Ottoman History Podcast - The Hundred Years' War on Palestine

Episode Date: November 19, 2023

with Rashid Khalidi hosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan | In this episode, Rashid Khalidi discusses his latest book The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017, where he defines Zionism not only as a nationalist project in conflict with the Palestinian one, but also a settler colonial project supported by the British and later the American imperialism. We begin in the late Ottoman period as Khalidi examines the familiar episodes and key turning points, which he characterizes as declaratations of war and wagings of war on Palestinians. We discuss the 1917 Balfour declaration and the communal conflict in the British Mandate of Palestine that led to the general strike and Arab revolt of 1936. The 1948 war, the Palestinian Nakba, and the creation of the State of Israel provide the backdrop for Cold War period conflicts, the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the outbreak of the First Intifada, which culminated in the Oslo Accords of 1993-95. Khalidi reflects on his experiences with the failures of Oslo, which set the stage for the rise of Hamas in Gaza and periodic sieges that have continued to the present day. We conclude with a consideration of the current war, situating the unprecedented civilian toll of both the attacks by Hamas in Israel and the subsequent Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip within Khalidi's larger narrative of more than a century of war on Palestine.   « Click for More »

Welcome to Ottoman History Podcast. This is Zainab Azar Badagan. On the 34th day of Israeli assault on Gaza after Hamas' attack on 7th of October 2023, I'm talking to Rashid Khalidi about history of Palestine from the Ottoman times to now. In his book, Khalidi discusses this history as a war on Palestine and a war on the very existence of Palestine and its people, the Palestinians. He argues that this was not only a war declared and waged by the Zionists or Israelis but more importantly was carried out by various colonial and imperial powers in the past hundred years. Before we get to the six turning points, or what you term as declarations of war on Palestine, I want to ask about the framing of the book, and more specifically,

its subtitle, A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance. I mean, the title of the book is The Hundred Years' War on Palestine. The US edition subtitle is The History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance. The UK title is slightly different, Colonial Conquest. And I argue in the book that that is the proper framing for understanding what's going on. It is a war on Palestine. It's not just a struggle between Palestinians and Israelis. It involves great powers as well as Israel on Israel's side. And it is and has always been a settler-colonial war intended to replace an indigenous population with a new population. Now, the new population also constitutes a national project. Zionism is not just a settler-colonial phenomenon. It is also a national project. And what has been created, as in many other settler colonial struggles, is a new national entity.

The United States is a settler colonial project which has produced a national entity. Zionism has done that. It's created an Israeli people, a national entity in Palestine. I would argue that that is a framework that most Zionists accepted before World War II. They had institutions like the Jewish Colonization Agency. I cite Zev Jabotinsky in the book repeatedly as talking about this as a colonial conflict. Of course the Arabs resist. All indigenous peoples resist colonization, he says. And he's right. And that was always the nature of it and it continues to be the nature of it and it continues to be the nature. You start the book in Ottoman Palestine with a letter by your great-great-great uncle,

Yusuf Diyar Pasha, who was the mayor of Jerusalem at the time that he wrote this letter in 1890. Can you tell us more about Yusuf Diyiya and this letter that he wrote to Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism? Yusuf Ziya was a persona non grata for various periods under Abd al-Hamid because he'd been one of the members of the Majestat Maboussane of the parliament, which had tried to put limits on the sultan's powers during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78. And he was apparently quite vocal in the Meclis. And so he was exiled by the sultan. Eventually, he brought him back, he gave him different jobs. But he was seen as slightly suspect. So he spent a great deal of time in Austria,

where he became a lecturer at the Kaiserlichen, the Royal and Imperial University in Vienna. So he knew German, he knew French. He'd served in Russia, he knew some Russian, he knew English. And he had lived in Vienna on and on. So he was aware of Herzl and the Zionist movement. Very, very knowledgeable about Zionism. In the family library, I found many books of his about Judaism and about Zionism. And so he writes to Herzl in 1899, you know, we are cousins. We have great admiration for Judaism. Abraham is our forefather, these kinds of things. We understand your links to Palestine. And Zionism in and of itself is not objectionable, but there's a population here that will not be supplanted. And there's an

