Joseph Massad - Right of Return Conference Keynote (2013)

Speaker 1: We will be hearing from the esteemed Dr. Joseph Massad. Joseph Massad currently teaches modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University. Massad has written extensively on the issue of Palestinian identity and self-determination, and he is one of the foremost Palestinian academics in the United States today. A student of the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, he is the author of Colonial Effects, The Making of National Identity in Jordan, and The Persistence of the Palestinian Question, Essays on Zionism and Palestinian Nationalism. In addition to his tremendous works on identity and self-determination, he is renowned for his thought-provoking studies on the histories of desire, gender, and sexuality in the Arab world. And his latest book, Desiring Arabs, received the Lionel Trilling Book Award in 2008. He also writes columns on Palestinian and Arab affairs for Al Jazeera English's website. Al-Ahram Weekly, and the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar. His forthcoming book is titled Islam and Liberalism. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Joseph Mazhar.

Joseph Massad: Thank you very much. Thank you, Alex, and thank you for inviting me to this wonderful conference. I'm delighted to be here, of course, and thanks to all of you who've stayed after this long day or two days. I understand it's been quite tiring, so I will try not to be terribly boring, although, of course, all the important things have already been said. I have very few things to add, perhaps more repetition, and... trying to give some conclusive maybe overview of the situation that we face. All right, the title of my talk is Returning Rights. Since its inception, the Zionist project was clear in its goals and the strategy required to achieve them. In order for Jews to colonize the lands of the Palestinians and establish an exclusivist Jewish state, Zionist strategists insisted the natives must be driven out of the country. For Zionism, colonization and expulsion were to be simultaneous processes that could not be decoupled from one another. Indeed, they would become the very same process. At the same time, Zionism insisted, following millenarian Protestant restorationist claims, that European Jews, rather than being descendants of European converts to Judaism, were actually descendants of the ancient Hebrews who had been allegedly exiled by the Romans in the first century AD. Based on this double fiction, Zionism claimed that European Jews were in fact returning to Palestine in order to colonize it. Indeed, that European Jews had the right to return to their original homeland. Thus, Jewish colonization was one and the same as Jewish return to Palestine, just as it was one and the same as the Jewish expulsion of the Palestinians from the country. Once Zionism had political control of Palestine, it followed two policies to ensure that its colonial project continued unhindered. On the one hand, it insisted that the Palestinians that expelled had no right to return to Palestine, and that it would prevent their attempt to return by military means while expelling as many as possible of those who remained. On the other hand, it decreed in 1950 a law of return for Jews, endowing them with the right to colonize Palestine, which is presented as a right, or as their right, to recolonize it. Turning the rights of the Palestinians to their homes and homeland into the rights of European Jews to return to Palestine was and continues to be the main political, legal, and ideological strategy of Zionism and the principal policy of the State of Israel. This translates into the only political formula that Zionist and Israeli leaders as well as the Palestinian people agree on. Namely, that Jewish colonization means expulsion of the Palestinians and Palestinian return means Jewish decolonization. What the two sides disagree on is which part of the formula they want to enforce. Understanding the transfer of the rights of one people to another, Edward Said affirmed, and I quote him, that the colonization of Palestine proceeded always as a fact of repetition. The Jews were not supplanting, destroying, breaking up a native society. That society was itself the oddity that had broken the pattern of a 60-year Jewish sovereignty over Palestine, which had lapsed for two millennia. Zionism therefore reclaimed, redeemed, repeated, replanted, realized Palestine and Jewish hegemony over it. Israel was a return to a previous state of affairs, even if the new facts bore a far greater resemblance to the methods and successes of 19th century European colonialism than to some mysterious first century forebears. Unquote. The propagation of the Zionist movement of the Protestant restorationist slogan that Palestine was a country without people for a people without a country betrayed not only the wishful thinking of Zionism, but also its understanding that its planned expulsion of the Palestinians would not garner international support. Thus, the propagated slogan was really a conscious cover-up for the Zionist belief that Palestine was a country with an undeserving people for a deserving people without a country. The representation of the Palestinians as a parasitic people who have done nothing to improve Palestine over the centuries and who allegedly left the land fallow without cultivation drives Theodor Herzl to exclaim in his novel Altneuland, and I quote him, if only we had the people here to restore the land, unquote. It bears noting that Zionists borrowed the notion of a parasitic people from anti-Semitic representations of European Jews and from the corresponding racist colonial representation of the natives of the Americas of Australia and Africa. Many Zionist plans were devised over the decades to bring about the expulsion of the Palestinians, starting with the simple plan advanced by Herzl, which proposed expelling Palestinian peasants off their land after the Zionists purchased it from absentee landlords for Jewish colonization. Dispossessing Palestinian peasants of their lands, however, would not be sufficient. Herzl understood that Palestinians as a whole must be dispossessed of their homeland altogether in order for Zionism to establish the Jewish settler colony. In his 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat, The State of the Jews, Herzl explained, and I quote him, an infiltration of Jews is bound to end badly. It continues till the inevitable moment when the native population feels itself threatened, and forces the government to stop further influx of Jews. Immigration is consequently futile unless we have the sovereign right to continue such immigration, unquote. To achieve a takeover of the land, Herzl proposed in his diaries that the Jewish colonists would gently expropriate the natives' property unquote, and this is a famous quote, perhaps many of you know it, try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries while denying it any employment in our own country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly. Let the owners of immovable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth, but we are not going to sell them anything back." Herzl's understanding would percolate through the Zionist movement and would be adopted by his Zionist followers, who would suppress all future dissent on this matter. Speaking of Palestinian resistance in 1923 and arguing against those who were proposing a compromise with the natives, Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionist Zionism, the rival of mainstream Zionism, understood well how colonization and expulsion were one and the same thing. He wrote, and I quote, any native people, it's all the same whether they are civilized or savage, views their country as their national home, of which they will always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that Arabs are some kinds of fools who can be tricked and who will abandon their birthright to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. Note birthright is a very important word today, especially after Susan Akram's important remarks. Jabotinsky continues, I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally, they are 500 years behind us. Spiritually, they do not have our endurance or our strength of will. But this exhausts all the internal differences. