Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Why don't Palestinians have a state? Haviv Rettig Gur on the True Tale of Palestinian Resistance

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Why don't Palestinians have a state? Haviv Rettig Gur on the True Tale of Palestinian Resistance · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:03
  G'day humans, welcome to the Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas. And this may be one of the most important conversations you will ever hear about Israel, Palestine, Gaza, and Zionism, and you'll probably only hear it from today's guest. It's a question that all of us have been asking for many years. Why don't Palestinians have a state? And the conventional answer, at the moment at least, seems to be because Israel is.
• 0:31
  But to answer that the Palestinians don't have a state because Israel exists is to treat Palestinians essentially as props in a Western morality play, according to today's guest, rather than to give them the dignity of treating them as agents, as people in a fight for their own survival, alongside Israelis in a fight for theirs.
• 0:52
  The true tale of Palestinian resistance is actually an extraordinary and complicated and, in some ways, inspiring story of power, of Zionism, of the Muslim Brotherhood, of Maoist ideas circulating in the Middle East in the middle of the 20th century.
• 1:11
  of anti-colonialism, in particular the experience of France in Algeria, where it was booted out, the lessons that Arab nationalists learned from the decolonization of North Africa, the influence of Egyptian strongmen on the thinking of the Muslim Brotherhood and others in the Middle East about how to repel the invading Jews, ideas about Islamic liberation, ideas about... I mean, it is such a complicated story that Haviv has his head around, and he tells it with such sophistication and such nuance...
• 1:40
  that I defy you to exit this conversation thinking about the conflict in the Middle East the same way, really, ever again. Haviv Retigur is an Israeli journalist and a political analyst. He's quite critical of Israel, I must say. I mean, he is no fan of the military occupation of the West Bank. He was no fan of the way that the Gaza War was prosecuted. He is deeply empathetic and sympathetic to the aspirations of statehood and nationhood from the Palestinian people.
• 2:10
  But he's also deeply, deeply informed about the nature of Palestinian resistance and the way that both sides have chosen their respective strategies over the course of the existence of Israel. Haviv is the senior analyst at The Times of Israel. He's a Middle East analyst at the Free Press. He's been covering the region for the better part of two decades. He has a podcast. It's brilliant. It's called Ask Haviv Anything. He's a podcast.
• 2:37
  If you respect Palestinians as agents in their own fate, rather than as victims in a westernised fable, you will be gripped by Haviv's insights into what exactly has gone wrong in the Middle East. I hope you enjoy, as much as I did, the one, the only, Haviv Rettigur.
• 3:04
  I was fascinated by your, you wrote a piece a couple of months ago about Ezra Klein having opined on the one state and two state solution. Let me see if I can find the quote that you wrote earlier.
• 3:20
  By ignoring the ideological reality of Hamas and Hezbollah, Klein treats Israelis and Palestinians as props in a Western morality play rather than actors in a high-stakes struggle for survival. I mean, I thought you could have substituted Klein there for basically every person who I've met since October 7th outside of the Middle East who I talk to about this conflict. What are we getting wrong?
• 3:52
  You know, it's not so much what's being gotten wrong, it's that the topic of conversation is, you know, there's psychologists, when you go to therapy, psychologists often like to say,
• 4:07
  What are we talking about when we're talking about X, okay? Couples therapy, you're angry at your spouse. Are you really angry at your spouse about the laundry? Maybe that is it. Maybe that's never the laundry. It's never just the laundry, Aviv. And maybe there are deep feelings of guilt or not getting as much as you need or not giving as much as you need. What are you actually talking about when you're talking about laundry?
• 4:33
  When you look now at the Western campaign for the Palestinians, Palestinians need the world's support in real material terms and in many other ways. One of the things they need is critique.
• 4:50
  Hamas catastrophically devastated Gaza and bent Gaza's entire economy to a war that would look like this war. And it planned for this particular kind of war. I know that's a big statement. I can defend it. And it doesn't exonerate Israel of anything. But nevertheless, Hamas actually literally planned for this kind of war. Critiquing Hamas is a pro-Palestinian act. It's not an anti-Palestinian act.
• 5:12
  And also, they need support, right? It's not like there isn't a deep right Israeli politics that don't care what happens to Palestinians and are willing to run roughshod over fundamental needs of Palestinians, irrespective of whether or not they want to kill us as a polity, whether their major political factions are set against us. That doesn't mean you're going to have military rule forever and ever. And I say that as somebody who thinks that right now, I literally don't know how to lift the military rule for...
• 5:40
  We call it security reasons. It's not security reasons. It's that the major factions will use every inch Israel pulls out of, as we learned from the last three Israeli pullouts of anywhere, to attack. And the West Bank is vastly more dangerous in that regard than even Gaza or South Lebanon. You mean the major factions in the West Bank, the major factions of Palestinians in the West Bank were Israel to leave? Of Palestinian politics, yes. Would not just say thank you very much.
• 6:04
  Mostly Hamas, which wins every poll in the West Bank, even if it doesn't rule there. It doesn't rule there as a function of Israeli intervention. It's not that it doesn't rule there because Palestinians enjoy the rule of Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas.
• 6:16
  And just a second, I guess the critique here, Javiv, there will be those listening to that saying, of course Hamas is popular in the West Bank. What would you expect a population that has been subjugated and occupied and shat upon and dehumanized for decades to do except to resort to the most dysfunctional and outrageous and violent tool that they have when the status quo has served them so poorly? Yeah.
• 6:40
  I want to, that is a great question, and I want to get to it, and I don't want you to let me off the hook. Can you remember it? Because I want to answer the first question. I will. Go for it. The first question, which was just, I should also say I slept two hours last night. The kid slept in the bomb shelter. Everyone was bracing for that Iranian attack, and it never came. Yeah.
• 7:01
  A deal happened and all of that. We're recording the morning after Trump announced the deal. But but so forgive me if I'm a little bit meandering, but I'll always come back. I promise all the big questions. Your question is, what is the world missing? The Palestinians do need support.
• 7:17
  None of that explains what we've seen in terms of the scale of the pro-Palestinian campaign. The unbelievable, totally unprecedented across dozens of countries, Muslim countries, but also European countries, marches repeating weekend after weekend after weekend for years, for two years,
• 7:39
  over Gaza, the reorganizing of progressive politics in one nation after another. And it simply never happened before. You had something similar in the United States over Vietnam. But then why was it identical in Britain and Holland and Spain and Italy? And you saw those marches in Jakarta and Algiers. And they're identical. And they often, across the cultural divides,
• 8:02
  use identical vocabulary and signage. And it's identically mobilizing at a mass level over time that simply has nothing, no precedent in the history of the West. And when you see the scale of this thing and the power it has, and then you look at the Gaza War. Now, you can take the worst version of the worst interpretation of Israeli intentions of the Gaza War.
• 8:28
  And it still doesn't explain it. In the United States, people will say to you, but we fund it. The scale of American military hardware involved in the Yemen war, where 85,000 children starved to death. People did not starve to death in Gaza except for tiny pockets of momentary hunger crises. And there is real need and there is real inadequacies for some periods of the war. But there simply wasn't mass starvation.
• 8:55
  And all the UN data will say that to you. And I wrote a lot about the hunger crisis last year, which was real and also momentary. And as soon as it became obvious that it was real and not propaganda, because there had been propaganda claims of hunger in Gaza during early 2024, for example, that turned out simply to be false.
• 9:12
  But when last year's hunger crisis turned out to be real, I wrote about it. A lot of Israelis wrote about it. Conservative Israeli journalists close to Netanyahu wrote about it, and the Israeli government flooded Gaza with aid. And I am very critical in how the Israeli government handled that moment. I'm not trying to get over it, but I'm just saying if you compare it to Yemen,
• 9:29
  In Yemen, you have an order of magnitude larger disaster, 370 something thousand, maybe 377,000 dead, a quarter million of them from starvation. And it's purposeful. And the people carrying out that war from the other side were American allies using American weapons with American logistical support and American intelligence support.
• 9:50
  against the Houthis of Yemen. And there wasn't anything like it. And the best that people like Mehdi Hassan can conjure up is that a few progressive senators tweeted about it or put up some kind of symbolic vote in Congress. Where are the millions upon millions marching? Nothing has ever been in the streets of the UK like the Gaza marches. And you look at that,
• 10:12
  At that astonishing, not as an argument that Israel's fine and can ignore the world's moral rage, but just agnostically, what is it? What is it?
• 10:23
  Is it actually about the suffering in Gaza? Is it that people finally could see the suffering of civilians on their phones? And so we live in a new information environment. And that new information environment means that in the future, war will be harder to conduct because the suffering of ordinary civilians that happens in every war. How many tens of thousands of civilians died in the war on ISIS? Just the Battle of Mosul alone is probably 10,000 civilian dead.
• 10:47
  And we didn't see them. And now we'll see them. And so there'll be marches everywhere in the world for every major war, every war with real civilian losses. Is that what's happening? Is this a new era? In that case, Israel is the villain right this minute for this particular war in this particular round. But this is a tremendously good moment for humanity because it'll be harder to conduct war and civilians will be safer going forward. But what if these marches never occur again for any war in which Israel isn't involved?
• 11:16
  What if that's actually what's happening? What if for all the genuine and totally decent emotions and responses to those images of so many of the people actually marching, the ordinary people actually mobilized to march,
• 11:31
  The upstream algorithms, the fact that the only images you'll ever see, they aren't even of people killed in Gaza by Hamas, or people killed by any Arab anywhere, even with American weapons. They're only people Jews kill. What if that's the only image you can ever see? Then that whole vast awakening of a moral consciousness is actually just bigotry, is actually just positioning the Jew
• 11:58
  as the evil other against which Christendom has historically, for two millennia, defined its goodness. And that's the classic construct of the Jew in Christian understanding of Christian morality since the days of Augustine. Can I give you a more charitable hypothesis about the— Something between those two options.
• 12:19
  Yeah, yeah, that the protester might say, which is that we have had in the past decade or two a reckoning and a realization of the crimes of Western colonialism. And we have concluded that in countries like Australia and Canada and New Zealand in particular –
• 12:41
  that indigenous people, people who were here prior to whites coming flooding in from Europe, deserve consideration and good treatment and recognition and...
• 12:57
  to see the enactment of true Western colonial ethnic and religious dominance and hegemony on people who have nowhere to go, nothing to fight back with,
• 13:18
  is galling in a way that it's not when Yemenis do it to each other, even if they are using US bombs. And it reaches a point at which people feel like enough is enough. I thought we were done with this whole killing brown-skinned people and taking their land and to keep them in an open air...
