Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "What IS a Zionist?" with Charlotte Korchak

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"What IS a Zionist?" with Charlotte Korchak · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  Get a humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
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  One of the most dangerous and uncomfortable questions that I've been wrestling with lately
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  and I hope you have too is, what exactly is a Zionist?
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  What is Zionism and what should the relationship between Jews and Arabs and between Israel
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  and the Arab world be?
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  Is Zionist somebody who believes that Jews should be able to parachute onto other people's
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  land, boot them out and then occupy them militarily forever or put an embargo on them so that
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  they have to live in squalid, open air refugee camps in perpetuity?
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  Or is Zionist someone who believes that just as Arabs have lots and lots of different
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  states, there should be one state in the world for the most persecuted ethnic minority
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  in history, whatever that looks like?
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  Those two questions have been increasingly difficult to disentangle over the past couple
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  of years and so I'm working through this as much as anyone is.
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  You will notice that I've got myself into all kinds of trouble from both sides as I try
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  to grow my way towards an understanding of what is just here and what is reasonable as
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  well as just.
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  Charlotte Courchak is an educator of Jewish and Israeli history.
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  She goes around the world trying to explain to people Zionism as she sees it through
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  the Jerusalem Education Institute and you may have noticed a viral video that went around
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  of Charlotte at Auschwitz at the death camp where she was displaying an Israeli flag and
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  was accosted by other attendees who thought that that was in bad taste, have a listen.
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  Despite the heat of that video, Charlotte insists that she is an advocate for trying to
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  find common ground and civility in conversations around Israel and Zionism.
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  She was born in Los Angeles but she moved to Jerusalem in 1997 and lived there during
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  the Second Indifada which helped to shape her perspective on the peace process and the
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  Middle Eastern conflict.
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  I hope you enjoy as much as I did the one the only Charlotte Courchak.
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  Education, fragility, advocacy, sake, activism, sake or politics or whatever it is always
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  has an agenda behind it and it's and that's fine but that doesn't yours.
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  With one agenda, I want to create more Zionists in the world, Jews, non-Jews, but that's
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  different because when it's for advocacy, it's defensive, right?
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  Like I'm teaching you how to defend Israel.
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  I'm teaching you the answers to the tough questions which I do also just because again if somebody
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  wants to use it for activism, great, I can be there but I feel like education when there
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  isn't a more of an agenda than just Zionism, it all of a sudden becomes not transparent.
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  So when you say that you're a gender is to create more Zionists, a lot of people will
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  hear that word and won't know exactly necessarily what you mean.
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  So let's define it.
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  They might think that you mean someone who carries water for Israel all the time regardless
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  of what Israel does.
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  I assume you don't mean that.
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  I don't.
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  Zionism is the belief in a Jewish state in the land of Israel and personally I think everyone
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  should believe in that.
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  Now what kind of state?
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  What are the borders of Israel?
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  These are all things that Zionists and I argue people who are engaged should be having.
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  But Zionists is just somebody who believes in a Jewish state in the land of Israel.
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  And you have extreme Zionists who are racist.
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  You have very moderate Zionists who are the most empathetic and peace loving people.
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  And I would say one is naive and one is brutal and we need to find a middle ground.
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  But when you learn it and you can unpack it, actually I think when we argue in debate
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  the right, the left, the religious, the secular, we create a thriving center.
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  And I believe in a thriving center all over the world.
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  I mean, when you say, you know, a land for how did you phrase the definition of the
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  belief in a Jewish state in the land of Israel?
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  Jewish state in the land of Israel.
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  There are a lot of people who in the past couple of years in particular, including secular
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  Jews, have said that's fine.
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  But why does it have to be this state behaving this way, asserting dominion over these
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  people?
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  Well, I have an issue with the dominion part, but it doesn't.
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  It could be, that's the part being engaged with the movement, right?
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  It was the same thing.
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  Jabotinsky and Ben Gorion sat down.
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  They argued they debated.
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  They created a country together, right?
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  And Bagan took over and Bagan and Jabot and Ben Gorion signed the Declaration of Independence.
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  They were on polar opposite sides.
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  They had two very different visions, but they somehow come to came together.
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  A Declaration of Independence was written out and they all signed it.
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  How would you summarize the difference of opinion?
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  Well, I mean, Bagan, his focus, he was a revisionist, right?
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  There are six different types of Zionism.
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  Everyone should know that, which means you're not shoved into a box.
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  You could be different, right?
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  He was a revisionist.
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  His core focus was defending the Jewish people.
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  He had a Holocaust background.
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  Ben Gorion immigrated there in the first decade of the 20th century.
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  He didn't have that kind of background where he had experienced intense hatred and vile,
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  of course, anti-Semitism pushed so many people there.
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  For Bagan, it was that's number one.
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  We must protect and defend Jewish people, right?
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  For Ben Gorion, it was labor Zionism.
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  It was political Zionism.
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  It was creating the institutions.
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  He led the hysteria, right?
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  The labor unions in Israel.
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  He came at it from a social, more socialist background.
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  He wasn't religious.
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  Bagan was religious.
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  They had different understandings of what this country should look like.
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  And yet, again, they sat together.
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  He sat in the opposition.
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  He sat in the coalition.
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  And they never killed each other.
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  They never fought again.
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  They debated fire in a fierce way, but they were all Zionists.
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  And that's what we need today.
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  We need that thriving conversation.
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  Now I would argue where to have that conversation, okay?
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  And then there's the conversation about what Israel is and what Israel needs to be.
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  And then there's a different conversation about how does that now play out with the Palestinians,
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  which is when you said dominion over another people I think hold on.
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  Let's pull back, right?
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  Is that for some people maybe that's the goal?
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  For a lot of people, I don't think that's the goal at all, right?
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  I'm Zionist.
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  It may not be that goal.
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  What if it's there inadvertent, the inadvertent outcome regardless of the goal?
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  So that needs to be the constant criticism, right?
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  So we talk about occupation of the West Bank, right?
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  And what goes on there, right?
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  The fact that there's military presence there and a military control over most of that territory, right?
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  But what's the purpose?
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  And most Israelis would say to protect Israel, to do counterterrorism?
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  Yeah, what's the, the byproduct is Palestinian hardship, right?
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  And for them, it's not perceived as counterterrorism.
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  It's perceived as oppression.
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  I don't think it is oppression.
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  I don't think you build schools and hospitals,
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  which is what we did in the West Bank in the 70s and the 80s after Israel to control.
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  We developed that area, right?
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  And we didn't say these are schools that Jews are going to teach in
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  and you're going to have to learn our curriculum.
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  No, these are schools for Palestinians grow, develop,
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  and we watch GDP rise and we watched education rise.
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  And we watched the economy get better.
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  And the only thing though is the layering elephant, which is,
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  but they weren't free.
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  They were living under a foreign military, right?
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  I'm not necessarily foreign to the land,
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  and that's a whole nother complex conversation, right?
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  But that's not oppression.
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  Now, it could feel like it once you get to the point where terrorism gets much worse
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  in the late 80s, into the 90s.
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  And all of a sudden it's, now I have checkpoints and I have a security barrier
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  and I have all these things that to me feel like this country is trying to control me
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  and oppress me.
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  And again, is that the intention?
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  No, but that's the perception.
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  And what I always try to teach as an educator is not just the facts,
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  but the perception of the facts, right?
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  So when I teach war of independence, I don't say war of independence.
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  I say, the first era of Israeli war.
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  And then I say, for the Jews, it was a war of independence.
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  For the Palestinian, it became an aqua.
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  It became a catastrophe, right?
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  And I can also talk about the evolution of that word and how that's not,
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  how it was originally used, but it's all,
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  it's important to understand perception,
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  but also not let that perception drive, then that becomes the fact.
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  It's not the fact.
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  The fact is we're there to protect ourselves.
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  And then of course, there's the elephant in the room,
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  which is the growing extreme side of that movement,
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  who is, who is moving into the,
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  into the engineering, into the West Bank.
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  The you're talking about the extreme side of the Zionist,
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  the Israeli movement.
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  The religious, the religious extremists.
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  Yes.
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  That for them, it's no, no, we're settling this land
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  because we need to make it part of Israel.
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  And you cannot have a country here, right?
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  I mean, to the, it's not, to the observer,
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  I can't talk about how perspectives are as much as,
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  as important as facts.
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  It sounds a little bit rich to say like it's not,
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  the only purpose is to keep Israel secure.
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  And yet for more than a half a century,
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  there have been these, this persistent indignity
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  of people not having their own self-determination
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  and having to stop at those checkpoints
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  and having to endure, like if you're under the age of 70,
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  and you're about sitting in the West Bank,
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  you know, no other reality than the reality
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  of your neighboring country running everything
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  under an undemocratic military essentially rule, right?
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  I mean, there's the Palestinian authority, corrupt, moribund.
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  Sure.
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  You know, a bunch of all the facts.
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  Nothing to do with Israel.
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  That happened.
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  No, but Israel is, you know,
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  Hold on, what happened?
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  How did that all happen, right?
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  Yeah, they didn't start to collaborate with them
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  or cooperate with them until,
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  coordinate with them until 2008, right?
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  678 is when that coordination started between the PM and Israel.
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  I'm just talking about that.
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  I'm just talking about regarding them as the legitimate people
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  to sit down to and talk about the future.
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  I mean, that was happening in the 90s.
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  Sure.
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  And that was the Oslo court, right?
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  Yeah.
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  Which created the circumstances of the West Bank, right?
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  A, B and C, right?
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  Yeah.
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  Checkpoints didn't go off very well.
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  For people who didn't know,
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  the West Bank is divided into A section, B section, C section,
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  each has different, we're not going to the arcane
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  or of that.
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  Right.
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  But it's important to know area A was both
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  the under full Palestinian authority control.
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  And it was for years, it was.
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  There were no Israelis there.
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  There were no military there.
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  It was a territory without Israeli presence at all, right?
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  And it was from 1995, 1994, 95, depending on what area
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  we're talking about that we withdrew from through those years.
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  It wasn't until 2002 that Israel re-entered those territories.
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  And why?
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  And now here it gets a little personal for me,
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  because I was raised in Israel during the Second of Difada.
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  And so when somebody says that to me,
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  I'm sitting there going, but there was a reason
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  we went back into those communities.
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  It's because from those communities,
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  that's where the terrorism was coming from.
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  And the Palestinian Authority neglected their job,
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  which was to stop the terrorism.
