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Why History Matters: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Noam Chomsky Victor Kattan: February 22, 2010; Running Time: 1:36:21

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Given the volume of writing on the Arab-Israeli conflict, “you might think that everything has been said,” says Noam Chomsky. But Victor Kattan’s new book, Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, takes a fresh look at the prehistory of the dispute, as well as the evolution of international law and its import for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, says Chomsky. While he is familiar with much of the material in this account, Chomsky also notes episodes in Kattan’s narrative that open up new, “sordid chapters” in these “convoluted, complex, often painful historical events.”

Kattan set out to explore how the conflict began, and so pored over the writing of scores of European political figures, and leaders of Zionist and Arab nationalist movements of the late 19th and 20th centuries. His key insight: Neither Arabs nor Jews were to blame for triggering hostilities, but rather Britain, and the other major powers.

Kattan argues that anti-Semitism, which welled up during a period of collapsing colonial empires, motivated British actions that led to a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and paved the way for trouble over decades to the current time. In the 19th century, Jews viciously persecuted in Russia began flooding Western Europe, especially Britain, where many thousands more embarked to the U.S. America and Britain were the promised land to the Jews, says Kattan -- not Palestine. But British distaste for these immigrants soon led to plans for diverting the unwanted foreigners to an alternative location.

In the early 1900s, Kattan describes documents authored by British statesmen, and by such early Zionist leaders as Theodor Herzl, arguing that Britain’s Jewish immigration “problem” could be solved by finding Jews a homeland in Palestine. Kattan even cites U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis endorsing such a solution. Anti-immigrant fervor, says Kattan, led to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, describing Britain’s intention to facilitate a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

This was a compromised piece of diplomacy, suggests Kattan, ushering in an era of unending disputes and hostility. Key issues the British sidestepped or muddied, says Kattan, included promises made to Arabs for their own independent kingdom, and the principle of self-determination, emergent in international law, which would have acknowledged the claims of the Arab majority in the lands carved out for the Jews. While Britain bore the largest share in creating the Middle East mess -- with its many vital interests in the region -- Kattan says that other nations were complicit, entangled as they were by immigration and independence movements and their own strategic influence.

Kattan follows this sorry tale through the Second World War and Israel’s founding, describing repeated failed attempts to reach a settlement between Arabs and Jews over a shared homeland. But due to a conflict set in motion so many years before, a “culture of blame” now exists that will likely prevent agreement, particularly, says Kattan, “as long as Israeli settlements expand.”

Lecture Details

Location: 66-110

“I argue that neither the Arabs nor the Jews are to blame for starting the conflict. It doesn’t mean they haven’t undertaken terrible atrocities in the last 100 years, but (the conflict)... was manufactured by British and European powers.”

Victor Kattan

About the Speakers

Noam Chomsky

Institute Professor; Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus, MIT

Noam Chomsky has written and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, international affairs and U.S. foreign policy. Most recently, with Ilan Pappé he has completed Gaza in Crisis (Haymarket Books, 2010). Other examples of his prolific work include: The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory; Aspects of the Theory of Syntax; Language and Mind; American Power and the New Mandarins; Reflections on Language; Rules and Representations; Knowledge of Language; The Culture of Terrorism; Manufacturing Consent (with E.S. Herman); Understanding Power; Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance; and most recently, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World, (with David Barsamian).

Chomsky received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955. He then came to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics. During the years 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. In the spring of 1969 he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford; in January 1970 he delivered the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lecture at Cambridge University; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in New Delhi, and in 1977, the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, among many others.

Chomsky has received honorary degrees from universities around the world, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Science.

Victor Kattan

Teaching Fellow, Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Victor Kattan has an LL.B (Hons.) from Brunel University, an LL.M from Leiden University and is studying towards a Ph.D. He was a Research Fellow in Public International Law at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law on their Human Rights in International Law and Iran project from 2006-8. Prior to this, he was a Director with the London-based media watchdog Arab Media Watch where he also worked as a journalist, an adviser and a researcher.

In 2003-4, Kattan worked in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as a U.N. Development Programme TOKTEN consultant on secondment to the BADIL Resource Center, a non-governmental organization specializing in Palestinian refugee rights.

Kattan is the author of more than half a dozen scholarly articles on the Arab-Israeli conflict in international law journals. His book, From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict was published June 2009 by Pluto Books. Kattan also compiled an edited collection of legal articles in The Palestine Question in International Law, which was published by The British Institute of International and Comparative Law in May 2008. He was the assistant editor of the Yearbook of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law from 2005-8.

About the Host