Humble Mumbles   /     26. “The Occupation is a Manifestation of the Problem” : An Interview with Jonathan Cook, Part II

Part II
(Part I here : bit.ly/2ptW4gs)

Are you looking for a gloriously compelling, coherent and comprehensive introduction to 20th century Palestine/Israel in the context of 19th century Europe and 21st century America? This is the clear and impassioned two-part interview episode for you

“History didn’t stop 2000 years ago and start again in 1948”

Last summer, our Humble Mumbles representative spoke with British journalist Jonathan Cook at Liwan cafe in Nazareth. We discussed: doublethink, dignity, borders, mythology, politics of archeology and forgotten history!

Jonathan speaks informally—with clarity, wit and grace!—about what led him to become an Israeli citizen, his political awakening during the second intifada, as well as his analysis of Israeli conceptions of Palestinians—whether as Israeli citizens or residents of the Occupied Territories.

“In the era of modern human rights, one could argue that Israel has been unlucky—I mean, it was created in 1948, same year as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was issued; it’s also the time that the Nuremberg Trials had defined what war crimes were and crimes against humanity, so Israel emerges doing all these very bad and ugly things just when the world has settled on the idea of what these bad and ugly things are, and Israel is doing them. One has therefore to turn a blind eye to this, which creates a huge sense of hypocrisy. But when we look at other countries, we see very similar things, and more successfully in many ways, like United States or Australia or Canada where we didn’t see mass ethnic cleansing, what we saw was genocide. And it was possible to do genocide then because we didn’t have 24 hour rolling news, we didn’t have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; people didn’t really care, they thought ‘these people are so primitive and barbaric that you could do what you like with them.’ Now we don’t live in that world anymore although many people in Israel seem to think it would be a good idea if we did, but we don’t. We have to accept that’s not the way the world works anymore. And so Israel is trapped in this effort to try to replicate what other settler-colonial societies did without being abel to commit the kinds of genocides that were committed then and this is why we see these decades of very ugly struggle against the Palestinians. They have to control them, oppress them, deny them all their rights while at the same time trying to seem like they’re a democracy because that’s what we expect of states now.”

Music provided by diy punk art kids Old Table, performing their smash hit “Israeli Prime Minister,” a minister Jonathan Cook knows well in terms of living under him