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  Don't let bomb factories be built.
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  Don't let terror cells just develop and grow
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  and strengthen in these areas, but they didn't.
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  And you're talking to somebody who lived in Gilo,
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  which is on the southern edge of Jerusalem,
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  butts up to Bethlehem.
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  And you're talking to somebody who missed a suicide bombing
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  by 10 minutes when a suicide bomber walked across
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  the wadi in between the valley,
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  in between our two communities walked into my community,
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  boarded a bus and murdered 17 people.
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  And I missed it by 10 minutes.
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  And to clarify, you were living in Israel proper.
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  You were living in a settlement?
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  I was not living in a settlement.
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  I was living, well, it depends on who you ask.
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  I was living in greater Jerusalem.
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  In East Jerusalem.
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  Well, it's called the East, but it was really southern.
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  We know that East Jerusalem is actually Northern
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  and southern in eastern part of Jerusalem,
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  but yes, Gilo is over the green line.
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  Right. Okay.
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  On the Palestinian side of the green line.
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  On the, on, yes, yes.
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  That being said, it's part of the municipal lines
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  of Jerusalem.
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  Right.
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  And after that attack, literally the day after
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  the attack that I missed was the moment
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  when Israel decided to build the security barrier.
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  Right.
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  It didn't come because we just wanted to separate it
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  because it's apartheid.
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  No, it came as a direct reaction to a suicide bombing
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  that I missed.
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  And so we have to zoom out and look at all that.
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  And then when you say 50 years of this, right,
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  well, it didn't have to be 50 years.
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  The Oslo courts were there.
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  They were meant to lead to a peaceful resolution.
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  And then came more violence and more terror,
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  not just from Hamas, but also from Palestinian authority,
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  encouragement and incitement, not just Hamas,
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  but other terror groups that were basically
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  under the banner of the PLO, right.
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  And then there were offers for peace,
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  which somehow, and that's not taught to the Palestinians.
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  Camp David of 2000 is not taught to the Palestinians
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  in the same way that it would be taught to Mirry you, right.
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  And it's factually incorrect how they teach it
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  in terms of how...
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  What do you mean it's not taught to the Palestinians?
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  What does that mean?
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  When the agreement...
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  Oh, it's not taught.
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  It's not taught.
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  Oh, I see.
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  Sorry, my American accent.
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  My American accent.
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  Sorry, everyone.
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  Yes, okay.
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  So yes, Palestinians don't learn about the fact that
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  in 2000, the fact in 2000 Israel offered
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  to fully withdraw from the Gaza Strip, okay.
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  Removing all Israeli communities from that area.
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  They offered to withdraw from over 90% of the West Bank
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  and the eventual offer under the Clinton Paranomers,
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  parameters while I'm struggling today,
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  would have given them 97% with land swaps, okay.
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  And no Israeli military presence,
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  no more communities within that 97%, no more Jewish communities.
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  It would have left a Palestinian state,
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  Jude and Ryan, free of Jews.
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  It was gonna give them a capital in Jerusalem.
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  So when you say 50 years in what if there were efforts
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  and the tragedy, actually, and forget,
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  let's move on from 2000, jump to 2008,
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  when El-Hud Omar, now offers the current president
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  of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas,
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  another offer, which is 100% of Gaza,
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  we already withdrew, right.
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  100% of the West Bank with land swaps.
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  A tunnel that was gonna be built, yes, a tunnel.
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  That was gonna be built between the West Bank
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  and Gaza to make their state contiguous.
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  And he didn't even get a phone.
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  And also importantly, address the right of return.
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  Address the right of return.
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  It's gonna be in the first real serious way.
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  I mean, both of them, what if, right?
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  It was $30 billion to reset a refugees
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  in that newly established Palestinian state.
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  And even some amount, about 5,000 to start with,
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  and then possibly more refugees
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  being able to return inside of Israel.
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  Yeah, that's what I mean.
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  As I understand it, it's just as it was the first time
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  that they actually said, okay, we have a limited number,
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  as a symbolic way of saying, we get it,
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  we understand that you have these ties,
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  we'll bring these certain number of thousands
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  of Palestinians back into Israel.
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  But not just random Palestinians,
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  it was people for family reunification purposes.
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  The families that had been divided by that line
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  that was drawn randomly in the sand in 1949,
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  by the Jordanians and the Israelis.
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  And so in 2008, that offer and a capital in Jerusalem,
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  yet again.
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  And so when somebody says, oh, well,
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  it's been 50 years of occupation, they always forget
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  the efforts made to decrease it.
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  At all, because I mean, I'm not bang on about this a lot
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  to my and design as friends,
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  to make the points that you'll make.
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  But I also want to stress,
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  you know, now people will point out Israeli rejectionism
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  and the growing radicalism.
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  But those rejections by the Palestinians aided that.
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  You know, I lived in an Israel
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  where people wanted those deals.
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  They said, yes, two-state solution,
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  like let's end this conflict and every rejection
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  led them to say, we just don't have a partner.
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  And I know that such a cliche,
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  like, husbara line of, we don't have a partner for peace.
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  But we didn't.
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  I mean, it's cliche, but it's real.
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  And when you feel that over and over again
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  that you're offering and you're offering
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  and every time it's a no.
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  But that's the over and over again bit
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  that I think people smell a rat on.
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  And I also absolutely take the point
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  that there have been two or three big over two with.
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  And I'm glad you bring this up.
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  We're the stars aligned.
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  And there was a US administration that wanted to do it.
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  And there was an Israeli administration
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  that wanted to do it.
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  And they came up and then the Palestinians fucked it.
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  And they essentially didn't have either the Palestinian leader
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  did not have the credibility on the Arab street
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  to be able to sell it or was just in Transagent.
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  But I actually want to go deeper.
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  Because I'm glad you brought it up.
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  It's like the point when I say a half century,
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  I'm not saying that all of the blame
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  should be shoulder-botties, right?
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  I'm saying that people look at the net effect
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  of what you have now, which is a militarized
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  thicker of ethnic discrimination on the West Bank
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  and war crimes are at least an annihilation
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  of Gaza.
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  And they feel uncomfortable about it.
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  Like it's almost like I've heard the analogy made to,
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  for example, the death penalty, where people will say,
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  you know, my opposition to the death penalty
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  is not contingent on whether or not the person
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  who we're putting to death is a terrible, terrible person
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  or a terrorist or something.
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  It's like, I just fundamentally don't believe
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  that a state should kill people.
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  Let's suppose that that's my position.
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  You know, there are people who say,
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  I fundamentally don't believe that a state
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  should be dispossessing and occupying a people
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  in the way that Israel is,
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  regardless of the fabulous justifications that it has.
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  But that's not it.
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  Regardless of the security concerns
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  and regardless of the fact that two or three times
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  in the past, they made an attempt
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  and then subsequently for the past 20 years
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  have been in Transigence and Obstant
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  and show no good faith in trying to foster a partner for peace.
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  Well, if any of that was true, I would get where
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  they're coming from.
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  But half of that is problematic.
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  Is being like nurturing the green shoots
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  of possible pacifism in the Palestinian territories?
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  No, but there have been Israelis
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  that have continued to try to do that.
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  Well, there's always been another side
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  and we can't just highlight the other side.
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  Even again, and I'm not somebody
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  who's going to defend BB often,
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  but even when BB took office,
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  he put a moratorium on settlement construction
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  from December of 2009 until September of 2010
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  to try to get Mahmoud Abbas to the negotiating table.
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  He almost lost his coalition as a result.
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  So let's not like he stepped in and then,
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  and then of course he had his own issues
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  and that caused him to have to buddy more and more up
• 16:57
  to the right, a right that if you get further and further,
• 17:00
  we're never the two state solutioners
• 17:01
  who always exist in Israel who were the minority, right?
• 17:04
  But again, everyone has a role to play.
• 17:06
  My point is that when you just sum it up
• 17:09
  and try to highlight, well, that's what Israel is.
• 17:11
  Well, there's no, there are people
• 17:13
  who did try to foster those peace, that peace.
• 17:15
  There are organizations.
• 17:16
  The end result is that they failed.
• 17:18
  But that's not fair to not highlight them.
• 17:21
  There are Jews who live in Judea and Samaria
• 17:23
  in the West Bank who actually reach out
• 17:25
  to their Palestinian neighbors who have,
• 17:27
  or is it, and that's what I'm trying to say,
• 17:28
  like we highlight one or the other,
• 17:30
  but we should really highlight both.
• 17:31
  There's an extreme and that extreme has, yes,
• 17:34
  grown and unfortunately for BB to get a coalition,
• 17:37
  he had to put them together and he created this party
• 17:40
  that now has a lot of power, right?
• 17:44
  Most Israelis don't support it
• 17:46
  and most Israelis, if they saw a path forward,
• 17:49
  they would embrace it.
• 17:50
  Now they're traumatized and they can't even imagine it, right?
• 17:53
  But the idea of you sat down with most Israelis
• 17:55
  and said, do you agree with a two-state solution?
• 17:57
  In principle, they would say yes.
• 18:00
  They would say, I just don't think it's possible.
• 18:02
  You had a not-well fun.
• 18:03
  She says that all the time, right?
• 18:05
  And that's the thing that I think people are missing.
• 18:06
  They like to look at Zionists as if there's always been
• 18:09
  this plan to control the Palestinians,
• 18:11
  to prevent them from ever having a state.
• 18:14
  And there were words that you said also
• 18:16
  that I have to disagree with about annihilation
• 18:18
  and dispossession.
• 18:19
  Again, I'm very big on intent.
• 18:22
  I'm somebody who we don't live in a world
• 18:24
  where people judge by intent anymore.
• 18:25
  We judge by impact, okay?
• 18:27
  Yes.
• 18:27
  And that's not how the world should be judged.
• 18:28
  Intent really matters?
• 18:30
  No, because even I'll give you a great analogy
• 18:33
  from one of my favorite scholars, Jonathan Height, okay?
• 18:37
  Let's say Maria eats some peanuts
• 18:39
  and then Maria goes and makes that with Bob.
• 18:41
  Bob drops dead of anaphylactic shock.
• 18:43
  Maria had no idea it was allergic to peanuts.
• 18:45
  He's dead now.
• 18:46
  What happens to Maria?
• 18:48
  Legally speaking, what would happen to her?
• 18:50
  Nothing.
• 18:51
  You wouldn't blame her.
