Latest / The Breakfast Club / INTERVIEW: Haviv Rettig Gur Talks Israel–Hamas, Benjamin Netanyahu, Political Views & Criticism, Protests +More

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INTERVIEW: Haviv Rettig Gur Talks Israel–Hamas, Benjamin Netanyahu, Political Views & Criticism, Protests +More · The Breakfast Club

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hold up.
• 0:01
  Speaker 2: Every day I wake up.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Wake your ass up. The Breakfast Club. You all finished
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: or you all done? Morning, everybody.
• 0:09
  Speaker 2: It's DJ Envy, Just Hilarious, Charlamagne Tha Guy. We are
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: The Breakfast Club. Lon LaRose is here as well. So
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: is Mimi. And we got a special guest in the building.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: Chagvif Reddick-Gore.
• 0:23
  Speaker 3: That was well done.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: All right.
• 0:24
  Speaker 3: That was not very well done.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: I'm sorry.
• 0:30
  Speaker 3: A for effort.
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: So what's the correct pronunciation?
• 0:33
  Speaker 4: It's a ha.
• 0:34
  Speaker 3: It's the Hebrew Chagvif.
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  Speaker 2: Well, good morning.
• 0:37
  Speaker 3: Thank you.
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: How are you feeling this morning?
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: I run his credentials down. He's an Israeli journalist, political analyst, commentator,
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: senior analyst at the Times of Israel, and Middle East
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  Speaker 1: analyst at the Free Press.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, now I'm tired.
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  Speaker 1: Your work focuses on Israeli politics, regional affairs, Jewish identity,
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  Speaker 1: and relations between Israel and the Jewish diaspora. Yeah.
• 0:59
  Speaker 3: Write about all the stuff happening to Jews, both now
• 1:02
  Speaker 3: and in the past, and my side hustle is teaching
• 1:04
  Speaker 3: history and all kinds of informal education. Yeah, I'm that
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  Speaker 3: kind of guy. History nerd.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: You know, I watch a lot of your stuff. Well,
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: I did watch a lot of your stuff, knowing that
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  Speaker 1: you was coming up here, and it made me wonder, right?
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: It's a lot of things. But I guess I'll start with,
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  Speaker 1: can two people have legitimate historical claims to the same
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  Speaker 1: land without one people suffering being treated as more important?
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  Speaker 3: Those are two different questions. So can two people have
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  Speaker 3: a claim to a place? Can two people have a story,
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  Speaker 3: and somehow those stories overlap and contradict and conflict? Absolutely.
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  Speaker 3: And not only that, we all live in stories. All
• 1:46
  Speaker 3: we are is stories we tell about ourselves. And those
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  Speaker 3: stories are really important. You know, you go to university
• 1:52
  Speaker 3: and they say to you, well, it's all just narratives
• 1:55
  Speaker 3: and we can deconstruct the narratives. That's a very shallow
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  Speaker 3: way of understanding it. We will live in a story.
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  Speaker 3: And if you take apart somebody's story, they'll build a
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  Speaker 3: new story.
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  Speaker 1: It's either real history or it's not.
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  Speaker 3: We only know how to live in a story of ourselves.
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  Speaker 3: And you can absolutely have two peoples, in fact. probably
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  Speaker 3: in a great many conflicts in the world, when you
• 2:14
  Speaker 3: dig deep into the story of what the people think
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  Speaker 3: is happening to them, what they think is going to
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  Speaker 3: happen to them, where they think they come from, you
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  Speaker 3: suddenly open a whole new window into what the conflict means,
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  Speaker 3: why it's the way it is, why it's hard to solve.
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  Speaker 3: And when those stories conflict and when those stories contradict,
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  Speaker 3: you get real conflict. And you can't understand the conflict
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  Speaker 3: It doesn't matter which side you take. You can't understand
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  Speaker 3: what the people in the conflict actually think is happening
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  Speaker 3: to them, why they're responding the way they're responding, if
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  Speaker 3: you don't know their stories. So absolutely, I think that's
• 2:47
  Speaker 3: the heart of what's going on right now. There are
• 2:50
  Speaker 3: these two stories, and the two stories conflict. And if
• 2:56
  Speaker 3: you can't find a path to settle the needs of
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  Speaker 3: both of these stories, the problem with talking this way
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  Speaker 3: is It's not just story. The stories are real. The
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  Speaker 3: stories are powerful. The stories are true. It's not like
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  Speaker 3: the Jews have 10,000 data points over 140 years proving
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  Speaker 3: their story. And the Palestinians have 10,000 data points proving
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  Speaker 3: their story. And so you got to find a way
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  Speaker 3: that respects those stories. What I see too much in
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  Speaker 3: the U.S., in the activist space, in journalism, even in
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  Speaker 3: academia that should know better, is people who pick one
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  Speaker 3: of the stories And all the history that doesn't fit
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  Speaker 3: that story gets erased. And then they feel very righteous,
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  Speaker 3: but they're not doing anything to help anybody on the ground.
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  Speaker 3: I don't know if that was too abstract, but that's
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  Speaker 3: the core problem.
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  Speaker 2: So my question is, so the term free Palestine, so
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  Speaker 2: why is the term free Palestine, I guess, so bad
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  Speaker 2: in the Jewish community?
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  Speaker 5: Why?
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  Speaker 3: Everything depends what you mean. It's a little bit like....
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  Speaker 2: You know, I.
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  Speaker 3: I went to middle school and high school in the States.
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  Speaker 3: I got this English, but I've never lived as an
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  Speaker 3: adult in America. So if I step into American culture wars,
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  Speaker 3: I'm a complete stranger and I don't know what I'm doing.
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  Speaker 3: But there's a big debate, or not a debate, there's
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  Speaker 3: a big problem in America if you say all lives matter.
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  Speaker 3: The problem isn't that you don't think that all lives matter.
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  Speaker 3: Everybody thinks all lives matter. The problem is that it's
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  Speaker 3: part of a discourse that's trying to say something to
• 4:25
  Speaker 3: another statement that's trying to, right? It's not about what
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  Speaker 3: the words say. It's about what you mean. And the
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  Speaker 3: Jewish community, when someone says free Palestine, hears the Jews
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  Speaker 3: of Israel, who are the last living Jews in the
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  Speaker 3: Eastern Hemisphere, after the entire Arab world and Europe all
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  Speaker 3: emptied of Jews through mass expulsion, ethnic cleansing, genocide, pogrom, etc.,
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  Speaker 3: that that shouldn't exist. And they're the last living Jews. Now,
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  Speaker 3: some people, when they say free Palestine, what they mean
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  Speaker 3: is everyone should be happy and free everywhere in the world,
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  Speaker 3: and there should be no borders and no ethnic nation
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  Speaker 3: states and no tyrannies and everybody should be happy and free.
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  Speaker 1: It's a call for human rights.
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  Speaker 3: And if that's what you're saying, fantastic. On the ground,
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  Speaker 3: when Hamas says free Palestine, it means destroy this group
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  Speaker 3: of Jews who are the last living Jews in the
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  Speaker 3: eastern hemisphere. And to an Israeli and the American Jews
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  Speaker 3: who talk to Israelis tend to take this view of it,
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  Speaker 3: it means what the people on the ground say it means.
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  Speaker 3: It doesn't mean what a progressive activist at the Columbia
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  Speaker 3: thinks it means. And so it is possible to say
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  Speaker 3: free Palestine and mean something perfectly anodyne and great, like
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  Speaker 3: just fine. It's also possible to say it and mean
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  Speaker 3: basically a genocidal impulse against the Israelis. And now I
• 5:44
  Speaker 3: have to figure out which one you mean. So it's
• 5:47
  Speaker 3: an exhausting wordplay. I don't take it too seriously. I
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  Speaker 3: don't get insulted when people say things. I also don't
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  Speaker 3: care about it. I want to know in plain language,
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  Speaker 3: leave aside all the all the What do you actually
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  Speaker 3: want to see?
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  Speaker 2: You know, the crazy thing about that is education, right?
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: Out of everybody I asked that question to, right, you're
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: the only one that detailed and answered in that way.
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  Speaker 1: I told you the same exact thing.
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  Speaker 3: We had a whole conversation about.
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  Speaker 1: Meaning of the free power of time. I told you
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  Speaker 1: that some people use it as a call for human
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  Speaker 1: rights and self-determination, and some people, when they hear it,
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  Speaker 1: they feel like somebody's calling for the elimination of Israel.
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  Speaker 2: Most of the time when you hear it, it's... People
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  Speaker 2: talk about it as the elimination of Israel, right?
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  Speaker 1: I'm not going to say it most of the time.
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: A lot of times when people say it, that's what
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  Speaker 2: it's said to say, right?
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: I disagree with that.
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  Speaker 3: I think one of the problems the pro-Palestine movement has
• 6:39
  Speaker 3: is that the activist core means the bad version. And
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  Speaker 3: a lot of really decent people who are just mobilized
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  Speaker 3: to the cause because they saw terrible suffering on their
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  Speaker 3: phones only even can imagine the good version. But if
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  Speaker 3: the activist core, the people who will act politically using
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  Speaker 3: that love of those decent people to act politically often
• 7:03
  Speaker 3: really do talk about how, I mean, to the point
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  Speaker 3: where you get these like Palestinian poets and activists and
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  Speaker 3: professors who just talk about all the Jews leaving. You
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  Speaker 3: know what it's called when you want millions of people
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  Speaker 3: who have their own culture, their own society, two million schoolchildren,
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  Speaker 3: their own language, and they all have to leave? You
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  Speaker 3: know what that's called? And that's considered a legitimate position
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  Speaker 3: to hold in present-day Western American academia.
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  Speaker 1: It's called what? Ethnic cleansing?
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's ethnic cleansing at least. And if you're willing
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  Speaker 3: to do it violently, it's more.
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  Speaker 1: That's what pro-Palestinian people say, though. That's their whole argument.
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  Speaker 3: That's what a lot of the activist core just say
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  Speaker 3: out loud and what these marchers down the streets of
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  Speaker 3: New York are screaming. And then the genuinely– totally decent
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  Speaker 3: people who are like, I just want the Palestinians to
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  Speaker 3: be okay. Like, they're living under military rule. Like, this
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  Speaker 3: is not– They mean that, but the activist core will
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  Speaker 3: use there to go to bad places. And this is
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  Speaker 3: not a small point. This is not a moral debate,
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  Speaker 3: what we're having here. This is not like, oh, you
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  Speaker 3: should be good and not bad. If you come to
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  Speaker 3: the Israelis and you tell the Israelis, free Palestine, meaning
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  Speaker 3: you all need to die, you haven't done damage to
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  Speaker 3: the Israelis. You convince the Israelis they can't give an
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  Speaker 3: inch to the Palestinians. In other words, the harm you've
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  Speaker 3: done by taking that radical view on Israel It's to Palestinians.
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  Speaker 3: Because then the Israelis are not moving. We have polls
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  Speaker 3: on this, tragic, awful polls of Israelis and Palestinians, where 90%,
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  Speaker 3: there was this huge poll conducted by Palestinian pollsters of
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  Speaker 3: Palestinians and Israeli pollsters of Israelis through universities, very, very
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  Speaker 3: serious people. The guy who polled the Palestinians was the
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  Speaker 3: guy Gallup uses to poll Palestinians. And this was last year,
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  Speaker 3: and one of the questions they asked was, what do
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  Speaker 3: you think the other side wants to do to you?
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  Speaker 3: And there were a bunch of options. I don't know what,
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  Speaker 3: two states, coexistence, and then worse things. And one of
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  Speaker 3: them was eliminate you. 90% of Israeli Jews and 90%
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  Speaker 3: of Palestinians picked that option for what the other side
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  Speaker 3: wants to do to me. In other words, Israelis and
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  Speaker 3: Americans are not part of the story. Israelis and Palestinians
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  Speaker 3: are immune to foreign pressure because they genuinely believe that
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  Speaker 3: the other side wants to You can't moralize at Palestinians
• 9:19
  Speaker 3: to get them to stop committing a terror attack. You
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  Speaker 3: can't moralize at the Israelis to get them to disarm
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  Speaker 3: their army because the other side is coming to murder
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  Speaker 3: my kids. And that's that's deep progressives on both sides
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  Speaker 3: believe this about the other side. Everybody believes this about
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  Speaker 3: the other side.
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  Speaker 1: I don't think the problem I'm having is the language. Right.
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  Speaker 1: Like you said, Israelis, shouldn't you be specific and say.
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  Speaker 1: The Israeli government led by Bibi Netanyahu. When you're talking
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: about Palestinians, shouldn't you say Hamas as opposed to saying
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: Palestinians versus Israelis?
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  Speaker 3: You absolutely have to distinguish. In the case of this poll,
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  Speaker 3: the tragedy of this poll is that that's what the
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  Speaker 3: ordinary people think, that the other side's really coming to.
• 10:00
  Speaker 3: eliminate them. And by the way, they got all the
• 10:03
  Speaker 3: data points to prove it. There's infinite quotes in it,
• 10:06
  Speaker 3: you know. Hamas still promises more October 7th today and
• 10:10
  Speaker 3: for all time until Israel's all gone. And those statements
• 10:14
  Speaker 3: from Hamas make the news in Israel. They don't make
• 10:16
  Speaker 3: the news in America. So I'm like, Hamas wants to
• 10:18
  Speaker 3: kill us all. And an American will say to me, relax. Like,
• 10:21
  Speaker 3: what are you crazy? I'm like, no, but actually in
• 10:23
  Speaker 3: my news cycle, that's front and center. And we're all
• 10:26
  Speaker 3: in different algorithms, so you don't see it. In terms
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: of the distinctions, absolutely. Absolutely. I think we're led by
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  Speaker 3: the worst government that has ever led Israel in the
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  Speaker 3: history of Israel.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: See, now I can talk to you.
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  Speaker 2: And why do you think that?
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  Speaker 3: It's catastrophically incompetent. You have to go to a war
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  Speaker 3: in which, let's imagine, all right? I'm not a general.
• 10:57
  Speaker 3: I tapped out of the army at sergeant. And I
• 11:00
  Speaker 3: wasn't a very good sergeant. But the point is, you
• 11:04
  Speaker 3: have to go to a war that's going to be
• 11:05
  Speaker 3: fought in a civilian space. And that happens quite often
• 11:09
  Speaker 3: in modern times. And the Americans had to do it. Many,
• 11:12
  Speaker 3: many armies have to do it. And there's going to
• 11:15
  Speaker 3: be a lot of destruction. And let's imagine that it's
• 11:17
  Speaker 3: a completely legitimate war. You can argue whether it's a
• 11:20
  Speaker 3: legitimate war, but let's imagine it is. If you're going
• 11:24
  Speaker 3: to cause that much destruction, shouldn't you tell a story
• 11:28
  Speaker 3: of the war that explains what you want from it?
• 11:33
  Speaker 3: In other words, is the Gaza war denazification? America burns
• 11:39
  Speaker 3: cities to the ground. Japan, even worse. The bombing of Dresden,
• 11:43
  Speaker 3: the Hiroshima bomb, burns cities to the ground. The goal,
• 11:48
  Speaker 3: by the way, generals in the Pacific Command, the American
• 11:51
  Speaker 3: generals of the Pacific Command talked openly, you could go
• 11:53
  Speaker 3: look this up, these quotes, about exterminating the last of
• 11:56
  Speaker 3: the Japanese from the earth because there are people that
• 11:58
  Speaker 3: can never be trusted. But the actual policy goal was
• 12:02
  Speaker 3: to rebuild a free, happy, safe, and non-confrontational, non-aggressive Japan
• 12:07
  Speaker 3: and Germany. And America then invested billions in the Marshall Plan.
