Good evening everybody. I'm Tim Pranks. I'm chairing the debate. Wonderful to see the auditorium packed. I have to say that when I was sent through the final wording for this debate, I thought how appropriate it was. Not just because it was interestingly worded, but because it was all in capitals. Israel is destroying itself with its sediment policy. If sediment expansion continues, Israel will have no future.
I know from my three and a half years reporting from the region and the abuse I'm still getting from my broadcasting that there are few subjects which lend themselves to such shouty certainty and loudly dogmatic diametric opposition as Israel and the Palestinians.
And I dare say a few of you would have come here tonight already stirred by this provocatively titled motion. Yes, you'll say Israel's sediment policy is fabulously self-defeating given that a Palestinian state is in Israel's best self interest. It undermines Israel's own institutions, its sacred institutions, its army, its respect for the judiciary, its budget drainingly expensive and it increases international isolation and tests friends beyond patience.
Or perhaps you'll say Israel, the Jewish state, is actually only establishing Jewish homes in areas that are historically, traditionally Jewish. A Jewish sediment is actually the West's outpost against militant Islam. They're not facts on the ground, but they're questions to be answered in any future negotiations. And how about if the left was right with all their gleamingly obvious arguments, why are they doing so spectacularly badly in the opinion polls?
All I ask is that as you listen to our top-notch panel tonight and you decide which way you're going to vote, I'm instructed to tell you how to vote. I'm probably going to get this wrong, but I think you each have a voting slip which says four or against. When it comes to the moment when you cast your vote, tear the voting slip in half if you know that you're going to vote four or against and put the relevant bit in the box. If you don't know, if you still don't know, just have the entire voting slip put in the box.
But anyway, before you get to that moment, unclog your ears, challenge your preconceptions, dare yourself only to make up your minds when you've heard all of our speakers. So let's hear all of our speakers. First of all, speaking for the motion, is William Seacard. William is a founder and chairman of forward thinking, an NGO which works with the leadership of all parties on both sides of the divide and the Israel-Palestine conflict. In particular, forward thinking is built a close relationship with the right-wing parties in the Israeli government coalition and with Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, the West Bank, Damascus and the Diaspora. William.
Thank you very much. Well, good evening everybody. I'm so glad Tim said what he said because I was going to say that at the beginning as well. Essentially, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict provokes very, very strong opinions. And I suppose of all the issues facing the world, few will stimulate quite such a level of intensity in public debate as this one. So I'm going to ask you tonight to try for a moment to cast aside your pre-held opinions, whatever they may be, pro-Israeli, pro-Palestinian, pro-neither, pro-both. And just try for a moment to put that aside because I'm going to try and argue this motion as well as I can in a non-political way.
Partly because there are no Palestinians on the panel, partly because I'm not an Israeli and the other three people on the panel are, I'm just a Brit with a temerity to have a view. And also because my job in conflict resolution requires me not to take sides, but just to try and be pragmatic and to try and identify the genuine obstacles to peaceful progress.
I'm going to argue tonight that Israel's settlement policy is deeply destructive to its own future for a number of reasons. First, by pursuing its policy of settling what is now over half a million Israeli citizens in the West Bank, on land deemed by the international community to belong to the Palestinians, Israel is making the world and even its own allies believe that it has no genuine interest in making peace with the Palestinians. Secondly, as a result of this settlement policy, Israel's support in the international community is weakening and it's leading to the expression delegitimization of Israel and isolation of Israel and I fear ultimately onto a path of its own destruction. Finally, I'm going to argue that even if Israel wanted to redress the situation at a future date as part of a peace agreement, the larger the number of settlements built and settlers settled beyond the so-called 1967 borders, the harder it will be for any Israeli government to persuade its citizens to withdraw from them.
But let's start at the beginning with some maps. I always find it helpful to look at maps as a way of illustrating what's been going on. I'm sorry, it's hard for you to see up there and turn your back.
But the map on the left-hand side, the first map, represents Palestine as it was under the British mandate which covers the whole of what is now the modern Israel and the occupied territories. The second map is what the UN proposed as the partition plan lines that would form the Israeli and the proposed Arab state or Jewish and Arab state as they call them in those days. And the white bit was proposed for the state of Israel and the yellow bit or brown, whichever you like to call it, was proposed to be the Arab state.
The third map gives you an idea of what actually happened after the British withdrew and after the 1948 War of Independence and the one before would have given Israel I think about 54, 55% of the land and the Arabs about 45%. After the 1948 War of Independence that gave roughly 78% of the land to the Israelis and 22% to the Palestinians. The Palestinians in the West Bank you can see on the right-hand side of the two yellow bits, the left-hand side is the Gaza Strip.
And the idea would be in the event of an Arab state that you would have some kind of road or railway or something that would connect the two so that Palestinians could get from one part of the territory to the other. And the final map on the right-hand side is roughly where we are today in terms of the yellow bits or where the Palestinians live and the white bits are where the Israelis live. This is a map of the West Bank and the West Bank is where the settlements we're talking about tonight are. You can see Jerusalem sort of quite low down on the map. So to the left of these yellow bits is the state of Israel and the rest of what you're seeing is the West Bank. The brown bits on the West Bank are where Israelis have control and the blue bits are the settlements. The brown lines are the roads which connect them all up. And the white, so white is a sort of strange color, but it's a creamy color, are the bits where the Palestinians live. And as you can see because of these roads and so forth, they're sort of broken up into lots of little areas where they live.
This is another way of showing you the map. It's what some people describe as an archipelago or a succession of little bits which don't create the possibility or the easy possibility of what some people would describe as a contiguous Palestinian state. Just as importantly, if I go back a map, you can see that the whole brown bit on the right is what connects up to the border with Jordan, with the river Jordan, and that is all under Israeli control. So if that bit remains so and the Palestinians didn't have that, the Palestinians wouldn't have an independent border. So that gives you, I think, an idea of where we are today, how people live today.
Now, over the last 25 years or so, there's been a peace process in progress, as you know. Led by successive United States administrations, the process has been attempting to secure a peace agreement between Israeli and Palestinian leaders leading to a creation of a Palestinian state. And that Palestinian state, as I said, would be the Gaza Strip and that whole West Bank area. But during the period of the peace process, successive Israeli governments have settled about 550 to 600,000. Danny will tell us the exact amount Israeli citizens on Palestinian land. That's in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Land that the international community have traditionally accepted as the basis for a future Palestinian state.
This is what begs the serious questions. If the state of Israel is genuinely pursuing peace, why is it intent on settling its citizens on land that it would have to return? Why is it spending tens of millions of dollars every year on building projects of housing and infrastructure, roads and so forth that would be unrecoverable? Synix would say that this is because Israel is not interested in making peace. It has no genuine intention of creating a Palestinian state, but instead intends to take over the whole of the West Bank, creating an Israel from the River Jordan all the way over to the Mediterranean Sea.
Given the nature of public debate and the current election campaign in Israel, this is not entirely far-fetched. There are plenty of members of the governing coalition who've publicly stated their opposition to a Palestinian state, let alone one that would be based as the international community desires on the pre-1967 borders. Leading Israeli politicians have in the last week advocated even the annexation of large tracts of the West Bank to secure them as permanent Israeli territory once and for all. And this may well, in fact, end up being a policy of the next Israeli government.
So settlement building is continuing a pace, not just within the existing settlements, new outposts are being established every year in the West Bank. And despite international criticism, even from Israel's closest ally, the United States, the process continues, often funded by donations from the United States, supported by tax breaks for US citizens who make these kinds of donations.
So given the rate of this settlement development, it's hard to find any international political figure who genuinely believes in the Israeli government's intent to seek peace with the Palestinians based on the 1967 borders, maybe with some land swaps, with a capital in East Jerusalem. And the rhetoric of the current Israeli election campaign, combined with these maps, tell a story, and I think you'd have to be peculiarly credulous individual to believe a different story.
