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BONUS: Why Jews Are Literally Nazis - Reflections on a Collapsing Conversation · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:06
  The whole thing feels a bit fatuous at the moment.
• 0:10
  I recorded an hour and 10 minutes of a monologue in my steaming hot
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  studio non air conditioned on a hot Sydney day over the weekend, including video.
• 0:24
  By the way, we now have video. Did you know that? We have a YouTube channel.
• 0:27
  Search Josh steps YouTube something channel thing and you'll get videos and increasingly
• 0:33
  more videos as we ramp up production. But enough about that. And I'm not going to release
• 0:41
  what I said because I think at this moment we need... Look, I don't know what I want to say here,
• 0:47
  but I have to say in order to know what it is. If that makes sense, I have to hear myself talk.
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  And my only aspiration is that I talk in ways that will be comprehensible to people who are
• 1:02
  fired up about defending Palestine and to those who feel besieged by those who are fired up
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  about defending Palestine. I don't seek to be comprehensible to far right Zionists in Israel who
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  think that Israel should run from the river to the sea and that it should keep building settlements
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  with impunity in the West Bank and that October 7th only proves that there was never a partner for
• 1:31
  peace. They're never going to understand my point of view. And people who think that the whole
• 1:39
  Israeli project is a misbegotten venture from the start. And we need a Palestine from the river to
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  the sea in the literal meaning of that term. And I'm going to come to that terminal moment.
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  They will never appreciate what I'm about to say either.
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  But we're at some kind of a tipping point folks. I've never in my life
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  felt as keenly as I do right now a preview of a potential dystopia that could come to pass in
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  the 21st century which until now has been academic for me. A dystopia in which we're so
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  governed by algorithms and increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence and
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  increasingly sophisticated non-state actors who have none of the guard rails of journalists or
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  government institutions and who are able to flood the zone with manipulated and manipulative
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  images and non-contextual videos and claims that intersect with the amplification machine
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  of social media and are able to operate in a sphere that has become intellectually free from
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  curiosity and nuance and boisterous pushback and has become actually quite credulous.
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  In other words what's happened to I think especially in universities and in social justice
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  classes and critical theory classes over the past 20 years is that it's become obvious to people,
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  to younger people that the right thing to do is to be on the right side of history and to support
• 3:19
  the oppressed especially if they have brown skin or black skin especially if they've been
• 3:25
  historically marginalized and the obviousness of that doesn't really demand interrogation.
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  So I'm hearing quite a lot from my colleagues in journalism and activism and online
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  Instagrammarism. Why aren't you speaking up more about Palestine? How can you see those images of
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  children being hauled out of rubble, bloodied, dead children? How can you tolerate the corruption
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  of this far right Israeli government? The shamelessness with which they're bombarding a defenseless
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  population and not want to use your influence, to call for a ceasefire, to call for a free Palestine,
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  to pressure the Australian government or the American government whatever country you're in,
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  to distance itself from Israel, to call out these war crimes, to stand up in the United Nations
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  and condemn what is an obvious injustice. I mean I feel the tug of all of those instincts.
• 4:27
  It's not, you know, newsflash, it is not a moral revelation to me that killing babies is bad.
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  You know this is not an enlightening thing that you guys are pointing out to, oh really,
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  oh we marching in the street, Palestine will be free from the river to the sea,
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  pop it up, we boo, did I'm bad, I'm bad, green eggs and ham, I don't like them, say I am,
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  let's all rhyme and chant with the flag and we'll hold up a banner and babies are
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  bet killing babies is bad. Oh great, okay this is how we march, is it? We march in lockstep? Do I
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  put my hand up? Now who's responsible? The Jews. It just smells a little group thinky.
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  And I see a future in which there's more and more group think, more and more
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  credulous, guileless following of obviously noble causes,
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  inflamed on social media, manipulated by bad actors, and used to really make peace much,
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  much less likely, rather than more likely. It is not obvious to me at all that the soup in which
• 5:35
  we're currently swimming is conducive to a better life for anybody including Palestinians.
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  It's not clear to me that a ceasefire right now would be conducive to a better life for Palestinians
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  if it means a return to the status quo anti, a status quo anti which we were constantly
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  being told may I add was intolerable. We were always being told something had to change,
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  something had to give. Gaza was an open air prison, the worst place in the world to be alive,
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  and that may have been true, but the moment there's an attack that brings on a reckoning,
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  of course the manner of that reckoning is sufficiently brutal that people would prefer
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  the previous status quo or maybe they, I don't know what they prefer, let's hear from them, shall we?
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  Instead of me, you're pining. A call from two action from creatives for Palestine,
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  the 13th of December is being nominated in Australia as a date of collective action.
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  And many of my friends and colleagues have signed this petition, creatives all over Australia.
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  Calling for a free Palestine. The front page of the petition says, hashtag from the river to sea to
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  the sea, hashtag always was always will be, which if you're not in Australia is an indigenous slogan
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  implying that Australia always was and always will be aboriginal land.
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  And the petition reads vastly, we are the artist produces front of house staff, audiences and
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  beyond who keep this industry alive. We're here unified in Australia and Australia is in quotation
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  marks. I like that. That's good isn't it? You know you're a little bit outside the mainstream when
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  you're putting the name of your country in quotation marks as if it's in dispute, you know, well some
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  people say Australia exists, but we, we beg to differ. We think maybe it doesn't. This so called
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  nation of Australia. Sorry, I said I was going to speak in ways that would be comprehensible to
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  both sides. Maybe I'm being a little snarky. We're here unified in Australia. Our colonized country
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  built on the genocide and dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
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  We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation from colonialism,
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  apartheid and ethnic cleansing and call for an immediate ceasefire and an end to occupation.
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  We're calling for collective public actions of solidarity and we're making demands of our
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  government and our arts institutions. Side by side these First Nations and settler migrants of
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  all generations and ancestors and identities demand one an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
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  Two for the Australian government and foreign minister to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire.
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  Three for our arts institutions to join the call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire.
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  Four for the safety and rights of artists to be honored wherever they may work.
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  Now, four is interesting, isn't it? For the safety and rights of artists to be honored wherever
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  they may work? That's that's code in Australia for the fact that at the opening night of the
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  Sydney Theatre Company's new play, the Seagull, the great check-off play, where I was in attendance.
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  Three of the actors donned Palestinian scarves at the curtain call and this caused a big bruja.
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  Now, this sort of thing is precisely what I mean by the kind of toxicity and division that we
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  should come to expect in the 21st century because it should be obvious, it should have been
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  obvious and should continue to be obvious to everybody that symbols in a hostile war environment
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  can mean different things to different people. And to many people, the Palestinian scarf,
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  the Palestinian flag means Palestinians should have some kind of self-government and they should
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  stop being shot on and they certainly shouldn't be in the situation that they're in and wherever
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  you may cast the blame, it's intolerable that our people should be required to live in
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  squalid refugee camps in perpetuity simply because of the failures of politics.
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  Like, something has to be done about this at the same time as we honor the Jewish aspiration
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  for self-determination. We have to honor the Palestinian's aspiration for self-determination.