• 12:12
  Speaker 3: So it's a terrible war. That's what it takes to
• 12:15
  Speaker 3: pull the kind of regime that the Nazis represent, the
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: kind of ideology that the extremists who ran Japan at
• 12:21
  Speaker 3: the time represent. That's what it takes to literally rip
• 12:23
  Speaker 3: them out of Japanese society and politics. But the goal
• 12:27
  Speaker 3: afterwards is a new day, a new dawn, a new freedom,
• 12:30
  Speaker 3: a new prosperity. This is an Israeli government that had
• 12:34
  Speaker 3: to go to this kind of terrible war. Now, you
• 12:36
  Speaker 3: can argue it went over, it went here, it went there,
• 12:38
  Speaker 3: but this was not going to be a gentle war,
• 12:40
  Speaker 3: even if it was fought exactly the way every progressive
• 12:43
  Speaker 3: hopes it was fought. It was still going to hurt
• 12:44
  Speaker 3: civilians tremendously.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: I mean, that's war.
• 12:46
  Speaker 3: That's war, especially a war in a densely populated... Tell
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  Speaker 3: the freaking story. Talk about how we need Hamas out.
• 12:54
  Speaker 3: We need Hamas gone. Hamas will never stop these wars.
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  Speaker 3: It will never not come for our kids. And when
• 12:59
  Speaker 3: Hamas is out, Gaza is born into a new day.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: It'll be big.
• 13:03
  Speaker 3: It'll be beautiful. Gaza has natural gas off the coast.
• 13:07
  Speaker 3: Gaza could be an emirate.
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  Speaker 1: That'll never be an excuse for 20,000 kids being killed.
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  Speaker 1: Over 20,000.
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  Speaker 3: I'm not talking about that at all. First of all,
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  Speaker 3: I don't know what excuses means. I don't excuse anything.
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  Speaker 1: There's no justification.
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  Speaker 3: It wouldn't justify anything. Like if you fight a war
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: and in that course of that war you commit a crime,
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: the fact that the goal of the war is a
• 13:29
  Speaker 3: good legitimate goal is not justification for committing a crime
• 13:32
  Speaker 3: during the war. But my government refused to say this
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  Speaker 3: is about getting rid of Hamas and when Hamas is gone,
• 13:40
  Speaker 3: Gaza has that new day. And most Israelis, and I
• 13:44
  Speaker 3: have family members who have spent hundreds and hundreds of
• 13:48
  Speaker 3: days in the army, in Gaza, in Lebanon. You know,
• 13:54
  Speaker 3: all of us have been sacrificing constantly. And they didn't
• 13:58
  Speaker 3: go to these wars to destroy anyone. They went to
• 14:02
  Speaker 3: these wars to kill Hamas, who will never stop coming
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: for our kids and declare it publicly. And my government
• 14:10
  Speaker 3: has refused to do this most basic thing that the
• 14:16
  Speaker 3: Israelis actually went to fight, believe in, which is this
• 14:19
  Speaker 3: is about the enemy. This is not about the people.
• 14:22
  Speaker 3: And so, yes, we are led in the most delicate
• 14:25
  Speaker 3: moment in Israel's history by the most incompetent fools, whoever
• 14:29
  Speaker 3: led us.
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: Do you ever have problems for the criticism?
• 14:32
  Speaker 3: I'm going to lose friends.
• 14:33
  Speaker 6: What?
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: Do you ever get into any problems?
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: Always tell the truth. You'll be fine.
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: For the criticism that you have.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: Of the Israeli government?
• 14:40
  Speaker 5: No.
• 14:41
  Speaker 3: The majority of Jews I talk to, the majority of
• 14:44
  Speaker 3: Israelis I talk to agree with me. Some of them
• 14:47
  Speaker 3: are a little angry with me because, you know, Netanyahu,
• 14:51
  Speaker 3: the scale of the failure is just shocking. Like, Netanyahu
• 14:55
  Speaker 3: hasn't spoken. So in this government, every Israeli government is
• 14:58
  Speaker 3: a coalition. You guys don't have those. But in a
• 15:01
  Speaker 3: parliamentary system, you can have a coalition of like five parties.
• 15:03
  Speaker 3: They don't agree on anything, but they agree to run
• 15:05
  Speaker 3: together and Each one gets a little piece of policy
• 15:08
  Speaker 3: that they control, and that's how a coalition works. That's
• 15:10
  Speaker 3: how it works in Austria and Latvia. A lot of
• 15:12
  Speaker 3: democracies work that way. The most extreme parties in Israel
• 15:16
  Speaker 3: are in this coalition. I mean, Itamar Ben-Gvir is this
• 15:20
  Speaker 3: guy who is the most extreme... There's no humans to
• 15:23
  Speaker 3: the right of him in Israeli politics. He's literally the edge.
• 15:26
  Speaker 3: And he's in his government. And he has said that
• 15:29
  Speaker 3: the goal of the war is to get rid of
• 15:31
  Speaker 3: all the Gazans. And you sit there and you're like.
• 15:38
  Speaker 3: Now, if that's not what most Israelis think the goal
• 15:39
  Speaker 3: of the war is, and if that's not what the
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: soldiers are dying, fighting Hamas are dying for, and if
• 15:44
  Speaker 3: that's not what most Israelis... But that's what the guy says, right?
• 15:47
  Speaker 3: So that's a self-inflicted wound, but it's not just that. Netanyahu,
• 15:52
  Speaker 3: because Ben-Gur has the deciding vote in the coalition because
• 15:56
  Speaker 3: it was a narrow election, he actually got elected with
• 15:59
  Speaker 3: just short of the popular vote. I don't know if
• 16:01
  Speaker 3: you guys ever happens in your system that you can
• 16:03
  Speaker 3: win without the popular vote, but... I'm joking. I apologize.
• 16:08
  Speaker 3: But it's a very close coalition. And Netanyahu doesn't speak
• 16:13
  Speaker 3: about the war. A little bit when Trump gets angry
• 16:15
  Speaker 3: at him for looking so awful and making Trump look
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: bad because of it, then Netanyahu will say something about
• 16:21
  Speaker 3: Gaza having a better future. But the fact is, when
• 16:25
  Speaker 3: Trump came up with the peace plan, with the board
• 16:27
  Speaker 3: of peace, it's this plan where Gaza is going to
• 16:30
  Speaker 3: be rebuilt. There's going to be huge Arab money that
• 16:33
  Speaker 3: Everyone's on board. The Arab countries are on board. The
• 16:35
  Speaker 3: thing passed the UN Security Council. This is the official
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: international community plan for rebuilding Gaza. It's all in place.
• 16:41
  Speaker 3: And Netanyahu's on board. Maybe because of Trump's pressure.
• 16:45
  Speaker 6: I don't know.
• 16:45
  Speaker 3: But Netanyahu's on board. That didn't actually cost him his government.
• 16:48
  Speaker 3: It didn't enrage Israelis. Netanyahu has refused to just say
• 16:56
  Speaker 3: this is a war because he's dealing with these far
• 17:00
  Speaker 3: rightists he depends on for his government. This is a
• 17:03
  Speaker 3: war that needs to have a good end, and that's
• 17:05
  Speaker 3: the purpose of the war.
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: The guy you just named, if he says things like that,
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: why do people get mad when they say it's a genocide?
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: He's literally telling you he wants to commit genocide if
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: he says he wants to get rid of all Godliness.
• 17:18
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 17:18
  Speaker 3: I mean, I don't know if you want to nitpick.
• 17:20
  Speaker 3: He's talking about ethnic cleansing. I know that sounds like nitpicking.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's genocide, ethnic cleansing. It's the same thing.
• 17:26
  Speaker 3: It's not the same thing. It's just that both are monstrous,
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: but they're very different. The Jews in the 20th century
• 17:31
  Speaker 3: had one great genocide and maybe 25 ethnic cleansings. And
• 17:35
  Speaker 3: the ethnic cleansings are considered the success story because they
• 17:38
  Speaker 3: all moved to Israel and built Israel. Genocide is worse,
• 17:42
  Speaker 3: but ethnic cleansing is so bad that if someone around
• 17:47
  Speaker 3: the world hears that and says, well, that sounds kind
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: of genocidal.
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: but if you say you want if we know 20,000
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: over 20,000 kids have been killed and you say I
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: want to get rid of all guardians did he say
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: kill or get rid of what he said no no
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: he wants them to move okay so that yeah he
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: doesn't want them to die yeah I know but it's
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: a thin line between ethnic cleansing.
• 18:06
  Speaker 4: And genocide but the words are different it's a huge.
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: Moral I don't think he cares it's a.
• 18:10
  Speaker 3: Huge moral line but it's like do you want to
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: I don't want to I mean I don't want to
• 18:16
  Speaker 3: go down yes ethnic cleansing is so evil that it's
• 18:19
  Speaker 3: evil enough yes And.
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: I think we get caught up in words, like even
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: with the free Palestine thing, what is the proper way
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: to call for the national liberation for Palestinian people? If
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: free Palestine is being demonized?
• 18:30
  Speaker 3: They need to be free. They need to be independent.
• 18:32
  Speaker 3: They need to have self-determination. They need to have their
• 18:34
  Speaker 3: own state under the sun. They need to be able
• 18:36
  Speaker 3: to be masters of their own fate. They're living under
• 18:38
  Speaker 3: military rule. That's a fact that's not relevant to any
• 18:41
  Speaker 3: of the vocabulary you use. And that's not tenable. That's
• 18:44
  Speaker 3: not sustainable. That can't be the future. there's so many
• 18:49
  Speaker 3: ways to say it. But there's also this addiction. I
• 18:53
  Speaker 3: got to tell you, I think we've all become abstractions.
• 18:56
  Speaker 3: You know, instead of talking about real people, we're abstractions.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: I agree.
• 19:00
  Speaker 3: People don't understand what an ordinary Israeli sees. And they
• 19:04
  Speaker 3: don't understand, I think, also what an ordinary Palestinian sees.
• 19:06
  Speaker 3: Because an ordinary Palestinian absolutely hates the Israelis, absolutely sees
• 19:10
  Speaker 3: the Israelis coming for them. But wow, are they trapped.
• 19:14
  Speaker 3: They hate their leadership in Ramallah, the Mahmoud Abbas government
• 19:17
  Speaker 3: of the P.A., They hate Hamas. Even as they are
• 19:21
  Speaker 3: ennobled by Hamas's great war and sacrifice for them, they
• 19:25
  Speaker 3: think Hamas ruined their lives at the same time. The
• 19:27
  Speaker 3: same people in the same minds can think these complicated things.
• 19:30
  Speaker 3: And nobody really has a conversation about what those ordinary
• 19:35
  Speaker 3: people think. I come from the Israelis, and I got
• 19:38
  Speaker 3: to tell you, I agree with the mainstream Israeli view.
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: And the mainstream Israeli view is basically there is this
• 19:48
  Speaker 3: ideological world in the Middle East. East. It has a name.
• 19:51
  Speaker 3: It's an ideology. It has a history. It's 150 years
• 19:54
  Speaker 3: of a movement, of a theology that's coming for us,
• 19:57
  Speaker 3: that's coming to destroy us. If you're an adult Israeli,
• 20:00
  Speaker 3: you have never lived a day of your life without
• 20:02
  Speaker 3: hearing some Middle Eastern leader demand your extermination. And it's exhausting.
• 20:09
  Speaker 3: And when Hamas comes for us and an outsider will
• 20:12
  Speaker 3: look in and say, well, all right, but there's this occupation,
• 20:14
  Speaker 3: so they have a reason. The Iranian regime is obsessed
• 20:18
  Speaker 3: with destroying Israel. Iran has no border with Israel. It
• 20:22
  Speaker 3: has no interest in Israel. Iran doesn't believe in rights.
• 20:26
  Speaker 3: It doesn't give its own people rights. It's not doing
• 20:28
  Speaker 3: this for Palestinian rights. Why is the Iranian regime obsessed
• 20:32
  Speaker 3: with Israel to the point where they declared a national
• 20:34
  Speaker 3: holiday called Quds Day, which is this huge holiday for
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: the regime where they march their army through the streets
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: of Tehran to celebrate the great power of the resistance.
• 20:44
  Speaker 3: What the hell is that? And that's to murder my people.
• 20:47
  Speaker 3: That's what that's about. They founded an organization called Hezbollah
• 20:50
  Speaker 3: in Lebanon, a Shia group that was stockpiling 200,000 missiles.
• 20:55
  Speaker 3: Until we blew up so many of these stockpiles in
• 20:59
  Speaker 3: South Lebanon, all of which are under these villages of
• 21:01
  Speaker 3: South Lebanon, 200,000 missiles and rockets were put there To
• 21:05
  Speaker 3: be used, not to sit there and not be used.
• 21:08
  Speaker 3: We are a tiny, tiny country that would set our
• 21:11
  Speaker 3: cities on fire. And Iran put them there to actually
• 21:14
  Speaker 3: do that one day. And so Israelis are looking around
• 21:17
  Speaker 3: the Middle East and they see Hamas embedded in this
• 21:20
  Speaker 3: much larger architecture, this much larger system. I don't know
• 21:23
  Speaker 3: what to call it.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: Alliance.
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: They call themselves, by the way, the mukawama, the resistance.
• 21:29
  Speaker 3: And when you hear people screaming resistance in the streets
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: of New York, long live the resistance. It's a mass
• 21:36
  Speaker 3: murdering genocidal ideology that demands that my people die. And
• 21:40
  Speaker 3: that's totally kosher because they've been coded brown and I've
• 21:43
  Speaker 3: been coded white. And so I don't get to complain.
• 21:47
  Speaker 3: And that's the conversation that you have in the streets
• 21:49
  Speaker 3: of New York with these activists.
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: Why does it sometimes feel like we're being asked to
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: understand Jewish trauma without giving Palestinian trauma that same understanding?
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: Because everything you just said could be a Palestinian that
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: would say the exact same thing. Just reversed.
• 22:04
  Speaker 3: I think you can't get anywhere if you don't understand
• 22:06
  Speaker 3: all the trauma. Let's say I want peace. I got
• 22:10
  Speaker 3: four kids. My oldest is 15. He's a pretty serious athlete.
• 22:16
  Speaker 3: I know you can't tell, but I was once in
• 22:18
  Speaker 3: the infantry. He terrifies me because he's going to be
• 22:25
  Speaker 3: something potentially pretty elite and go to do things that
• 22:28
  Speaker 3: are dangerous. When an Israeli kid goes into the army,
• 22:31
  Speaker 3: it's not the Belgian army. He's actually going to have
• 22:33
  Speaker 3: to fight a war. So let's imagine that I want
• 22:36
  Speaker 3: peace desperately, not because somebody overseas yelled at me about it.
• 22:42
  Speaker 3: How do I do it? How do I actually do
• 22:44
  Speaker 3: it today? If I go to the Palestinian political world
• 22:48
  Speaker 3: and I say, hey, guys, let's make peace, they'll say, okay, well,
• 22:51
  Speaker 3: we need land. We need a place. We need a country.
• 22:53
  Speaker 3: We need freedom. And I'm like, great. Let's split the land.
