How did tensions between Palestinians and Israelis reach the devastating breaking point of October 7? Our panelists will offer crucial background on recent history and events leading up to the attack on Israel and the war in Gaza. This forum will follow along the lines of a “teach-in” to educate and review what is known about the current situation—with the shared value of conveying compassion rather than blame. Scholars of Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East will share their insights on the forces that have shaped the war and how it is experienced on the ground.
MELANI CAMMETT: Our first presenter today is Professor Derek Penslar who is the William Lee Frost professor of Jewish History in the Department of History and director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard. The next presenter is Professor Amahl Bishara who is Associate Professor of Anthropology and of studies in race, colonialism, and diaspora in the Department of Anthropology at Tufts University.
And last but not least, we have Professor Yael Berda joining us from Israel. Yael Is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is a fellow at the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School. Thank you all for agreeing to speak with us today. And I will turn it over to Professor Penslar. Thank you.
DEREK PENSLAR: Hey. Thank you. There we go. 10 minutes. Thank you very much, Melani. And thank you for the invitation. I'm recovering from COVID. So if I cough a little bit, please forgive me. Obviously, I can't sum up the entire history of the conflict in 10 minutes. But what I do want to do is take us back to a key moment in 1947 when the international community had to make some decisions regarding Palestine, what Palestine's fate could be or should be.
And we're all really in 2023 living in the shadow of 1947, that is, after World War II in the wake of the genocide of European Jewry, in the wake of the beginning of decolonization movements throughout Asia and the Middle East, Palestinians demanded an Arab state, a Palestinian state in all of Palestine. Jews believing that Jews the world over needed a safe haven demanded a Jewish state or wanted a Jewish state in all of Palestine.
The United Nations was tasked with trying to figure out what to do with this. There were 600,000 Jews in Palestine. There were 1.2, 1.3 million Palestinians. What to do? And they came up with a couple of decisions. One was that they did not want a state that was entirely an Arab state or entirely a Jewish state. That would be grossly unfair. And so they had two choices. And they debated those choices, and we're with those choices to this day.
One was partition-- a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. And the other possibility, which a minority of the special committee on Palestine was in favor of, was a confederation, a single state with a central government but with autonomy for Jews and for Palestinians. And the United Nations committee on Palestine debated this. And they decided that the partition alternative was the least unjust and the least unworkable.
And I'm saying that quite carefully because they knew there was a certain amount of injustice in any proposal. There was a certain amount of threat of unworkability in any proposal. But they figured this was the best that they could do. But unfortunately, it wasn't good enough. Arab world and the Palestinians did not want a Jewish state in a portion of Palestine, and the Palestinians fought. They resisted against this, as did the Arab world.
They fought a war against Israel, and Israel defeated them. And in the process of the war, Israel dispossessed 750,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of whom, 95% of whom were not allowed to return to their homes. So we were pretty far away by 1949 from those two possibilities from 1947 in that Israel controlled much of historic Palestine, and the rest was controlled by Jordan, the area that became known as the West Bank and then a tiny sliver of land about three times the size of Boston, which became known as the Gaza Strip.
And just so that we understand the small size of the territory, not only is the Gaza Strip about three times the size of the municipal boundaries of Boston, the entire area of historic Palestine is almost identical to that of Massachusetts. So it's very, very small. And unfortunately, in the decades that followed, the Israeli Jews and the Palestinian Arabs moved further and further away from the kinds of attempts at equity that the United Nations had in mind in 1947.
In a series of wars between Israel and the Arab world and guerrilla resistance by Palestinians against Israelis, distrust, hatred between the sides grew ever greater. In the 1967 war, Israel took control of those portions of historic Palestine that it had not previously held. So by 1967, Israel really held the entirety of historic Palestine, keeping Palestinians who were not citizens of the state of Israel in a position of military occupation and essentially without rights.
There was a moment in the 1990s when it appeared that we might be going back to 1947 and to the promises inherent in 1947 when the Israelis and the Palestinians the PLO negotiated what became known as the Oslo Accords signed in 1993 and 1995. And these Accords did represent mutual recognition of the state of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization with the possibility, at least many in the international community hoped, that this would lead to Palestinian statehood in time.
But the Oslo Accords were scuppered, and they were scuppered as the result of actions on both sides, bad faith on both sides. Israel continued to expand its civilian settlements in the West Bank. And Palestinian extremists were determined to resist the Oslo Accords and the possibility of recognition of Jewish statehood. The most important of the factions that led this resistance against Oslo was Hamas that had been founded at the end of 1987 and that, in the 1990s and early 2000, perpetrated dozens of suicide bombings that killed close to 1,000 Israeli civilians.