Which brings me to my second point, Israel's waning support in the international community. In November, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, apparently frustrated with the lack of any progress with the peace process because as he puts it of Israel's continued settlement policies, went to the General Assembly of the United Nations in order to try and secure observer status for a Palestinian state. Now, in the vote, some 138 countries of the world voted in favor, 41 abstained, and only eight countries of the 187 in the voting process, apart from Israel, voted against. These countries were the Marshall Islands, Palau, Nauru, and Micronesia for tiny island states in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Panama, the Czech Republic, Canada, and the United States. This is what is left of the international support for the State of Israel when it really needs it.
It's hard to think of a more isolated country in the world, apart from Iran and North Korea. And for Israel to be able to rely on the support of neither on the support of the UK, France, or Germany, or even the Netherlands on this issue, is a rather dismal sign. So when Netanyahu announced the building of further settlements as a punishment for the Palestinians, going to the UN for observer status, condemnation instantly appeared from not other than the US, Canadian, and Czech diplomats who felt that their support in the UN vote had been betrayed.
So where does this leave Israel? Well, if it continues its settlement policies and refuses to accept the international parameters of the peaceful two-state solution, then I believe the process of Israel's delegitimization, moral, political, legal, the thing it fears the most, will continue to develop a pace. What are the alternatives? Well, there's a plausible alternative to a two-state solution, and it's a one-state solution where everyone, Jews and Palestinians, live together and are equal citizens in the same country. But this leads to the Jews being in a minority, and now it come unlikely to be plausible to Jewish Israelis and advocates of a Jewish state.
Some Israelis are now advocating a one-state solution, but they would rather like to leave Gaza behind so they can ensure the Jewish majority, which is not likely to appeal to the outside world or obviously the Palestinians. So if it's not a two-state solution or a one-state solution, what do we call what's left? The current status quo. If Israel does not allow any prospect of statehood, freedom, genuine self-governance for the Palestinians, and with the Israeli citizens having markedly different rights and standards of living to their Palestinian counterparts, and with Israel running out of friends on the international stage, the situation I'm afraid will inevitably lead to accusations from some countries in the world that this situation is one of apartheid. And that means that those countries will call for Israel's increasing isolation. In time, it will mean no more World Cups, no more Olympics.
And my final point should be just as worrying for Israel. There are now so many settlers in East Jerusalem in the West Bank that even in an Israeli government wanted to make peace and withdraw hundreds of thousands of settlers back to Israel, it looks almost impossible to do. Every year more and more settlers are becoming army officers, policemen, judges, politicians, the very people who will, if the time comes, have to supervise, orchestrate and legitimize the withdrawal of settlers from their home and their lands. The more settlers there are, the harder it will be to do, and it'll be harder for an Israeli government to be elected who advocates a withdrawal. Turkeys do not vote for Christmas, as they say, in Britain.
So that's my conclusion. It looks straightforward. I think it's pretty obvious when you look at the maps that the two-state solution is disappearing, the one-state solution is hardly going to be popular in Israel, and the support for Israel is going downwards, not upwards. I think in the long term this leads tragically that Israel is heading towards its own destruction, and that's why I support this motion. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, William. I should have explained that the reason I was tapping at my glasses is I'm under strict instruction. There's one thing I have to do tonight, apart from clean my teeth when I go to bed, is to limit our excellent speakers to 12 minutes, and they get a two-minute warning after 10 minutes, so that's the gentle tap on the glass, and then I get more vigorous after 12 minutes. Anyway, our next speaker is Danny Diane. He's chairman of the Yesher Council of Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria. Previously, he served on the steering committee that reconstituted the Yesher Council after its failure to prevent the 2005 Gaza disengagement, and during his tenure as chairman, appropriately enough, a greater focus is being placed on what in Hebrew is called Hazbarah, public diplomacy, both in Israel, and overseas, which is why happily Danny is here. Thank you very much.
First of all, I would like to apologize for my less than perfect English with the heavy Argentinian accent when I came to Hebrew yesterday, the guy at the immigration, told me what's the purpose of my visit, pleasure, or business. I taught him to give a lecture, so he told me you can't go in, but you have to promise you won't talk about the Falklands. I suspect I am going to speak about a much more inflammatory issue than the Falklands. I beg you to put aside all the stereotypes you may have, and all the demonization you have been exposed to in the media, and all the prejudices, and doubt everything.
I could choose the easy way to prove that the motion is wrong. The easy way is that should it be right that Israel is destroying itself with its settlement's policy, I would expect an overwhelming support for settlements in Arab countries, but we don't, of course. But that is too easy. Look, if it were right, you can justify a motion like that on two grounds. On the moral ground, you could suggest that Israel is eroding, it's moral standing, and I hear that argument with its settlement policy, or on strategy grounds. Israel is making itself more vulnerable with its settlement's policy. But the fact is that neither of those two arguments is true.
I would like to start with the moral one, because in my opinion, is the more important. And that in which more disinformation and deformation is being spread. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Jewish-Palestinian conflict, all it whatever way you like, is a peculiar one. You cannot compare it, for instance, with Israeli Egyptian dispute. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a conflict like not no other one in the world, in the sense that there are two ethnic groups, Jews and Palestinians, that have their beliefs, their historical narratives. And I dare to say, even if I'm criticized by some of my colleagues, that both are sincere. I'm not saying that I don't want to judge if they are right or wrong. Both are sincere.
I feel that Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. I am deeply touched by Hebron and Judea and by Safed in Galilee, in the first one in the post-67 Israel, the first one in the pre-67 Israel II. And Mahmoud Abbas is deeply touched by both, by Hebron and by Safed. He too is deeply touched by both. I see Zionism as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, and they see it sincerely as the 19th century colonialist and evil. Israel, not the settlements, because they consider themselves the natives, and ask the Africaners that came to usurp that their land.
Now, how do you resolve such a dispute? There is no other dispute like that in the world. You could suggest that partition, the so-called two states, is the just solution. Maybe. But what happens when one side accepts partition, and we saw the maps, the partition proposed in 1947 with improbable borders for the Jewish state and without Jerusalem. We, and we, I wasn't born at that time, but we, the Jews went out to the squares of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and Haifa to dance, to dance Hora in the squares. And they attacked us dead that very same night, not in order to get a better partition, in order to annihilate us.
Until 1967, from 1947 to 1967, the Arabs, the Palestinians, had the opportunity to sign a peace treaty with Israel along the Green Line. But instead, in 1964, they established the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, to liberate Tel Aviv, not to liberate Hebron. And then they attacked, in order again to annihilate Israel.
Now, I want you to listen very attentively to what I'm going to say now, because in my subjective opinion, it's sheer logic and ethics. You cannot go to square one after such an act. When you deny, when you reject partition and attack the other side in order to take it all by force, you lost the moral ground to demand partition. By the way, it was done again in the year 2000.
When our Prime Minister, Helle Barak, proposed partition in Camp David to Yasser Afat with President Bill Clinton in Camp David, Yasser Afat as the leader of the Palestinians, not only rejected it, but three months later, he launched the most vicious terrorist attack of the modern era, the so-called Second Intifada. So from a moral ground, we came back to our land, rightfully. We were ready to relinquish the most sacred parts, the most important parts of our patrimony, of our national patrimony. But the Palestinians rejected it. They could have a state, they could part divide the land. They decided that the rule of the game is by force. And they will prevail using the rules of the game. They decided upon it. From a moral point of view, our presence in Judean, Samaria, the so-called West Bank, erroneously called West Bank, is morally impeccable. Yes, in a 100-year war, we made mistakes, and we made injustices. Yes, of course, you cannot make, you cannot in a 100-year, so bloody conflict not make any injustice. We did our share of injustices. But in the moral balance between Jews and Palestinians, we have the upper hand by far. And we have an inalienable right to live in Judean, Samaria.