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon the prairie. This childish fantasy of our Arabophiles comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people, that this race is a rabble ready to be bribed or sell out their homeland for a railroad network, unquote. Jabotinsky understood well that the Palestinians, as he put it, are not a rabble but a nation. Unlike Herzl, who thought the expulsion process would be carried out gently through dissimulation, Jabotinsky's strategy was to expel the Palestinians from their homeland using military force. He added that, quote, Zionist colonization must either be terminated or carried out against the wishes of the native population, unquote, concluding, in his words, that Zionism is a colonization adventure, and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. Unquote. Brushing aside any ethical concerns, he concluded in 1939 at the conclusion of the Palestinian revolt that, quote, there is no choice. The Arabs must make room for the Jews of Eretz Israel. If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, which was ongoing between Stalin and Hitler in 1939, he continues, it is also possible to move the Palestinian Arabs. Unquote. The debates that the Zionists would have in the 1920s and 1930s about what they termed the transfer of the Palestinians, remember at the time they also were engaged in transferring German Jews to Palestine through a surreptitious transfer agreement that they signed with Hitler. So the debates that they had in the 1920s and 30s about what they termed the transfer of the Palestinians are rich in detail, but their conclusion was inescapable. Concurring with Jabotinsky, David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the colonial settlers of mainstream Zionism, declared in June 1938, and I quote, I support compulsory transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it, unquote. His statement would follow the policy adopted by the Jewish Agency, which was the main Zionist organ in charge of advancing Jewish colonization of Palestine, which set up its first, quote, population transfer committee, as it called it, in November 1937 to strategize the forceful expulsion of the Palestinians. A key member of the committee was Joseph Weitz, the director of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department, aptly titled, of course. This was hardly coincidental. As colonization and expulsion are part of the same policy, White's view and his role were central to both. White articulated the matter famously. I quote him, between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country. We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this small country. There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries. All of them, not one village, not one tribe should be left, unquote. The Jewish agency would set up a second population transfer committee in 1941 and a third one during the Zionist conquest of Palestine in May 1948. All this planning would come to fruition in the form of ethnic cleansing or the ethnic cleansing operation encapsulated in the Israeli army's plan Dalet, which was adopted in March 1948 by the Haganah. Plan Dalit's precepts, however, were enshrined in earlier versions of the same plan and were put into practice four months earlier, beginning on November 30, 1947, the day after the United Nations voted to partition Palestine and when the expulsion of the Palestinians by Zionist military force started. If Jewish colonization of the country was inaugurated in the 1880s by evicting Palestinians from their land through legal and financial means, and this is something that's very important. People forget that Palestinian peasants were expelled off their lands beginning in the 1880s. It's the military expulsion that begins in 1948. But for 50 years prior to that, you already had this financial, legally binding expulsion, which could not be questioned at the time in a court of law. If Jewish colonization of the country was inaugurated in the 1880s by evicting Palestinians from their land through legal and financial means, Zionism's failure to acquire more Palestinian lands made it clear that only a forceful illegal eviction would achieve this goal. In 65 years of aggressive purchases and legal and illegal acquisition of Palestinian land between 1882 and 1948, under the protection of the British occupation, the Zionists were able to acquire less than 7% of the lands of Palestine and could only expel tens of thousands of Palestinian peasants living on that portion of the land. If this was the rate at which land purchases were to continue, the best case scenario meant that the Zionists would need another nine centuries to buy the rest of the country and expel the rest of the Palestinians. That the Palestinians raised a massively successful national campaign against selling lands to Zionists rendered even that scenario a very optimistic one. This surely was not an acceptable solution for the Zionists, and one that they had anticipated and expected, as you could tell from Herzl's comments, and which necessitated forceful ethnic cleansing as the most effective way to successful colonization. By May 14, 1948, about 400,000 Palestinians had already been ethnically cleansed by advancing Zionist forces, who were not only securing the borders of the Jewish settler colony that the partition plan granted them, but were already well into the territory of the projected Palestinian state. It was this expulsion and territorial encroachment that became the casus belli, the reasons for war, for the weak and ill-equipped neighboring Arab armies to intervene, to put a stop to the ongoing expulsion and colonization. The weaknesses of the Arab armies, or the weakness of the Arab armies, was well known to the Americans and the Zionists. U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall's assessment was as follows. Let me read it to you. The whole government structure of Iraq is endangered by political and economic disorders of the Iraqi government. And it cannot at this moment afford to send more than a handful of troops, but more than the handful of troops it has already dispatched. Egypt has suffered recently from strikes and disorders. Its army has insufficient equipment because of the refusal of the British to aid it. And what it has is needed for police duty at home. Syria has neither arms nor an army worthy of the name and has not been able to organize one since the French left three years ago. Lebanon has no real army while Saudi Arabia has a small army which is barely sufficient to keep the tribes in order. Jealousies between Saudi Arabia and the Syrians on the one hand and the Hashemite governments of Jordan and Iraq on the other prevent Arabs from making even the best of the existing forces, unquote. American officials understood this very well. Indeed, Robert McClintock, a member of the US delegation to the UN, observed on May 4th, 11 days before the Arab armies intervened, that the Security Council would soon be confronted with the question as to, quote, whether Jewish armed attack on the Arab communities in Palestine is legitimate or whether it constitutes such a threat to international peace and security as to call for coercive measures by the Security Council. My good colleague who is not here, Irene Genzier, is writing a book actually on this period. McClintock further observed that if Arab armies entered