Professor James Ker-Lindsay's Recent Video on "Greater Israel"
Uncritically Accepting the Israeli Narrative
If you don’t know about Professor James Ker-Lindsay, he runs a fairly respectable (and growing) YouTube channel on conflict, international relations, and borders. I’ve promoted his channel on social media and have previously corresponded with him very briefly and I think for all intents and purposes, he is of good will.
Where he shines particularly are in areas in which he has either personally lived (Cyprus), is personally invested in (Brexit), or has been following and thinking and writing about for a long time (the Balkans). That doesn’t mean he doesn’t know what he’s talking about in other arenas, it just means his explanations in those cases aren’t fraught with difficulties.
Difficulty is precisely what I experienced recently when watching his recent video on the question, “Is a Greater Israel Emerging?” I am normally quite engaged when watching Professor Ker-Lindsay, but during this video, minute after minute, he simply repeated Zionist talking points or refused to bring up information that is directly correlated to the sort of issues he is ordinarily engaged in.
Professor Ker-Lindsay is quite engaged in the question of international law, and he’s been one of the people that has called out the unilateral declaration of independence of Kosovo as a mistake, as it opened the door to what happened in South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Crimea, and most recently, the new republics added to Russia since the beginning of the Special Military Operation.
And yet, Professor Ker-Lindsay fails to point out that no country flouts international law more and is responsible for more state-sponsored terror against unarmed civilians in the entire world than the state of Israel. Let’s look at some of Professor Ker-Lindsay’s errors and omissions in this particular video. I’ll put the minute markings in the headings so you can go back and look at the context yourself.
Ideas regarding a “Greater Israel” may be held in private, but are not government policy (1:11)
There are two problems here. First, there are no declared borders of Israel. Since May 15, 1948, when David Ben-Gurion unilaterally declared the independence of the state of Israel, neither specific borders nor a constitution were established. To this day no such borders exist. It’s a fun question to pose to Zionists when they ask if someone “supports the right of Israel to exist” to ask them what the borders of Israel are.
Some who have done the tiniest bit of homework will say that Israel referred to UN Resolution 181 when seeking US endorsement of their independence, but those borders were for the 1947 partition plan, which had dubious legal or moral force, and clearly are invalid today, as Israel has expanded far beyond those borders.
Even if we ignore the fact that “Greater Israel” has always been Israeli government policy (despite some temporizing from Ben-Gurion, but even he was caught up in the hysteria of 1967), the intimation that Greater Israel is some “private sentiment” is factually incorrect.
Witness this patch on an IDF uniform. Here we can see that “Greater Israel” is not some private theory held by “radicals” but is so mainstream and banal that is is not banned as a patch that can be worn by soldiers of the “most moral army in the world.” To those who think Israel doesn’t monitor such patches, the IDF did indeed ban a “Messiah” patch that some were wearing (wear it instead “under your clothes, close to your heart,” it was said). But the “Greater Israel” patch is not banned.
“Greater Israel” is a mainstream idea in Israeli society and a core belief of the fundamentalist right, who are in the ascendancy politically in Israel, something that Professor Ker-Lindsay alludes to towards the end of the video.
The Balfour Declaration and the Mandate for Palestine are simply facts, not major moral and legal errors that led to where we are today (2:45)
Professor Ker-Lindsay breezes over the Balfour Declaration, in which one country illegally and immorally promises the land that belongs to one group of people to a third party and does the same for the Mandate for Palestine, itself also of dubious legality and morality, and which alone in the Mandatory system (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, etc.) did not allow for the popular sovereignty of the majority population to determine the government of the country.
If you’d like to learn more about the origins of the Mandate, I recently spoke about James Quigley’s helpful article on the legality of the British Mandate for Palestine which appeared in the Journal of Palestine Studies.
Without discussing the major legal and moral problems of the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate for Palestine, no helpful discourse on Palestine can even begin.
