This Cambridge Union debate was a foregone conclusion. But my words needed saying
On 27 November, Hen Mazzig took part in a debate at the Cambridge Union - 'This House believes the International Community has failed Palestine'. This is his full speech
Mr. President, Honourable Members. When I told my Iraqi grandmother I was coming to Cambridge to debate the Middle East conflict, she said it’s good I get so much practice at our Shabbat dinners.
Then she asked what we will be eating and I had to tell her there’s no food, just the arguing*.
She seemed a bit less impressed.
But tonight isn’t just an argument; it is a confrontation with a tragedy. And let us be unequivocal from the very first breath: Palestinians have been failed. They have been failed catastrophically.
But if you walk through the ‘Aye’ door tonight, you are endorsing a dangerous lie about who failed them and how.
The Proposition wants you to believe the International Community failed because it didn’t give the Palestinian leadership enough money, enough impunity, or enough land.
They want you to believe that Palestine, is a helpless victim of Western neglect.
My argument is the opposite.
The International Community failed the Palestinian people not by abandoning them, but by indulging a political fantasy at the expense of human reality.
They failed because, for decades, they treated Palestinians not as a population to be uplifted, but as a geopolitical weapon to be sharpened against the state of Israel.
This motion collapses two things that we must tear apart:
Palestinians as human beings deserving of dignity, and “Palestine” as a political project run by factions who have spent decades holding their own people hostage.
If we truly care about the former, we must ruthlessly expose the failure of the latter.
Argument 1: The Context of the Region (The 100-Year War)
To understand this failure, we must look at the neighborhood.
The Proposition frames this as a unique struggle of the oppressed against the powerful. But history tells a different story.
Professor Rashid Khalidi calls this the “Hundred Years’ War on Palestine”. I agree there has been a hundred years’ war. But it has been waged by Arab nationalists against every non-Arab, non-Muslim indigenous community in the region.
If the International Community has failed anyone, it is the indigenous minorities of the Levant.
● They betrayed the Assyrians and Kurds after World War I, placing their territories under Iraqi, Turkish, and Syrian control, leaving them as persecuted minorities without statehood.
● They watched as the Maronites in Lebanon were diminished from a political majority to a fraction of their power.
● They allowed the Yazidis to face a genocide.
The pattern is not one of failing “Palestine.”
The pattern is the International Community appeasing Arab authoritarianism because of oil and Cold War alliances.
They normalized the idea that Arab majorities should control the entire region, even at the expense of older indigenous cultures.
My own grandparents were part of that story.
They were among the 850,000 Jews violently expelled from Iraq, Tunisia, and across the Middle East.
Their expulsion began in 1941 with the violent terror attacks on the Jews of Iraq called the Farhud. My grandmother watched her best friend being raped and mutilated in the streets of Baghdad, just because she was Jewish, while the Iraqi government invited in the Nazis from Europe and forced anti-Jewish legistlations making the lives of MENA Jews impossible in their own lands.
A Middle Eastern Jewish civilization, indigenous to the region, was uprooted and erased within one decade.
They received no UN agency. They received no perpetual refugee status. They received no annual resolutions. They were forced to move on. And because the world forced them to move on, they rebuilt. They built a future because the world refused to indulge their past. They weren’t handed a state, the Zionist movement worked to create one, and was then immediately forced to defend itself as seven Arab armies, and local Arab tribes, attacked them.
Argument 2: The Trap of UNRWA and Perpetual War
This brings me to the specific failure regarding Palestinians.
The International Community treated Jewish refugees from Arab lands as people to be resettled. But they treated Palestinian refugees as pawns to be kept on a chessboard.
They created UNRWA—the only agency on Earth that passes “refugee status” down through generations, effectively forever.
Ask yourselves why?
It was not to help them. It was to ensure that a child born in Gaza today is not raised to build a future in Gaza, but is raised to believe their only future lies in a “return” to a war from 1948.
The International Community pays for schools that teach maths, but are soaked with anti-Jewish ideas, as the education system indoctrinates children to believe that statehood does not come from negotiation, but from the conquest of the land “from the river to the sea”.
That is not aid. That is a trap. The world froze Palestinians in time. By keeping the “maximalist vision” alive , the International Community incentivized Palestinian leaders to reject statehood offers again and again—in 1937, in 1947, in 2000, and in 2008.
The failure is not that the world didn’t give the Palestinians a state. It is that the world funded the machinery that allowed their leaders to reject one.
Argument 3: The Moral Hazard of “Aid”
My opponents claim the International Community has ‘abandoned’ Palestine. This is not just an opinion; it is a factual error.
According to the latest data for 2024, Palestine was the single largest recipient of humanitarian assistance on the planet. Receiving approximately $3 billion in a single year— surpassing even Ukraine, Sudan and Syria.
Think about what that means. While war raged in Europe and Africa, the International Community prioritized this small territory above all others. So if the world provided the most money, the most aid, and the most attention of any conflict on Earth…why is the result so catastrophic?
It is because of the nature of that support. For every other nation, humanitarian aid is a temporary bridge. For the Palestinian leadership, we allowed it to become a permanent substitute for governance.
Because the International Community pays for the flour, the medicine, and the clinics, the Palestinian leadership pays zero percent of the cost of civilian survival.
We pay for their welfare, so they can spend 100% of their own budget on warfare.
We didn’t fail to send aid. We sent so much— more than to anyone else on Earth— that their leaders felt comfortable building a tunnel network larger than the London Underground, while leaving their civilians above ground without a single bomb shelter.
That is not abandonment. That is enablement.
Conclusion: The Trap of the Motion
Mr. President.
The Proposition wants you to vote “Aye” tonight because they believe the world should have given more. More money to this failed leadership. More diplomatic cover for their rejectionism. More indulgence of the fantasy that the Jewish state is temporary.
But you cannot fix a problem if you misdiagnose the disease.
The International Community failed because, for 75 years,
they loved the idea of the Palestinian cause more than they loved the lives of Palestinian people.
They prioritized the preservation of a political conflict over the preservation of human dignity.
If you vote for this motion tonight, you are telling the International Community to keep doing exactly what it has always done.
You are not saving Palestine by voting for this motion.
You are absolving that leadership of their crimes.
You are validating the very leaders who hold it hostage.
You are voting to keep funding the tunnels.
You are voting to keep teaching the hatred.
You are voting to keep the Palestinian people trapped in a century-old war they cannot win.
You are not voting to save Palestine. You are validating the very system that holds it hostage.
Do not be part of that failure. Demand better.
Demand better for Palestinians and Israelis.
* The Cambridge Union has contacted Jewish News to make it clear that while they understand Mr Mazzig’s comment was made in jest, it takes pride in providing hospitality to all their debate speakers and did provide a drinks reception and a dinner for Mr Mazzig, which he attended. Jewish News is happy to provide this clarification.
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