Latest / UK Column Radio / The Overwhelming Majority of Jews Support Genocide — Zachary Foster | Jerm Warfare

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The Overwhelming Majority of Jews Support Genocide — Zachary Foster | Jerm Warfare · UK Column Radio

0:40
Zachary Foster. Thank you for joining me in the
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trenches. for the first time on my UK column show.
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None More than two years since Israel
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launched its genocidal war against all 2.2 million people
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in the Gaza Strip, killing well over 70,000, we don't know the
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true number. It could be 100,000, could be
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200,000, Injuring more than 105,000, destroying 8090% of the
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housing stock, leaving hundreds of thousands of people, really
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millions of people homeless to fend for themselves, sleeping in
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the open air, in tents that get swept away every time there's a
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heavy rainstorm, of which there have been multiple in the past
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few weeks alone in the Gaza Strip.
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We're talking about the complete eradication of the healthcare
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system in Gaza. Every single day, people are
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dying of from their untreated wounds.
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They're dying from communicable diseases.
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They're dying from children, are dying because they haven't been
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vaccinated, because it's been 2 years since you've had regular
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proper vaccinations issued to Gaza's children.
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They're dying from malnutrition. We had over 400 Palestinians die
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from starvation in the past two years in the Gaza Strip.
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We haven't even mentioned the West Bank, where you have more
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than 40,000 Palestinians who have been uprooted and
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ethnically cleansed from their refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkadam
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and the Nurda Shumps refugee camp.
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That was in December 2024 and January 2025.
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You've had more than 60 communities in the West Bank
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uprooted, ethnically cleansed, mostly from Area C.
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These are the shepherding communities in the north of the
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West Bank and Hamsa around the E1 zone and Khan al Ahmad in the
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central West Bank, of course, as well in the southern West Bank,
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in the southern Hebron Hills, in Masafarayata and Sousia.
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You've had more than 1000 Palestinians in the West Bank
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murdered since October 7th, 2023.
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Many, many thousands more wounded. 10s of about 10,000
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Palestinians remain in Israeli detention facilities.
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These are torture dungeons in which more than 100 Palestinians
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have been killed since October 7th alone.
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From torture, from rape, from murder, from starvation inside
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Israel's torture dungeon. So here we are two plus years
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later since October 7th, and we're witnessing the most
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dramatic deterioration in the situation in Gaza, in the West
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Bank since 1948. OK, so for my UK column audience
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that might not know who you are, just give me your background.
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I'm a historian of Palestine. I did my PhD in Palestine
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history from Princeton. I have a newsletter where I
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write about the history and the politics of Palestine, trying to
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provide historical context for the present moment.
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I also teach courses on the history of Zionism, the history
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of Jewish anti Zionism, the history of the Palestine people
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and the history of the Palestine question and all that you can
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find at palestinenexus.com. OK, but now Zachary, you are
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Jewish. Why then, would you be so
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critical of? Israel.
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I think it's my Jewishness that has led me to become critical of
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Israel. I was raised on Jewish values
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like Zedek, Zedek Turdov. That's a biblical commandment
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that says justice, justice, pursue.
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You should pursue justice. That's a biblical commandment.
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There's another biblical concept commandment that that and that
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was summarized by Rabbi Akiva when he was asked in the the
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sayings. There's a famous book in in
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Jewish history, Psalms, in which he's asked to summarize the
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entire Torah standing on one foot.
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And he says, do, do unto others as you would have them do unto
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you. That's the whole Torah standing
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on one foot. Now, do you want to have one of
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the most powerful countries in the world impose A70,
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dispossessed you of your land and then it occupy you for 58
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years and then besiege you for 18 years and then genocide you
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for two years? Well, if you don't want to have
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some other country do that to you, then why would you be doing
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it to someone else? I mean, that's the whole Torah
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standing on one foot. I, I, I, I don't just identify
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it culturally as Jewish. For me, Judaism is a, is a
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belief system. It's a set of values that that
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teaches us that we need to treat all people as equal.
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We, all people are created in the image of God.
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I mean, that's the basis of the Torah.
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That's the basis of how we should lead our lives, is that
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every single person, including our enemies, are created in the
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image of God. And, and so we need to pursue
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justice and, and, and we need to treat others the way we want to
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be treated. These these are the principles,
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these are the foundations of Judaism.
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I come from South Africa. I think we're the only country
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in the world that is trying to hold Israel accountable.
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Of course, that doesn't mean good things for us.
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It's interesting that the US is so tightly integrated into
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Israel. Why is that?
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The United States alliance with Israel predates 1948.
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Every single American president, beginning with Woodrow Wilson in
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1917, has supported the establishment of a Jewish state,
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a Jewish Commonwealth, a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
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No exceptions. 0 exceptions, right?
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And that's because for many, many decades prior to the
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establishment of the State of Israel, you had a very
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important, a powerful, influential Christian Zionist
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movement. These are Protestant Christians
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who believe that at the end of the at the end of days, all Jews
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will gather in the Holy Land. And if the Jews don't convert to
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Christianity, they're going to burn in hell for all eternity.
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That's part of their eschatological fantasy about the
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end of the world and the the second coming of Jesus Christ.
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And that was, let's say, the main reason why Christians
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supported Israel for, let's say the first century of the
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existence of the Zionist movement, which what I would say
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began in the 1840s with Lord Shaftesbury and the Christian
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Protestants in England that first called for a Jews state in
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Palestine. In the 1840s.
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You could say the the second major reason that the United
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States supported Israel beyond the Christian theology was
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because you had a very powerful Zionist lobby in the United
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States. Again, this goes back way before
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1948. You had Louis Brandeis, a very
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prominent Jewish American, lobbying American presidents in
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the 1920s and 30s to support Zionism.
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You had close associates of Harry S Truman, the US president
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in 1948, who recognized Israel's establishment when it was
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declared in May 1948. He also had close Zionist
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associates who lobbied him to recognize the state of Israel.
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And then after 1967, you could say the American Jewish
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establishment. This is the AJC.
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This is the ADL, the Conference of the American Presidents.
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That's the most important Jewish organization, which sort of
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subsumes all the other American Jewish organizations.
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They've lobbied heavily to encourage the United States and
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the United States president, as well as the US Congress to
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provide Israel financial support, financial assistance,
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military assistance. And that lobby has only gained
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strength in the last few decades.
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And you could say really, I think today you can't find a
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single congressperson, the entire Democratic and the entire
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Republican Senate and congressional leadership,
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They're all in the pockets of AIPAC, the pro Israel lobby, the
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pro genocide lobby on Capitol Hill, the United States
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president himself, who are his biggest donors.
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Miriam Adelson has donated about $100 million every campaign
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cycle since 2012. She's donated billions of
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dollars to the Republican Party and hundreds of millions to
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Donald Trump himself, who who announced Israel's capital was
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Jerusalem in 2018. What was it, 2019?
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And that was a quid quid pro quo that Miriam Evelson had insisted
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on. So the United States government
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is in the back pocket of the Israel lobby.
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And then you do have this sort of legacy of the Cold War in
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which the United States saw Israel as an ally in the
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struggle against the Soviet Union, in which Israel would act
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as an American bulwark in the Middle East, fending off the
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Soviet allies, including Egypt and Syria.
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But that legacy is, I don't think, really relevant anymore.