• 22:59
  Speaker 3: This was proposed in 1937 for the first time. Let's
• 23:03
  Speaker 3: finally do some kind of a split, right? And then
• 23:06
  Speaker 3: I meet Hamas on the other side, which is the
• 23:09
  Speaker 3: most popular political movement among the Palestinians. And Hamas says, no,
• 23:13
  Speaker 3: we're not splitting. That's offense against God if we split.
• 23:17
  Speaker 3: Palestine is something called Waqf. It's a Muslim trust, according
• 23:20
  Speaker 3: to Hamas, meaning you can't compromise on it. You can't
• 23:22
  Speaker 3: give any of it away. So peace with the Jews
• 23:26
  Speaker 3: for Hamas is the Jews all leave, or we kill
• 23:29
  Speaker 3: them until they leave. And I need to then find
• 23:34
  Speaker 3: among the Palestinians the anti-Hamas. And then I need to
• 23:38
  Speaker 3: find among the Palestinians the people who don't like Hamas,
• 23:41
  Speaker 3: and there's a lot of them, and stop undermining them by,
• 23:46
  Speaker 3: if I'm behaving toward them badly, that undermines them inside
• 23:52
  Speaker 3: the Palestinian conversation. So I have to find ways to
• 23:54
  Speaker 3: strengthen them and then come to them and make some
• 23:57
  Speaker 3: kind of an agreement with them. And then back on
• 23:59
  Speaker 3: my side, because the only voice that, The only Palestinian
• 24:02
  Speaker 3: voice Israelis ever hear is Hamas. No other Palestinians talking
• 24:05
  Speaker 3: to Israelis. And all Hamas is saying to them is,
• 24:07
  Speaker 3: we're going to kill you. So we need to find
• 24:10
  Speaker 3: these voices from each side that says to the other side,
• 24:12
  Speaker 3: we're not coming to kill you. And that's an alliance
• 24:15
  Speaker 3: that can move forward. And that only comes by knowing
• 24:18
  Speaker 3: both stories.
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: But you can't do that with the current Israeli government, clearly, right?
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: Not if you're telling us that, you know, the guy
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: said he wants to get rid of all people from Gaza.
• 24:26
  Speaker 3: The far right of Israel is not only incapable of
• 24:29
  Speaker 3: doing it, it's totally uninterested in doing it.
• 24:31
  Speaker 4: But do you see that changing?
• 24:32
  Speaker 5: Because there's an election coming up in about two weeks.
• 24:35
  Speaker 5: So how do people feel about making that change?
• 24:39
  Speaker 3: There's a lot of anger and bitterness at this government.
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: It was before October 7th. I think people forget watching
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: all the Israelis in the street protesting against Bibi Netanyahu
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: before October 7th.
• 24:50
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but there's also a sense that we're really threatened.
• 24:52
  Speaker 3: There are real enemies at the gate. And Netanyahu, after
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: October 7th, led a kind of military return Gaza is
• 25:01
  Speaker 3: the Gaza debate, legitimate debate. But set aside for a moment,
• 25:05
  Speaker 3: Hezbollah started rocketing Israeli cities in the north from day one,
• 25:09
  Speaker 3: from October 8th, emptied out hundreds of thousands of Israelis,
• 25:12
  Speaker 3: demolished half of cities, and never stopped until the great
• 25:16
  Speaker 3: offensive in Lebanon that finally stopped them. And Iran, the
• 25:19
  Speaker 3: offensive on Iran, Netanyahu gets, that's very popular among Israelis
• 25:23
  Speaker 3: because they were building a missile arsenal to destroy us.
• 25:25
  Speaker 3: And they weren't pretending otherwise. It's weird to me to
• 25:29
  Speaker 3: come into a conversation in the United States among progressive activists.
• 25:33
  Speaker 3: I don't understand how it's even progressive. And I'm not
• 25:36
  Speaker 3: allowed to notice the ideology of the Iranian regime toward
• 25:40
  Speaker 3: my people. That's a weird thing. But for an Israeli,
• 25:43
  Speaker 3: that's a very real presence. It's a very real threat.
• 25:47
  Speaker 3: Netanyahu gets a lot of credit on that. And so
• 25:50
  Speaker 3: it's a debate among Israelis between all the stuff they
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: don't like about Netanyahu. There's also corruption stuff with Likud,
• 25:56
  Speaker 3: how Likud has run the country. There's also the question
• 25:58
  Speaker 3: of equal draft. You know, some people draft and some
• 26:02
  Speaker 3: people don't have to draft. With the ultra-Orthodox, I don't
• 26:05
  Speaker 3: know how much you follow this stuff, but this is
• 26:07
  Speaker 3: very big in Israeli politics. There's a lot, a lot
• 26:09
  Speaker 3: of questions of standard of living and crime and all
• 26:11
  Speaker 3: the stuff that normal countries have that don't have to
• 26:13
  Speaker 3: deal with these things. But the fundamental question is a
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: security question. And there, there's a lot of reasons to
• 26:18
  Speaker 3: vote against Netanyahu and some good reasons to vote for
• 26:21
  Speaker 3: Netanyahu in the eyes of a lot of Israeli voters.
• 26:24
  Speaker 3: It's not really a referendum on the far right. Like,
• 26:26
  Speaker 3: the Israelis are not... They don't think that Ben-Gvir, by
• 26:29
  Speaker 3: and large, Israelis have every opinion under the sun. The
• 26:32
  Speaker 3: question of voting for Netanyahu is not the question necessarily
• 26:34
  Speaker 3: for most Israelis of voting Ben-Gvir. Ben-Gvir himself is the 5%
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: furthest right of Israeli politics. I don't know. Who would
• 26:42
  Speaker 3: that be in America? The 5% furthest right?
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: 5% furthest right? I have no idea right now.
• 26:48
  Speaker 3: Well, probably not somebody... All that pleasant. So there's an election.
• 26:54
  Speaker 3: Netanyahu right now is not winning, but neither is the
• 26:58
  Speaker 3: other side. And so it might be a hung parliament
• 27:01
  Speaker 3: that then goes to a second election. We don't quite know.
• 27:05
  Speaker 3: One really interesting thing about the coming election is that
• 27:08
  Speaker 3: it could be decided by Arab turnout. So Arab voters,
• 27:15
  Speaker 3: they oscillate hugely in turnout. They go down to 50% turnout,
• 27:19
  Speaker 3: and then they go up to about 67, 68% turnout.
• 27:23
  Speaker 3: I just triggered all the kids in the world by
• 27:24
  Speaker 3: saying 67. And if they turn out in huge numbers,
• 27:33
  Speaker 3: it becomes almost impossible, I think, in the math for
• 27:35
  Speaker 3: Netanyahu to win. And if they turn out in those
• 27:37
  Speaker 3: low numbers, it becomes much harder for the opposition leader,
• 27:40
  Speaker 3: the Eisenkot, to win. And so that deep irony... is
• 27:44
  Speaker 3: that this Israeli election post-October 7, post the war, might
• 27:49
  Speaker 3: be decided by Arab-Israeli turnout.
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: If Netanyahu goes, has anything really changed for Palestinians?
• 27:57
  Speaker 3: That's a good question. First of all, yes. Some very simple,
• 28:01
  Speaker 3: straightforward things changed dramatically. The extremist Israelis attacking Palestinian villagers,
• 28:10
  Speaker 3: this is a debate I have with some Israelis. It's
• 28:14
  Speaker 3: It looks to the world like a huge phenomenon. It's
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: not a huge phenomenon in the sense that it's a
• 28:18
  Speaker 3: few hundred people.
• 28:19
  Speaker 4: Are you talking about the West Bank?
• 28:21
  Speaker 3: The West Bank.
• 28:21
  Speaker 4: Okay.
• 28:23
  Speaker 3: But it's terroristic. So, you know, a small terroristic phenomenon
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: has an immense effect.
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: It's like, right.
• 28:30
  Speaker 3: So it's a huge problem. Palestinians feel it profoundly. Any
• 28:35
  Speaker 3: Israeli government that isn't this one would rein it in
• 28:38
  Speaker 3: with an iron fist. Every single one. And another Israeli
• 28:43
  Speaker 3: government that isn't led by these people probably would stop
• 28:47
  Speaker 3: talking about ethnic cleansing as if it's fun. And any
• 28:50
  Speaker 3: Israeli government other than this one, Netanyahu, there's a position
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: in the prime minister's office that is supposed to coordinate
• 29:00
  Speaker 3: public diplomacy, information war, propaganda, that whole aspect of war policy.
• 29:07
  Speaker 3: Countries should be able to speak and try and argue
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: their case, right? It wasn't, there was nobody in the
• 29:13
  Speaker 3: job for the first two years of this war. Like, okay,
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: I was expecting you all to fall off your chairs. Like,
• 29:21
  Speaker 3: you'd think the Israelis would notice that Hamas is fighting
• 29:26
  Speaker 3: a global information war, while the Israelis think that the
• 29:29
  Speaker 3: war is on the ground in Gaza or Lebanon. And
• 29:32
  Speaker 3: they never noticed. They just, the scale of the stupidity
• 29:36
  Speaker 3: and the failure is unbelievable.
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: I mean, because it's awful. to believe that Israel would
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: lose a global misinformation war. Because we can't sit here
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: and act like Bibi Netanyahu isn't one of the key
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: people that puts out misinformation. He's really good at that.
• 29:52
  Speaker 3: He's done nothing. He said nothing. He hasn't put out misinformation.
• 29:56
  Speaker 4: Have you?
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: What exactly?
• 29:59
  Speaker 3: My complaint about him is that he never makes any
• 30:01
  Speaker 3: argument of any kind of any case of any.
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: Oh, he did. He did essentially say that, you know,
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: he forced Donald Trump into this war. He did say that.
• 30:12
  Speaker 3: Like, I don't know specifically which quote you're talking about,
• 30:14
  Speaker 3: but I can believe it.
• 30:16
  Speaker 6: But when people walked out and he called people moral cowards.
• 30:21
  Speaker 5: Right.
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: Like, yeah.
• 30:22
  Speaker 6: Just listen to what you're saying. He's making it seem
• 30:25
  Speaker 6: one way about this war when it's a different way
• 30:27
  Speaker 6: and challenging anybody who feels differently.
• 30:28
  Speaker 4: That's misinformation.
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 30:30
  Speaker 3: I don't feel like he's convincing anybody. I don't feel
• 30:32
  Speaker 3: like he's convincing me.
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: I mean, and.
• 30:37
  Speaker 3: There's no professionals actually running this on the Israeli side.
• 30:41
  Speaker 3: And and that's a problem because Hamas can win the
• 30:46
  Speaker 3: information war and win tremendous things.
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: And it.
• 30:50
  Speaker 3: It bolsters, when the Israelis are incompetent on these questions,
• 30:53
  Speaker 3: it bolsters the bad forces, not the good forces. And
• 30:59
  Speaker 3: Netanyahu also will not challenge his own extremists. And so
• 31:06
  Speaker 3: my country is going to pay the price for that
• 31:10
  Speaker 3: colossal incompetence and callousness. But, you know, none of that
• 31:15
  Speaker 3: is what Israelis actually think. None of that is what's
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: actually going through the heads of Israelis. That's just political
• 31:20
  Speaker 3: elites making every mistake they can.
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: What's your thoughts on Americans?
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: Hold on. It was an interview with Israeli TV network
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: Channel 14 when Netanyahu told Israeli voters that he had
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: spent close to 1,000 hours on American TV and used
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: his intimate knowledge of U.S. leaders to bring the U.S.
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: into the war against Iran.
• 31:39
  Speaker 3: It doesn't get dumber than that. What do you do
• 31:43
  Speaker 3: with that? What do you do with it? That's your
• 31:44
  Speaker 3: prime minister and the most sensitive moment in your country's history.
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: Now what do you do?
• 31:48
  Speaker 3: I'm sorry. I'm going through a therapy session here.
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: I was going to ask two questions. What are your
• 31:54
  Speaker 2: thoughts on America's involvement in their stance of what they've
• 31:58
  Speaker 2: been doing? And two, what are your thoughts on gays
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: for Palestine?
• 32:02
  Speaker 4: What?
• 32:02
  Speaker 3: America's involvement in Iran, in the Iran war. Iran is
• 32:12
  Speaker 3: your enemy. Iran claims to be your enemy. Ayatollah Khomeini,
• 32:19
  Speaker 3: who founded the Iranian regime, believed in this particular kind
• 32:25
  Speaker 3: of Shiism. People got to Google a guy named Ali Shariati.
• 32:29
  Speaker 3: He's this theologian who turned Shia Islam into a kind
• 32:34
  Speaker 3: of anti-imperialist Leninism. I'm just showing off. But if you
• 32:40
  Speaker 3: read Ali Shariati and a guy named Jalali, literally on ChatGPT,
• 32:44
  Speaker 3: people shouldn't work hard, but They'll understand this Iranian regime,
• 32:48
  Speaker 3: and this Iranian regime thinks that America is the great
• 32:52
  Speaker 3: force of evil in the world that has to be overthrown.
• 32:55
  Speaker 3: And they say it publicly, and Khamenei, the guy who
• 32:58
  Speaker 3: was supreme leader for 35 years, something like that, until
• 33:01
  Speaker 3: he was killed last year, said this almost every week.
• 33:05
  Speaker 3: Iran hates America, is anti-America, and Iran is plugging itself
• 33:09
  Speaker 3: into the Chinese global infrastructure to challenge America.
• 33:13
  Speaker 5: Mm-hmm.
• 33:14
  Speaker 3: A few months before the war, I have this sneaking suspicion.
• 33:17
  Speaker 3: I don't have any contacts in Washington or anything. But
• 33:21
  Speaker 3: I have this sneaking suspicion that the American entering of
• 33:24
  Speaker 3: the war with Iran has something to do with China,
• 33:27
  Speaker 3: which is to say, China was selling Iran supersonic missiles
• 33:34
  Speaker 3: that would have been able to take out American aircraft
• 33:36
  Speaker 3: carriers in the Indian Ocean. And America has spent decades
• 33:42
  Speaker 3: beefing up its military presence, its naval presence in the
• 33:45
  Speaker 3: Strait of Malacca, which is this narrow Strait of Malaysia,
• 33:48
  Speaker 3: through which imports to China and gasoline to China all go.
• 33:51
  Speaker 3: And China and America are playing this kind of shadow war.
• 33:54
  Speaker 3: China has a base. Its first overseas base is in
• 33:56
  Speaker 3: a place called Djibouti, which sits on the Bab el-Mandab Straits,
• 33:59
  Speaker 3: through which 50% of European goods have to pass. The
• 34:02
  Speaker 3: Houthis are now blocking the Bab el-Mandab Straits. That's a
• 34:04
  Speaker 3: huge problem. There's this American-Chinese shadow war everywhere in the world.
• 34:08
  Speaker 3: One of the most important things to know about Trump
• 34:10
  Speaker 3: in Venezuela... is that the oil stopped going to China
• 34:13
  Speaker 3: and suddenly is part of the global markets and helping
• 34:16
  Speaker 3: out America. So there's this huge... Iran is part of
• 34:19
  Speaker 3: that architecture. I think that's a lot of it. Trump
• 34:21
  Speaker 3: has been saying for 20 years Iran can't have the
• 34:23
  Speaker 3: bomb and nothing was going to stop them. And so
• 34:26
  Speaker 3: I think that the American entry into war with Iran
• 34:29
  Speaker 3: is an American interest. You might have screwed it up.
• 34:33
  Speaker 3: You might have done it great. Whether or not the
• 34:34
  Speaker 3: war itself is a good idea, but it wasn't fought
• 34:37
  Speaker 3: for Israel.
