Welcome, everybody, in the afternoon. This is our last meeting of the seminar for this term, and I'm delighted to introduce our speaker today, Professor Dame. I don't think Professor Slade needs much introduction. Not necessarily, not surely, not in Oxford, but just just a few words to contextualise our talk today, maybe. But first, his name is emeritus fellow attending Antony's and he is a former professor of international relations here at the DPR.
He was elected fellow of the British Academy almost 11 years ago. He has written extensively on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and his research has shed light on new light, I would say, on the history of Israel and the Middle East at large, to a degree that his work with others is now considered in hindsight or retrospective, to be ushering in a new era and a study of the region no less than that. Per today's talk, I just I would just mention two of his many books or many works.
In 1998, he published the collusion across the Jordan King Abdullah, the Zionist movement and the partition of Palestine in less than ten years. After that, he published the biography of King Hussein, Lion of Jordan, The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace. And in today's talk, Prof. Stand would offer us the consideration of a Jordanian perspective of Israel in the context of today's various studies seminar. Professor, thank you for coming. Thank you, Yaakov, for your kind introduction.
It's a pleasure for me to be here with you and to contribute to the Israel Studies Seminar. My topic is Jordanian Perspectives on Israel, and as you have just heard, I have written two books on Jordanian Israeli relations. The first one was about King Abdullah collusion across the Jordan, and the second one was the biography of King Hussein, his grandson, which in a sense is collusion, mark two thirds continuation of the story of very close Hashemite Zionist relations.
So what I thought I would do today is not give an academic paper, but give a very informal talk and range over 100 years of Hashemite Zionist Israeli relations. And also, if I may give a personal perspective on Jordanian perspectives on Israel, because I have been involved in this field for a long time. I am not a stranger to controversies. I have generated a lot of controversies.
And I would like to talk not just about Jordanian perspectives on Israel, but also the historiography of the subject and the controversies that I have been involved in. And I would like to begin by setting out some sort of a framework for understanding Hashemite Zionist Israeli relations. And two factors seem to me to be particularly important in constituting the framework, the context. The first one is the Hashemite tradition, the Hashemite dynasty headed by Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca.
And there have been relations with the Zionists and Israel over the last century. And the head of this dynasty, Hussein the Sharif of Mecca, who briefly became towards the end of the at the end of the Second World War with the First World War, he briefly became the king of the Hejaz. He had a very. Positive attitude towards Jews. And there was never I didn't detect any any trace of anti-Semitism in him or his or his descendants.
This is in marked contrast to the visceral anti-Semitism of the Saudi dynasty and other Arab leaders and Hussein. The Sharif of Mecca regarded the Jews as the people of the book, and he educated his four children in the tradition of respect for the Jews and tolerance towards the Jews. But he couldn't accept the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and the British offered him a defence pact if he would endorse the Balfour Declaration, and he refused.
He said he's perfectly happy for Jews to come to Palestine and to live happily under his rule and [INAUDIBLE] protect them. But he's not prepared. He he can't accept the Jews forcing their way in through the window. So he took his principled stand against the Balfour Declaration, and the British then abandoned him to the tender mercies of his great rival, Ibn Saud, who overrun his kingdom of the Hejaz.
And the other important factor to bear in mind in all of this is the colonial factor, the role that Britain played in the politics of the region. In a sense, Britain helped to create both of these and these countries, Transjordan and later Israel. This through this process started with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which Britain wrote into the mandate of the League of Nations in 1920. So Britain was not obliged to help the Zionists create a national home for the Jews in Palestine.
But Britain did not fulfilled, did not honour the second part of the promise, which is to protect the civil and religious rights of what were described as the known Jewish communities. So Britain with the Balfour Declaration, started the process of the gradual Zionist takeover of most of the country. And in 1921, Winston Churchill, the Colonial Secretary, created the Emirate of Transjordan, and as he later boasted, he created the Emirate of Transjordan by the stroke of his pen.
One sunny afternoon and still had time to paint some watercolours of Jerusalem. So Jordan was an artificial creation. It was a product a progeny of the British Empire created to suit British imperial interests, as was the Zionist movement in Palestine, the Zionist with a junior partners of the British Empire. So from the beginning, both Transjordan and the Zionist movement were the clients of the British Empire, and both were somewhat uneasy in the Arab environment.
