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KVETCH with Jon Liedtke - Adam Zivo LIVE FROM ISRAEL · Kvetch & Release

• 0:03
  Hey, everyone, welcome to Kvetch with John Lidkey. I gotta say I
• 0:08
  am super excited to have this conversation right now with Adam Zevo, who is
• 0:15
  a National Post columnist who is going to be speaking with us live right now
• 0:21
  from Tel Aviv in Israel, reporting live on the scene. And of course,
• 0:28
  you know an area that is not directly in the conflict. However,
• 0:32
  you really can't say that because it is an area that's constantly under threat,
• 0:37
  but obviously not nearly as much as across the border into Gaza. Adam,
• 0:44
  it's great to have you here right now. Thank you for joining me,
• 0:47
  Thanks for having me and listening to these stories about Israel. Yeah, you
• 0:51
  know, it's it's these are hard conversations to have. I don't believe there's
• 0:56
  anybody who's happy about what's going on. Obviously right now. I saw a
• 1:00
  tweet that you put out talking about how you had met someone who I believe
• 1:07
  had just lost a child, and you had mentioned how you had thought when
• 1:12
  you were hearing rockets flying overhead into Gaza, that you know, those could
• 1:18
  cause the loss of someone else's child, and that that hit me very hard.
• 1:23
  This idea that you know there are some people on one side, there
• 1:26
  are people on the other side, but there are the people that are dealing
• 1:30
  with it, the people who are living in and it must be stark to
• 1:34
  be there right now. And I think that's the conversation I want to have
• 1:38
  as your experience on the ground. Well, So before I go into anything
• 1:44
  else, I just want to clarify that, you know, I'm coming from
• 1:46
  this as someone who is generally pro Israel, but I also feel a great
• 1:49
  deep of a great deal of empathy for the Palestinians, and I think that
• 1:53
  it's important to keep Palestinians suffering in mind while also talking about Israeli experiences.
• 2:00
  You don't have to choose sides. You can show humanity to both. So
• 2:05
  I just want to take back a few steps. So I arrived in Israel
• 2:09
  basically on Friday. God time flies so quickly, and the first thing that
• 2:16
  I want to notice that, like, it was kind of shocking the degree
• 2:19
  to which life in Tel Aviv is normal. So when you want, like
• 2:25
  not affected by what's happening, complete completely unaffected at this point, right,
• 2:30
  So, I'd spoken to a journalist friend of mine who's very experienced in the
• 2:35
  Palestinian Israeli conflict. You know, he's made multiple trips throughout Gaza for many
• 2:39
  years. We met on the beach and he basically said that life in Israel
• 2:45
  had a sense of tension and fear and apprehension up until January, but in
• 2:51
  the more recent months things have been fairly okay. Even with the conflict with
• 2:55
  Iran. People didn't really take that too seriously because they felt that the iron
• 3:00
  almost going to be very effective. That prediction turned out to be quite true.
• 3:05
  And when you go through Tel Aviv, like everything is working normally.
• 3:08
  Cafes are open, restaurants are open, theater shows are still open. Sorry,
• 3:15
  you're gonna hear me cough. Sometimes I'm a little bit sick right now.
• 3:17
  Too much traveling, and and the beach is bustling with people right like
• 3:23
  completely full, and there's you know, techno music, and you know,
• 3:28
  lots of really beautiful shirtless people. The Israelis are incredibly fit. It's it's
• 3:32
  really intimidating, and it's bizarre. You are sorry. You had said on
• 3:38
  Twitter that a eight out of ten in Canada is a six out of ten
• 3:43
  in Israel. Yes, oh my god, Like you walk down the beach
• 3:47
  and there are just shirtless, muscular men with impeccable bodies jogging up and down,
• 3:53
  like an abundance of them. And that's but if I wasn't, that's
• 3:59
  the f training for you right there, right that in the TWN, I
• 4:01
  guess you know what, maybe we need conscription in Canada. Let's let's make
• 4:05
  Canada hot to here. But but it's really the whole the whole thing is
• 4:11
  surreal because while all of this is happening, there is an immense amount of
• 4:15
  suffering just two hours to the south. And we really have to stress how
• 4:20
  how how small Israel is, Like like literally just drive two hours and you're
• 4:26
  there. You know, in Toronto, you drive from one side to the
• 4:30
  other side, that's two hours. Yeah, where I'm from. I know,
• 4:32
  you guys are in Windsor. And so we went to the scene of
• 4:39
  the Nova Music Festival massacre and that was that was awful, right, you
• 4:43
  know, you go there and you realize that this is not an abstract thing.