Now you could say, okay, it is just. You have a moral justification to believe and to build houses and gardens and wineries in Judean and Samaria, but it is not wise. It is a stupid policy. That will bring even if you will die, you will commit suicide with justice. But no, the contrary is the truth. I heard Mr. Zigart talking about the, what will happen if the two-state solution does not crystallize? And this is the second preconception I beg you to free yourself of. The two-state solution, the two-state formula does not solve the conflict in the Middle East. On the contrary, it will aggravate it.
I live in a small community in Western Samaria named Maleci Omoron. From my home in Maleci Omoron, every morning, I look at Tel Aviv, as if we were in the palm of my hands. The Israeli towers, I see that the Israeli towers, the icon, the new icon of Tel Aviv are in its place, in their place, and they not go to work knowing that everything is okay in Tel Aviv. The thought that if instead of my wife, my daughter, and myself, in Maleci Omoron, in that very same window, an independent Palestinian state will be. Looking and yearning for Jaffa, looking and yearning for the places that they consider their national patrimony from high above, because in the map you also don't see the topography. By the way, much closer than the distance from Heathrow to London, much higher than Heathrow of course to London, completely dominating the landscape.
The thought that that will bring the Palestinians to accept partition as a feta complete, it will not tempt them to launch a new aggression to wipe out Israel from the map, is in the best case, Naive. In the worst case, I prefer not to characterize it. Without Judean Samaria, without the high hills of Judean Samaria, an uninterrupted Islamic fundamentalist territory that starts in Kabul, Afghanistan, and ends in Tel Aviv, Israel without any natural barrier exists. Only a fence will separate Tel Aviv from the Islamic dominated territory that ends in Kabul, Afghanistan. That is suicide. That is suicide.
Now, we did that experiment. Why should we guess? We did that experiment in the summer, in the infamous summer of 2005. I think it was Albert Einstein that once said that if you do the same experiment twice and expect different results, then you are no scientist. Maybe he used a more offensive word. The experiment was the withdrawal from Gaza. We ever quoted every single Jew from their civilian or military. At the fact that independent Palestinian state was established in Gaza, and we all know the consequence. The consequence is that every single penny, every single cent, every single euro and dollar pound that was contributed to the newly formed the fact that the Palestinian state in Gaza was used to amass armaments against Israel to form a new launching pad for an aggression against Israel, not for highways, not for schools, not for hospitals, not for universities.
The difference, and this is my summing by concluding remark, the difference is that Israel can survive an Iranian proxy state in Gaza because the the limit, the surrounding areas are not very densely populated. Of course, it's not a good situation, but we can't somehow cope with it.
The same thing in Judean Samaria, and it will be inevitably the same thing, inevitably, by coup d'etat, by gun or by ballot. The Hamas will take control of the new Palestinian state, will endanger the very physical existence of the state of Israel. Therefore, the settlements do not endanger Israel's existence, but guarantee it. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Danny. Next speaker is Daniel Levy. Levy, I do beg his pardon. I was so impressed with my pronunciation of Hasbarah just before with Danny Diane, that I decided to give you the full Hiberate pronunciation. Daniel Levy, he's the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He's also the senior fellow at the New America Foundation. He's a member of the board of the new Israel Fund, as well as a former advisor in the Israeli Prime Minister's Office and a member of the Israeli team that was at one point negotiating with the Palestinians. Daniel.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Tim. I'd like to thank the organizers of Intelligent Square and everyone here for joining us tonight. Monty Python's Meaning of Life, a film, it contains a scene, there's an obese chap, really a caricature of obesity. Mr. Kriosote, he walks into a restaurant, apparently it's his regular local, he orders everything on the menu and a jerebohum of champagne. After all this, the waiter offers him just one wafer-a-thin mint to round off the meal. He momentarily hesitates. Then Mr. Kriosote consumes said mint, he promptly explodes. For me, that is the danger that settlement overreach poses to Israel. Eventually, it will explode in our faces, just one more wafer-a-thin outpost, just a little e-1.
I will now devote my remaining remarks to those of you not familiar with Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.
现在,我将把剩下的讲话时间奉献给那些不熟悉蒙提·派森《生命的意义》的人。
Look, there is a certain powerful logic to the idea that Israel, as we know it, simply cannot coexist with the relentless continuation and expansion of settlements, in contravention of international law. Let's look at it like this. Imagine there's a triangle made up of three sides of the basic choices that Israel faces. One is a state with a Jewish character, drawn amongst other things from a clear majority of its citizenry being Jewish. The second line is an Israel that is recognizably democratic, observing democratic norms, respecting democratic rights, adhering to the international conventions it signed. Investing that democracy with meaning. And the third is an Israel that has all the territory, the territory of the Biblical home, if you like. The territory now under its control, the territory across which settlements are spread as those previous maps showed.
But in fact, Israel can only have two sides of this triangle. It can be democratic and Jewish character, but not have all the territory. Or it can have all the territory and choose to give up either its democratic character or its Jewish character. For with the territory comes its inhabitants and they can either be accorded democratic rights or denied those rights. It's a relatively simple equation. I prefer to say it's irrefutable and send us all home early, but let's dig a little deeper.
There are those who accept this basic premise, who accept yes, two states. I'm not sure we'll hear that position tonight, but you hear it often. But they then say chill out about settlements, the chill out camp. They're just not a big deal. You exaggerate their significance. They can always be removed. They're a bigger problems. If you want to do two states, what about the historical narratives? What about rejectionism on both sides? Security. Really the settlements? I would argue the opposite.
If you're arguing from a two state perspective, the single most prohibitive factor to achieving a two state outcome, I would say is the settlement enterprise, the single biggest practical on the ground driving force toward the indivisibility of this land, is the settlements. Even if the built up area of settlements takes up only a small area, the truth is it's about 1% of the West Bank, but the area under settlement jurisdiction, the municipal and regional settlement councils control the zoning and planning, that's 42.8% of the West Bank. Settlements help define Palestinian access or actually lack of access to land, to resources, even to quarries and Palestinian freedom of movement.
And this picture becomes even more stark if one factors in patterns of settlement and land expropriation in Palestinian East Jerusalem, making the viability of a future Palestinian state all the more impossible. Settlements define a cognitive map in people's minds, encouraging the world and the Palestinians to give up on a two state outcome or at least consider it a vanishing prospect.
There is a variation on the chill out crowd, which is this, that the two state model is okay with settlements because it can accommodate any amount of settlement growth the Palestinians can swallow any deal. Their territory can shrink to whatever in feebled is willing to be offered, whatever infringement on their resources and sovereignty. Let's not delude ourselves.
The Palestinian leadership accepted the idea of a mini-state on 22% of the land, not the 43% of the partition plan. If you want to go along with the idea of some element of victor's justice and rejectionist's remorse, I don't think there's much room for further retreat. There is a point at which the aspiration for Palestinian statehood, under such limited circumstances, becomes less attractive to Palestinians and the appeal of a one state democracy carries the day. This is true already for many Palestinians and settlements bring that day closer for many more.
Thanks very much Tim. What if, no, no, I'm finished. I'm going to use my 25 minutes now. Thanks a lot. But you could say, what if you look beyond a traditional two state paradigm? Is that the only solution you can come up with? Not one where there's no Israel, but one maybe there's a confederation, maybe something like Belgium, maybe something involving Jordan. I think it's clear that settlement policy reduces the prospects of all these alternatives.
Why would a Palestine that's part of a confederation or part of something to do with Jordan be any more willing to base itself on atomised islands of land without resources surrounded and with security arrangements dictated only by one side? There is a reason that two former Israeli prime ministers, Ehrud Barakan, Ehrud Olmett and Israel's, I guess, cultural icon Amosos have spoken of an approaching reality of South African style apartheid.