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 34:39
  Speaker 3: And Netanyahu, because it was the wrong thing to do,
• 34:43
  Speaker 3: went and said it is. But Israel's interest in fighting
• 34:46
  Speaker 3: Iran is much simpler. Iran wants to destroy us, and
• 34:49
  Speaker 3: we can't let it develop that capability. So my sense,
• 34:53
  Speaker 3: I mean, you guys might know much more than me
• 34:55
  Speaker 3: about this, but my sense is America has plenty of
• 34:57
  Speaker 3: reasons to try and take down this regime.
• 34:59
  Speaker 2: The reason I asked about the gaze for Palestine, and
• 35:02
  Speaker 2: that is a thing, I know it's a thing.
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: It sounded random. Like, why'd you tack that on?
• 35:07
  Speaker 2: The reason I ask is because people were saying that
• 35:10
  Speaker 2: in Palestine, they're so against it. So why are people
• 35:13
  Speaker 2: fighting for it so much? And Trump has been very
• 35:14
  Speaker 2: critical on the organization and their thoughts on it.
• 35:18
  Speaker 3: I assume that if you belong to an organization called
• 35:20
  Speaker 3: Gays for Palestine, that you feel a little self-sacrificial. In
• 35:26
  Speaker 3: other words, even though I would be unsafe in a
• 35:29
  Speaker 3: Hamas-controlled area... I am still going to side with the
• 35:33
  Speaker 3: needs of an oppressed people. You probably feel more self-righteous
• 35:37
  Speaker 3: than you did before. My main concern with Gays for
• 35:40
  Speaker 3: Palestine is that you've got to also be criticizing the
• 35:45
  Speaker 3: evils on that side. Not because you've got to take
• 35:48
  Speaker 3: the moral, exact thread, the moral needle through, you know,
• 35:52
  Speaker 3: but because everything that is ever done anywhere in support
• 35:56
  Speaker 3: of Hamas is the demolition of the Palestinian cause. And
• 36:02
  Speaker 3: so many Westerners feeling so self-righteous about how great they
• 36:06
  Speaker 3: are as helpers of the great anti-colonial struggle of the
• 36:10
  Speaker 3: Palestinians end up just bucking up and supporting and, and,
• 36:15
  Speaker 3: and uplifting the forces in Palestinian politics that destroyed everything.
• 36:21
  Speaker 3: I grew up absolutely believing in peace deeply. And my
• 36:27
  Speaker 3: dad was, uh, My dad was a parliamentary aide to
• 36:31
  Speaker 3: a far-left Israeli political leader in the 1970s, Yossi Sarid,
• 36:35
  Speaker 3: who believed in a Palestinian state before it was cool.
• 36:39
  Speaker 3: And he was a rabbi. He was a chairman for
• 36:42
  Speaker 3: Rabbis for Human Rights. And I always thought that, you know,
• 36:46
  Speaker 3: the Palestinians face an injustice, an injustice committed by my people.
• 36:50
  Speaker 3: And if the injustice is ended, everything becomes normal. So
• 36:57
  Speaker 3: I voted for the peace process, and I supported it
• 37:00
  Speaker 3: passionately and identified with it. And then at the height
• 37:04
  Speaker 3: of the peace process in 2000, the Second Intifada began,
• 37:08
  Speaker 3: what they called the Second Intifada, which was this wave
• 37:11
  Speaker 3: of 140 suicide bombings that targeted our kids, our cities, pizzerias, buses.
• 37:16
  Speaker 3: A 7.30 in the morning city bus in Jerusalem is
• 37:19
  Speaker 3: basically a school bus. Kids take the city buses to
• 37:22
  Speaker 3: school in Israel.
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: And I.
• 37:27
  Speaker 3: My own support for the peace process shattered because I
• 37:30
  Speaker 3: suddenly realized on the Palestinian side, there are, I, I
• 37:34
  Speaker 3: grew up in Jerusalem, born in Jerusalem and Jerusalem is 40% Palestinian.
• 37:39
  Speaker 3: You can't not live together and know each, know people.
• 37:43
  Speaker 3: And I went to a university, Hebrew university in Jerusalem,
• 37:45
  Speaker 3: which is 30% Palestinian student body or 25% Palestinian student body.
• 37:50
  Speaker 3: Some of them Arab Israeli, some of them West bank. And, um,
• 37:54
  Speaker 3: I know so many great Palestinians who just want to
• 37:57
  Speaker 3: live a normal life in peace. What are you talking about?
• 38:00
  Speaker 3: Palestinian shopkeepers are going to blow a bus? And it
• 38:02
  Speaker 3: turns out that in Palestinian politics, you've got all these
• 38:04
  Speaker 3: Hamas factions, Hamas-like factions, that they went to war on
• 38:10
  Speaker 3: the peace process. You know what 140 suicide bombings is? Imagine,
• 38:16
  Speaker 3: pick a culture war in America. I'm going to pick one,
• 38:18
  Speaker 3: get canceled, and finally get to sleep a little. Illegal immigrants.
• 38:24
  Speaker 3: Walks into a non-alcoholic bar. We have those in Israel.
• 38:27
  Speaker 3: They're bars for teenagers. There's alcohol in them usually, but
• 38:30
  Speaker 3: don't tell the police. But walks into a non-alcoholic bar
• 38:33
  Speaker 3: and blows up a bomb.
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: Why?
• 38:36
  Speaker 3: Because illegal immigrants in America are being abused. Because the
• 38:40
  Speaker 3: immigration policy is terrible. 20 million people are stuck in
• 38:42
  Speaker 3: this awful thing. What's the response in American politics to
• 38:47
  Speaker 3: a bombing like that?
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 38:49
  Speaker 3: Trump tweets out what? I... told you so right history
• 38:53
  Speaker 3: is easy what's a progressive response the progressives are suddenly
• 38:58
  Speaker 3: got a real problem right i agree with the video
• 39:02
  Speaker 3: the guy put out about how the immigration policy is
• 39:04
  Speaker 3: terrible but he just murdered kids so what do i
• 39:06
  Speaker 3: do right so they put out stuff like this guy
• 39:10
  Speaker 3: actually hurt the cause they put out stuff like this
• 39:12
  Speaker 3: is how bad the cause actually is the problem has
• 39:14
  Speaker 3: gotten now we should need to double right All those
• 39:17
  Speaker 3: things can be true. All those things can be true
• 39:18
  Speaker 3: at once. What happens a week later when there's two
• 39:21
  Speaker 3: more bombings? What happens a month after that when there's 13?
• 39:25
  Speaker 3: What happens over three years with 140? At what point
• 39:28
  Speaker 3: do progressives say, there isn't. The air's been sucked out
• 39:33
  Speaker 3: of the room. Americans love to say we're going to
• 39:36
  Speaker 3: put a pin in it and circle back or something
• 39:37
  Speaker 3: like that. We can't even talk about immigration right now.
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: But you know that's exactly how people feel about Bibi
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: Netanyahu's reaction to October 7th. Literally. Everything you just said
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: is exactly how they feel. It just simply went too far.
• 39:53
  Speaker 3: That's a legitimate position. That's not the position of the activists.
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: I think it is. Yeah?
• 40:00
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 40:01
  Speaker 3: We might be hearing.
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: I mean, these are reasonable ones I speak to. I
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: don't know who... When we say activists, we make these
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: broad statements and broad generalizations. I know a lot of activists,
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: and that's their position.
• 40:12
  Speaker 3: We all live in these information algorithms, right? So maybe
• 40:15
  Speaker 3: we're hearing different people.
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: And bots. Don't ever... And bots, obviously.
• 40:20
  Speaker 3: And I get protesters come to my talks at university
• 40:23
  Speaker 3: campuses or whatever. Any debate on a war is legitimate, serious, real, okay.
• 40:33
  Speaker 3: It's a war. I mean, the worst thing that can
• 40:35
  Speaker 3: happen is that a war would happen and nobody would notice.
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: Like, it wouldn't matter.
• 40:39
  Speaker 3: It's a war. There should be a debate about it.
• 40:40
  Speaker 3: None of it is not kosher.
• 40:42
  Speaker 5: Mm-hmm.
• 40:43
  Speaker 3: But to take it from there to the place where
• 40:46
  Speaker 3: you then have a debate about anti-Zionism and Jews not
• 40:49
  Speaker 3: being allowed to have their own country, and that's fundamentally
• 40:53
  Speaker 3: and always been criminal. And Zionism could never have ended
• 40:55
  Speaker 3: except in this most criminal and evil and terrible version
• 40:59
  Speaker 3: of itself, which is the one particular sliver of the
• 41:01
  Speaker 3: most extremist Israeli, which is where it's taken to, at
• 41:05
  Speaker 3: least in my algorithm. is the place where it becomes
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: just illegitimate bigotry. So yes, absolutely, a debate about the war.
• 41:12
  Speaker 3: I have opinions about the war, if that's interesting, but
• 41:14
  Speaker 3: I'm not like a war scholar or anything like that.
• 41:16
  Speaker 3: I'm just a guy who's following the news as close
• 41:18
  Speaker 3: as I can.
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: Do you believe Palestinians have suffered a historical injustice that
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: Israel has, I guess, a responsibility to acknowledge and help repair?
• 41:30
  Speaker 3: Absolutely. Absolutely. And it doesn't then follow that Israel has
• 41:36
  Speaker 3: to be dismantled. And it doesn't then follow that Israel
• 41:39
  Speaker 3: is into great justice. Can I just give a little, like,
• 41:45
  Speaker 3: a two-minute version of our story?
• 41:46
  Speaker 4: Of course.
• 41:47
  Speaker 3: That isn't told.
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: It don't have to be two minutes. Yeah, of course.
• 41:51
  Speaker 3: I'm expecting to be interrupted. That's how it works in
• 41:55
  Speaker 3: my culture. No, I'm saying, I'm giving you permission. Who
• 42:01
  Speaker 3: are the Israelis? Because, you know, they're not American Jews.
• 42:05
  Speaker 3: And that's so weird because the American conversation about Israelis
• 42:07
  Speaker 3: is filtered through American Jews. And that sometimes means that
• 42:11
  Speaker 3: people don't actually see or hear us. The Israelis are
• 42:14
  Speaker 3: the Jews who couldn't get into America. In 1921, the U.S.
• 42:18
  Speaker 3: Congress made a decision, took a vote that changed the
• 42:20
  Speaker 3: Jewish people forever. For about 40 years, from 1881, there
• 42:24
  Speaker 3: used to be this Tsar Alexander II, the emperor of Russia.
• 42:28
  Speaker 3: He was a great reformer. He abolished serfdom in the 1860s.
• 42:31
  Speaker 3: He And a lot, a lot of Jews in the
• 42:34
  Speaker 3: Russian Empire who were under these anti-Semitic laws, they had
• 42:36
  Speaker 3: to live in the palest settlement. They couldn't work in
• 42:38
  Speaker 3: most professions. Millions of Jews living in the Russian Empire
• 42:41
  Speaker 3: loved this Tsar Alexander II and expected this great reformer
• 42:44
  Speaker 3: who freed the serfs to someday free them and give
• 42:47
  Speaker 3: them equality. And then he's assassinated in 1881. And his son,
• 42:52
  Speaker 3: Alexander III, comes to power. And his son is a
• 42:54
  Speaker 3: reactionary anti-Semitic kid who just washes away all of it,
• 43:00
  Speaker 3: institutes new anti-Semitic laws. And then in 1881 begin, this is,
• 43:04
  Speaker 3: by the way, the origin story of American Jews, if
• 43:06
  Speaker 3: you don't know where they come from, begin these pogroms,
• 43:09
  Speaker 3: these thousands of bottom-up mass murders of Jews in communities
• 43:15
  Speaker 3: throughout Eastern Europe. And Jews begin to flee in their millions,
• 43:19
  Speaker 3: the anti-Semitic laws, the poverty that's forced on them by law,
• 43:22
  Speaker 3: and the violence. The violence that over the next 40
• 43:25
  Speaker 3: years is going to kill a quarter million Jews. The
• 43:27
  Speaker 3: 20th century is the bloodiest century in Jewish history without
• 43:30
  Speaker 3: the Holocaust. It's just the Holocaust is so big, you
• 43:33
  Speaker 3: can't even see the other stuff around in its shadow, right?
• 43:37
  Speaker 3: And they flee. Now, for those 40 years, 1881 to 1921,
• 43:40
  Speaker 3: two and a half million Jews flee Eastern Europe to America.
• 43:45
  Speaker 3: They're American Jews. They're Mel Brooks. They're the bagels of
• 43:48
  Speaker 3: New York. They're the Lower East Side. That's them. And
• 43:53
  Speaker 3: then in 1921, the U.S. Congress makes a decision. It
• 43:56
  Speaker 3: takes a vote, and it passes something called the Emergency
• 43:58
  Speaker 3: Quota Act. Congress says there's too many Jews coming in.
• 44:02
  Speaker 3: They're coming in more and more because the worst atrocities
• 44:05
  Speaker 3: against the Jews are happening in those years, 1918 to
• 44:08
  Speaker 3: 21 in the Russian Civil War. Every army in that
• 44:10
  Speaker 3: civil war comes across the Jewish village. The communists and
• 44:13
  Speaker 3: the white Russians and the Ukrainian nationalists, every army comes
• 44:17
  Speaker 3: across the Jewish village, burns it to the ground. And
• 44:19
  Speaker 3: so the Jews are now fleeing en masse. 1921 alone,
• 44:21
  Speaker 3: there's something like 110,000 Jews land in New York Harbor.
• 44:25
  Speaker 3: And the American Congress passes a law that says no
• 44:28
  Speaker 3: more Jews. And between 1921, 1924, there's an even stricter
• 44:32
  Speaker 3: quota law. It drops down from 110,000 in one year
• 44:36
  Speaker 3: to 10,000. And by the time the Nazis are in
• 44:38
  Speaker 3: power in Germany in 1933, it's down to 2,700. America
• 44:42
  Speaker 3: closes its doors to the Jews. And everybody closes their
• 44:45
  Speaker 3: doors to the Jews. Canada, Britain, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, South Africa,
• 44:52
  Speaker 3: the British Empire closes India to the Jews. You name it,
• 44:56
  Speaker 3: it's closed. The Jews can go nowhere. And that's the moment,
• 44:59
  Speaker 3: in the 40 years when 2.5 million Jews went to America,
• 45:03
  Speaker 3: about 50,000 joined the Zionist movement and moved to the
• 45:06
  Speaker 3: land of Israel, moved to Palestine, whether it was Ottoman
• 45:09
  Speaker 3: Palestine or British-controlled Palestine.
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: 2%?
• 45:12
  Speaker 3: What is that? I don't know math. But whatever, tiny.
• 45:16
  Speaker 3: When do the hundreds of thousands of Jews start to
• 45:18
  Speaker 3: go to the Zionist project in the land of Israel?
• 45:22
  Speaker 3: When the doors close. And then you suddenly, in 1935 alone,
• 45:27
  Speaker 3: You have 65,000 Jews. We call that the fifth Aliyah
• 45:29
  Speaker 3: in Hebrew. 65,000 Jews landed in Israel, and they are,
• 45:34
  Speaker 3: all of them, almost German-speaking. You'll never guess why, in 1935,
• 45:39
  Speaker 3: 65,000 Jews run away from Germany. And that's more than
• 45:44
  Speaker 3: in the 40 years of 1881 to 1921. And that's
• 45:50
  Speaker 3: when the hundreds of thousands show up and begin to
• 45:52
  Speaker 3: show up. And everybody knows about the Holocaust. I don't
• 45:55
  Speaker 3: want to tell you about the Holocaust. I just want
• 45:57
  Speaker 3: to skip to the end of the story. But the
• 45:58
  Speaker 3: end of the story is like two more quick points.