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  It can mean something as effectively banal as that, which pretty much everybody agrees with
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  except for the most right-wing assholes in the Israeli government who unfortunately have been
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  running the place for the past 20 years but we can get to that in a moment and well most of the Arab
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  world certainly come us and most of the Arab street. It should be obvious to people who interpret
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  Palestinian iconography and semiotics that way that there's an alternative interpretation
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  and that people whose friends and family members and co-nationalists and co-religionists
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  had their breasts soared off, played with like a soccer ball,
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  were gang-raped sometimes with penises and sometimes with knives and sometimes with
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  the butts of guns and who were then further mutilated, dismembered, shot in the head,
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  that flying the flag of the attackers who were also flying that flag could be interpreted,
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  misinterpreted as condoning those sorts of actions or at least condoning
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  the outcome of those actions which is some kind of a reckoning for the same cause under which
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  the ages of which those actions were taken. And it could also be perceived one should surely be
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  able to have the empathic imagination to conceive of how it could be perceived as a call for
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  the more extreme desires of Palestinian statehood which really are from the river to the sea. In
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  other words like we need a Palestine that is for Palestinians meaning non-ionists meaning non-Jews
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  and that sits on top of what is currently Israel. Sometimes alongside the banner from the river
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  to the sea you also see the banner by any means necessary which is a little more ominous or perhaps
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  just a little more honest. The details of what happens to the Jews who live in that area are
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  really remarked upon when you push people they say well they'll just have a great life. I mean in
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  this new in this new state this new state that unlike all the Arab all the other Arab and Muslim
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  countries in the world almost without exception will not be a theoretical state will not disrespect
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  the rights of religious and sexual minorities will not be misogynistic. We will perpetuate the
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  same level of freedom and productivity as exists in Israel but it'll just be run by
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  completely different people with completely different voters many of whom are the same people
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  who voted for Hamas in Gaza and don't worry Jews it'll be fine thank you terribly reassuring
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  it should be understood that there will be alternative ways of perceiving these things
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  so when the creatives for Palestine petition says that they're calling one of the four things
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  they're calling for is for the safety and rights of artists to be honored wherever they may work
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  what they mean is the safety and rights of actors to co-opt a curtain call in order to make a political
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  statement which invariably will be regarded as extremely provocative and hostile by some
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  portion of the audience and the wider public and that they should do so without consequence and that
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  the theater company should not suffer any backlash the safety and rights of artists to be honored
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  wherever they may work one might think or also to include the safety and rights of Jewish artists
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  not to feel like they're in an environment where there might be people who are somewhat sympathetic to
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  jihad or to the annihilation of their state in their midst even if that's a misguided
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  interpretation right I mean we're all inside our echo chambers we're all inside our bubbles
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  it's very easy for those of us on the left to see that the right are trapped in their own echo
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  chamber it's very easy for people on for conservatives to see that the woke are trapped inside an
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  echo chamber it's much more difficult for the rest of us especially on the kind of progressive left
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  to notice our own echo chambers because we want to be passionate about what is righteous and we
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  think that we're fighting for what is good I mean who doesn't really right I mean everyone's a
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  good guy in their own eyes everyone's the hero of their own story but it's just worth being aware
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  that regardless of what your intention is I mean isn't part of the whole like racial reckoning of
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  the past I don't know 10 15 years to become mindful of the way that things are landing from the
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  perspective of the person who's the recipient of the slight it's extraordinary to me to see the
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  behavior on social media at the moment from I gotta say mostly women in Australia who are
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  influencers who have big big audiences and who spend a lot of time talking about
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  the bloodthirsty baby killing Zionists you know some of them aren't that sophisticated and they'll
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  say things like here's a here's something on Instagram that I saw a tide of Jews centering their
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  feelings and tone policing Palestinian people the time for Jewish feelings and fragilities is done
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  that goes on and on and says I don't give a fuck about the conditions your ancestors grew up
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  and when your family and friends are currently subjugating torturing stealing gaslighting etc in order
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  to justify staying in a land that was never theirs in fact it's kind of worse to have gone through a
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  genocide and then to take your pent up rage and anger and power out on another marginalized group
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  who's completely uninvolved in the Holocaust you all want to act like you're not white but you're
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  doing the doing whiteness the most now that person was foolish enough to use the word Jew
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  so we can fairly easily at least write off the tone as being anti-Semitic
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  everyone else in Australia seems much more clued in and they use the word Zionist or have even seen
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  people call it the IDF as if they're only critical of the Israeli defense forces but then they'll
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  make a funny Instagram video what one I saw recently was an Australian I don't know who she is
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  the Australian comedian she seems to be popular and it was you know if the IDF was a family member
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  and she comes into her bedroom she opens the door and there's this person on the bed also played
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  by her and she at the door says what are you doing in my room and the person on the bed says
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  not your room it's my room and the other person says since when she goes three thousand years ago
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  in a past life and she picks her nose and they're ensues like a long convoluted contorted series
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  of analogies about how her dogs have stock home syndrome and her child is actually hidden behind
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  her dogs because it's been used as a human shield and she's using the pretext of a human sheet
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  of the upside using human shields in order to kill innocent children at one point she holds up
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  a gun to her kids head and shoots I mean a toy gun and pretends to shoot him it's all quiet it's
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  all quite nice it's all quite light there's a lot of levity you know I suppose she thinks she's