King Abdullah lacked legitimacy in the Arab world, and the Zionists, of course, were in conflict with the environment from the beginning. There was one other factor, and that is that the two movements, the two sides had a common enemy. Palestinian the Palestinian national movement may be an enemy, is too strong a word, but certainly an opponent and a rival for King Abdullah. The Palestinian national movement was the major rival in contention for possession of Palestine and for the Zionists.
The principal enemy were the local Palestinians. So having a common enemy or opponent or rival gave a basis. Provided a basis for collaboration between. The two sides. And there were some periods during the reign of King Hussein when I would argue there was active collaboration between the two sides in suppressing Palestinian nationalism. King Abdullah was an extremely ambitious ruler, and his greatest ambition was Greater Syria, because he was given by the British a backwater, the Transjordan.
And his aim was to make himself the king of greater Syria, to bring under his rule, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. He was described by a British official as a falcon trapped in a canaries cage. He was a falcon, but there he was, trapped by the British in the small cage of Transjordan, and he wanted to expand in all directions. But he was a client of the British, and he couldn't do anything without the agreement.
From the beginning of his rule, he tried to cultivate friendly relations with his neighbours to the West. He had high opinion of the Jews, of the knowledge of the capacity for developing country lands, for the technology, for the know how and for the international influence. So all along he tried to get along. He tried to get on well with them and he cooperated with them. And there were many friendly meetings between the two sides.
He also leased to the Jewish Agency the lands that he owned on the East Bank of the River Jordan private lands and the Jewish Agency. Throughout the 1930, throughout much of the interwar period, paid him £500 a year for the option to exercise this lease. It never exercised the lease, but it continued to pay him for the option. And I wouldn't call this a bribe, but there were payments that were made to him from time to time, apart from the payment for the option on the lease.
So money changed hands in this relationship. It wasn't just the dialogue. This friendly relationship continued with many ups and downs until the end of the Second World War. And after the war, the struggle for Palestine entered its most critical phase. After the Second World War, the British, the Israelis, the Zionists looked as hard as they could for one Arab ruler who would agree to the partition of Palestine.
And there was only the Palestinians, of course, rejected partition outright, and there was only one Arab ruler who was prepared to consider the partition of Palestine with the Zionists, and that was Abdullah, and that was the basis for the dialogue across the battle lines in the aftermath of 1946.
In 1945. Now this brings me to 1947, and here I will refer to my book, Collusion across the Jordan King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement and the Partition of Palestine, which deals in detail with this, the period from 1947 until the assassination of Abdullah by an Arab by a Palestinian nationalist in 1950. One. And the usual line up in most of the literature on the Arab-Israeli conflict during this period during the first half of the 20th century.
The usual line up is that Israel on one side, the Palestinians, all the Arabs and all the Arab nationalists on the other side. My interpretation of this period is that the real lined up below the surface was Hashemite and Zionist on one side against Palestinian and Arab nationalist on the other side. And in the book I put forward two theses.
The central thesis is that in 1947, the Zionist agency through Golda meir and King Abdullah had reached a tacit agreement to divide up Palestine between themselves at the expense of the Palestinians. The spirit of this understanding was that there would be a partition of Palestine by peaceful means and that the Jews would create this state. Abdullah would take over the Arab part of Palestine, and after the dust settled, they would sign a peace treaty and have normal relations.
That was the understanding. The Zionists tried a few times to persuade Abdullah to write this down disagreement, and he declined. And he said to them, Trust is crucial. If there is trust, there is no need for a text, for a written agreement. And if there is no trust, a written agreement isn't going to help. Subsidiary thesis. So just to continue this tacit agreement laid the foundations for limited clashes during the 48 war and to continuing collaboration in the aftermath of of the war.
The secondary subsidiary thesis is that Britain knew and approved of the collusion between the two sides. So Britain was, although the mandate was coming to its inglorious end, Britain was still very influential in regional politics. Now, as you know, there was a great debate between the old historians and the new Israeli historians, or revisionist Israeli historians of whom I am one. The other two were Ilan Papa and Benny Morris.