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I think now you have this new rhetoric around how the United
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States, and you'll hear this from European leaders as well as
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American leaders, and how this is the greatest investment we
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make as as an empire, right? This belief that the Israel is
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an extension of American empire. And so if America wants to carry
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out aggression against Hezbollah in Lebanon, if it thinks
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Hezbollah is it's adversary, or Iran or the Houthis in Yemen or
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whatever it is, it sees Israel as an extension of American
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power and influence in the region.
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You could say those are some of the main reasons why the United
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States has become so pro genocide and pro Israel over the
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past few decades. OK, So your strength is in
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Palestinian history. Take me, if you don't mind,
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through the history of Palestine.
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You can see the Palestine question, the Israel Palestine
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conflict as it's often described, although that's a
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misnomer because it's not a conflict, it's it's an
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occupation, it's genocide, it's an apartheid, it's a struggle
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for justice and freedom. But a conflict is a bit of of a
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misnomer. This struggle for this Palestine
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struggle, the the Palestine question dates to the late 19th
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century when Jews in Europe, primarily in the Russian Empire
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and Eastern Europe and and to some extent Central Europe as
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well, began to move to Palestine with the goal of transforming
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this country that was 97% Palestinian Arab into a Jewish
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state. Now, let me just ask you this.
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If you try to transform a country from 97% Palestinian
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Arab that is 97% Muslim, Christian to Jewish with the
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ultimate goal of subjecting that 97% of the population to the
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laws and, and the ordinances and the justice system and the legal
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system and the immigration policies of that minority.
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Well, guess what you're going to, you're going to get, you're
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going to have a conflict. And so you could say the
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Palestine question was a result of Jews.
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Jews in Europe who set out to colonize, settle, buy up as
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much, landed Palestine, and ultimately transform the
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demography of Palestine from Arab to Jewish.
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And by 1948, the Zionists had bought up about 5 1/2% of the
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land of Palestine. They were about 1/3 of the
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population. So they had gone from 3% of the
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population in 1880 to about 33% of the population in 1947, but
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they were still a minority. And then when the British
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decided to leave Palestine and the UN called for the partition
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of Palestine, that led to a civil war between the Jewish
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population of Palestine, that settler, that foreign settler
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population that was hell bent on controlling Palestine.
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That created Jewish cooperatives in which they hired only Jewish
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laborers because they were all by building a Jewish state that
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would guarantee Jewish prosperity, that would support
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Jewish labor, that would create a Jewish Commonwealth for Jews
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and nobody else. It was an unfortunate
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coincidence that were that they're all of these Muslims and
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Christians, all these Palestinian Arabs living in
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Palestine. That was a tremendous and an
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unfortunate coincidence that was resolved in 1948 when the
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British left and the Zionists realized that in order to
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establish that Jewish state with the Jewish majority to guarantee
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Jewish prosperity in a land of 2/3 Palestinian Arabs, they
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would need to wait for it expel the Palestinian Arabs, which is
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exactly what they did. And so in the years, and so they
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expelled about 750,000 Palestinians in 1948.
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And that's the beginning of the crisis, right?
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Because you know, in, in, in 1949, you have 200,000 homeless
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property lists unemployed stateless refugees living in
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open in the open air, living in, in tent encampments in the Gaza
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Strip. And it's, it's a Direct Line.
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It's a straight line from that dispossession in 48 to where we
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are today. OK, but I was asking now how far
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back does Palestine go? Because I keep hearing on social
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media Palestine didn't exist. There was no such thing.
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Gotcha. The word Palestine has been the
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subject of a great deal of controversy because, and there's
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a simple reason for that right there.
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There's no controversy, controversy over the word Syria.
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There's no controversy over the word Egypt or Sudan or Libya.
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But if you do a Google search for a timeline of the history of
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the name Palestine, you'll find a Wikipedia page with 500 plus
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footnotes. There's no equivalent Wikipedia
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page with 500 plus footnotes on the history of the timeline of
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the name Syria or Lebanon or Jordan or Iraq.
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None of those timelines exist and that's because there isn't a
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group of people hell bent on eradicating and erasing the very
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idea of Palestine in the 1st place.
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I mean the Zionists are obsessed with eradicating even the word
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Palestine. They banned the word Palestine
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in the 1960s, seventies and 80s. If you were a Palestinian, you
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wanted to open up a shop in Ramallah, in Khan Yunis,
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anywhere in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank, you would be
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bought banned from using the word Palestine in the name of
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your organization, business or association.
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Ask yourself why, why, why is it because the word Palestine to
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Israel is dangerous because it represents and in other people
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it represents another identity and a people and identity that
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pre existed that predated Zionism.
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That's why they're so obsessed with eradicating it and telling
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you it never existed. And that's in fact the subject
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of my dissertation research, which is a 250 page study of the
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history of the usage of that word Palestine.
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And of course, it predates to the ancient world was used by
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Herodotus in in the ancient Greek world.
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And then the Romans pick pick it up from the Greek from the
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Greeks and the Arab Arab conquerors pick it up from the
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sorry, the Byzantines pick it up from the Romans.
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The Arab conquerors pick it up from the Byzantines.
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And you can find that word Philistine, the Arabic
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translation of the English word Palestine in You could probably
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find that word in almost every single decade and it published
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in a text or written in a text in every single decade.
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Consistently in the Arabic language over the past 1400
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years, Arabs are using that word to describe the place that today
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we call Palestine more or less continuously without any
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interruptions over the past 1400 years.
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And in particular in the in the city of Rumla, what is today in
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central Israel. It is my argument based on
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multiple sources from the 11th and 12th century, from the the
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14th and 15th centuries, from the 16th, 17th and 18th
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centuries and 19th centuries, that people in that city were
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calling the place Palestine continuously for the past 1400
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years. And that that you can find all
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of the evidence for that argument in Chapter 2 of my PhD
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dissertation titled The Invention of Palestine.
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What is a Palestinian? A Palestinian is, is a
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subjective term, right? They're, they're just, you can't
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look into someone's DNA and determine whether they're
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Jewish, Christian, Muslim, German, French, Israeli, or
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Palestinian. DNA doesn't tell you those
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things because those are invented categories.
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We just made them up, right? You can't look inside someone's
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DNA and tell you whether they're Palestinian or not because it's
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an invented identity, just like all human identities.
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A Palestinian today, socially, culturally refers to a person
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who traces their lineage, their roots to Palestine, right?
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That could be a person of Bedouin background, of Druze
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heritage, of Jewish extraction of, of, of Arab origin, right?
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So it doesn't really even say anything about your ethnic
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identity. It says something about where
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you trace your lineage to the Palestine, right?
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So I mean, and the borders we could say, we, we could debate,
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you know what, what we mean when we say Palestine.
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But effectively the mandatory borders, the borders that were
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established by the British government in 1920 when it
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established A mandate over Palestine, what is effectively
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today the state of Israel, plus the occupied Palestinian
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territories of Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
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And then when you talk about Zionism, what are you talking
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about? Zionism, in my opinion, was a
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political ideology that has it's historical.
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Zionism is a political ideology that dates to the 1640s in
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England when you had a group of people of Protestants calling
17:16
themselves Restorationists. So Zionism is initially A
17:20
theological idea, not a political one.