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  doing the right thing and making some some good and interesting comedic satirical points
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  but it's all inside this unruffled bubble and all I want to do today and I know this is a very
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  long preface I apologize is edge the bubble open 10% to people on both sides
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  so a very prominent Australian feminist has taken to using the word Zionist a lot this one goes
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  out to all the Zionist women who are furious that their blood lust isn't being supported I don't
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  care babes she says she goes on and on and on she says stop killing Arab women and children it's
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  so telling that your own whiteness is so deeply wrapped up in your Zionism that not only do you
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  feel outraged at not being scented but you've also exceptionalized yourselves to somehow pretend
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  you're not white when you are okay so we talk about Zionists here because if we're only talking
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  about people who are literally Zionists in other words non Jews included people who just believe
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  in the ideology of Jews having a homeland then there's a perplexing amount of talk about whiteness
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  and about you've exceptionalized yourselves Jewish exceptionalism is a trope an ancient
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  anti-Semitic trope as he is should we add the use of the word Zionist as a code for Jew hate right I
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  mean the forged document that the Nazis loved that you know supposedly proved a global Jewish
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  conspiracy was called the protocols of the elders of Zion wasn't the protocols of the elders of Jews
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  in common parlance when we talk about Jewish conspiracy theories far right conspiracy theories that
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  the Jews actually control the international system these are called Zionist conspiracies they're
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  not called Jewish conspiracies there's a long history of anti-Semitic conspiracies being coded
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  using the language of Zionism so I would just say to this prominent feminist who am I like
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  whom I have a lot of respect for or had I know that you don't think that you're anti-Semitic
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  but be aware of the language game that you're participating in
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  there is no way that you would tolerate a man saying to a woman no no no no no hang on I'm not
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  being sexist you're taking this the wrong way babe what's the difference here Jews in their
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  scores probably in their thousands given how many followers these people have are telling you
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  this sounds a bit off the way you're using the term Zionism the way that we're all talking about
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  Zionism at the moment does not feel as if you're being careful about saying Palestinians deserve
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  a state and anyone who believes that the Jewish state should occupy the entirety of historical
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  Palestine is a moral monster at the moment given what's happening in Gaza that claim the vast
• 21:31
  vast majority of Jews in the world can get on board with but the claim that Zionist women have
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  a bloodlust and that their own whiteness is so deeply wrapped up in their Zionism that they've
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  exceptionalized themselves to pretend they're not white if a Jew says to you that sounds off
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  where the fuck do you get off saying no no no no no no excuse me you're taking my words out of
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  context I didn't say Jew I specifically said Zionist I never said the word Jew
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  right is that the rule that you want to apply to all minority claims of prejudice and indignity
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  do you want to say that the person of color doesn't have the right to say that they found
• 22:30
  something racist that we want to go back to a time when the white person got to say no stop being
• 22:34
  so sensitive I didn't say the end word or something I was just I was joking mate you can't take a joke
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  listen to my words this is what this is you're making this up I never said I didn't say that
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  this is on your eyes on you and if that's not going to become a general rule
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  then why is it that this one minority a Bay is different rules than every other minority
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  every other minority gets the benefit of the doubt but this one minority oh they're not really
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  a minority are they the Jews sorry the Zionists they're not really a minority I mean look how well
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  they're doing just notice that at every time in every place there's always been a reason why the Jews
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  don't count as a real minority they're either too powerful or their betrayers they're sniveling
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  and poor their hook knows they're shy locks they're greedy they're not really part of community
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  they've got this weird exceptionalism thing going on I mean she literally says it in that post you
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  know look of course we've come to believe that difference and exceptionalism is something to be
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  celebrated right if your difference shows up as a saree or a hijab or a bikini or a boy wearing
• 23:58
  a dress fabulous let's celebrate difference but if your difference shows up as you wearing a
• 24:05
  Yarmulka it's a bit extra can't you just be happy with the fact that you control everything
• 24:16
  this is not a good space for us to be swimming in and unless you have Jewish friends
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  or unless you indeed have truly Palestinian friends and by truly Palestinian I mean unless you
• 24:29
  can talk to people who are in refugee camps in Lebanon or Jordan who have a Palestinian identity
• 24:36
  card and don't have citizenship to those countries actual Palestinians refugees then you don't really
• 24:42
  understand what's going on right now you're seeing things that are cherry picked on social media
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  you're witnessing the calamity of what's going on in Gaza and you're inside a bubble
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  it's just worth saying that I mean there's so much to say there's so much to say
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  to my Jewish friends I would pull out the old line about anti-Semitism which is that
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  it's never as good a situation as it should be but it's never as bad as you think it is
• 25:29
  because a lot of Jewish people at the moment and you might find this totally baffling
• 25:34
  if you are just a generally well-meaning progressive pro-Palestinian person but a lot of Jews
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  at the moment are feeling like this is Kristallnacht there are 16 million Jews in the world
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  much less than the population of Australia Hitler managed to get through six
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  it is an extremely vulnerable population that has been hounded out of every society in the history
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  of the world repeatedly detested repeatedly pillaged repeatedly excluded prevented from joining
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  the professional classes prevented from getting elite educations prevented from joining the elite
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  everywhere and so has in a scrappy self-determined way may do often by going into finance and the creative
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  arts which is why Jews are overrepresented in those areas to some extent and
• 26:32
  they don't see the Palestinian I mean so there's a mistaken narrative I think among a lot of Jews
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  and Israelis that I want to acknowledge as being mistaken which is we were given a state in 1948
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  ever since then we've done nothing but try piece you know we were invaded three times 1948
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  1967 1973 and the 1990s we sought peace we've sought peace all at all along we've been consistently
• 26:57
  slapped back and now through no fault of our own we are sitting on top of territory that we
• 27:03
  accidentally acquired when we were invaded in 1967 and no attempt by us to give that back has been
• 27:11
  met with any reasonable negotiating partner all of the Arab states have been keen to destroy us
• 27:20