• 4:47
  I mean, obviously we all understand that death is not an abstract thing,
• 4:50
  but it's very different when you were on the scene and you see the
• 4:53
  physical location where everyone died, and the Nova Music Festival was where there was
• 4:58
  the initial attack. That's where you saw the attack via land and the air.
• 5:05
  It was a large music festival. People were fleeing, they were murdered
• 5:12
  while trying to escape. Was the site cleaned Adam like, or was it
• 5:17
  left still as it was? It was all cleaned. And one thing I
• 5:24
  want to say here is that you know, the people were attending this festival
• 5:27
  were predominantly young, which is predictable, and they were predominantly peace activists.
• 5:31
  They were Israelis who wanted peace, who wanted a two state solution, who
• 5:35
  wanted to respect Palestinians' lives and their rights to self determination. And then they
• 5:41
  all got killed, not all of them, but a significant portion, over
• 5:44
  three hundred, fleeing for their lives. And so you go there and you're
• 5:47
  standing in the trees and you're like, wow, this place was littered with
• 5:49
  corpses, you know, six months ago. And we talked to this guy
• 5:55
  who was a local hero because essentially, when he heard of this whole thing
• 5:59
  happening, he just got in his car and he went and he saved as
• 6:02
  many people as he could. And he put together a team of people who
• 6:05
  came and saved as many people as they could. So they would drive into
• 6:09
  this area which being was being patrolled by you know, Tamas terrorists, and
• 6:14
  they would find youth, put them in their car and drive them to safety.
• 6:19
  And this was incredibly dangerous, right, like if they took a wrong
• 6:23
  turn, they would be dead. And you know, he told one story
• 6:28
  that stood out where one of his like one of the youth that he saved,
• 6:31
  says, you know, save my girlfriend, save my girlfriend. She's
• 6:33
  here, YadA, YadA, YadA. You know, he's on the phone
• 6:36
  with her. He goes and finds her and she's in the process of being
• 6:41
  kidnapped. There are three Kamas terrorists taking her back to Gaza. And he
• 6:46
  speaks Arabic, right, and so he puts on a Palestinian accent and he
• 6:50
  says, the soldiers are coming, the soldiers are coming. You leave her
• 6:55
  with me. I'll take I'll take her. You guys just run for your
• 6:57
  lives. So that's what they did. Then they with this deception. They
• 7:01
  they they let him have her and they ran for their lives even though there
• 7:05
  were no soldiers coming. And he took her to safety. And in the
• 7:10
  end he's a seven people, him and his team and so and so like
• 7:18
  in that area, people constantly come up to me, did sorry, did
• 7:20
  you say seven seven hundred and fifty seven hundred and fifty, So the death
• 7:27
  toll would have been significantly higher if not. Yeah, Like he's a hero,
• 7:36
  and because he saved so many people people in this area, like it's
• 7:41
  very difficult for him to walk around without having someone come and express gratitude towards
• 7:46
  him. And this is what happened. We're in the middle of talking with
• 7:48
  him and then incomes interjecting. You know, is this this big, burly
• 7:55
  uh man who's he's a bedo Win. A bed Win basically is like a
• 8:00
  Muslim nomadic tribe well kind of people, which you know, he's a bed
• 8:05
  Win, he's a Muslim, but he's a proud member of Israel. Because
• 8:09
  this whole thing about you know, Israel being you know, a white supremacist
• 8:13
  nation is not true. You know, who goes throughunt Israel. The ethnic
• 8:16
  diversity, the diversity of skin colors is very obvious right away. So you
• 8:22
  know, this guy, dark skinned, dead to Win Muslim and he basically
• 8:26
  almost starts crying, being like, you saved my life because this guy was
• 8:30
  working security at the festival when it happened when Hamas came in and he you
• 8:35
  know, he basically if he had not gone one hundred meters deeper into the
• 8:39
  festival, he would have been dead. So all of this happens. And
• 8:43
  then we go to the site and there's just like a little like field full
• 8:50
