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BONUS: Should Israel Exist At All? · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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Get a humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas and at the risk of continuing
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to kick a hornet's nest fruitlessly I have to have faith retain faith in those of you
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who find it useful to continue wrestling with ideas in a non-partisan and fact based
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away as possible so I've been thinking a lot about Gaza and Palestine and Israel and
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I've come across a couple of articles recently and I've written one indeed that have helped
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me gain some new perspective that I haven't been getting from the mainstream media that
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I hope you might find valuable.
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The first reports which have gone really unreported in Australia of a video, a movie that was
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screened to international journalists by the Israeli Defence Force earlier this week.
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And it was a video 43 minutes long of raw footage from Hamas's body cams of the terrorist
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attack.
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So before we put into context the grand geopolitical battles that are underway in the Middle
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East, I think it's worth just noticing the inciting incident because we're forgetting
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about it.
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Many people aren't even aware of it.
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Many people including prominent journalists have claimed that many of the accusations
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that were made about Hamas's behaviour on October 7th were a bullshit and that that's
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just Israeli propaganda.
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So the Israelis gathered together the body cam footage and played it for international
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journalists.
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They haven't released it publicly for obvious reasons that I want to re-traumatise the
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families of the victims.
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Graham Wood is a brilliant and impartial journalist.
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He's not a cheerleader for Israel.
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He's one of the most informed authorities on Islamist jihadism and has been brought a number
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of great pieces during the aftermath of 9-11 and the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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He knows this region better than anybody and in the Atlantic he relates his experience
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of watching these videos with other international journalists.
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His article is entitled A Record of Pure Predatory Sadism.
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I recommend it.
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It's tough reading.
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He writes, I certainly hope I never see any of this footage again.
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When I quote from him, men, women, and children are shot, blown up, hunted, tortured, burned,
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and generally murdered in any horrible manner you could predict and some that you might not,
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the terrorists surround a Thai man, a man from Thailand, who they've shot in the gut
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and then bicker about what to do next.
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And Graham writes, about 30,000 ties live in Israel, many of them are farm workers.
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Give me a knife, one Hamas terrorist shouts.
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Instead, he finds a garden hoe and he swings at the man's throat, taking thwack after thwack.
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Graham writes, the audience gasped, I heard someone heave a little, at another scene this
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one showing a father and his young sons, surprised in their pajamas.
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A terrorist throws a grenade into their hiding place and the father is killed.
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The boys are covered in blood and one appears to have lost an eye.
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They go to their kitchen and cry for their mother, one of the boys' houses.
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Why am I alive and daddy, daddy?
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One says, I think we're going to die.
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The terrorists who killed their father comes in and while they weep, he raids their fridge,
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water, water, he says.
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The spokesman was unable to say whether the children survived.
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Graham would go on to reflect on these videos.
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It's kind of like the webcam from the Christchurch shooter where the shoe was on the other foot,
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if there are any feet in this morass in the sense that he was a white supremacist targeting
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Muslims.
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And so what does Israel do about that now?
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How many innocent garsens will be caught up in Israel's response?
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My heart breaks for the innocent people in Gaza, betrayed by so many people, the Israelis,
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the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Arab world.
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But a really interesting point was made by Madagalaceus in his sub-stack, which is called
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slow boring, which I wholeheartedly recommend, where he talks about the right of return.
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That's the idea that Palestinians should have the ability to go back to Israel and take
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back the homes that they were kicked out of in 1948.
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He says, we need to understand how widespread that expectation is across the Arab world,
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and even among Western human rights campaigners.
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He quotes from Amnesty International, which says, there can be no lasting solution to the
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Palestinian refugee crisis until Israel respects Palestinians refugees right to return.
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In the meantime, this is quoting from Philip Luther, who's Amnesty International's research
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and advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa.
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In the meantime, Lebanese and Jordanian authorities must do everything in their power to
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minimize the suffering of Palestinian refugees by repealing discriminatory laws and removing
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obstacles blocking refugees access to employment and essential services.
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And then he goes on to say there are currently more than 5.2 million registered Palestinian
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refugees.