But I, as I said, I'm not sure these are going to be the main arguments we're going to hear tonight. So let's not make it easy on ourselves. Let's step out of this comfortable paradigm. What if I am getting it all wrong? What if, like the toy store, settlements are us. There's no difference between pre-67 and post-67, one side of the green line and another side of the green line. But far from destroying Israel, settlement policy simply encapsulates the very essence of what Israel is. After all, Ramat Aviv, Tel Aviv University is built on the ruins of the Palestinian village of Sheikh Munas. And there is the list can go on.
I can certainly understand that from a Palestinian's experience, such distinctions might well appear to be rather arbitrary and not very relevant. Green line, not green line. And a Palestinian might have rather less interest in whether Israel is destroying itself or not, as compared to say whether Palestinian rights and freedoms are able to be exercised. But we don't have Palestinian speakers with us here today. I can't be an advocate for Palestinians. William can't. Mrs. Diane and Glick may enjoy settling Palestinian land, but I don't know if that makes them advocates for the Palestinians. I hope a future debate will invite Palestinians. But, and there is of course such a perspective held in the Israeli Zionist discourse that Israel equals settlements, which could render our debate meaningless.
And I admit that to some such a definition of Israel may sound more coherent, more compelling, even more honest. But there's a problem here. Because that is not how Israel has defined itself. Israel calls itself a democracy, a Jewish and democratic state. It enshrined these principles in its declaration of independence. It is a signatory to international charters that enshrines these principles. The Israel that has embedded itself in the community of nations and in the hearts and minds of Jews and others across the world is the democratic Israel. That carries the legitimacy. That is the Israel that is also on the 67 lines, been recognized by the PLO itself. So unless and until Israel redefines itself, let's say we call it the Jewish Empire of Greater Israel, until then, that is the standard against which one has to measure whether Israel is destroying itself with settlements or not.
There is a democratic recession going on in Israel. I would argue that the settlements drive that democratic recession. It's impossible to sustain a democracy on one side of a green line if you're managing a knot in democracy on the other. There could be an opening. Maybe this can just be a bi-national democracy. It's the 21st century percentages of Jews, percentages of non-Jews. Really, this is what we have to bother ourselves with. But again, would that be called Israel? Does it not answer the definition of this debate?
I want to finally say the following. And I want to be careful not to turn the oil-evay-dial up too high. But I think one can argue that settlement policy as a driving factor in Israel endangering itself. Not just in the sense of defining what Israel is, but also in a very real physical sense. That settlements constitute a high risk strategy for the security and well-being of Israelis and Israel. That settlements are the greatest barrier between Israel and pragmatic policies, between Israel and realistic policies, especially in the reality we face today.
Let's just look at it. A new Arab reality in which democratic and franchisement has come to the fore. A reality in which technological gaps, including Israel's qualitative military edge, are narrowing over time. A reality in which Israel is so dependent on the U.S., sorry I'm the Pacific Island state, in which Palestinian non-violence civil disobedience gathers steam, but also in which armed uprisings against oppression have received regional and international support in Syria, Libya and elsewhere, and in which Israel is losing its legitimacy and experiencing a brain drain at home.
In that reality, our settlements not the greatest manifestation of overreach, the reason why we have an Israel without borders, are settlements the way forward? Do they contribute to Israeli security or do they threaten to push Israel over the edge? And is this our only future? Is it really a viable future to live by the sword in perpetuity?
I'll close by saying this, I can see them. There are some speech bubbles coming out of some people's heads. Naive, naive, naive. The man's a defeatist. If we ended the settlements with the Arabs, really accept us. They opposed us before 67, after 67, with them to live in peace, to me that's the defeatism, to believe that there is no better future. Are the Palestinians uniquely intolerant, uniquely impossible to make peace with? Are we uniquely destined to be enemies forever? I'd argue that that view is ahistorical, is a misreading of reality, and it's a more than a little bit prejudiced. Unique, permanent unreasonableness does not apply to Palestinians or Muslims, it does not apply to Jews or Israelis. If we remove the Qasas belly, the burning humiliation of today and tomorrow, will everything still be dictated by the humiliations of yesterday and history? Both peoples can be forward-looking, and to support this motion is to send a message that settlements are taking us to a point of no return, not a smart strategy for Israel's future. Thank you. Thank you very much, Daniel.
Caroline Glick is our final speaker. She's a senior contributing editor at the Jerusalem Post newspaper. She's director of the Israel Security Project at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and she's the senior adjunct fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy. She's the author of one book, Shackled Warrior, Israel, and the Global Jihad.
She was also saying before we came in to this room this evening that she's taking a very precious day of writing her next book, which is due at the publishers in March, so I hope you will give her a sympathetic audience tonight. Caroline.
Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks. It's really a pleasure to be here in London. I think the last time I was here was in 95, and I think that Daniel might have been my soldier then I can't remember. But I find the whole resolution rather curious. I did just fly in here from Israel where I live with my children, and I think that I'm pretty pro-Israel. But this resolution essentially tells me that in order to be pro-Israel, I have to support the establishment of a Jew-free state for the Palestinians. I have to say that I support the establishment of a state that is going to be, that must be ethnically cleansed of all Jews before the people who are supposed to have that state will agree to independence. I find that crazy.
The presence of Jews in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank of the Jordan River, has nothing to do with prospects for peace or lack of prospects for peace. Israel has two peace agreements with two neighboring Arab states. It's that have been respected.
The one with Egypt for nearly 30 years, the one with Jordan since it was signed in 1994. And we signed six agreements with the Palestinians with the PLO, all six of which they have been in material breach since the very beginning. But none of those agreements that we signed with the PLO, nor the agreements that we signed with the Jordanians or the Egyptians, were impacted one Iota by the presence of Jewish communities beyond Israel's 1949 armistice lines. Not one of them was contingent on the absence of those communities.
And nobody made that a condition for negotiating with the Jewish state or for recognizing it. So if you think that throwing 500,000 Jews, 350,000 Jews, 650,000 Jews, 720,000 Jews out of their homes and their communities is the magic bullet through which we are going to achieve peace with the Palestinian Arabs. You're living in fantasy land. This has not been the case in the past. It has not been the case with our Arab neighbors. It has not been the case with our Palestinian neighbors. And there is no reason to accept the view that it is the case today.
The other argument that we've heard today is that if Jews keep living and building in Judean, Samaria, we're going to end up with a one state solution in which Jews are a minority. So let's think about this for a second. You're saying that by keeping Jews in Judean, Samaria, and in Jerusalem, that somehow or another, the Palestinians are going to, and the Israeli Arabs within the 1949's Armistice lines, are somehow going to magically bridge the 3 million person gap between the 6.1 million Jews and the 3 million Arabs inside of 1949 Armistice lines Israel and Judean, Samaria.
You don't know how to count. You don't know how to count. Were Israel to absorb Judean, Samaria tomorrow and offer citizenship to all of its Arab residents, Israel would still have a two thirds Jewish majority.
So the very notion that there is a demographic time bomb on Israel's hands is simply untrue. The Central Bureau of Statistics, Israel came out yesterday with its latest data. They found that there is convergence between Jewish birth rates and Arab birth rates. And the Jewish birth rates are trending upwards and have been since 1995. And the Arab birth rates are trending downwards and have since 2000. In fact, this is not just among the Palestinians or among the Israeli Arabs. This is throughout the Arab world. There is a collapse in the Muslim world in fertility rates. And there is a massive increase in Jewish fertility rates.
Israel has three children per woman among Jews and it has 3.5 children per woman among Muslims inside a pre-1949 Armistice lines Israel and 3.2 children per woman in Judean, Samaria, among the Arab population in the areas. So that the whole trend of the demographic model is completely the opposite of what all of these experts on Israel's demographic dire circumstances would have us all believe.