• 46:03
  Speaker 3: After the Holocaust, there are 15 million Jews in the world.
• 46:07
  Speaker 3: Excuse me. After the Holocaust, on European soil, there are
• 46:10
  Speaker 3: 15 million displaced persons. That's people who can't go home.
• 46:13
  Speaker 3: And they start trying to go home. This is the
• 46:16
  Speaker 3: war-ravaged Europe. There's a joke in Europe at the time
• 46:18
  Speaker 3: that no bicycle is being ridden by its owner. You
• 46:21
  Speaker 3: see a bicycle, it's some refugee trying to get home.
• 46:23
  Speaker 3: 15 million people are displaced after the war, and they
• 46:28
  Speaker 3: all try to get home. By the end of 1945,
• 46:30
  Speaker 3: there's 1 million left. 14 million have found their way home.
• 46:34
  Speaker 3: And that 1 million are people who cannot go home.
• 46:36
  Speaker 3: 400,000 of them roughly are Lithuanian, Estonian, Ukrainian, Nazi collaborators.
• 46:41
  Speaker 3: They can't go home because the Soviet Union now rules
• 46:43
  Speaker 3: their countries. They go home, they'll get killed. 250,000 or so,
• 46:47
  Speaker 3: 300,000 are Polish Catholics. Poland has collapsed into war. They
• 46:50
  Speaker 3: can't go home. And a quarter million of them are
• 46:53
  Speaker 3: the last remnant of Jews after the extermination. They survived
• 46:58
  Speaker 3: the Nazi slave labor camps. They were the last manufacturing
• 47:01
  Speaker 3: facilities on Nazi soil at the end of the war.
• 47:03
  Speaker 3: They're people who survived Auschwitz when the Red Army liberated it,
• 47:06
  Speaker 3: went back to the hometown of Vilna or whatever it is,
• 47:09
  Speaker 3: and discovered that their home is now owned by somebody
• 47:11
  Speaker 3: else or that it's all burned down. And then there
• 47:13
  Speaker 3: are pogroms in these Eastern European cities against the Jews
• 47:16
  Speaker 3: who just got back from the concentration and death camps
• 47:19
  Speaker 3: telling them, we got rid of you. You're not coming back.
• 47:21
  Speaker 3: And they run to the American and British zones. And
• 47:24
  Speaker 3: here's the thing. They are living now. They're going to
• 47:28
  Speaker 3: live in these displaced persons camps in the British and
• 47:31
  Speaker 3: American controlled zones of Germany for years. They're literally concentrated
• 47:38
  Speaker 3: into former concentration camps. It's like the British army liberates Bergen-Belsen.
• 47:42
  Speaker 3: I know you're thinking, don't talk to us about the Holocaust.
• 47:45
  Speaker 3: We need to get to the Palestinian issue. I'm getting there.
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: I promise.
• 47:47
  Speaker 3: I'm three minutes from done.
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: The British.
• 47:50
  Speaker 3: Liberate Bergen-Belsen. There's a typhoid epidemic. So they take out
• 47:54
  Speaker 3: the Jews, they burn down the whole facility to get
• 47:57
  Speaker 3: rid of the typhoid, and then they rebuild the facility,
• 48:00
  Speaker 3: and they put the Jews back in. They got these
• 48:03
  Speaker 3: million people, and these million people have to be fed
• 48:06
  Speaker 3: every day by the American army, and it's expensive, and
• 48:08
  Speaker 3: the Americans go looking for a solution. So together with
• 48:10
  Speaker 3: the British, they found something called the IRO. Nobody has
• 48:13
  Speaker 3: to remember all the details. We're going into the weeds
• 48:15
  Speaker 3: to see something. The International Refugee Organization, it's founded in 1946.
• 48:19
  Speaker 3: And it basically invites 40 governments to come to the camps.
• 48:24
  Speaker 3: A lot of countries need working hands. They're trying to
• 48:26
  Speaker 3: rebuild their economies after the war. And they invite these
• 48:30
  Speaker 3: 40 governments to these camps, and they say there's a
• 48:32
  Speaker 3: million people who need new citizenship, who need new passports,
• 48:35
  Speaker 3: who need work. You guys need workers. Come take these people.
• 48:39
  Speaker 3: Forty countries come to the camps. They set up booths.
• 48:41
  Speaker 3: I imagine it like high school college fairs. They come
• 48:46
  Speaker 3: to these camps. And they hand out 750,000 passports. The
• 48:50
  Speaker 3: first ones to get passports are all the Nazi collaborators.
• 48:54
  Speaker 5: Why?
• 48:54
  Speaker 3: Because they come out of the war healthiest. And if
• 48:58
  Speaker 3: you were a Nazi in the war, you know one
• 49:00
  Speaker 3: thing I'm absolutely certain you're not? You're not a communist.
• 49:04
  Speaker 3: In 1946, not being a communist is a big deal.
• 49:07
  Speaker 3: And then the next group that gets passports are the
• 49:09
  Speaker 3: Polish Catholics. And then all the governments, every last one,
• 49:14
  Speaker 3: closes up shop and leaves. and the last people in
• 49:17
  Speaker 3: the camps in 1946. are the Jews, the 250,000 Jews.
• 49:22
  Speaker 3: And Truman begs Congress to let them in. Truman says,
• 49:26
  Speaker 3: I know we have these quotas, but guys, that was
• 49:28
  Speaker 3: when there were 10 million in Eastern Europe coming in.
• 49:30
  Speaker 3: There's 250,000. We got to feed them anyway. Let's let
• 49:34
  Speaker 3: them in. Congress refuses. There's one of the eight organizations
• 49:39
  Speaker 3: in one of the camps that gives a survey to
• 49:41
  Speaker 3: these Jews. And that survey, they say, where would you
• 49:45
  Speaker 3: go if we could get you that place? So they
• 49:47
  Speaker 3: give them like five lines and they say, please rank
• 49:49
  Speaker 3: for us the places you want to go to. I
• 49:50
  Speaker 3: don't know if I could give it to you, but try. 90%
• 49:53
  Speaker 3: write on the first line, Palestina. And then 90% write
• 49:58
  Speaker 3: on the second line, Palestina. And then the survey distributors
• 50:02
  Speaker 3: are really annoyed because apparently Jews don't know how to
• 50:04
  Speaker 3: take surveys. And they give them a new survey and
• 50:07
  Speaker 3: it says, other than Palestine, where would you go? And 25%
• 50:11
  Speaker 3: right on the first line, crematorium.
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: Where's that?
• 50:15
  Speaker 3: That's where they burned the bodies of the Jews at Auschwitz.
• 50:18
  Speaker 3: We go there or we go nowhere. The Jews of
• 50:21
  Speaker 3: 1946 are still living in those camps in 1947. They're
• 50:25
  Speaker 3: still living in those camps in 1948. When did the
• 50:28
  Speaker 3: DP camps start to empty out? In large numbers? May
• 50:33
  Speaker 3: 1948 when Israel was established. And then for the first
• 50:36
  Speaker 3: time in their lives, their whole lives is the story,
• 50:38
  Speaker 3: you know, Americans think World War II is about defeating
• 50:41
  Speaker 3: the Nazis. But that's an American perspective. The Jewish perspective is,
• 50:46
  Speaker 3: the Nazis won. European Jewry, this thousand-year civilization, with its
• 50:51
  Speaker 3: own culture and language, it spoke Yiddish, it's dead. It
• 50:55
  Speaker 3: was wiped out. And the last living remnants, starved and stumbling,
• 51:01
  Speaker 3: come into an Israel of May 1948, into a war
• 51:04
  Speaker 3: to eliminate Israel with five Arab armies invading, Five Arab armies,
• 51:08
  Speaker 3: by the way, who will take control of the West
• 51:09
  Speaker 3: Bank and Gaza and not establish a Palestinian state there
• 51:12
  Speaker 3: because it was about killing the Jews, not freeing the Palestinians.
• 51:16
  Speaker 3: And those DPs who come in are a quarter of
• 51:20
  Speaker 3: the IDF. They're a quarter of the Israeli army in
• 51:23
  Speaker 3: that 1948 war. And their only thing they know about
• 51:28
  Speaker 3: the world, and I want to say this because, you know,
• 51:31
  Speaker 3: the American Jewish story is the exact opposite story. If
• 51:35
  Speaker 3: you got into America by 1921, what is your story?
• 51:39
  Speaker 3: For the very first time in the history of Jews,
• 51:42
  Speaker 3: you belong. Jews in the Russian Empire can live in
• 51:45
  Speaker 3: the Russian Empire for hundreds of years. They're never going
• 51:47
  Speaker 3: to be Russians. Jews can live in Germany for hundreds
• 51:50
  Speaker 3: of years, and they think they're Germans, but the Germans
• 51:52
  Speaker 3: explain to them that actually they're not Germans. Jews can
• 51:55
  Speaker 3: live in Baghdad for centuries and millennia. Baghdad was 25%
• 51:59
  Speaker 3: Jewish in 1930. That's twice as Jewish as New York.
• 52:03
  Speaker 3: It's not a contest. I'm just saying Baghdad wins. And
• 52:06
  Speaker 3: then by 1960, Baghdad is 0% Jewish. The Iraqis explained
• 52:10
  Speaker 3: to the Jews that they don't belong. America is the
• 52:12
  Speaker 3: first time Jews ever landed in a place where they
• 52:15
  Speaker 3: totally and utterly belong, not just according to the Jews,
• 52:17
  Speaker 3: according to everybody else. So the American Jewish experience of
• 52:20
  Speaker 3: America of the 20th century is an integration, a welcoming, liberalism, morality,
• 52:26
  Speaker 3: those with salvation, that's what saved you, that's your rescues project.
• 52:30
  Speaker 3: What saved the Jews of Israel after America's doors closed?
• 52:34
  Speaker 3: They built an army. They built a state. They had
• 52:37
  Speaker 3: that solidarity. Those DPs showing up in the land of Israel,
• 52:40
  Speaker 3: this was the first time where somebody was willing to
• 52:43
  Speaker 3: fight and die for them. And that's the only way
• 52:45
  Speaker 3: they survived. Immediately after the founding of Israel, and this
• 52:47
  Speaker 3: is my last point, and thank you. You'll never have
• 52:49
  Speaker 3: to hear me again. My wife says I do this
• 52:53
  Speaker 3: a lot, to suddenly start talking and then start to
• 52:55
  Speaker 3: shut me up. But just this is the last point.
• 52:57
  Speaker 3: In 1948, Israel's founded. Five Arab armies invade. And immediately
• 53:03
  Speaker 3: the Arab world begins this process of totally emptying of
• 53:08
  Speaker 3: every last Jew. Iraq, Baghdad is 25% Jewish. That community
• 53:14
  Speaker 3: had been there since before Iraqis spoke Arabic. And Baghdad
• 53:19
  Speaker 3: has no Jews. And today, October something or other, 2026,
• 53:25
  Speaker 3: no Jew can live in Iraq. Today, right now. That's
• 53:30
  Speaker 3: something that's just seen as just part of how the
• 53:32
  Speaker 3: world works. They empty of their Jews. Where do those
• 53:35
  Speaker 3: Jews go? Where did the complete ethnic cleansing of the
• 53:39
  Speaker 3: Arab world? I had a debate with an Egyptian, actually,
• 53:43
  Speaker 3: and I said, the Arab world emptied of Jews. What
• 53:45
  Speaker 3: right do you have to tell us where we're allowed
• 53:47
  Speaker 3: to live if I can't live in your country? You
• 53:49
  Speaker 3: don't get to tell me where I'm allowed to live.
• 53:52
  Speaker 3: And this Egyptian says, well, the only reason we kicked
• 53:54
  Speaker 3: every last Jew out with massacres, pogroms in Morocco, the
• 53:57
  Speaker 3: Farhud pogrom in Baghdad in 1941, seven years before the
• 54:01
  Speaker 3: founding of Israel. The only reason that there was ever
• 54:03
  Speaker 3: tension between Jews and Arabs is Zionism. You founded a
• 54:06
  Speaker 3: state of Israel, and therefore the Arabs all hated the
• 54:08
  Speaker 3: Jews who had lived back in their countries for thousands
• 54:11
  Speaker 3: of years. And we Jews know that that's a lie.
• 54:13
  Speaker 3: That's self-justification. How do we know that that's a lie?
• 54:17
  Speaker 3: We know that that's a lie because Because imagine making
• 54:21
  Speaker 3: that argument about New York. Imagine New York and Baghdad.
• 54:26
  Speaker 3: New York is about 12% Jewish, something like that. Imagine
• 54:29
  Speaker 3: if in 20 years there wasn't a single Jew in
• 54:31
  Speaker 3: New York. At all. Not a single Jew. Not a
• 54:35
  Speaker 3: Mamdani voter. Not a Trump voter. Not a blue-haired activist on,
• 54:41
  Speaker 3: I don't know, all the stereotypes. So imagine I did
• 54:43
  Speaker 3: a clever stereotype just now that's super funny. Not right wing,
• 54:47
  Speaker 3: not Hasidic, not Zionist, not anti-Zionist. All the Jews had
• 54:51
  Speaker 3: to leave for Israel, every last one. I submit to you,
• 54:55
  Speaker 3: you wouldn't know anything about Israel. You would know something
• 54:57
  Speaker 3: very important about New York itself. That's Baghdad. By the way,
• 55:01
  Speaker 3: the Arab world is still emptying of minorities, even as
• 55:03
  Speaker 3: we speak. Syria in 2011 was 10% Christian. That's one
• 55:07
  Speaker 3: of the oldest Christian communities in the world. Syria today
• 55:10
  Speaker 3: is 2% Christian. And the Jews end up in Israel.
• 55:16
  Speaker 3: Half the Jews of Israel come from the Arab world.
• 55:19
  Speaker 3: And we have nowhere else to go, nowhere else to be.
• 55:23
  Speaker 3: To an American Jew, when you say something like, I'm anti-Zionist.
• 55:27
  Speaker 3: So the American Jew thinks Zionism is this, like, story
• 55:30
  Speaker 3: of identity. Who am I? Well, I'm a Zionist. That's
• 55:32
  Speaker 3: part of being part of a Jewish people. It's how
• 55:34
  Speaker 3: I feel. It's how I identify. But what's a Zionism
• 55:38
  Speaker 3: to an Israeli Jew? It's literally the last living Jews
• 55:41
  Speaker 3: in the hemisphere. And everywhere else kicked you out or
• 55:44
  Speaker 3: murdered you. So to be an anti-Zionist to an Israeli Jew,
• 55:47
  Speaker 3: you're either saying, I want you all dead because Zionism
• 55:50
  Speaker 3: is the only way you survived. Or you're saying, I'm ignorant,
• 55:53
  Speaker 3: don't know this history, which is fine. Why would you
• 55:55
  Speaker 3: know this history of some other people somewhere else? But
• 55:58
  Speaker 3: then don't be so emotionally invested in it, in being
• 56:00
  Speaker 3: an anti-Zionist if you don't know what it means.
• 56:02
  Speaker 5: Or what?
• 56:05
  Speaker 3: What's the other option? Like, there's no such thing in
• 56:07
  Speaker 3: the Israeli mind as an anti-Zionist. Like, it's not a
• 56:10
  Speaker 3: coherent word.