Ottoman Empire, which is the sovereign. And you can't go around these things. And so he ends it by saying, for the sake of God, leave Palestine alone. This will be a problem. This will be a problem for Muslim-Jewish relations. This will be a problem with the Ottoman Empire. This will be a problem with the existing population of Palestine. He was right on all three counts, of course. So that's his letter to Herzl. Herzl replies. And basically, he completely ignores everything that Yusuf Zia Pasha says. He basically says, you know, we couldn't possibly think of harming the population, the population will benefit. We wouldn't think of removing the population. Now, Yusuf Zia Pasha never mentioned removing the population. So something is going through

Herzl's mind. He wants to reassure him about something he's actually thinking of doing, which we know he was thinking of doing from Herzl's own diaries, which Yusuf Zia never mentioned. And it's very telling. Basically, he ignores every serious point that Yusuf Zia Pasha makes. And that's pretty much characteristic of Zionist leadership from that point on. That kind of ignoring of the Palestinians and of their demands and of their concerns, pretending that or assuming that Palestinians are stupid and are not able to read German and read the program of the Zionist congresses and the plans and Herzl's books. Just for our listeners, what was the Zionist project?

What was Herzl's books. Just for our listeners, what was the Zionist project? What was Herzl's project? Well, Herzl's project was to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, to, in the words of his diaries, to spirit the population across the frontiers discreetly. So in other words, replace the Arab population with the Jewish population. That's always been this demographic drive has always been central to Zionism because without bringing in large number of Jewish immigrants and without reducing the Arab population, it is impossible to create a Jewish majority state in an Arab majority country.

So let's talk about the first declaration of war on Palestine, which is the Balfour Declaration of 2nd of November 1917. We just had the anniversary of it. What was the Balfour Declaration and what was its impact on Palestine and the Zionist movement? I traced the beginning of what I call the war on Palestine to the Balfour Declaration, which I describe as the first declaration of war on the Palestinians. And what I'm trying to do here is the Balfour Declaration, which I describe as the first declaration of war on the Palestinians. And what I'm trying to do here is to decenter the idea that this is Arabs and Jews or Palestinians and Israelis only. What I'm trying to do is to show that this has always been a struggle between the Palestinians

on the one hand and great imperial sponsors of the Zionist project as well as the Zionists. And Britain's patronage of Zionism, starting in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration, is what changes the situation. It's not just Zionism. It's the British. And it involves a British commitment to support the establishment of a Jewish national home for the Jewish people with an understanding that nothing shall be done to harm the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish populations. What does that mean? It means there's one group that has national rights and is a people, and that's the Jewish people. Britain is committed to that. The second element of this declaration, which is equally important, is what it does not say. It describes one group as a people

with national rights, and it does not describe the other group. It simply says non-Jewish populations. So they're not a people. They do not have national rights. They do not have political rights, because if you're a people with national rights, then you have a whole range of political rights that follow from that. The others are simply non-Jewish communities. And the only rights that are guaranteed to them under the Balfour Declaration are civil rights, i.e. litigation and so forth, and religious rights, not national rights, not political rights. And unlike the Jewish people who are named in the Declaration, the Palestinians are never named.

And the importance of the Balfour Declaration is not just that it puts the power of the greatest empire on earth at the time behind the Zionist project, but that the League of Nations incorporates the Balfour Declaration into the terms of the mandate for Palestine, which is issued to Britain. So Britain has issued a mandate which amplifies what the Balfour Declaration means. The mandate never mentions the Palestinians either. The mandate never describes them as a national community or as a people. It reiterates and amplifies every one of the terms of the Balfour Declaration. How is Britain supposed to do this? It's supposed to establish close settlement of Jews on the land. It's supposed to open immigration to Palestine. These are the terms of the mandate. And so

the Balfour Declaration and the mandate are a declaration of war by Britain and by the League of Nations on the Palestinian people. And what is the Palestinian reaction to the Balfour Declaration and then the mandate? How much do they know about the details of what's being said? When do they find out? And how do they react? Well, they don't find out for a while because the press is suspended during the war. There's only one paper published under the Ottomans. There's a shortage of newsprint and there's censorship. And the Ottoman army is retreating at the time the Balfour Declaration is issued in November. They find out about it much later via the Cairo press. Press is not re-established in Palestine until 1920.