Benny Morris has been to the extreme right, and he's changed his views very radically. So only two new historians left. That's Ilan, Pappy and myself. And the many bones of contention in the debate between the old historians and the new historians. But the one that is relevant here is what was Britain's policy in the twilight of the mandate over Palestine. The old historians say Britain's aim was to prevent the birth of a Jewish state, which was envisaged in the U.N. partition resolution.
We say no. Britain accepted a Jewish state. Its aim was to abort the birth of a Palestinian state, and it achieved that aim in cooperation with Abdullah and the pioneer who was Ilan Pappy, who who wrote a thesis, Dphil thesis. He was a student of the Middle East centre. He was a dphil thesis on Britain, the Arab-Israeli conflict, 1948 to 1951.
I was his external examiner. I was a training at the time and all I learnt much more from him that he ever, he ever learned from me and all the ideas of the new history in their thesis in one form or another. But the most radical, most arresting thesis was that Britain's aim in 1940 748, was to help Abdullah Annexe the Arab part of Palestine and do away with the Palestinian state in British eyes. A Palestinian state was not synonymous with a mufti state.
The mufti was a renegade who had thrown his lot with Hitler. So hostility to the Mufti and to a Palestinian state was a constant factor in British policy throughout this period. Britain gave Abdullah a nod and a wink that once the mandate expired to send his army into Palestine, but only into the parts allocated to the Palestinian state by the U.N. resolution. But Abdullah was warned not to tangle with the Jews and not to invade any area that was allocated to the Jews.
When it came to the crunch. At the end of the mandate. Golda meir had a second meeting with Abdullah on the 11th of May 1948, four days before the expiry of the mandate. And this time, Abdullah said he didn't deny that there'd been an agreement and understanding. He said he was no longer a free man. He was one of five the Arab countries prepared to invade Palestine and he couldn't stand back because he would be denounced as a traitor.
So he didn't completely betray the understanding and he didn't fulfil the spirit of the original agreement. It was he was somewhere in between. And during the war he did his best to avoid a head on clash between the two sides. And for the most part, with very minor exceptions, the Arab Legion respected the border, the borders of the Jewish state. Most of the clashes between the Hagana, the Israeli army and the Arab Legion were in and around Jerusalem, on which there hadn't been an agreement.
Most people thought that my book most Jordanians thought that my book was an attack on King Abdullah. In fact, I tried to explain what happened in this very complicated year, 1948. And he comes out from my research as the only Arab leader who had a realistic assessment of the military balance of power.
Who knew that the Arabs had no chance of defeating the Zionist on the battlefields and that Britain and America and the international community wouldn't allow a defeat of of the new state of Israel. So he tried to find a way round it to avoid a head on clash. The publication of my book in 1988 caused the panic in the royal court in Jordan, in Amman. Prince Hassan, who was then Crown Prince, read the book and he panicked because he saw my name.
It's a Jewish name, and he thought it was part of a right wing Zionist Zionist plot to prepare to delegitimize the Hashemite and to prepare the ground for Israel. So for Jordan is Palestine. And the book was banned in Jordan then, and it is still banned in Jordan today. The book was also criticised by a number of Israeli historians, most prominently by Avraham Sela. The basic argument was that there was no collusion across the Jordan.
That there was a UN partition resolution. The Jews accepted it. The Palestinians and all the Arabs rejected it. So it's the Palestinians who had the chance of a state who blew it and went to war to nullify partition. So Israel is not to be blamed for depriving them of a state. That's the main argument against me. And I reply to my Israeli critics in an article in 1995 called The Debate about 1948.
It was published in the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, and I deal with all the main points of contention between the old and the new historians, and particularly in the section about Arab War aims in which I discuss all of this in reply to my Israeli critics.
This debate isn't over. A recent Ph.D. student at the Middle East Centre, Graham Javan, wrote a book thesis and then a book on Britain, the Arab Legion in Jordan, in which he has a chapter dealing with the collusion thesis of in 1948. So the debate continues. I now want to come to the end of the 1948 war and to address another issue, contentious issue between the old and the new historians. And the question is, why was there no political settlement for three decades after the guns fell silent?
And the old historian's answer to this question in two words is Arab intransigence. And my own opinion is that the Arabs were not intransigent. The Arab rulers were not intransigent. They were pragmatic. Every Arab ruler. King Farouk of Egypt. King Abdullah of Jordan. And Hosni Zain, the ruler of Syria. They're all ready to negotiate with Israel. Each ruler had his terms, but Israel was intransigent in these negotiations.