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The vast majority live in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the occupied Palestinian territories.
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Israel has failed to recognize their right under international law to return to homes where
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they or their families once lived in Israel or the occupied Palestinian territories.
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At the same time, they've never received compensation for the loss of their land and property.
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So let's just set aside the question of whether or not we hold any other colonial societies,
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and I've used those that word in square quotes and quotation marks, responsible for compensating
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let alone giving back the land of people who they pushed out.
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Is that an expectation that we hold of the United States and Canada towards Native Americans?
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Is it an expectation that we hold of Australians towards First Nations people that they should
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be able to come and take your house because they used to be here?
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Is it not because it was just a long time ago, a longer time ago, is that not a matter
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of principle, but just time, like if the Israelis just wait 200 years, will people no longer
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think that that's a legitimate claim?
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Because we really can't talk about the Palestinian issue unless we talk about whether or not
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it's legitimate for Palestinians to take over the land that they were on when Israel was
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created in 1948.
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Let me quote from Madagalaceus here.
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He says, you might think Arab public opinion is extremely sympathetic to Palestinians and
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eager to see Arab governments help Palestinians have better lives.
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Were that true?
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You might expect to see Egypt opening its doors to refugees fleeing the carnage in Gaza.
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Of course that would be a logistical and economic burden on Egypt, but countries like Saudi
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Arabia, Q8, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are right there and could help
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out with money.
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You can of course, Matt writes, understand from general immigration policies why Egypt
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might not want to do this and why the richer Arab states might not want to help out with
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money.
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Generally speaking, you should do stuff to help foreigners is a hard sell in politics.
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But Matt writes, what's peculiar about the Palestinian issue though is that this normal
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level of indifference to the welfare of foreigners coexist with what we're told is a profound
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level of preoccupation with their fate, meaning the Palestinian fate.
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The moment you talk about Palestine across the Arab world, it inflames everybody.
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The Arab street explodes.
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They claim to care very much about their Palestinian brothers and sisters.
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But the practical things that they could do, like give work permits, let alone citizenship
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to the Palestinians who are living in Jordan, who are living in Lebanon, they don't do.
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Now the more conspiratorially minded people might say, well, they don't do it because they
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like having the Palestinian issue, the leaders, the corrupt leaders like having a Palestinian
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issue as something that they can rally the Arab street around.
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It's nice to have an enemy, it's convenient to hate Israel.
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You don't actually want to make the Palestinian situation worse because it serves your narrow
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political interests.
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But there's also a more strategic and less cynical reason for not giving Palestinians rights
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for Arab countries, not giving Palestinians rights, which is they and many Western human
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rights organizations, like Amnesty International, think that to do so would remove the pressure
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off Israel to find a lasting solution.
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And that lasting solution is inextricably bound up with the right of Palestinians to return
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to Israel, that is the end of Israel as a Jewish state.
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He writes, note that Amnesty sort of glossed over the fact that Palestinian refugees living
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in Jordan and Lebanon lack full access to employment rights and social services.
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And in this context, Palestinian refugees does not necessarily mean someone who fled
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from settle of violence six weeks ago.
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If your great grandparents were kicked out of their village when they were kids and fled
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to a refugee camp in Lebanon and then had children in the 1950s who had kids in the 1980s
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who had you in the 2010s, then you are still not a citizen of Lebanon.
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You are a stateless Palestinian refugee.
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And the Palestinian cause, writes Matt, means fighting for your right to return to that
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village, not fighting for your right to enjoy citizenship in the country where you and
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your parents and your grandparents were born.
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To be clear, writes Matt, this is a population of a few hundred thousand people out of millions
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of refugees, but the fact that pro-Palestinian advocacy generally doesn't mean advocating
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for the right of people born in Lebanon or Jordan to become citizens of those countries
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is relevant to understanding the broader dynamics.
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This is fascinating to me because it sort of reveals the fundamental audacity of the
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claim, not just of Palestinians, not just of Arab governments, not just of Iran, but
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of Western human rights organizations and pro-Palestinian activists.