And there's intensive censorship. And the British try and hide this because it causes all kinds of problems for their military administration. There's a military administration for several years after the war. But the Palestinians find out. They react extremely negatively. They write to the Paris Peace Conference. They write to the British. They start forming what are called Muslim Christian Congresses, which elect national representatives, whom the British refuse to receive, of course. The Palestinians aren't a people. They don't have the right to a national existence. Therefore, their representatives have no status. And that's the British position right up until the end of the mandate. So they resist first verbally and via petitions and demonstrations and so on, and then eventually violently. There are riots and

demonstrations that turned violent in 1920 and 1921. There's a major uprising in 1929. Many people are killed in 1929, especially many Jews, even more Arabs. And then there's a huge national uprising, which starts as a general strike in 1936 and turns into a nationwide Palestinian revolt from 1936 to 1939. So they reject the Balfour Declaration from the beginning to the end. And the British keep saying, if you want us to talk to you, you have to accept the Balfour Declaration from the beginning to the end. And the British keep saying, if you want us to talk to you, you have to accept the Balfour Declaration in the terms of the mandate. They say, by the terms of the mandate, we don't exist. We're supposed to recognize a document and accept the document as a basis for talking with you, which negates our very existence.

We can't do that. In this clip, the spokesperson for the Arab Higher Commission lays out the reasons and demands for the 1936 Palestinian general strike, summarizing the Palestinian aspirations for self-determination and British failures to safeguard them within the framework of the mandate. Against all principles, the British government imposed the Balfour Declaration which is abhorred by all Arabs in the Near East, and on favouring the establishment of a national home for Jews, forgot intentionally to safeguard the civil rights of the non-Jewish population, the Arabs who decided on a general and a complete strike until the total and immediate stoppage of Jewish emigration is brought about

and until the government introduces an essential change in its present policy. So the British declare war in 1917 and with the adoption of the mandate in 1922. massive repression by over 100,000 British troops and police, with auxiliaries recruited from the Zionist militias to help the British, with the Royal Air Force bombing villages, with torture, with summary execution of prisoners, with prison camps up and down the length and breadth of Palestine, with the entire Palestinian leadership exiled, such that by the end of the revolt, somewhere between 14 and 17% of the Palestinian Arab adult male population have been killed or wounded or imprisoned or exiled. The entire leadership is exiled, and many, many leaders are killed. This breaks the Palestinians.

So fast forward to 1947, which is the second declaration of war. What happens in 1947? So the next declaration of war that I describe is the partition resolution of 1947. By 1947, something fundamental has changed in Palestine, and that is the rise to power of the Nazis has led to an enormous increase in the Jewish population of Palestine. In the late 20s and 30s, that proportion hovered at between 17 and 18%. In fact, it goes down slightly at the beginning of the 30s.

Suddenly, because of the rise to power of Hitler in 1933, immigration shoots up. And such that by 1939, the Jewish population of the country is over 30%, whereas it had been 17% or 18%, six or seven or eight years earlier. This changes the situation. It's the main trigger for the Great Revolt. And it means, in the eyes of Ben-Gurion and the leaders of the Zionist movement that they have the demographic capability and also the military capability to turn Palestine into a Jewish state. And that's what happens in 1947-48. The partition resolution is adopted

by the General Assembly of the United Nations, Resolution 181 of November 29th, 1947. We're coming up on the anniversary of that as well. November is a solemn month for Palestinians. The United Nations decides to give most of Palestine to the Jewish minority, who constitute less than 33% of the population. So 55% of the country, including most of the fertile land, is given to 35% of the population who own about 6% of the land in Palestine and less than 20% of the arable land. I described the partition resolution as I described the Balfour Declaration and the mandate as declarations of war, not so much by Israel as by the international community, as represented by the United Declaration and the mandate as declarations of war, not so much by Israel as by the international

community, as represented by the United States and the Soviet Union, which are the main sponsors of the partition resolution. And similar to the Balfour Declaration and the waging of war during the Arab revolt, you have the partition as the declaration of war, and you have waging a war in 48. What happens during that war? The Zionist movement triumphs in fighting the Palestinians before May 15th, 1948, which is when the British Mandate ends, the British army leaves, the state of Israel is established, and the Arab armies enter. Before that, 300,000 Palestinians are driven out of Haifa, Jaffa, Tiberias, Bissan, and dozens of other villages in the beginning of what Palestinians called the

