This is Democracy – Episode 291: Palestinian History and Identity

00;00;21;06 – 00;00;47;19
Jeremi Suri
Welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy. This week, we have a wonderful opportunity to talk to a new friend and leading scholar of the Palestinian experience across the world and through history. This is Professor Maha Nassar, and she is an associate professor of modern Middle East history and Islamic studies at the University of Arizona.

00;00;47;22 – 00;01;13;05
Jeremi Suri
She’s the author of many works, most specifically a terrific book called Brothers Apart Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World. And as I said, she writes quite a bit on Palestinian identity and how that history of the society and this people influences the ways in which our community and our understanding of these issues, both contemporary and historical, evolves over time.

00;01;13;07 – 00;01;16;01
Jeremi Suri
We’re very excited to have the opportunity to talk to you today.

00;01;16;02 – 00;01;19;00
Dr. Maha Nassar
Maha, thanks so much for having me, Jeremy. It’s great to be here.

00;01;19;07 – 00;01;29;00
Jeremi Suri
Thank you. Before we get into our discussion, we, of course, have mister Zachary Suri’s, scene setting poem. What’s the title of your poem today, Zachary?

00;01;29;03 – 00;01;30;12
Zachary Suri
On the other side.

00;01;30;14 – 00;01;33;14
Jeremi Suri
On the other side. Let’s hear it.

00;01;33;17 – 00;02;03;14
Zachary Suri
On the other side. I wonder if it’s sometimes feels like this, if it’s lonely to. And terrifying if. When the sun comes from the east, you can also see your cousins sending it halfway across the world to you on the other side. I wonder if it sometimes hurts like this. If you’re pain to feels too big to hold and you go walking in the snow asking everyone on the street what they have done today to change the world on the other side.

00;02;03;14 – 00;02;28;01
Zachary Suri
I wonder if it sometimes sounds like this. The shouting and the psalms repeated each day like promises, like a folk song stuck in your head because it sounds like the truth. The truth is, I’m not really sure who you are on the other side, whether you feel and heard and sing in the same way, or if you want the same things, or if you know who I am.

00;02;28;03 – 00;02;38;20
Zachary Suri
In truth, I know only that the salt in our tears is the same, and the soil in our boots, the soil of the same land.

00;02;38;22 – 00;02;43;26
Jeremi Suri
Zachary, that’s a very moving poem. I sense you put a lot of thought into this.

00;02;43;29 – 00;03;11;00
Zachary Suri
Yeah, I think it’s a poem. It’s really about the irony. I think of any conflict, particularly a conflict that involves two people whose history has been so tied together, at least in recent years. And and the irony that that the pain and the reactions and the anger and the frustration and the horror and the the morning, it often looks the same on both sides.

00;03;11;02 – 00;03;12;20
Zachary Suri

00;03;12;22 – 00;03;14;20
Jeremi Suri
Professor Nasser, your thoughts on this?

00;03;14;27 – 00;03;48;16
Dr. Maha Nassar
I appreciated your poem, Zachary. What I was thinking about as I was listening to it, was the fact that oftentimes that lack of knowledge, I think, speaks to some of the larger historical and structural impediments to conversation, particularly here in this country. I think a lot about it myself, as a Palestinian-American who grew up in the United States as the daughter of Palestinian refugees forced off their land in 1948.

00;03;48;18 – 00;04;17;25
Dr. Maha Nassar
And the disconnect that I experienced growing up, knowing what was happening on our side because of my own family’s experience, because of my community’s experience hearing about what was happening on the other side, because in the United States, the story of the Israeli experience and the Jewish experience is, I would say, more readily available than the Palestinian side and the Palestinian story.

00;04;17;27 – 00;04;39;25
Dr. Maha Nassar
And so there is a disconnect between the levels of understanding of the other side. In other words, Palestinians who are immersed in their own history necessary have to know what the story is on the other side in order to be able to tell their own story. But the opposite isn’t true.

00;04;39;26 – 00;04;40;18
Jeremi Suri
Right?

00;04;40;20 – 00;04;45;03
Dr. Maha Nassar
And so that’s something that I think a lot about. And that’s the right really informed a lot of my work.