• 13:37
  prison in perpetuity and then just bomb them so cavalierly because they tried to escape in bloodthirsty and awful ways on one day does not justify that you do the same back to them every single day for a year or more i think that's the thinking in the heads of the protest my my conclusion um to this answer is that that's the thinking
• 14:03
  The thinking is essentially projecting onto the Israelis and the Palestinians the Australian experience with Aborigines or the American experience with Native American tribes. Although even the experiences projected on are fables. They're myths. They're national myths that are decent national myths. They're national myths that drive you to terrible things, and they're national myths that drive...
• 14:30
  All that true, there are entire kingdoms of Native Americans who held out for hundreds of years and built entire over vast spaces and made choices and themselves conquered each other in brutal ways. And there's a whole big, complex humanity here. But the the self-understanding of English speaking, you know, nations established through mass settlement is absolutely that story.
• 14:57
  And what it is, and this is, I'm not sure how to put this, this is a bigotry. And it's a bigotry not in the sense that I hate those people, but in the sense that my story is actually their story, and it's all one story. And the basic point is, the reason that so many Westerners will march on Israel is that they project the evils of Israel.
• 15:25
  that they see in themselves onto Israel. So if the Jews of Israel are the avatar of the West, and our Western morality is now constructed on post-colonialism, on anti-colonialism, on the post-imperialism, in the case of the British, different places it's framed a little bit differently based on national experiences. Australia is at the forefront of this whole settler-colonial theory question because of the Australian experience.
• 15:53
  Everywhere you go, it's a little bit different. But the fundamental point is, what is evil in my story, I now see right there happening over there. And if I can stand against that evil, which is my evil, my inner evil, then I get to exonerate myself. I get to be the generation of Australians or Americans or, you know, British Americans.
• 16:16
  that is not complicit in the crime that is the founding of Australia and the establishment and the colonization. I think that's right. But I don't think they would regard that as being hypocritical or illegitimate. I think they would say, yes, people did that in the 1700s. And I live in a country that is founded on that.
• 16:38
  And I, as an individual, stand in opposition to the power structures that did that at the time and gave rise to this country. So you ask me what's missing? It marks me out. Yeah, exactly. It marks me out to be able to see it happen in real time in 2025 and to say no. No.
• 16:57
  What's missing is that Hamas doesn't want freedom for Palestinians. It wants the extermination of the Jews. Explicitly, in writing, repeated, ad infinitum. What's missing is that the Muslim theological response over a century and a half from reformist thinkers who are looking at European imperial conquerors of Ottoman lands, of Egypt, of the French settlement in Algeria that begins in 1830 or so,
• 17:24
  They're looking at this immense European power and Muslim weakness, and their response becomes, and there's a whole genealogy of major, serious, profound Sunni Muslim thinkers, often in Egypt, mostly in Egypt, but not only. People like al-Afghani and Abdukhu became the Grand Mufti of Egypt in the 1890s, and his great student Rashid Rida, and his great student Hassan al-Bana, who is a name known throughout the Middle East because he was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.
• 17:53
  developed a theology. And these are, again, core, major, top thinkers. One of the names I just read out, Rita, was the editor of the most important journal in Islam, read from Morocco to Malaysia. And
• 18:07
  excuse me, and they developed a theology to deal with the fact of Muslim weakness. Because Muslim weakness in the modern age, which they very courageously addressed and looked at and thought about, and they couldn't help it, they were being trampled over by European empires. The discrepancy in power between Islam and Christendom was not something they could ignore. And it was a major theological crisis.
• 18:28
  Because Islam is supposed to be on top, because Islam is the true revelation and has this function of ultimately conquering and redeeming all of humanity. And so the redemption of humanity is at stake if Islam is weak and backward. And they develop this theology that essentially is a return to an imagined reality.
• 18:47
  romanticized puritanical early Islam. They talk about the early generations, the holy generations of early Islam after the Prophet, which was this immensely successful enterprise, a vast and almost immediate conquest. And why were we successful then? Because we were pious, and why are we unsuccessful now? We've become too modern, we've become less pious. And so it was a call to return to a kind of originalist Islam. They call themselves Salafis, many of them,
• 19:14
  I'm sorry, Habib, when is this? Can you superimpose this onto the creation of Israel?
• 19:33
  And Rida dies in 1935, and Hassan Abana takes over his journal, his famous journal on Lenar, and I think runs it for a couple of years, but runs it into the ground because he's no Rida. But he establishes the Muslim Brotherhood, if I'm not mistaken, in 1929. And they develop this theology that says, and just to clarify and to get to our point quickly, and they look from that perspective of Islamic weakness, of the great theological problem of Islamic weakness,
• 20:03
  at Zionism, at the Jews. And the thing they see in the Jews terrifies them. And it terrifies them for an obvious reason, once you think about this theology of Islamic weakness that they're grappling with. To be a Muslim theologian in Egypt under British rule is bad. Islam should be on top. There's a theological problem here.
• 20:26
  But you know what, it's not so bad, because the British at least have the decency of being the most powerful empire in the history of the world up to that moment.
• 20:34
  So to be under the most powerful Christian empire imaginable for 10 minutes, not so terrible. It doesn't prove that Islam is collapsed catastrophically in terms of geopolitics and economic power and scientific advancement and all the ways that that that piety is supposed to give you that geopolitical boost because you're in sync with God's plan for history. All of that idea that is deep, deep core Islamic concept.
• 21:00
  It's okay if it's the British. You're talking about the British in the Palestinian mandate in the 20s? I'm still talking about ruling Egypt in the 19th century. But yes, absolutely, it becomes a discussion, including with Rita, on the Palestine mandate after 1917. Or I think the mandate technically comes in after San Remo. Whatever the dates exactly are, people can look that up on Wikipedia. But yes, absolutely. Over the course of these years, 1898 to Rita's death in 1935,
• 21:27
  He goes from a kind of respect for early Zionism, this thinker, this really important Lebanese Sunni thinker who moves to Egypt and becomes this really important voice in Islam. He respects Zionism because he sees it as the Jews returning to their true selves in response to mass pogroms and oppression and going back to Hebrew and back to who they are. And he says the Arabs and the Muslims need that. That's take the Jews example. We need an Arab Muslim Zionism. That's Salafism in his mind.
• 21:56
  And then he begins to seriously read and grapple with Zionist thinkers, and he understands that these Zionist thinkers are actually not talking about the thing that their diplomats are asking for. The Herzl, when he wanted to meet with the Ottoman Sultan to ask for Palestine, he asked for autonomy under Ottoman rule. Autonomy under Ottoman rule is a fantastic idea if you're a Muslim theologian. All humanity should have autonomy under Muslim rule. That's the natural
• 22:25
  But he then reads the Zionists, and he reads their desperation, and he reads their fear, and he reads their discussion about how Europe is going to collapse and the catastrophes of the imperial fall and the rise of nationalism, and how liberalism has brought on the worst anti-Semitism Jews had known in centuries, and how Europe was going to collapse. All the stuff everyone laughed at the Zionists about.
• 22:45
  right up until everyone became Zionist because everyone else was dead. All of that stuff he reads, and he realizes the Zionists can't stop. The logic of Zionism, that the world is unsafe and a minority needs its own place under the sun, because otherwise it will literally be destroyed. It could literally be destroyed.
• 23:02
  He reads that and he says, they're not going to settle for some kind of partial autonomy. They need self-determination. And if Zionism needs self-determination, that's a theological catastrophe. Because the Jews of 1898, when he's writing this stuff,
• 23:21
  are the weakest people on earth. They're refugees fleeing the czarist hinterlands because of hundreds of pogroms, hundreds of thousands of Jewish dead over those 40 years of pogroms, probably a quarter million. And they're fleeing in their millions with nothing but the shirts on their backs. They were peasants to begin with. They can't even take whatever property, small property they had with them.
• 23:44
  And he says, they're going to push back Islam? They, the weakest people on earth? And he writes letters like this to the Palestinian Arabs. He says, he writes, he addresses it to the Arabs of Palestine. It's a letter in Al-Manar in 1898. And he says, you will allow the weakest people of all civilization kicked out of every land to push you back and become masters in your land?
• 24:05
  Now his problem isn't Palestinian nationalism. He's never heard of Palestinian nationalism. His problem isn't civil rights, one state, two state, military rule. None of those things interest him, even in the slightest, even if he were alive today. His problem is Muslim weakness. And if Jews...
• 24:20
  The Jews of 1898, not even the Jews with an Israeli air force, you know, not even today's Jews. Those Jews can push back Islam. Then how weak is Islam and how great is Islam? If you thought it was insulting to be occupied by the British Empire, wait till you get a load of, yeah, Jews. Exactly.
• 24:36
  And Hassan al-Banna, his chief student, founds the Muslim Brotherhood, leads a massive Egyptian drive toward religious piety, conservatism. Women used to walk around Egyptian cities without a headdress and go to universities and pride themselves on modernity.
• 24:56
  that they took from Britain and France, these models of modernity. And that is no longer true of Egyptian society. I think 80 percent, something like that, of Egyptian girls undergo female genital mutilation, which is just a conservative custom that comes out. It's a shocking statistic. It's in all the UN reports that comes out of just conservative rural Egypt and is connected with this Islamism. So he leads this vast return to a kind of imagined originalist piety,
• 25:24
  in Egyptian society over decades, over almost a century now. And in 1987, a chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt is established in Gaza. And its name is Hamas. And in its founding charter, it makes a few assertions. In 1988, the charter is not long. People can read it.
• 25:47
  It says, for example, that all Palestine is waqf. Waqf is a Muslim trust. It's lands Muslims cannot compromise on. It is core, holy, Islamic land. It is what the Hijaz is, according to all Muslims. Mecca and Medina and the holy cities where Muhammad did his prophesying. Yeah.
• 26:07
  And all Palestine is counted by Hamas as waqf, meaning there is no inch on which a Jew can declare their independence. There is only subordination to Islam. And Hamas has never wavered from that point.
• 26:25
  And Hamas is willing. People know all about the tunnels of Gaza, but they don't sit with the tunnels of Gaza, really sit with what this thing is, because nothing like it has ever been built in the history of war. I think the second biggest tunnel system ever built for war, if I'm not mistaken, I read about this a while ago, I hope I'm right, but people should definitely look this up, was the Viet Cong system. And the Viet Cong system in a much, much larger country is not a
• 26:55
  But this tunnel system is immense. It's an astonishing achievement. It is, there's never in the history of war been anything like it. Palestinians have never built
• 27:06
  Anything remotely as big as the tunnel system that is today under Gaza, most of it destroyed by the Israelis, but there's still extensive, massive pieces of it, especially in areas where the Israeli army isn't currently present in Gaza. It's hundreds of kilometers, six, 700 kilometers that we know of. It's air conditioned. It's electrified. There are places where it's wide enough to drive trucks through, such as under the Egyptian border, because trucks were driven through these tunnels. There are manufacturing facilities in these tunnels. There are massive food stores in these tunnels.