  of just flags and poles with people's faces, everyone who died. And then
• 8:56
  you look at them and they're all young, they're all happy in their photos,
• 9:01
  and they're all dead, all of them. And there was a mother
• 9:07
  and a father and they were there to you know, commemorate their son who
• 9:11
  was dead, murdered six months ago, and they were wearing T shirts with
• 9:16
  his face on it. And so you see the little pole where there's the
• 9:20
  face of the sun, and you see the parents with the face of their
• 9:24
  son. Of course he's rotting in the ground somewhere. This is all that's
• 9:31
  left is just a T shirt really, and they're lighting a candle to you
• 9:35
  know, commemorate him. And and in this area, like you can see
• 9:39
  so many, so many burnt out candles, so much pain, rotting reats
• 9:46
  of flowers, and just the pain is so apparent. And so I took
• 9:52
  some photos of them with their permission, I let a candle for their son
• 9:56
  too. But throughout all of this, because this is very close to Gaza,
• 9:58
  you can here the artillerary boom like it's like thunder like. Some of
• 10:05
  it's really loud, some of it, you know, jostles you. And
• 10:09
  this reminded me of when I was in Ukraine and hot GeV, and I
• 10:13
  couldn't help but think, you know, there's so much pain here, but
• 10:15
  there's so much pain elsewhere too, And the importance of recognizing the coexistence of
• 10:20
  this pain because all of these explosions, which were in a sense banal for
• 10:24
  us, because you know, we're in this massacre, happened. But right
• 10:28
  now it's peaceful. You know, it's just sunlight and wind and and and
• 10:33
  and this memorial. But we're safe. But with every single artillery boom,
• 10:39
  there's there's some mother and father in Gaza who has to worry if their son
• 10:43
  is dying. And I couldn't help but feel like this overwhelming and crushing sense
• 10:48
  of sadness. I wanted to to cry, like the entire time I was
• 10:54
  there, and it just felt so cruel and pointless and stupid. Why people
• 11:01
  do this to each other? You know, it's Ah, it's easy for
• 11:13
  people to get caught up on the side of whatever conflict that they're on,
• 11:18
  and you know, you entrench yourself and you dig your heels in the ground.
• 11:22
  But it's the perspectives that you know you're giving right now on the ground,
• 11:28
  if you will, And of course you're not in Gazza right now,
• 11:31
  but close enough and recognizing and seeing and hearing what's actually occurring. When you
• 11:37
  know, it takes it away from that abstract from the ideological to the this
• 11:43
  is happening and there are implicit consequences to them. And I don't at all
• 11:50
  mean to appine on, you know, the the merits of the war at
• 11:54
  all in this conversation right now. It's just the fact is it is happening,
• 12:00
  and there are very real, uh, you know, outcomes of what
• 12:05
  that means. It must be so interesting to you know, speak with even
• 12:11
  injured soldiers, Adam, I know that's something that you're going to be doing.
• 12:16
  Uh, how do you even prepare to have conversations in that sense?
• 12:22
  Like what is your prep like as a as a journalist who's like on the
• 12:28
  ground and who's going into this It's it's one thing for me to speak to
• 12:31
  a fellow journalist. It's another thing for you to be having, like,
• 12:35
  you know, these these very real, meaningful conversations that actually you know have
• 12:41
  have have more merit than what I'm doing. I guess I I honestly don't
• 12:48
  prop at this point because I don't know what to expect. That's an interesting
• 12:54
  It was just to come in with the basic sense of humanity and curiosity and
• 12:58
  ask people to tell their's story and ask intelligent questions based on what they describe.
• 13:03
  For example, when we went today, we went to Hostage Square,
• 13:07
  So it's a square within Tel Aviv where people just come in and they set
• 13:11
  up tents. The tents have been there for months now, and the relatives
• 13:16
  of the hostages that are being held in Gazza. We'll just talk to people
• 13:20
  about their experiences about the hostages. And we didn't know what to expect.