00;04;45;05 – 00;05;05;09
Jeremi Suri
It’s a really interesting inversion because the traditional Jewish experience as being in another society, German Jew or a Russian Jew of the 19th century and needing to understand Russian or German society, even though they don’t need to understand you and what you’re pointing out, which is really insightful, is that Palestinians are in that position in the United States.

00;05;05;10 – 00;05;06;09
Dr. Maha Nassar
Absolutely.

00;05;06;11 – 00;05;22;05
Jeremi Suri
So so where should we start? I mean, one of our goals today is to help our listeners and I need help with this. To better understand that the Palestinian experience historically as a sense of social conditions and experiences. So so where should we start?

00;05;22;08 – 00;05;45;20
Dr. Maha Nassar
So I think since most of your listenership is based in the United States, I think it actually helps to start with how the Palestinian experience has been understood and talked about here in the United States, throughout much of the 19th century, to the extent that Palestinians were talked about at all, they were talked about a scary native other.

00;05;45;23 – 00;05;53;08
Dr. Maha Nassar
So I don’t know if you know, but one, probably the bestselling book in the 1870s was Mark Twain’s Innocent Abroad.

00;05;53;09 – 00;05;54;10
Jeremi Suri
Sure.

00;05;54;12 – 00;06;22;18
Dr. Maha Nassar
And I read it recently and read specifically his travels. It’s a travelog, right, by Mark Twain of him traveling to the Holy Land, to the Levant, including to Palestine. And his descriptions of my people, people who would have been my great grandparents generation. Sounds like what a 19th century white American author would say about Native Americans. Very racialized, very hostile.

00;06;22;20 – 00;06;45;04
Dr. Maha Nassar
Positioning them as an inherent threat to Mark Twain’s very existence and his ability to travel in the land. And I think that speaks to the parallel that a lot of Americans saw between the United States as a new Israel, as a new Jerusalem, and their understanding of what emerges as the Zionist project in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

00;06;45;07 – 00;07;10;15
Dr. Maha Nassar
So by the time we get to the establishment of the State of Israel, when we go into the 1950s and 60s, we see that most Americans are getting their story about the Israeli establishment through Exodus. You remember that novel? Sure. The Leon first novel of 1958, and then the Paul Newman film a couple of years later. Runaway bestsellers.

00;07;10;17 – 00;07;28;04
Dr. Maha Nassar
The book was a runaway bestseller. The film was a runaway blockbuster. And so the vast majority of Americans at that time got the story of Israel’s founding. And by default, the story of the Palestinian Nakba, the dispossession of Palestinians in 1948 through Exodus.

00;07;28;07 – 00;07;29;00
Zachary Suri

00;07;29;02 – 00;07;58;11
Dr. Maha Nassar
And so I also did an analysis of Exodus and again, highly racist and orientalist depictions of Palestinians. But it set the stage for what I call a discourse of peace through domination. If you go back and I am not recommending people go back and watch the movie, but if you do, you’ll see that the Paul Newman character, or even canon is talking about how we Zionist pioneers want to come and live in peace with the Arabs.

00;07;58;11 – 00;08;29;16
Dr. Maha Nassar
We want to come and bring them modern technology and modern medicine and modern farming techniques. And the good ones like Taha will accept our presence here on this land. But the bad ones are going to fight us because they hate Jews who are taught to hate Jews. And so that peace through domination framework becomes the dominant framework for understanding Palestinians as either docile and friendly, like the quote unquote good Indian right, or hostile and threatening.

00;08;29;19 – 00;08;54;11
Dr. Maha Nassar
And therefore they need to be dominated over. And we still see legacies of that discourse in today’s right wing, both Israeli right wing and in pockets of the American right wing as well. So no recognition, no understanding that Palestinians have a long history of connection to their land, a deep spiritual and religious connection that goes back centuries, millennia.

00;08;54;14 – 00;09;18;15
Dr. Maha Nassar
And there is also a lack of understanding that Palestinians have a deep, personal, deep, deep personal family ties to their land. So any Palestinian anywhere in the world and here in the US, too, when we meet one another, actually just happened today on campus, actually, when we meet other Palestinians. First question we ask is what Balad or what town or city is your family from?