• 56:11
  Speaker 5: So.
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 56:13
  Speaker 3: We're having a radically different conversation where an Israeli comes
• 56:15
  Speaker 3: to America and they hear, well, the kids are anti-Zionist today.
• 56:18
  Speaker 3: I don't know what that means. What, that the Jews
• 56:20
  Speaker 3: shouldn't have survived the 20th century?
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: What does that mean?
• 56:22
  Speaker 3: Now, obviously, that's not what those kids think it means
• 56:24
  Speaker 3: because they don't know my actual history.
• 56:25
  Speaker 4: They're not connected to the history for the most part.
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: That was it.
• 56:29
  Speaker 3: That was my rant. Thank you.
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: They do think Zionism is evil. I don't know. I
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: don't know what that is. I don't even know what
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: Zionism is because I grew up seeing like Mount Zion Church.
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: Like literally, I don't even know what Zionism is.
• 56:42
  Speaker 3: Zionism, so the reason it's confusing is that many people
• 56:45
  Speaker 3: use the word in a different way. And there are
• 56:48
  Speaker 3: all these ideologies that are like Zionism. Like there's a
• 56:51
  Speaker 3: religious Zionist movement.
• 56:53
  Speaker 1: Like they'll tell me, I'm not anti-Semitic, but I'm anti-Zionist. Yeah.
• 56:56
  Speaker 3: That's really popular right now. I don't know what that is. Yeah.
• 57:00
  Speaker 3: So there's a Zionist movement that's like, you know, there's
• 57:04
  Speaker 3: socialist Zionists. Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, was
• 57:07
  Speaker 3: a socialist Zionist. And what they meant by socialist Zionist
• 57:11
  Speaker 3: was they're socialist, they're Marxist, they believe in the final
• 57:15
  Speaker 3: equality of the proletariat or whatever communists believe. And Zionism
• 57:20
  Speaker 3: is part of that great socialist story. And then there
• 57:23
  Speaker 3: are religious Zionists who say, well, Zionism is actually part
• 57:27
  Speaker 3: of the great redemptive story of the Bible, right? And
• 57:30
  Speaker 3: then there are capitalist American liberal Zionists sitting in Zionist
• 57:35
  Speaker 3: conferences with communist Russian Jewish Zionists. There are all these
• 57:39
  Speaker 3: different kinds of Zionists. Well, if you can be a
• 57:43
  Speaker 3: capitalist American and a communist Russian and be Zionist, and
• 57:46
  Speaker 3: you can be an atheist and you can be religious
• 57:48
  Speaker 3: and be Zionist, what is the actual shared thing you're
• 57:52
  Speaker 3: all sharing? Because you're not sharing your capitalism or your
• 57:55
  Speaker 3: communism or your religiosity. What is the actual Zionism? And
• 57:58
  Speaker 3: the simple answer is, it's a vast... enormous, unbelievably successful
• 58:04
  Speaker 3: rescue project. The founder of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl,
• 58:09
  Speaker 3: said a catastrophe is coming, and everybody laughed at him.
• 58:12
  Speaker 3: He once had a meeting with the Rothschilds where he
• 58:15
  Speaker 3: said to them, I don't know how they will come
• 58:17
  Speaker 3: for us. I don't know if they will murder us,
• 58:18
  Speaker 3: expel us, or kill us. I suspect it's all these
• 58:21
  Speaker 3: things at once. The Zionists predicted the collapse. It was
• 58:25
  Speaker 3: this brilliant analysis of what's happening in Europe. They were
• 58:27
  Speaker 3: watching these multi-ethnic empires, like the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire,
• 58:30
  Speaker 3: the Austro-Hungarian Empire, They're watching them collapse. They're watching these
• 58:33
  Speaker 3: new nationalisms come up from the bottom. And they're saying
• 58:36
  Speaker 3: in these new nation states, there's not going to be
• 58:38
  Speaker 3: room for minorities. They're going to turn with brutal murderousness
• 58:42
  Speaker 3: on their minorities. And the Jews had better get the
• 58:44
  Speaker 3: hell out or there's going to be a catastrophe. That's
• 58:47
  Speaker 3: Herzl's word. The thing that unites all the different kind
• 58:50
  Speaker 3: of Zionists is the expectation of a catastrophe and desperately
• 58:54
  Speaker 3: organizing to save what can be saved. And the great
• 58:57
  Speaker 3: tragedy of the 20th century for the Jews outside of
• 59:00
  Speaker 3: America Because in America, none of this happened. And American
• 59:03
  Speaker 3: Jews learned that liberalism saves you. But every other Jew
• 59:07
  Speaker 3: learned something else because that liberalism didn't save them. Outside
• 59:11
  Speaker 3: of America, Zionism horrifically, tragically, was right. That's what Zionism is.
• 59:19
  Speaker 3: That's what real Zionism is. That's not the Zionism of
• 59:21
  Speaker 3: this professor or that elite or these group of, you know,
• 59:24
  Speaker 3: these people who are like, my Zionism is cultural Zionism.
• 59:27
  Speaker 3: We don't even need a state. We just need to
• 59:28
  Speaker 3: produce Beautiful Jewish culture, and that's Zionist. That's how elites
• 59:33
  Speaker 3: talk about shallow stupids about themselves.
• 59:36
  Speaker 1: Are you a Zionist?
• 59:37
  Speaker 3: Absolutely. Millions of people were saved who would not otherwise
• 59:40
  Speaker 3: have been saved. What more can you ask for? And
• 59:45
  Speaker 3: the Palestinians paid a cost for it. And all of
• 59:48
  Speaker 3: that's true all at once. And if you pretend like
• 59:50
  Speaker 3: the first half isn't true, you're talking to yourself about yourself.
• 59:54
  Speaker 3: You're not talking about the real people who lived through
• 59:56
  Speaker 3: the actual 20th century. I am amazed I'm amazed when
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 3: I go into college campuses and I listen to a
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 3: 19 year old who can't tell me any of the
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 3: facts I just laid out here, just literally has never
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 3: heard them sit in judgment, in moral judgment of people
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 3: trying to survive the 1940s. That's how, that is how
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 3: shallow the debate is. We are a real people and
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 3: we are the last remnants of a dead civilization. And
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 3: you can talk to us about how evil a war is.
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 3: That is a, It's not a legitimate conversation. It's a
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 3: necessary conversation. It's a freaking war. But you come to
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 3: us to talk about whether or not it's legitimate that
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 3: we exist? Fuck you. I don't know if you're allowed
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 3: to curse on this.
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: That's cool. One thing I appreciate about your commentary is
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: that you explain why Israelis think the way that they do.
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: But how do you make sure that explaining Israel's fears
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: doesn't turn into justifying everything the Israel government does in
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: response to it?
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 3: I criticize things the Israeli government does every day of
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 3: the week. I mean, it's a government, obviously. I don't
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 3: think that's a debate. I watched a couple of your
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 3: interviews before coming on. Who did you see? I saw
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 3: Ben Shapiro. I saw Hassan Piker. And I saw the
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 3: senator from Michigan. I'm sorry.
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: Senator from Michigan.
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 5: Oh, Dr.
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: Abdul Saeed. Dr.
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 3: Abdul Saeed.
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 3: Very charming guy. Almost wanted to vote for him. I mean,
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 3: he wants my country to disappear. That's not true. He's charming.
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: That's not true, though.
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 3: Please tell me that's not true.
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: That's not true.
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 4: You say that because he won't say it.
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: He does say it, though.
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 3: I think he openly talks about being anti-Zionist, which in
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 3: my world, the actual people who actually lived Zionism rather
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 3: than the abstraction that Americans who never had to experience
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 3: any of it go through, the people who didn't need Zionism,
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 3: are having a moral debate about the necessity of Zionism.
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: It's the words. It's the words.
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 4: That's what I'm saying about he won't say it.
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: The free Palestine.
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it's the words. You guys have a disagreement of words.
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: Anti-Zionist. It's just all a disagreeance of words.
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 3: I'm honestly asking because I don't know the guy at all.
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 3: If he was in this room hearing this conversation, he
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 3: would understand that there was this immense human drama and
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 3: it's the survival of millions and he would not sit
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 3: there and start judging who should live and who should
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 3: die i don't know absolutely not that's good news.
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: Basically i've only met him once one conversation i see
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: him a lot on television i don't think.
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 3: So there's a real culture gap here because what zionism
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 3: means to the average israeli he said explicitly you know
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 3: i'm anti-zionist who gets to decide what the word means
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 3: the people who literally are it Or everybody else who
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 3: has feelings about it.
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: But we have to feel that way about Free Palestine, too.
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: Because we know that just means they want the liberation
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: of Palestinian people. It doesn't mean.
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 3: Let's take it to the Palestinians. You know, if people
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 3: can concede to me that my people get to exist,
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 3: everything else is up for debate. I'm happy to. If
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 3: I pull out of the West Bank today, today, pull
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 3: out of... 80% of the West Bank and give them
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 3: other land elsewhere. And that solves 90% of the settlement
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 3: problem because then nobody, because most of the actual Israelis
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 3: living over the Green Line are living within like 3,000
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 3: feet of the Green Line, whatever. The Clinton parameters, I
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 3: don't know what. If we do that, if there is
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 3: this Palestinian space, it'll definitely be taken over by Hamas.
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 3: They would win the election. They win every poll in
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 3: the West Bank among Palestinians. And they would definitely start
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 3: digging tunnels and they would definitely go to forever war.
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 5: Can you quickly explain what's going on in the West
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 5: Bank with the occupation and all of that? Because, as
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 5: you just said, you said Hamas would come in if
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 5: it were empty. Yeah.
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 3: Israel was founded in May 1948. There is this war
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 3: of 48-49. Five Arab armies invade. And the war ends
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 3: in 49 with a ceasefire line. And that ceasefire line
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 3: produces basically two territories that Israel doesn't control, which is
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 3: today we call them Gaza, and in English you call
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 3: them the West Bank. And Jordan is in control of
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 3: the West Bank. That's just where the soldiers end up
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 3: on the day of the ceasefire. That's what everyone controls.
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 3: That's where that line is drawn. 49, the ceasefire. Jordan
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 3: ends up in control of the West Bank, and Egypt
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 3: ends up in control of the Gaza Strip.
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: Jordan.
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 3: annexes the West Bank immediately. It declares this is Jordan.
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 3: It gives them all Jordanian citizenship. It doesn't want to
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 3: hear about a Palestinian state. It wants it to be Jordan.
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 3: And Egypt doesn't actually annex Gaza, but it rules Gaza
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 3: with its military pretty oppressively. Inside Israel, the Arab Palestinians
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 3: who remain in Israel at the end of that war,
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 3: based on where those boundaries are at the end of
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 3: the war, get Israeli citizenship. It's not great. The ones
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 3: who are living on the border also have military curfews
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 3: for about the next 15 years or so. It's not perfect.
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 3: It's not even close to good. But they do get citizenship.
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 3: They do vote from the very first election in 49,
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 3: and things improve over time dramatically. And that's where things stand.
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 3: And then comes 19 years later, the 1967 war. In
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 3: the 1967 war, Israel faces.
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 3: Three countries, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, a little bit from others,
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 3: but those are the basic countries. And Jordan, of course,
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 3: is in control of the West Bank and Egypt in
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 3: control of Gaza. And as the war progresses, Israel pushes
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 3: the Jordanians back out of the West Bank and gains
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 3: control of the West Bank. And the same thing happens
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 3: to pushes the Egyptians out of Gaza. And from that
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 3: moment on, 1967, the Israelis rule militarily these two territories. Jordan,
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 3: by the way, It still claims the West Bank as Jordan,
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 3: not Palestine, until 1988 or something. They're really bitter about
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 3: letting it go. This is why a lot of Israelis
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 3: are really sarcastic and skeptical about the Arabs supporting Palestinian independence.
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 3: They don't support Palestinian independence when it comes to some
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 3: Arab tyrant ruling them. They only support Palestinian independence when
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 3: it comes to pushing Israel back. But the Palestinians come
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 3: under Israeli military rule.
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: And.
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 3: And then basically, just to run through real quick, the
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 3: Israelis start having conversations about what to do with it.
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 3: There's an offer very early on from the Israeli government
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 3: to pull out of either all or some significant pieces
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 3: of it that is given to the Arabs, but the
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 3: condition is a real peace. And the Arab states refuse.
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 3: And they have a conference in Khartoum in Sudan where
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 3: they issue what they call the three no's, the famous
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 3: three no's of Khartoum. I'm giving people things they can
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 3: throw into chat GPT to get the story. And the
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 3: three no's of a cartoon are no normalization, no peace,
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 3: no acceptance. I forget all the no's, but they're, you know,
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 3: no peace whatsoever. And then parts of the Israeli, mostly
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 3: religious right, but not only, start to build very small,
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 3: what would come to be called settlements, which is to
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 3: say Israelis moving in to various places in the West Bank.
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 3: And they're in places where Jews had been massacred in
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 3: the 1920s, 30s, 40s. So, for example, the Etzion block
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 3: south of Jerusalem is a place that the Jews were
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 3: wiped out there in a great massacre of them before 1948.
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 3: But then that movement begins to slowly grow. In 1987,
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 3: there's a car accident in Gaza. An Israeli military truck
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 3: hits a Palestinian car. The people in the car are killed.
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 3: And that sparks these mass riots. in Gaza that very
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 3: quickly spread to the West Bank. It's not about the
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 3: car accident. It's about 20 years of military rule. And
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 3: the military rule in the 80s is really close. In
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 3: other words, there's no Palestinian municipalities, really, almost. There's no
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 3: Palestinian police. So if you're like a Palestinian schoolchild in
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 3: the city of Jenin, let's say, and you're, that's in
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 3: the northern West Bank, and you're walking home from school,
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 3: the guy running traffic at the traffic circle is an
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 3: Israeli soldier. It's very, very close. And In 1987, these
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 3: riots begin to spread, and it's the first serious Palestinian rebellion, uprising,
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 3: against the military control. And it has many, many different
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 3: things all happening at once. There's terror attacks, and there's
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 3: a lot of... Hamas is founded that year in Gaza.
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 3: It's a lot of different things. But there's one piece
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 3: of it that is sort of burned into the psyche
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 3: of Israelis and of Palestinians, and we have the same
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 3: name for it. and it's called the Children of the Stones.
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 3: All over these cities, kids pick up stones and throw
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 3: them at the Israeli soldiers, who have been running their
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 3: cities basically for their entire lives, if you're, I don't
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 3: know what, a sixth grader. And that experience is experienced
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 3: by large parts of the Israeli public as a moral argument.
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 3: In other words, the Palestinians are saying to the Israelis,
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 3: What's the game plan? Like, you're going to rule us
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 3: forever with your army? Like, how does this end? And
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 3: it builds out very quickly. 1987, it begins. By 1982,
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 3: there's a new Israeli left. And the Israeli left is
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 3: absolutely committed. It's like it's civic religion. It's obsessed with
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 3: this idea of ending the occupation, ending the control. And
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 3: they elect a guy named Yitzhak Rabin. He's a former general.
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 3: He was the actual chief of staff of the IDF
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 3: in the 67 War. He's the man who conquered the
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 3: West Bank and Gaza. And he's elected prime minister to
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 3: go to a peace process. In 93, he and Arafat
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 3: announced the Oslo Accords, which is just like an announcement.
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 3: It's not like a hard agreement. But by 95, there's
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 3: a hard agreement. It's called Oslo II. It's a treaty.