The Jews had to “escape persecution in Europe” by coming to Israel (3:10)
What do Jewish difficulties in Europe have to do with the Palestinian land and people? The UK and the US closed their borders to Jewish immigrants during this period and preferred to push them onto an “empty” land (which it turns out, wasn’t empty). Professor Ker-Lindsay omits this important bit of information.
Whatever happened to Jews in Europe has nothing to do with Arabs in Palestine.
The UN had the legal and moral authority to partition Palestine (3:50)
While Professor Ker-Lindsay doesn’t himself endorse the partition plan, he calls no attention to the fact that the majority of the land in the 1947 proposal was given to a minority of the population, a minority that owned less than 10% of the private land in the territory.
What authority, legal or moral, did the UN have to partition Palestine? Further, to do so in a way that was opposed to the native population and in favor of immigrants from Europe?
“Fighting broke out between Jews and Arabs after November 1947” (4:11)
This is one of the bigger howlers in Professor Ker-Lindsay’s analysis. Renowned Zionist historian Benny Morris states in both 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War and The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited that roughly 300,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes between November 1947-May 1948. How can that be characterized with the casual phrase “fighting broke out between Jews and Arabs”? Calling this “fighting” is the same as referring to what is currently happening in Gaza as a “war” as if there are “battles” and similarly equipped military forces fighting each other instead of a “genocide” in which defenseless men, women, and children are slaughtered and then the evidence of such actions is proudly uploaded to social media.
The language used by Professor Ker-Lindsay here is the typical (and alas, lazy) narrative of “both sides” when it is clear that one side immorally and illegally expelled the other, waving, in defense, the paper justification of an entity that had no moral or legal right to partition the country.
“Israel was attacked by its neighbors” shortly after May 15, 1948 (4:22)
I’ve dealt with this bit of hasbara already (“six Arab armies”) but again Professor Ker-Lindsay shows he is not really familiar with the events of 1947-1949 and he omits that the country which shared the longest border with Israel, Jordan, had a secret deal with the Israelis in which the West Bank would be annexed by King Abdullah, which was part of the benching of the most fearsome force on either side in 1948, the Arab Legion, trained and officered by the British. Outside of some heated battles outside Jerusalem, the Arab Legion never invaded into the Jewish-state-demarcated-by-the-UN areas of Palestine.
To learn more about what happened in 1948, consider reading The War for Palestine.
How can we say “Israel was attacked by its neighbors” without saying that a) Israel attacked first, beginning in 1947 and b) the nation with which it had the longest border cut a deal with it to close off the possibility of an independent Palestinian state, something neither Israel nor Jordan desired?
“Another conflict broke out in 1956” (5:15)
Again, Professor Ker-Lindsay makes this sound fairly pedestrian. Instead, in one of the dying gasps of the prerogatives of modern colonialism, France and England teamed up with Israel to gang up on Egypt. Back when the US was willing to say “no” to Israel, using only a small measure of the social capital it had accrued after WWII, all sides backed down and things returned to status quo ante.
The framing of “another conflict broke out” doesn’t take into account one of the major drivers of Arab aggression, a refusal of the Israelis to honor the UN-recognized right of refugee return, an action which would have indicated that Israel was interested in a long-term peace and which would have removed refugees from Arab countries, which triggered numerous domestic political issues.
Israel had to annex the Golan Heights to “protect itself” from Syria (6:45)
To this day no one except the US (under Trump in 2019) recognizes the validity of the annexation of the Golan. It would be helpful to underline a recurring theme here: Israel benefits from international law when it suits them (1947 partition) and flouts it when it doesn’t (UN Resolution 242, 2024 ICC arrest warrants for Gallant and Netanyahu, 2024 ICJ finding).
I would argue that Professor Ker-Lindsay is an enthusiastic apostle of “international law and order” and yet he doesn’t pause once in the video to note that Israel (besides the US) is probably the single largest threat to international law and order on the world stage today.
Israel does what it wants because it can (and does) always cry “anti-Semitism” when opposed.