• 27:35
  And all of Gaza's economy was bent to building these tunnels for, you know, a generation, for almost 20 years. For the 17 years Hamas ruled Gaza with a special intensity after about 2012. It took over in 2007, roughly from 2012. It begins to do this very intensively. There were protests by Palestinian shopkeepers when the taxation of the shopkeepers got to be too egregious, I think in 2018, because Hamas was squeezing Gaza's economy to build these tunnels. And what are they for?
• 28:05
  Once you grasp the scale, this unbelievable, amazing achievement, this astonishing thing, just in the four years between 2014 and 2018, those are two Israeli Hamas wars. Something like 5 million cubic meters of concrete go into Gaza. That's 16 Burj Khalifahs. That's the tallest building in the world in Dubai, 160 stories. 16 of those in concrete went into Gaza. And Hamas built nothing that we can see with them. Hamas actually built almost nothing in Gaza.
• 28:35
  except this one unbelievably huge thing. Those, that concrete, where are Gaza's skyscrapers after all that concrete goes in? And the answer is, they're underground. Some of those tunnels go 200 feet deep. The sheer scale of investment means that we need to take a step back and we need to say, well, why? What's it for? It's not a simple bomb shelter system, although it's the most comprehensive bomb shelter system ever built.
• 29:02
  Because they're intercity tunnels. In other words, it's a strategic maneuvering system. It's not just hiding from the airstrike and then you can come back out when the airstrike's gone, when the airstrike's finished. Israel has that. Every new apartment built in 30 years has to have a room that's up to the spec as a bomb shelter. My apartment has that. It's something very, very different and much bigger than that. And more importantly than that, after building that enormous, astonishing bomb shelter system,
• 29:31
  Then Hamas carried out October 7, with every fighter carrying a GoPro and orders to broadcast on Israeli social media, everything they were doing to those Israelis. And then they go back into Gaza and go into hiding. And in three years of war, as far as we know, and again, please look it up, not a single child of Gaza.
• 29:58
  Not a single civilian was allowed into those tunnels anywhere in Gaza, the most comprehensive bomb shelter system ever built. And you look at all of that put together and you can begin to ask yourself, so what was Hamas doing on October 7? Assume that they're not just...
• 30:16
  emotionally petulant children just exploding out of their open-air prison. One of the most favorite, one of the favorite sort of Palestinian, it's not a talking point because they believe it deeply and authentically, but Palestinian ways of remembering the Gaza before this war is to share how beautiful it was, how developed it was, how prosperous it was, how people could eat, beautiful little restaurants, how the cuisine was wonderful.
• 30:45
  That's your open-air prison, which is now remembered deeply fondly as this incredible, beautiful place. And in fact, Gaza is one of the most beautiful beaches in the Mediterranean. And has natural gas off the coast. The sheer development capacity for Gaza. What Gaza could have been and could be in the future. But Hamas engineered this war.
• 31:06
  very shallow, stupid people came to the Israelis after October 7 and said to them, don't you dare respond, how dare you, Palestinians might die. That's a dumb thing to say to Israelis. Because Israelis just learned on October 7, not that they'll kill our children as soon as they get a chance. Not that they'll massacre their way through our towns as soon as they get a chance. We
• 31:29
  that they will kill their own, that they will drive wars that will devastate their own polity, that the sacrifice of Palestine on the altar of the destruction of Israel isn't just a tolerable cost for them, it is their strategy. And that Israeli lesson meant that in the Israeli mind, you can critique it. It's a war with civilian casualties. You should critique it.
• 31:54
  But you should understand what you're critiquing, what the people doing you think they're doing. In the Israeli mind, Hamas became definitionally undeterrable. You cannot deter somebody who sees the destruction of their own society on the altar of a religious, eschatological need to destroy yours. By anything you could do to their society, there's no firepower you could burn, there's nothing you can do. What is the world missing?
• 32:23
  It's missing any real sense of what these people actually believe and think and where it comes from. There are many voices. So just expand that, Habib. Let me take it back to— I get carried away. That's all fascinating. I love it. I love it. But I want to take it back to expand it to the strategy of Palestinian resistance in the 20th century. Because everything that you have said, I can hear the pro-Palestinian voice in my head saying—
• 32:51
  Yes, Hamas are terrible. They're deranged jihadist death cult terrorists. Great, we all agree on that. The Palestinians have responded suboptimally, shall we say, to Israeli peace overtures. Great, they're a dysfunctional, shat-upon community. You know, they haven't been perfect. But the fundamental reality is Israelis get to live
• 33:18
  wealthy, prosperous lives, while they can ignore the suffering and hardship of people who live under military occupation in the West Bank, or under a deranged Hamas and an Israeli blockade against Hamas in Gaza, and then subsequently the war. But what I think the other component that's
• 33:41
  is what you alluded to earlier about the anti-colonial lessons that the Muslim Brotherhood took from its anti-colonial successes in Algeria, from its understanding of resistance from Chinese communism. There's a whole...
• 34:00
  There's a whole wealth of beliefs about how to repel an intruder and how to achieve dignity that were deployed by Arab resistance throughout the 20th century that led to the point at which Israel seems to have veered off course in the opinion of pacifists with the Netanyahu government in the late 2000s.
• 34:27
  which are absent from people's understanding if you merely start the clock in 2008 and say, why has Israel been so mean? And obviously the Palestinians would respond in dysfunctional ways to such an indignity.
• 34:41
  The key point, yes, it's important for me to say, this is rich and deep and serious, and these are profound ideas. And they've been echoing in elite discourses and also in ordinary people coming to the mosque on a Friday for a century.
• 35:04
  And to shrink that down to, I know exactly what this is. This is the Australian Aborigine, and the Israeli is the Australian settler. And that's all it ever is, and that's all it can be. The differences are not minor, you know, details on the edges of, you know, I don't know what, cultural aesthetics. The differences are fundamental to how each side understands their options. If you're an Israeli Jew...
• 35:32
  You probably, the vast majority, came to Israel as a refugee. You came to Israel when the doors to Australia were closed to you, the doors to America were closed to you, Canada, Europe. I mean, the British Empire, everybody remembers that in 1939, they passed the white paper and closed Palestine to Jewish immigration after America and Canada and Australia and Brazil and Argentina and South Africa and everybody else closed the doors to Palestine.
• 35:56
  Jewish emigration as the Jews are facing increasing pressure in Europe and desperation to leave. But people don't remember that the British Empire also closed India during the Holocaust. Like, okay, you don't want to piss off the Arabs. You just had the Arab revolt. Don't let them into Palestine. Why not issue a million visas to India? What kind of demographic problem do the Jews pose in India, right? There's a joke with Indian-Israeli relations warming that it's a great alliance because together we're a fifth of humanity, right?
• 36:26
  And yet the British still shut India. The Jews are corralled by the world into the death camps. And after the Holocaust, when everybody knows everything, and Eisenhower takes pictures next to the bodies to make sure no one will ever be able to deny it, which was an optimistic take on humanity on the part of General Eisenhower.
• 36:46
  The Jews still can't get into any of these places. America's quotas are still in place. Australia still won't take them in. There's then trickles and specific plans and specific deals. But the majority of the displaced persons are still sitting. You know, the British liberate Bergen-Belsen. And there's a typhoid epidemic in the concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen, in northern Germany. And so the British pull out the Jews and burn Bergen-Belsen to the ground to get rid of typhoid. And then build a new camp and shove the Jews back in.
• 37:15
  And the Jews will remain in these DP camps, most of which are concentration camps, Dachau, Buch involved. Jews are still living in them in 1946 and 47 and 48. And it's much worse than that because then the occupiers, the Americans and the British, they set up an entire refugee placement organization called the IRO, the International Refugee Organization.
• 37:36
  whose job is to get rid of DPs. They're not just Jewish DPs. They're about 750,000 DPs who are Polish Catholics and essentially Nazi collaborators, about 400,000 Nazi collaborators from Eastern Europe, Lithuania and Estonia and Ukraine. And they're all living in these DP camps and they all can't go home after the war. That's what they share. They will be killed.
• 37:55
  And governments come to these camps and they set up little booths like a college fair at a high school. I went to an American high school. That's where this English is from. So I don't know if that's how they do it in Australia. But nevertheless, like a little booth. There's an analog. Yeah. Okay. And they sort of tell you, oh, this is what our country is. A lot of countries are missing working hands. 50 million people just died, many of them working age men. And everybody wants to jumpstart their economy after the war. And the first people to be scooped up
• 38:22
  are all the Nazi collaborators. They finished the war healthiest. They're most likely to be Protestant. And so for the Anglophone countries, that's a plus. And the one thing you know about them, if they're Nazis, is that they're not communists. And in 1946, not being communist is a huge boon for any immigrant. And then come the Polish Catholics, the second wave. They all agree to take the Polish Catholics, mostly as a mission of mercy.
• 38:48
  And then all the governments, every last one, shut down their boots and go home, and there are a quarter million people left in the camps, and every one of them is a Jew.
• 38:58
  There's one camp where one of the aid organizations conducts a poll that Harrison, Truman, President Truman's emissary to the camps, this guy named Earl Harrison, writes about in his report on the camps. This organization has a poll where it tries to ask the Jews where they want to go in the world. And it says to them, list the five places you want to go. And number one, for 90% of the inmates, residents, what do you call it? Number one is Palestina.
• 39:28
  And then 90% of them write on number two, Palestina. And at this point, you know, the people distributing the survey get annoyed because apparently Jews don't know how surveys work. And so they give them a new survey. And in the new survey, they say, other than Palestine, where would you go? 25% write on the first line crematorium. There comes a moment.
• 39:51
  where the Jews know something about the world, and they know very little else about the world. And these are the shattered remnants, you know. It's famous that the Allies won the war. Well, they won the Allied war on the Nazis. But the Nazis won a different war, the war on European Jewry. They won. European Jewry was wiped out. It is no longer. What exists today is new communities born out of the ashes. That millennial Jewish civilization is dead and gone.
• 40:17
  And the last remnants of it are stuck behind barbed wire on German soil, the soil of their murders, for years after the war. When America closes its doors in 1921, there are 10 million Jewish refugees. It's already taken 10 million impoverished, stricken Jews desperate to leave. They've already taken in two and a half million. And they're like, we don't want another 10 million. That is a
• 40:37
  Reasonable immigration argument. I'm sad about it. They're my people and they're desperate and they would go on to the Holocaust. But I get the thinking in 1921. But in 1946, there's a quarter million left. There's nobody. All the Jews left in Eastern Europe are behind the Iron Curtain. There's nobody left to take in. And the U.S. Army has to feed these people for years. They run the camps. So you're paying for them anyway. And still they wouldn't take them in.