It's simply a matter of not counting properly. Now, the truth of the matter is none of this is important because the whole issue of whether or not the settlements in Judean, Samaria, or somehow or another going to destroy Israel or not, is not about demography and it's not a bad piece. It's about civil rights. It's about Jewish civil rights.
What they are saying essentially is that Jews should not be allowed to live there just because they're Jews. Now, why should Jews be allowed to live in London, live in Germany, live in San Francisco, but not be allowed to live in Judea? Why? And in Jerusalem. Where does this come from?
They want to talk so much about Palestinian rights. Let's talk about Jewish rights for a second. You're saying that you so support a Palestinian state that is going to be inherently bigoted and that Jews aren't allowed to even live there, that they have to all be ethnically cleansed first before these people can even deign to accept sovereignty. What kind of state do you want to establish?
What kind of nonsense is this is a racket. This is a racket. Jews don't have civil rights. We're not allowed to live wherever we have property rights to build just because we're Jewish and this is a moral argument. This is a reasonable argument.
This is establishing what exactly? A state based upon ethnic purity. This is where we've come to in 2013 in the western world. Where are the liberal values that are being advanced by this cause of a Jew-free Palestine? Somebody can explain this one to me because I don't understand it. I don't understand it. I don't understand. I went to Columbia. I went to Harvard. I just can't get it.
And let me just say one more thing about that. I can talk from now. I've heard illegal Palestinian land all of this. I'm not going to have a discussion here about sovereignty. I talk about that in my book. It's going to be coming out hopefully at the end of the year, random house. Can I look for it and buy multiple copies? But if we want to, we can talk about Israel's national rights and our legal rights to these areas. They are very strong and in fact they're incontrovertible in under international law.
But we're talking about civil rights. We're talking about civil rights. And it's not simply that it's morally repugnant to tell Jews that we're not allowed to live any where we want to and buy property anywhere that will be sold it. It's also true that this is a failed proposition. It's been tried twice and it's failed twice. The British tried it. You tried it in 1939 and in 1940 with the white paper and the subsequent acts of parliament that denied Jews the right to buy land in the vast majority of the Palestinian mandate that the British government was legally bound by the mandate of the League of Nations to allow close Jewish settlement of throughout.
You abrogated that right in material breach of the mandate of the League of Nations in 1939 and 1940 and how did that work out? It was done at the time in May 1939 in order to appease the Palestinian Arabs who at that point were allied with the Nazis and were conducting a terrorist war not only against the Jews of the Palestine mandate but against the British mandatory authorities. And in an attempt to appease Hajimin al-Husaini who by that time was in Baghdad stirring up a pro-Nazi coup d'état that took place in 1941.
The British said that the Jews have no national rights and we actually didn't mean that we supported the establishment of a Jewish state when we said we did in 1917 in the Balfour Declaration. Whoops. And you know what happened? You know what happened? There was a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq and Britain that was pinned down in Libya. I had to go and invade Iraq in order to take it down. And then they had to invade Iran because in Iran you had preachers in the mosque saying hey Hitler is the second coming of Muhammad. And that's what they did. And this is what they got for appeasement.
They got King Farouk in Egypt supporting the Nazis. They got the Iraqis supporting the Nazis. They got a Nazi party in Syria. It didn't work. And by the way they did it at the time that what? They abrogated Jewish civil rights in the middle of the Holocaust. Morally repugnant and strategically ridiculous. It didn't work.
We tried it again as Danny said in 2005 and what did we get? 8,000 Jews thrown out of their homes, 24 communities in Gaza raised to the ground and transferred to the Palestinians. What did we get? We got Hamas in charge. It wasn't just an abrogation of Jewish civil rights. It ended up becoming an abrogation of Palestinian civil rights just as the Christians in Gaza. Just last month they went to Bethlehem for the Christmas celebrations and they came to Israel and they said don't make us go home. Can we please have a asylum here? Can we save us? Pretty soon just weeks from now there's not going to be any more ancient Christian community in Gaza. But whose civil rights are being impacted here? Not just ours, not just the Jews, but the Arabs as well. The women in Gaza who are now being increasingly intimidated say you have to run around wearing a big hat over your head. Or how about those summer camps that are being firebombed by Hamas because they have girls and boys together? Whose civil rights are advanced by the expropriation illegally of land from Jews in the transfer of the Palestinians? Nobody. Nobody.
I tell you what, this is what we're talking about here. You want to know what we're really talking about here when we talk about throwing all these Jews off the lands that we bought that belonged to us? We are talking about trying to find common ground with terrorist organizations that are mandated to enact a genocide of the Jewish people. Just read the Hamas covenant. Just see what they say. They call not for only the annihilation, the obliteration in their words of the Jewish state, but they call for the genocide of world Jewry and to try to find common ground with these murderers or with Holocaust deniers like PLO Chief Mahmoud Abbas. We have people like Danny Levy and Mr. Seaghart saying what? We can agree that there's a subset of Jews that we also dislike. Let's call them the settlers and say that they're destroying all prospects for peace. Not Hamas, not Fatah, that are throwing missiles at the homes of now 3.5 million Jews are in their range from Gaza?
No, no, no, no, no. It's because Jews have the temerity to build on land that they own. That's the problem. We can sit down and talk to Hamas because we like them hate Jews. Now we don't hate all Jews, but a subset. And we're going to blame everything, all the pathologies of the Arab world, all the pathologies of the Palestinians on them. It's their fault. They're going to block peace. Not true.
Again, to return to the beginning at the end of my remarks. Israel has two peace treaties, one with Jordan, one with Egypt that are just fine. Thank you very much for asking. And they were signed, sealed and delivered and maintained while Israel was expanding the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria and Gaza. We signed six agreements with the PLO, again, none of which they've maintained or adhered to, but they were all signed. While we were building in Judea and Samaria, how is it that suddenly this is the obstacle to peace? Because you can now find common ground when you all want to delegitimize Israel. Oh, we can all agree that we hate these specific Jews and they should all be thrown out of their houses. This is a moral atrocity. It is morally reprehensible. It is strategically idiotic. And this resolution should be opposed by all of you unanimously. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Caroline. And thank you to all of you for listening to the speakers in silence and, for the most part, and except when you laughed when you were supposed to. And also, I got a sense that you were all concentrating, as I was concentrating, very, very closely on what they had to say. It is my task now, before I throw this open to the floor, to tell you what the result of the pre-debate poll was, I am told that there is always a lot of don't know in these debates. I said I was rather skeptical that in this debate there were going to be a lot of don't know, but they were a fair number. Anyway, the number, this was before the speakers began talking, was 343 for the motion, 97 against, 192 don't know.
So, in order to try and further our exploration of the issues, we are going to have a question and answer session. For those of you who have seen me do this sort of gig before, you will know that the tired joke that is about a roll over the horizon, and I apologise, but especially when it comes to discussing Israel, it tends to be an answer and answer session, rather than a question and answer session, just for the sake of brevity and sanity, and to allow as many people as possible to get their questions in, please try and restrain yourself and have a question, at least a question mark at the end. Upwards intonation helps. If you put up your hands, I will try and get around as many as possible, please wait for the microphone and what we will do is we will take them in clumps of 2 or 3 and then ask the panel for their thoughts.
So, first of all, there is a very well illuminated hand actually behind you, the lady in the glasses. Thank you very much for the presentations. I think that every site has got valid points. What bothers me is I am not for the settlements. I feel that I don't understand with modern sentence statistics, there are more Arabs living in the Galilee than Jews. The negative is very sparsely populated. Why don't the settlers live there and strengthen Israel? And from the moral point of view, I am a bit baffled that Israel wants the UN to do justice, but there seems to be one moral law for Israel and one for other people, because when it doesn't suit Israel, it does other things. So, it's a bit of a pity. Thank you.
Where's the other microphone? Excellent. There it is. Thank you.