• 18:53
  Her intentions were completely pure.
• 18:55
  Scenario number two, Maria Poison's Bob.
• 18:59
  Bob finds out goes to the hospital.
• 19:01
  He's totally fine.
• 19:02
  What happens to Maria?
• 19:04
  She goes to jail because her intentions were to kill.
• 19:06
  Bob is dead in the first scenario, no punishment.
• 19:09
  Intent matters.
• 19:10
  Well, this point of view has guided sort of Western
• 19:14
  like moral, foreign policy.
• 19:16
  As it should.
• 19:17
  I'm not saying that impact doesn't matter.
• 19:19
  I'm not saying impact doesn't matter.
• 19:21
  It has to, both have to have full count.
• 19:22
  Because I mean, I remember the case being made,
• 19:24
  the point being made during the Iraq war
• 19:27
  when the Bush administration was sort of dancing
• 19:30
  around this topic and saying like it's very regrettable
• 19:33
  that we're only trying to minimize civilian casualties
• 19:36
  and the sort of not that I'm a big known Chomsky fan,
• 19:40
  but like I think it was Chomsky at the time
• 19:41
  who was like, I mean, if you knowingly start a war
• 19:44
  that kills a million people,
• 19:47
  you can talk all you want about
• 19:48
  whether or not you didn't intend to.
• 19:49
  It was a foreseeable consequence of your actions.
• 19:52
  In the case of Maria and the nut thing,
• 19:55
  it's as if like she's gone into an area,
• 19:58
  she's gone into a clinic for people
• 20:00
  who have nut allergies and she's eaten the nut
• 20:03
  and she's made out randomly with one of the inmates.
• 20:05
  They could have been a nurse.
• 20:07
  They might not have actually had a nut allergy,
• 20:09
  but it's reckless of her to do it.
• 20:10
  And similarly, you can't look at the situation
• 20:14
  in Israel since 1967 and not say that there is either
• 20:19
  a recklessness or a grotesque failure
• 20:22
  in its capacity to not inflict suffering on Palestinians.
• 20:25
  I mean, I wouldn't, I would say that there was
• 20:28
  a growing problem that when hindsight we can look back
• 20:32
  and we can look at all of the issues
• 20:33
  and we can look at how we fix them,
• 20:35
  but it's a hindsight issue.
• 20:36
  The intentions, I don't think we're to do that,
• 20:39
  but I think the longer you're there, unfortunately,
• 20:41
  and one of my favorite colors is Yossi Klein-Halevi,
• 20:43
  and he talks about it in one of his books where he said,
• 20:45
  you know, I became a soldier in the 1980s
• 20:46
  and solely but surely just through the act of being part
• 20:50
  of the Israeli military and being part of that military
• 20:52
  occupation and presence in the West Bank,
• 20:55
  I, slowly but surely Palestinians,
• 20:57
  it became harder for me to see them as human beings, right?
• 20:59
  Because when you're dealing with terror all the time, right?
• 21:02
  Then you have to look over your shoulder
• 21:04
  and you have to see everyone is suspect
• 21:05
  and of course that's gonna cause a moral corruption
• 21:08
  to a certain extent.
• 21:09
  That's not the intention at all.
• 21:10
  Now, could we have done better at trying to prevent that
• 21:12
  at noticing it and trying to stop it?
• 21:14
  Yes, but again, you're talking to a child
• 21:16
  of the second of Defada who lost three friends
• 21:18
  in a suicide bombing.
• 21:19
  And the reality is is when you say,
• 21:21
  for the sake of security, yes,
• 21:22
  damn straight for the sake of security, I'm sorry.
• 21:24
  The reality is is that if Jews just said,
• 21:27
  okay, well, we can't do this because we need to be nice,
• 21:29
  we can't do this because it's gonna cause a little hardship
• 21:31
  or some suffering and we're gonna die?
• 21:34
  No, I just, I won't, I can't go there.
• 21:36
  No, no, I totally get it.
• 21:37
  I'm so with the exact same thing with Gaza.
• 21:39
  Like could we argue about,
• 21:40
  as Gaza gone on too long,
• 21:42
  as the way in which it's been conducted
• 21:44
  not been perfect, 110%.
• 21:47
  The intentions of the war though were just.
• 21:50
  The war is just that doesn't mean
• 21:52
  that every action taken in the war is just.
• 21:54
  That means that there could be really bad policies
• 21:56
  that were put in place.
• 21:57
  Israel should have known in March of this year
• 21:59
  when they cut off aid.
• 22:00
  Oh, six months of aid worth of aid was sent in
• 22:03
  between January and March.
• 22:04
  And so they have enough for six months.
• 22:06
  So if we cut it off, we can restart it up in six months.
• 22:08
  Come on.
• 22:09
  Six months.
• 22:10
  A lot of people won't know that.
• 22:11
  So there was criticism
• 22:12
  and let me explain actually.
• 22:14
  Only because I know where my,
• 22:16
  a lot of my audience's head is at when they go,
• 22:18
  when the Israeli starving Gaza thing,
• 22:21
  when Israel cut off aid,
• 22:23
  the whole world community went that shit crazy
• 22:25
  because they're starving the garsens.
• 22:27
  What Israel is really bad at doing is promoting its own.
• 22:30
  Yes.
• 22:31
  Point of view, there's this kind of,
• 22:32
  I mean, I feel like,
• 22:33
  I feel like we do kind of have a thing of like,
• 22:36
  we don't need to explain it.
• 22:37
  We shouldn't have to explain ourselves.
• 22:38
  I think that was true.
• 22:39
  To the rest of the world.
• 22:39
  I think that was true.
• 22:40
  And then we also now explain it
• 22:41
  and the world just doesn't listen
• 22:42
  because I, I heard it over and over again.
• 22:45
  If you go to the right sources,
• 22:46
  they had sent in a huge amount of food.
• 22:48
  Six months worth of aid.
• 22:50
  And then, so then they cut it off in order to,
• 22:52
  and why did they cut it off?
• 22:54
  And this is what they should have,
• 22:55
  they knew this, right?
• 22:56
  Because that was the purpose.
• 22:57
  They cut it off because they know that Hamas
• 22:59
  was stealing 80% of the aid,
• 23:01
  which isn't even by the way, our numbers.
• 23:02
  The UN's numbers show that.
• 23:04
  They show how many trucks went in
• 23:05
  and how many trucks were intercepted.
• 23:07
  So we know how much was intercepted.
• 23:09
  And then what do we know?
• 23:10
  They take the aid, they sell it,
• 23:12
  and they profit off of it.
• 23:13
  And that's how they pay their fighters, right?
• 23:14
  And then they feed themselves, right?
• 23:16
  And so again, it's very valid to say,
• 23:20
  we know that what we're sending in
• 23:21
  is actually allowing our enemy to profit
• 23:24
  and to continue to fight this war.
• 23:26
  So there's a valid reason.
• 23:27
  Then again, you also know that because they've intercepted
• 23:30
  that amount of aid,
• 23:31
  that there's not six months worth of aid,
• 23:32
  reaching the people.
• 23:34
  So you knew that hunger and starvation
• 23:36
  was gonna start sooner.
• 23:38
  And the GHF, that they were trying to create
• 23:40
  the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,
• 23:42
  which was problematic on a number of levels,
• 23:44
  but the fact is they were distributing,
• 23:45
  they started to distribute it,
• 23:46
  but only in late May, when they finally got it up and running.
• 23:49
  And then, and let's not absolve other organizations,
• 23:53
  like the UN and others who basically
• 23:54
  sat to Israel because the GHF exists,
• 23:55
  we're not gonna cooperate with you anymore.
• 23:57
  So we're not even gonna deliver aid,
• 23:59
  which means that they were also playing fast
• 24:01
  and loose with the lives of Palestinian children.
• 24:03
  And that's disgusting.
• 24:04
  And I encourage everyone to listen to Dan Suner's podcast,
• 24:07
  where he had on Rick something,
• 24:09
  rather a couple of weeks ago,
• 24:10
  talks all about UNRA and what UNRA has done with the past.
• 24:13
  The podcast has called Call Me Back.
• 24:14
  It's a great podcast.
• 24:15
  Dan is great.
• 24:16
  Another interesting thing on that issue
• 24:18
  about non-intentional starvation is,
• 24:22
  and this comes from my buddy Norm,
• 24:24
  who hosts the, who hosts live at the cellar.
• 24:26
  I don't know if you know comedy cellar podcast,
• 24:27
  but he's great and he is much more of a,
• 24:31
  I would say an apologist for Israel and I am.
• 24:34
  He even recently made the point
• 24:36
  that there was a leaked document that just came to light,
• 24:38
  which was the Israeli government
• 24:39
  talking about what a failure,
• 24:41
  one of its campaigns,
• 24:42
  I can't remember what city it was in Gaza was,
• 24:44
  because they didn't manage to eradicate
• 24:46
  as many Hamas leaders as they wanted to.
• 24:50
  And this is one of those places
• 24:51
  that everybody says everyone was starving in.
• 24:53
  And his point was, if it were true that Israel's secret goal
• 24:57
  was to starve people,
• 25:00
  then why would there be like secret leaks
• 25:04
  that the Israeli government's opponents are leaking,
• 25:06
  in which the Israeli government officials themselves
• 25:09
  are saying to each other,
• 25:10
  this was a failure because all we did was starve people
• 25:12
  and we didn't get the Hamas terrorists.
• 25:14
  Wouldn't they be saying this was great?
• 25:15
  We managed to starve as many people as we wanted to.
• 25:17
  That's it, that's it.
• 25:18
  And it goes, that's my point of going back to intent.
• 25:20
  And what I, again, I just expressed frustration
• 25:23
  at the Israeli policy of cutting off aid altogether
• 25:25
  because again, your intention made sense to me.
• 25:28
  And I, and then I think they did try to explain that to people.
• 25:30
  It's not like PR, it's just what the media chooses
• 25:32
  to pick up and not pick up, right?
• 25:34
  And I listened to Israeli media.
• 25:35
  I listened to the Times of Israel,
• 25:36
  which is Israeli media that's in English to the outside world.
• 25:39
  And they covered all of it, and I knew all of it.
• 25:41
  But you choose what to believe.
• 25:43
  And so again, intention matters here.
• 25:45
  Like I will never say that the intention was to starve people.
• 25:47
  Do I think there are some people maybe in our government
• 25:49
  who don't care of people starve?