Nakba, the catastrophe of 1948. The Arab armies enter partly because of this flow of refugees, and the conflict is transformed into an Arab states versus Israel conflict. The Palestinians sort of, for a period, disappear. They take even more of Palestine than was allotted to the Jewish state under the partition plan. They expand the territory that is supposed to be under their control from 55% to 78%. And in so doing, they drive out another 400,000 or so Palestinians, such that by the time the armistice agreements are signed between Israel and the four neighboring Arab states, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, 750,000 or so Palestinians have been driven from their homes. Many of them end up in cities in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. Others remain in the West Bank, which comes under Jordanian control,

or in the Gaza Strip, which comes under Egyptian control. So you have the creation of an entirely new refugee population as a result of this war. So let's move to the next declaration of war, which is 67. What happens in 67? And why is it a turning point for Palestinians and also for the Arab states, actually? As we know, Israel launches a preemptive strike in June 67, defeats three Arab armies and occupies the Egyptian Sinai, the Syrian Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In the lead up to this war, what I think is really important, two things are important to understand. One is that by this time, Palestinian nationalism has reasserted itself. And you have Palestinian resistance groups,

which launch attacks on Israel, which helped precipitate the 67 war, actually. The result of this is the creation of another wave of refugees. Israel expels about a quarter of a million, maybe 300,000 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, from East Jerusalem, the refugee camps along the Jordan River Valley, and some people from Gaza. And the Palestinians come into much more prominence as a result. The other important factor in the 67 War is, and this is why I call it a declaration of war, not just by Israel, but by the United States. The United States, as American documents show, President Johnson, Secretary of Defense McNamara, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Wheeler, all give Israel a green light to launch its preemptive strike. all give Israel a green light to launch its preemptive strike.

And even more importantly, in the UN Security Council, the Americans and the British craft a resolution, UN Security Council Resolution 242, which is adopted again in November of 1967, and which doesn't mention any of the issues relating to Palestine that had been the concern of the United Nations up to this point. Up to this point, the United Nations had argued, called for the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes and their compensation. Up to this point, the United Nations had tried to get Israel to return some of the territories that it occupied during the 48 War. Up to this point, this was seen as the question of Palestine, at least in the General Assembly. 242 changes all of that. The United States, Ambassador Goldberg, Secretary of State Rusk, President Johnson, and their advisors, all of them are agreed that this has now become a problem between Israel and the Arab states. The Palestine question is off the

table. Palestinians aren't mentioned in 242. Just solution of the refugee problem is the only reference, oblique and indirect, to the Palestinians. It's like the oblique and indirect reference in the Balfour Declaration. The Palestinians are not named, and no provision is made for any political resolution of their issues, i.e. what happened to the Arab state called for under the partition resolution, disappears into the ether in 242. So the United States moves the gold posts, as it were, of course, in close coordination with the Israeli government, to a situation much more favorable to Israel, including language which doesn't call for Israel withdrawal from all the territories that it occupied in the 67 war. But in exchange for Israel getting secure and recognized boundaries and things that Israel wants, the Arab states are only to get withdrawal from territories occupied,

which is a loophole through which Israel drives a Mack truck and says, well, we'll give back some of them. We won't give back others of them. And that's the Israeli position to this day. They were forced to give back all of Sinai because the Egyptians insisted in the 1979 peace treaty. But they not only refused to give back the Golan Heights or any part of the occupied Palestinian territories, they've annexed much of them. They've annexed the Golan Heights, they've annexed Jerusalem and annexed other bits. So I argue that this is a third declaration of war. Not so much the American support for Israel during the war as Security Council Resolution 242. And this is the moment that basically whole of Palestine is occupied directly by Israel. And what happens to Palestinian

resistance between 67 and 82, which is the next declaration of war. The Palestinian National Movement has been revived by this stage, even before the 67 War. As I mentioned, their attacks on Israel are one of the precipitating factors in the 1967 War, actually. So they're already there. They're a source of great concern to the Arab governments because the Arab governments are very much afraid of Israel.

