The Same Archive, Four Meanings: Finkelstein, Morris, Rabbani and Destiny Debate Israel and Palestine

Norman Finkelstein knows people mock his pace. Viewers on YouTube, he says, are told to play him at two or three times speed. He offers a reason rather than an apology: he attaches value to every word. Across the table, Steven Bonnell—known online as Destiny—talks at roughly ten times that speed, stacking clauses and demanding numbers. Finkelstein’s later imitation of him is unsparing: talk fast so people think you are coherent.

Lex Fridman invited four people for a debate on Israel and Palestine with no time limits and no formal rules. Finkelstein and Benny Morris are historians. Mouin Rabbani is a Middle East analyst. Bonnell is a political commentator and livestreamer. Fridman says the aim was not to crown a winner or chase views. He wanted a free-flowing conversation about the history, the present, and the future of the conflict.

He also decided not to dampen the temperature. Tension was in the room from the start and only rose. Finkelstein calls Bonnell a “fantastic moron.” Bonnell fires back that Finkelstein does not even speak Hebrew yet styles himself an Israeli historian. Morris accuses Finkelstein of inventing quotes. Rabbani, pressed for a precise October 7 death tally he does not have, refuses to invent one. Fridman later says the conversation itself was a microcosm of the conflict: distance, anger, wit, and occasional camaraderie, all too human.

Fridman’s first question is about 1948. For Israelis, that year is independence and the founding of a state. For Palestinians, it is the Nakba, the catastrophe in which some 700,000 people were displaced from their homes. He asks what around 1947 to 1949 still explains the present, and he wants Finkelstein first, then Morris, then Rabbani, then Bonnell.

Morris is Israel’s best-known “new historian,” the scholar who used archives in the 1980s to reopen the refugee question that older Israeli chroniclers had smoothed over. Finkelstein, whose parents survived the Holocaust, wrote his dissertation on Zionism and says he has read Morris’s corpus at least three times. Rabbani, a Palestinian analyst who worked at the International Crisis Group, speaks more quietly than the others but does not hide his position. Bonnell is the youngest and the only one without an academic brief; he presents himself as a newcomer with a dense, combative brief of facts.

The seating chart already encodes the argument. Morris will treat 1948 as a war the Arab side started and lost. Finkelstein will treat it as a partition that both sides aborted. Rabbani will treat it as the predictable product of an exclusivist project backed by a British shield. Bonnell will treat origin stories that begin in 1947 as a moral trap. Same year, four plots.

Finkelstein’s opening is unusually mild. After World War II, he says, Britain no longer wanted the Palestine file and tossed it to the United Nations. The UN was not sitting as a moral court. It faced two national communities with irreconcilable fights over immigration and land. The UN Special Committee on Palestine recommended two states; a minority of India, Iran, and Yugoslavia preferred one, hoping the communities might still find a modus vivendi. The General Assembly chose partition.

He calls that choice correct. He does not believe the two communities could have been forced to live together. He quotes Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko on Jewish suffering in Europe—“this is an unpleasant fact, but unfortunately, like all other facts, it must be admitted”—and Ben-Gurion’s public definition of a Jewish state as a Jewish-majority democracy of equal citizens. Then he turns Morris’s own sentences against him: Zionist practice was “necessarily and elementally expansionist,” and “transfer” was “inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism.” The Arab side, Finkelstein says, rejected partition outright; Israeli leaders used the war as a pretext to expel the indigenous population and widen the borders. Neither side kept the resolution.

Morris answers with a different chain of causation. The General Assembly spoke for the international community. The problem was that Arab states and Palestinian Arabs said no not merely to a land ratio but to the principle that Jews should have any sovereign territory. Palestinian leader Hajj Amin al-Husseini, Morris notes, had said only Jews present before 1917 should even receive citizenship. A disorganized civil war followed the vote; in May 1948 Arab states invaded. “The Jews created a state,” Morris says. “The Palestinian Arabs never bothered to even try to create a state before ’48… and for that reason, they have no state to this day.”

Rabbani refuses the fairness of the map. Two thirds of Palestine’s population was Arab; the Yishuv was about a third and controlled still less of the land. The resolution gave roughly 55 percent to the Jewish community and 41 or 42 percent to the Arab community, a inversion that Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi had called revolutionary rather than preservative. Over 80 percent of Palestinians in what became Israel were expelled or fled, then barred from return—ethnic cleansing, Rabbani says, because blocking return is half the crime. He adds Avi Shlaim’s research: from the 1930s, Zionist leaders and Jordan’s Hashemites colluded to prevent an independent Arab state in Palestine.

