have a lot to offer us as intellectuals. I think that uh part of it, and I try to do it in the book on the lobby, has to do with the longevity of the lobby in the United States. It's a very powerful institution that has been there for many, many years, has a lot of experience, and in fact was able in politics of above to create an inertia by which it doesn't even have to exert power, people know its power and therefore self-censor themselves. But then came the, if you want, the information revolution. And people who might have known very little in 1948 about what happened in Palestine, people in 2023 or 2024 know everything that needs to be known about Palestine and also before 2023, of course. And therefore, actually, in something very positive in my mind, when they look at, if you want, in a simple way, who is the victim and who is the victimizer, they form a moral position. A moral position that is not informed by racism or anti-Semitism is informed, and we know it because we can examine their positions on other places where they think people are unjustly victimized, they form a normal moral, you know, indignation against people who are being occupied, ethnically cleansed, uh dispossessed, or abused daily, and are very critical on the people who are the victimizers. And the lobby, with all its power, with all the inertia that works in politics, especially in the United States, where money and politics go hand in hand, do not work with an ordinary person. You cannot threaten a person in the street, if you want, who says the poor Palestinians, one should stop their oppression and occupation by telling him you will not be re-elected. Now, the academics have a very interesting objective here for the lobby. They feel, they think, and I think we we should have a totally different conversation about what are universities in the 21st century, because there's this confusion in the public perception about the university of being either a business, a corporation run by a management, or a community of scholars who are devoted to truth and research and inquiry. And and the lobby can deal with the university as a management, as a corporation, because it resembles in their eyes politics. So they can use the same tactics of intimidation or inducement. But what do you do with uh the university as a community of scholars? You cannot really do that. And you cannot use the same tactics. And I think that's where where the uh the moment for me, and I will finish with this: the moment of truth is is not for the lobby. I think the moment of truth is here is for the universities. Maybe this is a wake-up call for us of what are we doing in those institutions? And sometimes because we have we have left this question unanswered for many years, we analyzed everyone else, but we didn't analyze ourselves enough. Uh, maybe it's a wake-up call for us to ask again, what are these institutions of higher education? And can they really be censored by politicians, even if politicians say we are funding you, so we expect you to uh reciprocate. I think all that is coming to the fore in many ways as tragic and it's horrible to think what's happening in the Gaza Street today on a daily basis. But looking at it in a wider context, it reopened questions of what is international justice, what are universal values, what is an academic institution's role in a society, and what is its relationship or should be its relationship with political elites and financial elites. And I think that sometimes it happens that there is an event that is so powerful, so charged, that it opens all these questions that sometimes we left uh unanswered because it was convenient, not because they shouldn't have not been answered. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 52:01

Thank you for your eloquence. You have uh done more than just about anybody to open the eyes and that discussion about what we should be doing, which I hope is searching for truth and uh justice uh and peace as uh our core uh foundation. And you've done this brilliantly and bravely. Thank you. We've been speaking with uh Professor Ilan Pape, professor of Exeter University, and a great, great scholar of uh the Middle East, of Israel, of the Israel-Palestine conflict. We've been speaking about his two recent books, a very short history of the Israel-Palestine conflict and lobbying for Zionism on both sides of the Atlantic. Most grateful to you, uh Elon for all your work and for this conversation. And thanks to everybody uh listening today. Uh uh thank you for joining Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you for joining in the conversation. Please subscribe, rate, and write a review on whatever platform you listen for your podcast.