00;09;18;18 – 00;09;27;23
Dr. Maha Nassar
We can be third generation exiles who’ve never seen our ancestral homeland. But we have that geography that is a very personal geography and a personal tie to the land.

00;09;27;27 – 00;09;44;12
Jeremi Suri
That’s that’s really interesting. I just want to comment on that for a second, because it’s different, at least from the way I relate to my grandparents, who come from India and Russia. And I don’t feel a tie to those lands. I feel a tie to the language and the culture, and it’s probably one of the things that makes me a historian.

00;09;44;15 – 00;09;51;07
Jeremi Suri
But when I meet someone from another Jew from Russia, I don’t talk about the land in the same way. So this this sounds very different.

00;09;51;08 – 00;10;12;04
Dr. Maha Nassar
It’s very different. And it’s very I think it’s not unique to Palestinians. Lebanese do the same thing. Syrians do the same thing. But it does speak to a very deep rooted and again, personal familial connection to the land that I think gets overlooked in a lot of a lot of discourses and a lot of conversations around Palestinian experience.

00;10;12;09 – 00;10;13;17
Jeremi Suri
So, Zachary.

00;10;13;20 – 00;10;38;02
Zachary Suri
Yeah, I think this is a really, really helpful perspective on this history that obviously is often overlooked. I’m wondering for our listeners, how should we understand this and how do you understand the coexistence of of these very real familial, cultural or religious ties to the land among Palestinians, but also among Jews and Israelis? How can one sort of hold those two at the same time?

00;10;38;04 – 00;11;04;17
Dr. Maha Nassar
That’s a great question. And leads me to the second discourse that I think was very prominent in the 90s, in 2000, which was what I call a peace through negotiations framework that very much recognizes Palestinian ties to the land but pairs them up with Jewish and Israeli ties to the land. So we can think about, like the seeds of peace camps, for example, that brought Palestinian and Israeli teenagers together to mean in the summer.

00;11;04;21 – 00;11;31;03
Dr. Maha Nassar
The idea being that if they get to learn about one another’s respective ties to the land and historical and religious connections, they’ll be able to forge a path forward. The Oslo negotiations, I think, are another example of this. In a more formal negotiations idea, both of them being premised on the idea that we need to recognize both respective national and religious and ties to the land.

00;11;31;06 – 00;12;03;01
Dr. Maha Nassar
But the logical conclusion that comes out of it is, well, therefore we need to have both sides need to make compromises. We can’t have maximalist claims on either side. We need to have a kind of reconciliation between these two conflicting claims to the land, both legitimate, but both conflicting, or an intention with one another. And so the logical conclusion there is not domination, but some kind of either partition, which is where the two state solution idea comes in, or some kind of a mutual something.

00;12;03;05 – 00;12;31;02
Dr. Maha Nassar
Right. So confederation also kind of fits into that. And that’s, that’s helpful in the sense that it’s a step away from this domination, racialized discourse. But the catch is that that peace through negotiations, discourse doesn’t get at the power asymmetries historically that Palestinians have experienced. And so that takes us to our third discourse, which is what I call the justice through liberation discourse.

00;12;31;04 – 00;13;01;03
Dr. Maha Nassar
And that’s been the dominant one among the Palestinians, really, from the beginning. And what it says is it goes a little bit further back in history, not ancient history, but it goes back 100 years, 150 years and says we had conditions when Palestinians, the people of Palestine consisted of Muslims, Christians and Jews who did indeed recognize one another’s personal, religious and local ties to the land.

00;13;01;05 – 00;13;28;20
Dr. Maha Nassar
But it was on a basis of sharing rather than a basis of domination or partition. And there’s been a lot of really interesting recent scholarship by Saleem, Tamar and, Michel Campos and others that have looked at the idea of sharing the land, but not on a basis of domination, not on a basis of colonialism, because what made the Zionist project different from the historical Palestinian Jewish presence?

00;13;28;20 – 00;13;56;04
Dr. Maha Nassar
And there were Palestinian Jews, Jews who lived in Palestine. Right. But what made the Zionist project different was that they weren’t coming to be part of the existing social fabric in Palestine. They were coming to convert Palestine into a national home for the Jewish people, and did not recognize or pay due attention to the fact that Palestinians also had these strong connections.

