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Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

1948 - with Benny Morris (Part 2)

Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

Ark Media

Society, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Israel, News Commentary, News, Politics, Elections, Palestine, Dan Senor, Government

4.82.3K Ratings

🗓️ 1 March 2024

⏱️ 37 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

PART 2 of 2 For more than 30 years of ‘on again-off again’ peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, many Israelis, and certainly most interested observers in the West, looked to the 1967 Six-Day War as the root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If only we could reverse the results of that defensive war in which Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza, the problem would be solved, so the narrative goes. And this served as the basis for all peace talks and agreements that have taken place since. But, to anyone willing to listen, the story that Palestinian leaders were telling had nothing to do with 1967, and everything to do with 1948. And the story they tell goes something like this: ‘In the 1940s Jews escaped the Nazis, fled Europe, colonized Palestine, and unprovoked - ethnically cleansed the Arabs. A textbook case of settler colonialism.’ They have managed to propagate this false narrative throughout much of Western society, where millions are mindlessly chanting those six words - ‘from the river to the sea.’ So while we never thought we’d need to re-litigate this topic, we invited to the podcast (for a special two-part discussion) one of the quintessential historians of 1948 - Benny Morris. Professor Morris has dedicated his entire career to studying and writing about the war of 1948, the circumstances that led to it and its aftermath - i.e The Palestinian Refugee Problem. Morris's first book was “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949”. His other books include: “1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War”, and “Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001”. He completed his undergraduate studies in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and received a doctorate in modern European history from the University of Cambridge. Links to all of Benny Morris’s books can be found here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Benny%20morris His recent published essays can be found here: https://quillette.com/author/benny-morris/?gad_source=1

Transcript

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0:00.0

And I am pleased to welcome back to this conversation Benny Morris for the second part of our discussion.

0:20.0

Last time we spoke about the first part of the war in Palestine, the civil war between the

0:25.2

Arabs and the Jews, between November, 1947 and May, 1948, resulting with about somewhere

0:31.3

just around 300,000 Arab refugees fleeing or expelled to the

0:36.2

West Bank and neighboring Arab countries in the Middle East. Let's start with just

0:41.3

a basic question. What triggered the 1948 Arab-Israeli war?

0:45.9

And specifically, why did Arab states

0:48.7

in the Middle East invade Israel,

0:50.9

or what was now this newly declared Israel?

0:53.5

The simple answer, the one which they broadcast to the world was we are invading Palestine

0:59.3

in order to protect our Arab brothers, the Palestinian Arabs, who have just been crushed by the Jews in the civil war,

1:06.4

and are being massacred by the Jews, that's the way they presented it to the world.

1:10.4

But the answer appears to be more complicated. Some of the Arab soldiers, some of the Arab leaders may have been motivated by a desire to help their fellow Arabs and to restore those who had been uprooted from their homes back to their homes, but most of the Arab leaders had interests of their own.

1:28.6

Jordan had been long interested in occupying East Jerusalem with the old city of Jerusalem at its center

1:36.1

for religious and political reasons and to occupy the West Bank, which is what they did in the invasion of 48. Egypt had its eyes set on

1:46.0

occupying the Negev desert, the southern part of Palestine, which had been largely

1:51.0

allocated for Jewish statehood. The Syrians

1:54.4

apparently were interested in taking hold of the sea of Galilee and

1:58.2

the surrounding land around it because they coveted water and perhaps the sea for other reasons.

2:04.0

So each of the Arab states invading probably had their own particular

2:09.0

geopolitical interests in occupying parts of Palestine.

2:13.0

So we're talking about Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and what about Iraq?

...

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