  until very very recently when diplomatic overtures by the Israeli government has created some kind
• 27:25
  of a detente with at least the Arab leaders who want to use Israel as a way of ganging up on Iran
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  and then we get attacked and no sooner are we attacked than there are marches in the street not
• 27:38
  for the people who were violated in the attack but for the people who are next order was who
• 27:45
  committed the attack and those marches are angry because we're shitty neighbors to them
• 27:51
  like what the fuck obviously there are lots of problems with that analysis
• 28:00
  the largest of which is the fact that for more than 20 years Israel has been ruled by right wing
• 28:05
  shitheads who have got us to this situation I've been saying for years that there's going to be a
• 28:11
  reckoning you can't just you can't continue subjugating people the way that Israel was subjugating
• 28:16
  the Palestinians without something giving it was untenable like what the fuck did you expect
• 28:22
  was going to happen doesn't justify it but nobody's blameless here and on the other side I would
• 28:31
  say to the Palestinians what the fuck did you expect was going to happen when in 1948 you were given
• 28:39
  a state by the United Nations alongside Israel of course pretty humiliating to be given a state
• 28:44
  that's only half of the land that you wanted but hey as Austin Powell says I want a toilet made of
• 28:49
  solid gold we don't get everything we want nonetheless to respond by having all of the other Arab
• 28:57
  states instantly invade Israel and try to wipe it off the face of the earth and then lose what did
• 29:03
  you think was going to happen when you attacked and lost in 1967 when you tried to wipe out Israel
• 29:09
  again and lost what did you think was going to happen in 1973 when you tried to wipe out Israel and
• 29:15
  almost succeeded and then lost what did you think was going to happen in the 90s when there were real
• 29:22
  legitimate efforts first by Rabin then Clinton and the Oslo Accords and Camp David real efforts to
• 29:30
  for a two-state solution away from which Arifat just walked without even putting another offer on
• 29:35
  the table what did you what did you think was going to happen well what happened unfortunately
• 29:40
  was that the Israelis concluded that there was no partner for peace and there was no point in it
• 29:44
  that they'd been robes all along and thanks in part to demographic change and thanks in part to
• 29:50
  the cynicism of bibi Netanyahu who's probably the worst thing that's ever happened to Israel a
• 29:54
  corrupt little hack we found ourselves with more than 20 years of settler acceleration settler
• 30:06
  violence and an obvious disdain for any possibility of Palestinian statehood but I would say to
• 30:14
  both sides what the fuck did you think was going to happen anyway back to this petition
• 30:22
  13th of December baby a call to action from creatives for Palestine
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  so on Wednesday the 13th of December where your kefir your lapelpin or your Palestinian solidarity
• 30:35
  shirt to wherever you work show up in solidarity at your local gallery theater venue
• 30:43
  in trying to figure out whether or not we should support a ceasefire and whether we should support
• 30:48
  a free Palestine from the river to the sea I think we need to know what
• 30:53
  yeah what are the potential outcomes like what are the good scenarios here we have to we have to
• 30:58
  create a kind of a context to climate in which the good is even imaginable because at the moment
• 31:03
  it's inconceivable so we'll talk about the good in just a moment but I first just want to give you
• 31:12
  another sense of what's happening online so that if you're not particularly online and you don't
• 31:20
  know where the center of gravity of most mainly young people but I think the center of gravity of
• 31:26
  Australians is here's a snapshot after those three actors don't the Palestinian flag another performer
• 31:42
  was at a gig and said can you all stop recording no reporters no journalists no cameras
• 31:53
  and he just made the point that we're all inside a bubble at the moment and we're not understanding
• 31:59
  how our words are landing and our symbols are landing for other people and that his heart goes
• 32:05
  out to Jewish people at the moment because this was in the immediate aftermath of that national
• 32:12
  brujaha about the Palestinians carbs and as a result that leaked and he got annihilated on social
• 32:20
  media this shit is the least surprising thing in the world he's always been a slimy liberal supporting
• 32:26
  genocide genocide just seems very on brand how many dead children do you want to see in Gaza
• 32:31
  more than 6,000 not enough for you another person are so this person thinks child killers are
• 32:38
  acceptable this is what you support one person tweets at him with horrendous images and what you'll
• 32:48
  slam your peer actors for just so your stupid theater company can keep touching Zionist donor money
• 32:54
  you're a demonic racist who defends and promotes the greatest evil of genocide
• 33:01
  I like seeing the images of queers for Palestine that's good I've got a queers for Palestine
• 33:08
  the world action collective and there they are there's a bunch of queers with the Palestinian flag
• 33:12
  and rainbow flag someone cheeky has put that up against a picture of
• 33:19
  a herd of cows in front of a McDonald's with the slogan cows for McDonald's
• 33:26
  yeah it's great being a queer in Palestine they treat you really well how much loves you
• 33:31
  another another tweet here america's elite universities and by the way I'm not just cherry picking a
• 33:36
  random tweet okay I'm not playing the game of like oh let's find what the most ridiculous person
• 33:41
  on Twitter says and dunk on that these are selected as being emblematic of something that you see
• 33:47
  all the bloody time if you're on social at the moment which I encourage you not to be as a general
• 33:54
  rule but specifically now america's elite universities have long been funded by Jews as
• 34:00
  everyone well knows this tweets says now that the Jews are finally reaping the whirlwind we find
• 34:05
  them squealing like stuck pigs oh the irony that's another person foolish enough to use the word
• 34:11
  Jew but there you go there's also just a lot of misinformation i mean i think it's just worth
• 34:18
  being aware as you feel increasingly baffled about why more people aren't taking the obviously
• 34:25
  correct moral position of being outraged at what israel is doing that yes israel is
• 34:31
  fucking hammering a place that has endured so much it's horrendous i mean it's awful it is all
• 34:40
  the conditions in gaza are miserable it's also worth noting that gaza's leaders live in opulence
• 34:48
  in places like doha and siphon off united nations funds for their own benefit and to pay for
• 34:55
  rockets to shoot at israel so yeah i mean gaza's a shithole it's not a shithole in the parts where
• 35:05
  the people who don't want it to be a shithole live and it's not a shithole in the palaces in doha
• 35:11
  where they reside and it needn't necessarily be an entire shithole it's on a beautiful stretch of
• 35:18
  the Mediterranean the oceans right there now israel has a blockade on it essentially making sure
• 35:25
  they check what's going in and out of the israeli border but there's the Egyptian border through
• 35:29
  which things can pass and the israeli blockade seems somewhat more justified in the wake of october 7th
• 35:39
  so yes there's a whole lot of terrible staff that's happening there and i don't know i can't
• 35:44
  speak to whether or not the israelis are going overboard obviously i'm not a supporter of the
• 35:52
  most extreme human rights abuses of the israeli defense forces and i said many many times that i'm
• 35:58
  not a supporter of the israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories at all and certainly
• 36:03
  not a supporter of settlements being built and certainly not a supporter of the right wing
• 36:07
  liquid or if any of these ass hats who think that israel should control Palestinian all Palestinian
• 36:14
  territory and perpetuity but a lot of the stuff that you see online is just not true
• 36:23
  about what's going on in gaza and it actually takes a couple of days for journalists to do the
• 36:28
  sniffing around to debunk something and as the old saying goes that you know a liar's gone halfway
• 36:34
  around the world before the truth has had time to get its pants on you don't actually care about
• 36:38
  whether or not the things that you saw on social media three days ago turned out not to be true
• 36:42
  because you feel that the vibe of them is true the gist of them is true who cares about
• 36:47
  personality facts when you know that the underlying morality the righteousness lies on the side
• 36:54
  of the dispossessed the alienated the brown skinned the poor
• 37:01
  as for the proportionate use of force in gaza i did hear in israeli say we considered using
• 37:06
  proportionate force in gaza but our soldiers didn't think that beheading and raping people
• 37:10
  was appropriate so we didn't use proportionate force ho ho um so let me just give two examples
• 37:18
  of where social media has got it completely and utterly wrong just in the past few days
• 37:22
  a few days ago there were images of semi-naked gazans being rounded up by israelis
• 37:30
  in the desert and in an urban environment and a credible looking instagram
• 37:39
  account called gaza in english came across my feed with an image of it looks horrible these
• 37:47
  uh sort of bound up uh men wearing nothing but loincloths in the desert with israeli
• 37:56
  defense personnel milling around them and the caption says a short while ago the israeli
• 38:00
  occupation forces kidnapped more than a hundred unarmed Palestinians in front of their children
• 38:04
  women from a school for displaced people in the northern gaza strip took them to an open area
• 38:10
  executed them in cold blood one after the other and threw them into a pit among them a children
• 38:16
  as young as 15 years old and then i saw this uh these similar images again on another
• 38:24