Palestine, this would lead the Jewish forces to claim, and I quote, that their state is the object of armed aggression and will use every means to obscure the fact that it is their own armed aggression against the Arabs inside Palestine which is the cause of the Arab counterattack, unquote. This is an American official who understood the situation as did the American government in 1948. Given their weakness and the strength of the invading Zionist army, the Arab armies failed to stop the ongoing expulsion of the Palestinians and the colonial expansion of Israel. Ben-Gurion did not dissimulate when he described the situation on the ground. I quote him, He would add, and I quote, And this is a famous quote. If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural. We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us. But what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel. It's true. But that was 2,000 years ago. And what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz. But was that their fault? They only see one thing We have come and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? Understanding the Palestinian position, however, did not deter Ben-Gurion from assessing the success of Zionist policies, namely that successful Jewish colonization can only be achieved through successful expulsion of the Palestinians. A reversal of the expulsion would undo this coupling and indeed reverse colonization. This is why Ben-Gurion and all subsequent Israeli governments categorically refused to allow the Palestinian refugees to return home. While the expulsion was ongoing in July 1948, Ben-Gurion insisted that, quote, we must do everything to ensure that the Palestinians never return, unquote. Indeed, the leadership of the Jewish settler colony hoped that the old Palestinians will die and the young will forget. But this was not to be. The Palestinians have neither died away nor forgotten their rights. And those among them who remain on the land continue to be steadfast in the face of Israel's colonial expulsion policies. Thousands of Palestinians, contrary to Ben-Gurion's expectations, attempted to return between 1948 and 1956 under the cover of darkness by crossing Israel's makeshift colonial borders. But Israeli guns awaited them. The Israeli army would kill upwards of 5,000 of them during this period, calling them foreign infiltrators. Rhetorically, Zionism has understood the power of the right of return not only in its legal and ethical dimensions, but also in its ability to undermine the meaning that Zionists attributed to that very same concept. After all, it was Zionism which insisted that European Jewish descendants of European converts to Judaism were in fact descendants of the ancient Hebrews who had been allegedly expelled from ancient Palestine and whose repatriation and return was a moral and political imperative 2,000 years later. Note that Zionism's argument is not a historical one, wherein it was and is not claiming that the alleged Hebrew exiles of the first century should have had the right to return to Palestine then, but rather that their fictional descendants should have the right to do so two millennia later. These ideological premises would be enshrined in Israel's very own law of return, passed by the Knesset in July 1950. Yet it is the same Zionists who insist that the return of the Palestinian refugees, whether immediately following the expulsion in 1949 or every year since, is impractical and impossible. Today they express shock that refugees should have a right to return to their homeland a mere 65 years after their expulsion, while they insist on the rights of Jews to return after 2,000 years. In an attack on this very conference, one Richard Kravatz, a Boston-based Zionist propagandist, expressed his horror in the time of Israel last week. Echoing standard Zionist arguments, he stated that, quote, no population of refugees has ever presumed that the right of return, if such a right even exists, could be claimed not only by the original refugees, but also by their descendants, unquote. Kravats seems to have forgotten that it is European Jews whom Zionism had invented as fictional descendants of the fictional Hebrew refugees of the first century who have presumed exactly that very right in the name of which they colonized and colonized Palestine. While for Zionism, Jewish return is the very condition of colonization. Israel understands very well that the return of the actual Palestinian refugees and their descendants means nothing short of decolonization and the undoing of the Zionist project. Israel is of course correct in its assessment. It should be noted here that international law's understanding of the rights of the refugees includes the rights of their descendants to return. In addition to the annual UN reassertion of the Palestinian refugees' right of return, the right of return was upheld in principle and practice after the Bosnian War. Upwards, of half a million refugees and internally displaced persons returned to their homes in Bosnia, a country of three and a half million people, to places which were dominated demographically and politically by members of another ethno-national community, and they did so with international assistance following the 1995 Dayton Agreement. As the Bosnian case clearly demonstrates, the right of return of the refugees trumped the racially separatist policies of the local authorities who sought to continue to control the land of the displaced refugees and to populate it demographically with their own ethnic group at the expense of the refugees. International enforcement of the Bosnian refugees' right of return was based on the well-established right of return of refugees in international law and UN resolutions, while demographic racial separatism has no moral or legal standing in enforcing the refugees' rights. The problem for Zionism in Israel, however, is not the right of return, as that is central to their ideology and their colonial settler project, but rather with who is allowed to be a right of return-bearing subject in general. Like everything else with Zionism and Israel, their conception of rights is never universal, but always particular, indeed, always Jews-specific. Whereas for Zionism, Jews by definition are right of return bearing subjects, whose exercise of the right of return translates immediately into the colonization of Palestine, Palestinians can never be permitted to become right of return bearing subjects, as their exercise of such a right translates immediately into decolonization. It is this particularism that informs the Israeli commitment to Jewish colonization, racial separatism, and supremacy, which Barack Obama supports unequivocally and which stands in the way of Palestinian return. But unlike the Palestinians who have the right to return to their homes according to international law and UN resolutions, which apply their criteria universally, not being refugees from Palestine, Jews are not granted the right to return to Palestine or Israel in any international convention or UN resolution. Indeed, it is Israel alone that has granted them that right on its own. All the international foundational documents of Zionism not only insist on the rights of the Palestinians and the rights of diaspora Jews to remain safe in the diaspora, but ironically, they grant no right of return to Jews. The British Balfour Declaration of November 1917 grants British support for the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. But it does so on the condition, and I quote, that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country, unquote. The League of Nations mandate for Palestine, which actually the Zionists helped script, reiterated the very same language, mentioning only the rights of non-Jews. The UN partition plan itself guarded in explicit terms against any expulsion of the population of the Jewish or the Arab