• 41:01
  Those people empty out, begin to empty out in large numbers from the DP camps in May 1948, when one place on Earth suddenly exists that will take them in. And they're roughly a quarter of the IDF in the 48 war. And they don't know much about the world, but they know one thing. And that one thing is this is the only place where people will fight and die for their survival. And if they don't have this place, they don't have any place. And they don't mean it as an ideological argument. They mean it absolutely literally.
• 41:29
  That is the founding ethos of the Israelis. The Jews, the Arab world then went on to say, how dare you have a Jewish autonomous nation state here, anywhere in the Arab world? How dare you? And also, we're going to kick out all of our Jews.
• 41:45
  To the last man, woman, and child from every Jewish community in the entire Arab world. Different places in different ways. They had different language for it. Not a Jew left. The best story, the least horrific story is Morocco, where 1% of the Jewish community remains. And everyone else is worse than that.
• 42:03
  This is something that is also misunderstood in the West, Habib. I mean, your tale about the post-Holocaust Jews is touching, but it reaffirms what a lot of people have as a misconception, which is that all of Israel is basically a bunch of European Jews who parachuted in, who have no indigenous relationship to the land except for old texts in the Torah that they can cite from 3,000 years ago in the kingdom of David. Yeah.
• 42:31
  In fact, isn't it true that a majority of Israelis descended from Jews from the Middle East? About half. About half. Yeah, about half. They're about a third of the Jewish immigrants, but they had more kids than they had them earlier. And, you know, because, you know, how many kids do German Jewish intellectuals have? So this is an ethnic joke you're allowed to tell if you're Israeli. But, yes. And they were encountering... Ashkenazi Jews also had never not...
• 42:58
  believe that they come from that place for millennia. We have texts from Ashkenazi Jews from the ninth century where they say the same thing that Ashkenazi Jews say today about themselves. And there's also genetics that tell us that they do in fact have descent from the Levans. Right. I mean, so the other thing that is banging around in my head when you talk about the Holocaust— But yes, if the world is categorized by white and brown, we're also brown. Let me just throw this in quickly. Every time someone talks about how the Jews had no other options after World War II,
• 43:27
  And they were going to fight and die for, you know, to go to Palestine. The response to that is, well, why should Palestinians, why should innocent Palestinians today have to bear the brunt of something terrible that happened so long ago?
• 43:43
  You know, I want to, let me just, can I finish the thought? Yeah, yeah, finish the thought, finish the thought. Because I also want, you know, I want to understand the thinking of the Arab populations that they were migrating into. If you take that, okay, and you take that story, the total emptying of Baghdad. Baghdad was a quarter Jewish in 1930. It was, the Jews had lived in Baghdad for probably a millennium before the Arabs showed up in Baghdad.
• 44:10
  And there are no Jews in Baghdad in 1960. None. Not anti-Zionist Iraqi nationalist Jews, and there were many of those, could not remain. Baghdad's regime during the war was the Ali Rashid regime, people should look it up, was Nazi. Not pro-Nazi, Nazi. It was so deeply Nazi ideologically, the biggest youth movement in Baghdad during the war was run out of the Nazi embassy.
• 44:31
  And the Farhoud of 1941 precedes the founding of Israel, the massacre of hundreds of Jews in the streets of Baghdad by the mob. And the Jews flee Baghdad to the last man, woman, and child, and that ancient community is erased. You know what that is? That is a Zionist country.
• 44:46
  Baghdad is Zionist. Do you know why Baghdad is Zionist? Why Iraq is a Zionist? Because Jews cannot live there. And yet Iraq has a powerful argument to make about how Jews shouldn't have a nation state of their own when it, in fact, did everything the Zionists warned would happen and the catastrophe that was to come right after the Europeans did. What do you mean when you say that a country that doesn't allow any Jews is a Zionist country?
• 45:09
  I mean it only half facetiously, but my point is simple. The Zionists, there were many different kinds of Zionists. There were very liberal Zionists and very religious messianic Zionists and everything in between and cultural Zionists and Marxist Zionists and British aristocratic Zionists. Zionists come in many shades and colors. What does Zionist therefore mean, right? If you can have all these different visions of history and of the meaning of things, what is the Zionist that everybody shares when they get together in a Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897?
• 45:38
  What they share is the idea that the Jews are in danger and have to be rescued. That's the thing they share. Zionism is the great rescue project. And the great tragedy...
• 45:49
  is that they were right. That's not like a happy thing, that the Zionists were right on everything. In fact, Herzl never expected when he talked about a coming catastrophe. He literally said to the Rothschilds, as he's fundraising for his organization, I don't know how they will come for us, whether they will rob us or expel us or kill us. I suspect it'll be all these things at once. He writes in his diary these dire expectations about how European antisemitism would turn out. And the great and horrifying tragedy
• 46:19
  is that Europe not only met his expectations, but exceeded them about an order of magnitude greater than what he actually thought was the catastrophe that was coming.
• 46:28
  And then the Arab world immediately did the same thing. And they love to blame Israel. If you hadn't founded Israel, we wouldn't have kicked out every last Jew. You know what? If you could kick out every last Jew, thank God we founded Israel because their time was anyway on a clock. So a country that permits no Jews is Zionist by implication. Because if Jews had nowhere to go, they wouldn't need a country to go to.
• 46:53
  Yes, and the most anti-Zionist country in the world is probably the United States, because Jews live there in beautiful freedom and integration and belonging. I'm half facetious, but the point is the most important point to understand about the Israeli 20th century. Australians are used to Jews, not to put too fine a point on it, who are Australian and have the Australian historical experience and Australian problems.
• 47:19
  The Israelis are the Jews who didn't get into Australia in time, or Canada, or the United States, or Britain, or anywhere else. And the last living Jews of the Eastern Hemisphere
• 47:29
  either learned Hebrew, learned English, or died. I apologize to tiny exceptions like Argentina and France are the exceptions that prove the rule, because Argentina closed its doors in 1938 against any Jew fleeing into Argentina. And France, of course, is 90% Sephardi, because after the Holocaust, Jews flood it as Jews are fleeing North Africa and the Arab world that's kicking them out and making them flee. So it's absolutely the exception that proves the rule.
• 47:53
  So the Israelis are Jews for whom the world looks radically different because their history of their grandparents, not of some ancient civilization, is radically different from the Jews of the English-speaking world. So when Australians speak to a Zionist Jew in Australia, Zionism to the Zionist Jew in Australia by and large, and I apologize to my fellow Jews in Australia who I love and adore and admire, and some of my best friends, as they say, but they really are some of my best friends,
• 48:21
  Some of them have moved to Israel and, you know, meet them regularly. Australians who speak to Australian Jews about Zionism hear from Australian Jews that it's a deep part of their identity, of their sense of self, of their sense of history, of their tradition. All these things that you can say, yeah, but why should Palestinians pay a price for your sense of self? With respect, you're safe in a safe, happy, free country.
• 48:47
  The Israeli Jew did not go through that history and did not build assumptions about the world from that Anglophone liberal story. They built the assumptions of the world from the DP camps and from then having to fight war after exterminationist war against them by ideology after ideology that rose up to destroy them. Because either some version of Islam or some version of Arab nationalism could not allow them to exist.
• 49:13
  And every generation fought those ones. Explain those versions of Islam and of Arab nationalism, because that's, I think, fascinating. And it's something that I hadn't even really realized until I got into your work. The Jews who arrive in Israel and who are faced with, you know, Arabs who are already living there, who we now call the Palestinians, who had a, you know, legitimate right to resent being booted off their land, such as they were.
• 49:38
  The response to that, the strategic response, is embedded in the things that you were talking about earlier, the Muslim Brotherhood, also in North Africa. And you mentioned French Jews, Algerian Jews rather, North African Jews coming from the French colony in Algeria into mainland France. Yeah.
• 49:59
  It's fascinating to me how the Algerian experience informs the strategy of Arab resistance to Israel. Can you unpack it? Yeah. So one of the things you don't see if you call Israel European colonialism, right? Colonialism is not settlement. Colonialism is a powerful nation projecting itself onto another weak place that it then exploits and settles as part of its mechanism of exploitation.
• 50:29
  a mass group of refugees with nowhere else to go doesn't quite fit the definition in its most salient moral point, which is power. What else could the Jews have done when literally, please don't believe me, to all the listeners and viewers, look for alternatives. Uganda was brought up by the British. Madagascar was brought up by the Nazis. Herzl himself said maybe Argentina. Not one of these plans wasn't a fragile colonialist project that would fall.
• 50:58
  or the doors actually closed to the Jews when the Jews were most desperate. Not one of these plans would have worked. Stalin established Birol Bidjan, a Jewish autonomous oblast over on the Chinese border, and then massacred all of its elites repeatedly. Nothing else worked. The only thing that worked was Zionism. And so Jews tried every other option, from communism to Haredism, to also Orthodox, and only Zionism worked. So it's not
• 51:22
  to say, oh, these are white colonialists, and over here are brown aborigines, and I now know everything, misses everything. Misses everything Palestinians think about themselves and their history and what it all means, and everything the Jews experienced and what they think about themselves and their history and what it all means. And if that's the world you want to live in and project yourself onto everyone else, and then be absolutely certain of all the morality of everything and not think that...
• 51:47
  Maybe Hamas's desire to annihilate Israel for generations, maybe the hundreds of attacks on peace processes Hamas has carried out over the last 30 years might have something to do with the Israelis giving up on peace processes and withdrawals, which they've done repeatedly and ended always in rivers of blood. And all of this is true if the Israelis really were horrific in Gaza. None of this changes, and none of the complexity goes away, and none of the solutions are the Australian solution, just because, you know what I mean? I happen to think that
• 52:17
  Gaza is extremely complicated, and some of what looks worst in the world stage is absolutely necessary in a war against Hamas. And some things are unquestionably totally wrong. I happen to think of Gaza in a very complicated way, and I've written about it, you know, probably a million words at this point. But, um...
• 52:36
  But the problem and the complexity and the foreignness of it to your story doesn't change just by concluding. In other words, you can still hate Israel. You still need to understand this if you want to have any usefulness to Israelis or Palestinians going forward for any kind of peace or freedom or independence or anything.