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And then over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, that
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idea is, is somewhat forgotten and is revived by Napoleon in
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1798 when he invades Palestine and calls on Jews around the
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world to return to, quote UN quote, return to Palestine
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because he's facing heavy resistance from local forces.
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And he believes that if he calls on Jews around the world to
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support his invasion and occupation of Palestine, that he
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has a has a chance of military victory.
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But that ends up failing. And you don't really see a
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resurgence of, of Zionism, let's say of political Zionism.
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Really. I would say I would, I would
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trace that movement to the 1840s when in England you have people
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like Lord Shaftesbury and, and, and many others.
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I'm not talking about one or two people.
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I'm talking about literally hundreds, thousands of people
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writing about Zionism in the 1840s.
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OK, priests, pastors, colonial administrators.
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What, what's happening in the 1840s?
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And why does Zionism become a thing in the 1840s?
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Recall that in 1831 the the ruler of Egypt, Muhammad Ali
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Pasha, he invades and conquers Palestine and he, he, he
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occupies Palestine for about 9 years.
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And the Ottomans are desperate to get Palestine back, rest
18:38
Palestine away from that Egyptian ruler, that local
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upstart ruler who was occupying a large swath of the Ottoman
18:45
Empire. And so the Ottomans enlist
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British and French support to retake the Ottoman, to retake
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the that that part of the Ottoman Empire, what is today
18:54
Syria, Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan condition that the
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British then get granted all these capitulations in the
19:02
aftermath of the conquest, one of those capitulations.
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So now the British are confident and their, their, their
19:09
imperialism is shining bright because they've realized that
19:12
they've now helped the the Ottoman Empire take back this
19:15
part of the empire only owing to their military and diplomatic
19:20
efforts and their support. And this gives all these British
19:23
colonial administrators and all of these British officials in
19:28
the British imperial administration this idea that
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they should call for the Jew, the establishment of a Jewish
19:35
state in Palestine, which would thus serve as an extension of
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British Empire. For the same reason that the
19:41
Balfour Declaration is an extension of British imperial
19:45
influence in, in, in the Levant. That was the same idea in the
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1840s, very similar. And so you get all these British
19:51
officials. You can have the, the, the
19:52
British consul in Damascus in 1840 publishes it's, it's like
19:57
an official letter. It's, it's a statement that gets
20:00
widely circulated and he's calling for a Jewish state in
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Palestine in 1840. This is, by the way, long before
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there are any Jewish Zionists. The first Jewish Zionists you
20:08
could say, come around in the 1860s and 70s, people like
20:11
Judah, Rabbi Judah Alkali and others who who are strongly
20:16
influenced by the European nationalisms of the era, Serbian
20:19
nationalism. German nationalism, German
20:22
unification, Italian nationalism and Italian unification, Russian
20:26
nationalism. So all these Jews in Europe are
20:28
seeing all of these national movements and, and, and, and
20:31
wondering where, what role they play, right.
20:33
And and they're then they're told by the Europeans, but
20:35
you're not Russian, you're Jewish, right?
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You're not German, you're Jewish.
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So the European anti Semites deny Jews the ability to kind of
20:45
play important roles in those national struggles in Europe.
20:47
And so did you say, OK, well, if we can't be part of the the
20:50
German nation or the Russian nation or the French nation,
20:52
well, I guess we're a separate nation and where's our national
20:55
home? And well, it's Palestine and you
20:56
get this movement of of of that. They're initially called the
21:00
clove of eight Sione in Balu, these Zionist clubs in Eastern
21:03
Europe. This is still a decade and a
21:05
half of theater Herzl. And they start, they form these
21:07
clubs around Eastern Europe and start sending settlers to
21:11
Palestine to colonize Palestine. And they establish A
21:14
colonization association. They use the word colonization
21:16
association. It's called the Jewish
21:18
Colonization Association. That's the name they use.
21:21
Because for them, colonialism is a good thing, right?
21:23
Yeah. They're bringing civilization to
21:26
the Orient, that they're bringing progress and, you know,
21:30
moderate modernity, right? This is the rhetoric.
21:32
And so that they embrace the word colonialism and
21:35
colonization and they do that for for for about two decades.
21:38
And then you get Theodore Herzl, who then you could say
21:40
spearheads the diplomatic efforts of trying to establish
21:44
diplomatic recognition for this incipient Jewish Commonwealth in
21:47
Palestine. And he does not achieve that.
21:50
But in during World War One, high invitesment does achieve
21:54
that by lobbying the British to adopt the Balfour Declaration,
21:57
thus supporting the establishment of a Jewish
22:00
national homeland in Palestine. And that sort of paves the way
22:04
for the for you could say the Zion this movement successes in
22:08
the 1920s and 30s and ultimately why they established a state in
22:11
48. But then, paradoxically, do you
22:14
think Israel has a right to exist?
22:18
Well, international law doesn't have opinion about whether or
22:21
not any state in the international W ofalian system
22:23
has a right to exist. If tomorrow Canada said we want
22:27
to create a political union with the United States and dissolve
22:31
the state of Canada, international legal experts
22:34
wouldn't say, well, no, that's illegal because Canada should be
22:38
an independent state. No, that's not how it works.
22:41
International doesn't say any state or has a right to exist.
22:45
Peoples in international have rights to exist.
22:48
The Palestinian people has a right to exist.
22:49
And if you try to eradicate that either the Palestinian people,
22:52
the German people, the Israeli people, if any, if you try and
22:54
eradicate a group of people, you would be in violation of the
22:58
1948 convention and prevention of genocide.
23:02
But but but states knows no state has a right to exist.
23:05
That's just even that that that framing that even that language,
23:09
Israel has a right to exist. It stems from doesn't stem from
23:13
international legal experts. It stems from Zionist
23:15
propagandists who who are obsessed with demonizing anyone
23:20
who is opposed to forcible displacement, ethnic cleansing,
23:23
occupation, apartheid, genocide. That's the origins of that that
23:26
phrase, yes. And then, by extension, Zachary
23:30
Israel is just defending itself. Well, actually it's, it's, it's
23:36
false to say that Israel has a right to defend itself on
23:39
occupied territory, right? So, for example, if the United
23:43
States tomorrow goes and invades a foreign country, it doesn't
23:47
have a right to defend itself on that foreign country, right?
23:51
When U.S. troops get shot at in in Venezuela as they're
23:54
abducting a head of state, they have no right to self-defense 0.
23:59
Any shot they fire on that foreign territory is illegal
24:02
under international law because they just invaded a foreign
24:04
country. They, they have no right to
24:06
self-defense in Venezuela. Zero.
24:08
And the same is of course true with Israel in in Gaza, in the
24:10
West Bank, which are occupied territories.
24:14
Every single shot fired inside the Gaza Strip by an Israeli
24:17
soldier is illegal. They, they have no right to
24:19
self-defense. 0 Every single shot fired in the West Bank is
24:24
illegal because every Israeli soldier stationed in the West
24:26
Bank is stationed there illegally against international
24:28
law. And that's because Gaza in the
24:30
West Bank where territories conquered in war.
24:33
And according to the 4th Geneva Convention of of 1940, which
24:36
really forms the basis of the international order that we live
24:39
in today, it is illegal to conquer land and war.
24:42
Otherwise we should all be praising Hitler, right?
24:45
If you, the basic principle of international law is, is like
24:49
founded on this idea that states are sovereign.