states that it proposed. Once the expulsion was underway, the UN General Assembly issued its Resolution 194 on 11 December 1948, granting the Palestinian refugees the right of return and compensation for lost or damaged property. There is not one UN resolution, not one international legal document, that grants Jews the right of return to Palestine or Israel. Whereas the Palestinians are considered right of return bearing subjects in a universalist international law language, Jews have acquired that right only in the particularist Israeli law. This discrepancy is a central one to Israel's rejection of the Palestinian right of return. The arguments that Israel regularly puts forward have no international legal standing at all, but they do have standing within the structure of Zionist ideology. While the Israeli-granted Jewish right of return guarantees Jewish colonization and safeguards Jewish racial and religious supremacy, just as the expulsion of the Palestinians guarantees Jewish demographic supremacy, the Palestinian right of return, if implemented, would undermine both. Israeli leaders are clear on this, and they do not mince words when addressing this problem. Benjamin Netanyahu is only the latest Israeli leader to reiterate them. Namely, and I quote him, that the return of the Palestinians will wipe out Israel's future as a Jewish state, unquote. To guarantee his continuation in good standing as part of the Oslo process with his American and Israeli partners, Yasser Arafat conceded the Palestinian right of return in a New York Times editorial in 2002. Arafat frankly expressed his so-called understanding and respect of the Israeli need to maintain Jewish demographic supremacy. He asserted, and I quote him, We understand Israel's demographic concerns and understand that the right of return of Palestinian refugees, a right guaranteed under international law and UN Resolution 194, must be implemented in a way that takes into account such concerns, unquote. Arafat proceeded to state that he was looking to negotiate with Israel on, quote, creative solutions to the plight of the refugees while respecting Israel's demographic concerns, unquote. i.e. respecting its Jewish supremacist demographic concerns. However, what makes the right of return of Palestinian refugees, whom Israel expelled and whose land it stole and steals, uncreative is not some geographic or demographic consideration, not some environmental or logistical obstacle. What makes the return not pragmatic is that they are not Jews, and therefore not right of return bearing subjects. Arafat's position was recently reiterated by his American-picked successor, Mahmoud Abbas, who conceded his own right to return to the city of Safad, now in Israel, from which he and his family had been expelled in 1948. Ten years after Arafat's concession, Abbas declared on Israeli television in November 2012, and I quote him, Palestine now, for me, is 67 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. This is now and forever. This is Palestine for me. I am a refugee, but I am living in Ramallah. I believe that the West Bank in Gaza is Palestine and the other parts are Israel." The reaction of the Palestinian refugees in the West Bank in Gaza and the diaspora was swift and their anger uncontainable. Abbas was burned in effigy and denounced across the Palestinian political spectrum. Palestinians understood that his renunciation of the right of return was an endorsement of Israeli colonialism and a Palestinian ratification of the Jewish settler colony. So did Israeli leaders. Israel's president, Shimon Peres, described Abbas's statement, and I quote, as a brave and important public declaration. And that Abbas, quote, understood that the solution to the Palestinian refugee issue cannot be in Israel's territory and to the detriment of Israel's character, unquote. Whereas Abbas's vision of the future of Palestine is shared by Israeli Jewish leaders and most Israeli Jews, unsurprisingly, it is not shared by most Palestinian refugees as evidenced by the hostile popular reaction to his statements. Abbas's, however, is not the only Palestinian vision for the future. Another vision continues to animate Palestinian hopes and strategies for a restoration of their rights and for returning them to their homes. The Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanifani articulated this vision more than four decades ago in his important 1969 novel, Returning to Haifa. Canafani, in that novel, explored the return of expelled Palestinians to their homes. The novel depicts a Palestinian couple, Said and Safiya, refugees from Haifa who were expelled to the West Bank, driving back to their home in Haifa in June 1967, a return made possible by Israel's invasion and occupation of the West Bank a few weeks earlier. In the frenzy of the 1948 expulsion, the Palestinian couple's firstborn son, Khaldun, which means the immortal one, was left behind. Dreaming for 19 years of returning to their home in Haifa and of recovering their lost child, the Palestinians arrive at their home, now occupied by a European Jewish family and their Palestinian son. Khaldun, it turned out, had been abducted and adopted, taken over by Zionism just as the family home had been, just as the entire country had been. Renamed Dov, bear, predatory bear, perhaps, their son was now serving in the Israeli army. The Palestinian couple's second son, Khaled, also a variation on Khaldun, meaning the immortal one, was born in the West Bank, wanted to join the Palestinian guerrillas, but his parents had opposed his decision before returning to Haifa. Yet their return to their still colonized homeland forced them to pose the question, what is a homeland? Said's answer to Safiya resists their erstwhile reactionary nostalgia that sought to return to Haifa, or to a Haifa that once was, and insists not on a pre-colonial past, but on a decolonized future. Let me quote what he says. I am looking for the real Palestine, the Palestine that is more than a memory, more than a son. As for us, you and I, Safiya, Palestine was something we searched for under the dust of memory. And look what we found under the dust. Yet more dust. We made a mistake when we thought the homeland was only the past. For Khalid, their son in the West Bank, the homeland is the future. This is why Khalid wants to carry arms. There are tens of thousands like Khalid who are not halted by the tears men shed while looking in the depth of their defeats for scraps of their shields and broken flowers, but look forward to the future. And in doing so, they correct our mistakes. Indeed, the mistakes of the entire world. Dov is our shame. but Khalid is our enduring honor. Did I not tell you from the beginning that we should not have come back, and that our return requires that a war be waged? Let's go." The war continues to be waged, but it is not a war of arms. There is an ongoing Palestinian legal and political struggle that aims to achieve a decolonized future for Palestinians and Jews. It is the war of boycott, or more precisely, the war of boycott, divestment, and sanctions. BDS understands well that colonization and expulsion are one and the same process, and that the reversal of one is the reversal of the other. The nonviolent war launched a decade ago by the Palestinian BDS movement and its international allies demands an end to Zionist colonization and the reversal of it through the dismantlement of the settler colonial racial structure that governs Israel and prevents the return of the Palestinian refugees. Hence the insistence by the BDS movement that overturning the racial legal privileges of Israeli Jews and turning Palestinians and Jews into equal citizens is the only program for decolonization and the only condition of and for the return of the Palestinian refugees. Thank you for staying. Thank you. If you have any questions, please, I'm happy to field them.