• 25:51
  Yes, I do.
• 25:52
  And they're despicable and they shouldn't be part of my government.
• 25:54
  I feel that, I mean, aren't there a lot of people?
• 25:55
  I mean, aren't there, hold on, hold on.
• 25:57
  No, I was in Israel a few months ago.
• 25:59
  I was struck by what I felt
• 26:01
  was a callusness among my own friends and colleagues.
• 26:03
  I'll tell you where it was just like, you know what?
• 26:05
  Fuck him.
• 26:06
  It was like, I honestly don't give a shit.
• 26:07
  I'll tell you why.
• 26:08
  I really think this is important for your audience to hear, okay?
• 26:11
  I am in Israeli.
• 26:12
  I'm also an American.
• 26:13
  I spent time in Israel.
• 26:14
  I spent time outside of Israel.
• 26:17
  Israelis are in deep trauma, okay?
• 26:19
  And people have to understand this.
• 26:22
  They, in no way, shape or form,
• 26:24
  are capable right now of feeling compassion.
• 26:27
  They're avoiding.
• 26:28
  They're not seeing what's coming.
• 26:29
  They're barely seeing what's happening in Gaza, okay?
• 26:32
  And again, if you give them time to heal,
• 26:35
  which they can't do as long as this war continues,
• 26:37
  as long as there's these huge fights going on
• 26:39
  within the government and within the population,
• 26:42
  as long as we still have hostages, right?
• 26:44
  It's impossible.
• 26:45
  And I know is Ray Lee's and you've said it.
• 26:47
  I was there a few months ago, my friends,
• 26:49
  your friends were not like that two years ago.
• 26:50
  And I guarantee you give them two years
• 26:52
  and they won't be like that anymore.
• 26:54
  It's not, they won't.
• 26:55
  And I'm gonna do everything in my power to make sure of it.
• 26:58
  They need to be able to heal.
• 27:00
  They're in trauma and to demand compassion of,
• 27:03
  not, I'm not saying your enemy
• 27:05
  because not all the Palestinians in Gaza are enemy.
• 27:08
  But for Israel, for Israelis,
• 27:10
  what happened on October 7th?
• 27:11
  Again, your audience also, I hope that they know.
• 27:14
  The brutality of it struck them in a way
• 27:17
  and sparked and struck a chord
• 27:20
  that is there in a place where it's impossible
• 27:23
  for them to feel those things right now.
• 27:24
  And it's, I'm not excusing it more.
• 27:26
  So I'm just trying to help people understand
• 27:28
  where they're at.
• 27:29
  And I don't think it's fair to necessarily demand
• 27:31
  that they go all the way so quickly
• 27:34
  when we still have hostages.
• 27:36
  Let me just be clear about something
• 27:37
  because when you came in here,
• 27:39
  you said that you'd said to some people,
• 27:41
  some colleagues of some friends of yours
• 27:43
  that you were going on my show and they're like,
• 27:45
  oh, you know what, Josh just did,
• 27:46
  he wrote this, it's not cool.
• 27:48
  And the, that is a piece that has been widely misunderstood
• 27:53
  and I made a mistake at the time
• 27:55
  for, in my choice of words.
• 27:59
  By the way, credit to you for saying that.
• 28:01
  A lot of people don't say I made a mistake these days.
• 28:03
  And I just, I always like to give credit
• 28:05
  or credit to you anyway.
• 28:06
  It was a mistake because as, when you're writing,
• 28:08
  you're always torn between two imperatives.
• 28:11
  One is to hedge everything in a very careful way
• 28:14
  so that you can't possibly be misunderstood.
• 28:16
  But then you don't get anything across.
• 28:18
  It's uninteresting.
• 28:18
  It's one of the things to make people fall off their seat
• 28:20
  because you punch them in the chest, right?
• 28:22
  And perhaps I shouldn't have done the latter
• 28:24
  or quite the way that I did.
• 28:25
  Right, especially given again,
• 28:26
  not only the traumatized community in Israel,
• 28:28
  but let's just also talk about the transgenerational trauma
• 28:30
  that Jews are experiencing with the anti-growing anti-Semitism.
• 28:33
  Yes, although I view my, I view a Jewish community
• 28:37
  that is perceived by non-Jews as being critical of Israel,
• 28:41
  boisterous, rambunctious, argumentative, diverse
• 28:44
  as being a protector of Jews against anti-Semitism.
• 28:48
  And I think to the extent that the average Jew in the street
• 28:51
  is perceived as being in lockstep
• 28:52
  with the Israeli defense forces that endangers Jews.
• 28:56
  But we can, I'll let you jump on that.
• 28:58
  I just think what bothers me about that
• 28:59
  is the people who assume that don't talk to Jews.
• 29:03
  No, they don't ask them,
• 29:04
  they don't go to the Jews and say,
• 29:06
  do you really support like everything that's going on here?
• 29:09
  And I guarantee you, if you asked most Jews that,
• 29:11
  they would say, no, let's have a conversation about it.
• 29:13
  Absolutely.
• 29:14
  And that's what's frustrating is again to the listeners
• 29:16
  who listen and hear but never talk to Jews.
• 29:20
  Why are we assuming this?
• 29:21
  You're saying we should have this boisterous conversation.
• 29:23
  Do we demand that of the Muslim community?
• 29:25
  Well, when I hear Jews say that, I say actually yes.
• 29:28
  We do.
• 29:29
  I mean, the rest of the country might not.
• 29:31
  I do demand it of the Muslim community.
• 29:33
  I do wish that more of them had spoken out after October 7th.
• 29:36
  I do want Muslims to be more anti-Jihadists.
• 29:39
  But I'm not assuming that those conversations aren't necessarily
• 29:42
  happening within the Muslim community.
• 29:44
  I need to ask, this is a problem.
• 29:47
  People have to stop assuming things about people
• 29:49
  just based on a label.
• 29:51
  This is the entire world right now.
• 29:52
  I mean, it doesn't depend on you.
• 29:54
  I don't see how it hurts us to go the extra mile.
• 29:56
  I'll tell you how to extend the olive brand to people
• 29:59
  and say, you know what, we're going to,
• 30:02
  I'm going to risk, you know, a bit of reputational damage here
• 30:04
  by going out on a limb to end and bucking the norms of my tribe
• 30:09
  by understanding.
• 30:10
  And let me also just make the final point about
• 30:13
  the why it was a mistake.
• 30:14
  Yes.
• 30:15
  To say that Jews should abandon Israel
• 30:17
  will come at the end of a long article in which my point was
• 30:21
  that diaspora Jews should abandon the instinct
• 30:24
  to reflexively defend this state.
• 30:27
  Beautiful.
• 30:28
  So what I should have said was,
• 30:29
  it's time for Jews to stop carrying water for Israel.
• 30:33
  But that's not quite as punchy a line.
• 30:34
  It's not quite as good.
• 30:35
  I hear you.
• 30:36
  But it's time for non-Israeli Jews to separate themselves
• 30:40
  from the actions of this state, right?
• 30:42
  Now that doesn't mean that I'm not a Zionist.
• 30:44
  By the action, spatial idea about Zionism,
• 30:47
  which is that like Jews have a right to a state
• 30:50
  in the land of Israel, sure, why not?
• 30:52
  But I, as a non-Israeli Jew,
• 30:55
  should not be expected to account and to,
• 30:58
  and it should not be assumed,
• 30:59
  and I was sort of drawing a line under this,
• 31:01
  that you cannot assume that I,
• 31:04
  that that state represents me anymore.
• 31:06
  Sure.
• 31:07
  And that's a tragedy, I think.
• 31:10
  I mean, I think that's really, really sad.
• 31:12
  But I think it's different from saying, for example,
• 31:14
  that Israeli Jews should like leave Israel.
• 31:16
  That Israel doesn't have a right to exist.
• 31:18
  But I also, like, I'm with you on the,
• 31:20
  we don't have to always defend Israel's actions.
• 31:22
  I'm an educator and I literally,
• 31:23
  I said that to students today at Mariah College.
• 31:25
  I said, you can absolutely be a critic of the state of Israel.
• 31:28
  You should be.
• 31:29
  That's part of being a Zionist.
• 31:30
  There's always going to be Zionists
• 31:31
  who don't agree with the Israeli government
• 31:33
  because there's Zionists on the right,
• 31:34
  and there's Zionists on the left.
• 31:34
  So whoever's in power,
• 31:35
  there's always going to be people who are critical.
• 31:37
  I think my frustration is the assumption of others
• 31:40
  that we do always defend it.
• 31:42
  And then I think there's also a problem
• 31:43
  with understanding, with not understanding
• 31:45
  why Jews feel the need to defend Israel all the time.
• 31:49
  And that is because there are people all over the world
• 31:51
  who somehow today are justifying attacks against Jews
• 31:54
  in the world because of the actions of Israel.
• 31:56
  And once you have nothing to do with the other,
• 31:58
  Sean Mendez got it.
• 31:59
  Well, it doesn't hurt us to say it.
• 32:00
  No, but the problem is is that when we do say it,
• 32:05
  what happens, we get tokenized, the Jews who do say it.
• 32:08
  This is what's happened.
• 32:09
  I've watched this because I've been in this world
• 32:11
  for 20 years of Israel education,
• 32:12
  Israel activism, and what I've watched is
• 32:15
  the older generation says this.
• 32:16
  It's like, well, we can't air out our dirty laundry, right?
• 32:18
  Because then the anti-Semites and the anti-Semites
• 32:20
  are going to use it against this.
• 32:21
  And you're smiling because you've heard the same thing.
• 32:23
  Absolutely.
• 32:24
  And that's what you're railing against.
• 32:25
  And for me, I agree with you.
• 32:26
  And I still think that there's a place and a time
• 32:29
  and a way to do it where you won't be tokenized.
• 32:34
  As see, even a Jew says that Israel,
• 32:37
  and then they'll take it to the extreme.
• 32:38
  See, even a Jew says that there's a genocide.
• 32:40
  No, there's not.
• 32:41
  And that's not what I said.
• 32:42
  That's what we can do about disingenuous people
• 32:44
  in this country.
• 32:44
  No, I know that.
• 32:45
  So what we can do is speak as clearly and as cleanly
• 32:47
  as we hope we can.
• 32:47
  Exactly.
• 32:48
  And you've just admitted that we make a mistake
• 32:50
  like saying Jews should abandon Israel.
