Transcript of More 4 News broadcast
Kylie Morris: Among those in Jerusalem during this fortnight of anniversaries was the writer and historian William Dalrymple who has written about Palestinian history. I asked him why the United Nations Plan of sixty years ago to divide the land between Palestinians and Israel had failed.
William Dalrymple: The whole story of the disaster - what happened to the Palestinians very largely has to do with incredible mismanagement by everyone. I mean, at every stage, the Palestinians have failed to take opportunities given to them. There are a whole series of disastrous leaders who have come and messed things up for them. And so again, one can’t possibly exclusively blame Israel for their plight. But the fact remains, in sixty years after the Israeli Declaration of Independence, the Palestinian people are scattered to the winds. [Film clips shown of Palestinian refugees from 1948] Their culture has been erased from the face of the earth. Their history has been buried. People across the globe really don’t understand what their grievances are. It is well known in the Arab world and it is well known in parts of the Muslim world but it’s just not known widely in the west. An entire nation has been destroyed.
Kylie Morris: Did Britain make mistakes here?
William Dalrymple: Britain made colossal mistakes here. Most obviously, Arthur Balfour, without ever having visited this region, and assuming from looking at David Roberts prints and lovely images of deserts assumed that there was an amazing history here linked to the Jewish people but the present was a bunch of Bedouin in tents. He famously said that we shouldn’t allow the prejudices of a primitive people to come in the way of God’s master plan for humanity. And then, in the final declaration, this sort of laden sentence saying all this will happen – this homeland for the Jewish people will happen without in any way infringing on the rights of the inhabitants. Of course, every single one of the inhabitants – the Palestinians who have lived here for centuries have suffered in a variety of ways, [scenes of destroyed homes, Palestinian women crying out in the streets, a funeral] ranging from destruction of homes, destruction of rights, displacement through to actual murder.
Kylie Morris: How is it that the British public memory has been erased of these events?
William Dalrymple: History has to be fought for. History is not something objective and static which is there and which is undisputed. The key resource I would recommend is an extraordinary book which is available in libraries all over Britain called All That Remains by Walid Khalidi. [The book is shown together with images of Palestinian villages and pictures showing the ruins of villages] Now this book contains images of every single Palestinian village. Photographs of small communities amid fields with mosques, with churches, hundreds of old houses, bazaars, souks and so on and then photographs them today where they have been completely erased, bulldozed and dynamited from the face of the earth. And in the process of the Naqba, not only were people displaced and villages destroyed but hundreds of holy sites were completely disappeared. While one totally takes one’s hat off to the achievements of the Israelis, and recognizes that in the creation of Israel, a home was created for a people that had suffered centuries of persecution, you have to recognize at the same time that that achievement was built on the grave and the skeletons of an existing culture and only when the land is divided and two states are existing side by side can that grievance even begin to be redressed. And at the moment, Britain is simply not putting the pressure on Israel to create a Palestinian State. [ Clip of Tony Blair addressing a forum] Every single day around here, the settlements are growing. More land is seized, more people expelled, more people have their permits or their residence rights removed and this is happening at a time when there is meant to be a complete freeze on settlement building, when Bush has assured us that he is working for a peace process. [Clips shown of settlement building] There can never be a Palestinian State while those settlements continue to expand and land continues to be seized.
LACK OF RIGOROUS TESTING OF CONTRIBUTORS:
The contributor makes numerous contentious statements and presents a one-sided narrative yet this is never scrutinized or challenged by the interviewer. For example, the contributor is allowed to claim unchallenged that Israel’s achievements were “built on the grave and the skeletons of an existing culture”. Furthermore, the contributor claims that there “can never be a Palestinian State while settlements … expand and land continues to be seized” but there is no attempt to question him on whether there are other factors impeding the establishment of a Palestinian State such as terrorist attacks against Israelis or the ascendance of Hamas – an organization that opposes a two-state solution.