Speaker 3: Today, the whole world, including Israel, recognizes Palestinian national identity. What's the purpose, then, of continuing to deny Jewish connection to the land of Israel that started out over 3,000 years ago?

Joseph Massad: I mean, mostly, I think, because it doesn't go back 3,000 years, first of all. This is a claim made, I mean, of course, Palestinians don't claim that their national identity is 3,000 years old. I mean, their national identity is 100 plus years old, but their presence on the land is thousands of years old. As for Zionist claims... that a kind of a physical connection links Jews worldwide to Israel. There's much scholarship on this. We know that, of course, nationalism is a 19th century phenomenon. In the case of Zionism and Arab nationalism and Palestinian nationalism, It's a late 19th century, early 20th century phenomenon. So the construction of Jews as a nation is very, very sort of recent. And the construction of Jews as a nation who have always had a quest for a physical place called Palestine is also very recent. So I mean, one cannot accept, no one, the whole world does not accept that Palestinians have had national identity for 3,000 years. I don't think Palestinians accept that. Nor should we. And of course, the whole world doesn't accept that Jews have had a 3,000-year-old connection to that. But Protestant millenarian claims from the 16th century on began to claim that European Jews, in fact, descendants of the ancient Hebrews, and that they must be restored to Palestine. This was an anti-Jewish Protestant movement, which Jews, especially rabbis, fought against until the mid-19th century. In fact, until the late 19th century, until some secular Jewish intellectuals decided to take up this anti-Jewish idea from Protestant millenarians on board. The majority of rabbis, as we know, both orthodox rabbis as well as reform rabbis were against this project from the start. Herzl had a very, very hard time convening the first Zionist Congress, which was slated to be convened in Munich. For the first and probably last time, both the Orthodox and Reformed rabbis of Munich got together and signed a document preventing Herzl from actually having the first Zionist Congress in Munich, which forced him to move across the border to Basel in Switzerland. So as a result, the majority of Jews did not believe that they had any connection, any physical connection, to Palestine well through the 1940s, which is why they continued to oppose Zionism in their majority. So as a result, the connection became actually a colonial connection. And as we saw, much of the literature from within Zionism itself, the Zionist leadership, spoke and strategized through use of the term colonization. This is what the fund that was set up for the purchase of the land was called the Palestine Colonization Fund, or colonial trust. Several of the organizations had names like colonization or colonial. This was fully recognized. Only in the 1930s, when it became a bit less fashionable to speak about colonization as colonialism was ending, did Zionists from within the Zionist movement began to pay attention to the term colonialism and spoke, especially Weiz himself, began to speak about, let's stop using the word colonialism because if we are claiming we are returning to the country, you don't colonize your own land, so let's stop using it, it's antagonizing the Palestinians. I mean, this is all part of the record, you see. So it's not some ideological claim or... And I think historians, Jewish historians and historians of the history of European Jews have shown very clearly that the idea of some connection to the physical land of Palestine hardly ever existed. And as you might know, also during the Ottoman period, most Jews from the Arab and Ottoman period did not move to Palestine. They could have. There was nothing preventing them from moving there. They never went there. There was no reason for them to go there. Some A few would go on pilgrimages to visit. Hardly any actually lived there. The only Jews who moved to Palestine were, of course, after the Inquisition, as many of them had moved to the Sephardi Jews who left Spain to the Ottoman Empire, to Salonika, to Holland, to Britain, and some even came to Hebron and Safad. And, of course, the Hebronite Palestinian community dates itself from the time of the Inquisition when Jews and Muslims lived. were expelled from Spain. But this is a new community, of course. And it doesn't trace itself back to the Hebrews or anything of the sort. It was actually, it went to the Ottoman Empire because the Ottomans provided protection from the Inquisition. And it went all over the Ottoman Empire. A very small number of Sephardi Jews ended up in Palestine. The majority ended up in Salonika and Istanbul and elsewhere. Thank you for your question. I must have been very persuasive. I don't see any questions. All right then. Oh, is there a question? Okay, so there's one more.