24:52
That's the West of alien political system.
24:54
You can't as a state, It's not, it's, it's against the rules of
24:59
international law to interfere in the internal affairs of
25:02
another state as it is against international law to invade,
25:06
occupy, conquer and annex any part of another state.
25:10
And that's why all international legal experts there's, there's
25:13
basically no exceptions, except of course for those a Zionist
25:17
legal experts who obviously are, are loath of Zionism, not
25:21
international law. But there's zero international
25:23
legal experts that dispute this. Gaza and the West Bank are
25:26
occupied territory. The IC, the ICJ just just
25:30
confirmed that in a July 24, 2024 opinion where they said
25:34
where they definitively said every single square inch of the
25:37
West Bank in Gaza and E Jerusalem is occupied territory.
25:40
But Zachary, it doesn't matter because nothing happens.
25:46
Well, you're right that international law is not being,
25:51
it's not being abided by, not by the United States, really not by
25:55
Israel, certainly not by Russia and most other countries in the
25:58
international system. But without international law,
26:01
we're, we're back to the law of the jungle.
26:03
And if we want to return to the law of the jungle, well, then
26:06
we're talking about holocausts and genocides being the norm,
26:10
not the exception. I mean, do you want to return to
26:13
a world in which it's, it's, it's according to the, the
26:17
system that the rules and engagements of the system that
26:20
we live in, it's totally OK to put 6 million people in gas
26:24
chambers. Like, is that a world you want
26:26
to live in where any government can just gas chamber millions
26:29
and millions of people? No, but you.
26:30
Get you get what my question is, what you're saying is true, but
26:35
Israel is just doing what it's doing.
26:39
That's correct. It is.
26:41
And, and, and that's because it has the support of the United
26:44
States. But, but you have to realize
26:46
like that that's not going to last forever.
26:49
I mean, the United States isn't going to last forever.
26:51
And United States support for Israel, certainly among the
26:55
population, certainly among young people, certainly among
26:58
Democrats, increasingly among Republicans as well, is hostile
27:02
to Israel. We saw the Pew poll, was it a
27:04
few months back for the first time, a majority of Americans
27:07
when asked that simple question, do you support?
27:09
Do you, do you stand more with Israel, more with the
27:11
Palestinians? They now say the Palestinians.
27:13
That's a complete sea change in public opinion just in the past
27:16
two plus years. You're talking about candidates
27:19
like Zohan Mamdani explicitly stating their opposition to
27:23
Israel's a Jewish state, preferring a state for equal
27:26
with equal rights rather than Jewish privilege and Jewish
27:30
supremacy. He just won an election in New
27:33
York City and he's he's going to provide a blueprint for an A
27:38
whole new generation of politicians.
27:40
He's inspired a whole generation.
27:42
And in the next years and in the coming years and decades, the
27:46
way to win in American political race for the US Congress or for
27:51
president is going to be to reject APEC money that that's
27:55
winning political program. Now you're going to win if you
27:59
say I refuse to accept the blood money of the most genocidal
28:03
organization in the United States.
28:04
And that would probably be AIPAC.
28:06
So that will be a winning strategy moving forward.
28:09
Zoran just showed us the playbook.
28:12
Why? Is Israel doing this though?
28:16
Well, the basic problem with the state of Israel is that it's
28:20
trying to enforce Jewish supremacy in a land that is
28:25
overwhelmingly, let's say say about half non Jewish.
28:29
I mean, the whole concept of Jews say is that Jews have more
28:33
rights than non Jews. If they didn't have more rights
28:35
than non Jews, it wouldn't be a Jews state, it would just be a
28:37
state. It's part of the definition of
28:40
the state that Jews have to have more rights.
28:43
Because if I'm a Jew outside of Israel and I'm not allowed to
28:46
move to Israel, what what makes it a Jewish state?
28:48
It's the fact that Jews outside of Israel have more rights and
28:52
privileges that that non Jews instead of Israel that makes it
28:55
a Jewish state, right? So the essence of the state is
28:59
Jewish supremacy. The essence of the state is Jews
29:02
should have more rights and more privileges than non Jews.
29:06
So of course, any state that is, whose founding principle is, is
29:11
racial ethnic privilege and, and, and, and racial ethnic
29:14
supremacy of one group over others.
29:17
That is the the essential nature of the state.
29:19
And that's what Israel's been trying to uphold and maintain
29:22
for the past 78 years. And that's why it is such a
29:27
bloody place. And that's why there's so much
29:30
death and destruction, because whenever you impose a regime of
29:33
domination, you will face blowback.
29:35
That is the nature of violence. If you carry out violence
29:38
against someone else, which is embedded in the project of a
29:41
racial state, of an ethno supremacist state, then it's
29:44
going to blow back in your face. And that's why that that's why
29:48
it's such a bloody, violent place.
29:51
What is the sentiment, though, of Israelis themselves?
29:58
A January 2024 poll showed that 95% of Jewish Israelis believed
30:03
at the time, and this is 2 years ago, when Israel had already
30:07
killed about 2530 thousand Palestinians.
30:09
So, so at a time when Israel had already killed 30,000
30:13
Palestinians, 95% of Jewish Israelis has said that Israel
30:17
was either carrying out the right amount of force in Gaza or
30:21
not enough force. We had many, we've had many
30:25
polls that have come out since then that that, that confirm
30:29
those, those, those polling numbers.
30:31
We had polling data just, was it March 2025.
30:35
So now that, that that polling data is already almost a year
30:37
old. But in March 2025, you had
30:40
Shaikh Askani publish a piece in Haaretz in which he describes
30:44
the polling data. And it's it's just horrifying.
30:47
So 82% of Israeli Jews believed in March 2025 that the Israeli
30:55
government needed to empty the Gaza Strip of all its
30:58
Palestinians, that every Palestinian in the Gaza Strip
31:01
needs to be ethnically cleansed. About half of it, 47 or 48
31:05
percent or so, agreed with the following statement.
31:09
The Jewish Israelis agreed with the following statement.
31:11
When the Israeli army conquers a city, it should wipe out all of
31:17
the people in the city that it conquers.
31:19
That's that's almost the direct quote of, of the question that
31:21
was asked. So very unambiguously.
31:23
Do you support genocide, yes or no?
31:25
About half of Israeli Jews said yes, OK, 62% of Israeli Jews
31:31
said we should ethnically cleanse, expel Palestinian
31:35
Israelis, that he'll carry Israeli passports.
31:38
I mean, Can you imagine 62% of white Americans saying we need
31:42
to strip 100% of black American citizens of their American
31:47
citizenship and send them off to El El Salvador?
31:50
That's literally the state of affairs in Israel.
31:52
You're talking about the most genocidal society on planet
31:54
Earth by an order of magnitude, Zachary.
31:58
This obviously means that there's an elephant in the room,
32:01
the growth of Hamas. Well, I mean, Hamas has since
32:08
let's say October 6th, 2023. So on the eve of the Hamas
32:13
attack on southern Israel, you could say that Hamas was
32:16
honestly, in my anecdotal assessment, not that popular in
32:20
Gaza. I had visited the Gaza Strip
32:22
twice in 2023 before October 7th and you heard a lot of
32:26
criticisms just like you would hear criticisms of any of the
32:28
government, right? They were bullying St. vendors
32:31
trying to impose taxes on them. They were bullying taxi drivers
32:34
trying to impose taxes on them. They were establishing state-run
32:36
businesses which would compete and push out non state-run
32:39
businesses. People were upset about that.