• 32:53
  Is you were probably used by people to say, see?
• 32:56
  Here you go.
• 32:57
  These are the Jews.
• 32:58
  These are the good Jews.
• 33:00
  There's always those good Jews in history.
• 33:01
  Yeah, but I mean, that's a downside.
• 33:03
  But the upside is that if there's a child
• 33:05
  who's waiting at a school bus to go to a Jewish school
• 33:09
  and is easily identifiable as a Jew,
• 33:11
  I do think that it makes it harder for the community
• 33:15
  to look the other way at an act of anti-Semitism
• 33:17
  against that child if they regard Jews
• 33:19
  as being a complicated people who wrestle
• 33:22
  in nuanced ways with Israel.
• 33:24
  I hear you, and I'm so there with you.
• 33:26
  My problem is is that one should never lead to the other.
• 33:29
  There should always be outrage if a Jewish did.
• 33:31
  And there should never be something
• 33:32
  that needs to alleviate it.
• 33:33
  And that's the thing that we don't want to feed.
• 33:36
  So it's a fine line.
• 33:37
  And I'm like, almost there.
• 33:39
  But I have to find that line
• 33:41
  where I have to draw clear distinction
• 33:44
  that no matter what Israel does
• 33:46
  and no matter how Jews in the world react to it,
• 33:48
  anti-Semitism is never gonna be okay
• 33:50
  against a Jewish person.
• 33:51
  No, absolutely, but I mean,
• 33:52
  you're talking a little bit between shoulds
• 33:54
  and the reality of the world.
• 33:56
  I know, I know, I know.
• 33:57
  But it was a reality of being Muslim
• 33:59
  that you were under a great high level of threat
• 34:02
  than you were on the 10th of September 2001.
• 34:05
  Did you know that there were still more anti-Semitic attacks
• 34:06
  against Jews than Muslims in America,
• 34:08
  even after September 11th?
• 34:09
  And the Jews are by far the most targeted.
• 34:11
  The most targeted one.
• 34:12
  So again, let me just,
• 34:13
  yeah, yeah, sure.
• 34:14
  Had there been a window in which,
• 34:16
  and also in terms of the community,
• 34:18
  like the conversations that we have
• 34:20
  within the community versus outside the community,
• 34:22
  I understand that I instinct not to air
• 34:24
  your dirty laundry outside.
• 34:25
  But I went to synagogue,
• 34:27
  I never go to synagogue,
• 34:28
  but my father just died.
• 34:29
  So I went to synagogue.
• 34:30
  Oh, my father just passed away too.
• 34:31
  Oh, really?
• 34:32
  Yeah.
• 34:33
  I actually saw that, the podcast that you did.
• 34:35
  And I said, oh, when was it?
• 34:37
  Sorry to just go pass my first podcast.
• 34:39
  Maybe four weeks ago?
• 34:40
  Oh, my gosh.
• 34:41
  So really recent.
• 34:42
  Yeah, really recent.
• 34:43
  I lost my in a December.
• 34:44
  So we're both in a veilus.
• 34:46
  We're both in warning.
• 34:47
  Yeah.
• 34:48
  So, sorry, I wasn't talking about that.
• 34:50
  No, that's okay.
• 34:51
  But it's like honor our fathers for a second.
• 34:53
  You were probably very shopping nachas
• 34:54
  from this conversation.
• 34:55
  They would love it.
• 34:57
  Yeah.
• 34:58
  So I went to synagogue and the rabbi said
• 35:02
  in terms of expanding his fear of concern
• 35:04
  for the congregation,
• 35:05
  he ended by saying,
• 35:07
  you know, let's think about the hostages
• 35:08
  and then he said,
• 35:09
  and some of you won't be ready for this yet.
• 35:13
  But let's also think about the garrisons
• 35:15
  and let's think about the Palestinians.
• 35:18
  And if you're ready for that,
• 35:19
  then allow your heart to go there.
• 35:20
  And if you're not, then we could understand.
• 35:23
  And I walked out of there feeling proud
• 35:26
  that my ethnicity and religion and tradition
• 35:30
  has the capacity for that.
• 35:32
  And I did wonder how many mosques in Australia
• 35:36
  have the imams saying,
• 35:37
  let's think about the Jews and let's think about Jews.
• 35:40
  Or maybe not even hostages.
• 35:41
  Let's just think about, I mean,
• 35:45
  I doubt I-
• 35:46
  I think if people thought more about the hostages,
• 35:47
  they might think a little bit differently
• 35:48
  about what's going on in Gaza.
• 35:49
  Maybe, but I can understand.
• 35:50
  I can imagine people saying,
• 35:51
  well, yeah, hostage,
• 35:52
  Shmosage, there's like, you know,
• 35:54
  baby's dying in Gaza all the time.
• 35:55
  Yeah, and then I'm going to say to them,
• 35:56
  yeah, you could say that when you don't know the person
• 35:58
  and you know, one of my friends' brothers
• 36:00
  is being held hostage.
• 36:01
  And you could say that when these people were kidnapped
• 36:02
  out of their beds.
• 36:03
  And there's no reason for them to be there.
• 36:05
  And you could say that about the galsons who they know
• 36:06
  who died in, you know, an airstrike or like.
• 36:10
  They can, but there's a difference
• 36:12
  because Hamas started the war.
• 36:13
  And there's a difference.
• 36:14
  I'm sorry, there's a difference.
• 36:15
  It's like having the same sympathy for the Brits
• 36:17
  who were killed in the Blitzkrieg in the bombing of London
• 36:21
  and then having the same amount of sympathy
• 36:22
  for the Germans in Hamburg.
• 36:23
  I'm sorry, or in Dresden.
• 36:24
  I'm sorry.
• 36:25
  There's enough sympathy to go around.
• 36:27
  My point is just that, you know,
• 36:29
  in terms of the internal conversations,
• 36:31
  I think it's good for us to foster as many
• 36:34
  as much of our capacity for empathy as possible.
• 36:37
  I couldn't agree.
• 36:38
  And had the Muslim community been more overtly,
• 36:42
  not just inside the tent, but outside the tent,
• 36:45
  more overtly opposed to jihadism, Islamism,
• 36:51
  to Saudi Arabia, to radicalism, to like.
• 36:56
  This is something that I think Iranians do quite well.
• 36:58
  It's quite possible for Persians in the diaspora
• 37:00
  to distance themselves from the theocracy in Iran.
• 37:04
  But it is trickier for Arab Muslims
• 37:07
  to clearly and cleanly articulate their opposition
• 37:10
  to Islamism for some reason.
• 37:13
  And I don't want to be them.
• 37:15
  I don't want Jews to be them.
• 37:16
  I agree.
• 37:16
  I want Jews to be the bigger party
• 37:18
  who are able to distance themselves
• 37:20
  from the state that claims to represent them
• 37:22
  when it is not representing them.
• 37:24
  And you're talking to an educator who I let a conference.
• 37:26
  I didn't lead, excuse me.
• 37:28
  I was invited to attend a conference
• 37:30
  of a training conference for students
• 37:32
  in the United States and in Canada,
• 37:34
  who were gonna go off to their campuses
• 37:35
  and have to stand up for Israel, defend Israel,
• 37:37
  but really that's not it.
• 37:38
  For me, it's explain Israel, help people understand
• 37:40
  Israel have these conversations.
• 37:42
  And I opened up the conference with that,
• 37:44
  with talking about empathy,
• 37:45
  with talking about how hate doesn't benefit any of us,
• 37:48
  how actually compassion is gonna help us heal.
• 37:52
  And I planted that in them to take that onto their campuses.
• 37:55
  And most of them thanked me for it
• 37:56
  because they're craving that.
• 37:58
  But again, it was in a safe space.
• 37:59
  And again, that's something that I wouldn't even hesitate
• 38:01
  to say publicly, right?
• 38:03
  It's the depth of the criticism
• 38:06
  and where you go with it,
• 38:07
  that you have to ask yourself,
• 38:09
  am I going to eat an abat anti-Semitism right now
• 38:11
  or am I going to stop it
• 38:13
  or am I going to do the opposite, right?
• 38:14
  Am I gonna eat an abat the fight against anti-Semitism, right?
• 38:18
  And I mean, it's my belief that nuance is always
• 38:22
  the best way of combating bigotry.
• 38:24
  So if I can present as, yeah, the title of my article
• 38:29
  and perhaps the final line of my article were mistakes,
• 38:31
  the 1150 words, which the majority of which are,
• 38:36
  is a searing criticism of anti-Sionists at the moment
• 38:39
  and a defense of Israel basically.
• 38:42
  And then there's the pivot to the bar.
• 38:44
  Yeah.
• 38:45
  Right.
• 38:46
  You know, showing the world that we are capable,
• 38:50
  that we are the party that is capable of wrestling
• 38:52
  with ourselves in complicated and nuanced ways,
• 38:54
  I think is the greatest way of attacking anti-Semitism
• 38:57
  because it makes it impossible for people to believe
• 39:01
  in cartoon caricatures of another people, right?
• 39:04
  It makes it difficult for them to other.
• 39:06
  I'm the Jew.
• 39:07
  I'm fully on that same page.
• 39:08
  I mean, that is my organization actually
• 39:10
  that I just, my institute that I just founded,
• 39:11
  I use four words to describe the education that I provide.
• 39:14
  Fact-based, it's not about my opinion,
• 39:16
  like that's not it.
• 39:17
  It was on a foundation of just Zionism
• 39:19
  and Zionism is correct, right?
• 39:20
  Everything else is fact-based, which means I'm not just
• 39:22
  gonna show you one sign, I'm gonna show you all of the sides
• 39:24
  and I'm gonna try to give you all of the facts,
• 39:25
  whether they're convenient or not, okay?
• 39:28
  So fact-based, nuanced, my other word,
• 39:31
  I love nuance, I live in the world of gray,
• 39:33
  transparent, being open and honest, right?
• 39:36
  With students about Israel, you have to tell the whole story
• 39:39
  and lastly, accessible, make it accessible
• 39:41
  for students and for people around the world.
• 39:43
  And nuance is incredibly important.
• 39:45
  Again, I just, there is still a place
• 39:47
  where you have to be careful and that's all I'm saying.
• 39:49
  I'm not saying don't do it.
• 39:50
  I'm just saying do it in the right places,
• 39:53
  do it at the right times, do it where it will help, okay?