And after the end of the war. The the dialogue across the battle lines resumed. There were many, many meetings between King Abdullah and various Israeli leaders. They made steady progress. They even had a draft peace treaty which was initialled but never signed. And, you know, Abdullah, literally, until his dying day, continued this dialogue. So you cannot you cannot say that he was intransigent. And one of the people Israelis I interviewed was Moshe Sassoon.
Whose father was Eliyahu Sassoon, who started and conducted the dialogue with Abdullah over many years. But when he was appointed minister to Turkey, Musharraf, the foreign minister, appointed his son, was a young diplomat, Moshe Sassoon, to to continue the dialogue because he knew how important the personal contact was for Arab leaders. And Morrison told me that at his first meeting with Abdullah, he was a very young man.
He said to him, You know, Your Majesty, I want to ask you a question which may be out of place. And Abdullah put his hand on his. And he said to him, Ask my son, ask. And he said to him, Why do you want to make peace with us? And Abdullah said, It's not because I have become a Zionist, but because if we don't make peace, there would be another war and another war and another war and another war. He repeated it four times and we will lose. That's why I want to make peace with you.
I now want to move on. To the second part of this history, to the reign of King Hussein, which began in 1953. So I wrote a biography of King Hussein. But my main interest is the Arab-Israeli conflict. That's how I ended up writing this biography. And what I wanted to dispel in the iron wall and in the biography of King Hussein was the myth of Arab intransigence. And Hussein was a very good candidate. In order to help me to provide ammunition for dispelling this myth of Arab intransigence.
King Hussein essentially was a peacemaker. He spent most of his career trying to find a way to live, to coexist peacefully with Israel in. The sources for. Sorry. Go back a minute. The book is a comprehensive biography of King Hussein political biography. But my real interest and the only original contribution is about King Hussein's relations. In secret meetings with Israeli officials from 1963 until the peace treaty was signed in 1994.
It's every student of the Arab-Israeli conflict knows there is a huge asymmetry of sources between the Israeli sources that are available and the Arab sources. The Israeli sort of sources are much, much greater. And Israel has a 30 year rule for reviewing and declassifying official documents. And these are the sources that I use in all my books. But the fact that there is an asymmetry of sources doesn't mean we can't write about the Arab-Israeli conflict.
We have to write on the basis of the sources that are available. And as I have always said to Ph.D. students of mine who reached a dead end in their research, don't give up. It's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. So that was my guiding light. And there is no archive at all in Jordan. Arab countries all have a national archive where they keep the records in Jordan. There isn't even a national archive. Only the Royal Court has its own documents.
So I conducted about 80 interviews with Jordanian officials, and recently I deposited my papers in the Middle East Centre Archive, including a whole pile of the transcripts of these 80 or so interviews and letters and so on. But I did have a really good source for this book, and that is the Charles File.
The Israeli official who started and conducted the secret negotiations with King Hussein was Dr. Yaakov Hertzog, who was the son of the chief rabbi of Ireland, a very, very learned man, a very serious diplomat. He started the secret meetings with King Hussein in London, and he continued them until Golda meir became prime minister and she sidelined him. He is too moderate for her. And these documents are still classified in the Israeli state archive, although more than 30 years have gone by.
But I was lucky enough to meet Shira Hertzog, the daughter of Yaakov Hertzog, and she photocopied for me the whole of the Charles File. Charles was the code that the Israelis held for who say they never wrote his name down in any of the communications, hence the name for Charles File. And all the talks were in English, and Hertzog wrote very detailed reports on every meeting. Sometimes five, sometimes ten, sometimes 15 pages.
And this was the main source that I used in reconstructing all the secret meetings between King Hussein and the Israelis. I'm going to skip. Sorry, but I. I interviewed King Hussein in 1996, and he has in his house in Ascot. I recorded the interview. It lasted 2 hours, and in it we covered the whole of his reign on the theme of relations with Israel.
And after he died, they published an edited version of this interview in the New York Review of Books under the heading His Royal Highness King Hussein in Israel. And. The whole interview was about his relations with Israel. And the first question I asked him was, why did he initiate the secret meetings with the Israelis in 1963? And his reply was roughly as follows The Jews were in armies. We didn't want them here. History put them here. And I is a person in a position of authority.
