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Transcript

Left Unsaid · Letter to America

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: One of the most cliched phrases in marketing is think outside the box.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: In 2009, when I was trying to find a name for my consulting practice, I finally looked it up.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: I have found that most of us who use the phrase know little about the puzzle associated with it, which is more than a century old.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: It features nine dots arranged in a square in three rows of three.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: The classic challenge is to connect them with four straight lines, without lifting a pencil.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: The assumed boundaries make it difficult to recognize that the lines can extend beyond the shape the dots form.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: I named my business nine dots with a Z in honor of the puzzle, and an unusual solution that uses only three lines.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Connecting dots in the fewest lines possible in unexpected ways is a bit of a hip pocket strength of mine.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: This podcast, I've realized, is built on the same premise, seemingly disparate anecdotes connected by patterns that become obvious in hindsight.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: And yet I seem to have missed a pattern that formed outside the frames of individual letters.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: In Never Forget, I explored how pain and fear clouded my judgment after 9-11, and how my anguish and anger led me to seek vengeance rather than security or even justice.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: In Family Feud, I recognized how some cultures rely on silence and gesture, as much as straight talk, to address challenging subjects.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Even episode 8, Grandfathered, was about what's left unsaid in service of maintaining close relationships, across topics too fraught for open debate.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Looking back, I see a pattern connecting these episodes.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: As anyone who's lived in Cairo can attest, denial is indeed a river in Egypt.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm guilty of unconsciously hiding from my own intense feelings about Palestine and not expressing them.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: I hid behind the premise that my letters are written very deliberately to leave the conclusions to the listeners.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: I stand by that practice.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: I also realize that it was never a reason not to say what I think, only a reason not to tell others what they should think.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that two wrongs make a right.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Not in the three years since October 7th, not across three millennia of history.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think that Israelis and Palestinians, living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, have the same human rights.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Both peoples have the right to self-determination.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: The same rules must apply whenever either invokes self-defense.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: They may choose to live side by side in one liberal democracy, two states in some kind of federation, or two completely separate countries.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: That is for both peoples to decide, and for the international community to respect.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Their rights are already theirs.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: Back in the 80s at Cairo American College, I witnessed firsthand a crystal clear demonstration of this kind of mutual respect.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: We had a mock Security Council debate on Israel and Palestine.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: Students in the Model UN Club represented the delegations.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: The son of the Israeli cultural attache to Egypt represented the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: An Arab student with a relative in Palestinian politics represented Israel.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: They were selected for those roles deliberately by the American Jewish head of the Social Studies Department, who had brought Model UN to the school.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: They were friends who knew the subject well.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: As I recall, it was intense and very realistic.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: The students argued their assigned positions convincingly and with conviction.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Their parents and other adults watched uncomfortably.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: It was a little uncanny.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: At the first break the two friends ran around the large table in the library to face each other.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: They hugged for a long time, whispering into each other's ears to apologize and make clear that neither had meant any disrespect.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: You heard that right.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: An Arab who once met Yasser Arafat representing Israel, an Israeli diplomat's son, representing the PLO, both well versed and unapologetic in their portrayal of each side.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: They were articulating positions that people had fought wars over.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: They were classmates, at the end of the day, close friends, not enemies.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: To me, it was like watching two families looking through a window at each other and realizing that what they were seeing was their own reflection.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: What struck me was how much they had in common classmates, fellow MUNers.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: They'd had school trips together, meals in each other's homes.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: If they had been switched at birth, I imagine both families would have embraced the other as their own.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: These parents wanted the same things for their boys, the same things that any parent would demand for any child.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, children are not treated equally.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: I met a young California man, only a few years out of high school himself, who had served in Afghanistan.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: He was an IT contractor at a company I was working with in 2009.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: He heard about my background and was interested in talking about his experience with someone who might understand what he had been through.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: On one occasion he opened up to me about an incident that I think he needed to get off his chest.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: He described an operation in which a group of U.S.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: soldiers were going door to door in a village looking for Taliban fighters or hidden weapons.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: They approached houses from the front and back to ensure no one could escape.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: At one home, as he covered the backyard, the door swung open, and a boy, maybe twelve years old, came running through, carrying a rifle.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: They made eye contact, and in a split second he had to decide whether to fire.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: He squeezed the trigger.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: He was haunted by a question.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Was the boy coming out to engage him in a firefight?
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Or as he suspected, was he running out of the house as instructed by a parent to save himself and hide one of their most valuable assets from confiscation by the troops?
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: He will never know the answer.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Under the rubble of Gaza's homes, schools, and hospitals are the bodies of men, women, children, and elders.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Entire families have been killed in attacks aimed at a single suspected fighter.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the people Israel has killed were Hamas fighters.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Some were responsible for the atrocities of October 7.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yet their guilt does not belong to the children buried beside them.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: In September 2025, a UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: It examined the killings, the starvation, the destruction of the conditions necessary for people to survive, and the evidence of intent.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: When we question the killing of innocent Palestinians, we're offered percentages, ratios of civilians to combatants, one to one, ten to one, a hundred to one, as though identifying enough combatants among the dead could settle the question of what happened to everyone else.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: A new documentary, NASA, takes its name from Israeli military shorthand for collateral damage.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: In it, Israeli intelligence officers, speaking anonymously, describe how the number of civilians permitted to die alongside a target was approved in advance.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: The Israeli military disputes the film's account.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: A casualty ratio does not justify the killing of innocents.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: Calling someone collateral damage changes nothing about their innocence.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: When arithmetic is offered as an excuse for atrocities, I hear math splaining murder.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: I would not accept my child's death being explained away that way.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: Why should a Palestinian parent?
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's time to demand for everyone what anyone would expect for themselves.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's time to love our neighbors.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's time to stop the killing and free Palestine.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is Handalen from Istanbul.