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 3: It has to be ratified in the Knesset, and it is.
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 3: It establishes the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. It
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 3: creates areas A, B, and C. It creates a kind
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 3: of five-year... It talks about five-year pathway to Palestinian... statehood
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 3: to a full separation, a full final agreement that will
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 3: include Jerusalem, refugees, all the things that are borders, all
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 3: the stuff that's difficult. So Oslo, too, thinks that by 2000,
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 3: we're done. The Israeli army, Rabin is killed in 95
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 3: by an Israeli right-wing Jew who is opposed to the
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 3: peace process. There's an election in 96. Netanyahu wins for
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 3: the very first time in 96. And even though Netanyahu
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 3: was opposed to the peace process, the things that Israel
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 3: committed to in this treaty that are ratified by the Knesset,
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 3: he actually implements most of them. In other words, he
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 3: pulls the Israeli army out of Hebron and Jericho and
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 3: the cities and towns of Gaza. And the Palestinian Authority
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 3: is set up roughly in 1998. And within two years,
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 3: in 99 Netanyahu falls, a new left-wing leader, Barak, comes
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 3: to power. And he, Bill Clinton, and Yasser Arafat go
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 3: off to Camp David to hammer out the final agreement.
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 3: And in the fall of 2000, I think it was
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 3: in September, end of September, something like that of 2000,
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 3: that's when, between rounds of talks, that's when the second
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 3: intifada begins. Now, Israelis experience the first intifada as a
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 3: moral argument. We owe the Palestinians an answer. It's a
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 3: moral debt. I'm not a nice guy for wanting to
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 3: end a military rule over them.
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: I owe them this.
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 3: But the second intifada was the exact opposite. The second intifada,
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 3: there were no Israeli soldiers in Jenin. Who's the armed
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 3: person in the intersection running traffic? The kid from the
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 3: first intifada is now the Palestinian policeman under the PA,
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 3: under a Palestinian mayor running traffic. The Israeli army doesn't
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 3: exist in any Palestinian city. And at Camp David, they're
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 3: negotiating stuff like shared sovereignty on the Temple Mount, on
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 3: the holy places, like crazy stuff that was unimaginable 10 years.
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: Earlier Was that like the beginning talks of a two-state solution?
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's Bill Clinton's big process. He was desperate. That
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 3: was going to be his legacy. He was desperate to
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 3: get away from his other legacy. I'm the son of
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 3: a rabbi. I have less leeway here to talk about.
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 3: And that's when the second intifada begins. Now, the Palestinians
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 3: get to name these things. So one is an intifada,
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 3: the other one's an intifada. But in the Israeli experience,
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 3: they're opposite things. One is a bottom-up argument that we're
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 3: doing something wrong, that there's an injustice. But the second intifada,
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 3: what was it about? They're literally discussing the finals, and
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 3: it's 140 suicide bombings on our kids. You can't recruit
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 3: 140 suicide bombers without literally martyrdom classes in networks of
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 3: Hamas mosques in Gaza recruiting them. You can't build bombs
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 3: at that scale without laboratories and bank accounts and It
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 3: was a guerrilla war top-down rather than a rebellion bottom-up
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 3: against an injustice. And that broke the Israeli left. To
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 3: this day, we are 26 years later, the Israeli left
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 3: has not won an election since. And the West Bank
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 3: since then has basically been in a kind of holding pattern. Now,
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 3: the Israeli right, last story ends in 2006, the last
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 3: piece of this for the Israeli psyche, the Israeli right
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 3: was secretly kind of desperate for the left to succeed.
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 3: I know they were screaming against the peace process the
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 3: whole time, but actually they kind of wanted it to
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 3: be over. And how do I know that? Because the
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 3: Israeli right then came up with a new idea. Look,
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 3: we can't make a deal with them. The Hamas guys
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 3: over there are going to torpedo everything. They're dysfunctional, Arafat's lying, whatever.
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 3: But we need to get out of there for our
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 3: own interests. We need to not rule over them for us,
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 3: not for them. They can't come to the table. There's
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 3: whatever extremism, dysfunction, who cares? We got to leave. And
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 3: Ariel Sharon, the leader of Likud, of the right wing,
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 3: gets up in 2003 on national television and announces the
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 3: disengagement from Gaza, the withdrawal from Gaza. And in August 2005,
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 3: Israel pulls out of Gaza to the last inch, to
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 3: the last soldier, to the last settler. And then within
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 3: a year, two years, 2007... Hamas in Gaza, the place
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 3: we pulled out of, carries out a violent coup against
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 3: the Palestinian Authority. They kill hundreds of Fatah guys, they
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 3: throw them off roofs, and they establish the Hamas dictatorship
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 3: in Gaza. And that convinces a lot of Israelis, even
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 3: right-wing Israelis, who were willing to go for a unilateral withdrawal,
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 3: even from most of the West Bank. There's a guy
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 3: named Ehud Olmert. This is the last sentence, I swear.
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 3: I'm going to have a bunch of semicolon... No, this
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 3: is the last sentence.
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 5: Um.
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 3: There's a guy named Ehud Olmert who is running for
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 3: prime minister in 2006. He literally says, I'm pulling out
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 3: of most of the West Bank. And if you don't
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 3: want me to, don't vote for me. He called it
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 3: the convergence plan. People can look this up. And if
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 3: you don't want it, don't vote for me. And he
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 3: wins the election. And then the one place we pulled
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 3: out of unilaterally, Hamas took over. And now you can't
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 3: pull out of the West Bank. So all of that
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 3: is to say, the average Israeli, the ordinary Israeli who
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 3: lives their lives in Hebrew and doesn't know what's happening
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 3: in the world and the crazy conversation about them, genuinely believes,
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 3: and you can argue that they're wrong, but you should
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 3: argue with what they think happened to them rather than
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 3: just with what you think happened to them. They genuinely
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 3: believe that they tried and tried and tried and every
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 3: vacuum of power is filled by the bad guys who
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 3: want to exterminate us for bigger religious reasons, not for
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 3: Palestinian independence. So a progressive Israeli left-winger has been traumatized
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 3: for 30 years by the fact that nothing ever seems
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 3: to work and as near as they can tell, And
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 3: they might be wrong, but as near as they can
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 3: tell from real experience, there's something wrong with Palestinian politics.
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 1: But doesn't Israel have all the power, though? Meaning that Israel,
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: they got one of the most powerful militaries in the region.
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: They got American support and established government. Palestinians don't have
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: anything comparable. So doesn't having that much power come with
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: a much greater responsibility to protect innocent people? Go get Hamas.
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 3: No, the last part I agree with 100%. A lot
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 3: of power is a lot of responsibility to protect innocent people.
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 3: At the risk of sounding like Spider-Man, but it's true.
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 3: The first half, does Israel have all the power, all
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 3: the agencies? Is Israel the only actor here that can
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 3: do anything? Absolutely not.
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: In the region?
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 3: Absolutely not. The Palestinians have a choice. Because we see
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 3: in the.
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 5: West Bank the settlers taking Palestinian land. So how do
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 5: those two go together?
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 3: That group of extremists, and it's a lot of people.
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 3: I don't know what to say. They're exactly what they
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 3: look like, and they need to be reined in. I
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 3: personally have advocated counterterrorism measures against them. And they have
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 3: the support of the extremist wings of the Israeli government,
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 3: and Netanyahu won't come in and crack the whip and
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 3: crack down. And by the way, the guy running against Netanyahu, Eisenkot,
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 3: who's a really remarkable story. He's this poor kid born
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 3: in Tiberias on the Galilee, which is this poor working
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 3: class town when he was born there, grew up in
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 3: an even poorer town called Eilat, and he rose his
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 3: way up the ranks of the army to become chief
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 3: of staff of the army. He's this remarkable guy. And
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 3: he lost a son in the Gaza war and a nephew.
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 3: And he comes in and he says, one of the
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 3: first things I'm doing when I'm prime minister is reining
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 3: that in, is stopping that terrible violence. So that is
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 3: absolutely an Israeli failure and all the cost brought to
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 3: bear on Israel for that What am I going to
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 3: say here? Like, please don't hurt. That is absolutely as
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 3: criminal as it looks. There's no defending it. There's no
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 3: need to defend it. It's exactly that bad.
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: Well, let's talk about peace. Let's end the conversation talking
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 1: about what does peace actually require? What would Israelis have
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: to give up? What would Palestinians have to change? That's it.
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 3: I'm going to solve it.
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 5: Sure.
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 3: Why not?
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 1: Just your thoughts.
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 3: Yeah. I'm going to do something that's going to sound
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 3: like I'm pandering, but this is in YouTube from years
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 3: ago of me doing this on YouTube in Israel to
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 3: a bunch of Jewish kids. I want to talk about
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 3: Martin Luther King. But I swear to you, I have
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 3: spent 20 years teaching Martin Luther King. in Israel to
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 3: Israeli kids in Hebrew. And it's on YouTube. I just
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 3: want to clarify.
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 4: No, you're not just doing it because you're black.
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 3: Not because you're black and not because I'm in America
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 3: and it sounds great. And not because I swear to you,
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 3: I have been doing this for 20 years. And this
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 3: is genuinely what I believe.
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: He got balls. It's a great guy to quote. It's
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: a great guy to teach about. If he's right, he's right.
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 3: And I wanted to open with it's not pandering because
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 3: I want to say more than that. I want to
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 3: say that he's the answer. Yeah.
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 1: Dr.
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 3: King had a debate back in, and I teach this
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 3: in Hebrew to Israelis in all kinds of informal education.
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 3: I taught in pre-military academies, which is these 19-year-olds who
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 3: take a gap year of volunteering between high school and
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 3: military service. Amazing, amazing kids who volunteer with old people
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 3: and peace stuff and agriculture and all this stuff. And Dr.
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 3: King had an amazing vision for how you make peace.
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 3: And he debated Malcolm X on this. And the idea was,
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 3: His basic idea was you have to do two things.
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 3: You have to make the injustice untenable, but also you
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 3: have to make a path back from the injustice possible
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 3: for the side that's committing the injustice. So he had
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 3: a debate with Malcolm X. I'm just going to make
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 3: a cartoon version of it just to get through the
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 3: point because it was big. Sometimes they literally debated each other.
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 3: Just a big, complicated story, but basically Malcolm X said,
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 3: How much does white America have to do to prove
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 3: to you that it's kind of evil on this? Like,
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 3: what does it have to do to black Americans to
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 3: show you that this is what they are? And King's
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 3: answer to that was all the story of slavery and
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 3: all the story of the Civil War and then Jim
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 3: Crow and then the struggle in the 50s, which is
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 3: when they're debating, just to have the basic equality, the
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 3: basic promise, you know, they're still litigating what the Civil
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 3: War meant in the 1950s. And King says, all of
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 3: that's true. I'm with you, obviously. But there is something
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 3: on the other side. There is something on the side
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 3: of white America that I can make peace with. Not
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 3: the terrible injustice and all the sensual, but there's something
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 3: on the other side. And basically, he says, it's their
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 3: story of themselves. And so they have this story about
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 3: themselves as the birth of freedom. That's not a lie,
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 3: just because they didn't live up to it. That's the
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 3: thing that I can force them to. So he does
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 3: two things. One, He puts the issue on the agenda
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 3: by setting the injustice on fire, meaning he marches in
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 3: cities where he knows the sheriffs are going to go
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 3: violent against nonviolent protesters. That's tactical. That's brilliant strategy. He
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 3: wants the violence on TV. He wants the nonviolent black
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 3: man facing the violent white cop upsetting white suburban expectations
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 3: in the northern cities. He wants that on TV. And
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 3: once you can't look away because it's happening right there
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 3: in front of you, then he goes and gives the
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 3: I Have a Dream speech, And the big deal of
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 3: the I Have a Dream speech is not about the
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 3: four little kids, even though I have four little kids
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 3: and I really like the four little kids part of
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 3: the speech. But the big deal of that speech is
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 3: the check. He says, I have a promissory note given
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 3: to me by the founders that I come to the
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 3: Bank of Liberty. I refuse to believe it's returned marked
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 3: insufficient funds. In other words, you Americans have said this.
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 3: You gave a problem. What do I want from you?
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 3: I don't want you to change. I want you to
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 3: be the you you claim you are. If you're the you,
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 3: you tell your children you are. We're done here.
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: That's it.
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 3: So you lower that bar for the beating a path
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 3: back from the injustice while also making the injustice much
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 3: more expensive. There are two kinds of conflict in the world.
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 3: There's zero-sum conflicts, and there are complicated conflicts. Zero-sum conflicts exist.
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 3: That's when one side has all the justice, the other
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 3: side has.
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 1: None of it.
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 3: Good versus evil.
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 1: Okay?
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 3: Lord of the Rings. For example, World War II. Not
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 3: everything the Allies did is right. There were war crimes committed.
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 3: All the justice is on the Allied side. The Nazis
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 3: are totally wrong.
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 1: Totally 100%.
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 3: Zero sum. And then there are conflicts, most conflicts. Any
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 3: conflict you might have with your spouse is complicated. 90%
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 3: of the justice is on my side, obviously. If it's
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 3: my spouse, then it's 10%, but you know what I mean.
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 3: But there's also justice on the other side. And those
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 3: are two psychologies of leadership. So for example, if you're
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 3: in a zero-sum conflict, if you're in a zero-sum conflict
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 3: and your people, your population believes that they're 100% right
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 3: and the other side is 0% right, and you try
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 3: and make peace, what happens to you? You're making peace
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 3: with evil. Chamberlain went to Munich to make peace with Hitler.
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 3: And history doesn't remember him as a man who tried
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 3: to avoid war. History remembers him as a man who
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 3: would make peace with Hitler. You undermine yourself because there's
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 3: zero justice on the other side. But what if there's
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 3: a little bit of justice on the other side? What
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 3: if there's 10% justice on the other side? And this
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 3: is what King was trying to do. I'm not making
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 3: peace with the injustice on that side. I'm making peace
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 3: with the justice on that side. Then you can create
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 3: a situation where I have 90%, 80%, 60%, whatever of
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 3: the justice, but there is something over there that's right.
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 3: There is something over there that's true. If I can
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 3: make peace with that, then the totality of 100% becomes 200%.
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 3: I can create greater justice. You have to have some
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 3: legitimacy on the other side to reach out. The Palestinian
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 3: story of us is that we are totally and utterly illegitimate. Completely.
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 3: They use many different vocabularies about it. By the way,
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 3: that's why there's so much vocabulary and words on us.
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 3: We are settler colonialists and also colonialists, which are two
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 3: completely different things. So if you say, but that doesn't
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 3: make sense, then they always have another one to pull out.
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 3: And we are imperialists. And we are the handmaiden of
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 3: British imperialism. And we are apartheid. And we are all
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 3: the things. I mean, I forget half the things. But
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 3: there's like all the things. There's not one thing. We're Nazis.
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 3: In Arabic, we're all the time called Nazism. Not so
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 3: much in English. It doesn't play well in Arabic constantly.
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 1: But keep in mind, Palestinians feel like some Israelis. So
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 1: I don't like the generalization. Some Israelis feel the same
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 1: way about them. One second.
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 3: But I want to make a point here. When these
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 3: arguments are leveled at Israel, that it is every one
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 3: of these evil kinds of regimes, evil kinds of institutions,
• 1:25:07
  Speaker 3: they're not making a specific argument that it is specifically,
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 3: literally that thing. We're not literally colonialist. Okay, every colonialist
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 3: project in the 20th century had a mother country. We
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 3: have no mother country. We're the only colonialist project built
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 3: by refugees with no other options. That's not what colonialism is.