  this was being pushed by threads on instagram breaking the israeli Zionist militants abducted
• 38:29
  dozens of Palestinian civilians from un shelter schools forced them to take off their clothes
• 38:36
  and take them to an empty area in preparation for their execution this is beyond in humane it says
• 38:43
  and then these images make it to people i actually follow who start reposting it one of whom
• 38:48
  posts the comment on my fucking god over this photo which now has this caption a new photo
• 38:55
  published by an israeli channel on telegram shows the occupation forces taking civilians to an
• 39:00
  empty area in preparation for their execution live massacres in front of the world on my fucking
• 39:06
  guard the person i follow right yeah on my fucking guard would be right if it were fucking true
• 39:15
  you ask hat i mean there's not i'm not saying you need to know on the basis of that it looks
• 39:20
  fucking true looks horrendous but it's not true it took a couple of days and then the BBC
• 39:30
  tracked down one of the people what first up i mean the israeli commented on it almost
• 39:34
  immediately at a press conference and said there is a hummus stronghold area of gaza city which
• 39:41
  has been evacuated for two weeks we went in there to clear it out and these were the only individuals
• 39:46
  left there it's known to be a center of gravity for hummus these are all military age men and they
• 39:53
  were the only people there were no women and children left because we'd been we'd clear the
• 39:56
  place out and we'd let it drop it um so we stripped them down and we took their weapons and now
• 40:02
  they're being interrogated or headed over to the red cross um now obviously you can say well
• 40:08
  of course the israelis would say that they probably did shoot them and put them in a ditch anyway
• 40:11
  because there's the evil Zionists however the BBC tracked one of them down they've got an
• 40:17
  interview online with this 22 year old guy he explains what happened i don't think the BBC is like
• 40:21
  in the pocket of the Zionists and if you think that is then you're probably too far gone and then
• 40:28
  the second beat of this act was an even more disturbing thing that i've seen floating around which
• 40:33
  is images of these guys and one of them is giving up his weapons supposedly according to the
• 40:38
  israelis there's video footage he's holding this ak 47 in his hand and he's walking forward from
• 40:44
  this group of semi naked uh Palestinians and he's dropper he's throwing the weapon down
• 40:50
  but there's another video of him doing the same thing with the ak 47 in his other hand
• 40:59
  and the internet's been going bonkers saying this just shows that the whole thing is
• 41:04
  fucking staged who who brings multiple weapons like so he went back and he did a retake
• 41:10
  the Israelis are getting him to do a retake and why does he still have weapons if he's naked
• 41:14
  don't you take the weapons away from the naked person what you take his pants but you don't take
• 41:17
  his gun what's going on here this is like the this is just israeli propaganda well i've got to
• 41:24
  say give the Israelis some credit i mean when they do propaganda they're not so fucking stupid that
• 41:28
  they do it that way the BBC again looked into this the BBC has a project called BBC Verify where
• 41:35
  they look where they try to verify and dig into claims that are being made online they found
• 41:40
  the original footage and yes the guy brings is is ordered to bring three weapons it's a continuous
• 41:47
  shot he it's a weapons handle i mean it's stupidly staged israel shouldn't bother staging this
• 41:53
  stuff it's obviously dumb to yeah you've exactly as the people saying like the people these people
• 41:57
  are already semi-naked why are you forcing them to bring over their weapons but according to the
• 42:03
  according to the Israelis it was their weapons and they were told to bring those weapons in and
• 42:09
  they were filmed doing it kind of ham-fisted kind of stupid the way governments do things government
• 42:14
  sound as savvy as jihadists working the social media game but the BBC found that it is a
• 42:19
  continuous shot it's not they're not they're not doing a retake they're not telling him to take the
• 42:24
  gun back and now do it in you in the other hand as so many people who I saw on social media were
• 42:29
  claiming they're getting them to bring three AK-47s from one place over to another in to demonstrate
• 42:36
  that hummus fighters are being disarmed all of this is so boring and stupid like who gives a
• 42:46
  shit what happened when the scale of the catastrophe is so huge but i'm just trying to give a couple
• 42:54
  of glimpses of the way that social media functions like journalists and government organizations
• 43:00
  are not good at playing the social media propaganda game we're just not i mean for a start we're
• 43:05
  constrained by facts so that is an immediate impediment and it's just worth being aware if you
• 43:12
  get most of your news from social media and i'm again i'm not denying that there are calamities
• 43:16
  going on in gaza i'm just saying in the in the game of what aboutism and moral equivalence
• 43:23
  it is striking how much downplaying of the horrors of october 7th there is and how much
• 43:28
  goosing up the volume on the supposed crimes of the the Israelis there is like if an alien came
• 43:35
  down to earth and did a full accounting of what went on on october 7th and just as an aside
• 43:42
  if you if you think that october 7th was sort of a jailbreak you know i mean and what how could you
• 43:48
  blame hummus from trying to shake up the status quo so they came out yeah they killed a few people
• 43:52
  that's terrible they took some hostages whatever no i don't know i don't know i don't even know
• 44:01
  where to start because it's so horrifying i feel like i might cry if i recount any of the things
• 44:05
  that i know went on but if you doubt it there's a BBC article that was published on the 5th of
• 44:15
  december entitled israel gaza hummus raped and mutilated women on 7 october BBC hears it's a long
• 44:23
  piece and it's interviews with people who are there and the people who were the first responders
• 44:30
  and it says according to the BBC's Middle East correspondent in Jerusalem Lucy Williamson
• 44:36
  that rape was a premeditated strategy on october 7th and the most brutal and horrifying
• 44:43
  kinds of rape i mean you're talking about you know at this peace music festival this rave
• 44:50
  it's early in the morning a lot of people are on mdma presumably and they're partying
• 44:57
  this is a part of the country which is not right wing settlers this is a pretty peace
• 45:01
  nicky part of the country southern israel it's not like this is being inflicted on you know ultra
• 45:06
  Zionist orthodox people who want to take back all of Palestine these are the kinds of people who
• 45:10
  would have voted for the israeli left and for peace processes but i mean not that makes any
• 45:14
  difference when you're talking about calamities this bad but it's just a point worth noting that
• 45:19
  they're effectively morally blameless if you think that there's some immorality in you know
• 45:25
  ultra Zionism that needs to be remedied by hummus these people were not that and
• 45:32
  there are real stories of you know i don't even want to go into the sexual violence but
• 45:41
  you
• 45:43
  horrendous mutilation the likes of which al-Qaeda never did this is ISIS level stuff
• 45:56
  if you doubt the BBC you can also look at the Atlantic where Graham Wood who's an excellent
• 46:00
  journalist who isn't who doesn't carry water for Zionists uh went to israel and witnessed the 43
• 46:05
  minute body cam footage of what the terrorists had shot uh and you know they're proud of it
• 46:16
  they're proud of what they're doing one of them calls home on a dead Jews phone and uh
• 46:24
  enthusiastically reports to his parents about how many people he's killed and
• 46:29
  in in Israel and what a good boy here's and unlike the way that any
• 46:37
  American or Australian or European parent of a military fighter would respond which is
• 46:44
  what the fuck are you talking about it you're saying it's a good thing that you intentionally killed
• 46:49
  civilians they just seem concerned for his safety his welfare they just want him to get home
• 46:55
  and i i i i i i say this i understand that the moment we talk about
• 47:04
  the extraordinary violence and
• 47:08
  depravity of hummus and jihad a little thought bubble pops up over a lot of people's heads which is
• 47:15
  well yeah but what about all the shit that's going down in Gaza that's no picnic either
• 47:19
  right like and yes of course you can say well the Israelis are we're trying to avoid civilian
• 47:24
  casualties but if you unleash a war on people in which you know that civilians are going to die then
• 47:28
  you have blood on your hands and i sort of concur with that moral calculus to some degree i mean
• 47:33
  to the case that i made during the Iraq war as well where the the argument was we're doing
• 47:39
  everything we can to avoid civilian casualties sure except you've just made a military decision
• 47:45
  that you know is reliably going to kill hundreds of thousands if not millions of people
• 47:50
  so your hands out that clean the point about ISIS and al-Qaeda and hummus that i was trying to
• 48:01
  make before i got sidetracked by october 7th is just that um they've gotten pretty good at playing
• 48:10
  playing the social media game so like think back to the early genesis of ISIS where
• 48:18
  you had american airmen in orange jumpsuits trapped in cages in the desert and being
• 48:24
  being set on fire or the beheading of Daniel purl the journalist you know the live beheadings
• 48:30
  that was an era where jihadists kind of got the memo about how to play that game and they're
• 48:38
  very good at ramping up the brutality of either themselves or their opponents depending on
• 48:44
  what suits them uh and there has been you know considerable connection between the
• 48:52
  way that hummus plays the game in the way that ISIS plays the game so your social media algorithm
• 48:58
  is not a well-meaning feed it is amplified by algorithms as you know to inflame your sensibilities