Bonnell objects to where the others begin. People like 1947 and 1948, he says, because those years offer a clear Arab catastrophe to pin on the new Israeli state. The method is to moralize first and then harvest supporting facts. He lists what that method leaves out: a civil war instigated by Arab rejection of partition; land bought from Ottoman-era owners before the Mandate even started; King Abdullah’s line that Arabs were “as prodigal in selling their land as they are in weeping about it.” Every deal, he says, was rejected because Arabs did not want a Jewish state anywhere in the region.

Finkelstein then tries to pin Morris to Morris. In the first refugee book, transfer got about four pages. After critics said that was too thin for such a claim, the revised edition gave it twenty-five densely documented pages and the phrase “inevitable and inbuilt.” In interviews Morris had said a population had to be removed. In *Righteous Victims* he had written that territorial displacement was the “chief motor” of Arab resistance. If Arabs feared expulsion, and Zionists knew it and proceeded anyway, Finkelstein argues, transfer was not an accident of war. Morris replies that the Nakba was “a product of war, not design,” that transfer never became party policy, and that Ben-Gurion and Weizmann only briefly echoed the Peel Commission’s 1937 transfer idea before dropping the talk after 1938.

Fridman, sensing the quote-war loop, asks the living author the question the books cannot settle: how central was expulsion to early Zionism, and how much does the ideology still govern Israel? Morris is blunt. Zionism was central until 1948 and in the state’s first decades, then faded the way Bolshevism faded in the Soviet Union. Israelis now think about individual success and capitalism. Transfer existed as an idea, he says, but it was never the core. The core was saving persecuted Jews, after centuries in Europe and the Muslim world and finally after the Holocaust, by building a state on the ancient homeland.

Rabbani brings Theodor Herzl’s diaries to the table. The founder of political Zionism, he says, modeled the movement on Cecil Rhodes and wrote that the existing population would have to be spirited across the borders. Morris answers that five volumes yield one paragraph, perhaps even about Argentina rather than Palestine, amounting to a hundredth of a percent of the diary. What Herzl wanted, Morris insists, was a liberal Western state for Jews, not an imperial franchise. Rabbani counters with another diary line: a Jewish state as “an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” Two men, one archive, two Herzls.

Morris rejects the “traditional Arab argument” that the world made Arabs pay for a European Holocaust they did not cause. In the 1930s, he says, Arabs pressed Britain to keep Jews from the one safe shore available, while America, Britain, and France also refused them. That pressure, in his account, contributed indirectly to Jews being slaughtered in Europe. He adds Husseini’s wartime record: a German Foreign Ministry salary, SS recruitment among Bosnian Muslims, and broadcasts calling for the murder of Jews.

Rabbani’s reply is a question: was Palestine the only land on Earth? Palestinians were not Europeans and had no role in the rise of Nazism. “Even if Hajj Amin al-Husseini never existed,” he says, “the Holocaust would’ve played out precisely as it did.” Morris agrees with that counterfactual. Rabbani still draws a distinction. British and American closed doors were about not wanting Jews on their soil. Palestinian opposition was about stopping a homeland from being turned into a Jewish state that would dispossess them.

He then names what he thinks is more fundamental than transfer quotes. Without Britain, Zionism might have been one more utopian project that appeared and vanished. Walid Khalidi called that patronage the “British Shield.” In World War I, Ottoman forces threatened the Suez Canal, the empire’s jugular between Europe and India. Britain’s method, Rabbani says, was the familiar one: implant a foreign minority and build a protectorate. The Balfour Declaration spoke of a “Jewish national home,” not a state. World War II bankrupted Britain, which then left India and Palestine; a Jewish state, meaning uncontestable demographic, territorial, and political supremacy, emerged in that vacuum. After 1948, he continues, Israel confiscated up to 90 percent of land owned by Palestinian citizens, ran military government over them until 1966, and is now described by major human-rights groups, including Israel’s B’Tselem, as a regime of Jewish supremacy from the river to the sea.

Morris answers that Zionism predates 1917, that Balfour also spoke of a civilizational debt Christendom owed Jews, and that British policy was not a straight line of support. Britain capped immigration, issued the 1939 White Paper promising Arab self-rule within a decade, and did not even vote for partition. Husseini, Morris says, rejected a document that had given Arabs what they wanted. Finkelstein finds Balfour’s conversion too convenient: the same man had sponsored the 1905 Aliens Act to keep Eastern European Jews out of Britain. He also calls Palestinian blame for the Holocaust absurd. Raul Hilberg’s thousand-page classic, he notes, gives the Mufti one sentence. His analogy is domestic: he once housed a homeless man for two and a half years, but “if I knew in advance that that homeless person was going to try to turn me out of my apartment, I would think 10,000 times.”