32:42
There wasn't, as far as I could tell, a whole lot of love for
32:45
Hamas and gas in Gaza in in in October 2023.
32:50
Excuse me now, what has happened over the past two years, I think
32:53
is is as follows. Hamas has become incredibly
32:56
popular in the West Bank, certainly much, much more so
32:59
than they were before October 7th, 2023.
33:02
Because of the the only people seen as resisting, excuse me,
33:08
they're the only people seen as resisting the Israeli occupation
33:12
forces. It's certainly there's no
33:14
resistance coming from Fatah. If anything, Fatah condemned,
33:19
you know, all of Hamas's resistance operations.
33:22
Fatah has supported Israel as it goes around the West Bank,
33:25
murdering Palestinians, arresting them, detaining them,
33:28
torturing them, killing them. Fatah, led by Mohammad Abbas, is
33:31
part of the Israeli occupation apparatus, doesn't represent
33:35
resistance to it. It's part of it.
33:37
So Fatah has no popularity. Certainly Mahmoud Abbas, his
33:41
approval ratings, if you look at his approval ratings, really
33:43
they've just been in a almost down and to the right every year
33:46
since I would say about 1520 years now.
33:49
I mean, he's, he's in year 17 of a four year election.
33:52
He was, he won the race for presidency was in 2006 and what
33:58
is it 20 years later? So he's, he's, I believe he has
34:03
less than 10% approval rating, which is shocking when you
34:06
consider that about 1/3 of Palestinians employed in the
34:08
West Bank are employed by the Palestinian Authority.
34:10
The people deriving salaries from this regime themselves
34:13
despise it. So it's, it's, they have no
34:16
legitimacy now. Hamas, I think.
34:19
Where are Palestinians on Hamas these days?
34:21
Obviously there's incredible amount of outrage at Hamas
34:24
within the Gaza Strip for a feeling that they brought on
34:27
this, or at least it triggered this genocidal onslaught.
34:32
So I don't think Gazans are particularly happy with Hamas.
34:35
So certainly two years later, when they're still living in
34:37
tents, when they're still being starved, that there's no medical
34:40
equipment coming in, their, their lives have been completely
34:43
destroyed. So I, I, for that reason, I
34:46
don't think there's a whole lot of love for Hamas in the Gaza
34:48
Strip. However, there's still the
34:50
ruling party and they, they still are, are providing the
34:54
basic governmental services to the extent that any exist in the
34:56
50% of Gaza that is controlled, nominally controlled by Hamas.
35:02
So in that sense, I mean, it's not like you're going to see
35:04
protest against Hamas. I mean, we saw when Hamas took
35:08
over power. But when, when that ceasefire
35:11
was signed, was it October 10th, 2025, we saw Hamas carry out
35:16
retribution attacks against those militia members who had
35:20
collaborate with the Israeli military, the Dagmushkin.
35:24
I think 20 or 30 members of that clan of, of, of, of effectively
35:28
collaborators were executed. But Hamas, Hamas researched its
35:32
authority and is, is the governing authority in the 50%
35:36
of the Gaza Strip along the coastal plain.
35:38
We're talking about David Bella and you say that the southern
35:43
parts of Gaza City that is still controlled by Hamas.
35:45
So they're they're still, you know, to the extent that they
35:48
can clean cleaning the streets, trying to clear up debris from
35:52
the streets. They're still operating the
35:54
hospitals. To the extent that there's any
35:56
medical, to the extent that the hospitals, hospitals are able to
36:00
operate, they're still policing the streets, right?
36:03
That Hamas is still in charge. You know, they're still
36:07
operating the population registry to the descent that
36:09
they can. They're, you know, recording
36:11
bursts and recording deaths and right.
36:13
So they're doing the best that they can to, to maintain law and
36:16
order, which is obviously become incredibly difficult.
36:20
So like, I think at this point, Hamas has already said really
36:24
since it's been 2 years, in December 2023, they said we are
36:27
very happy to step down for power.
36:29
We do not want to rule the Gaza Strip anymore.
36:31
They said that more than two years ago and, and, and, and,
36:34
and that they want to, they, they're not willing to give up
36:37
the weapons. We know that they're willing to
36:39
give their weapons to a Palestinian army as part of a
36:43
process of the establishment of a Palestinian state.
36:45
And they said that many, many times.
36:47
They've even gone as far as to say, look, our offensive
36:50
weaponry to the extent that we have any of it, these, these,
36:53
these homemade rockets we, we fired stay wrote and and
36:56
Ashkenon, those rockets we're actually willing to put under
36:58
some a kind of a keeper ship for in which an international force
37:04
could would secure those weapons and ensure they won't wouldn't
37:07
be used. But in terms of light arms,
37:10
defensive weapons, rocket propelled grenade launchers,
37:13
there's a 0% probability that Hamas is giving that up before
37:15
the establishment of the Palestinian state.
37:17
So for all intents and purposes, they are and will be the
37:21
governing authority in the Gaza Strip for the foreseeable
37:23
future. You're going to get criticized
37:26
for sugar coating Hamas though because the common trope is that
37:30
they are dictatorship type militant organization.
37:36
Yeah, I'm, I'm obviously I identify as progressive.
37:40
I I support free and fair elections.
37:43
I, I believe in the rule of law. I, I like secular politics.
37:46
I, I lean socialist, right? Obviously these are things that
37:49
put all of these things put me at great odds with Hamas as a
37:53
political organization. Hamas carried out atrocities on
37:59
October 7th. They slaughtered hundreds of
38:02
Israeli civilians. Those are war crimes and the
38:05
people who carried them out should be prosecuted in
38:07
international courts. I, I'm the first to criticize
38:11
Hamas. I attack Hamas all the time.
38:13
I have no love for Hamas at all. However, Hamas is every time
38:18
they kill an Israeli soldier in the Gaza Strip, every time they
38:21
kill an Israeli soldier stationed in Israel, stationed
38:23
in the West Bank, that's that's legal under international law.
38:28
They're not. They're not violating
38:29
international law when they kill Israeli soldiers.
38:31
I mean, they have a legitimate right to use force according to
38:34
international law to, to resist a belligerent 58 year military
38:40
occupation the hell bent on their destruction.
38:43
So no, I mean, I, I have no, I, I, I, I, I'm, I'm believer of
38:48
international law, of international humanitarian law.
38:50
And, and for those reasons, they have a legitimate right to
38:52
resist. Again, assuming they follow the
38:53
laws of war, which on October 7th, they didn't, but, but they
38:56
certainly have the right to resist.
38:58
There's no question about that. Am I right in saying that Hamas
39:01
started out as a charity? Yeah, that's exactly right.
39:05
They in in in 1973, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was ethnically
39:10
cleansed violently from his home when he was 13 from the town in
39:13
what is today Israel called Juba and wound up as a refugee in the
39:16
Gaza Strip. And when he was a young adult,
39:18
he founded the was effectively an outgrowth of the Muslim
39:22
Brotherhood. He was he was he be preached.
39:25
He was a religious person. And he founded this charity,
39:30
which from 1973 to 1987, they opened up health clinics and
39:35
orphanages and after school program programming for kids.