• 39:56
  And where we, where we've crossed the line
• 39:59
  to people saying, well, the Jews do this
• 40:01
  and it's causing anti-Semitism.
• 40:02
  Or the pro, somebody, an influencer,
• 40:05
  decided to comment on the protests in Israel saying,
• 40:07
  well, your protests are causing more anti-Semitism
• 40:09
  in New York City.
• 40:11
  And-
• 40:11
  Wait, the anti-war protests in Israel?
• 40:13
  I'm posing.
• 40:14
  That's also the problem, that's not the right framing.
• 40:16
  They weren't anti-war protests.
• 40:17
  They were protested about bringing about the hostages
• 40:19
  and if that means ending the war,
• 40:21
  and that's the nuance, right?
• 40:22
  And that's the part that the media didn't get
• 40:24
  and that's where if you frame it as anti-war protests,
• 40:26
  then yeah, maybe it's, you could say,
• 40:27
  well, see, they're using that to then attack Jews in America,
• 40:31
  which again, BS, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna allow it.
• 40:33
  Nothing causes anti-Semitism but anti-Semites, right?
• 40:36
  Mandy Petinkin saying, you know,
• 40:38
  oh, the Israeli government BB is causing more anti-Semitism.
• 40:41
  Again, we're eating and abetting the anti-Semites
• 40:43
  by doing that, we're giving them this justification.
• 40:46
  But there is a-
• 40:47
  I don't really agree with that,
• 40:48
  but I don't want to go down a rabbit hole.
• 40:49
  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
• 40:51
  no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
• 40:52
  No, because again, it's the Shawn Mendes thing,
• 40:54
  which I so appreciate-
• 40:55
  What's the Shawn Mendes?
• 40:55
  Shawn Mendes stood up at his concert
• 40:56
  and he said, it's heartbreaking to watch what's happening
• 40:59
  in Gaza and he got a big cheer and then he said,
• 41:01
  but that's no reason for Jew hatred anywhere in the world.
• 41:03
  Yeah.
• 41:04
  And that is the line.
• 41:05
  And that's what people have to understand.
• 41:07
  Now, hold on, I actually, with the person who said
• 41:09
  it's causing more anti-Semitism, I say the opposite,
• 41:11
  I say, when you say, I say, if you know how to talk
• 41:14
  about it correctly, you would say, what do you mean?
• 41:18
  Look at Israel, you're saying that you think
• 41:20
  that every Israeli is like rapidly anti-Palestinian
• 41:23
  is wants to kill them, wants to starve them.
• 41:25
  There are people who are showing you exactly how they feel,
• 41:28
  which is, we just want our hostages home
• 41:30
  and we're willing to end this war
• 41:31
  because for us, this war from the beginning
• 41:33
  and until now has been about getting those hostages home
• 41:35
  and hasn't been about harming the Palestinians.
• 41:37
  And that's that you can-
• 41:38
  that is, it's not just something you can use as a tool,
• 41:40
  it's the truth.
• 41:42
  And then all of a sudden, we have that nuance,
• 41:44
  but when it's framed as anti-war protest
• 41:46
  and then it's used by anti-Semites to say,
• 41:48
  you see even all these Israelis agree with us,
• 41:50
  that hold on, hold on, let me think that the war
• 41:53
  is a genocide, that the war is this, that and the other
• 41:55
  and see even the Israelis, that's when we get it wrong.
• 41:58
  And that's when I'm just, and you're, and I-
• 42:00
  No, I get it, but I mean, I'm agreeing,
• 42:02
  I'm going further than you, I think in the same direction,
• 42:05
  which is to say, even if it were the case
• 42:07
  that Israel is committing a genocide,
• 42:09
  that would not justify anti-Semitism in America
• 42:12
  or Australia.
• 42:13
  Yeah.
• 42:14
  I mean, so we could grant that the protests
• 42:17
  were anti-war protests, I call them anti-war protests
• 42:20
  because one thing that struck me when I was in Israel
• 42:22
  was the amount, the number of bring-them-home posters,
• 42:25
  right, everywhere, bring-them-home-home posters.
• 42:27
  You can't turn a block, you can't turn a block.
• 42:29
  And I said to a friend of mine who's a reporter over there
• 42:31
  who works for the Wall Street Journal,
• 42:32
  you know, what is the subtext of that?
• 42:34
  What does it mean?
• 42:36
  And we had a long conversation about it,
• 42:38
  and I walked away from that conversation
• 42:39
  and you made disagree with her, feeling like,
• 42:42
  what bring-them-home really means is,
• 42:44
  baby, you're not doing enough to stop the war.
• 42:47
  But that doesn't stop this.
• 42:49
  Yes, of course.
• 42:50
  You're not doing enough.
• 42:51
  I think you're wrong.
• 42:52
  It's you're not doing enough to bring the hostages home.
• 42:55
  And we are now saying that if it means ending the war,
• 42:59
  make the deal.
• 42:59
  You don't think it's a passive, it has a pacifist subtext.
• 43:04
  I think there are some people who are part of those protests
• 43:07
  that are pacifist, but I think the vast majority,
• 43:10
  knowing them and being at those protests
• 43:11
  and knowing those families and knowing what they say,
• 43:13
  I think if you interviewed the vast majority
• 43:15
  and said, is this an anti-war protest,
• 43:17
  or is this a protest to bring back the hostages,
• 43:19
  even if that means ending the war,
• 43:20
  the vast majority would say the latter not the former.
• 43:22
  Right.
• 43:23
  So of course, there's always going to be those.
• 43:24
  And then you would support a policy of accelerating the war
• 43:27
  if it meant that the hostages were going to come home.
• 43:28
  But they're, and by the way, the other people in Israel
• 43:32
  who don't, who didn't protest, that's what they believe.
• 43:35
  Or, and I think there's some,
• 43:36
  and I think we need to acknowledge this camp
• 43:37
  that say, listen, the hostages are not the top priority.
• 43:40
  And that is a camp in Israel.
• 43:42
  That says, no, what's more important
• 43:43
  is accelerating the war together in Hamas.
• 43:46
  And if that means that we might not get all the hostages home,
• 43:48
  then that's what it means.
• 43:49
  And by the way, there are even hostage families
• 43:50
  that are part of that.
• 43:51
  Like people don't realize there's two hostage family forms
• 43:54
  in Israel.
• 43:55
  There's the bring them home now, which was those protestors
• 43:57
  who said, make the deal.
• 43:59
  And then there's those who say, my kid wouldn't want you
• 44:01
  to make a deal for him.
• 44:02
  He wouldn't want you to really, and that's-
• 44:03
  I totally, I would have been somewhat surprised
• 44:05
  by the emphasis, I must say.
• 44:07
  And I don't understand the Israeli trauma
• 44:10
  that you alluded to earlier, because I wasn't there.
• 44:14
  But I could have imagined a universe
• 44:17
  in which the reaction to October 7th,
• 44:19
  instead of we have to do anything we can to bring them home,
• 44:22
  was, fuck this.
• 44:24
  This is the last time you ever get to use this, play this card.
• 44:28
  We're done with hostages.
• 44:30
  We're giving up on them.
• 44:31
  I'm sorry.
• 44:32
  I'm sorry.
• 44:33
  I'll tell you why that didn't happen.
• 44:34
  We are going to do whatever we have to do
• 44:36
  to get to fuck over Hamas.
• 44:38
  And the only way to do that is to give up on the hostages.
• 44:40
  I'm sorry.
• 44:41
  We're never going to play this game again.
• 44:42
  I'll tell you why that didn't happen.
• 44:44
  Unlike Elad Shalit, which was the lesson
• 44:46
  that that was really the person we learned the lessons from, right?
• 44:48
  He was a soldier who was a soldier who was kidnapped,
• 44:50
  but he was a soldier.
• 44:51
  He was on duty, okay?
• 44:53
  When you swear the oath.
• 44:54
  And just explain the significance of that.
• 44:56
  I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to go away.
• 44:57
  I got you.
• 44:58
  I gave back a bazillion thousand years.
• 44:59
  And they gave back a thousand, seventeen.
• 45:00
  But hold on, he was a soldier.
• 45:02
  He was on duty.
• 45:03
  He sworn out to the country.
• 45:04
  He understood that this role has certain risks, okay?
• 45:07
  Everyone does, right?
• 45:09
  He was kidnapped.
• 45:10
  He spent five and a half years in Hamas captivity.
• 45:12
  And eventually he was released.
• 45:14
  And in a, in a deal where Israel had to release a thousand, seventeen prisoners.
• 45:18
  Of course, the most important one being the number one on the list, Yahya Sinwa, who
• 45:21
  was the one who eventually will rise the ranks of Hamas in Gaza and plan and execute
• 45:25
  October 7th.
• 45:27
  He is now dead.
• 45:28
  He was killed about a year ago in Gaza.
• 45:31
  But the Gilad Shalit lesson was we should never do that again for soldiers, which is
• 45:35
  that everyone, probably many of your listeners, have heard of the Hannibal directive, right?
• 45:39
  Which was this idea of do everything in your power to prevent soldiers from being kidnapped,
• 45:42
  right?
• 45:43
  October 7th was different because it wasn't soldiers.
• 45:46
  It was innocent people in their homes.
• 45:49
  And it was a failure of Israeli intelligence.
• 45:52
  And so I think what the conversation that I've had with people in Israel is after this,
• 45:57
  we have to have a complete new conversation about hostages and what we will or will not
• 46:02
  do to get them home.
• 46:03
  But now, because it was a failure of our government and because these people were not soldiers,
• 46:09
  some of them are, but very few, even the ones that remain, were soldiers on duty.
• 46:13
  These are people who were in their homes pulled out of their beds.
• 46:16
  And it was a failure of the government and therefore the government needs to do everything
• 46:18
  in their power to get them home now and then deal with the consequences of whoever we
• 46:22
  release and what we have to do to clean up, to clean it up after.
• 46:25
  What do you, sorry, what do you make of the Israelis, including former prime ministers
• 46:28
  and people in government who say, you know, we should have just told Hamas to give, we
• 46:33
  should have just agreed to whatever they wanted to got the hostages back and then find
• 46:37
  them on another day.
• 46:38
  Like just lie to them and just get the hostages back.
• 46:40
  Funny enough, I wasn't going.
• 46:41
  I was the one saying, why are we playing this game of like, you know, like, I think it's
• 46:45
  easier said than done.