Felt that I didn't want it second hand. I wanted to meet with the Israelis face to face to see what was the problem, to see what what they were about, and to try and figure out a peaceful way out of this conflict. And he said, by chance, I had a friend who looked after my health here. He was referring to Dr. Emanuel Herbert, who was a Jew and a Zionist, and he was his personal physician in London. And Hussein said to me, and he offered the possibility of a meeting.
And I said, Fine. And that's how it started. And all the meetings took place in the heart of the home of Dr. Herbert in St John's Wood. And. One point that I want to make about King Hussein is that he had a very sensitive understanding and sympathy for Jewish suffering, unlike a lot of Arab rulers. He knew about Jewish suffering.
He knew about the Holocaust. He took that into account in all his dealings with Israelis and his son, the present king, some of his generals, they all said to me, the king was an educated his majesty was an educator. And he always used to tell us, when you deal with the Jews, bear in mind that they suffered a lot. Bear in mind that they that they went through the Holocaust and this they are bound to be obsessed with security.
So when you deal with them, take that into account. So that was his approach in dealing with the Israelis. The one departure from this peaceful dialogue was the June 1967 war. I'm not going to go into details about why it happened. But joining the Arabs, joining Egypt in the attack, not the attack, joining the Arabs in the war against Israel was the mistake of his life. And he paid the price for that mistake.
He lost the West Bank in Jerusalem, the jewel in the crown, and the dialogue that continued after the June six, 1967, war. It was a very intensive dialogue, very frequent meetings with an ever growing range of Israeli leaders. But nothing happened. Nothing happened. The Israelis were stringing Hussein along. Another meeting and another meeting. And another meeting. And from day one, he offered them total peace for total withdrawal, and they would not agree to it.
And they kept coming up with various offers, like their long plan, that he would get back 60% or 70% of the West Bank, but not Jerusalem. And it was all unacceptable. So nothing happened in these meetings. And the question is, why did. Why didn't Hussein call it a day?
Why did he continue? And the answer to that is that he was afraid that if he fell out with the Israelis, they will topple him and they will capture the east bank of the Jordan as well, or more likely, they will topple the monarchy and enable the PLO to take over the East Bank of Jordan and turn the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan into the the the the Palestine Republic. So it was fear. It was because in order to defend his kingdom, that he continued the dialogue. I have to skip a lot.
And I would like to come to another landmark in 1988, when King Hussein broke off the legal and administrative links between Jordan and the West Bank. One of his advisers told me that reading collusion across the Jordan, which came out in May 1988, influenced his decision at the end of July to cut his losses on the West Bank. So I asked him politely whether my book had influence on him, and he said, yes, you had the right reading, but he didn't elaborate.
Secondly, I can only guess that he read the book and he realised that his granddad had tried his upmost and couldn't reach an overall agreement with the Israelis. He had been trying for 20 years and he didn't get anywhere with the Israelis. So he decided to cut the links and to say to the Palestinian, to the PLO, I've tried and failed. You take over, you represent the Palestinians, see if you do any better and they haven't done any better.
The big change in Jordanian Israeli relations came after the election of Itzhak Rabin in 1992, and Hussein didn't trust Peres because Paris was a politician. Hussein trusted Rabin because Rabin was a military man. A word was the word. And because they often put themselves in each other's shoes and they formed a really close working relationship and Rabin sidelined.
Shimon Peres was the foreign minister, and he himself and his team conducted the negotiations with Jordan that led to the peace treaty. And this relationship with Rabin was extremely helpful to King Hussein. Like all Arab rulers and like the Shah, he was very impressed with the influence that Israel and the Jews and Israel's friends in Washington had over American foreign policy. And these Rabin and his team helped Hussein with the American with the Clinton administration.
They helped they persuaded Clinton to write off the national debt of Jordan in the lead up to the peace treaty. The negotiations were concluded with and I asked KING and they led to a peace treaty. I asked King Hussein, was he happy with the peace treaty? And he said yes. He was that he and Rabin had an understanding reach an understanding on all the important issues. And it was a balanced. That was the word he used. It was a balanced treaty which serve the interests of both sides.