Speaker 3: The premise of this conference is not to discuss the Roger return, which I think you kind of set forth really clearly, but also practical return and how to look on the ground and how the return actual will happen in reality. So I would love to hear how do you envision the return of the weapon on the ground? I understand that you see the BDS movement as a means to push for the decolonization of Israel and the right of return, but how do you see it politically happening on the ground after the return?

Joseph Massad: All right, thank you. The question is that while I mention or I speak about BDS as sort of a strategy to bring about the decolonization of Israel, how I would envision this to be implemented. There are, of course, I don't have any kind of a blueprint for this, and I think it would be wrong to have any kind of blueprint that we would expect would be implemented in any possible way. We don't really know the conditions under which decolonization would happen, but of course there are several plans out there that ensure that a maximum amount of justice to everyone be sort of implemented, I think, My good colleague Salman Abusiddeh's article from over a decade ago has shown us a way of a population movement and restoration of Palestinian rights to land with a minimum of displacement of Jewish Israelis. It's a very, I think, generous plan. in the way it conceives of the restoration of the lands of the Palestinians. There have been many other sort of ideas floating around, some of which were discussed today and perhaps yesterday. I'm sorry I missed. Yesterday I came late. So ultimately I think decolonization happens differently in different places. In South Africa, as we know, there has been no decolonization because the neoliberal arrangement of the 1994 end of apartheid was one where you end political apartheid while maintaining economic apartheid. As a result, poverty remains the same. Segregation, in a way, economic segregation, which becomes racial segregation, except for a certain peppering of certain towns remains the same. And not unlike what happened in American desegregation. As we know, black Americans today are poorer than they were in the 60s. They are less educated than they were in the 1960s. More of them are in jail than they were in the 1960s. As we know, there are more African American men in jail today in relative and absolute numbers than at the height of apartheid in South Africa. And yet, of course, we pretend to live in a world that is post-American segregation, over which Barack Obama claims to be presiding. So depolonization will take several forms, and it seems to me before that happens, there has to be a change within Israeli society. And I do believe BDS can bring that about. I do think that, in a way, Israeli Jews, who might today see themselves as fully against any such thing as a right of return, if their economic wherewithal is affected and is reduced measurably, through an increase in the effectiveness of BDS. And BDS is a long-term process, of course, but it's already very effective. Two days ago, I think the Teachers Union in Ireland has joined the BDS movement. It's a long-term strategy, and I do believe when people are influenced, or let's say impacted economically in their pocketbooks, they'll change their minds. I mean, if you ask most white Americans who supported segregation in the South, five years after the end of segregation, what their opinion was, they would tell you, oh my God, we never supported it, or how could anyone have supported that? Go ask white South Africans today. Oh, my God. You won't find anyone except the right-wing neo-Nazi types who would tell you they still support it. Most of the white South Africans who supported apartheid a few years ago tell you that they've never supported it. It was a horrible, horrible thing. I look forward to the day, and I expect I will live to see it, when Israeli Jews would say, who are those horrible people amongst us who supported this? Because we didn't. Oh, sorry. One on the right, maybe? Hey, there's no mic, but I can be loud. You're loud sufficiently.

Speaker 4: In a good way.

Speaker 5: I have a rather ill-formed question, but it's something I've been thinking about for a long time and I was interested in your thoughts. Essentially, the first question that was asked, given the difficulties or the complexities involved in tracing lineages and sort of the ways in which we can acknowledge the constructed nature of identity in general, and even indigenous identity in particular, I wonder if you could just maybe point out two things. One, the difficulty, the potential role of the constructed genealogies of indigeneity, because I think that's sort of the problem with it, because I think they often posit as a person, as some kind of authenticity, and I wonder about that posit. In this context, but also, or rather, It's related to this conference. What does it mean to state the assertion of a demand for rights on the plane, given exactly what you probably mentioned in your talk, that return was mobilized by Mr. Zionist ends. What does it mean to mobilize return Mr. Palestinian ends? on, to mobilize the same claims that we've been making to these certain groups.

Joseph Massad: It's not in the generity as such, of course, in the sense that no Palestinian will claim that they've been there for 3,000 years necessarily or that they come from some original genetic stock of which all of them are descendants, clearly. And we haven't seen any genetic research on Palestinians undertaken by Palestinian geneticists as to the Palestinian-carrying gene or the kinds of diseases Palestinians are prone to. like some Zionist Jewish geneticists have been engaged in, and anti-Semitic geneticists have been engaged in since the late 19th century. So in this sense, there's no genetic or biological or even firstness that is invoked in the Palestinian claim. It's actually simply about the local conditions on the ground. A Palestinian family, we don't know, many of them have been there for hundreds of years, probably for thousands of years, probably for 50 years. It doesn't really matter. What we do know is that these local populations who've been living on that land, who had habitual residence on that land, were evicted from it by colonial settlers who came and claimed a right of return. Now, the two right of returns or the two claims for right of returns aren't equivalent except rhetorically. in the sense of if we invoke a kind of a liberal understanding of two claims by two protagonists, which transforms the Palestinian-Israeli colonial situation into the Orwellian language of a Palestinian-Israeli conflict, you see. So in this sense, I think the right of return for Palestinians when they claim it, or for Zionism, which claims it for Jews, are distinguished by one important factor, that we can establish in living memory and in the present, as we speak, that Palestinians are being evicted, this is the local situation, of land in which they occupy, of homes in which they live, and they've lived there in living memory, Whereas Zionism claims the return of Jews that in its living memory it claims have never come from there, right? That actually it's a historic claim to thousands of years, a mythical claim of sorts, even for the Zionists, right? So the people who actually claimed some authenticity for the Palestinian peasants were Ben-Gurion and the early Zionists who claimed that it is most likely that that the Palestinian peasants are the direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews, on account of having kept the names of the Palestinian towns with their Hebrew names intact, as opposed to the European Jews who were not. This was actually a claim made by Ben-Gurion and many of the early Zionists in the first several decades, in the hope of some kind of an understanding, possibly. that he thought would happen. So again, there are no stakes in terms of speaking of firstness. Whatever the Palestinians are today, they were not 200 or 300 or 400 or 500 years ago. On the contrary, as we know, this is a place where there was a lot of movement. There was population movement. This is part, I mean, even during the Palestinian revolt in 1936 to 39, other Syrians, or Shamyeen, also thought that this was actually a colonization of part of their land. This is why Azadeen al-Qassam, the first Palestinian Fida'i in 36, came from what is today Syria to defend what is today Palestine against the British and Jewish colonization. There were volunteers from all over the area because the movement, the population movement under the Ottomans, while small, but it was natural within the area that was governed by the same kind of political understanding, and I wanna use the word sovereignty, but with under much, I'm sorry?