• 52:54
  So what is the story? Yeah. So to your question, I'm sorry. Too much talking. But the Middle East kept me up all night. It's not. The Middle East is complicated. I'm just interested in the, yes, in the understanding of how it comes to. Yeah. At the moment, the sole. The sole.
• 53:14
  A friend of mine says something interesting, which is, if you want to know something about somebody's psychology, look at to whom they grant sympathy and look at to whom they grant agency. And the whole story of Israel's predicament in the eyes of many progressive people in the West is that Israelis have agency and that Palestinians deserve sympathy and don't have agency—
• 53:38
  And it's only until you start understanding how Israel ended up, like, forget about, you know, we don't even have to think about the current militarization of the West Bank or the war in Gaza. If you just stop the clock even at 2008 and Netanyahu is never born, simply analyzing the
• 53:59
  manner in which local Arab populations and leaders tried to respond to what they were characterising as a colonial project...
• 54:10
  reveals a lot about how Israel has found itself in this pickle to understate the case. So, Algeria. A good window. Yeah, absolutely. So, Algeria. And Nasserism. They converge. A good window into this is 1964. In 1964, in Cairo, Arab League Summit, the PLO was founded, the Palestine Liberation Organization.
• 54:38
  And in its founding charter, already some of your listeners are like, wait, that can't be right. That's three years before the beginning of the occupation. In one of its earliest, most important statements, the PLO says that the West Bank and Gaza are not areas of operations.
• 54:59
  only within the Green Line, within the 1949 ceasefire line that is Israel, that's controlled by the Jews of Israel. Because the West Bank and Gaza are controlled variously by Jordan and the West Bank. That's why it's called the West Bank. If you're in Jordan and Amman on the east bank of the river, you look across the river of the West Bank is that. They gave it that name. Palestinians have no name for that specific piece of territory. The biblical name is Judea and Samaria. That's what it's called in Hebrew.
• 55:26
  And of course, the names mean that you're claiming ownership, so everybody's arguing about the names, but West Bank is a Jordanian name. And that's because in 1949, Jordan ends up holding the West Bank at the end of the war, and Jordan annexes the West Bank and gives citizenship to the Palestinians there, and holds a conference, a famous conference in Jericho in 1950 or 51, in which the Palestinian elites all gather together and swear a kind of allegiance to the Jordanian monarchy,
• 55:52
  Jordan will lose that land in 1967 to Israel, but it will retain its claim to still own it as part of Greater Jordan until 1988. And so the PLO is founded as an arm of the Arab League of Nasser's vision, of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president's vision of a pan-Arab unity.
• 56:11
  Nasser had this argument that many Arab intellectuals had, which is that a lot of the borders in the Middle East, all the borders in the Middle East, are drawn by European empires. The French carve out Lebanon. The Syrian-Iraqi-Jordanian border is a French-British invention. Transjordan is created by Winston Churchill. These are all European borders.
• 56:32
  And they were created by Western empires to divide and weaken the Arabs. This is echoes of the theological Islamic weakness conversation that a couple generations earlier it began, but they're all running in parallel. And Gamal al-Dil-Nasser of Egypt comes to power in Egypt, I think, in 1952. And over the next 20 or so years, roughly, give or take, leads four wars—
• 56:56
  By Egypt, leading a coalition of Arab armies, of Arab countries, briefly in the early 60s, Syria and Egypt literally unite into a single state called the United Arab Republic.
• 57:07
  leads these armies in mass invasions and wars against Israel. 56 is Israeli, it's the whole Suez crisis. 67, he's got Israel under naval blockade and declares that he's going to destroy it. And the Israelis believe him. They dig mass graves in Tel Aviv, 13,000 graves in the biggest park of Tel Aviv just days before the war. Nobody knows what's going to happen. Everybody knows a war is coming. The Israelis think they might die.
• 57:30
  And then you have the 69 to 71 attrition war. Nobody remembers today, but soldiers are dying on the Egyptian front every week. And then you have the famous 73 war, this incredibly successful Egyptian, in the first day or two, Egyptian invasion. He leads these mass wars. Arab unity.
• 57:47
  the rising of the great Arab nation to its proper place in history will be accomplished, Nasser argues, by the defeat of the Jews. That's the signal, that's the obstacle that will show that we have come into our own. And the PLO was established in 1964 by that Arab nationalist Nasserist world, by the Arab League, pushed by Egypt, funded by Egypt. And its task is to use the Palestinian question without ever challenging the fairly brutal Egyptian rule over Gaza.
• 58:16
  And the Jordanian demand and rule and claim over the West Bank, the only Palestinians who need freeing are the Palestinians of Israel. Right. Sorry, just to clarify, because, pardon my ignorance, are the Gazans given Egyptian citizenship the way that the Palestinians in the West Bank were given Jordanian citizenship? No. Or are they just in our place? No, and in fact...
• 58:35
  They're not given citizenship, and in fact, they're very brutally oppressed. And the Egyptian excuse for not giving them citizenship is they don't want to give the Jews a way out, because giving them citizenship recognizes a Gaza independent from the rest of Palestine. Right, right. The Jordanians just wanted to expand Jordan. So they were much more important. I'm learning something here. So Israel gets created, the Arab states invade. In the process of that invasion, Jordan keeps the West Bank and gives West Bank Palestinians Jordanian citizenship.
• 59:05
  Egyptian citizenship. And then prior to the war in which Israel is able to retake the West Bank and Gaza and other bits that we don't need to concern ourselves with now in 67, the Palestine Liberation Organization is founded not with the mandate of liberating the West Bank and Gaza, but liberating the Arabs, the Palestinians who were living in Israel proper.
• 59:31
  some 20 years after Israel was created. And the methods it chooses, and the reason the Arab League and Nasser himself thinks this is a good idea and would achieve something important
• 59:42
  is Algeria. Algeria is this shockwave, pivot. It's a fundamental change in world history. And your college students studying anthropology or psychiatry or anthropological psychiatry or half the social sciences, half the humanities are learning this stuff. This is why they want to decolonize everything. This is a vocabulary that comes from Algeria. Algeria in 1954 has been
• 1:00:12
  And the French settled it massively. I mean, there's well over a million white French European settlers in Algeria and its whole cities. They're actually a deparment of the French Republic. They're represented in the French parliament in Paris. They're a part of the French Republic. But even though they're a part of the French Republic, France never gave citizenship to the Muslims. And the Muslims outnumber the French Europeans in Algeria five to one.
• 1:00:39
  And roughly, again, all the numbers are on Wikipedia. Don't work hard. But that's the rough situation. And in 1954, different Algerian Muslim organizations and groups all unite into something called the National Liberation Front, the FLN.
• 1:00:54
  FLN because it's in French, so the letters are worked around. Front Liberation National. And the FLN launches the paradigmatic anti-colonial war. The anti-colonial war is based on a fairly simple theory. You can read this in Mao. You can read this in Lenin. It's not complicated.
• 1:01:14
  Anti-colonial war is the argument that the colonialist is a powerful country by definition. It's a country that can project itself to your country. And it arrives powerful, but it actually only seeks to get out of your country some particular benefit. The benefit could be silver mines. The benefit could be slaves. The benefit could be something abstract like the glory of empire or the Portuguese competition with the Spanish. But there's a benefit. If you give the benefit the value X, how do you kick out the colonialist?
• 1:01:42
  You create a cost that's X plus one. And the colonialist leaves, right? Now, you don't owe the colonialist to be polite. You owe your children freedom as soon as possible. So you don't raise the cost to X plus one. You raise the cost to X plus 300. Because if you can inflict massive costs, massive pain, way beyond the perceived benefit in the colonialist mind, the colonialist leaves sooner. That's it. That's the whole, as we say in Hebrew, Torah on one leg.
• 1:02:13
  And so anti-colonial war, because of the X plus 300 logic, has this tendency to brutality. The FLN conduct horrific terror campaigns against the French and set up infrastructures in Paris and shoot up families on the beaches of Algeria and blow up cafes and conduct this horrific campaign. The French military response...
• 1:02:40
  is two orders of magnitude worse. Historians have kind of figured that probably around 500,000 Algerian Muslim civilians are killed in the French bombings, in the French military campaigns against the villages of the Bled, of the desert south of the coastal cities, to try and crush the centers of rebellion of the Afalit.
• 1:03:04
  And the French army encounters the FLN in the desert repeatedly and manages to kick the FLN out of Algeria entirely. And they camp out in Morocco or Tunisia in the desert. And the French army actually has sets up, you know, boundary lines along the borders to try and catch them. Every encounter between FLN and French military, the French military win every single one.
• 1:03:25
  And then eight years into this mass terror war, this horrific war of independence for Algeria, eight years in, after unbroken French victories, the French en masse, overnight almost, I think within a couple of weeks, get up and leave. Or a couple of months, or whatever it is. They get up and leave. I mean, a million people get on a boat. Cities empty out. And French Algeria, Algerie Française, the home of Albert Camus,
• 1:03:54
  Algeria Francaise is gone. And that's 1962. Give or take 18 months later, sitting in Cairo at the Arab League, the leadership of the Arab world, led by Nasser and his pan-Arabists will destroy the Jews and the Arabs will come into their own vision, established the PLO. And the PLO's task is just that. Do the FLN.
• 1:04:20
  It looks like it fits. The Jews had been in Israel a long time by 1964, but the French were longer in Algeria. There's a lot of them, but there was a lot of them. They're powerful, but they were more powerful. It's not very long when you think about 1964. I mean, if you actually count back to the state of Israel, this is what always blows my mind when you think about the 60s. I mean, if you're talking about, what is that, 18, 1964, 16 years? Even from the beginning of serious Jewish immigration, it's just from the 1920s.
• 1:04:48
  Yes, right. I mean, 2010 is the date at which Israel was created, if we're in 1964, right now. You know, it's like, well, yeah, yeah, that's right. What worked on the French colonialists will work on the Israelis. When people today talk about Israel as colonialists, that's a vocabulary they got from 1960s Palestinian and Arab nationalist Nasserist ideologies and ideologues.
• 1:05:17
  making that comparison, which in their minds was a totally reasonable and authentic comparison. Well, they also find, I mean, to give them credit, they do find colonial language in early Zionism, right? I mean, in the late 19th century and early 20th century, people talked about
• 1:05:33
  colonizing Palestine for Jews. I just don't think that what you said earlier about the salience of what is wrong with colonialism is lacking. It becomes a bit semantic. Like, yes, okay, so it's a colonial project in that you're importing people. But the reason why we hate colonialism so much is that there's an incredible power imbalance between the colonizing power and the people who are being shat upon. So just want to head off that criticism. In late 19th century Europe about colonizing. Yeah.