Israel, in turn, had its own extremists, one of whom assassinated the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. So the promises of Oslo failed. And once again, we returned to a situation, which was exactly the opposite of what the United Nations wanted in 1947, the increasing reality of a single state dominated by Israel in which Palestinians live either discriminated against within the state of Israel or occupied in the former territories held by Egypt and Jordan.
And this is the way things have remained. And I think that the ways forward have been really limited because of two diametrically opposed and yet mutually limiting ways of thinking. That is the way that Israel has conceived of the Palestinians and the way that Palestinians and their supporters have conceived of Israel. And they've been both kind of totalizing epistemological frameworks.
In the case of Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab world in general are viewed through the lens of the long history of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. It is not a coincidence that, for example, after 1948 in films or in literature in Israel, it was not uncommon to have a scene where an Israeli soldier rescues an injured Arab soldier from 1948 only to find that this soldier is in fact a German volunteer, a Nazi. This was kind of a theme in 1950s film and literature.
And it has shown up over and over again, the equation between the two, the notion that the entire Palestinian people have been represented to Israeli collective memory through Mohammad Amin al-Husseini, the interwar Palestinian leader who was a Nazi collaborator during World War II. He spent the war in Berlin or part of the war in Berlin broadcasting propaganda for the Nazi regime.
But then in Israeli collective memory, the entire Palestinian people become associated with this one human being. And this conflation of Arab, Palestinians, and so forth with the Holocaust showed up yet again just a few years ago when the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that it was Amin al-Husseini who actually put the idea of the genocide of European Jews into Hitler's ear, which is, of course, not true.
And it helps us explain some of the depth of the reactions to October 7 that it was within two days of the massacre that many people all over the world in the Biden administration but also throughout the state of Israel and the Jewish world talked about this event as the greatest day in-- or sorry-- the greatest massacre or the greatest tragedy in Jewish history since the Holocaust.
This was not insincere. This was not manipulative. This was, I believe, a sincere reaction to a culture that has been traumatized by generations of not only the aftermath of the genocide of tow-thirds of European Jewry but also Holocaust denial and Holocaust minimization in so much of the world, including the Arab world. This has definitely made it difficult, I think, for Israelis to fully appreciate Palestinian rights, the Palestinians as a people with rights to obviously collective self-determination dignity, and so forth.
But just to finish, Palestinians themselves and their supporters have also been trapped in a rather totalistic way of thinking of understanding Zionism solely through the lens of settler colonialism and the Nakba, the catastrophic dispossession of the Palestinian people. It's quite common, and I'm sure we'll hear more about this in a few moments, to understand Zionism through the lens of colonialism. And that is indeed one important way of understanding Zionism's place in the 20th century.
The problem is that if all Israel is reduced to or associated with is colonialism, two errors emerge. One is that settler colonialism is a global phenomenon throughout the 20th century. There isn't a populated continent on this planet that did not practice settler colonialism in the 20th century. It's not unique to the West. And to present Zionism as somehow a Western invasion, incursion really suggests that the state of Israel shouldn't be there. And if you believe that the state of Israel shouldn't be there, it's not far from that to then believing that the state should somehow be eviscerated.
The second much more I'd say simple and even more problematic corollary of the association between Zionism and colonialism is that, regardless of whether Israel is or is not a settler colonial state, there are seven million Jews who live there, and they're not going anywhere. And they have been there for generations.
And as Rashid Khalidi points out at the end of his most recent book, The Hundred Years' War against Palestine, the Israelis have developed all the attributes of a people, of a nation. Again, they're not going anywhere. So the use of the settler colonial motif is I think very important for analytical purposes. But I'm not sure it's very important or very helpful in terms of moving forward and coming to a situation where we can get back to 1947. And that's really what we need to do.
We have two options. The options are partition-- Jewish state and a Palestinian state-- or some kind of confederation where Jews and Palestinians share governance, but each people is allowed to enjoy autonomy and self-determination because the alternatives a Jewish state dominated by Jews dominating the Palestinians or a Palestinian state that dominates Jews or expels them or kills them as was stated quite explicitly by Hamas as recently as 2021, these are obviously not going to be acceptable from a moral sense or in a pragmatic sense because neither side is going to allow that to happen. So thank you.