00;13;56;06 – 00;14;18;23
Dr. Maha Nassar
So if you look, for example, at Herzl’s diary in 1895, he talks about transporting the penniless population to the other side of the Jordan River. There was a sense that the Palestinians were somehow movable, very much, by the way, like what we’re hearing these days are, you can just move the Palestinians from Gaza into Jordan or Egypt or what have you.

00;14;18;25 – 00;14;35;19
Dr. Maha Nassar
So that’s what I see as the fundamental difference between that more peace through negotiations framework that does a good job of recognizing both sides, but doesn’t understand the structures of oppression that have been at the root of the conflict.

00;14;35;21 – 00;14;41;14
Jeremi Suri
That’s that’s very helpful. Zachary. I have a sense that you have a different reading of that history.

00;14;41;17 – 00;15;10;17
Zachary Suri
Well, sorry, I don’t I obviously a doctor Nassar is much more qualified than I am to speak to any of these issues. So I obviously don’t want to challenge any of of her very cogent analysis. But I do want to ask, how do you how do you think about these issues in the context of sort of much of Israeli history and Palestinian history of the last century, which has been one of of real war and armed struggle on both sides, in which both Israelis and Palestinians have been killed and and both sides have committed atrocities.

00;15;10;18 – 00;15;31;28
Zachary Suri
How do you. How does that history fit into this. And then I also want to ask my maybe qualm with this story is, is the complexities of Zionism as a, as an ideology, as a political force is that it’s easy to find in Zionist text exactly what you’re saying, which is the sort of overt racism of, of, of many of Israelis.

00;15;32;03 – 00;15;54;24
Zachary Suri
But it’s also very easy to find in the text that some of the same authors, the exact opposite. Hertzel writes in the book that was translated into Hebrew as Tel Aviv or in German at New Zealand, of Israel. He imagines Jewish Palestine as a place that would be run by Yiddish speaking Arabs, a place where there would be a sort of cultural syncretism, a new kind of cultural fabric.

00;15;54;27 – 00;15;56;23
Zachary Suri
How do how do we reconcile all of this?

00;15;56;25 – 00;16;35;17
Dr. Maha Nassar
So two great questions. So on the first one with in terms of conflict and violence on both sides, I think here it’s helpful for us to drill down a little further into what violence we’re talking about. So oftentimes we are immediately drawn to the kinds of spectacles of violence, right. Direct violence that targets, that kills but injures, but what we don’t talk as much about in this last century of history is the much more pervasive structural violence, the structures of violence that don’t make the headlines, that don’t make the front pages of newspapers.

00;16;35;20 – 00;17;00;28
Dr. Maha Nassar
That disproportionately affects Palestinians because of the structural imbalance that we’re talking about. So when Palestinians, for example, in the 1920s, are tenant farmers who have been living in, you know, in a village for generations, and their landlord who only recently became their landlord because only recently acquired title to the land, sells that land to the Jewish National Fund.

00;17;01;01 – 00;17;28;05
Dr. Maha Nassar
They put a stipulation in the land did that the tenant farmers have to leave and they’re forced at gunpoint to leave, whether it’s by the British police or by the by house from a hotel, you know, whoever. Right? That structural violence that doesn’t make it into our narratives about the conflict, but it’s real. That is real violence that is happening or was happening and is happening on a daily basis.

00;17;28;07 – 00;17;50;04
Dr. Maha Nassar
So if we’re going to talk about violence, I think it’s helpful to talk about the totality of violence and including the structural violence. And then if we do that in its totality, I think it becomes less of a both side story. And that’s where that discourse of of liberation comes in. In terms of your question on Zionism, I appreciate it.

00;17;50;04 – 00;18;20;26
Dr. Maha Nassar
I think it’s an important one, as I’m sure you know, Dark Pencil has a new book out on Zionism as an idea. There’s been lots of really, nuanced work around the different forms of Zionism. I and I don’t have any quibbles or qualms with all the different definitions of Zionism as it pertains to Jewish self-identity. Where I am most focused on in terms of Zionism is not Zionism as an identity, but Zionism as a project.