• 1:06:03
  colonizing isn't colonialism. And it's funny that progressive academia is so deeply invested in sussing out the deep subtleties of vocabulary. It's Talmudic. Yeah, that's what they are, Talmudic. Don't tell them that. Unless it's the Jews, in which case, all the words are kind of the same. Yeah, yeah. Colonizing can be colonialist.
• 1:06:33
  colonialism, what makes it an ism, as opposed to colonizing, which is the act of settlement, what makes it, humanity will hopefully someday colonize Mars. It will not colonialize Mars. That won't be a colonialist project unless we find indigenous living sentient beings on Mars. Colonialism is a powerful country projecting itself to a powerless country or a much less
• 1:07:04
  Now, in some ways, the Jews of 1898 are incredibly weak. In some ways, they prove to be incredibly powerful. Their single greatest source of power is their total and utter desperation.
• 1:07:22
  And I have endless, you know, pro-Palestinian activists hunt me down on social media. They saw some video of mine, and they're enraged, and they can't sleep at night, and they come at me, and they throw at me on social media a quote from Ezer Weitzman, who was
• 1:07:37
  you know, head of the Air Force and then president of Israel, or his father Chaim Weizmann, one of the founders of Israel and Israel's first president, or David Ben-Gurion, or Theodor Herzl from his diary in 1894. They throw at me some quote that they got out of a little anti-Israel, you know, quote book that quote mined the hundreds of millions of words written by Zionist thinkers and writers and political leaders. And they say, how dare you say that Ben-Gurion doesn't, you know,
• 1:08:02
  And they miss the fact, right, they'll throw at me something about Ben-Gurion saying, we do this in the service of the British Empire. In the 30 seconds, not 30 seconds, 20 years in which Zionism desperately needed the British Empire, like every small people, by the way, the Palestinians in World War II and in the 30s, you know, 35, they are already turning explicitly and, and, and, and.
• 1:08:25
  Just tremendous. I mean, they're like, they hold events at holy sites at Nebuchadnezzar, for example, inviting the Nazi ambassador. They turn Nazi. Now, why do the Palestinians side with the Nazis explicitly and publicly? And while some Palestinians are serving in the British army.
• 1:08:43
  But the Palestinian leadership in the land has to flee because the British now hunt them down, but they go and sit in Berlin like Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem. Why do they turn Nazi? Because they're literally Nazi? They turn Nazi because they're anti-British and anti-Jewish. And they don't have a whole lot of defenders in the world, and they need whatever they have. They go to the Soviets for support. The Jews in 1948, in that first war, the most existentially threatening war,
• 1:09:08
  The war where Holocaust survivors, after two days, land off the boat in Jaffa, get two days of training and get sent to a battlefield because there aren't enough fighting men. That desperate war, the Jews get their help from the Soviets.
• 1:09:25
  So you make whatever friends you have to. You make whatever friends you have to. Because we were talking about the 1960s and that definition of colonialism. Right. So they throw at me all these quotes about being imperial and being colonial. But what they miss, because they went quote mining for their politics, for their propaganda, basically...
• 1:09:47
  is the one big thing, the great thing that they talked about in every speech and in every conference and in every newspaper. And the thing that Ben-Gurion met with Palestinian journalists in 1935 in Geneva and gave them an interview, and this is what he told them. He said to them, millions of refugees are coming. I don't know that you guys are understanding what's happening.
• 1:10:09
  This is not, you know, you think Nazis are joking. We don't think Nazis are joking. 1933, when Hitler wins the election, Ben-Gurion gives a speech in Jerusalem in which he says, the next war is coming. The British were saying the next war is not coming. He said the next war is coming and it'll be worse than the last war, than the Great War, World War I, and the Jews of Europe might be over.
• 1:10:30
  And that's the desperation. And if you miss that one great thing, right, then you will not understand why, after the PLO is established, modeled in terms of its strategy, it begins to hijack airliners.
• 1:10:45
  It begins to carry out—it doesn't begin. It'd been carrying out these massacres of Israelis from across the borders, the Fideyin coming in from Gaza, coming in from Jordan for many, many years. But it ups the ante on that. You have in 1974, I think it was, DFLP, Democratic Fund for the Liberation of the Pets, one of the groups inside the PLO, comes down there. Their commandos come down from the Lebanese border. They enter an Israeli school in the town of Ma'alot.
• 1:11:10
  and they've killed, I think, 22 kids by the time Israeli commandos can get in there, and about 60 are wounded before they're taken out. They carry out this mass terror campaign that's modeled on Algeria, and they do it in the service of this Arabist, Nasserist idea. And they understand Israel as French Algeria, as Frenchmen who came in. Now, if you understand the Jewish story,
• 1:11:35
  that I related now, as we say in Hebrew, on the edge of a fork, the tiniest little bite of it. But if you understand what the world looks like to the Israeli Jew, which is radically different from what the world looks like to the Jews who made it into the English-speaking West in time. The Jews who didn't, the world looks radically different. And their assumptions today about the nature of the world are radically different. The gap between how the West thinks the world is and how the Jews of Israel think the world is, is a gap within the Jews.
• 1:12:01
  Western English-speaking Jews could love Israel and stare like, whoa, you guys are bombing everything. And the Jews of Israel, when they hear from Hezbollah, we're going to murder you. We're going to destroy you. You will not survive this, and we'll do it forever. And we...
• 1:12:16
  We are more willing to have Lebanon burn than you are willing to burn Lebanon. And the burning of Lebanon is a legitimate price to pay on the altar of your destruction. And when Hamas talks that way, everything that has happened, Hamas leaders have said explicitly, and that made the headline news in Israel when they say this, even if it doesn't make any press in Australia.
• 1:12:36
  But what they say is, Gaza was a success, and there'll be more October 7th for all time. And every sacrifice the Palestinian people have laid on the altar of redemption. And they're not talking about Palestinian independence. They know that they are destroying that. They're talking about the redemption of Islam. And so we face enemies that to us look...
• 1:12:56
  I think, like what they are, what they actually are, this mass Islamic redemptionist. Now, what I'm saying is not, how can you ask us not to be brutal at war, Hamas are evil. That's not my argument. It's not a moral competition. My argument is, what Hamas is, is a thing that can never be deterred, and therefore has to actually be extracted and actually be cut down.
• 1:13:25
  That's what Hamas is. And Hamas has set the cost of that, it turns out, to a cost Israel can't pay. And a cost that, in Gaza, Hamas is still there.
• 1:13:36
  And that's a disaster. It's not a disaster for Israel. It's even more than that. For the Israeli right, having the Hamas still be there is, you know, everyone keeps, the progressives want to have two competing contradictory conspiracy theories. They want to argue that Netanyahu secretly supported Hamas because they want Palestinian politics to be radical so that he never has to compromise. And also, wow, what courageous heroes those Hamas are. They never give in.
• 1:14:07
  will mean that the Israelis will finally be able to hear the world. In a way, the Israelis can't hear the world today, because they have spent a century hearing from the other side, not that they need to pull back for peace,
• 1:14:23
  but that they need to die and disappear and be gone. And they've heard that generation after generation after generation. My dad fought in the 73 war. And the first day of the war, he was behind Syrian lines. Most of his artillery battalion was wiped out in that first day. What were the Syrians looking for in that war? To get the Israelis down off the Golan after 67, just to reclaim a tiny bit of Arab pride?
• 1:14:46
  If they could have destroyed Israel and massacred every last Israeli in that minute, would they have? Of course they would have. And the catastrophic failure was on the Israeli side that we didn't expect it. And we had that massive intelligence failure we had again 50 years later on October 7. That'll happen sometimes. And the other side will actually seek our extermination. And no Jew lives in the Arab world or can live in the Arab world. And who's seriously going to come to me and say any of that is not true? And so why should I not look at the Arab world and just believe every word that comes out of their mouth?
• 1:15:16
  Hamas does not care about Gazan suffering. Hamas believes it is a sacrifice laid on the altar of the redemption of humanity. By the way, that is why when you poll Palestinians, and especially Gazans, on Hamas, you get these amazingly fascinating contradictions in their responses. You ask Palestinians, do you love Hamas? Do you hate Hamas? Do you support Hamas? Do you want Hamas to continue to rule after the war? And you have total contradictions from within the same mind. A Palestinian will say to you,
• 1:15:44
  Hamas is the last person. There are Palestinians in Gaza today willing to have Israel rule Gaza and not Hamas rule Gaza. Like, there's something like 20% that want Hamas to rule Gaza. The vast majority don't want Hamas to rule Gaza after the war. And then you say to them, but are you proud of Hamas? And the vast majority, yes. Does Hamas oppress you? Yes. Are Hamas heroes?
• 1:16:05
  Yes. Why do they give these contradictory answers? Because even though they see the destruction Hamas has wrought and know that Hamas can give them nothing else, Hamas has never built anything except war and never promised anything except war and always stood against and always literally massacred Israelis to disrupt every peace process. But Hamas also tells Palestinians a story.
• 1:16:26
  That is a powerful and profound story of dignity. You are not the weakest Achilles heel of Islam. You are not the most pathetic thing in Islam pushed back by the weakest thing that ever pushed back Islam, which is the Jews. You are, in fact, the pivot, the turning point, the place where Islam stops centuries of retreat and decline and begins to come soaring back into history. That's our story. And that's where sacrificing literally everything.
• 1:16:50
  And so Hamas is both a source of immense pride of a grand heroic story, which, by the way, fits very neatly into third worldist Leninist anti-imperialist stories and anti-colonial stories of Franz Fanon out of Algeria. And so there's a very natural overlap there of the Islamic vision and of the progressive vision.
• 1:17:09
  So just thread this for us. I think that's fascinating. The Leninist, Maoist, Arab nationalist, Algeria resistance-infused vision of how to respond to this colonial insult of the Jew being in Palestine in the 60s when the PLO was founded prior to the occupation—
• 1:17:35
  expresses itself through these acts of terrorism, through airplane hijacking, through the massacre at the Munich Olympics, through all of this that leads up to the beginning of the peace process, at which it becomes clear that there has to be some alternative to this, to the military occupation of the West Bank and at the time of Gaza.
• 1:17:56
  But how—so every time you criticize Hamas, I still hear a voice in my head saying that only proves that the real goal has to be to sideline Hamas, cleave it off from the rest of the Palestinian population, bolster moderate Palestinians—
• 1:18:17
  tend to the green shoots of liberalism such as they may exist in the Arab world, tend to secularism, go back to the table with yet more overtures to try to sideline extremists, and that Israel has given up any possibility of that happening over the past 20 years. Can you thread the line between... All the... Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:18:46
  It sort of comes back to the earlier question that we postponed for a moment, which was my saying, how would you expect the Palestinians to respond except dysfunctionally after having endured the amount of dehumanization that they had?