39:39
They they were big into women's empowerment.
39:41
They believed they had, they were helping women get jobs.
39:45
And they were, of course, also all about Islamic preaching,
39:47
trying to make Palestinian society more religious.
39:51
And then what happened was in the 1980's, the Israeli
39:55
occupation became more violent and over the course of the
40:00
1980s, you were, you got more and more resistance operations,
40:03
not from the Islamic Hamas, which at the time was called the
40:06
Islamic Collective Al Mujima Al Islami wasn't even called Hamas
40:09
until 1988. But and then what happened was
40:12
after 20 years of this belligerent religious occupation
40:14
in which Israel's killing 32 Palestinians every year for 20
40:17
years, in which Israel is arresting 10s of thousands of
40:20
Palestinians every year for 20 years, in which Israel is
40:23
banning Palestinians from waving A Palestinian flag every year
40:25
for 20 years. In which Israel's suffocating
40:28
economic life de developing Palestine, according to Sarah
40:31
Roy, every year for 20 years, preventing Palestinians from
40:35
opening banks, from, you know, from lending practices,
40:40
establishing a factories, building, planting citrus trees,
40:43
right. Palestinians were banned from
40:44
doing all these things. They couldn't even use the word
40:46
Palestine in the name of an association, as we already said.
40:49
So you have a belligerent military occupation for 20
40:51
years. What happened?
40:52
It's what happens with every military occupation.
40:54
It breeds resistance. And so you get this spontaneous
40:57
leaderless uprising in early in late 1987.
41:00
And when that happens and you have this mass uprising of, and
41:03
it's almost overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly nonviolent and
41:08
overwhelmingly unarmed. We're talking about kids
41:11
throwing stones at Stanks, kids throwing stones at tanks.
41:15
We're talking about leafleting. We're talking about refusal to
41:18
pay taxes. We're talking about SIT
41:20
insurance, we're talking about tire burning and and blocking
41:24
roads to prevent Israeli military vehicles from entering
41:26
Palestinian refugee camps. We're talking about what is
41:29
overwhelmingly an unarmed resistance, which was evidenced
41:33
by the fact that at the end of that first year, at the end of
41:35
1988, the Israeli military had slaughtered 142 Palestinians in
41:40
the Gaza Strip and faced 0 casualties.
41:42
There may have been one actually and faced 1 casualty was an
41:46
Israeli military police officer that was killed.
41:48
But basically this was a non violent uprising and Hamas felt
41:52
like if they didn't join the fray they would be left out.
41:55
It would become irrelevant. And so much like the other
41:58
factions in Palestine, they joined that uprising and and
42:03
carried out their first armed attack on an Israeli military
42:06
target in 1989 and carried out a few more attacks in 1990.
42:10
And they're still small and not well known at that time.
42:14
And they don't really become a force in Palestine until after
42:17
1994, when a Baruch Goldstein, an American from Brooklyn,
42:21
enters the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron on Ramadan and slaughters
42:26
28 Palestinians in a gruesome act of violence before he's
42:31
beaten to death. And, and, and, and when you
42:33
interview and, and you have many terrorist attacks in which Hamas
42:39
kills as innocent Israeli civilians after that.
42:42
But it's all after 94, very, very few attacks on civilians
42:44
before 94. Hamas basically came to the
42:46
conclusion that, well, you know what?
42:48
If they're going to slaughter our innocent civilians, we're
42:49
going to slaughter theirs. And that was a catastrophic
42:53
decision for Hamas, both strategically, but also
42:56
ethically, and is the reason why they became this, you know,
43:02
infamous terrorist organization blowing up as raising cafes.
43:05
That was they never, they never able to recover from that
43:09
reputation. And and that's why Israelis
43:11
became so radicalized against Hamas and so radicalized against
43:15
Palestinian armed resistance. And that's why they became so
43:19
genocidal at the end of the day, because in a world where you
43:21
believe you're superior to the other person, and in a world
43:24
where they're blowing up your innocent civilians, you just say
43:27
fuck them, kill them all. And, and, and that's where
43:29
Israeli Jewish society wound up already, I would say, I mean,
43:32
long before the genocide started.
43:34
I mean, even going back to the early 2000s, you had polling
43:36
data coming out of Israel. It was just shocking.
43:39
I mean, Israelis became genocidal 20 years before the
43:41
genocide started. It sounds a bit like a chicken
43:46
and the egg scenario. Which came first?
43:51
Well, for about, let's say 2000 years, there was no such thing
43:59
as an Israel Palestine conflict. It didn't exist.
44:01
There were Muslims, Jews and Christians living in Palestine
44:03
consistently together. I'm not saying they were living,
44:07
you know, merry lives together that they that, that relations
44:10
were always perfect and but, but no, they were.
44:12
There was no such thing as an Israel Palestine conflict before
44:15
Zionism. It didn't exist.
44:17
If you told someone who do you support in the Israel Palestine
44:19
conflict in 1840, they would have no idea what you're talking
44:22
about. The reason there's a conflict in
44:25
Palestine is because the Zionist movement set out to colonize a
44:30
land and transform it from a country that was 97% Palestinian
44:35
Arab to a country that was dominated and controlled by
44:40
Jews. That is why there is violence in
44:42
Israel Palestine. That is the underlying root
44:44
cause of the violence in Palestine.
44:47
No one debates that. I mean, if you go back and look
44:49
at the actual history, I'm writing many pieces now on
44:51
actual the, the process of the colonization itself.
44:56
And if you go look, whenever Zionist established a colony in
44:58
Rehovotes in the 1880s, in the Gala, they established multiple
45:02
colonies in the Galilee in in Metula in the 1890s, in 1896,
45:07
same thing, Afula 1911, wherever you have.
45:11
And then the same thing happens in the 1920s in the Marjah
45:14
Manomar in the Jezre Valley. Every time Zionists establish a
45:17
colony, guess what happens? They buy land, usually from
45:20
absentee landlords, and then uproot the people living on the
45:23
land. Why did they get uprooted?
45:25
Because they had the wrong religion.
45:27
The goal of Zionism was to place Jews in Palestine, was to put
45:32
establish Jewish colonies in Palestine.
45:35
And so whenever they bought land, they bought land.
45:38
We said it was 97% Palestinians. They would always buy land from
45:40
Palestinian Arabs, and then they uprooted them and kicked them
45:43
out and displaced them because they had the wrong religion.
45:48
And so that and that's why. And so just to finish the point,
45:51
and so every time they establish a new colony, they displace
45:54
Palestinians and violence breaks out.
45:56
And that's the story. That's the root cause of the
45:59
violence. There's no debate about that.
46:00
Historians don't even debate that point.
46:02
Zionism is not necessary. Not necessarily a Jewish thing,
46:05
yeah. 98% of Zionists around the world are obviously not Jewish,
46:10
right? I mean, maybe it's 99.9%.
46:12
I mean, I, I don't know the exact numbers, but there's
46:14
15,000,000 Jews in the world and this is an.
46:18
This is an important point because there's a lot of hatred
46:21
for Jews just just because. Unfortunately, many, if not most
46:27
of the most powerful Zionists and the most outspoken Zionists.
46:30
Not all of them, obviously, but many of them are Jewish, right?