00;18;20;26 – 00;18;46;04
Dr. Maha Nassar
The Zionism that was enacted on the ground in Palestine and what it meant for the non-Jews living there, for the Palestinian people living there. So the, you know, the debates between the religious Zionist and the secular Zionist and the Labor Zionist and etc., you know, great have at it. I, you know, God, that’s not really my area of specialization.

00;18;46;04 – 00;19;15;13
Dr. Maha Nassar
And it’s not something that, I really want to get involved with. And I think it’s fine to have different understandings and debates about Zionism, but what I’m most interested in and what I think is most immediately relevant for Palestinians is what Zionism on the ground meant for them and on the ground meant for them. Regardless of what imaginations had, the actual Zionism that was actually imposed resulted in a lot of violence, structural violence, and, of course, direct violence.

00;19;15;20 – 00;19;19;13
Jeremi Suri
So Zachary wants to ask a follow up. Go ahead. Zachary.

00;19;19;16 – 00;19;41;08
Zachary Suri
Sorry. Thank you. That was a very interesting answer. I wanted to ask on the first point. Yeah. About violence. I guess what I wanted to maybe I didn’t ask my question specifically enough. I think for most Americans and particularly for American Jews, the connection to Israel really doesn’t necessarily even begin in 48. It begins in 67 or 73.

00;19;41;09 – 00;20;03;13
Zachary Suri
Right. With these sort of iconic images of, of war between sort of great armies all over this land. And I think it’s impossible, at least. And I know this isn’t really what your scholarship focuses on, and it’s certainly, maybe not even a question of Palestinian identity, but I think it’s impossible for a lot of Americans, and particularly American Jews, not to see that as a two sided conflict.

00;20;03;16 – 00;20;32;06
Zachary Suri
And then on the other point, I want to ask, and I think maybe this is the crux of of the entire discussion or even the entire conflict. But can liberation not also mean for in some cases, like violence or justification of violence against the people? And and the flip side, can the violence you describe the dispossession, the cruelty not also mean homeland for refugees, a space of liberation for others?

00;20;32;09 – 00;20;41;11
Zachary Suri
And isn’t that sort of like that irony that like liberation and violence, it seems, go hand in hand in both perspectives? The real the real issue?

00;20;41;13 – 00;20;42;20
Dr. Maha Nassar
Yeah.

00;20;42;23 – 00;20;44;18
Jeremi Suri
Small questions. Sure. Thank you. Sorry.

00;20;44;19 – 00;20;45;18
Zachary Suri
I’m sorry.

00;20;45;21 – 00;21;23;18
Dr. Maha Nassar
Easy peasy. So I think to your first question, this really speaks to the history of the 20th century. And this is actually where your dad’s work comes in really handy to think about the ways in which anti-colonial guerrilla struggles were enacted around the world in the 1950s, 6070s, 80s. The Palestinian liberation movement very much grounded itself and saw itself as part of that larger anti-colonial struggle that necessitated violence in order to, as they saw it, liberate themselves from the structures and systems of colonial violence.

00;21;23;20 – 00;21;35;22
Dr. Maha Nassar
So I don’t know of a case. And, Jeremy, correct me if I’m wrong, has there been a case of a people achieving liberation from colonial rule solely, nonviolently?

00;21;35;24 – 00;21;37;07
Zachary Suri
India.

00;21;37;09 – 00;21;38;03
Dr. Maha Nassar
India had violent.

00;21;38;03 – 00;21;41;20
Jeremi Suri
Yeah. I mean, there’s there’s some degree of violence, but there’s a wide spectrum. Sure.

00;21;41;21 – 00;22;09;10
Zachary Suri
Right. Well, I think also the question is maybe like less directly about the role of violence, but more about like who who suffers the violence in the sense that let me phrase this as a personal perspective, because I don’t want to make historical claims that I’m not qualified to make. Okay. But the struggle is I think that sometimes from an Israeli perspective, civilians, innocent children are portrayed as combatants, as people who are somehow worthy of this horrible violence that they suffer.

00;22;09;12 – 00;22;35;07
Zachary Suri
But I think the opposite is also often true, and that the victims of a lot of the violence that we’re discussing that can be labeled as liberatory are innocent children and civilians too. And I think this honestly is the second question to how can one be justified and the other not. And I don’t it’s something I struggle with personally and I don’t I don’t think that there’s an easy answer.