Israel has defeated them catastrophically and categorically and decisively in 1948. And Israel defeated Egypt decisively in 1956. And they have just been defeated decisively in 1967. Israel is already a regional superpower. We now know it's a nuclear power. It has nuclear weapons by 1967. At the outset, Egypt wages what it calls a war of attrition along the Suez Canal from 68 to 70. The Americans finally bring about a ceasefire in September of 1970. But the Palestinians continue their campaign against Israel. They're driven out of Jordan, which had been their main base in what's called Black September. Abdel Nasser dies.

A new president comes into power in Egypt. President said that. And he tries to make peace with Israel in 71 and 72. The Israelis contemptuously dismiss these efforts. And he finally goes to war in 1973 together with Syria. And the stated objective is to obtain the liberation of the territories occupied in 1967. No longer are the Arab countries fighting Israel over what happened in 1948, over the destruction of Arab Palestine. And they accept Security Council Resolution 242. Meanwhile, the Palestinians have unified, have taken over the Palestine Liberation Organization,

which had been founded by the Arab states to control Palestinian nationalism, and they now control it. And they're recognized by the Arab states as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. And then Arafat comes to the UN in the same year, 1974. I am a fighter for freedom. I am a fighter for freedom. And I know many of those sitting in this hall were in the same situations of the struggle I am fighting now. In 1974, Yasser Arafat gave the famous olive tree branch speech to the UN General Assembly. Arafat famously ended his speech by saying, Today, I have come bearing an olive tree branch and a freedom fighter's gun.

Do not let the olive tree branch fall from my hand. I repeat, do not let the olive tree branch fall from my hand. The Palestinians for the first time are internationally recognized as an interlocutor, not by Israel, not by the United States. They demand that the Palestinians accept 242. And the Palestinians have the same problem with 242 in the 1970s and 80s as they had with the Balfour Declaration in the 20s and the 30s. You want us to recognize something that eliminates our existence. We don't exist in 242. What happens in 82? Why does Israel occupy Lebanon? And what does that have to do with the Palestinian question?

Israeli governments from 1977 onwards are dominated by the Likud party. And the Likud party is even more resolute than other Israeli political formations in its determination that all of Palestine should belong to Israel. And they're very disturbed by the possibility that the PLO might eventually accept 242 and accept the idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. And finally, under Prime Minister Begin and Defense Minister Sharon, the Israeli army invades Lebanon in 1982. And in so doing, it obtains another green light from Washington. So the United States is a party

to this war, which is designed to eliminate the PLO, force Syria out of Lebanon, and establish a puppet regime which will make peace with Israel. Again, it's another declaration of war, which is not just by Israel, by Israel and the United States. Israel invades Lebanon, kills about 20,000 people, besieges Beirut, forces the PLO out. The United States guarantees the safety of Palestinian civilians who are left behind. But after the president-elect, who was to head this puppet state, Bashir al-Jumeirah, is assassinated, Sharon enters West Beirut, and the Israeli army perpetrates through its Lebanese clients the Sabra and Shatila massacres, in spite of American guarantees to protect those civilian populations, under the claim

that there are terrorists hiding there. So this is an American, an Israeli-American war on the Palestinians, which establishes a new government in Lebanon, which eventually signs a peace treaty with Israel, which is never ratified. And ultimately, Israel exchanges the PLO for a new force which develops in Lebanon, which is Hezbollah, which resists the Israeli occupation until 18 years later, the Israelis are finally forced to withdraw from South Lebanon in 2000. So that's the next, that's the fourth declaration of war. What happens to the PLO when they're forced out of Lebanon? Well, the PLO is weakened, obviously, because Lebanon was their last base. They're forced to move their headquarters to Tunis.

