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BONUS: Josh's thoughts on Israel & Gaza · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  I have to say a few things about Israel and Gaza. A lot of people are asking me about it.
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  It's not an easy situation to talk about. Tempers are fled and roar on both sides. When
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  I mention this on the air on my radio show, I get a deluge of almost exclusively pro-Palestinian
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  text messages and calls saying terrorists are not born, they're made. The Palestinians
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  have been put in an impossible situation. And to some extent that's true. My initial overarching
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  instinct is that it's always been untenable to expect millions of people to live in squalid
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  open air refugee camps or prisons in perpetuity with no sense of hope, no possibility of
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  nationhood. It's an intolerable situation that Israel finds itself in. And it is incumbent
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  on the people who hold all the chips, who have the power, who have the might, who have
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  the luxurious lives of living in a Western liberal democracy that, to be fair, have created.
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  It is incumbent on them to find a solution, to find a way out of this morass. It's just
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  not good enough for the Israeli right to keep saying, we have more partner in peace. What
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  can we do? You have to do something. You have to have done something. There was a time
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  when something was being done. I mean, let's just roll the clock back a bit. We don't have
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  to go into the 1967 war when Egypt was ready to pounce and was amassing its military. This
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  was a time when Israel did not control the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. The West Bank
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  was part of Jordan. The Gaza Strip was part of Egypt. The Golan Heights were part of Syria.
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  The Egyptians blocked Israel's access to shipping. And Israel had said that if you do that,
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  we're going to consider that war. Israel did it. Egypt did it rather. They amassed their tanks
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  and troops on the border. They told the UN peacekeeping outfits to get out of Dodge, which they did.
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  And just before Egypt could attack Israel, preemptively struck. And as part of that,
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  took the Sinai and the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and the Golan Heights. And then just six years
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  later, if you know the story of the 1973 war, the Arab countries set stuff this for a joke. Let's
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  finally push Israel into the sea. Let's get rid of all the Jews. And their armies are
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  masked on the borders. And again, Israel struck preemptively and wiped them out.
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  And then three decades later, there was a real attempt at peace. It was orchestrated by President
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  Clinton, Ehud Barak, who was the Israeli Prime Minister and Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader,
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  came to Camp David. They worked on a follow-up to the Oslo Accords and essentially Arafat was
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  offered 97% of everything he'd been asking for. Certainly the Americans and other international
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  observers regarded it as a travesty that the Palestinians walked away from that deal that Israel
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  was offering them in President Clinton's biography. He writes an anecdote that Yasser Arafat once
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  complimented him by telling him, you are a great man. And Clinton said to Arafat,
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  I'm not a great man, I'm a failure, and you made me one.
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  And then there was the attempt by Prime Minister Yitzhak Khabin,
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  to offer peace to the Palestinians. He was assassinated by a right wing Israeli.
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  And in the wake of all that, successive Israeli right wing governments,
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  the legacy of Benjamin Netanyahu has been that essentially Israelis have functionally given up
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  on the possibility of peace. They talk about it, but in practice, no real attempts have been made.
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  Now one could say that's understandable because the Gaza Strip has been run
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  for almost 20 years by Hamas, a terrorist group that says in its charter that it wants to wipe out
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  all of Israel, that there should be no Jews living in that part of the world.
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  And to people who think, well, maybe they shouldn't be, I mean, maybe the whole thing is a colonial
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  project. Let's just be careful with our words about colonialism. Israel is not a
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  colonial project. You may think that it's a misbegotten venture. You may think that it's
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  horrendous to have shipped all of these Jews back to that part of the world,
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  blindly stampeding the interests of the people who were living there in the 40s.
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  But it's not a colonial project the way that the British Empire was,
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  or like the Dutch East and Indies, or the Portuguese Empire, or the Spanish.
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  Think about what, for example, an acknowledgement of country or a land acknowledgement is. It's a
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  recognition that regardless of whatever has happened in the past few hundred years, take the
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  case of Australia, that having ancestors who lived here thousands of years ago accounts for
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  something. If anyone was doing welcomes to country in the Middle East, it would be Jews
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  who have the most ancient existing civilization and ethnicity and religion on that land.
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  This is land where King David once ruled in 1000 BC. This is not the British partitioning Africa
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  with no history in that place. This is the people who have the greatest historical links to
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  that land, and who have been hounded, and raped, and slaughtered, and excluded from every other
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  society, suffering the worst genocide in the history of the world, and then being given a tiny
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  patch of land, from which they came. Now that doesn't justify the settlements, it doesn't justify
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  the Israeli right, it certainly doesn't justify the lack of action on pursuing peace.
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  But let's cut the nonsense about colonialism. We in the West have a post-colonial
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  guilt complex, and perhaps rightly so, which biases us towards thinking that brown skinned poor
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  people are usually in the right, and white people who speak good English and wear fancy suits,
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  and try to justify why the poor brown skinned people are wrong are usually the oppressors.
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  It certainly looks that way when you look at the conditions in Gaza and the West Bank versus
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  the conditions in Israel. But be conscious, be mindful of that bias that we have, that post-colonial
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  bias, because we're talking about a tiny number of people, Jews globally, who have never been accepted
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  into any society that they've lived in, have never been allowed to join the professions,
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  or get their own education, or be part of the moneyed class, or the elite anywhere,
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  who now finally have a place where they can live supposedly in freedom. Again, that does not
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  justify the abysmal treatment of Palestinians, but it does complicate the moral narrative
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  when you just think that the Palestinians are the good guys, and the Israelis are the colonialist
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  oppressors. I mean, the thought experiment is worth heating in Israel of if each party could do
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  whatever it is that they want to do had unlimited power, what would they do?