• 13:24
  We know who we talk Iris, who was lovely and she spoke about the
• 13:30
  hostages taken from her kibbutz. And there's no need to over intellectualize it.
• 13:33
  There's no need to overthink it. You talk to someone as a human,
• 13:37
  you listen to them as a human, you ask them for their experiences and
• 13:43
  that's it, and I expect to do the same later this week when I
• 13:48
  speak with these soldiers, I'm trying not to come in with too strong of
• 13:52
  an agenda. I just want to listen. There's no ideological vents or anything.
• 13:58
  No, there's just these people have stories. Let them be the storytellers
• 14:05
  and just engage meaningfully. Well, the only thing that I really insisted upon,
• 14:11
  you know, when I came on this trip is that as much as
• 14:13
  I am pro Israel, and I and I you know, believe Israel deserves
• 14:20
  to exist, deserves to defend itself, there is that strong commitment to the
• 14:24
  Palestinians as well. And I said that, you know, I need to
• 14:28
  be able to ask people what they think about Palestinian lives. And so that's
• 14:33
  that's the only agenda that I have here as like a condition is that,
• 14:37
  you know, when I speak to these soldiers, I hope to ask them,
• 14:39
  well, what do you think about the people of Gaza and what is
• 14:43
  their future? And maybe some of them will want to talk about it,
• 14:46
  some of them won't. I'll do a bit of pressing. Obviously, you
• 14:50
  can't force someone to talk about something they don't want to. But at the
• 14:52
  very least you can try, and I want to create that space for a
• 14:56
  conversation. And look, you know, many of the people who I've spoken
• 14:58
  to already, there are people who were peace activists, were being the opposite
• 15:05
  to the important word here. They wanted peace, They thought that they had
• 15:11
  a partner here, They thought that the Palestinians could be trusted. Some of
• 15:13
  them still believe that. Most of them feel disillusioned, and so maybe we'll
• 15:18
  see the same thing with the soldiers too. There's all sorts of different valid
• 15:24
  responses to the whorors of October seventh. There's so much emotion here. Iris.
• 15:30
  For example, the aforementioned woman at Hostage Square, she dedicated so much
• 15:33
  of her her life to advocating for Palestinians. She used to she used to
• 15:39
  bring like women, palestinianmen from Gaza out of Gaza to connect them with Israeli
• 15:45
  medical services, right, help them with that, and then her hometown,
• 15:50
  you know, just savaged. And she said them something that I thought was
• 15:56
  really powerful. She said, intellectually, she understands that the Gosins are suffering.
• 16:00
  She knows that she understands that, but she can't emotionally deal with it
• 16:07
  because as she said, She said, I am sitting in my own trauma
• 16:11
  right now, and that's what she can feel right now is her own trauma.
• 16:15
  She doesn't have the emotional capacity to go beyond that. She has the
• 16:19
  intellectual capacity, but not the emotional capacity. And she knows that she should
• 16:23
  feel emotionally for the Gossins, but she is simply incapable of doing that considering
• 16:30
  the size of the trauma in her own life that she has to grapple with.
• 16:36
  I think that's a feeling that a lot of people might be able to
• 16:41
  recognize, if they're comfortable enough to be able to get to that point as
• 16:47
  to recognizing why they might be able to look over the traumas of other people,
• 16:52
  you know, sort of just going like my own things are affecting me
• 16:55
  more than or more than I'm able to look at things that are affecting other
• 17:02
  people. I think that's a that's an interesting point just to keep a hold
• 17:06
  of. I guess my last question for you, Adam before I let you
• 17:10
  go, and I really appreciate you taking so much time, especially late at
• 17:14
  night, at this point for you right now in Israel, are you going
• 17:18
  to be speaking with people about the protests that we're seeing here in North America
• 17:26
  and what they think about them, and whether or not they are effective and
• 17:33
  contribute to you know, in a positive way, a negative way, or
• 17:37
  in any way whatsoever. Oh. Absolutely, I mean we've been doing that
• 17:41
  the entire time that we've been here. And I wanted to clarify. I'm
• 17:45
  here with whole bunch of other journalists. Everyone thinks it's ridiculous. Everyone thinks,
• 17:49
  like, what is going on when you when you when you say sorry,
• 17:55
  when you say everyone, you don't mean just the fellow journalists, of
• 17:57
  course, you mean like people you're speaking with on the ground. Yeah.