Speaker 4: I heard something.

Joseph Massad: Oh, okay. Sovereignty guardedly. So it's not about mobilizing only the right of return of Palestinians. It's actually mobilizing an anti-colonial discourse, of which the right of return is only part. Today, this conference has been dedicated to the right of return of Palestinian refugees, a large number of whom lives in the diaspora, a good portion of whom lives in the West Bank and Gaza, and not less than a quarter million of whom live inside Israel proper. So it is a return not only across borders, but within borders, and in this way it does encompass over half the Palestinian population. But this is not, this is only one of the conditions I think for decolonization, but it's an important one. And I think in this regard it's not being mobilized by itself, Nor is it being mobilized as some kind of a transcendental right, but actually in recognition of not only the displacement, but the continued displacement of these Palestinians that this is happening. In the case of, I mean, it is also, I mean, someone invoked, I think, Noura invoked Hannah Arendt before. I mean, it was not about being human that Hannah Arendt was concerned about. It is about the right to have rights, right? that basically stateless people don't have the right to have rights. And this was the most important sort of problem that World War I created for all these stateless people. And of course, what the Palestinian situation, what 48 and the conquest had rendered for the Palestinians. So it is not really about staking any claims to indigeneity. But it is staking many claims against colonization and against European colonization, a certain kind of colonization. that continues, that continues to, because this is why when I wrote about the Nakba several years ago, I kept saying the Nakba is not some event that happened in 1948. The Nakba is an event that began in the 1880s and continues until today. Palestinian land continues to be taken away Palestinians continue to be expelled today. Palestinians continue to be denied rights today. So in this sense, there's no discreteness either to the events that have befallen the Palestinians, nor discreteness to any claim for their indigeneity. It is simply the claims against colonization, against the usurpation of their property, dispossessing them of property after. And of course, we heard today about the transformation of property into private property in Palestine. Remember, this was the condition for colonization. Until 1856, there was no private property in Palestine. Part of the concessions and the capitulations of the Ottomans to the Europeans, who had been forcing the Ottomans to make several concessions since the 18th century, was beginning the privatization of land during the period. Within 20 years of that law, during which the absentee landlords acquired the land privately, Zionism was able to come in and take those lands. So in this sense, modernization and land privatization from the start were experienced by the Palestinians as colonization and dispossession. And indeed, the Peel Commission, someone referred to the Peel Commission's noting that Palestinian peasants were very much against the privatization and the registering of the land precisely because of the understanding that modernity and claim to private types of property and therefore certain kinds of modern liberal indigeneity through possession of the land through registration were understood as actually part of a colonial project and not of one that can assert indigeneity. Of course, the problem is for the Palestinians since then, the only game was the modern game of laws, the only game was the game of being a right-bearing subject or not, and the only game became the game of sovereignty. So it is unfortunate that the language of decolonization has to rely on these very concepts by which the Palestinians have been dispossessed. But thank you.

Speaker 4: It likes to be hobbyed. So thank you very much for speaking. I'm very tired, but I think I can confirm this question. I learned the first 90% of your talk about... I can't ask for more. I'm going to summarize that you said that the so-called right of return of the Jews, which is not historically justifiable, is equivalent to the expulsion of the Palestinians, and that the return of the Palestinians is equivalent to decolonization. I prefer to say decolonization is expulsion. Return is decolonization. So I followed that, and that is great the way you explained that, but I don't understand your justification for your final point about the DDS movement as a representative movement for return of the Palestinians and for decolonization, because there are large segments of the DDS movement who support a two-state solution and who define what they're boycotting Israel over as being only their actions in the 1967 occupied territories. And there are also large segments of the BDS movement who attack anybody who discusses issues of Jewish identity and who don't seem to allow people to to question Jewish historic, alleged historical connection with Palestine and right to go into Palestine, right to return, so-called return to Palestine, and rather there's segments of the DDS movement who see the struggle as like a struggle for equal rights where both people have the same right to be there. Thank you.

Joseph Massad: I think you're absolutely right. I did not say at all that I didn't mention one state at all. I didn't mention that the Palestinians have to return to one state. It could very well be two states. A depolonized Israel and a West Bank and Gaza state, if that's what they want. I did not stake any claims to one state or two. I myself, of course, have a different view of this. I do support one state. But I the way it sees its program as calling for, it calls for Israel to repatriate the Palestinian refugees, it calls on Israel to end discrimination against non-Jews, it calls on Israel to be decolonized. is the only way to end Israeli or Jewish colonization of Palestine and begin decolonization. Now, what form that will take, is it one state, is it two, is not of concern to BDS, it seems to me, or to the argument at hand. So that's a very, very different thing. Now, on the question of Jews, of course, now Israeli Jews now have an Israeli Jewish identity, much as they deny it, and they think their Jewish identity is shared universally by other Jews. No, they have specifically Israeli Jewish identity and Israeli nationalism, and many of them have been there for 100 years, others for 50, others for three months, but nonetheless, the majority of them have been there, have been born there, the fact that the problem is that they continue to be privileged racially and religiously and ethnically in the law. So what this calls for, what BDS calls for, is that all colonial privileges that Jews continue to have must end legally and in practice. This is not in any way denying the link of Israeli Jews to Israel. That, of course, they have. How could you deny that? This is where they were born. They have no other place to go. Well, of course, Ashkenazi Jews do. Many of them have double nationalities, and they want to go to Europe if they are denied colonial privileges. But many amongst them actually want to stay, and certainly Arab Jews have no other place to go. Even though, of course, that is... And I wanted to say this early on, but I was... I'm not allowed to ask a question this morning. When Susan Akram made her important intervention, I wanted to say that in 1975, six Arab states Yemen, Egypt, and Sudan, all called, and most of them were then ruled by new regimes that had not been in power when Jews in their countries had left in the 50s. They all invited all Arab Jews, all their nationals of Jews, to come back to the country upon the insistence of the PLO, which raised sort of all kinds of... questions and debates insisting that the Arab states must invite all the Arab Jews to come back to their home. And the governments immediately said yes. And all of them, in fact, issued these invitations. Arab Jews chose, and Israel chose not to heed this call. They can still. We are always, I mean, there's every few months now, it's very fashionable to have one more film about Egyptian Jews who left in the late 40s, early 50s. I mean, Egyptian Jews were about, or the Jews of Egypt, actually, to be more frank and accurate, were about 60,000 people, about 30,000 of whom were not even Egyptian nationals. Many of them were British nationals. Some were stateless. But about half of them, 30,000, were Egyptians in a country at the time of some 30 million people. And many of them left when they were harassed by the secret police, many for political reasons, being communists or being Zionists. But many, of course, ultimately were harassed because they were Jewish and were associated with Zionist activism there. which, of course, was made possible by Israeli recruitment of Jewish spies in Egypt and what have you. But nonetheless, even that, I mean, recently, even the Muslim Brotherhood has asked 60,000 Jews and their descendants, half of whom were not even Egyptian when they left in the 50s, to come back to the country. So in that sense, they have abided by international resolutions. Arab Jews should have that right. I call upon all Arab states who have not yet issued such an invitation to issue that invitation. And all the rights and properties should be, of course, immediately given back to the heirs of the people who lost it. This is the only just solution to them. But at the same time, if they don't want to come back and they want to be in Palestine, they should be able to stay there, but without colonial privileges, you see.