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Again, my heart goes out to the Palestinians, it's not really their fault, it's certainly
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not the fault of a five-year-old Palestinian child who will be killed by an Israeli strike
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that this situation exists, but the situation partly exists because just as for Palestinians
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does not in the current context mean making the lives of Palestinian people better.
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It means making the lives of Palestinian people worse in order to put pressure on Israel
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to resolve the situation once and for all.
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Matt imagines a hypothetical person.
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He says, imagine a kind of guy who runs around advocating for the following ideas, one, Egypt
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should open the borders with Gaza and allow unarmed people who can pass some kind of background
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check to leave the quote-unquote open air prison, which is what we call Gaza, and enjoy life
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in a neighboring Arab state.
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Proposal 2 Lebanon, Jordan and other countries should either grant birthright citizenship
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to the descendants of Palestinian refugees who live in their countries, or at a minimum
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create an easy naturalization process.
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Birthright citizenship means you become a citizen if you're born in that country, which does
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not apply to Palestinian refugees who are living in Lebanon and Jordan, they are still
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stateless.
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If they were born there, their parents were born there, their grandparents were born there.
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Lebanon and Jordan says you're not ours, you're Palestinian.
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Proposal 3 of this imaginary person who Madaglaceus is inventing.
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The Gulf states, which currently rely heavily on foreign labor, should tilt away from their
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current reliance on workers from Africa and South Asia and give more visas to Palestinians.
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This is what's interesting.
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Matt says you don't actually need to imagine that guy though, because I've met guys like
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that, and they're either right-wing Israelis or Jewish Republicans in the United States.
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Clearly he writes Palestinians would be much better off on average if this agenda were
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implemented.
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That is, if Egypt opens the borders with Gaza and allows Garsens in to enjoy life in Egypt,
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if Lebanon and Jordan grant citizenship or allowed Palestinian refugees to become citizens
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of Lebanon and Jordan, and if the Gulf states allowed Palestinians to come in as foreign
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laborers, clearly that would benefit Palestinians.
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But Matt writes, not only is this not a strategy of a Palestinian cause, advocating for it
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would be seen as incredibly hostile to the Palestinian cause.
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Why?
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The fear is that lots of Palestinians would welcome the opportunity to emigrate.
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It's not fun living in the West Bank, it's even less fun living in Gaza.
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This is me talking now, not Matt.
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And if other Arab states, let alone Western countries, were more welcoming to Palestinian
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immigrants, plenty of them might choose that option.
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And as a result, they would never be allowed to return.
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The claim is that Israel would never let them back in.
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But Matt makes the point, you could construe basically any refugee situation in that way.
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He writes, during the Syrian civil war, you could have argued that urging European countries
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to accept Syrian refugees should be understood as a form of complicity with the Assad regime,
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letting Ukrainian women and children flee the war zone for safety in NATO states could
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be construed as a form of complicity with Putin's invasion and desire to crucify eastern
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Ukraine.
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The construction of narratives, right Matt, is a discursive process that can go in different
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directions.
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But whatever you think about the issue on the merits, it's important to understand that
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this is the way the Palestinian cause has been constructed.
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That's somewhat eye-opening to me.
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eye-opening that Palestinian suffering is construed by pro-Palestinian activists, not necessarily
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Palestinian people, but by pro-Palestinian activists, by Hamas, by Western human rights
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organizations, and by the Arab street, as well as Arab leaders.
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Palestinian suffering is seen as indispensable to the overarching cause of Palestinian self-government.
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And therefore, the actual interests, the day-to-day interests of alleviating the suffering
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of Palestinians, is regarded as inimical to long-term Palestinian interests.
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In other words, if you are pro-Palestinian, you are expected to advocate for the emiseration
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of Palestinians now so that Israel has to do something in the long term about the problem.
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And if you argue for policies that would help Palestinians right now, that's regarded
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as being anti-Palestinian, because you're alleviating the pressure, the pressure cooker,
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that will supposedly Sunday force Israel to do what?
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What exactly?
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Create a state, a full state, right next to it after what just happened on October 7.
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So that's the right of return issue.