• 1:19:01
  So if it was identical in the 20s, long before there was a Jewish state, the massacre or the 1929 massacres of Hebron and Tiberias in Jerusalem, it's not about occupation. And if the PLO was established in 64, not 67, it's not about dehumanization and occupation. It's more fundamental and older and deeper and more definitional.
• 1:19:22
  And it remains that. And that's why Hamas can engineer the destruction of Gaza. Most governments will try to prevent the destruction of their polity. Hamas engineers as big as possible destruction because the war, it is actually fighting, not the war its supporters in the West think it's fighting or pretend it's fighting. Different ones know different amounts is not that war. What could Palestinians actually do? All the words you just said,
• 1:19:48
  don't exist in Palestinian politics on the ground. Liberalism and the little shoots of, you know, all these different kinds of ideas that the West likes to imagine would be the secret wishes of any brown colonized people. But in the end, they'll definitely create the...
• 1:20:05
  a beautiful little utopia, which will also be authentically rooted and romantically full of solidarity and truth and ancient dancing and all of that, because that's exactly what I don't have in the West. And I live in this German romanticist world that we all have to live in because that happened.
• 1:20:21
  you can't unsee certain ideas that embed themselves that deeply in the culture. None of that stuff has any cachet. I know that in the West, when you have this conversation and they say, just let Palestinian democracy flourish, and you say, well, show me Palestinian democracy,
• 1:20:40
  Democracy, when has that ever, what little, by the way, any democracy in any part of, anywhere around me, I mean, even Lebanon is in total free fall and collapse, and it should have worked, and it never did. Do you think, just as an aside, that Lebanon could have worked in the absence of Iran at Hezbollah? I mean, Lebanon sort of did work for a bit. Christian Lebanon worked for a bit, and it was unique to Christian Lebanese.
• 1:21:08
  And I don't know what that strength was. It might have been just deeper integration into Western ideas and intellectual spaces. They were more westernized in that sense. That might just have been it. But it never really worked. Lebanon, even when it had functional democratic institutions and governments,
• 1:21:27
  was subject to the whims of the Syrians, and then after that of the Israelis, and the Great Lebanese Civil War, and then the Iranians swoop in in the 80s. And so, you know, I don't, the Iranians and the Israelis swoop in in the 80s. I don't think... Right. It doesn't exactly fulfill the brief of being an Arab Muslim state that you can point to and say, this is what Palestine would look like in the best case scenario.
• 1:21:55
  But that is right. But those are what Palestine will look like in the best case scenario. And the best case scenario for Palestine is not Lebanon and Tunisia. Palestine culturally is much more akin to Syria, Jordan, and maybe in some ways Egypt. So it will look like a failed state. By the way, the West Bank has the Palestinians in the West Bank have the GDP per capita. I think of Cairo right now.
• 1:22:19
  Um, that's, that's, that's what it looks like. Now, does that mean that culture can't change? Does that mean that they are doomed because they're Arabs to be anti-democrat or non-democrat? Of course not. Obviously not. Arabs hit the West and integrate into the West and turn out to be exactly like Westerners, right? None of this is biologically determined.
• 1:22:37
  But culture is real. Culture matters. And you can't just pretend like the culture isn't what it is and just project onto it what you think. It probably secretly is in a secret order of being in which your particular ideological peccadillos are the only world that's allowed to exist. That's not directed at you personally. I'll take it. I've heard worse. So what could Palestinians do? What's the horrific missed opportunity?
• 1:23:08
  And the argument goes like this. The Israelis are immune to anti-colonial violence.
• 1:23:21
  I don't mean morally, how dare you? Israelis and Palestinians both share one belief, which is that the other side wants to exterminate them. There are polls on this, and the polls tell us, there's a huge poll last year from the Tommy Steinmet Center at Tel Aviv University, and Khalil Shikaki is the most important pollster of Palestinians. He's used by Gallup to poll Palestinians. He's a sociologist affiliated with some American universities. He has a think tank in Ramallah. And they used him to poll Palestinians, especially Gazans, and they used...
• 1:23:49
  this think tank at Tel Aviv University to poll Israelis, and they went deep into the polling. And one of the questions was, what do you think the other side wants for me? And I think there were five options, including two states, including doesn't care about me, including extermination or elimination or whatever. They said something like erasure. They said some word like that. 90% of both sides pick that choice.
• 1:24:14
  Israelis who think the other side genuinely and authentically and have a hundred years of data points proving it, wants to eliminate them, are immune to the global moral emotions of foreigners. What foreigners think literally, it can't crowd out the genuine authentic belief proven by Hamas rhetoric now, now in the last two weeks and in the last three years and as long as Hamas has existed and as long as the Palestinian national movement has existed.
• 1:24:42
  that they genuinely want them dead and gone. And the Palestinians are the same. You come to Palestinians and you say, how dare you launch suicide bombings on buses full of kids in Jerusalem during the Second Defa, destroying the peace process when Bill Clinton wanted to dump on you $100 billion in a state.
• 1:24:58
  They don't care about the moral emotions of foreigners because they genuinely think they're under existential threat. So that's what the sides authentically believe in polls in their own languages to their own pollsters. This is not a poll where they identify as an American pollster or something like that. They're immune to anti-colonial violence. Jews are immune to terrorism, to waves of terrorism. The same terror that was tried on the French and eight years in the French all leave.
• 1:25:24
  They had a France to leave to. One of the things about understanding that Israel isn't colonialist, again, it's not a moral argument. I don't stand before the world in some kind of moral popularity contest. The fact that the world thinks there's a moral popularity contest that we all stand in judgment of—
• 1:25:40
  is bigotry, is a prejudice, is a centering of the Western moral imagination as the only truth and arbiter of mankind. I don't actually give a shit what the world thinks. I teach, and most of my talks and most of my content is for Jews and Jewish communities, and it's about Jewish history. People ask me these questions, so I answer them. I genuinely, deeply, profoundly don't care what the world thinks.
• 1:26:03
  So I'm arguing not as a moral point, but as a strategic point. If you come at the Jews with terrorism, but also demand that they all lie down and die, the terrorism will be ineffective. You will not cause the change of behavior that terrorism is meant to cause, because they're not going to die. They are not going to run back to their home country. There is no home country. That's what distinguishes them. That and several other things, like an ancient tradition of belonging to that place. Every synagogue in 2,000 years prays to Jerusalem. That was not true of French Algeria.
• 1:26:33
  Many things distinguish them from colonialism, but that's the strategically relevant one. They have nowhere to go. When you murder the children of a people that thinks it's indigenous and has nowhere to go in its own psychology, and you just killed their kids, they're not going to do what a colonialist does and run away. They will face you as a tribe with nowhere to go whose kids were just murdered.
• 1:26:55
  In that sense, if you think of the Israelis as just another Middle Eastern Arab tribe, you will understand, you will look back on their history and you will understand the stupidity and futility of the wars against them and why they fight so desperately and so capably, and also why they don't care about the world's opinion. You can't dislodge them with violence. So what would work? I, in high school in the United States, in Wisconsin, was forced to learn Martin Luther King.
• 1:27:24
  because American kids learn all about Martin Luther King. And going into the class, going into that study section unit, I was very annoyed because I was a know-it-all 16-year-old. And I know that that's a shocking thing to admit. So many years later, you can't see it. But nevertheless, I was a little bit of a know-it-all 16-year-old. And Martin Luther King has this status in the American imagination of a moral paragon, of this apotheosis of all human wisdom.
• 1:27:53
  And that's super annoying because I know better than everybody. And if he's big and important, then obviously he's terrible and bad and I'm going to prove it. And I go into the class and the teacher forces us to do something I'd never done before, which is read, actually read, actually read King. Yeah.
• 1:28:08
  And I fell madly in love with him because I discovered a deeply clever, slightly ruthless strategist. King didn't just do marches in Selma and Birmingham and elsewhere to raise awareness. King sought violence.
• 1:28:28
  He believed in nonviolence for his side, but he believed in violence. Violence is a redemptive force, just not from your side. His argument was, I walk into these places where I know the violence will happen. I seek out the police forces where there will be violence, and I face it with nonviolence. And then I get on the TV screens of suburban white America, all over America, white cops being violent to nonviolent black protesters, black marchers.
• 1:28:57
  And I upend white expectations about where violence comes from, about how there's injustice in the South. Everybody knows it. But injustice has this way of being long-term, low flame, something that's tolerable. And ending the injustice is chaos and sometimes has high costs in the short term. And so people will prefer the low injustice to high flames of fixing the injustice.
• 1:29:20
  So what you have to do to injustice, says King, I'm paraphrasing badly, forgive me, he writes in beautiful poetry, what you have to do to injustice is set it on fire. And how do you set injustice on fire? You trigger the other side's violence while robbing the other side of the excuse. Not the excuse, the justification, however the other side sees it.
• 1:29:41
  So you make the other side have to enforce the injustice with brutality. King credited Gandhi for this concept, but he did it better. And then you take away the other side's possibility for explaining their own brutality through danger, through feeling endangered in any way. And that was what King tried to do. So he tried to do two things. One, march in places where the cops will definitely beat his people. Get that on television, or it didn't count.
• 1:30:11
  And also come to white America and say, dear white America, I want you to know my goal is not to dismantle white America. It's not, you know, black separatism, which was Malcolm X. And King and X actually had literal debates on this in that period in op-eds and things.
• 1:30:29
  What I want you to know is, and this is the I have a dream speech, and people should actually watch him deliver the I have a dream speech and listen to it to every word. Because in I have a dream, everybody remembers this line where he says, I have a dream that one day my four little children will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Beautiful, adorable. I have four little kids. He had four little kids. Who doesn't love four little kids?
• 1:30:51
  That's not the core of the speech. The core of the speech is when he talks about a check. He says, I have a promissory note written to me by the founders of America, and I refuse to believe that I will go to the Bank of Liberty and get that check returned with insufficient funds.
• 1:31:07
  Marked insufficient. The check bounced. The check of liberty. Okay, again, he said it well, but just go with me. The check of liberty bounced. I refuse to believe that the check of liberty bounced. He made an argument to white America where he said to white America, I will set the injustice on fire. You will not be able to look away. I will torment you with it.
• 1:31:26
  And also, I don't want anything from you except to be the you you claim you are. You tell your children that you are this America. And here I come to cash the check, the promise of the founders. And the Bank of Liberty returns the check? The debt that you owe your black citizens that you refuse to pay?