Rabbani grants Husseini’s Nazi collaboration as a legitimate fact, then asks why Yitzhak Shamir’s past is treated as irrelevant. In 1941 the Lehi, the Stern Gang, proposed an alliance with Nazi Germany; Shamir was a prominent leader of that group and later became Knesset speaker, foreign minister, and prime minister. Morris’s defense is scale and status. Lehi had about 300 people against the Haganah’s 30,000. The Zionist mainstream called them terrorists and hunted them. They wanted arms against the British, as others in that period hunted for any anti-British ally, even Stalin.

Rabbani will not drop the document’s language: the proposal claimed “shared ideological principles.” Morris asks whether Lehi members were Nazis, whether they worked in Berlin. Rabbani says that is exactly what Husseini did. Finkelstein, exasperated, cannot see why Palestinians should be tied to the Nazi genocide at one, two, or three removes. “Trying to blame them directly, indirectly, indirectly or indirectly three times removed for the Nazi Holocaust is completely lunatic.” Bonnell says Morris is not blaming Palestinians for the Holocaust; he is describing how Jews in the region would have experienced a closed escape route. The two tables talk past each other until Fridman cuts toward the present.

Fridman asks a pointed question: were Hamas’s October 7 attacks genocidal? Ethnic cleansing? Morris says fighters were sent to murder and rape, killed about 1,200 Israelis, and abducted about 250 people, mostly civilians. The 1988 Hamas charter, in his reading, is genocidal: Jews as sons of apes and pigs who must be eliminated from Palestine. Hamas, he argues, also understood that embedding fighters among Gaza’s population would produce a devastating Israeli counteroffensive and a propaganda harvest. Killing Jews on the border was the first aim; the civilian death toll in Gaza was, in his account, priced in.

Rabbani grants the charter’s antisemitism and rejects the word genocidal. A 2018 Hamas document, he says, distinguishes Jews from Zionists; Morris calls that document a statement, not a new charter, and probably insincere. Hamas, Rabbani adds, has no record of deliberately targeting non-Israeli Jews or of attacking Jews or Israelis outside Israel and Palestine. His larger demand is institutional: “I don’t think I should take your word for it, I don’t think you should take my word for it.” The Genocide Convention covers states, not movements, so Hamas will not face an ICJ hearing. He considers ICC prosecutor Karim Khan to have sat on the file. Hamas has called for independent inquiry; Israel, backed by the United States, has rejected one.

Finkelstein will not contest that about 850 civilians were killed, a figure published in Haaretz. He has said from the first day that Hamas committed significant atrocities, plural. He also says he has not seen convincing evidence of rape, and that Israel’s own ICJ filing never mentioned beheadings of infants. Bonnell wants a harder sentence: does Finkelstein believe Hamas killed the majority of those 850? Finkelstein answers that even 400 would be huge, and that he cannot pin a number. Morris says perhaps 800 of the 850 were slaughtered by Hamas. Rabbani lands where the whole debate keeps landing: a clear majority, yes, “but don’t force me to give a number I don’t know.”

Fridman zooms out: are Palestinians in Gaza justified in violent resistance? Rabbani splits the question. Palestinians have a right to resist, including armed resistance, and that right is bound by the laws of war. Almost all public attention, he says, went to attacks on civilian centers. Much less discussed, “to the point of amnesia,” were extensive attacks on Israeli military and intelligence sites. Seizing territory is not, in itself, the same as deliberately targeting civilians; the latter is illegitimate by definition. Morris hears insufficient condemnation. Rabbani answers that for decades he has been asked to condemn Palestinian acts and never Israeli ones, a demand he calls selective outrage.

The argument then becomes a referendum on Israeli firepower. Finkelstein reads Morris’s 1982 Lebanon account as a sanitizing of a war that killed 15,000 to 20,000 people, overwhelmingly civilians, and quotes soldier Dov Yermiya’s diary of a war machine trampling civilians. Morris says he believes the IDF tried to avoid civilian casualties and that critics such as Robert Fisk are anti-Zionist. Bonnell’s technical claim is that a drone strike killing four children on a Gaza beach is not a lone soldier’s crime: it would have been signed off by intelligence, weaponeers, lawyers, and a chain of command. Finkelstein says Bonnell has just made the opposite point: if the machine had to approve it, the policy sits at the top.