Speaker 4: One last question?

Joseph Massad: Yeah, let's take one. Ah, you have. Okay, quickly two questions, and I'll answer them together.

Speaker 4: A year and a half ago, there was an immense demonstration inside of Israel on Jews, poor Jews, and what they were hurt by, neoliberalism. Of course, they didn't make any commitments of equality, but is there some kind of basis for an alliance between

Speaker 5: and these people down the road on the basis of with Palestine, on the basis of democracy and anti-capitalism?

Joseph Massad: No, not at the moment. Only when Israeli Jewish economic interests are hit by an expansion of BDS worldwide, only then will they begin to see that their racial privileges have to end to restore economic equality. Yes, I can hear you.

Speaker 5: Thank you for your presentation. I wanted to ask a question regarding Taika's question and your response. I think this is more of a clarification. Your statements about engineering and what sort of gives us the right to do research, I believe, boils down to statelessness and running through copyrights.

Speaker 4: My question is, where does that leave people who were not personally refugees and do have rights to a better country, especially in, like, India? I don't understand. Could you explain? People who are not refugees, but I didn't understand the second part of that sentence.

Speaker 5: People who have the right to a better country, and they are not citizens. They have their right to a better country.

Speaker 4: I'm sorry, I perhaps misrepresented myself.

Joseph Massad: No, no, no. I only spoke about the initial condition of statelessness, but even the attempt to give Palestinians nationality always came also with discriminatory policies and what have you. I mean, mostly denying, I mean, the attempt initially was to dilute Palestinian identity. We know, for example, that the Jordanian state initially, along with Israel, criminalized the term Palestinian and Palestine. Initially, it renamed the parts of Palestine it took control over at the end of the war in 1949 as the Western Provinces, then it became the West Bank, and Palestinians who were in Central and Eastern Palestine came to see themselves then as West Bankers, thanks to this Jordanian imposition, which criminalized the use of the term Palestine for a long time. Similarly, those who are in Israel became Palestinian Israelis, or for a long time, Israeli Arabs. They continue to be called Israeli Arabs for the most part by the Israeli state, because the word Palestinian was not allowed to be used. So in both cases, we see an attempt to give them a nationality. In Israel, Palestinians who are Israeli citizens, have citizenship rights, but they don't have the right to return, as we've mentioned earlier, to Iqrit, or Kufr Bira'im, or many other places. Ein Hod, for example, where the refugees live down the road from where this lovely art colony, or we should call it art settler colony, now is inhabited by Israeli artists. So, no, these people continue to be denied their rights to their property and to home. Many of them live in refugee camps and others don't. Someone also gave a very good presentation this morning about the game of numbers. Many Palestinians, of course, especially the middle class or the lower middle class, who are quite poor and dispossessed in 1948, felt it basically that beyond their dignity to even apply for ration cards for UNRWA, and did not. And they were not even counted as refugees in UNRWA. Many had UNRWA cards and then let them lapse. And the middle class and the upper class never applied for UNRWA cards, so they're not even counted, and therefore, Again, I think Susan Akram's notion of Palestinian citizenship, which goes back to 1925. Remember, in the case of Jordan, the Palestinians were nationalized overnight in 1949. Indeed, they were nationalized before the territory itself became Jordanized. So before the West Bank became the West Bank, Palestinians became Jordanian, just as the West Bankers among them in 1988 went to sleep one night as Jordanians and woke up as non-Jordanians. Similarly with Israelis. So I think in this case, and I will repeat the stance of international law, which was also mentioned earlier, that those who were forcibly evicted from Palestine, or those who left without being forcibly evicted because they were scared, or those who were studying abroad or working abroad and could not come back because the Israelis wouldn't let them come back, all of those have the right to return. The majority of Arab Jews, I would say all of them, were not expelled. from Arab countries. Some individuals, for political reasons, were actually expelled. But as a community, they were not. This does not mean they don't have the right to go back to their country. Even if they left of their own accord and they decided to come back the next day, they should have the right to do this. And this is enshrined in international law. So regardless of whether they have French citizenship or not, they still have a right to their Egyptian or Moroccan or Yemeni citizenship that they lost as a result of this.