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The second reason why that's interesting, apart from highlighting that kind of hypocritical
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position of many people in the West who are most agitated about human rights in Gaza,
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rather than the calamity of what happened to Israel on October 7.
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The second point is just to understand the gulf between what the pro-Palestinian movement
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is asking for and what the Israelis can reasonably give.
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They're really not generally asking for, and Hamas is certainly not asking for, a free
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state alongside Israel.
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They're asking for the right of Palestinians to go back to what they regard as Palestine.
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They basically don't want any Jews in the Middle East.
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And if you're not scrupulously clear about what you mean by a free Palestine, you can
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find yourself arguing for an impossibility.
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You are just not going to push the nuclear armed Jews into the sea and kill them all,
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not without destroying the world in the process.
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So it would be helpful if people who care for Palestinians were able to talk about what
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they actually want to happen to improve the lives of Palestinians right now, rather than
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using Palestinians as a pawn in a longer-term geo-strategic game.
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And also, to split apart the question of what is tolerable as a state for Palestinians,
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versus the right of return, which even Amnesty International says is fundamental, the right
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of return that no one else in the world accepts for their indigenous populations, and certainly
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won't be accepted by a population which has millennia-long ties to the land as the
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Jews do.
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Because the moment you start talking about whether or not someone whose grandparents were
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evicted in 1948 should have a right to your house, the question of whether or not your
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great, great, great, great grandparents who were there centuries ago, or stretching all
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the way back to the Kingdom of King David in 1000 BC, also have some right to the land.
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So I think it would be useful going forward to think about the right of return as a specific
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boxed-off quarantined issue, and in that alongside that issue is the whole question of what
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we mean by the future of a free Palestine.
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And then in another bucket, the well-being of Palestinian human beings who exist on
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the planet right now, because those two things are very different.
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To care about the latter is treated by pro-Palestinian activists as being a betrayal of the former.
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In other words, caring about the lives of Palestinians right now in very practical ways is regarded
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as being a betrayal of the long-term future of a free Palestine if a free Palestine is
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construed as being Palestine all the way from the sea to the mountains.
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In other words, no Jews, or Jews as a minority in some fundamentally Palestinian state.
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Lastly, I wrote a piece about this.
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I sent it out on my sub-stack.
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If you're a subscriber, you will have read it, hopefully.
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If not, I'd just like to read it out.
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And I hope you enjoy it.
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It's called, it's not about Israel, it's about us.
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And I wrote, I've recently tried to inject some nuance into the catastrophe in Gaza and
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Israel on radio and on my podcast.
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No sooner does the syllable gar slip from my lips than the comments start pouring in.
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How do you feel about gars and babies being murdered?
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The listeners don't need to add the Jew part out loud.
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The images out of Gaza are utterly heartbreaking, emotions are raw on both sides.
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My grandparents were Holocaust survivors, my father was born in a refugee camp during World
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War II before coming to Australia by boat.
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They wanted justice for Arabs, they would have been appalled by the failure of right-wing
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Israeli governments to pursue peace.
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It's unsustainable and unethical to build settlements on another people's land and to condemn
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millions to rot in squalid, open-air refugee camps in perpetuity.
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But let's be clear about what happened two weeks ago.
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Southern Israel is not populated by right-wing settlers who oppose peace, not that it would
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justify Hamas' atrocities, if it were.
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It's populated largely by left-wing peace-necks.
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On Kibbut Sim, it's a hippy-dippy part of the country.
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The largest group of victims were kids in their early twenties dancing at an all-night
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outdoor peace rave.
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Terrorists with body cam swarmed in, the Christchurch shooter on mass.
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They shot up kindergarten, executed babies, beheaded half dead soldiers, dragged old ladies
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bleeding from their genitals through cheering crowds.
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Some of the young concert-goers who weren't gunned down found shelter.
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Hamas rolled grenades into their midst, writhing bodies with their limbs ripped off.
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The body cam footage has been verified by international journalists.
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If you find yourself responding to these facts with a knee-jerk, but what about Gaza?
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Then you need your humanity checked.
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This isn't a game of who has the most corpses wins.