• 49:04
  and that inflammation is itself being co-opted by forces who want to lead you down as much of a
• 49:12
  garden path or at least into as much of an echo chamber as they can forces like for example
• 49:19
  this uh post which says i watched this live stream this is talking about this is quoting from
• 49:27
  someone who was reporting on the live stream the most barbaric footage you might ever see
• 49:33
  there was no torture there was no killing the hummus fighters apologized to the father repeatedly
• 49:37
  for injuring him and said they wouldn't hurt any of them it wasn't until the Israeli army arrived
• 49:41
  that civilians started dying that person says so i mean how would you know what world are we
• 49:48
  creating man in which this is going to be the way that most young people get their information
• 49:53
  about the world speaking of young people a poll in the economist caught my eye united states
• 50:03
  December 2nd to 5th 2023 so this is two weeks ago at the time of recording
• 50:11
  they polled this is the economist polling americans on the question of the holocaust is a myth
• 50:22
  65 plus effectively 0 percent agree 45 to 64 year olds almost 0 percent agree
• 50:29
  30 to 44 year olds almost 10 percent agree that the holocaust is a myth 18 to 29 year olds
• 50:40
  20 percent agree that the holocaust is a myth in america on the question of the holocaust has
• 50:49
  been exaggerated 65 plus almost 0 45 to 64 three or four percent 30 to 44 i'm vague here because
• 50:58
  this is a graph it's not a i'm i can't read the number 30 to 44 percent almost 10 percent
• 51:04
  18 to 29 year olds the holocaust has been exaggerated 22 23 percent
• 51:11
  almost one in four more than one in five americans under the age of 30 think the holocaust has
• 51:18
  been exaggerated where's that coming from is that coming from a studious and thoughtful examination
• 51:23
  of the facts or is it coming from the same place where you get most of your information about Gaza
• 51:32
  a piece in the Wall Street Journal this was posted actually the 12th of December so just a couple
• 51:40
  of days ago a poll of 250 American students showed that the vast majority support the from the river
• 51:46
  to the sea chant 53 percent couldn't name the river and the sea some said the Caribbean
• 51:55
  more than 10 percent of these American students polled thought Arifat was Israel's first president
• 52:03
  more than 25 percent hadn't heard of the Oslo Accords
• 52:08
  after learning a handful of basic facts about the region more than 67 percent said they now reject
• 52:13
  the chant from the river to the sea from the river to the sea it rhymes it's got that going for it
• 52:26
  this call to action from creatives Palestine this petition that's being enacted
• 52:34
  on the 13th of December is a little bit confusing to me because the sign off is
• 52:44
  where the graceful justifiably angry digital or live it's increasingly clear that to stand for
• 52:50
  the right for Palestinians to live liberated and safe is not only punishable but must also be
• 52:55
  apologised for the show mustn't go on as usual when people are being massacred from the river to the
• 53:02
  sea always was always will be but the first request that they have in their set of demands is an
• 53:11
  end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine and then the sign off is from the river to the sea
• 53:18
  and the hashtag at the top is from the river to the sea but the first demand is an end to the Israeli
• 53:23
  occupation of Palestine aren't those contradictions an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine means
• 53:32
  Israel gets out of the West Bank and Gaza doesn't it or does it mean from the river to the sea
• 53:39
  does it mean an end to Israel because Israel is sitting on Palestine
• 53:46
  I mean Israel is sitting on historical Palestine and the United States the Western half of the
• 53:53
  United States is sitting on top of Mexico and 100% of Australia is sitting on top of Indigenous land
• 54:00
  this is how history has unfolded this is how the world works
• 54:04
  I mean if we're using the word Palestine to now mean everything that exists in what used to be
• 54:13
  the British mandate of Palestine like before Israel existed then this creatives for Palestine
• 54:21
  petition is literally genocidal what happens to the Jews where do they go
• 54:31
  Joe Biden tells an anecdote about meeting Golden Mayor I love the fact that the guy is so old he's
• 54:38
  met Golden Mayor you know he was we're back when I was meeting Thomas Edison he's had something to
• 54:45
  me so Golden Mayor says to him don't worry about us she says don't worry about us we'll be fine
• 54:55
  we have nowhere else to go we have nowhere else to go there are half a billion Arabs in the Middle
• 55:11
  East there are 16 million Jews in the world the West Bank you may or may not know was invaded by
• 55:21
  Jordan when Israel was created in 1948 the West Bank under the British plan at the end of World
• 55:29
  War II was supposed to be the main chunk of a new Arab state it wasn't the Israelis who invaded
• 55:34
  it to take it over it was Jordan and for 20 years it was a significant part of Jordan I didn't
• 55:40
  actually realize how important it was to Jordan until this whole bruja made me do a lot more
• 55:45
  reading into the history of that neck of the woods but by the mid 60s the West Bank was almost
• 55:54
  half of Jordan's population it was about a third of its GDP it was more than a third of its agricultural
• 56:02
  output the West Bank was about half of Jordan's manpower 80% of Jordan's fruit growing land was in
• 56:10
  the West Bank 40% of its vegetables were in the West Bank and still Israel's per capita
• 56:19
  product it's GDP per capita was 10 times more than that of the West Bank so even when the West Bank
• 56:26
  was part of Jordan and Israel wasn't touching any Palestinian land apart from what it was you know
• 56:32
  unless we're using the term Palestine to mean Israel which is a little bit of a fact but so
• 56:35
  let's just call Israel you know Israel and Palestine the Palestinian territories before Israel had
• 56:40
  a finger on any of the territories prior to 1967 it was 10 times wealthier than the West Bank so the
• 56:47
  argument that things are shitty in the West Bank and Gaza because Israelis are mean
• 56:51
  well how were they so shitty there before 1967 when the Israelis were just doing their thing
• 56:57
  and had no one touching any part of the Palestinian territories so anyway Jordan had invaded
• 57:03
  you know the rough story right the West Bank is part of Jordan Jordan and the other Arab countries
• 57:09
  all gathered together on the border of Israel in 67 they're about to launch an attack Israel sees
• 57:14
  that happening wipes them out and in the wipeout is able to steamroll across all of the Arab territories
• 57:20
  that the Arabs had been offered but had declined in 1948 and yeah I get it it wasn't a great deal
• 57:26
  like if you're pro Palestinian you're gonna say well how could they've been expected to take that
• 57:29
  deal I mean they were all living there on that land they'd been there before the Nakba was a catastrophe
• 57:34
  yeah yeah history sucks like there's a lot of bad shit in history okay my grandmother grew up
• 57:40
  in a Jewish majority town in Poland that the Nazis raised and all everyone there was sent to
• 57:46
  Auschwitz except for her because she got out in 1938 like I don't expect any there to be any
• 57:55
  compensation for that I don't expect me to have a right of return to that town the Jews who were
• 58:02
  elsewhere in the Middle East at the time have no right of return to Syria or Iran or all the other
• 58:10
  places they were living in 1948 they were all kicked out the Arab states were like oh you're
• 58:14
  gonna build a state for yourself we'll fuck you get out I mean we talk about Israel being in a
• 58:18
  apartheid state you hear this all the times in a apartheid state okay yeah it's an apartheid state
• 58:22
  in the sense that it is controlled it has a military horrendous military occupation that most
• 58:27
  Israelis don't support and don't know what to do about because they don't feel safe being able to
• 58:32
  hand it back to the people who just did October 7th and the people who didn't want to respond to
• 58:37
  their peace overtures in the 1990s and the people who invaded in 73 and the people who invaded in 67
• 58:42
  the people who invaded in 48 so yeah there's this pickle and Israelis definitely share some of the
• 58:47
  blame for the failure of that especially as I've said over the past 20 years when they've been
• 58:51
  ruled by shitheads but an apartheid state I mean there's an Arab on the Israeli Supreme Court
• 58:59
  there are Arab members of parliament there are Arab parties in the free democracy of Israeli politics
• 59:08
  20% of Israel are Arabs and the majority of Israeli Jews are refugees from other parts of the
• 59:15
  Middle East like they're from Arabia the Jews weren't you know I think a lot of people have this
• 59:19
  impression that the Jews parachute it in from Europe after the war and they're all a colonial
• 59:26
  settler society the majority of Jews in Israel are from the Middle East and you want to talk about a
• 59:35
  apartheid how many Jews remain in Iran and Syria and Lebanon and Jordan and Egypt who were there in
• 59:46
  1948 I mean it's as good as zero these are apartheid states these are places where to be a Jew
• 59:57
  in Iran or Syria even though you had a long history of your family living there prior to 1948
• 1:00:04
  counts for fuck all I mean if nothing else you don't want a right of return because they'll
• 1:00:10
  kill you something that Israel notably doesn't do to its Arab citizens it's calamitous and tragic
• 1:00:20
  that it does do it to the to the territories over which it wields a lot of control I mean I wanted
• 1:00:27
  to say occupy but doesn't even occupy guys or anymore it got out of there and admittedly still
• 1:00:33
  contributes to making the place a total shit hole through its blockade but that's what happens
• 1:00:38
  when you vote for jihadists as soon as you're released from occupation so like it's complicated
• 1:00:47
  Israel is not a colonizing country like the British Empire was or the Dutch in the East Indies