• 46:46
  If that deal had been on the table, it never was like, there was never a deal where it
• 46:50
  was.
• 46:51
  We'll give everyone back for an end of the war.
• 46:53
  It was never, there was never that deal.
• 46:55
  And if that had been on the table, then we could have that conversation.
• 46:57
  But it wasn't.
• 46:58
  So like they're saying it is like an if okay, great, but that was never offered.
• 47:03
  So that's hard.
• 47:04
  Like now, hindsight, we can look back and say, well, now Hamas is finally in this place
• 47:06
  of a final deal.
• 47:07
  And of course, BB transitions from final deal to partial deal.
• 47:10
  I mean, that back and forth is is remarkable.
• 47:12
  And that also tells you a little bit about his politics and what he's trying to do and
• 47:15
  where he's going with all of this.
• 47:16
  But again, that was never offered.
• 47:18
  And I was the one who said that.
• 47:19
  I was the one who said initially, like, if there's an offer, get them all back and the
• 47:23
  war.
• 47:24
  And then yeah, eventually Hamas is going to attack us again in one rocket and we can go
• 47:27
  right back in.
• 47:28
  Just go straight back in.
• 47:29
  Yeah.
• 47:30
  Yeah.
• 47:31
  Do a deal and then going, I was one of those people.
• 47:34
  I was one of those people.
• 47:35
  But that deal was never on the table.
• 47:37
  That in try very hard.
• 47:38
  I mean, it's hard, it's hard to blame the Palestinians 100% for that when you also have
• 47:43
  a prime minister in Israel who has a vested interest in not having his government fall apart
• 47:47
  because he's afraid of going to jail if he loses his coalition, so he needs to bend
• 47:51
  up a back.
• 47:52
  Whole can of worms that we just opened.
• 47:53
  But yes, absolutely.
• 47:55
  And again, and that's also, but again, whether, whatever camp I'm in and hopefully
• 48:01
  you don't, you might know what camp I'm in, but there is BB can still say there is
• 48:07
  part of this constituency that sides with me that for them, it's about total victory.
• 48:10
  It's about ending Hamas now and the hostages are not their top priority.
• 48:15
  And there have been people that have said that in the government, right?
• 48:17
  So at least, I mean, there's an element of there's an honesty there where they are saying
• 48:20
  that's not our top priority.
• 48:21
  And they can't, they're not saying we're going against all Israel.
• 48:24
  There is a constituent.
• 48:25
  There are the minority, but they would say, okay, but these are the people voted for us.
• 48:28
  Yeah.
• 48:29
  This is the mandate.
• 48:31
  And again, I'm not necessarily defending.
• 48:33
  And this is where again, you said, funny, you said earlier, the idea of like being an
• 48:36
  Israeli apologist.
• 48:37
  And sometimes people think in my job, like, that's my job.
• 48:39
  But I'm not, I'm an educator.
• 48:40
  And so for me, what I really try to do is just keep adding more information and more facts
• 48:44
  because then things get more complicated.
• 48:45
  One of the things that I want you to talk about before we run out of time is the second
• 48:48
  in the father and your experience there.
• 48:50
  Yeah.
• 48:51
  And so you move to Israel in 97.
• 48:54
  I move to Israel in 97.
• 48:56
  And so taught me through what, where you were, what you're doing in 2000 when you should
• 49:01
  hit his turn.
• 49:02
  I should say I moved to the land of Israel in 1997.
• 49:05
  And then I moved into the proper state of Israel in 1998.
• 49:09
  And then I moved, yeah, because I lived, I lived in Judeans, Maria.
• 49:12
  Okay.
• 49:13
  So I say the land, because it is the land of Israel.
• 49:15
  People might call Palestine.
• 49:16
  The West Bank, Judeans, Mar, whatever you want to call it, but it's the land of Israel.
• 49:18
  I moved into a Jewish community with some of my call settlement.
• 49:21
  That was my first year.
• 49:22
  It was mainly, it was like a very American community and my parents just wanted a soft
• 49:25
  landing for us kids.
• 49:26
  And then we realized very quickly that it just was not the community for us.
• 49:29
  And it wasn't necessarily an ideological thing, more just like small town and yes, a little
• 49:33
  bit ideological, but mostly.
• 49:35
  And then we moved to Jerusalem, just getting to a big city, right?
• 49:38
  Change.
• 49:39
  And I lived there for two years until the Intifada broke out.
• 49:41
  Well, I lived there through the Intifada breaking out, but the Intifada breaks out a week
• 49:45
  after I turned 13 September of 2000.
• 49:48
  And I have to tell you this, because I vaguely remember the Camp David agreement.
• 49:53
  I vaguely remember saying to my mom, but mom, what does this mean?
• 49:56
  Like they're offering, I think Jerusalem, like, part, what does that mean?
• 49:59
  And she said, well, that means that they would live right over there and we would live
• 50:02
  here.
• 50:03
  And I remember feeling fear.
• 50:04
  I remember it very distinctly, because there had already been suicide bombings.
• 50:07
  And I said, but, but what if they attacked us?
• 50:11
  Said, well, you know, and it was, it was this, it was this real, as a, as a 13 year old,
• 50:15
  I was thinking, and then the Intifada breaks out, right?
• 50:18
  And then it just becomes, I'm living through buses blowing up in my city, right?
• 50:22
  The marketplace blowing up multiple times.
• 50:25
  And then February 16th of 2002, suicide bomber walked up to a group of my friends in that
• 50:30
  community that I used to live in, in the settlement, which I hate to put that in because
• 50:34
  I'm people, well, they're settlers.
• 50:35
  Let's not dehumanize people just because they, where they live, and they move their legally,
• 50:39
  according to the Israeli government, it's a legal settlement.
• 50:41
  It's not an outpost.
• 50:42
  They're not people.
• 50:43
  Not according to international.
• 50:44
  That's a, bring me back and we can talk about international law when it comes to that,
• 50:47
  because I can rip apart Article 49, Part 6 of the Geneva Convention all day long.
• 50:51
  Sure you can.
• 50:52
  And I'll find someone else on the other side who will rip it apart the other way.
• 50:55
  And they can do their best, but I know the context of it.
• 50:57
  And what I would say is, settlements exist in a wild cray area and we can have a deep conversation
• 51:01
  about whether they're right or wrong, but the idea that you're going to paint them as
• 51:03
  just illegal, I think, is really a misreading.
• 51:06
  And so, including some of the authors of Article 49, Part 6, who said that it's a wild
• 51:09
  misreading of that article, but it's another conversation for another time for Jews on
• 51:14
  the land that everybody knows will have to end up being part of a policy.
• 51:17
  This was literally one of the ones that was right over there.
• 51:18
  That was granted in, you know, as far as the Arab part of the partition.
• 51:23
  Um, yes, that they rejected and never held any held any legal weight.
• 51:27
  Like, there's a whole background to this, but again, they also lived right over the
• 51:30
  Green Line.
• 51:31
  It's one of the ones that in any agreement would be included into Israel.
• 51:33
  Right.
• 51:34
  It's either way.
• 51:35
  People were slaughtered.
• 51:36
  And that's the bad thing.
• 51:37
  And it wasn't just, yeah, as soon as I mama walked up to a bunch of teenagers, they were
• 51:39
  all, they were my, my former group of friends and he stood in the middle and blew himself
• 51:43
  up.
• 51:44
  And there were no adults there.
• 51:45
  They were all teenagers.
• 51:46
  And he murdered two of my friends that night.
• 51:47
  And that was common.
• 51:48
  I mean, that was the strategy.
• 51:49
  That was the word.
• 51:50
  I mean, that happened all the time.
• 51:51
  All the time.
• 51:52
  And worse, it was youth.
• 51:53
  Yeah.
• 51:54
  Yeah.
• 51:55
  Yeah.
• 51:56
  I mean, my friends, my, my siblings friend went to a school in the south and he, it
• 52:01
  was a dormitory and a grenade and terrorists infiltrated their school.
• 52:05
  A grenade was thrown through his window and he burned a life.
• 52:07
  And this was way before October 7th.
• 52:10
  So my friends, two of my friends were killed that night.
• 52:13
  The bomber attacked his bomb with nails and screws, which was also a common tactic to
• 52:16
  cause as much carnage as possible.
• 52:17
  And one of my very close friends was hit in the head with a nail and she died 11 days
• 52:21
  later.
• 52:22
  And you know, I'm, my whole young life was shaped by that in a sense that I had a lot
• 52:28
  of anger.
• 52:29
  I had a lot of some hate towards Palestinians.
• 52:32
  But at the same time, I also had an amazing parents who talked to everybody and every
• 52:35
  and never saw, you know, they judge people by the content of their character.
• 52:38
  I don't want to say he's never saw color because then people are going to attack me even
• 52:41
  though that's as far as I'm concerned, I am a Martin Luther King Jr.
• 52:44
  All the way that is, that is my, that is how I think we should go back, we should go
• 52:47
  back to that idea of judging people by the content of their character and stop looking
• 52:50
  at somebody and assuming that you know what they think or how they feel or what they've
• 52:53
  experienced because of how they look.
• 52:55
  It really bothers me.
• 52:56
  But they, we had Palestinian friends.
• 52:58
  I had Arab Israeli friends.
• 53:00
  I went to a school of that at that time when my friends were killed.
• 53:04
  I was at a school in Jerusalem that had not a bunch of Arabs, but a handful of Arabs.
• 53:08
  And out of those handful, two of them were my best friends.
• 53:10
  And I would go to their houses and show a fat and in Bay Trenina.
• 53:13
  And so I had had a different experience than most Israelis because I had had interactions
• 53:16
  and Palestinians.
• 53:17
  Also, my dad attended the wedding of the former mayor of Ramallah's daughter, okay?
• 53:23
  Because the guy she married was the guy who worked at our grocery store who my dad became
• 53:26
  very close with because again, my dad talked to everybody and he never saw, he judged
• 53:30
  people by the content of their character.
• 53:31
  We would go to their house and he said, we are in the East Jerusalem all the time for dinner.
• 53:35
  They actually warned us when the second eighty-five broke out, like don't come back here
• 53:38
  because we can't guarantee that you're going to be safe in our community.
• 53:42
  And so for me, but I went to Jericho and hung out with that ex mayor of Ramallah in his home.
• 53:46
  We drove into area A and people were waving at my mom because she became a common feature.
• 53:51
  This like blonde lady driving through Jericho, right?