They're forced to move their forces to all over the Arab world, Algeria, Yemen, and so forth. And they are considerably weakened in consequence. So in that respect, Sharon's war aims are achieved. The PLO is in a very low state until the First Intifada erupts in December of 1987. And it is a largely unarmed, sometimes violent, but mainly nonviolent uprising against Israeli occupation. After 20 years of Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Palestinians rise up with demonstrations, with boycotts, with strikes, with throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, with a nationwide refusal to accept the occupation. And this forces changes on Israel eventually. I describe it as one of the few Palestinian victories

in the entire war on Palestine. So how did the First Antifada lead to the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995, which you describe as another internationally sanctioned American-Israeli declaration of war on Palestine. The Oslo Accords emerge from a shift in American policy, a shift in PLO policy, and a shift in Israeli policy. The PLO in the 80s changes its charter, changes its objectives to a Palestinian state alongside Israel, accepts the principle of partition, accepts Security Council Resolution 242, and meets the American conditions to be

accepted as a negotiating partner. And it takes three years from 1988 when the PLO does that till the Madrid Peace Conference and the negotiations in Washington that follow. The result of this ultimately is the Oslo Accords. I describe this from my own perspective because I was an advisor to the Palestinian delegation that was sent to Madrid and that negotiated in Madrid and in Washington with the Israelis. And one of the things we realized was that the negotiating framework imposed by the United States and Israel, which launched negotiations with Lebanon, with Syria, and with Jordan, and in the case of Jordan

led to a peace treaty, and in the case of Syria came very close to a treaty, in the case of the Palestinians excluded final resolution of all the important issues. What we were allowed to negotiate was autonomy under continued Israeli military occupation without diminution or cessation of the Israeli settlement project in the occupied territories, without any discussion of sovereignty or statehood. All of this was left to what were called final status negotiations, which never came to a conclusion in the end. We realized this in Washington, and these conclusions were pretty much conclusion in the end. And we realized this in Washington, and these conclusions were pretty much at a dead end. The PLO decided to negotiate secretly with

the Israelis and sent delegates to Oslo, who produced the Oslo Accords, which are essentially the agreement that we in Washington refused to accept. And our point was, you can't negotiate over a pie while the Israelis are gobbling it. You know, you have to stop, at the very least freeze settlements. And the Americans and the Israelis refused. And we realized in Washington that this kind of process could not lead to even a minimal satisfaction of Palestinian national objectives. And the Osco Accords did not. And they produced this grotesque sham of a Palestinian authority, which has no sovereignty, no jurisdiction. Israeli troops can enter any part of the occupied territories at any time, and has really very

little authority. What is Palestine in post-Oslo? Before Oslo, movement in and out of the occupied territories and into Israel, even after the first intifada, was basically free. You could move from any place in Jerusalem, the West Bank or Gaza, to any place in Israel or the other occupied territories. There was no wall.

There were no barriers. Oslo created those barriers. What Rabin argued for was separation. And that meant hemming the Palestinians into enclaves, one around Ramallah, one around Nablus, one around Hebron, one around Jericho, separated from one another by vast swaths of Israeli-controlled territory into which the settlers have been expanding ceaselessly ever since. Such that most of the West Bank is now not only Israeli-controlled, but is increasingly occupied by settlers. 60% of the West Bank is so-called Area C.

What Israel has created post-Oslo is the realization of Likud Dream, of exclusive Israeli sovereignty from the river to the sea. And you have now an imposed Israeli one-state solution, which excludes the possibility through the occupation, settlement, and absorption legally of the West Bank into Israel. You have a one-state reality from the river to the sea. So let's talk about Gaza. What happens to Gaza after the Oslo Accords? Gaza suffers a very cruel fate, because Gaza was turned into a sealed, besieged entity. The walls and the fences start going up after Oslo. The checkpoints, the controls on population increase starting in the late 1990s and into the period of the Second Intifada, which starts in 2000 and is much more violent.