• 18:00
  Yeah, the people who were speaking with right, Like, you know,
• 18:03
  they're they're like, this is absurd and and and you know, once again,
• 18:07
  many of the people were and you know, pro Palestinine activists, pro
• 18:11
  peace activists, and they're they're shocked by the fact that so many people in
• 18:15
  the West are pro Hamas. Right. Look, it's fine to be empathy
• 18:23
  to empathetic towards the Palestinians. That is a very understandable position. But when
• 18:29
  you have all these protests in the West where they go beyond that and they
• 18:33
  romanticize come us, and they celebrate October seven. That's inexcusable, and there's
• 18:40
  a sense of bewilderments. It's it's inconceivable here, and I want to know
• 18:45
  that before the other journals arrived. I came two days earlier and I was
• 18:48
  like interviewing you know, queer Israelis former soldier one of them. Another guy
• 18:56
  was a drag queen. Another guy was a documentary filmmaker who made a film
• 19:00
  about Palestinian refugees. You know, all of them wanted a two state solution,
• 19:06
  all of them believed the Palestinian self determination. All of them were very
• 19:08
  empathetic people who did not vilify the Palestinians, and all of them hated,
• 19:17
  hated the whole queers for Hamas thing. They were like, what is this?
• 19:22
  Hamas will literally behead you or throw you off a building. Try to
• 19:27
  be you know, queer or trans or hold hands with someone in in in
• 19:34
  Gaza. It just doesn't work. Dive into that for you, like just
• 19:38
  like, I mean, like, how do you feel about that when you
• 19:41
  see the banners and the people marching and the chants that are saying, you
• 19:47
  know, queers for Hamas and Canada, like in the country that you live
• 19:52
  in here, like to me, it's just it's bewildered. Well, look,
• 19:55
  I'm going to put this really, really, really nicely. These people
• 19:59
  are over privileged morons, you know. That's that's probably the nicest way that
• 20:03
  I can put it. I have been an LGBTQ activist for years, you
• 20:10
  know, I had my own LGBTQ activism campaign from twenty sixteen to twenty nineteen.
• 20:15
  I knew all the queer activists in Toronto very well, in meshed within
• 20:19
  all that they exist in their own bubble. You know, they're they're usually
• 20:22
  inside like a little tiny like their little bubble in an urban center, and
• 20:26
  they have no sense of how the rest of the world around them operates.
• 20:30
  And they're they're too ignorance of the world to understand how ignorant they are.
• 20:36
  So they genuinely convince themselves that like, oh, yeah, you know,
• 20:40
  Gaza could be a lend of transliberation. You know, spoiler alert, it's
• 20:44
  not. And and and they just completely delude themselves and about the realities of
• 20:52
  what queer life is like in Palestine. And in a sense, I'm shocked.
• 20:59
  But when you get to know these people and see some of the things
• 21:02
  that they believe it's also not shocking. You know, these people often like
• 21:07
  so radical that anything which is anti Western is de facto good, and so
• 21:12
  they'll make all sorts of bizarre allies because that's what gets them off, even
• 21:18
  if it's something which is morally deplorable. So there's there's the bigger picture thing
• 21:22
  for them to latch onto, to justify the unjustifiable along the way, I
• 21:29
  suppose Adam, I guess last question for you. I know I said last
• 21:33
  question last time, but I lie sometimes. Last question for you? What
• 21:37
  do you think so far your biggest takeaway has been from the trip that you're
• 21:41
  on. I think that there isn't a lot of understanding of some of the
• 21:52
  pain that some of these communities in Israel went through. We didn't see a
• 21:55
  lot of the images of the kibbutzes. We went through a kibbutz, you
• 22:00
  know earlier today. A kibbutz is basically like a small communal community. There
• 22:04
  are several of them that were just outside of Gaza. They tend to be
• 22:08
  left leaning, they tend to be pro peace, pro Palestine. And in
• 22:15
  this kibbutz, one quarter of the people were murdered, kidnapped, So four
• 22:18
  hundred people, one hundred people gone. You go through the Kibbutz, so
• 22:26
  many of the buildings are just destroyed, burnt out. There was a school,
• 22:30
  you know, there's a little stuff bear abandoned, covered in a film
• 22:33
  of dust. They burnt down, you know, the buildings because people would
• 22:37
  go into bomb shelters, right, and then they weren't inaccessible in the bomb
• 22:41
  shelters, so they smoked them out. And he goes out a home and
• 22:45
  it's like, wow, everything is melted, everything is incinerated, and it's
• 22:49
  terrifying. And I remember just seeing like a whole bunch of children's clothes covered
• 22:56
  in suits, right, And I asked the woman than who was organizing this?