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  We know what the Israelis would do because they do have all the power.
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  They would not be wiping out all the Arabs, and we know what the Palestinians would do if they
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  had more power, because when they get a bit of power, they do things like what happened
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  the weekend before last. Not all of them, most of them are victims of this same
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  death cult, as the Israelis are, most of them are victims of Hamas.
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  But let's be clear, if the Arabs put down their arms, there would be peace tomorrow in the
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  Middle East. If the Jews put down their arms, there would be no Jews left in the Middle East.
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  You may not be fully aware of what happened the Saturday before last.
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  You may just think, well, they were okay, there was an attack, the Palestinians had been oppressed,
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  so of course they lashed out, regrettably some civilians were killed.
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  Israel has not wanted to traumatize its own citizens by publicizing the images that came out of
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  that assault by Hamas on southern Israel, but they have shown some of those images and some of
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  those body cam videos that were being livestreamed to journalists, and the descriptions
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  are absolutely horrifying. They're like the Christchurch massacre.
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  Images of kindergarten being shot up of babies being executed, of civilians being beheaded,
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  of old ladies being raped, of old ladies bleeding from their genitals being dragged through
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  crowds in Gaza, where onlookers were cheering and screaming, God is great.
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  For Israel, it's a bit like a 9-11. Let's be clear, this part of Israel, not that it would ever
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  be justified to treat anybody this way, but this part of Israel is not the settlements in the West
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  Bank populated by hyper-zionist, anti-peace Israelis who want a mega-Israel that gives Palestinians
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  no rights. Southern Israel, and I hadn't realized this until I did more reading after the massacre,
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  Southern Israel is largely populated by left-wing Israelis, it's Kibbutzim, it's places where people
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  who really would have been members of organizations like Peace now which seeks a resolution to the
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  conflict. It's a pretty hippy-dippy part of the country, this border area, with Gaza.
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  It's no coincidence that it was the location for this peace concert where hundreds of young
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  Israelis, 22-year-olds, 23-year-olds, most of them left wing, would gather and have a rave in
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  an open field, it was literally a peace festival, a music festival for peace. It starts around midnight
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  on Friday night, and on Saturday morning, as they were still partying, as the sun rose,
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  terrorists struck, many of the young people who weren't machine gunned down found shelter,
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  some of them in bomb shelters, and the terrorists came along with grenades and rolled grenades
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  into their shelters, and the body cam footage shows riding bodies with their limbs ripped off.
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  Still alive, targeted specifically as civilians.
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  Now there are hundreds of hostages in Gaza, infants, old people, some of the infants with their
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  families, some not. There are some reports that Hamas has said that for every Palestinian or
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  Hamas militant who is killed by Israel in any ground incursion, they will live stream the
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  execution or beheading of an Israeli civilian hostage. This is the party that was voted in
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  by the citizens of Gaza, only once that's the way you do elections in
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  Middle East and countries, isn't it? You vote for people once and then they don't let you vote
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  again. So it's somewhat disconcerting to see that most of the narrative from listeners and from
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  the mainstream press is hand-ringing about what Israel will do, whether it will be proportionate,
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  whether Israel is going to hurt Palestinian civilians. Of course that's a horrible thing to
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  countenance. Of course the blockade of Gaza in which essential materials have not been getting in
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  and people have been forced to live below the poverty line for years is barbaric and regrettable.
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  But the blockade is not because Israelis like blockading Arabs.
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  The blockade is so that Hamas can't pull off shit like this. Is it overhanded? Surely. Yes.
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  Is it too punitive against innocent Palestinians? Surely. Yes.
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  But if you think there's a side of good guys and bad guys in this one
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  and you think the good guys are the oppressed brown skinned people who've been forced to live in
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  squalor in the Gaza Strip, then your empathic imagination is not large enough
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  because there were regular people trying to lead their lives who were specifically targeted,
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  their babies executed, their infants shot, their grandparents raped, for what?
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  What is Hamas's play here? What do they think is going to happen?
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  How much restraint do they expect the Israelis to have? How much restraint would you have
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  if it happened to your family? And of course the same can be said on the other side. How much
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  patience would you have if you were a garson for Israelis who say, well, we just wanted to go to
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  a music festival and dance. As just a few kilometers away, you are living in squalor,
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  unable to hold on to any hope of the better future because of Israel and because of Hamas.
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  It's a catastrophe, the whole thing is a catastrophe and this is kind of a doomsday scenario for
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  Israel. It's an episode of Fowda, the Israeli thriller, turned up to 11.
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  So I don't have a lot to say except that I find it pretty disgusting at this early point for
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  people to be marching in the streets against Israel. The country has its flaws,
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  the country has made huge mistakes. But to some extent the country is a victim of its own
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  success and a victim of how young it is. What happened when the British Empire conquered Australia?
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  Or New Zealand? Or Canada? Or the United States? What kind of behaviour was there?
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  I mean it happened long enough ago that we don't have to think about it terribly.
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  And we make tight gestures towards reconciliation and we say our acknowledgements of country before
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  every Zoom meeting and we think that's going to make it okay. But if it had happened just 70 years ago
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  and every attempt at reconciliation had been rebuffed and every partner in peace had been swiftly
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  replaced by a more extreme faction who simply wanted all white people either killed or moved off
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  the continent altogether. What would you expect our reaction to be?
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  So I don't know where that gets us except that I do think the only appropriate emotion at the
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  moment is deep heartbreak and sadness at the barbarity of humankind and patience and resolve
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  and empathy for both sides. No one's going to win out of this but to expect one side to just
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  cop it is hypocritical.