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It's lose-lose.
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And it's deeply depressing that our reaction, as a nation, seems to be to refract the events
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into our pre-existing moral certainties, grievance scorecards, and what aboutisms.
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Garsens have been betrayed by Hamas, by Israel, by Egypt, by Jordan, by the Arab world.
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The only people who are expected to answer for their plight are Jews.
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We don't hold Iranian Australians responsible for the crimes of Hisbalah.
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We don't expect them to renounce the mullus of Tehran.
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We don't place the crimes of the Chinese Communist Party at the feet of Chinese Australians.
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We don't argue that China's barbarism against the Uighurs negates the Chinese people's
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right to a state, but the Jews.
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Well, the Jews are different.
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They're not real people, are they?
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Except when their evil puppeteers.
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Either way, they have some explaining to do.
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They always do.
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The underlying fury at Israel is not about settlements or Gaza.
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It's about whether Jews are a pain in the ass.
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It's about whether Israel should really exist at all,
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whether it's a fundamentally illegitimate project, a colonizing power.
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Look, you may think Israel is a misbegotten venture.
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You may think it was wrong to ship Jews back to that part of the world,
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steamrolling the interests of many people who were living there at the time.
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But Israel was not a colonial project.
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Not like the British Empire or the Spanish conquistadors or the Dutch in the East Indies.
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Jews are a tiny population, 16 million people globally,
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who were never accepted into any society they've ever lived in.
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They were never allowed to join the professional classes.
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They couldn't get mainstream educations.
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They couldn't join the elite.
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After being hounded and slaughtered and excluded from every other place,
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they were allowed, in 1948, to self-govern the land that King David ruled in 1000 BC.
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There's a laudable instinct in Western democracies to trust our post-colonial guilt.
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Given the barbarous history of colonization,
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we're biased towards assuming that brown-skinned poor people are usually in the right,
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while white-skinned people who speak good English and wear fancy suits are usually the oppressors.
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In the case of Israel, it's nonsense.
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Think about what an acknowledgement of country, a land acknowledgement is.
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It's a recognition that regardless of whatever has happened in the past few hundred years,
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having ancestors who lived here thousands of years ago, counts for something.
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If anyone was doing welcomes to country in the Middle East, it'd be Jews.
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To repeat, this doesn't justify West Bank settlements.
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It doesn't justify the abysmal treatment of Palestinians,
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but let's cut the nonsense about colonialism.
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There really truly are two people with legitimate claims to Israel Palestine,
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yet only one side of the conflict agrees with this.
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There are about 30 times as many Arabs in the world as Jews.
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If the former put down their weapons, they could be peace.
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If the latter did, there would be no Jews left in the Middle East.
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How long will the experiment of Jewish self-government last?
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How successful do Hamas, the Taliban, Hezbollah and Iran have to get?
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For Australia's well-meaning anti-Israelites to reject an Islamist death cult
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is vocally as they reject a Jewish state.
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My father now has Alzheimer's and recently moved into a Jewish aged care home.
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In nursing home hired armed guards last week, in case some glassy-eyed depot
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enacts Allah's will by slaughtering as many elderly Sydney Jews as he can.
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My friend's daughter goes to a Jewish school in Sydney.
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She worries about her little girl waiting at a bus stop,
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wearing that school uniform, a uniform as distinctive as a yellow star of David
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embroidered on her chest.
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Jewish civilians are collateral damage everywhere always.
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They are the top target of hate crimes in Australia, in the United States and elsewhere.
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Sydney's mosques, incidentally, do not feel the need to arm themselves against homicidal Jews.
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So yes, let us weep for garsens, but let us not lose sight of ourselves of our shared Australian humanity.
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My dad was born 80 years ago amid the cinders of flaming Jewish flesh.
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He will die again protected by armed guards, a full circle, a timeless trap, the oldest hatred.
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But but but but gars and babies, Israel deserves it. Jews are the oppressors. This time is different.
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Yeah. When it comes to Jew hatred, this time is always different isn't it? It always has been.
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So that's that. God bless. Be strong. Love each other. See you next time.