另一个话筒在哪里?太好了,就在那里。谢谢。
Can I ask for clarification? The term is always used that the Israelis are expropriating land in the West Bank for settlements. The last speaker spoke about land that was owned by the settlers that the settlers had bought. I think that's quite an important point, and I'll be grateful for clarification of whether the land is always purchased from the Palestinians as opposed to expropriated.
Excellent. Let's see if the microphone is now working. Jews live in England and thereby by English laws. Jews living in the occupied territories by which law? I'll repeat the questions. I'll ask one of you from both sides. You can decide among yourselves.
The questions were why don't settlers go to the inside of the green lines and strengthen Israel, the state of Israel within the green lines. What is it with this land that's been bought by the settlers, appropriated by the settlers, what's the status of settlement land, and why don't Jews in the settlements abide by Israeli law?
No, no, no, that's not the question. The question is, what law should they abide by? That was the question. If I'm doing you justice, I'll go and get my code. No, no, it's fine. He's never forgiven me for mispronouncing his surname. Caroline and Jenny.
Those were quite factual questions. They have three very short factual answers. The first one regarding the Galilee and the Negev is that we do. Second and third generation so-called settlers from Judea and Samaria now establish communities both in the Negev and in the Galilee with our support and encouragement. So, you know, I for a long time have got to the conclusion that persons that take upon themselves Zionist causes and what in Hebrew we call it Yashvut to populate distant areas of the country. They do it everywhere and those that prefer the easy life in Tel Aviv do not, not, don't migali and not in the Negev and not into the and Samaria.
The second factual question from above I think was about the status of the land. Well, someone I think, I think it was Daniel that recalled us of the fact that Tel Aviv University in Ramatavir is built on the ruins of an Arab village of Shechemunis. So, please rest assured that no settlement is on the ruins of any Arab village. More than that, no Arab was evacuated from his home in order to build a settlement. Well, that is the fact you can laugh as long as you can. I know now Daniel will say it, Hebron and Hebron is the exception that proves the rule. You can laugh as long as you know, but I challenge you to show me one case in which an Arab, a Palestinian, was evicted from his home in Judea and Samaria in order to establish there, in order to establish there. They will be a chance for people to intervene in the floor again.
Look, Daniel, you move on to the, because we want to get other questions, you move on to the last. This is a fact. Move on to the last question, which is what is more. And more over since 1979, the ruling by the Supreme Court of Justice of Israel, even no expropriation with monetary compensation is allowed on, in a non-inhabited land in order to establish a settlement. Now, if you do not accept the facts, then it's very difficult to make an intelligent discussion here. The third one was which law we abide. Of course, we abide the law of Israel. Thank you very much.
Is it going to be you? Yeah, yeah. No, really. I don't think supporting this motion is about poking Israel in the eye, or how terrible Israel is, or even about demonizing settlers. I'm going to interrupt you, because it sounds almost like a, something else, can you answer those three specific questions? You can have your own arguments, but you can't have your own facts, and the entire basis. But literally, we could open the equivalent of a swear box on the exit from this hall. And I just think from the combined people in this audience, we could collect a hundred factually accurate rebuttals of what we've heard today, and sadly tens of examples of Palestinian private land and Palestinian dispossession.
But, you know, I've said, I've said, you know, many, many examples, Danny. I have said from the beginning, I've said from the beginning, no one on this panel is a Palestinian. You know, you know, the Supreme Court rulings, we can vote on your law. Danny, Caroline, he's calling Danny a liar. I would like him to give one example of a lie. I think it's fair. Okay, but we'll try and take it in turns to speak. There is not one Palestinian on this panel. There's also no one on this panel who was born in Israel. Sorry? So no one on this panel. There are three people on this panel who have veiled themselves of the opportunity that the law of return provides to every Jew around the world to move to Israel. I really hope that in the future there will be a debate where a variety of Palestinian perspectives can be heard. But I'm not the person to provide a Palestinian perspective.
I can correct some of your mistakes. I can explain that, and then you know this well, that when negotiations have been serious, the Palestinians have been willing to look at land swaps, to look at land. I just answered the questions. You are running away to a completely different topic, blaming me or not telling the truth. Is there any expropriation? Okay, let me. No, but it's just there's so much factual inaccuracy that has been shared. But let me. The name of one that was evicted from the zone and today. The name of one.
Now if I don't carry around the name, I don't carry around the name. I just want to ask. Let me just put one question to you, Daniel. The one about which law is being respected here. Israel. It's a very interesting question. It's a very interesting question because. The point put by Danny is that this is Israeli law which is being respected. Well, it's not of course because Israeli law has not been extended to the occupied territories because the occupied territories have not been annexed to Israel. What you have is that Jerusalem has been annexed to Israel, something not recognised anywhere else in the world. The West Bank is administered de facto as an occupied territory by Israel. Israel has not taken upon itself that de jure, but in practice what you have is a hodgepodge of legislations there where the Israeli military is sometimes making up the rules, sometimes it's drawn from Jordanian law, sometimes Ottoman law, sometimes Israeli law, and almost always whatever most suits Israel and sadly, increasingly the case of the settlers, but not always because that's where the Supreme Court in Israel sometimes intervenes and says, wait a minute. This land has been expropriated from private Palestinian ownership. This land you can't build on, but then the government has refused to implement the Supreme Court rulings, which is why one of the things to look at and worry about next week in the Israeli election. It's something of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court was not the one about it. The Supreme Court was not. How long did it take? Is it still at the home there? The home there? The home there? The home there? The Supreme Court and the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court. Look, I talk earlier about rules of the game. I expect. I expect. No, no, I'm sorry. I expect British rules of the game. British rules of the game are not the holy organic rules of the game. I mean, I expect to honour the truth. You are spreading life here. Okay, well, you'll be able to. Sorry, 90. Sorry. No, no, no, Daniel, really, because we'll be able to. We'll be able to deal with some of this in the summing up speeches, but I did say that this was a question and answer session. Is the microphone over there now working? It is, Hooray, the very patient man who has been trying to speak to us all evening.
I propose to you that Israel is not a democracy. It is an ethnocracy because only one race has rights in Israel. And the law of return only grants the rights to people with Jewish blood going back to Israel. We've never been there and building on Palestinian land. And it doesn't right any rights to the Palestinians to even have extensions to their homes or it denies unbelievable things. Is there a question which deals with the military? Well, basically, it is an ethnocracy, not a democracy. Okay, thank you. We have somebody up on the gallery. The most interesting point of her this evening is the argument about Israel being a democracy, which in principle I think we most agree with, and the comparison with South Africa during apartheid.
Now, if I may make another comparison, it's a question for the panelists against the motion. I was wondering if you see any comparisons with what Israel is currently doing to the Palestinians with what the Nazis did to the Jews. And specifically. And one more down here. We've got a question at the back. Excuse me, I haven't finished. Excuse me, I wanted to qualify my question. It wasn't a statement, it was a question. Understood. But we've heard it. No, no, no, I wanted to, sorry, I wanted to qualify it. I just wanted to say it wasn't to be polemic about the Holocaust. It took two aspects of my comparison. One is the fact that the Nazis also got voted in, democratically, just as much as the Israeli right-wing governments get voted in. Second, all the Nazi ideology was founded on fear of the Jews, just as much as the arguments have hurt tonight about the survival of Israel based on fear of the Arabs attacking. Okay, thank you. We will, no, we thank you very much. We've got the tenor of your point. Thank you. You, sir.
I find in these difficult issues that historical context is often very helpful. A question for each of the panelists, which of you has read Edward Said's book, The Question of Palestine? Right. Let's, I'm glad that it was the panelists rather than the chairman there, so I don't have to display migrants. Let's hear from perhaps William and Caroline this time briefly. Is Israel a democracy or not? Are there any useful comparisons to be drawn? Not just with South Africa, but with the Nazis, and have any of you read Edward Said?