• 53:55
  And so I was lucky enough that I had had those interactions.
• 53:58
  And so I think it might have been a little bit easier for me to, to after leaving Israel
• 54:02
  because the economy had crashed.
• 54:03
  My family couldn't survive there anymore about six months after my friends were killed.
• 54:07
  I had the ability to heal.
• 54:09
  I wasn't, you know, the Antifada went on for another two years.
• 54:11
  We're still dying, buses were still blowing up and Israelis were living in it.
• 54:13
  And when you can't step outside of it becomes very hard and you develop those feelings
• 54:17
  of frustration and anger and for some hatred.
• 54:19
  And for some they already hated and then that just fed their hatred, right?
• 54:22
  And that's the far, far extreme.
• 54:24
  But for me, I was able to step back and what I, you know, you learn.
• 54:28
  You learn, you grow up and you realize hate hurts you, not anybody else.
• 54:33
  And I realized, I don't want to feel this way.
• 54:34
  And I want to have compassion and I want to be able to look at Palestinians
• 54:38
  and I can see the terrorists and I can see the harm that they're causing.
• 54:41
  And I can, I don't like hate, but I can dislike and be very adamant
• 54:45
  about these people need to be stopped.
• 54:47
  Whatever that means, okay?
• 54:49
  And if that means killing them, sometimes that means killing them.
• 54:51
  I think you're allowed to hate a person who steps onto a school bus and blows, blows out.
• 54:54
  Okay, again, I just, I'm going back to the idea of hate doesn't help me though.
• 54:58
  So it's just a toxicity within my body.
• 55:00
  So again, this idea of, I'm not caring about you, okay?
• 55:03
  If something happens to you, you're not getting my, you're not pulling in my heart strings
• 55:06
  when we kill a terrorist, but that there are a lot of Palestinians and not all of them
• 55:10
  support terror.
• 55:11
  And they also have lived under very difficult conditions because of those terrorists,
• 55:15
  which is what led to the occupation, which is why we had to be woven into their lives
• 55:18
  and why they feel oppressed and all of those things.
• 55:21
  And I see us both as victims of terror.
• 55:23
  And when you can develop that, all of a sudden it becomes a very different conversation.
• 55:26
  And then, you know, I as an adult jumped into academia when it came to learning about
• 55:31
  Israel.
• 55:32
  And you realize you can't just learn about Israel, you got to learn about the Palestinians,
• 55:34
  you got to learn that history.
• 55:36
  And Jews need to realize, you know, some of these people have been there as far back as
• 55:39
  they can remember.
• 55:41
  Some move there a hundred years ago, but some have lived there as far back as they know.
• 55:44
  It is their home.
• 55:46
  They belong to that land, just like I belong to that land.
• 55:49
  And you start to realize that when you hold onto these ideas of, well, it's ours, okay,
• 55:54
  then what?
• 55:55
  They're there.
• 55:56
  So what's the answer, right?
• 55:57
  And no, I'm not going to engage in the conversation of expelling people or of, because
• 56:01
  also that's not going to solve anything.
• 56:03
  It's just going to create more hatred.
• 56:04
  And so I end so many of my lectures when I end by saying, look, there are about seven
• 56:10
  million Jews between the river and the sea.
• 56:12
  And there's about seven million Arabs between the river and the sea.
• 56:15
  So my dad's Palestinian, so my dad's Arab Israelis, that's another conversation.
• 56:19
  But neither one of us are going anywhere.
• 56:22
  And both of us feel deeply connected to this land.
• 56:25
  And we have to figure out a way to live here together.
• 56:27
  And my Zionist, my Zionism comes in and I say, but the Jews have to have a country.
• 56:33
  And that's the last thing that I would say about that article that you wrote, what touched
• 56:35
  me when you said we have to abandon Israel, which again, whether you said it or not, whatever
• 56:39
  it was, is we as Jews do not have the luxury of thinking that even though we've lived
• 56:44
  in a place and it's been okay, and we've been protected, that that's going to last.
• 56:48
  And that's an important thing for people to hear, because Jews sit with transgenerational
• 56:52
  trauma.
• 56:53
  We're sitting in the city that has one of the highest per capita of Jews who have survived
• 56:56
  the Holocaust outside of Israel.
• 56:58
  And you can't just tell Jews to forget that, because Germany was the best place for Jews.
• 57:03
  Wait, what was that statistic?
• 57:04
  Are you saying that Sydney, we have, there's one of the highest rates of Holocaust survivors
• 57:09
  in Australia, maybe not Sydney, in Australia higher than anywhere else in the world.
• 57:14
  Is that right?
• 57:15
  Yeah.
• 57:16
  And we have to acknowledge our transgenerational trauma and people have to realize that Germany
• 57:20
  was the best place for Jews to a certain extent in the 1920s.
• 57:24
  And within 10 years, it became the worst place, and then it became the place that eliminated
• 57:27
  a third of the Jewish population in the world, 33%.
• 57:31
  And it wasn't that the whole world hated us, and that's why that was able to happen.
• 57:35
  It was that everyone had other priorities, which I get.
• 57:39
  You have a country, there's a depression, there's the economy to think about all of these
• 57:42
  things.
• 57:43
  But ultimately, it led to the abandonment of the Jews.
• 57:45
  Even when people could have done more.
• 57:48
  And so I look at Israel, and I say, yes, I want it to be great, and I will criticize,
• 57:51
  and I will do all of the things that we talked about, but it has to exist.
• 57:55
  And that's why Zionism for me is a must.
• 57:57
  That doesn't mean you have to sport a reaction, that doesn't, you can argue, you can debate
• 58:00
  it, but it's a must, because I do not trust this world.
• 58:05
  And they've given me no reason to trust them.
• 58:07
  And I know that might sound harsh to some people listening.
• 58:10
  But when you see a rise in anti-Semitism, after the worst, deadliest attack, and most brutal
• 58:15
  attack that we've seen against Jews, since the Holocaust, and since the founding of that
• 58:18
  state, and within a day, there are people celebrating it, even before we had even entered
• 58:23
  Gaza.
• 58:24
  People were celebrating it.
• 58:26
  That tells me everything.
• 58:27
  It tells me that I will...
• 58:29
  Boy, I don't think that there were, of course, people who were celebrating the execution
• 58:35
  of Jews and the killing of Jews.
• 58:36
  There were also a lot of people for whom they felt frustrated about the Palestinian issue
• 58:41
  for a long time, and took the opportunity at a very tasteless moment to express that.
• 58:47
  Like I'm not absolving the anti-Semitism, what I'm saying is, and also, Jews should
• 58:53
  abandon Israel, right?
• 58:54
  That line.
• 58:55
  They make it clear in the peace, and I'll let you go in one second, they make it clear
• 58:58
  in the peace, that I'm not talking about the Israel and the clouds that my grandmother
• 59:03
  dreamed of when she used to be at the Holocaust, right?
• 59:05
  I know.
• 59:06
  I'm not talking about the concept of an Israel.
• 59:08
  I know you are.
• 59:09
  I'm talking about...
• 59:10
  And it's two Israel's great credit, after all the things that you just related about
• 59:13
  the second and to father, they still came back with an offer in 2008, because I always
• 59:19
  say, like, what the fact of the Palestinians expect that Israelis were going to do, I mean,
• 59:23
  people are like, oh, well, Netanyahu has been running this really right-wing anti-peace
• 59:26
  government for 20 years.
• 59:27
  I was like, well, if that's true, what the fact did you expect was going to happen after
• 59:31
  all of that comes?
• 59:32
  And also, forget the offer of 2008, go back 2005, we withdrew from Gaza without any
• 59:37
  offer, right?
• 59:38
  The point, and we can unpack, I mean, again, we could have unpacked all of this.
• 59:41
  So can I ask one final question?
• 59:43
  Yes.
• 59:44
  Seven million Jews, seven million Arabs, there have to be two states, the Jews get a state.
• 59:52
  Great.
• 59:53
  They just have a state.
• 59:54
  We have to maintain that state.
• 59:56
  Yes.
• 59:57
  And I think the best way to do that is to criticize it, you know, full-throatedly when it
• 1:00:04
  does the wrong thing, but not the principle of Jews having a state.
• 1:00:08
  So I hear us in a while, comes back to life today and looks at Israel's conduct over the
• 1:00:15
  past two years.
• 1:00:18
  Don't you think he smiles and goes, they took the bait?
• 1:00:22
  Yeah.
• 1:00:23
  They did it.
• 1:00:24
  They've got themselves.
• 1:00:25
  They've achieved exactly what I wanted October 7th to achieve, which is to alienate,
• 1:00:29
  which is for the world to turn on the Jews because of Israel's blunders.
• 1:00:32
  Worse.
• 1:00:33
  He's not looking at Israel saying they took the bait.
• 1:00:35
  This is the worst part.
• 1:00:36
  He's looking at the world and he's saying they took the bait.
• 1:00:40
  That's the tragedy.
• 1:00:41
  The tragedy is all these people who genuinely care about Palestinians.
• 1:00:46
  They're playing right into Hamas's hands when they don't talk about Hamas.
• 1:00:50
  That's the problem.
• 1:00:51
  It's not the Jews.
• 1:00:52
  We had to do what we had to do.
• 1:00:54
  Israel had to do what they had to do to stop Hamas to prevent this from ever happening
• 1:00:57
  again and try to get hostages home.
• 1:00:59
  And the first round of violence, the first round of attacks in Gaza were successful.
• 1:01:02
  We got all of the children out.
• 1:01:05
  No.
• 1:01:06
  Worse.
• 1:01:07
  He's laughing, saying, the Western world played right into my hands.
• 1:01:10
  All of those leaders that are about to recognize a Palestinian state without any preconditions,
• 1:01:14
  without even demanding that Hamas disarm.
• 1:01:16
  That's the tragedy.
• 1:01:17
  The simple fact that world leaders haven't spent the last two years saying Hamas released
• 1:01:23
  the hostages and surrender, and this war could be over tomorrow, but instead very quickly
• 1:01:28
  turned and said to Israel cease fire without any preconditions, that's where Yahya Sinoir
• 1:01:32
  was the most successful.
• 1:01:34
  Charlotte, thank you.
• 1:01:35
  You're very welcome.
• 1:01:36
  It's lovely to talk to you.
• 1:01:38
  Very welcome.
• 1:01:39
  Thank you so much.
• 1:01:40
  We could have gone for an hour or two hours.