“The majority of people in the United States have stopped accepting that everything Israel says is the truth”

Why do you say that Zionism is a colonial project of settlement which advances a little masked?

There has been colonization (of the Palestinian territories) since the June 1967 war but this is the essential nature of the Israeli project. When we look closely at what the Zionist leaders said from the beginning, it was: “We are settlers and we are going to colonize, this is our country, it belongs to us.” Besides, they named the Jewish Colonization Association that. They knew they were Europeans coming to colonize an Arab country. This is what was hidden, and well hidden. I try to show, thanks to the frankness of (Zeev) Jabotinsky (one of the main theorists of Zionism, Editor’s note), that they knew they were colonizers. It wasn’t a secret. The reality is that they drove out the indigenous population, stole land, passed laws saying that only Jews could buy or rent. This is colonization. But we didn’t see that. We saw another story, a lie.

This project could not have existed without the great powers.

I go further than that. I describe what happened as declarations of war. It was England which made the main effort to import this project there. Theodor Herzl (the founder of Zionism, Editor’s note) knew that without a European sponsor, his project had no chance. He therefore addressed the German Kaiser, the French president, the Ottoman sultan… Without success. He finally found this support among the English. So, it was not the Zionists who repressed the Palestinians in the 1920s and 1930s, it was the British army. Just like it’s not Israel that makes fighter jets and bombs, or vetoes the UN Security Council, it’s the United States. So this war against the Palestinians is not only sponsored but it is led by these great powers. They are the ones who made and make possible the existence of Israel.

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Not without complete disdain for indigenous Palestinians, whom the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate make invisible. Does this negation of the Palestinians mean, in your opinion, that there is a racial, or even racist, dimension to the Zionist project?

Every colonial project has a racist dimension. In administrative colonialism, where one rules over another population, there is disdain. In the case of settler colonialism, this tendency is even stronger because contempt means that we have more rights than them, that we are superior to them. So, if we read the writings of Herzl, for example, there is a somewhat hidden but perceptible contempt towards the indigenous population. We’re going to let her go, we’re not going to let her work for us. It is an important element of any colonial settlement project. And it continues until now. Disdain towards Arabs has increased more recently, particularly due to religious considerations.

What do you think your work can bring to the debates on the Palestinian question?

This book aims to give voice to a narrative other than the dominant narrative, the one that makes the Zionist discourse widespread in the United States and Europe. For this, I based myself on facts, I used documents, including works from the family library, but I also wanted to show how this story came to life. So I integrated the stories of my uncle, my aunt, my father, my grandfather, and what I saw at my level. I therefore speak as a historian and also as a witness. The book offers a different story than the one which has completely occupied public space and which is now under pressure. Polls show that the majority of people in the United States have stopped accepting anything Israel says as the truth. And sympathy for the Palestinians for more than two years has been greater than that for the Israelis. For the first time in history. The war against Gaza has considerably accentuated this trend observed over the past ten or fifteen years. People witnessed something they could not unsee.

Israel used unprecedented force against all its enemies and on a scale never before seen, including in Iran. What does this situation change from the Palestinian point of view?

That changed everything. The Palestinians suffered ethnic cleansing in 1948, endless occupation in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem since 1967. And now, we have suffered a genocidal war. I am not a lawyer, I am a historian, but according to the definition of the convention on the crime of genocide of 1948, this is what Israel does. All this, on the one hand, has made the Palestinians weaker. But, on the other hand, Israel has not achieved all of its war goals. The Palestinians are driven out of the Gaza Strip but the entire population remains, only a minority wants to leave. If we consider this project on a scale of a hundred years, the goal was to put an end to the Palestinians. This is still not the case. So, yes, there are huge problems. There are political divisions. We are at an impasse among the Palestinians. And it’s not easy to find the correct strategy when you’re at a dead end. There needs to be a third way.

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Does the so-called “post-Zionism” current, led by the Israeli supremacist far right, not further compromise the possibility of lasting peace?

Yes and no. On the one hand, this will make any solution based on justice and equality much more difficult. But on the other hand, it will make it increasingly difficult to continue the support of the Jewish communities and evangelical Christians. Divisions are beginning to appear within the Jewish diasporas in the United States especially, and in a few other countries such as England and Germany. In the United States, for anyone who is not an evangelical Christian, that is, other Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, it is not acceptable to hear that God gave them land and therefore we can do this to the Palestinians. There is a real evolution, especially among young people in Jewish communities, because of what happened (in Gaza), which is a denial of justice and humanity.

There are still signs of hope. Municipal elections took place on April 25 in the West Bank and central Gaza Strip.

People want to be represented. People want elections. This is very important. These elections do not carry great weight but they express the desire of the Palestinian people to be represented. This is a first signal.

You, who participated in the negotiations leading to the Oslo Accords more than 30 years ago, what would you say remains of this tremendous hope?

We learned a lot in these negotiations. We had hope, yes, you are right. One of the things I learned is that you should not view the United States as a neutral mediator. They must be at the table next to Israel, as enemies. Unless there is a change in the United States, and that is not going to happen in two years, during the Trump era. If the Republicans lose the midterm elections (next November), he may be a little stuck in his foreign policy, but that won’t change things much. He has had enough of these wars, and so he is looking for a way out, especially with regard to Iran. But that doesn’t mean there is a possibility that the Americans will become an honest mediator. During the negotiations at the time in Washington and Madrid, we discovered that the Americans are worse than the Israelis. At one point, there was an argument between our delegation and the Israeli delegation, and the Americans said they were going to make a bridging proposal, to build a bridge between our positions and the Israeli positions. We continued to discuss with the Israelis at that time. Denis Ross (the main American negotiator, Editor’s note) came with Aaron David Miller and Dan Kurtzer, and they put on the table a proposal that was worse than the latest Israeli proposals. The Americans proved to be more royalist than the king. So why have them? We negotiated with the Israelis. But if we have a neutral mediator, the Israelis do not accept it, they want someone who is on their side, and who is aligned. This also happened with the Norwegians, who we learned much later had coordinated everything with the Israelis. So, they were playing the same game as the Americans.

Which mediator, then?

Anyone except the Americans.

“The French elites are either pro-Zionists or they are cowards”

As a professor at Columbia, you were able to observe the pro-Palestinian student movements. Did the importance they have taken surprise you?

No, I was not surprised because we knew the opinion of young people in the United States, especially in universities. The movement to boycott Israel BDS (Boycott, Disvestment Sanctions) in universities, and especially the boycott of companies that support the Israeli occupation, such as Caterpillar, has been gaining momentum for at least a decade. And we had a vote at Columbia, around 2018, and up to two-thirds of the students voted for the boycott. And this also happened at the University of Michigan, Brown University, etc. The students were aware that the Israeli narrative is full of lies and deception, and that what was happening in Palestine was a bad thing. Then came this genocide. Students did not get information from traditional media, they used social networks, independent media, to find out what is happening there. They were horrified.

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Your book was initially published in English in 2020. Why did it take so long for a French translation to appear?

That’s a good question. And it’s not just the six-year deadline: why are there thirty-five translations before French? I have an agent who had no problem selling this book for translations into German, Italian, Danish, Basque, Portuguese, Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese, and I can go on. Even countries where the governments are not too pro-Palestinian, where there is a more sympathetic public opinion towards Israel. I would say that it is because censorship in France is much stronger than elsewhere, at the level of cultural, political, media elites and publishing houses. Apart from Israel, it was the most difficult market, but the book will also be published in Hebrew. And I think that tells us something. This says that the French elites are either pro-Zionist, and have been brainwashed, or they are afraid, and are cowards. I lean towards the latter idea: they are cowards.