46:33
They're obviously dramatically overrepresented in terms of the
46:35
people that put their money where their mouth is that spend
46:39
big bucks to get elect pro Israel candidates to the US
46:42
Congress to spend big dollars ensuring every CNN host and
46:46
every Fox News correspondent and every New York Times journalist
46:49
is pro Israel. The people spending the money,
46:52
the people working behind the scenes to ensure mainstream
46:55
media is behind Israel and doesn't use the word genocide
46:58
and doesn't use the word ethnic cleansing and doesn't even call
47:01
it an occupation. Those people are overwhelmingly
47:04
Jewish, unfortunately. Yeah.
47:07
What would you? Like to see Zachary?
47:11
I would like to see an Israel and a Palestine where no one
47:16
cares what your religion is or your ethnicity.
47:18
I mean I thought this was obvious.
47:21
I mean, like, do people, do people forget the Holocaust and
47:25
the Nazi and the fascist world in which actually the only thing
47:27
that mattered was your religion and your ethnic religious
47:30
identity? I mean, how did we so quickly
47:33
forget that the root cause of Nazism was this idea that the
47:36
only thing that matters is your identity?
47:39
I mean, we need to, we need to live in a world of where
47:42
politics are based on principles and values like rule of law,
47:47
where everyone is treated equally before the law, like,
47:51
like division of powers, where no one branch of the government
47:54
can have too much power. We get for freedom of speech and
47:58
and civil society where you're not abducted in the middle of
48:01
the night because you tweeted something.
48:04
But in Israel, none of those things are true.
48:06
You get abducted in the middle of the night for tweets in
48:08
Israel, both in Israel proper and in the West Bank and Gaza
48:12
and Israel properly. The only thing that matters when
48:14
it comes to the state is your identity.
48:16
Everything else is secondary. There's no such thing as rule of
48:19
law. I mean, the whole system is
48:20
based on the absence of rule of law.
48:23
I mean, that's the, the essence of the occupation is you have no
48:25
rights. If you're a Palestinian, you're
48:26
just abducted off the streets of Ramallah.
48:28
You're, you're sent to a torture dungeon and you're tortured to
48:31
death or raped to death or starved to death.
48:33
I mean, there's no due process. The whole system is built on a
48:36
foundation of the, of the, of denying people due process.
48:40
So, so I, I, I, I have the same belief system about Israel,
48:44
Palestine that I have about the United States and Mexico and
48:46
Canada, which is that you need a political system that is based
48:51
on a set of principles that have worked and, and, and provide
48:54
justice and equality and rule of law and free speech and freedom
48:59
of religion to, to all people under it's rule.
49:02
And, and that's the basis for every society I would certainly
49:05
want to live in, and I presume you as well.
49:08
And and that's what we need to establish in Israel and
49:10
Palestine what happens. Now.
49:13
Well, Hamas actually is desperate for a Tuesday
49:15
solution, right? The entire Hamas platform for
49:19
the past decade has been a Tuesday for the past two
49:21
decades, really, really since the early 2000s.
49:23
They're desperate for a Tuesday solution.
49:27
I mean, if you look at the articles that were first
49:30
published by people like Aziz on TC, by people that kind of they
49:35
were publishing op eds in CNN, in the Guardian in 25, 2005 and
49:39
2006, saying plagiarizing resolution 242, plagiarizing
49:43
resolution, UN resolution 181, plagiarizing the, the two state
49:46
solution framework, plagiarizing all the UN resolutions and all
49:50
the statements from every U.S. President and every, you know,
49:55
major world leaders calling for the establishment of a
49:57
Palestinian state. I mean, look at those op eds,
49:59
the one in the Guardian op-ed in 2006.
50:01
They, they, they, they were making the case that we want a
50:05
Palestinian state whose borders would be the June 5th, 1967
50:09
borders. That is the entirety of the Gaza
50:11
Strip, the entirety of the West Bank with E Jerusalem as its
50:14
capital and a just and fair solution to the Palestinian
50:17
refugee issue. I mean that, that that's what
50:19
international law says as well. By the way, Hamas, if, if you
50:23
want to accuse them of anything, you can accuse them of
50:25
plagiarizing international law. Now, the problem is that on the
50:28
Israeli side, there's no desire to, to give Palestinians a state
50:34
at all. I mean, every single leader in
50:37
the state of Israel, every single one, every single Jewish
50:41
Israeli leader. 0 exceptions. 0 Not one exception, 0 exceptions.
50:47
It supports Israel's apartheid rule in the West Bank, supports
50:49
expanding settlement expansion, supports holding on to the Gaza
50:56
Strip in the West Bank forever, right?
50:58
So there's no the only person in the Israeli, the only Jewish
51:02
Israeli member of the Knesset who voted against.
51:06
There was a resolution that came before the Israeli Knesset in
51:09
this past summer. So the summer of 2025.
51:13
The resolution was brought forward by I think one of the
51:15
Arab parties and the resolution said, you know, we support the
51:18
establishment of Palestinian state.
51:19
There was a single Jewish Israeli Knesset member, his name
51:21
is Ofer Kassif. He was the only one that
51:24
supported that resolution. You're talking about 99% of
51:28
Jewish Israeli parliamentarians, including those representing the
51:31
far left parties. I mean, there's no such thing as
51:34
a far left Jewish Israeli party in Israel.
51:36
But the the furthest left you can go in Israel.
51:39
They reject the establishment of a Palestinian state and support
51:43
permanent Israeli apartheid. They support the permanent
51:47
subject subjugation of 5 million, five and a half million
51:50
Palestinians forever, that they should be enslaved to the
51:54
Israeli military forever. That's the position of 98% of
51:57
Israeli Jewish political leaders.
52:01
Zachary, What would happen if the United States pulled all of
52:05
its funding? That's a very good.
52:08
Question and I think I would say most analysts I think get this
52:11
question wrong. I think there's this belief that
52:14
if the United States cut off funding that Israel's toast.
52:18
I don't think that's true. I think Israel has a lot of
52:21
allies around the world. Now I'm not saying they're going
52:22
to get as good a weapons as the F35.
52:25
I'm not saying they're going to get the 2000 LB bunker Buster
52:28
bombs. I'm not saying they're going to
52:30
get, you know, the best air defence technology as part of
52:33
it's Iron Dome system. They're not going to get top of
52:36
the shelf, you know, cutting edge American military tech, but
52:42
including AI, including these systems that make it incredibly
52:46
easy for Israel to slaughter Palestinians at record paces.
52:51
But you have China, you have Russia, you have Serbia, you
52:56
have Germany, you have a lot of weapons.
52:58
You know, there's a lot of people who have very happy to
53:01
sell weapons to Israel. That's the world we live in.
53:05
So I think it's overblown. I, I, I think Israel would
53:07
suffer tremendously. Right Where they would
53:09
especially suffer would be also be in, in the diplomatic realm.
53:13
Right now, they don't have a, a veto at the UN.
53:15
The UN Security Council could pass a resolution calling for a
53:20
foreign military to to grant authority to a foreign military
53:23
force to invade and occupy Israel, right.
53:27
So that that, you know, losing the diplomatic support is also
53:30
very important, perhaps even more important, as we said,
53:32
which, you know, in comparison to the military support, which
53:36
like we said, I think there are replacements for us.
53:38
Maybe not the ones Israel would like, but, but, but people will
53:42
sell Israel weapons. I'm, I'm not worried about that.