Finkelstein then cites the UN inquiry into Gaza’s 2018 Great March of Return: snipers targeting children, journalists, medics, and a disabled person 300 meters from the fence. Bonnell reads a UN passage about protesters damaging the fence, throwing stones and Molotovs, and flying incendiary kites. Finkelstein says he has the months wrong; he is talking about the period that began on March 30. Morris’s later numerical defense of the Gaza war is that if Israel wanted to kill civilians it could have killed 500,000; 30,000 in four months is, in proportion, evidence of targeting Hamas. Finkelstein calls “only 30,000” a historian’s tell, notes polls that 90 percent of Israelis wanted the same or more force, and reminds the table that a minister talked of dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza.

Fridman asks Morris whether Gaza is a genocide. Morris says no. Rabbani’s answer is legal before it is moral. On December 29, 2023, South Africa sued Israel under the Genocide Convention. On January 26, 2024, the court issued a preliminary ruling. It did not find Israel guilty or innocent. It had two doors: dismiss a frivolous case, or find that South Africa had presented a plausible case of possible convention violations and proceed to a full hearing. It chose the second door. Rabbani was not surprised it skipped a ceasefire order; Bosnia and Myanmar did not get one either. What mattered, to him, was that the court did not throw the file out.

He adds a personal judgment he separates from the law: based on the evidence before him, Israel is engaged in a genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza. Genocide, he reminds the table, is not a body count. It is destruction of a people in whole or in part plus intent. Thirty thousand deaths can cross the threshold; not reaching 500,000 is beside the point. On intent he points to South Africa’s brief and to the German judge who, unpersuaded by much of the case, still found the intent section so overpowering he voted with the majority. Morris guesses the court will eventually find no genocide.

Bonnell calls “plausible” an extremely low bar, perhaps below an indictment, and says South Africa’s complaint misrepresents quotes to a degree that “borders on criminal.” His exhibit is President Isaac Herzog on October 12, 2023. The filing quotes “an entire nation out there that is responsible.” The linked article, Bonnell says, continues with Herzog acknowledging many innocent Palestinians and asking whether he may defend himself against a missile in a kitchen. Finkelstein says Israeli researcher Yaniv Kogan and Jamie Stern-Weiner checked every citation in Hebrew and English and found one real problem. He does not believe fifteen judges, including an American court president, were duped. Qualifying as plausible, in his Olympic-team analogy, is already a high worldly bar: “you must be doing something pretty horrible.”

After a break, Fridman asks when the two sides were closest to a settlement. Morris’s answer is 2000. Barak and then Clinton offered Arafat a two-state deal; the December Clinton parameters gave about 95 percent of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, half the Old City, some joint control of the Temple Mount, and all of Gaza. “The Palestinians said no.” Morris’s reading is psychological: Arafat was “constitutionally, psychologically incapable” of signing a deal that accepted a Jewish state. Others say the terms were insufficient; he does not buy that.

Rabbani notes that Arafat formally recognized Israel in 1993 and doubts 2000–2001 was a genuine resolution. Israel already held 78 percent of Mandate Palestine; Palestinians were seeking a state on the remaining 22 percent, and that was apparently too much. His lost opportunity is earlier: the mid-1970s after the 1973 war. He quotes Moshe Dayan in 1971 choosing “Sharm el-Sheikh without peace.” After 1973, Israeli calculations shifted. A joint U.S.–Soviet push toward 1967 lines and a Palestinian state, he thinks, had a reasonable prospect. Sadat’s separate Egyptian peace removed Israel’s strongest Arab adversary and, in Rabbani’s account, gave Israel a freer hand in the occupied territories and Lebanon.

He does not accept that a two-state settlement has passed a point of no return. Israel’s hold on the occupied territories is, he argues, more tenuous than France in Algeria in 1954, Britain in Ireland in 1916, or Ethiopia in Eritrea in 1990. The new question is desirability. Can one make peace with what he now calls an increasingly irrational genocidal apartheid state that meets every political problem with more violence? Europe needed certain regimes removed; Southeast Asia needed the Khmer Rouge gone; southern Africa needed white-minority rule dismantled. He distinguishes dismantling the Israeli state’s institutions from the Israeli people, who have acquired rights and with whom a formula for coexistence would still be required. Bonnell hears a program for dismantling Israel and calls it a way to push Israelis further from giving Palestinians anything.