So for Hussein, the peace treaty with Israel was mission accomplished. And things went well until the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. King Hussein went to the funeral in Jerusalem, and he made a funeral oration, which was very moving. And after the funeral, he went back to the King David Hotel, and he stood on the terrace looking at the magnificent landscape.
And a woman journalist, an Arab journalist who was quite friendly with him, went up to him and he was crying and he was 30, smoking very nervously. And she said to him, you know, what's the matter? And he said, I've come here to bury a friend. And I have a feeling that today we have buried the peace. And these were prophetic words. I've exhausted my 40 minutes. I can stop here. No, please, go on. Really? Yes. Okay. Well, I'll try to be brief.
Netanyahu won the election against Paris in 1996, and he had his first term as prime minister from 1986 to 1999. Netanyahu never liked the Oslo Treaty, so it isn't surprising that as soon as he got into power, he set about dismantling the Oslo peace agreements. And he succeeded. He completely arrested and froze and in many ways reversed the Oslo peace process. That's understandable, given his ideology and his political position.
What is not so easily understandable is why did it destroy the foundations that his predecessors had built for peace with Jordan? I do not have an answer to that. And it's a question that the king puzzled over, and he didn't have an answer. And when I interviewed him in December 1996, in that when we got towards the end of the interview. He started pouring his heart to me about Netanyahu and he said to me, This man is ruining everything that I've worked for all my life and that Rabin worked for.
We did it not for our sake. We did it for the sake of our two people. And this man is ruining everything. I don't know what to do. Do you have any advice for me? And I didn't have any advice for him. But worse was to come. In 1997, the national affair, when the Mossad made an attempt, abortive attempt to assassinate Khalid Mashaal, the mid-level Hamas official was a Jordanian citizen in Amman.
And the background was that since the peace treaty, there was very close strategic and intelligence cooperation between the two sides. And the king represented Jordan in these regular meetings of security cooperation with the Israelis. And in 1997, the king said, I have a very important proposal for you from Hamas. Hamas proposed a long term ceasefire, a long term ceasefire. And I put all my weight behind this proposal.
It's a serious proposal. And I want you to take this proposal and give it to the prime minister, to Netanyahu, without any delay. And two days later, the Mossad agents tried to assassinate Khalid Mashaal. And this was like spitting in the face of the king and his reading, his interpretation of this and I know this from Ali Shukri, who was his private secretary. And I became I interviewed him about six, 16 times, and I got a lot of the information from him.
And he said the King interpretation interpreted that the assassination attempt is a message from Netanyahu that he doesn't want to resolve the conflict, he doesn't want a ceasefire, and he's not prepared to confine the conflict with Hamas to Israel in the occupied territories. He wants to extend it to Jordan, and he suspected that this was part of a plot to topple the monarchy and implement the right wing agenda.
The Jordan is Palestine to topple the monarchy so that the PLO could take over the East Bank. So. Hussein called Clinton. Marshall was in hospital. He was dying. Hussein said to Clinton, This is what has happened. If Marshall dies, I'm going to convene a press conference and I'm going to renounce the peace treaty. And Clinton said to him, This man is impossible, but let me have a try.
I'll speak to him. And Clinton spoke to Netanyahu and persuaded him to send a team and medical team with the antidote to the poison. And Marshall survived. But that was the end of any possibility of friendship or cooperation between the two countries. And King Hussein wrote a three page letter in the aftermath to Netanyahu. And Ali Shukri gave me this letter. He wrote it himself. And in it he surveys the relationship, all these efforts and all.
And he blames Netanyahu for sabotaging all his efforts and causing a lot of damage to both countries. So I'll stop there. And just a few concluding remarks about your Jordanian perspective on Israel. The hallmarks of the Jordanian approach to Israel is pragmatism, moderation and the search for peaceful coexistence. The Israeli response, I would say, summarises intransigence, diplomatic intransigence and the arrogance of power.
That's why I knew there was no future after the peace treaty of a real peace, a genuine peace, which is what the King wanted. But I would add one last remark that not everything is Israel's fault. It's a complicated set of relationships. And the Jordanians, like the Palestinians, had the misfortune of having Israel as their opponent because, as Edward Said said, in relation to the Palestinians, Israel is the most morally complex opponent that anyone could have. Thank you.