53:43
And in addition, Israel has claimed, at least Netanyahu has
53:46
claimed $100 billion plan to invest in its own military
53:50
manufacturing capabilities. Now, obviously that's going to
53:53
take a long time to get off the ground and, and who knows if
53:56
it'll succeed, but I think people overblow the United
54:00
States. I think people think that if the
54:03
United States cut off weapons tomorrow, that would be the end
54:05
of Israel. They would certainly, it would
54:06
certainly hamper Israel's ability to kill Palestinians.
54:09
There's no question about that. I mean, if you stop sending the
54:12
2000 LB bombs, there's no 2000 LB bombs to drop on Gaza.
54:17
But Zachary, I mean, Israel also needs to defend itself against
54:21
the entire Arab world that wants to wipe it off the face of
54:24
Earth. I think the evidence suggests
54:28
the opposite, that it's Israel that is occupying, invading,
54:31
annexing, attacking the rest of the Middle East.
54:35
Iran has never attacked Israel. I mean, it responded to Israel's
54:42
acts of aggression. Iran has never attacked Israel.
54:46
When does Lebanon carry out an offensive war against Israel?
54:49
Never. Hezbollahs, but certainly not
54:51
the state of Lebanon. What about Syria under Assad?
54:54
Under under the, you know, pro Palestinian Assad?
54:57
When did Syria attack Israel? Never.
54:59
When did Egypt attack Israel? Was Israel that attacked Egypt
55:02
in 60-7 and then Egypt attacked Israel in 73 trying to get back
55:06
to territories that Israel stole from it?
55:09
When did Saudi Arabia, the Gulf? UAE, I mean you, the United Arab
55:13
Emirates is about as close an ally as Israel has in the entire
55:16
world. But Qatar, when does Qatar
55:18
attack Israel? In fact, the United States
55:21
begged Qatar to host Hamas officials during the over the
55:24
course of the negotiations over the past two years.
55:27
I mean, Israel's a menace. It's a regional menace.
55:30
It has no regard for human life, certainly not Palestinian life,
55:33
Lebanese life, Iranian life, Syrian life.
55:36
It's, it's slaughtered 1000 Iranians, it's slaughtered
55:40
thousands of Lebanese, it's killed hundreds and hundreds of
55:42
Syrians, it's killed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
55:46
And, and what have any of those countries done to Israel?
55:48
I mean, you got the story wrong. Israel is an expansionist state
55:54
and, and, and, and the rest of the, the regime would have,
55:57
would love to have nothing more than a peace treaty with Israel
56:00
so that it stops attacking its neighbors.
56:02
I mean, that's what Saudi Arabia wants.
56:04
They had the Arab Peace initiative from 2020, from 2002
56:07
already going back 23 years, basically saying look, just stop
56:11
attacking, stop occupying, stop invading, stop conquering, stop
56:15
killing. We just want peace.
56:18
I, I asked you earlier what you would like to see.
56:21
Now my question is, what do you actually think is going to
56:24
happen in the next, I don't know, 10-15 years?
56:30
Are we going? To be having the same
56:31
conversation again. I think the most likely scenario
56:36
is a continuation of what is happening today.
56:39
People have this, but whenever you get especially 10:50, I
56:42
mean, who knows what happened in 1050 years and we can't possibly
56:44
predict that that's way too out and further out in the future.
56:46
But certainly in for the coming years, certainly for the rest of
56:49
the Trump presidency. No, we're just going to see more
56:51
of the same. Well, a ceasefire in which 5 to
56:54
10 Palestinians are killed every day.
56:56
If by the way, 5 to 10 is raised were killed every day during the
56:59
ceasefire, they would call it a massacre.
57:01
They they, they would call it mass murder.
57:04
If Hamas killed 400 Israeli civilians in the past 2 1/2
57:07
months, Hamas would be accused of carrying out another October
57:10
7th. But when Israel kills 400
57:12
Palestinians into enough months, they call it a ceasefire.
57:15
So we'll see more of the same. We'll see Israel continually
57:19
encroaching and expanding the control of the Gaza Strip.
57:22
We'll see Israel continuing entrenching it's apartheid rule,
57:26
expanding the the settlement enterprise, more settler
57:29
violence, more ethnic cleansing operations.
57:32
Israel will probably push further into Syria.
57:34
It will continue to bomb Lebanon at will.
57:37
It'll probably launch another war with Iran.
57:40
It will continue to attack the Houthis.
57:42
It'll try and get ethically cleanse Palestinians to
57:46
Somaliland. I mean, it's a very bleak
57:48
picture. Israel is nearing 100 years.
57:52
Do you think it's going to make it?
57:57
I think it will be a pariah state for a long time before it
57:59
collapses all together. I mean North Korea has been
58:03
completely cut off from the most for literally decades and
58:09
decades and decades and it seems to have survived.
58:11
So I think people underestimate the ability of a regime to
58:14
survive, assuming it has some amount of international support.
58:18
I mean, I mean look at Cuba. Look at how long Cuba survived
58:22
despite having such a belligerent neighbor in the
58:27
United States so close. So regimes can survive for for a
58:31
lot longer than I think people realize, but one.
58:34
Thing is, for certain, the world does seem to be changing it's
58:38
position on Israel. There's no question about that.
58:42
I mean, Israel will, is becoming a price state and, and, and that
58:46
trend will only increase in, in, in the years to come, right?
58:48
The more ICC warrants, arrest warrants for more Israeli
58:52
leaders, more ICJ rulings that the I'd be shocked if the ICJ
58:57
isn't, doesn't rule, it's a genocide.
58:59
I think the the arms embargoes from countries will only
59:03
continue and pick up. I think that the United States
59:06
is, as we already pointed out, becoming a country that is
59:09
increasingly supportive of the Palestinian people and that will
59:11
eventually trickle down into politics, as we certainly would
59:14
hope. So Latin America is is
59:17
increasingly hostile to Israel, especially now as Israel is seen
59:21
as implicated in this illegal attack on and and abduction of
59:26
Nicolas Maduro. So I think Israel is becoming a
59:29
prize state everywhere, that those trends will only increase
59:33
and, and, and, and, and I think Israeli societies just becoming
59:36
more genocidal. The apartheid regime is
59:39
entrenching itself. So all the things that are
59:40
pushing Israel, creating this environment, Israel's becoming
59:45
an apartheid state and is becoming a pariah state, all
59:48
those trends are are only increasing and entrenching
59:51
themselves. So in the future, Israel's
59:55
status as a pariah state will only also entrench itself.
59:59
All right, Zachary, how can my audience follow your work?
1:00:04
You can find me on Twitter under SCORE, Zach Foster, and if you
1:00:07
want to follow all my writings, you can find
1:00:09
those@palestinenexus.com. I must admit I love your
1:00:14
website. All those maps are particularly
1:00:17
fascinating. Thank you so much.
1:00:19
Yeah, we have a collection of digital maps.
1:00:22
I've collected many, many thousands of maps, mostly of
1:00:26
Palestine in the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, dating to, I
1:00:30
think the we have maps going all the way back to the 17th
1:00:32
century. So it's an antique collection.
1:00:34
And you can find all those maps. All of them are downloadable
1:00:36
high resolution maps for free at palestinexus.com.
1:00:40
Zachary Foster, thank you for joining me in the trenches.
1:00:42
Thanks so much for having me.