Well, the answer to the last question is yes. The answer to the first question is more complex. Is Israel a democracy? I suppose a simple answer to that question from my perspective is, which israel? An israel on 1967 borders, or an israel that as we saw on the map, covers the whole of the west bank and control of Gaza. If Israel is the latter, it's hard to see it as a democracy because Palestinians don't get to have the vote in Israeli elections. Now, you might argue and say, well, Israelis don't get to vote in Palestinian elections, but as we know, Palestinians, when they have elections, their governments don't tend to be recognized.
The second question was the parallel with the Nazis. And I think the parallel you were using, I hope, was nothing to do with the Holocaust. It was to do with fear and all those kinds of things. I'm always very, very uncomfortable with anyone making any analogies to the Holocaust and the Nazis. I think it's deeply inappropriate, and I don't like to make these kinds of historical connections. I hope I've answered your questions. You have with Admiral Brevity, Carolyn.
So, regarding Edward Said, I didn't read his book, but I did heckle him in 1990. As for the issue of, what is it, Israel and Nazis? Oh, shame on you. Shame on you, shame on you. Let me just give you a little historical background, which you may or may not know, and actually I don't really care what you think. But just so people know, there was the founder of the Palestinian nation, was a guy named Hajimeen al-Husaini, who was the Mufti of Jerusalem, that the British appointed in 1920. And he was a Nazi agent, and among other things that he did, he established in 1940, the Hans-Harr SS Division of Bosnian Muslims. And among other things that the Hans-Harr Division did, was they liquidated the Bosnian Jewish community, or 90% of it. They killed 12,600 Jews out of 14,000 Jews in Bosnia. This was a man as well who intervened with Himmler and with Eichmann to prevent a prisoner swap of 4,000 Jewish children. In, in, in, yeah, so basically Hajimeen al-Husaini was a Nazi war criminal, not that you care about this, but it's interesting that just last week, Mahmoud Abbas, who is the moderate PLO chief and Palestinian authority leader, hailed Hajimeen al-Husaini as the hero of the Palestinian people in a speech in Ramallah. So that, you know, I think that when you're making, when you're making a comparison, excuse me, when you're making a comparison between the people, the people, the victims of the Nazis and their Palestinian agents, and their Palestinian apologists, including Mahmoud Abbas, who wrote a PhD thesis for the Oriental University in Moscow, denying the Holocaust, and claiming that it was a joint plot of the Zionist and the Germans. And you compare us to them, the perpetrators, the people who now they want to commit genocide against, just read Hamas's charter, you have some serious moral issues that you need to deal with yourselves. Okay, Caroline, thank you very much indeed. Can we just get one final brief group of questions, and then we'll take the final vote? The gentleman in the glasses just here in the middle.
William and Daniel are very disingenuous in that they choose selectively to show maps of Israel as it currently is. It currently occupies 16% of the mandate for Palestine. 77% of which was given away by the British, totally in contravention of the agreement. The agreement still stands because under Article 80 of the UN, all agreements adopted by the League of Nations are still extant. So you're actually completely wrong. Why is it that, as Caroline alluded to, it's okay for Jews to be shipped out wholesale from wherever they happen to be, from Iraq, from Egypt, from Syria, from Lebanon. How many Jews are there now? And yet, transfer, and from Judea and Samaria, it's okay to transfer wholesale half a million people, but God forbid there should be ever any movement of any other peoples.
Okay. You know, at the end of the Second World War, the end of the Second World War, Germany lost. We have a whole-style transfer of the point of question. So that's the question. Why is it okay for Jews to be moved under nobody else? Thank you very much indeed. We've got somebody with a sort of blue sleeve here. Green. I'm a little shocked by some of the comments from Caroline in particular. I will ask a question. I haven't had anyone suggesting that all Jews need to be removed. There is a difference between Jewish people living in a place and what settlements represent in terms of the control of the land, the control of movement, in terms of the expropriation of resources. I've stood on a hilltop and watched Palestinian water systems being destroyed.
Okay. Do you have a question there? Yes, I do have a question. My question is, if it's alright for settlements in their current form, I don't mean for Jewish people to live in the West Bank, but if in their current form, you think that it's alright for settlements to remain and expand and develop. What is your proposal for the Palestinian people who are living in area C and areas A and B? We haven't talked about Oslo. Whole other debate. But in the whole of the West Bank, what are you proposing actually happens to them in the future?
Okay, thank you very much. And let's have our final question from the balcony. I'm going to try and be brief. At the beginning of the debate, I was asked to empty my mind of any preconceptions. I tried to do that. And as someone who is not Jewish or Palestinian and may have some idea about the conflicts and the problems that go on there, what am I supposed to take away from this debate? Because I have to say, frankly, I'm a bit confused. And I'm actually, I feel like I've been bludgeoned over the head because I'm not intelligent enough to understand some of the points here. And I just, I actually came here to learn, but what do you want me to take away from here?
That's an excellent question. Thank you. Okay. I'm going to plead for a decision and also for us not to raise our voices. But the three questions were, why is it not okay for Jews apparently to live in certain places? What will be the long-term future for Palestinians if settlements stay in place? And why is it, if I can just paraphrase your very heartfelt question, why is it so often that when it comes to discussing Israel, the blood boils?
Well, it's a very interesting array of questions, and I can't answer the last one, Tim. But I think that the ladies' question from the balcony is perhaps the most salient and the most important. And I speak, as I say, as a Brit and as a non-Jew, and therefore to some extent, I come from her state of mind, or I did 10 years ago when I first got involved in this conflict. And I can tell you that I have the most extraordinary privilege of anybody in this room, which is I get to meet the leadership of everybody on all sides, and there are not many people who are allowed to do that. And the one thing I can tell you is that if the Palestinian leadership were offered a two-state solution based on 1967 borders, probably with some land swaps, they would bite your arm off. It's as simple as that. That I am lucky and privileged enough to have discovered for myself. It is very hard, in a very shouty, noisy, both debate here but internationally, to get people quite to understand that. So that, I hope, is a point of information, but to the lady up there who wanted to know what to take out of this. And I think that those blue points on the map I showed you earlier along are getting in the way of that.
Thank you very much, and to you, William. Danny, I want to ask you, what is the long-term future for Palestinians if settlements not just continue to expand?
非常感谢,威廉,同样感谢你。丹尼,我想问问你,如果定居点继续扩张,巴勒斯坦人的长期未来会怎样?
Okay. First of all, I apologize if in some instances I lost my temper and broke the rules of the debate. I think that what makes me, my blood boil is not the issue of Israel, but in accuracies or fallacies, but I should have shown more restraint.
Now, and of course, again, I must say the outrageous comparison to the Nazis, that I am quite surprised to see it come. Please. By the way, Prime Minister David Cameron was also elected in democratic elections, and sometimes he spread fears of the EU. Does it make him a Nazi? I doubt it.
Danny, what is the long-term future for Palestinians? Now, I will answer that. Look, you can be happy or frustrated by it, but it is still a fact. There is no point that reconciles the minimal requirements of Israel and the minimal requirements of the Palestinians. How do I know it? Because Prime Minister Ulmert gave the most far-reaching offer that any Israeli Prime Minister can give to Mr. Mahmoud Abbas.
By the way, the US Secretary of State Condoleezza writes in her memoirs that she couldn't believe her eyes when she saw the offer, and Abbas rejected it. So, for the. Don't get backwards. No, no, no, I go forward. So, we have to understand that for the time being, we have to improve the situation on the ground vis-a-vis human rights, vis-a-vis freedom of movement, vis-a-vis the fact that my daughter shouldn't have to go to school in a bullet-proof bus, and no Palestinian child should be threatened the same way.
On the long term, and now I go into speculation. My. I suppose that the solution of the conflict will be peculiar, as the conflict itself. I suppose that it will be original one. I suppose that someday it may be tomorrow, or maybe in 50 years, there is going to be an inevitable change of regime in Jordan, because monarchies, monarchies not like your monarchy, monarchy in which the monarchs actually rules are a primitive way of government.