Israel began a policy of settlements after 1967 (7:00)
Yithzak Rabin is one of the few Israeli officials on the record who initially condemned the settlements, but Professor Ker-Lindsay fails to note here that the settlements themselves are the result of official government policy that leads to a “Greater Israel.” We can sometimes be fooled into thinking of Greater Israel as only relating to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt, but the reality is that anything beyond the internationally recognized 1967 borders of Israel is “Greater Israel.”
The settlements, perpetuated and expanded by the most radical in Israeli society, constitute the biggest obstacle to peace in Palestine, and while officially “illegal” under US policy (and international law), is part of the general Israeli policy of creating “facts on the ground” to justify later annexations. This was done in the Golan and that area will likely soon expand as well, given the Israeli invasion into Syria after the fall of Assad.
“A Palestinian Uprising Began” (8:40)
Professor Ker-Lindsay fails to note that the official government policies of apartheid and the worsening of living conditions after Oslo led directly to both intifadas, respectively. Strangely enough, when you don’t treat people as equals and refuse to grant them citizenship, they tend to rebel.
Professor Ker-Lindsay could have quoted Moshe Dayan, an Israeli official, regarding the status of the Palestinians after the 1967 occupation began: “we don't have a solution, and you will continue living like dogs, and whoever wants will go, and we'll see how this procedure will work out. For now, it works out.” At the time it was estimated by Dayan that people could live at least 50 years under an occupation in which they were denied citizenship.
Uprisings begin for reasons. Failing to acknowledge these reasons helps feed the narrative that Palestinians are unreasonable, unreasoning monsters only interested in “terrorism” and destruction. Nowhere in the video does Professor Ker-Lindsay acknowledge the internationally recognized right of peoples to resist their occupiers, even to the point of using force.
“This all changed in October 2023” (9:40)
This is perhaps the laziest take from Professor Ker-Lindsay in the entire video. October 7th is not some isolated event, but rather just another part of the cycle of violence perpetrated by the Israelis on the Palestinians for daring to host the first internationally recognized fair and free elections in the Arab world…and to dare to vote differently than how the US and the EU approved of. The siege on Gaza began after that 2006 election, which is sometime before October 2023, when “this all changed.”
Professor Ker-Lindsay also has no time to note that any nonviolent protest during this post-Oslo period, like the 2018 Great March of Return, is met by IDF sniper bullets which kill medics, press, and unarmed civilians, some of whom were already disabled from previous “run-ins” with the occupiers. Deliberate targeting of medics, press, and unarmed civilians are internationally-recognized war crimes.
October 7th was not the beginning of anything new in the conflict other than the most violent phase of the ongoing genocide and dispossession of Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba. Unfortunately for Israel, it was the beginning of a global awakening to the evil of the Zionist entity and the realities of what is happening to the people in Palestine, particularly in Gaza, a majority of which are (or rather, in many cases, were) children.
“The current Israeli administration has no intention of honoring a two-state solution.” (13:09)
This frame makes it sound like there was ever any Israeli administration that had any intention of honoring a two-state solution.
No such administration has ever existed.
In sum, to answer Professor Ker-Lindsay’s original question posed, “Is a Greater Israel emerging?” the answer is, based on all the principles held dear by the professor, that not only does a Greater Israel already exist, in the occupied Shebaa Farms, Golan, West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, it will continue to expand until some future time in which the world braves being called “anti-Semitic” to hold Israel to account to the rules-based order of nations.
Before closing, let me say that I am still a subscriber of Professor Ker-Lindsay’s channel and I really appreciate all he does to help further enlighten people on international relations. But on the question of Palestine it is clear that he is not even superficially read on the real issues and does not have a genuine grasp of what has been going on in Israeli society from 1948 to the present. That’s not his fault, because there’s no moral requirement that people educate themselves about this topic. Indeed, most people don’t know and don’t really care about the Palestinians.
But by the standards he’s set for himself and what he’s led watchers of his work to expect, he doesn’t have any business getting into the issues of Palestine until he’s done more homework.
#EndTheOccupation