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 3: Colonialism is a structure of power. We are literally defenseless
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 3: refugees who try to do this to survive. That's not colonial.
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 3: By the way, maybe it's evil, but it's not that
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 3: specific evil, right? But to apply all these words to us.
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 3: Not anymore, but they're talking about the very founding of Israel,
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 3: the very idea of Israel. The point is that all
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 3: these things share one thing in common, which is that
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 3: you can peel them off. You can peel apartheid off
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 3: South Africa and be left with the South African people.
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 3: You can peel Nazism off Germany and be left with
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 3: the Germans. You can remove Israel from the land. You
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 3: can remove it. That's a removable thing. And We are
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 3: this totally illegitimate thing that is removable. And therefore, any
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 3: Palestinian leader who tries to make peace with us is
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 3: profoundly undermined. Because there's no Palestinian story that says, this
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 3: is a tribe of people with nowhere to go. It's
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 3: been here generations. Half of them come from the Arab world,
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 3: not from Europe.
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 1: But why do they need a story? They're just humans.
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 1: They don't need a story.
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 3: You need a story.
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I don't think you need a story. If I
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 1: see 20,000 dead kids, that's 20,000 dead kids. If I
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 1: see somebody come at a concert and kill 1,200 people,
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: that's 1,200 people killed. I guess that's the story. That's
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 1: how you get to a place of empathy, I would think.
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 3: That's a single event. That's a single event. In 1974,
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 3: I think it was, DFLP, it's one of the Palestinian
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 3: terror groups, comes down from Lebanon. A bunch of commandos,
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 3: they take over an Israeli school in a town called Maalot.
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 3: They've killed 22 kids by the time Israeli police have
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 3: gotten there and killed them. That's a massive massacre in
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 3: a school. Single event that for Israelis was like, this
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 3: is what the Palestinians.
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 1: When all those single events add up, there's been a
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 1: lot of single events throughout this whole. Hundreds. You know
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 1: what I'm saying?
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they all add up.
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 1: All these single events.
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 3: But if I need a Palestinian leader who reaches across
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 3: the aisle and says, OK, you know what? Those Jews,
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 3: they're not going anywhere. They're a tribe. They're a people
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 3: in the Middle East. They're not going anywhere. They got
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 3: nowhere to go. That's enough. Now, they've done terrible things
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 3: to us. Maybe we did terrible things to them. Obviously, 90%
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 3: of the justice is on my side.
• 1:27:24
  Speaker 1: Come on. It's been back and forth. No, no.
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 3: I'm speaking as a Palestinian. Everybody thinks they're better than
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 3: the other side thinks. Everybody thinks 90% of the justice
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 3: is on their side.
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 5: Okay?
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 3: What I'm saying is it can't be 100-0. It has
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 3: to be 90-10. There has to be something on the
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 3: other side you've got to be able to reach out.
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 3: You've got to be a Palestinian leader who reaches out
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 3: to the Israelis, and you can't just say what Mahmoud
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 3: Abbas says, the leader who's willing to have some kind of–
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 3: you can't just say to them, to the Palestinian people, look,
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 3: they're evil Nazi apartheidist colonialist bastards, but they've got tanks,
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 3: so I've got to make peace with them. You can't
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 3: do it. Because what you end up with is Mahmoud Abbas,
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 3: currently the Palestinian president, with single-digit support among Palestinians.
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: You have to see their humanity.
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 3: His own story of himself is that he's a betrayer
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 3: of the Palestinian cause. He's a Chamberlain. You have to
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 3: say the Israelis are legitimate. On the Israeli side, it's
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 3: exactly the same thing. You have to see, on the
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 3: Palestinian side, a humanity. You have to not only see
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 3: the Palestinians through the lens of what Hamas is saying
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 3: to you. And these forces that want a zero-sum conflict.
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 3: These forces, like Hamas, tells Palestinians, God is on our side.
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 3: So if we force the permanent forever war, if we
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 3: force the total war in which one nation lives and
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 3: one nation disappears, we're going to win because God's on
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 3: our side. Well, that's a catastrophe. So there has to
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 3: be some legitimacy on the other side. Peace begins with
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 3: legitimacy on the other side, and then the end. if
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 3: you give people a path back, right? What should the
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 3: Palestinian message to the Israelis be? It should be the
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 3: whole point of Zionism is that only Jews can defend
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 3: Jews and that Jews need a place under the sun
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 3: to defend themselves after the 20th century and forever because
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 3: you cannot be You cannot rely on the mercy of
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 3: others because the mercy of others will always dry up
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 3: and then you are dead. And so you need your
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 3: own place. That's Zionism. And then Palestinians can come to
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 3: the Jews and say, guys, that's it. That's all we need.
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 3: We need Zionism. Your story of yourselves, that's what we're
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 3: asking for. And you are a legitimate people who gets
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 3: to exist. That Palestinian movement would clean up in Israeli politics.
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 3: And there's a lot that the Israelis have to do
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 3: in recognizing the Palestinian legitimacy as well.
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 1: I've got two questions. One goes back to Hassan. Because
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 1: when Hassan says he's anti-Zionist, and I had to look
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: it up, his opposition to Zionism is that he characterizes
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 1: Zionism as a nationalist ideology tied to the displacement and
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: oppression of Palestinians. Do you agree with that definition?
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 3: That that's what Zionism is?
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 5: Yes.
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 3: That's a completely ridiculous claim. Zionism offered repeated offered.
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 1: And the reason I brought it up because you said
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: if Palestinians adopted Zionism then they would.
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 3: For them their version of Zion for them in other
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 3: words we need a place under the sun to be
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 3: safe that's an argument you can bring to the Israelis
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 3: they'll understand but it can't be it can't be and
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 3: therefore the Jews don't get to have it which is
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 3: the actual argument of Hamas and of a lot of
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 3: these activists that's the beginning of a path forward There's
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 3: two peoples, and they both need a place.
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 1: That's it.
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 3: There's nothing else. There isn't a... So you believe in
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 3: a two-state solution? I believe I'm the last person in
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 3: the Middle East who does, so please treat this as
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 3: truly I'm a ridiculous, silly person, but nobody has yet
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 3: explained to me what else is possible. And I talk
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 3: all day long with the Israeli right. I talk all
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 3: day long with Palestinians. I talk all day long for
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 3: my job with everybody in this world, and nobody has
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 3: yet actually explained We can't rule over them. They don't
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 3: want to be Israelis. We don't want them to be Israelis.
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 3: By the way, if you stop thinking you can replace
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 3: the other nation, a lot of things become pretty easy.
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: I agree.
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 3: And so that needs to be the beginning. And just
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 3: to say to that point, the activist pro-Palestinian world that
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 3: doesn't make that distinction between Palestinian freedom, which is a
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 3: good thing, and removing Israel which is telling the last
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 3: surviving Jews of the 20th century that they didn't deserve
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 3: to survive and shouldn't going forward. An activist world that
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 3: doesn't make that distinction is an activist world that's working
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 3: against that peace. You've got to be very clear about
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 3: where you stand on that point. You cannot say to
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 3: the Jews of Israel, not morally, tactically, also morally, but tactically,
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 3: you can't say to the Jews of Israel, you've got
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 3: to make room for a Palestinian state and you don't
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 3: deserve to have a state. That's a great way for
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 3: them not to make room for a Palestinian state, if
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 3: it's a zero-sum thing. In order for them to have
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 3: their state, I have to lose mine, which is the
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 3: Hassan Piker argument. Then it's not going to happen. So
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 3: there are two just peoples here. There are two real peoples.
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 3: And the idea that one of them is this fake
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 3: thing that came from Europe and colonized is just an
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 3: idea that it can be removed. And it can't be removed.
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 1: This is my last question.
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: You've explained why Israelis are afraid of what could happen
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 1: if they give up control over Palestinian territories, right? But
• 1:32:25
  Speaker 1: what are Palestinians supposed to do while Israelis wait to
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 1: feel safe enough to give them freedom?
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 3: I would say that almost there is in 30 years
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 3: of peace processing, no Palestinian leader has ever spoken to
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 3: the Israeli people. And sometimes, and you already asked about this,
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 3: so I'll answer it directly. Sometimes you say, sometimes the
• 1:32:55
  Speaker 3: weaker side has agency. By the way, King talked about that.
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 3: Sometimes the weaker side has the stronger side, you know,
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 3: in a place where it can. The Israeli left believes
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 3: that it tried and Palestinian radicalism destroyed its attempt. And
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 3: there are thousands of dead people on that attempt. And
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 3: that politically makes it almost impossible for them to move.
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 3: There needs to be a Palestinian movement that says, the Israelis,
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 3: you're good, you're fine, you can live here. For example,
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 3: Congressman Ro Khanna was talking about how Marwan Barghouti has
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 3: to be let out of prison. Marwan Barghouti is a
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 3: Palestinian leader who is serving five life sentences, convicted in
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 3: a civilian court, not in any military court, for masterminding
• 1:33:45
  Speaker 3: the mass murder of Israelis during the Second Intifada. He's
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 3: very popular among Palestinians. And if he were released, he
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 3: could be a Nelson Mandela of Palestinians. That's what Ro
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 3: Khanna said. The problem with that is that Marwan Barghouti
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 3: has never actually agreed that the Jews get to have
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 3: a state. When he's asked, point blank. And so I
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 3: don't know whether he should be released or not. I
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 3: don't care. But he's not the solution because he can't
• 1:34:08
  Speaker 3: come to the Jews and say, you do get to
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 3: have a state, but we need ours. When that comes
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 3: out of the Palestinian political arena, then something becomes possible.
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 3: Until then, It's not that the Palestinians are sitting tight
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 3: and the Jews are sitting tight and I'm waiting around
• 1:34:22
  Speaker 3: and the Jews are powerful, the Palestinians are weak, so
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 3: we should take the first attempt. There is an active
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 3: Palestinian political world doing active things. And mostly they take
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 3: the form of Hamas. And that is catastrophically destructive to
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 3: the possibility of Israelis ever saying, we can possibly afford
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 3: to come down off the West Bank. The West Bank
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 3: are the mountains that overlook all of our cities. if
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 3: we give up the West Bank, we are nine miles
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 3: wide in the middle of the country. Now, that's not
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 3: an argument not to, but it is an argument to
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 3: respect the fact that it might feel terribly frightening and
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 3: scary in the middle of the Middle East. Who are
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 3: our neighbors?
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 1: Syria? Iraq? Egypt? Saudi?
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 3: Lebanon? You want to be nine miles wide in the
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 3: Middle East right now? Like, would America do that? So
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 3: if it's not safe, it won't happen. Again, when I
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 3: speak overseas, especially to Americans, because Americans have this culture
• 1:35:18
  Speaker 3: of thinking about things in moral terms, which is an awesome,
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 3: beautiful tradition. It just can make it hard to think
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 3: about other people's experiences somewhere else. I'm not making a
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 3: moral argument that it shouldn't happen. I'm saying if you
• 1:35:29
  Speaker 3: want to get it done, the practical path to getting
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 3: it done is that the Israelis have to have any
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 3: reason to believe that it won't end in catastrophic disaster
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 3: for them and then a knock-on disaster for the Palestinians.
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 3: If I pull out of the West Bank and Hamas
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 3: takes over the West Bank, and shoots mortars at Ben-Gurion Airport,
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 3: our one international airport, and shuts it down, which is
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 3: like a stone's throw from the West Bank, and mass
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 3: bombs my city, I have to retake the West Bank.
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 3: You know how horrifying that looks? It has to actually
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 3: be safe before it can happen, which means that if
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 3: there is to be a Palestinian state, it probably should
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 3: be as part of a much larger bargain with Arab
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 3: states that can come in, that can fill the power vacuums,
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 3: that can prevent the Hamas coming over. This is basically
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 3: the international plan for Gaza. that a bunch of Arab
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 3: countries come in and put together Gaza. Maybe that's a
• 1:36:17
  Speaker 3: solution for two-thirds of the West Bank that can then
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 3: be connected to in some confederation with Jordan so they
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 3: have an international airport. You can't build an airport in.
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 1: The West Bank.
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 3: It's too hilly. There's no flat areas. But what if
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 3: there's an open border between the new state of Palestine
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 3: and Jordan and that's some kind of a confederation? And
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 3: Jordan and Israel have a peace treaty and we supply
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 3: them with their water and they have the stewardship over Al-Aqsa,
• 1:36:37
  Speaker 3: the holy site of Gaza.
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 1: Do you think there will ever be a regime in
• 1:36:42
  Speaker 1: Israel that really wants that?
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 3: It's doable. But it's doable if it's not going to
• 1:36:46
  Speaker 3: involve the mass murder of my children. And the only
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 3: Palestinians talking to Israelis are Hamas.
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 5: Damn.
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 1: But the only Israelis talking to Palestinians are people like
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: the guy who you say want to get rid of
• 1:36:58
  Speaker 1: all people and guys.
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 3: The only Israelis that most Palestinians hear is the Ben-Gurion.
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: Jesus Christ. Well, it was a great conversation. I mean,
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 1: We clearly didn't solve peace in the Middle East, but
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 1: it was a great conversation.
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 3: That was so close.
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 1: Great conversation, man.
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 3: Listen, thank you for having me on.
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 1: Come back anytime, man.
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 3: It's frustrating to have these, to hear all the activists
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 3: screaming over here.
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 1: Would you ever talk to us on, or would you
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 1: ever go on like the Young Turks would like?
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 3: Sure, but I mean, it's all this like quote mining,
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 3: all this kind of BS. You know, there was, Ben-Gurion
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 3: wrote millions of words, and there's a few sentences that
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 3: sound kind of racist, and then they pull them out,
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 3: and I'm like, The point about Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel,
• 1:37:41
  Speaker 3: is that he was saying several, like a million times
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 3: over the course of the 1930s, the Jews are about
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 3: to die. In 1933, he gives a speech. He says
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 3: European Jewry is over. 1933. And they're coming and quote
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 3: mining with me all these bad things that he said
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 3: about some other thing. I would be happy to have
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 3: a debate if it's a real debate and it's not
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 3: just quote mining stupid stuff. You know, Palestinian leaders sided
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 3: with the Nazis in World War II. Does that mean
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 3: they're Nazis or does that mean they were anti-British? You
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 3: know what I mean? Like, like, do we have a
• 1:38:09
  Speaker 3: serious debate or are we right? So, yeah, to have
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 3: a serious conversation about it, for sure.
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 1: Why not? OK. All right.
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 2: Well, thank you for joining us.
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 1: Tell them how to follow you and stuff, man. If
• 1:38:18
  Speaker 1: you want all this backlash.
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I'm on X where I yell at people
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 3: too much. I'm trying to get off. So don't go there.
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 3: I have a podcast called Ask Khabib Anything. It was
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 3: my wife's idea for a brand. And now people ask
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 3: me questions I don't know the answers to. But if
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 3: you come to me and questions on the Middle East, Israel, Palestinians,
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 3: the conflict, I'll do the best I can to answer
• 1:38:37
  Speaker 3: the question. And we got, you know, Patreon, Substack, all
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 3: of that kind of stuff.
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 1: I enjoyed the conversation.
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 3: Oh, and I'm at the Free Press, which is... Awesome,
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 3: and I love those guys, and that's my American connection.
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 1: All right, Javi. Thanks so much.
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 2: Thank you for joining us. Appreciate you.
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 3: Thank you.
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 1: It's The Breakfast Club. Good morning.