Finkelstein would rather stay on the documentary record than pundit a future. Since about 1974, he says, Palestinians accepted two states on the June 1967 border. Israeli political scientist Avner Yaniv called the resulting fear a “Palestinian peace offensive”—moderation as a threat. That, for Finkelstein, is why Israel went into Lebanon in 1982: to liquidate a PLO that had become too reasonable. He has read the 15,000-page Palestine Papers. Going into Camp David, Shlomo Ben-Ami has Israel keeping about 8 percent of the West Bank, the major settlement blocs, 80 percent of settlers, large parts of Jerusalem, and “no moral, legal or historical responsibility” for refugees. International law, Finkelstein says, calls the settlements illegal, East Jerusalem occupied Palestinian territory, and the right of return a Palestinian right. By that baseline, every concession came from the Palestinian side.

Bonnell does not call international law irrelevant, but he will not let it be the final shape of a deal. Israel has never negotiated inside the strict box of Resolution 242 or General Assembly votes. Secret bilateral talks have written the actual maps. Broad appeals to law, he argues, only inflate Palestinian expectations that cannot be met. After the 2004 ICJ wall opinion, Palestinians did not gain land. “You can say whatever we want until we’re blue in the face, but there’s half a million Israeli people are not being expelled from the West Bank.” Rabbani’s analogy is a stolen house: if the police are useless, you sit in what used to be your living room and bargain, and you get nothing unless the occupier agrees. Bilateral talks, in that frame, hand each side a veto after Palestinians have already recognized Israel.

Morris and Bonnell call that recognition meaningless. Hamas rejects Israel, won a majority of seats in 2006, and leads polls today. Rabbani notes Hamas won seats, not a majority of votes, but grants current support. His complaint is the moving goalpost: Palestinians were told to accept 242 and 338, then to have the PLO recognize Israel, and each time the act was recoded as a tactic. “It’s like a hamster stuck in a wheel” told that running faster will open the cage. Finkelstein finds the same trap in Morris’s *One State, Two States*: even if Palestinians accepted Israel in their hearts, Morris wrote, they could not rationally accept a deal that left them a few parcels of a beautiful country. If reason itself requires rejection, Finkelstein asks, why not just say Palestinians can never be reasonable? Morris’s refrain is that they want all of Palestine. Finkelstein challenges him to find a negotiation in which Palestinians asked for all of Israel; land swaps were 2 to 5 percent. Hamas, Morris answers, has always said otherwise. Finkelstein says they are talking about negotiations, not a charter.

Fridman asks what still gives them hope. Morris’s answer is short: people do not like war, and fear of disaster should push them toward peace. Finkelstein has almost none. Israel, he says, believes it must restore deterrence after October 7, which means the annihilation of Gaza and then a turn toward Hezbollah. Arabs, in his view, learned the opposite lesson: Israel is weaker than they thought, so a military option exists. “I think it’s a zero-sum game at this point and it’s very, very bleak.” The floor he will name is a permanent ceasefire, an end to what he calls the illegal blockade, and the release of hostages. Morris asks why a blockade is illegal after twenty years of rockets. Because every human-rights, humanitarian, and UN body, Finkelstein says, has called it collective punishment. When Morris tells him to forget the law, Finkelstein answers that then Morris should not complain about October 7: without international humanitarian law, civilians and combatants are no longer distinct.

Rabbani’s hope is the longest and the starkest. The situation is bleak and will get bleaker. What sustains him is that Palestinians have never surrendered—not to Israel, not to the West, not even to supposed allies. “This is a people that never has and I believe never will surrender.” At some point, he says, Israeli leaders will have to recognize that these people will achieve their national rights “by hook or by crook.” Pressed, he still calls a 1967 two-state partition reasonable in principle, while adding that ideally rights would run from the river to the sea, and that refugee rights would need acknowledgment without wrecking a two-state foundation.

Fridman’s last question is for the two historians’ legacies. Finkelstein cites Helen Hunt Jackson’s *A Century of Dishonor*, which did not save Native Americans but preserved their memory, and Eisenstein’s massacre scene that ends “Proletarians, remember!” Preserving the record has been his life’s work, even if his Gaza book is so dense it gives him a headache. Morris’s wish is simpler: unlike his colleague, he wants to have written the truth about what happened in various periods, “if I’ve done a little bit of that, I’m happy.” Fridman closes by saying the conversation was a human-scale model of the conflict itself. Four hours produced no consensus. The useful remainder is the demonstration that facts do not interpret themselves, and that getting nearer the truth takes more archives, more independent investigation, and a willingness—rare in this room, visible when Finkelstein admits a prediction was wrong—to say so.