He hated Israel. Nobody watching this needs to pretend otherwise. That is why it works. It is not a speech written for us. It is a mirror held up in an Arab hall, and you can see it on their faces.
People talk as if this war has always been about a Palestinian state that Israel somehow prevented from being born. Then Gaddafi stands in front of the Arab League and asks them what happened to the cause they had before 1967. Were they lying to themselves or to the world.
Thousands died before that war, and he wants to know for what. If Palestine is only the West Bank and Gaza, and if the demand now is that Israel go back to the pre-1967 lines, then what exactly was occupied in 1948?
Then he says the part they cannot stand. Gaza was under Egypt. The West Bank was under Jordan. From 1948 to 1967 those territories were in Arab hands for nineteen years. If that was Palestine, why didn’t they establish a state there? What was the justification for the wars, the dead, and the embargo on Israel before 1967, if the whole story only begins after that year?
Watch the room. They sit there and take it. He is not making an Israeli argument. He is pointing at the hole in their own story. They held the land. They had the time. They never built the state they now say was the point of everything.
So it was never about a Palestinian state. A state was available. They chose something else.