A Jewish truck that was attacked by Arab irregulars on the main road to Jerusalem, 1948. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Curiosity drove me to attend a seminar held at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, of visiting Palestinian academics, Dr. Lamma Mansour and Dr. Yousef Kamal AlKhoury.

Mansour’s presentation, “Structure of Erasure – Past and Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine” predictably consisted of a carefully curated one-sided tale of Palestinian victimhood buttressed by cherry picked quotes and devoid of historical or geo-political context. Her themes of settler colonialism, Nakba, fragmentation and apartheid trod well-worn territory. Settler colonialism was presented as the original sin.

The Nakba, or “catastrophe” that occurred when “750,000 Palestinians were violently expelled and driven out,” was presented as the defining feature of Palestinian identity. Of course there was no mention of the 1947 United Nations two-state solution — rejected by Arabs, accepted by Jews — or that upon declaration of statehood in 1948, the fledgling Jewish state was immediately attacked by five regular Arab armies. Also ignored was the context that the Jewish people had experienced a genocide in Europe, in which six million were murdered and the world had refused to take most refugees.

Further omissions included that the Arab exodus in 1948 resulted from multiple factors: flight from active fighting, fear generated by the conflict, expulsions in some locations, collapse of local leadership and calls by Arab command to leave temporarily while the new Jewish state was destroyed. In addition, between 1948 and the early 1970s, roughly 850,000 Jews left or were expelled from Arab countries, a massive demographic upheaval, rarely incorporated into discussions. These refugees were resettled in the new Jewish state.

Many of those Arab families who chose to stay in 1948 make up the 20 percent of Arab Israeli citizens with full rights. Indeed, Dr. Mansour is part of that demographic, hailing  from Nazareth in Israel, gaining a degree at Haifa University and currently serving as a fellow at Hebrew University. She also studied at Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship, an awkward fact raised during question time, given that she had included a Cecil Rhodes quote as part of her colonization critique. Mansour even admitted that 50% of students at Haifa university are Arab, exposing the dissonance between her narrative of suffering and oppression and her lived reality.

The “fragmentation” piece of her argument consisted of observing that Palestinians live in separate zones; Gaza, eastern Jerusalem, the West Bank, Diaspora refugees, and Palestinian citizens of Israel. Conspicuously absent were arrangements agreed to by Palestinians in the Oslo Accords, or multiple major land-for-peace proposals to establish a Palestinian state in most of the West Bank and Gaza, which was rejected by numerous Palestinian governments.

Instead, they chose the Second Intifada — a five-year campaign of suicide bombings, shootings, and rocket fire that killed over 1,000 Israelis and many more Palestinians. The unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 was ignored in the presentations, as was the fact that Hamas violently took control of Gaza in 2007, and, in order to fulfill its genocidal goal to eliminate Israel, prioritized terror tunnels and rockets. October 7, 2023, was also not mentioned.

People should be aware of the views of Palestinian academics like these, before they attend an event — or these speakers are welcomed to campus.

Sheree Trotter has a PhD in History and is author of Zionism at the Ends of the Earth, fellow of London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, and founder of Indigenous Embassy Jerusalem.