• 23:00
  They said, well, how much international media has come here? Has
• 23:04
  the CBC come here? She laughed. Of course, the CBC would never
• 23:07
  send someone here. They could barely call hamas terrorists. Even the Globe and
• 23:12
  Mail apparently didn't send anyone to the Kibbutz. Made me, I mean,
• 23:17
  you'll have to fact check me. At least in dis Kibbutz. Even though
• 23:19
  it was one of the main ones, it was like the first one to
• 23:22
  be attacked. I kind of expected better from them, and so I think
• 23:26
  to myself, you know, how many Canadians really understand the trauma that is
• 23:32
  driving to the Israeli response if they haven't seen the traumatized communities I've tried to
• 23:40
  explain, especially like living in Windsor on a border, Like if there was
• 23:45
  a rogue band of terrorists just sobver across the Detroit River, we decided to
• 23:49
  like come through the old rail tunnel that we have, and they did what
• 23:55
  happened in Israel here, but to the equal numbers proportionately, and they took
• 24:00
  you know, prisoners across. It's like I would hope to God that our
• 24:03
  government response would be We're gonna fully go to war to get back absolutely everyone
• 24:11
  that we can. Don't. I don't know. If it's anti Semitism,
• 24:15
  I don't know. If it's the fact that it's just so far away,
• 24:18
  I don't know, or maybe it's just a lack of you know, the
• 24:21
  story accurately being told, as you were just saying, I don't know what
• 24:26
  it is that makes it so. I guess quasi acceptable, I guess would
• 24:32
  be the phrase I would use, maybe like everybody just it seems like,
• 24:37
  oh, well it happened, move on, let's just all get onto the
• 24:41
  next story. And it blows me away that from what you're saying the media
• 24:45
  perspective that like you were at one of the major kibbutzen and you know they
• 24:52
  haven't seen some of our major national outlets, like this is just like what
• 24:59
  is going on? He here, we've seen this already happened before all all
• 25:03
  of these outlets were in Ukraine. You know, yeah, they have the
• 25:08
  resources. I was in Ukraine. It's it's really not that hard to go
• 25:14
  and send someone to Israel, considering it is like it was the most important
• 25:18
  story in the world when this happened in October. So obviously you can pay
• 25:23
  some money for someone to go there, or at the very least if somehow,
• 25:27
  you know, you're over a billion dollars in public subsidies is not enough,
• 25:33
  or you know, somehow the Thompsons, I've run out of money to
• 25:34
  get the Globe mail. You can pay three hundred bucks to some freelancer operating
• 25:40
  in the area to go to the kibbutz for you. But Nope, didn't
• 25:42
  happen. From my understanding, it could be wrong, but that's what I
• 25:45
  heard. That is a story we can dive into on another day with more
• 25:52
  research. But Adam, I want to thank you so much for your time.
• 25:57
  I've taken up more than you had granted me. I really appreciate it.
• 26:03
  I'll let you get some rest because I know you've got a very busy
• 26:07
  day tomorrow as well in Tel Aviv and throughout Israel. Thank you so much,
• 26:12
  Adam zo, I really appreciate it. Oh thanks for having me on
• 26:17
  the show. Yeah, thank you.