• 1:31:45
  So you will be unable to look away. But also, if you were the you, I'm paving you a path out of the problem. If you are the you, you claim to be. So, Javiv, at the risk of blundering into an analogy that I will get a lot of shit for, and I don't mean in any way to compare Martin Luther King to the violence of Palestinian terrorism because he eschewed violence. So setting that component of the analogy aside. What would a Palestinian version of this look like?
• 1:32:13
  Well, there is that, but I also just want to be more provocative and say, if the strategic insight was to provoke your enemy into overreacting in order to reveal how morally bankrupt the enemy is, then Hamas and Sinwar got that bit right. Yes, with one catastrophic blunder, which is that they still tell the Israelis they're going to murder their kids.
• 1:32:43
  all of them, to the end. And then all the brutality and all the suffering and all the pain and everything you have brought on South Lebanon to get to the Hezbollah tunnels is an identical military engineering problem as getting to the Gaza tunnels. You can't reach a tunnel system like that without breaking the city.
• 1:33:06
  There's never been a tunnel system at that scale in the history of war. And anybody who comes at the Israelis, and you can argue, therefore, they become untouchable, fine. But all the costs that Gaza has suffered, and again, this is true if you think the Israelis are good people facing a terrible situation and a terrible kind of enemy, or terrible people. It doesn't affect the point that we're making here, which is Hamas imposed these vast costs, and Hezbollah is willing to destroy Lebanon on the altar of the destruction of Israel.
• 1:33:36
  And the Iranian regime, by the way, is the same mukawama resistance ideology and ethos of mass martyrdom. Iran can burn if it means that their redemptive, revolutionary, eschatological vision for history is achieved. And the first step is Islam overcoming the weakest thing that ever pushed it back, which is the Jews. That's why an Iran that has no border with Israel, no interest in Israel, obsesses about Israel over any other and every other topic on the Iranian agenda for 40 years. Because of this religious idea.
• 1:34:07
  And all of it will fail because you leave the Jews ultimately no choice, because you still demand the Jews to die. What King did was twofold. So what would a Palestinian version of King's vision, which is set the injustice on fire but take away the justification? A Palestinian movement that becomes pacifist, non-violent.
• 1:34:32
  Not 15 nonviolent activists walking into an Israeli checkpoint and facing the violence of Israeli cops who think they might be blowing up on them, for all they know, because there have been hundreds of suicide bombings in this history just in the last 25 years. Not 15 nonviolent activists where there's all the rest of Palestinian politics doing violence over there.
• 1:34:55
  but a movement that knows how to reign in its own, that is believably nonviolent, and that validates the basic Israeli story, not any particular Israeli action. Your crimes are your crimes. I hate you and you did these terrible things. But you're a people who has no other place and deserves a place under the sun. And uses the other side's story to validate their own. What's the fundamental point of Zionism? The only way you can be truly safe and truly free is in your own home.
• 1:35:22
  That's all we're saying, we Palestinians. The Israelis keep saying the Arabs don't really believe in Palestinian nationalism. Every time it's up to the Arabs, they screw over the Palestinians completely. Witness the Jordanian occupation of up to 67, and the Egyptians in Gaza were even worse. No Arab actually believes in Palestinian nationalism unless they come for the Jews. That's a great Palestinian argument. What's the only safety Palestinians will ever have? True safety is in their own place. That's an argument you make to the Jews because it's in Jewish terms.
• 1:35:51
  Then you come to the Jews and say, you have a vision of the world that informed everything you have built, and you have built this astonishing thing. But you rule over us for generations with your military. We are no longer coming for your kids. We no longer seek your total annihilation. There is no longer this mukawwama vision of Islamic mass death and destruction that we're going to wreak on you as the beginning of the direction of the world. But also, you set the injustice on fire, nonviolently, but in a way that forces the
• 1:36:21
  the unexplainable to the Israelis. The Israelis have to oppress without knowing why they're oppressing. Right at this moment, if I pull out of the West Bank, Hamas will definitely take it over. And then Hamas will control the territory 16 times the size of Gaza, that's the highlands overlooking all of Israel's major population centers, and it'll shrink Israel down to nine miles wide in the middle of the present day Middle East. So if you come to me and say, that must happen, I'm gonna tell you,
• 1:36:48
  You know, go jump in a lake. You're literally not actually dealing with the world as I actually live in it. You're dealing in little morality plays in the Australian mind. But what if you settle that Israeli problem by saying, no, Israel must exist. It's just that Israel exists. And by that justice, there must be a Palestine. And if you don't give it to me when I guarantee it, and I will myself police my violent elements, then I will set it on fire. I will not enable you not to.
• 1:37:17
  What would that look like? Imagine a thousand Palestinians tomorrow morning, totally nonviolently, walking out in groups of 10 from Palestinian cities in the West Bank and taking a hundred hilltops. Not taking, sitting, sitting in groups of 10 in a hundred hilltops. The Israeli police come in and remove them all. Now it's organized, so they throw them in jail for three days to have everyone pipe down, right? The next day, there's another thousand Palestinians in the West Bank. They do it again. And the next day again.
• 1:37:45
  And by now, the Israeli police understand that there's this whole organization. So what do they do? They shut down all Palestinian cities. You nonviolently sit in front of the police. And then, totally nonviolently, if you start shooting, if you start punching, if you start brutalizing, if you blow up a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv...
• 1:38:02
  then the Israelis know you still just want to annihilate them. And none of this is real. It's just an excuse for the TV cameras. If you do a king, which requires accepting the validity of the other side, then you rob the other side of its story, of its justification. You affirm its story, but you rob it, its larger story, but you rob it of its justification, and you set the injustice on fire. At some point, and this will serve this Palestinian strategy, the Israeli police turn
• 1:38:30
  And that's the point where the Palestinians, within two weeks, rebuild an Israeli political left. But everything depends on not actually wanting to annihilate me. If the only politics Palestinians can produce, and so far, that's the main one, incidentally, people will now say, the Palestinian activist living in your mind will say, Abbas sitting in Ramallah abhors violence for 25 years, which is exactly why Palestinians hate him.
• 1:38:56
  And which is exactly why he pulls in the single digits. People talk about how the PA should take over Gaza, and Netanyahu is an obstacle to that. Netanyahu isn't an obstacle. He is an obstacle. He would be an obstacle to that if he could be, but he doesn't get a chance to be, because Palestinians in Gaza hate the PA. Nobody trusts the PA. Because it isn't Hamas, because it isn't violent, because it doesn't lead war against the Israelis, that's ultimately configured and coded in the Palestinian conversation as eliminationist. What if...
• 1:39:26
  What if the Israeli left that went to the Oslo process was actually a Palestinian creation in the first intifada, those children throwing stones at soldiers? And what if that same Israeli left, which suddenly won the election of 92 and the election of 99, talking about ending the occupation, that was the issue on the ballot, and they won the election and formed the government, and that same Israeli left was killed?
• 1:39:50
  by the 140 suicide bombings of the Second Intifada, which in the Israeli Jewish experience came at the height of the peace process. What were they about? Everybody understood among the Israelis, there's six Palestinian narratives about this and five Israeli narratives, but the mainstream Israeli Jewish narrative is that at the height of the peace process, it wasn't one bombing, it wasn't two, it was 140. It was a mass guerrilla war against our civilians modeled on the FLN of Algeria.
• 1:40:18
  And that greeted us after eight years of peace processes, after the Israeli army from 97 to roughly 99 pulled out of all major Palestinian population centers. And the first thing those population centers produced was a mass wave of suicide bombings in the three digits in our cities, in our towns, on our kids. Well—
• 1:40:37
  That's not going to liberate Palestine because that's, for Israelis, just a sign that you're just coming to kill us and we have nowhere to go. So turn away from violence, not because it's immoral. Everybody here thinks the other side wants to eliminate them. Turn away from violence only because it's not going to work. It's not going to work. The tiny little distinctions that separate Zionism from traditional colonialism, you want to still call it that as a curse, call it that as a curse if it makes you happy.
• 1:41:00
  But what's different between Zionism and colonialism is the one strategic thing that you need for anti-colonial violence to work. There's six other things, but the specific strategic thing you need for anti-colonial violence to work is different. King, nonviolence, but what he called coercive nonviolence, impolite, kind of aggressive and brutal nonviolence, but using the other side's violence while validating the other side's story and robbing the other side of an explanation for their violence.
• 1:41:31
  That would work on the Israelis even now. No one in Palestinian politics can do it because they're still married to the great and grand religious meaning of their struggle, which Hamas represents, and would win an election tomorrow in the West Bank. And that story, because these are real people, they're not little cartoons. They are real people. They don't dance to a Western anti-colonialist fiddle. They still live in that grand story of redemption.
• 1:42:01
  And therefore they won't do it. But I'm not even, one last sentence. I'm not arguing this is, I'm not arguing this is what they should do morally. I'm arguing that because of the nature of the Israelis, if you understand the story the Israelis are living in, it's just the only thing that'll work. Nothing else will work. If we have to go through a couple of decades of international pressure and isolation and sanctions and boycotts,
• 1:42:29
  And then we discover that even that doesn't break the Israelis, because the other side won't stop. The international community will scream in one ear of the Israeli psyche, pull out of the West Bank, or I'm going to sanction you and crush you and oppress you and make you feel bad. And the Hamas will tell me in the other ear, I'm going to murder your kids from everywhere you pull out of. Hamas will always be louder.
• 1:42:52
  Palestinian politics have agency here. In fact, even though they're the weak party, and so it seems morally untenable and not okay and not fair, history isn't always fair, sometimes the weaker party has the agency.
• 1:43:08
  That's also something King talked about. They have the agency. They built a left and they destroyed an Israeli left. And I happen to think, maybe I'm a crazy person, they can rebuild that Israeli left. But only if they fundamentally change their demand of the Israelis. And not in tiny little westernized elites that come and say in Canberra, what are you talking about? All we want is to live in a single civic democracy with the Jews.
• 1:43:35
  That only works in Canberra. That's not what anyone in Palestinian politics in the West Bank or Gaza ever talked about. And so that's it. That's what they could do. And that's what 140 years of their response to Jewish immigration and refusal to really learn the Jewish immigrant story and understand where it comes from and what drives it and why it can't be reversed or stopped by the tools that got rid of French Algeria or the British settlement in Western Kenya and the British settlement in the West.
• 1:44:03
  That's why that never worked. And this is the only thing that will work. Javiv, if I could clone you and have you parachuted into every school in the Palestinian territories and Israel and the West, I would. Thank you for coming on the show. It's fascinating to hear from you as always.
• 1:44:21
  Thank you, Josh. Thank you. And apologies for the interruptions and the talking over. And I'm going to go take a nap. That's why we get you on the show, Aviv. It wouldn't be a conversation between a couple of Jews without a few tangents. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me on.