00;22;35;07 – 00;22;38;14
Jeremi Suri
Yeah, exactly. I struggle with that too. So thank you for bringing and.

00;22;38;14 – 00;22;59;13
Dr. Maha Nassar
And I struggle with it as well. So I appreciate you, Zachary, really bringing this up because this really does get at the discomfort, I think, with a lot of these conversations, which is that if we’re going to say civilians are off limit, then civilians are off limit. If we’re going to say civilians can’t be killed or shouldn’t be targeted, then civilians shouldn’t be targeted.

00;22;59;16 – 00;23;21;03
Dr. Maha Nassar
So I hear I hear your discomfort. I share your discomfort. I think the way that I think about it, at least without getting into questions of, you know, justification or not, because I don’t think that’s the right angle to take. I think the way to think about it again goes back to the question of structural violence versus direct violence.

00;23;21;05 – 00;23;50;27
Dr. Maha Nassar
And so if there is a structure that is violent, not just in the moment, but every single second of every single minute of every single day, and we’re going to look at that violence as it and as it manifests in health outcomes. So Palestinians have, on average, a ten year shorter life span than Israelis. And that’s not just because of direct violence.

00;23;50;28 – 00;24;23;07
Dr. Maha Nassar
So even the studies that public health studies and others who factor out the, you know, those who are killed directly, lack of access to health care, inability to cross the checkpoint, inability to get the medicines they need. Those are structural forms of violence, of violence in the sense of taking away life, liberty, well-being. That, again impacts every Palestinian, at least every Palestinian, under Israeli occupation, every minute of every hour of every day of every year since 1967.

00;24;23;10 – 00;24;40;00
Dr. Maha Nassar
And so if we’re going to say that all lives should be treated equally, and that harm to each and every life should be weighed the same, then then what’s our calculation going to be? Right? I think that’s how I think about it.

00;24;40;05 – 00;24;56;24
Zachary Suri
I, I do want to ask though, isn’t there? And I agree with what you said. I think that’s the that’s the challenging question. Isn’t terrorism or living with the specter of terrorism and violence against civilian populations from an Israeli perspective, also a kind of structural violence?

00;24;56;26 – 00;25;18;27
Jeremi Suri
Exactly. It’s a great question. When you talk about liberation and you’re so correct to say that many different people’s suffering under colonialism, and, of course, for a time, both Jews and Palestinians suffered under colonialism. Those suffering under colonialism adopt liberation ideologies of one kind or another. And you and I are both written about that in different versions. Right.

00;25;19;00 – 00;25;42;21
Jeremi Suri
What is for Palestinian, especially Palestinian Americans? What are the ways they think about liberation? And what role does violence is gets to Zachary’s question, what role does violence play in that. Because I think one of the distortions is when I’ll just speak for myself. When I hear about Palestinian activities in the news. It’s usually associated with terrorist violence.

00;25;42;21 – 00;25;55;13
Jeremi Suri
That’s when the Palestinian word appears in the news. Of course, that cannot be anywhere near a representation of how Palestinians think about liberation. So how do they if one can generalize, how should we understand that?

00;25;55;16 – 00;26;34;23
Dr. Maha Nassar
Well, of course, Palestinians have a wide range of perspectives when it comes to violence. When violence is justified, when it’s not what targets are allowable and what targets are not. One of the things that’s really striking to me, following the Arabic news, as well as the English language news, as well as Israeli news, both English and Hebrew, to the extent that I can is that activities that are carried out by Palestinian militant groups against Israeli military targets are labeled as as a military operation in the Arabic news.

00;26;34;26 – 00;27;09;27
Dr. Maha Nassar
But in the Israeli, an American news is often labeled as an act of terrorism. And so there’s a flattening of that distinction between guerrilla attacks against military targets versus guerrilla attacks against civilian targets. So most Palestinians, I would I’m not going to say most. I would say, yeah, no, I will say most. I would say most Palestinians, believe that guerrilla attacks against Israeli military targets is a legitimate act of liberatory violence because it is against a military target.