There are going to be two nation states, a Jewish-Israel, and the Palestinian east of the Jordan, with joint responsibility and joint control of Judean Samaria. Okay, we'll leave it. Jews will be ruled by Israel and have Israeli citizenship. Palestinians will be ruled by the Palestinian state.
I suppose the last last remark, this may be a pattern of government that doesn't have yet a name in international relations in political science, but if you confine yourself to conventional forms of solving conflicts and governing people, you will never solve this conflict. Thank you very much indeed.
Daniel wants to say something very, very, very brief. I mean, my takeaway, and it was predicted by important Israeli leaders at the time in 67, is that occupying another people for 40-plus years has a terribly, morally corrosive effect on the occupier. Of course, it's not a picnic for the occupied, but I do think that that has come out this evening.
The need to justify the unjustifiable, the need to do those somersaults in the air when one doesn't have a grounding in being able to justify something, it has an effect, and it's a tragedy of Israeli society today that I hope we can still turn around, and that I hope this isn't the direction we're going in.
One sentence. One sentence. I actually, like I mentioned, I'm writing a book now, and it's called the Israeli Solution, and my solution is simply to allow the Palestinians to apply for Israeli citizenship. I don't see any reason why that shouldn't just be the long-term future, that this will be a one state, and the Palestinians will have the right to be Israelis, just like everybody else. Thank you.
Listen, we're now going to ask you to, we're now going to ask you, we're now going to ask you, I'm sorry, but we're running out of time, we will be kicked out of here. We're now going to ask you to cast your votes.
While you are casting your votes, we're also going to have very brief summing up speeches. Really, rigidly, two minutes from each of you, and we're going to be taking it in the reverse order. I'll be very grateful if you could just be quiet for the summing up speeches, which we will take in reverse order, so we will begin for two minutes. And when I start sort of hammering on my glass, the two minutes will be up with Caroline.
Caroline Glick, please. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, and just keep going ahead with your voting. I just want to say one thing. You know, Danny mentioned that Zionism is a Jewish national liberation movement, and it is. And it is based upon the proposition that the Jewish people have rights. We have right to determine our own lives. We have a right to sovereignty in our land. This right was recognized under international law. That recognition has never been abrogated as the young man said in one of the later questions this evening.
And really what we're talking about here, I think, in this whole idea of whether Israel has a right to assert its rights or not, is whether or not Jewish rights are conditional on other people's approval of them. And so I'm here to tell you that they're not conditional on anybody else giving us approval for our right to determine our own existence as Jews in our land.
And Israel is a democracy. It's the only democracy in the Middle East. And our people will continue to determine our future as a people in our land. And we hope very much that you will support that. But if you don't support that, that's okay. That's all right. That's just fine with us because the whole point of having a Jewish national home and of having a Jewish state in Israel is for us to be able to determine our faith, regardless of what others think. Because for 2,000 years as an exile community and dispersed throughout the world, we didn't have that. We didn't have that, and we lived at the mercy of others and at their pleasure. And that's over. It's done. It's done. Thank you very much.
To singularly say we have rights. Others don't. It's at the expense of others. Only we have national self-determination, not the Palestinians. But the idea that we can dwell alone as a nation in the modern world, the idea that all of us can live unconditionally, we enter into social contracts every second of the day. When I cross a road because it's green, I'm in a social contract with a driver who's not going to run me over. To think that Israel can exist outside of the real world, ignoring the fact that all this great independence that we've just heard asserted is only made possible by the support of the United States, which is going to turn on us with those kinds of opinions. Look, you could say we had nothing, we got Balfour, we got half of it in the partition plan a bit more than we got 78%. And now we've got 100%. We can keep it all. I think it's a misreading of Israeli and regional and global realities. What worries me is that rather than the people with those opinions winning an election and implementing those ideas and discovering rather quickly that they can't work and allowing us to move on, that we're going to continue to play a game where drip, drip, drip, we move in that direction without ever stepping back and asking ourselves, how does this end well? What is the strategic objective? Where are we going? That's why I've spoken in favor of this motion tonight. Thank you very much.
Danny? Okay. Well, the difference between Daniel's words right now and mine is only one. That he presents us with a new topic, with a new topic, a portrait of reality, and I'm looking at reality as it is. The fact is that the Palestinian state does not exist even today because of the moral and the political decisions made by the Palestinians themselves. It's not history. It's a close of 2008. It's a close of 2010. I was in Washington in 2010 when Prime Minister Netanyahu, Chairman Abbas and President Obama started the negotiations. A month later, Chairman Abbas found a pretext to leave the negotiating table. Now, how can you do an agreement under those circumstances? I beg you to see the situation as it is. Do you know who was the American president that made the most damage in the Middle East? The American president with the best intentions, Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton assumed power in 1993 with the stable Middle East. He thought it was a kind of romantic vision of what can be achieved in the Middle East, when together, when the candidate, the summit, proposed the Palestinian state, raised expectations, and the result was that yes or a fact made the end of his administration. The most chaotic Middle East that ever existed. That is an example of how misunderstanding the situation in the Middle East with very liberal views and very. Am I liberal too? By the way, I refuse to visit South Africa until the apartheid regime was toppled. Yes, that's a fact you've done. We'll have to leave it there in order to be fair.
William, two minutes. Thank you very much. More and more Israelis are against making peace because it's no longer in their economic or political interest to do so. Already the leader of Jewish home, Naftali Bennett, likely to be the second or third largest party after the election, has said that there could never be a Palestinian state and he wouldn't ever countenance forcing a settler out of his home.
Where's he taking Israel? Well, you've heard. You can sense it. And the truth is that if the two-state solution, a state of Palestine alongside a state of Israel, does not appear or can no longer practically appear because of the facts on the ground, there will be irresistible pressure from the international community for Israel to accept as the South Africans had to, that the state of Israel will have to become a bi-national state that includes all the Palestinians with equal rights. And in a democracy that puts the Jewish population into a minority, that means the end of the Zionist dream.
And even if a future Israeli government decided to surprise the world and make a dash for a Palestinian state on borders that the Palestinians could accept, could that government organize the necessary concessions from an Israeli public and system of governance that increasingly is made up of senior settlers? Each announcement of further settlement approvals by an Israeli government removes any remaining doubts amongst the international community about Israel's genuine intentions towards peace. Or of their intentions to the Palestinians, some trapped in Gaza and others in that archipelago of islands I showed you on the map in the West Bank. That will have enormous ramifications for Israel's future. That is the conclusion of none other than Shimon Perez, the President of Israel, only a few days ago. It's also mine. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, William. You actually have 3.1 seconds to spare. I should say that in wrapping up the question and answer session, I was guilty of yet another filthy lie by a journalist about the Middle East in that I said that the reason we had to wrap it up was because we were going to get kicked out of here. That's not entirely true. We do have to wrap up the debate and I'm now filling for time before I get the results of the vote. But in fact, there is a paying bar here until quarter past nine and in proper journalistic fashion, I'm encouraging you all to go to the bar and spend your pennies. The other thing that I would say as well is, yes, there are books to be had there, including many of Williams, that the organizers of this debate have asked me just to say that they deliberately did not ask Palestinians onto the panel because they wanted it to be a debate among Israelis and Jews and those interested in Israel. So that was the point.
And that has brought me to the Golden Globe moment where I tell you the result of the debate. But before I do that, thank you all very much for your patience and your attention and your thoughtfulness just actually to turn out on the debate. And I'm actually to turn out on a cold weekday evening to hear all this.
In the end, after listening to the speakers, for the motion, Israel is destroying itself with its settlement policy, 517 against 99 undecided after all that, 31. So thank you to you. Thank you also very much to Intelligence Square for another very intelligent debate. Safe journey home.