• 1:00:55
  or the Spanish conquistadors this was as I've said a tiny handful of people who'd been
• 1:01:01
  shut up on in every society who had kingdoms in that part of the world three thousand years ago
• 1:01:09
  and who'd been driven out who'd been basically promised the land by the Brits
• 1:01:16
  the Arabs were also promised the land and remember nobody had had sovereignty here I mean this
• 1:01:22
  was a part of the world that had been colonized by everybody going back to the year dot the Arabs
• 1:01:28
  came in the 600s the Ottomans came in the 1500s the Palestinians who we want liberation for now
• 1:01:37
  from the 1500s up until when my grandmother was born were living under Turkish rule from Istanbul
• 1:01:46
  they were either slaves or they were free people being ruled over from another empire
• 1:01:53
  and then the Turks backed the wrong horse in world war one the Brits said to the Arabs and the Jews
• 1:01:59
  of the Middle East in the Ottoman Empire if you help us drive the the Ottomans the Turks out
• 1:02:05
  will give you a homeland they kind of played both sides off each other
• 1:02:11
  after world war one the Ottomans have been driven back Turkey loses the Brits win the Brits
• 1:02:16
  kind of control this they have a rough plan for a bit of Israel you know they'll
• 1:02:20
  will give the Jews the the bit on the west that's next to the coast will give the Arabs the bit
• 1:02:24
  on the east that's next to the river and everyone will go along that on their merry ways
• 1:02:33
  world war two comes along six million Jews are incinerated
• 1:02:37
  and the Brits say this is a pretty good opportunity since we're getting out of the empire game in
• 1:02:41
  the first place to hand this over to the United Nations give them this steaming polish it the UN
• 1:02:48
  goes okay pretty shitty what happened to the Jews I guess that was the final reckoning wasn't
• 1:02:53
  that they probably get to and you know since the late 1800s Jews have been moving back from Europe
• 1:02:58
  because they've been the victims of so much discrimination and pogroms and having their villages
• 1:03:02
  raised even before Nazism I mean it didn't start with Nazism it started you know in the 1800s
• 1:03:08
  so Jews have been getting back going back to Palestine for a while at this stage and the idea
• 1:03:13
  the ideology of Zionism as being like a homeland has been gaining steam and it finds it's
• 1:03:18
  fruition after world war two in 1948 and there's a strip for the Jews and the strip for the Arabs
• 1:03:26
  and the Jews take that deal and the Arabs don't the Arabs invade again perfectly fine if you're
• 1:03:33
  a Palestinian to say why the fuck should we take that deal we were living here yeah I know it
• 1:03:39
  fucking sucks but in hindsight wouldn't have been better just to take the fucking deal
• 1:03:48
  in hindsight wouldn't have been better not to invade in 1967 in hindsight and this is
• 1:03:57
  heresy wouldn't it maybe even have been better if Israel had never taken back the West Bank
• 1:04:06
  because the Arab armies had never tried to invade in 1967 and Jordan had just sat on the West Bank
• 1:04:14
  and everyone in the West Bank was leading a free life as a Jordanian
• 1:04:18
  Palestinianism as an idea as an ideology as a self identifier arises in opposition to the creation
• 1:04:27
  of the Jewish state it doesn't exist prior to Israel it comes as a response to Israel that doesn't
• 1:04:32
  make it illegitimate it's perfectly legitimate for national self-determination movements to arise
• 1:04:37
  as a result of persecution or expropriation of land but it does mean that like Gaza could have been
• 1:04:45
  Egypt in an alternative universe and the West Bank could have been Jordan in an alternative universe
• 1:04:51
  and you wouldn't have had populations that were wildly different it's not like saying well let's
• 1:04:56
  just absorb the Jews you know I don't know into Africa or something let's just carve out this
• 1:05:02
  little place for them they would have been absorbed and of course that's heartbreaking to anyone
• 1:05:08
  who thinks that the aspiration is that they should control all of Palestine or they should have
• 1:05:14
  self-determination as a people in opposition to Zionism but in terms of the reality on the ground
• 1:05:20
  for the lived lives of Palestinian people can you truly argue that it would have been
• 1:05:30
  worse for the Palestinians to have taken up any of those shitty offers that the UN
• 1:05:38
  and then Israel and the United States put on the table because when you fast forward to the 1990s
• 1:05:46
  and you get to the Oslo courts and camp David and so on you know the offers from Israel
• 1:05:52
  may have been shitty they were like 97% of the land that the Palestinians had in the occupied territories
• 1:06:02
  but there were carve-outs you know where oh well there's bits close to Israel and settlers are
• 1:06:07
  already living there so you know we'll keep this bit and we'll give you this other shitty bit in
• 1:06:11
  exchange of course there was that sort of stuff but the thing is Arifat never came back and said
• 1:06:16
  no what we want is actually all of Palestine plus you know Palestinian territories plus half of
• 1:06:22
  Israel he never even said that there was no counteroffer now there was a potential
• 1:06:32
  offer in 2008 that could have gone somewhere but you know these offers always came about with
• 1:06:38
  lame duck Israeli prime ministers who were at the end of their tenure and had no credibility and
• 1:06:43
  it's not like Arifat and his successes have had credibility in Palestine either so it's
• 1:06:49
  it's a really tricky situation and by 2008 maybe it's too late and there's too much bad blood
• 1:06:55
  but the fact remains that the two-state solution is the only path forward
• 1:07:00
  I didn't believe this prior to October 7th I was a one-stater I thought there just has to be a
• 1:07:07
  way of enshrining the rights of Jews into the constitution of an Israel Palestine that rules
• 1:07:16
  over that whole area and that should be the ultimate aspiration now you can't really have a
• 1:07:23
  right of return I mean the right of return is a really interesting thing to understand and I think
• 1:07:27
  if you're pro-Palestine you have to understand you have to do the legwork to understand what we
• 1:07:32
  mean by from the river to the sea and what we mean by the right of return because most of the
• 1:07:41
  Palestinians who don't live in the Palestinian territories well almost all of them live in refugee
• 1:07:47
  camps in Lebanon and Jordan I've met these people I visited these people I made a great friend in
• 1:07:54
  Beirut this Palestinian guy and when he says he's Palestinian what he means is that Lebanon won't
• 1:08:02
  give him citizenship or any pathway to citizenship the Arab countries regard these people as stateless
• 1:08:09
  refugees even though get this it's not like he has fled settler violence in the West Bank six
• 1:08:16
  months ago his ancestors left their town in what is now Israel in 1948 or pushed out you know
• 1:08:27
  I'm not going to litigate how traumatizing the experience of the creation of Israel was for
• 1:08:33
  the Palestinians who were living there I'm sure it was horrible so they there for whatever reason
• 1:08:38
  and I would whatever circumstances they're out and they moved to Lebanon but Lebanon doesn't
• 1:08:44
  regard them as it being Lebanese but they have kids in the 50s who have kids in the 70s who have
• 1:08:53
  kids in the 90s one of whom is this guy and when you ask him where he's from it doesn't say Lebanon
• 1:09:03
  Lebanon has no purchase with him he's Palestinian he's never been to Israel he's never been to this
• 1:09:13
  mythical town of his imagination that his great grandparents fled but his right to return there
• 1:09:23
  and to return with the scores and scores and scores of descendants that the one person who left
• 1:09:29
  has now had is an indisputable part of the Palestinian identity you know unlike almost every
• 1:09:36
  other diaspora where you just get used to the new place like I'm in my grandmother okay I you know
• 1:09:44
  I have presumably some right of return to go back to Poland and to track down what house she grew up in
• 1:09:51
  but that's immaterial to me because I have a life in a new home country that's the way the refugee
• 1:09:57
  system tends to work and because that has because that's been stymied and because Palestinians
• 1:10:02
  been so screwed over by not just Israel but by Lebanon and Jordan and Syria and Arab leaders and
• 1:10:10
  the rest of the Arab street in the region not to mention Hamas and jihadists because they've
• 1:10:17
  been so screwed over they haven't been able to build new routes in new places but even saying
• 1:10:23
  that that is an aspiration that we should have for Palestinian for individual Palestinians
• 1:10:29
  marks you amongst most of polite society as being a rapidly right wing Zionist fascist asshole
• 1:10:36
  because why shouldn't they have their land from the river to the sea why shouldn't they go back why
• 1:10:40
  should they have to endure the indignity of going somewhere else you settler colonial Zionist always
• 1:10:48
  will always will be Aboriginal land always will be Palestinian land always was always will be
• 1:10:57
  from the river to the sea what are you saying what are you saying what are you advocating for
• 1:11:05
  when you say that the number one demand of the call to action from creatives Palestine is an
• 1:11:10
  end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine do you mean that Israel should get out of the West Bank
• 1:11:14
  and Gaza or do you mean that the whole thing is Palestine and Israel has to cease existing because
• 1:11:18
  that's what's implied by the sign off to the petition which says from the river to the sea always
• 1:11:23
  was always will be this is not a way of thinking about the the ways in which nations bump up
• 1:11:34
  against each other and people get dispossessed and people try to find self determination that we
• 1:11:38
  apply to any other situation we don't expect non indigenous Australians to grant the right of
• 1:11:47
  return to indigenous Australians you know from the sea to the sea we don't expect that of Americans