It's violent. I mean, it involves suicide bombings. It involves Israeli bombings of Palestinian towns and villages, bombings with aircraft and combat helicopters. And over time, Hamas develops into a much more powerful force. It starts in 1987, Hamas as a challenger to the PLO. Hamas takes up that cry for resistance, armed resistance, and for total liberation. And as the Oslo peace process

fails, as it becomes apparent, not only that the Palestinians will not get a Palestinian state because of Oslo, but that Oslo has made their situation much, much worse. They're being hemmed in, walls, closures, checkpoints, GDP per capita goes down, settlement project continues to expand without any cease. Hamas becomes more popular over time, to the point that by 2006, they're able to win the elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council that's been established under the Oslo Accords. And Israel retaliates, refusing to accept a Palestinian coalition government, including Hamas and Fatah, that the Palestinians tried to establish that would negotiate with Israel, and eventually hermetically sealing Gaza under blockade, which eventually becomes a siege.

And Hamas then takes over the government of the Gaza Strip. And the reality ever since then has been periodic wars on Gaza, tax from Gaza, wars on Gaza, and so on and so forth, until this horrific war that we're witnessing today. Today, Palestinians use social media to broadcast the news of what is happening in Gaza. One prominent example is the 25-year-old Bissan Aouda, whose consistent message is always one of survival. Hey everyone, this is Bissan from Gaza, Mr. Alive, and today is the day 43 of the war in Gaza. And it's been more than 50 days... of the war in Gaza, and it's been more than 50 days.

As a final question, is the war that we are witnessing today any different from, because there are so many parallels with all of these turning points that you describe, but at the same time, it just looks so horrendous to the point that it has been called a second Nakba. We have not yet reached the level of frightfulness of 1948 in terms of expulsions of Palestinians. Palestinians have been expelled, over a million have been forced to leave their homes in the northern parts of Gaza. An area that was already tightly constrained with a huge overpopulation has been reduced by Israeli attacks on the northern, particularly, they're attacking all of Gaza, all of the Gaza Strip, but they're now particularly focusing on

the northern part. And there have been expulsions of Palestinians in the West Bank from their villages by settlers supported by the army, maybe a thousand or so Palestinians living in isolated communities in the southern part of the West Bank and in the Jordan River Valley, but nothing on the scale of 1948 yet. The other level is the casualties. The two highest casualty tolls among Palestinians in all of these wars that I've described were in 1948 when about 20,000 Palestinians were killed, mostly civilians, and in the war on Lebanon in 1982 when 20,000 people, 19 or 20,000 people, were killed, including both Lebanese and Palestinians. The Palestinian death toll may have been more than half. We are approaching that

number in terms of Palestinian deaths in Gaza right now. But we will soon be approaching the numbers of Palestinians killed in 82. And heaven forbid, if it goes on for more weeks or months, we may be approaching the ghastly casualty tolls of the 1948 war. Those took place, however, over a period of many, many months, from the spring of 1948 until the armistice agreements of 1949. This death toll of 10,000 people, 10,500 people, has taken place over a period of a month. So the frequency and the number of casualties has been at a rate never before seen on the Palestinian side. Also on the Israeli side, by the way. I mean, the number of Israeli civilians killed in the first few days of this attack, the assault by Hamas,

according to Israeli sources, is about a thousand. And they've already identified almost 900 of the civilian victims. That's the highest Israeli civilian casualty toll maybe ever, including 48. 6,000 Israelis died in 1948, but they were mainly soldiers. Almost 400 Israeli soldiers and security personnel also died in the first days of the Gaza war as a result of Hamas's attack on Israeli military installations and then on the settlements along the border with Gaza. So we're reaching casualty tolls never before seen. So this is a new chapter. And we're in the middle of it. It hasn't finished, of course, as we speak. But already, it marks gruesome new heights in civilian casualties, actually on both sides.

So these casualty tolls are stratospheric by the previous standards of this conflict. You said this war is a new chapter. Would it fit the same frame of analysis as your book that this is a settler-colonial war on Palestine. It's a settler colonial war on the Palestinian people, which the new Israeli government is much more explicit in admitting. I mean, when they talk about what they're doing in the West Bank, it's clear they intend to annex and limit as much as possible. And some ministers in the government are talking about expelling the population entirely, which apparently, according to many reports, the Israeli government tried to, via American mediation, get Egypt and Jordan to accept the expulsion of parts of the Palestinian

population from historic Palestine into Sinai and possibly into Jordan. So it was and is always a settler colonial project, in the words of Jabotinsky, to transform Palestine into the land