This year's lecture focused on the question of Palestine in its entirety. The subject covered was the crucial period from the vote on the partition plan on November 29 1947 to the end of the British Mandate on May 14 1948.
The traditional interpretation of these events defines them quasi-legally as either a unilateral and unprovoked declaration of war by the Arabs or the continuation and concretization of Zionist aggression begun, at the very least, with the Balfour Declaration of November 2 1917. What these accounts have in common is the presupposition of perfect knowledge on the part of the actors of the consequences of their actions, an indispensable postulate for a judicial view of history. Yet what dominates the last weeks of 1947 is the confusion of minds and situations.
Lecture