Part II
(Part I here : bit.ly/2ptW4gs)

Are you looking for a gloriously compelling, coherent and comprehensive introduction to 20th century Palestine/Israel in the context of 19th century Europe and 21st century America? This is the clear and impassioned two-part interview episode for you

“History didn’t stop 2000 years ago and start again in 1948”

“My hunch was that there was something significant about what was going on inside Israel towards Palestinians — that this was a better way to understand what was going on in the Occupied Territories (West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza). If you really wanted to understand what Israel was, it was more important to look at what it was doing to Palestinians inside its own borders, to Palestinians who were unarmed — you stripped away the whole ‘security’ discourse that Israel was using about Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. It was easy for Israel to cast these kinds of Palestinians as terrorists. If they resisted their occupation, they were terrorists and therefore Israel has the right to do what it liked with them whereas these citizens weren’t armed… they were requesting proper full rights, equality and yet Israel couldn’t but treat them as an enemy.”

Last summer, our Humble Mumbles representative spoke with British journalist Jonathan Cook at Liwan cafe in Nazareth. We discussed: doublethink, dignity, borders, mythology, politics of archeology and forgotten history!

“Instead of challenging the antisemitic stereotypes, (Zionists of the early Israeli state) absorb them and they accept them and they replicate them”

“What were (19th century) European ethnic-nationalism really trying to do? What they were saying was that each European was a race, a biological tribe, if you like, that had a god-given right—or not-necessarily a god-given right (usually these kinds of ethnic-nationalisms appeal to some kind of divine supremacy .. but even if you take the divine bit out) to attach themselves to a piece of territory that they believe they have a right to. They say ‘we are the French race’ ‘the German race,’ ‘the Aryan race,’ whatever and ‘we cannot be a true race, we cannot fulfill our historic destiny unless we are on this piece of territory’. Now the problem for European racial tribalism of this kind was the Jews. The Jews were the obvious target. There were other ones, like the Romany and so on but the Jews were the biggest problem because they didn’t fit into this idea of a biological tribe. They subverted it, for these people who believed in these ideas of race. So, (with) Zionism, Theodore Herzl understands this is what’s going on and he finds a solution. His solution is to say ‘yes, this is true!’ He doesn’t say ‘no this is all all nonsense.’ We have other Jewish groups like the Bundists, for instance, taking this position: ‘This is all a nonsense and we shouldn’t fall for it.’ But Theodore Herzl isn’t like this. He absorbs this analysis, and then he reflects it, he mirrors it back. He says ‘yes, we are all races and the Jews are a race too. Therefore, we need our bit of territory then we can become a race like all the other races, we can become a normal people like everyone else.’… He’s really just accepting this really ugly ethnic-nationalism and he mirrors it back and says ‘We have to do the same.’”

Jonathan speaks informally—with clarity, wit and grace!—about what led him to become an Israeli citizen, his political awakening during the second intifada, as well as his analysis of Israeli conceptions of Palestinians—whether as Israeli citizens or residents of the Occupied Territories.

“They are erased from all narratives, they are seen as a hostile enemy, they are seen as a mythic people”

“For example, the Bedouin here are about 1 in 10 of the Palestinian population. Many of them live down in the area we call the Negev or the Naqab and they live in really terrible conditions. Israel refuses to recognize the places they live, that they have any community attachment to (them). They’re called the unrecognized villages, same as in the West Bank and they live in very similar circumstances. They live in tin shacks and tents because anything else would get destroyed by the Israeli Army. If they try and build a concrete home it gets destroyed because Israel says they have no right to this territory. They day it’s state land even thought he Beduin have title deeds to this land that go back to the Ottoman period. It’s easy for us also to buy into this Israeli idea of the Bedouin as nomads. Most of us were raised on films like Lawrence of Arabia where Omar Sharif is on his camel going from one oasis to the next. But this isn’t how the Bedouin were in much of the Middle East and certainly not in the area we now call Israel, or historic Palestine. The Bedouin had settled. They’d become farmers, they were herders, they had goats. They moved around but they were still located in certain communities which they considered their homes, so this goes back to well before Israel’s creation. Now Israel refuses to recognize these communities, says they don’t exist; this is all state land, this is all made up….. You will hear Israeli politicians from Netanyahu to Lieberman all referring to the Bedouin in the Negev as squatters and trespassers. This is standard Israeli terminology for the Bedouin even though they’ve been living settled for more than 100 years. In Israeli popular thinking and political thinking, they are squatters and trespassers. Once you think of people like this, you really strip them both of their humanity, their agency, and their rootedness to the land and this makes them kind of a malleable population. They’re not Palestinians, they have no connection to this land, And that’s exactly the opposite of what the Zionists are trying to do for the Jews.”

I could go on quoting forever!

“In the era of modern human rights, one could argue that Israel has been unlucky—I mean, it was created in 1948, same year as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was issued; it’s also the time that the Nuremberg Trials had defined what war crimes were and crimes against humanity, so Israel emerges doing all these very bad and ugly things just when the world has settled on the idea of what these bad and ugly things are, and Israel is doing them. One has therefore to turn a blind eye to this, which creates a huge sense of hypocrisy. But when we look at other countries, we see very similar things, and more successfully in many ways, like United States or Australia or Canada where we didn’t see mass ethnic cleansing, what we saw was genocide. And it was possible to do genocide then because we didn’t have 24 hour rolling news, we didn’t have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; people didn’t really care, they thought ‘these people are so primitive and barbaric that you could do what you like with them.’ Now we don’t live in that world anymore although many people in Israel seem to think it would be a good idea if we did, but we don’t. We have to accept that’s not the way the world works anymore. And so Israel is trapped in this effort to try to replicate what other settler-colonial societies did without being abel to commit the kinds of genocides that were committed then and this is why we see these decades of very ugly struggle against the Palestinians. They have to control them, oppress them, deny them all their rights while at the same time trying to seem like they’re a democracy because that’s what we expect of states now.”

Music provided by diy punk art kids Old Table, performing their smash hit “Israeli Prime Minister,” a minister Jonathan Cook knows well in terms of living under him

Thank you

Follow Jonathan Cook on his blog and Facebook. Book a tour in Nazareth! www.jonathan-cook.net
Follow Old Table on the Net. Book a standing seat to one of their shows probably in New York oldtable.bandcamp.com
Thanks so much to Dave Marley and Never Forget Radio for their editing aid and abetment

Photo: Nazareth, 2016