This week I spoke on the Berkeley campus. A transcript of my remarks follows below the video.
I’m on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, where conservative speakers are being systematically censored by violent protests designed to prevent them from speaking. I am on Sproul plaza in the centre of the campus, where free speech was supposedly enshrined back in the sixties but where it is now appallingly being suppressed.
This is the campus where conservative views are called fascism and shouted down. As you can see from these posters on this campus noticeboard.
This is where Jewish students in particular are being intimidated by threatening pro-Palestinian demonstrators. I was originally asked to speak at Berkeley Hillel, the Jewish student centre here. But remarkably, even that was considered too dangerous for me.
So I spoke instead to Jewish students at another, more discreet centre. These students had to be personally coaxed to attend my meeting – because Jewish students at Berkeley are now too frightened for their own safety to attend pro-Israel presentations. That is the truly shocking state of affairs in this prestigious seat of learning today.
I was invited to speak to Jewish students here in order to provide facts about the Arab-Israel dispute that even many pro-Israel people may not know. So this is what I told the students.
Should we support a two-state solution? If the Palestinians were to accept a state of Palestine living in peace alongside the State of Israel, whose existence as a Jewish state they would accept, I would certainly accept that and I guess most Israelis would accept it too. But when you look at certain facts, which most people either deliberately ignore or suppress or don’t even know, you realise the question itself is a tremendous red herring.
First fact. The two-state solution is actually part of the problem. It is not a modern solution at all. It dates from before the State of Israel even came into being.
In 1922 the British accepted a Mandate to administer Palestine and to settle the Jews throughout that land. When they found themselves up against sustained Arab terrorism against both themselves and the returning Jews, the British offered the Arabs in 1937 a slice of Palestine, to create an Arab state alongside the Jewish homeland.
The Arabs refused, as they have refused every such subsequent offer of a state alongside Israel — offers made in 1947, 2000 and 2008. While the Jews have accepted every such proposal for a two-state solution, the Arab response has been instead to wage yet more war or terrorism against the Jews.
But the point is that the two-state solution was always from the start an attempt to appease terrorism. The British response to the Arabs’ murder campaign was in effect to reward them for it — by offering them part of the Jews’ own legal entitlement to the land, and thus breaking the terms of the Mandate.