00;27;09;29 – 00;27;34;05
Dr. Maha Nassar
Where the debate comes in more is this question of who constitutes a civilian, especially in Israeli society, with universal conscription and so forth. But so there the, the questioning gets a bit more nuanced. And I think you have a conversation that is similar to the conversation that you have in the United States, actually, around this question of like militants hiding out in Gaza and so forth.

00;27;34;08 – 00;27;59;06
Dr. Maha Nassar
So there are there are these efforts to grapple with who is a civilian and is the targeting of civilians versus the killing of civilians as collateral damage? Like, how does that all work? But one point I do want to make is that the ways in which Americans understand Palestinian acts of violence collapses the specific targeting of military targets with other acts of violence, including acts of terror?

00;27;59;09 – 00;28;15;11
Jeremi Suri
Sure, there’s no doubt there’s a lot of scholarship on this. There’s a bias towards the justification of traditional militaries using military force and nontraditional actors, nontraditional organized military units and their use of force. They’re seen as two different things, even though they could be serving the same.

00;28;15;11 – 00;28;38;23
Dr. Maha Nassar
Purpose in terms of vision. Because I think ultimately, Zachary’s question has to do with vision. What is the Palestinian vision for the future? And again, there’s a wide range of opinion. Generally, I think Palestinians are have, by and large, given up on the two state solution. I’m not hearing really, how many Palestinians in this country who think that that’s a viable option.

00;28;38;25 – 00;29;17;15
Dr. Maha Nassar
Interestingly, public opinion polls in Palestine of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip still hold out hope for the possibility of an independent Palestinian state on 67 lines. But in the United States, I think one of the reasons why there’s skepticism about the two state solution is that it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen, obviously, but more so the Palestinians who are in America, many of them, like myself, are descendants of refugees from 1948 and know where in the two state paradigm is there any indication of what would happen to us?

00;29;17;17 – 00;29;33;29
Dr. Maha Nassar
Again, Palestinian connection to land is highly localized. So my family, my mom was born in Jaffa and my dad was born in Barbara, which is in was in southern Palestine. Now it’s almost called Muscatine, a few miles north of the Gaza Strip. That’s where we’re from.

00;29;34;03 – 00;29;34;17
Zachary Suri

00;29;34;19 – 00;29;46;01
Dr. Maha Nassar
And I have dozens of cousins in Gaza and probably thousands of people from Barbara living in Gaza right now. Their connection is to Barbara.

00;29;46;01 – 00;29;46;27
Zachary Suri

00;29;46;29 – 00;29;56;05
Dr. Maha Nassar
It’s not. It’s to say yes in the sense that they don’t want to leave. But part of why they don’t want to leave the Gaza Strip is because it puts them further away from Barbara.

00;29;56;10 – 00;29;57;10
Zachary Suri

00;29;57;12 – 00;30;32;11
Dr. Maha Nassar
And so one of the so what Palestinians are thinking about when they’re thinking about what would a liberated Palestine look like. They’re actually not thinking about Israelis or Jews very much. They’re thinking about their connection and their return to their land. If Israelis Jews want to stay and live alongside Palestinians alongside, there isn’t I people are going to be surprised to hear me say this, but there isn’t actually a lot of thought about the fate of Israeli Jews in a liberated Palestine.

00;30;32;13 – 00;30;47;21
Dr. Maha Nassar
That’s going to be up to them if they want to live side by side with Palestinians. They’re free to do so. If they want to continue to try to dominate over and and oppress Palestinians, then we’re going to see continued struggle.

00;30;47;22 – 00;31;04;07
Jeremi Suri
This is really important because certainly what I hear quite often, especially from the Jewish community, but from actually even more so from Christians and non-Jews in the US, is that the Palestinian vision involves removing the Jews. That’s not true. No.

00;31;04;09 – 00;31;27;07
Dr. Maha Nassar
No, there’s no idea of a forced removal. There is discourse that a lot of Israelis won’t want to live with us. Right. And so they’ll up and leave because they won’t be able to tolerate living as equals, side by side with Palestinians. There’s that theory. But the idea of forced removal is just not present in any of the literature that I’ve seen.

00;31;27;10 – 00;31;29;07
Jeremi Suri
Last question to you is actually go ahead.

00;31;29;09 – 00;31;51;25
Zachary Suri
Thank you. I just wanted to ask if the vision is not one of forced removal, what’s the vision of what should happen to the Israelis and the Jews, who now, 3 or 4 generations later, are living in the same land? Probably most likely ones who never, who didn’t have, at least in many cases, didn’t have anything to do with the displacement of the Palestinians who live there.

00;31;51;27 – 00;31;58;13
Zachary Suri
What’s what from a Palestinian perspective, but at a very like basic like block by block level, what does that look like?

00;31;58;15 – 00;32;18;02
Dr. Maha Nassar
So there’s a scholar named Suleiman Abu Citta who actually mapped all of this out. And what he found was that 85% of Israelis live on about 15% of the land, that the vast majority of the land is actually very sparsely populated. So 85% of Israeli Jews still live in that end pattern of settlement from way back in the day.

00;32;18;04 – 00;32;37;27
Dr. Maha Nassar
So there is a lot of land. And again, I’ll I’ll give you Barbara as an example. I looked into this a few years ago. So Barbara, in 1948, when my father was a kid, there had about 3000 inhabitants, according to his research. Nowadays, we can say maybe there are about 15,000 or so people who trace just two generations.

00;32;37;27 – 00;32;51;29
Dr. Maha Nassar
One, two generations trace their ancestry to Barbara. The land of Barbara right now is largely sitting empty. As I said, there’s this moshav called Musqueam. In 2019, it had a population of 400.

00;32;52;02 – 00;32;53;14
Zachary Suri
Maybe.

00;32;53;17 – 00;33;23;00
Dr. Maha Nassar
Post October 7th. I don’t know what the population there is, but you could, in theory, have an almost full return of the Palestinians of Barbara to their ancestral land of Barbara, without displacing people. There aren’t that many people to displace. And you can find village after village after village where you have similar cases like that. So logistically, it’s not as hard of a project as one might think.

00;33;23;02 – 00;33;25;25
Dr. Maha Nassar
Politically, obviously, is much thornier.

00;33;25;27 – 00;33;52;16
Jeremi Suri
Right. This has been the beginning of a very fruitful conversation. Both. Professor Maha Nassar and Zachary, I want to praise you both for putting some tough issues on the table and having what I think was a rare, open, thoughtful discussion. About this. Many of our episodes are designed to inform, and certainly this episode was designed for that, but this episode was also designed to model.

00;33;52;18 – 00;34;13;09
Jeremi Suri
Model how we can actually have conversations. And I want to give you, Professor Nassar, the last word. I know this is very important to you having conversation, not just getting people to understand the issues, but getting people to open up and have a conversation. What is the advice you can give our listeners, regardless of where they stand on these issues, of how they can have more conversations like this?

00;34;13;11 – 00;34;24;03
Dr. Maha Nassar
I would say, listen, with an open mind, listen with an open heart, and don’t expect to always find the answers.

00;34;24;05 – 00;34;38;01
Jeremi Suri
That would reflect this conversation very well. We all had open minds and open hearts and, I think we came away more knowledgeable. Certainly, Zachary and I came away in a more knowledgeable. But I think we might have more questions now than when we started. And that’s.

00;34;38;01 – 00;34;38;16
Dr. Maha Nassar
As it should.

00;34;38;16 – 00;35;01;16
Jeremi Suri
Be, as it as it should be. Professor Maha Nassar from University of Arizona. I hope all of you will look up her work and read her work. Zachary, you always add so much to our podcast, but today you really added a lot with a tremendous poem and an even more tremendous set of thoughtful, introspective questions. So thank you, Zachary, for your contributions as well.

00;35;01;19 – 00;35;02;08
Zachary Suri
Thank you.

00;35;02;09 – 00;35;23;23
Jeremi Suri
And thank you most of all, to our loyal listeners and subscribers to our Substack for being part of this and particularly this conversation, for being willing, regardless of where your personal views were, to come into this difficult conversation. If nothing else, please take away just what Professor Nassar said. It is so important that we have open minds and open hearts and talk about these issues.

00;35;23;25 – 00;35;32;21
Jeremi Suri
Thank you so much for joining us for this week of this is Democracy.