• 1:11:57
  as I've said before is it just a matter of time is it be till the Israelis just have to wait
• 1:12:01
  as long as the Australians and the Americans have waited so that if a couple a hundred years goes by
• 1:12:05
  we regard it as being kosher pump pump like I don't think we understand if we're supporting Palestine
• 1:12:16
  in the West what we're actually supporting we're not supporting the betterment of Palestinian lives
• 1:12:23
  because there are all kinds of things you could do to improve Palestinians lives that are regarded
• 1:12:27
  as inimical to the quest for Palestinian self-government and Palestinian independence and autonomy
• 1:12:35
  because they help Palestinians you know get out of the shithole that they're in and there's actually
• 1:12:41
  a desire amongst pro-Palestinian activists and aid organizations and Arab leaders to keep the
• 1:12:49
  Palestinians suffering alive so there has to be a final reckoning about Zionism there's a subtext
• 1:12:55
  here that you're not seeing if you think this is just about dead babies being pulled from the
• 1:12:59
  gas and rubble so what do I mean there are things that we could be doing well I'm oh a dead of
• 1:13:06
  gratitude to Matt Eglaceus the American blogger and thinker for pointing us out to me but of course
• 1:13:11
  there are a whole bunch of things that we could have been doing short of expecting the impossible
• 1:13:16
  of Israel which is to annihilate itself prior to October 7th that would have helped Palestinians
• 1:13:23
  that people who speak on behalf of Palestinians don't want to happen for example
• 1:13:30
  open the border with Egypt and let people who pass a background check and who aren't militants
• 1:13:35
  come across the border and live in Egypt if they want to that is regarded as not being conducive
• 1:13:43
  to the Palestinian cause even though it would vastly improve the lives of the people who had been
• 1:13:47
  living in the squalid shithole it was Gaza here's another one the Gulf states like Qatar and the
• 1:13:56
  United Arab Emirates have a need for tons of foreign workers they give bazillions of worker visas
• 1:14:02
  they ship people in mostly from Bangladesh Pakistan India and Africa they could just flick a
• 1:14:09
  switch and say instead of prioritizing those workers we're going to prioritize Palestinians they
• 1:14:13
  can leave Palestine they can come and live in the UAE or Qatar they can work for us they can stay
• 1:14:19
  on whatever however long they want five years ten years make a ton of money by Palestinian standards
• 1:14:24
  send it back home improve their lives that would be regarded as a cop out by the people who claim
• 1:14:31
  to speak on behalf of Palestinians it's a way of oh you know making Palestine a more distant dream
• 1:14:40
  it's a bandaid well everything's a fucking bandaid in the long run
• 1:14:45
  you know I mean you could criticize the resettlement of any refugees on that basis
• 1:14:50
  you could say that Australia taking my father in out of the ruins of World War II in some way sort
• 1:14:56
  of validated what the Nazis were trying to do they were trying to drive the Jews out of Europe
• 1:15:00
  oh well are they we're going to let them succeed in that mission by taking in Josh's father
• 1:15:06
  isn't that just pandering to what the Nazis wanted yeah yeah it is a bit it also gave me a better life
• 1:15:14
  you know if you talk about resettling people from Ukraine into other NATO states
• 1:15:21
  you could argue that that achieves Putin's goal Putin is trying to crucify eastern Ukraine
• 1:15:26
  you take the the ethnic Ukrainians out of the east of Ukraine you're doing Putin's job for him
• 1:15:33
  yeah okay fine but you're also resettling refugees you know so the other thing that could be done
• 1:15:42
  is that Lebanon and Jordan and places where a lot of Palestinian refugees live could give them some
• 1:15:47
  pathway to citizenship like this bloco I met in Beirut he can't become a Lebanese citizen it's
• 1:15:52
  ridiculous it's barbaric and if this is a problem of resources if this is a problem of well why
• 1:15:59
  should Lebanon have to import all of these refugees and have them competing for jobs for example
• 1:16:05
  with their locals well compensate everyone with cash let it rein money we claim to care about this
• 1:16:10
  so much you're all marching in the streets holding up the banners from the river to the sea
• 1:16:16
  killing babies is bad opening our eyes to such profound moral insights open your pocket book
• 1:16:25
  the golf state certainly can you know the weird thing about the Palestinian issue is at the same
• 1:16:31
  on the one hand you have complete apathy towards the lives of actual Palestinians and it's not just
• 1:16:36
  from the Israelis it's from everyone they're getting fucked left right in center the Lebanese aren't
• 1:16:41
  giving them citizenship like why can't they just you know again I sound like a right wing Zionist
• 1:16:48
  arsehole saying why can't they just get Palette get Lebanese passports Jordanian passports
• 1:16:55
  and set up a life there like that is a position that is so right wing that even even left wing
• 1:17:04
  Israelis blush at the mention of it but I don't see what's wrong with it I don't see what is
• 1:17:11
  less preferable about that than about the status quo I understand why it's less preferable then
• 1:17:16
  the imaginary castle that you've built in your brain about how there can be a peaceful Palestine
• 1:17:21
  from the river to the sea where Jews and Palestinians live in harmony and Arabs don't hate Jews and
• 1:17:26
  there's no anti-Semitism in the Middle East and there are no right wing Zionists and the rivers
• 1:17:31
  flow with milk and honey and the lion sleeps with the lamb and the postman hugs the saint Bernard
• 1:17:38
  but like in comparison to what we've got the idea of allowing Palestinians to live and work in
• 1:17:45
  Egypt to get citizenship in Lebanon if they've been living there and their parents were born there
• 1:17:49
  and their grandparents were born there and and encouraging them to have work visas in Gulf
• 1:17:57
  States and using the money that we say we're committed to like plugging our heartstrings in such a way
• 1:18:05
  that we can compensate these countries for dealing with Palestinians to improve their lives
• 1:18:11
  right now that is perceived as being incredibly hostile to the Palestinian cause
• 1:18:19
  the Palestinian cause as it is constructed in the minds of Western aid organizations
• 1:18:25
  human rights groups Arab dictators and the Arab street means Palestinians need to be dispossessed
• 1:18:34
  and completely fucked over and they're in Palestine and in they have to stay in the Palestinian
• 1:18:39
  territories and they have to suffer as much as possible to put pressure on the global community
• 1:18:45
  to put pressure on Israel to find a final solution and a lasting peace
• 1:18:51
  now what the median Jew in the world wants is a lasting peace and a two-state solution
• 1:18:59
  it's hard to under to follow polling too reliably in the Arab world but the polls are so
• 1:19:06
  off the charts that it's hard to disbelieve them that the median Arab does not want a two-state
• 1:19:10
  solution they just don't think that the Jews should have a homeland in that part of the world
• 1:19:15
  so if you're out there chanting from the river to the sea
• 1:19:22
  your the implication is that you believe in a right of return not just for Palestinians to have
• 1:19:26
  control over the Palestinian territories which I agree with which the majority of Jews agree with
• 1:19:31
  which Israeli successive Israeli governments agreed with up until the past 20 years of disillusionment
• 1:19:36
  and right wing takeover which has got us to this calamitous place and I've laid the blood of
• 1:19:41
  Israelis and garrisons at the feet of successive right wing Israeli governments just as much as
• 1:19:46
  at the feet of jihadists so don't mistake me for being an apologist for right wing Israeli
• 1:19:51
  Zionism here but understand what the context in which you're having this conversation and in
• 1:19:59
  which you're making these calls there is just a misguided disjoint here
• 1:20:08
  where the Jews of the world really do feel like there was a like they're seeing for the first
• 1:20:18
  time that there must have been a kind of if not Jew hate Jew distaste simmering under the surface
• 1:20:28
  of the people who they thought were their friends and colleagues in order for it to be so easily
• 1:20:34
  unleashed in such a partisan and unsuttle way like unneuonced way in this firestorm of compassion
• 1:20:45
  towards what people say is Palestine but what is very close to either at best sympathy for the
• 1:20:56
  calamity on October 7th that brought this reckoning about or at worst the idea that there should be
• 1:21:03
  a single Palestinian state from the river to the sea which is going to be majority Arab
• 1:21:08
  that area is already 50 50 Arab and Jew if you take the whole thing Israel and the Palestinian
• 1:21:14
  territories and if you have some kind of right of return which all Palestinian activists say is
• 1:21:19
  fundamental then yeah you've got my Lebanese mate coming in from Beirut as well swelling the numbers
• 1:21:25
  and Arabs have more babies than Jews so you know if not already then very very soon Jews are
• 1:21:30
  minority and there are minority in an Arab state that's going to look like what exactly that will
• 1:21:36
  have what kind of constitution that will have what kind of minority rights that will have what kind
• 1:21:40
  of justice system I used to think a one state solution made things simpler it makes things so
• 1:21:48
  much more complicated we need to be fighting for a two state solution and to the extent that you're
• 1:21:53
  out there marching saying from the river to the sea you are impeding a two state solution you
• 1:21:58
  are hostile to Palestinian statehood you're a rube you're being played I mean I don't want to
• 1:22:07
  say I'm conspiratorial but Iran and Hamas they're not innocent actors here they're not standing on
• 1:22:16
  the sidelines going oh this is interesting I wonder what's happening they are active in propagating
• 1:22:22
  a message I'm not saying that you can't say that what Israel is doing in Gaza is barbaric
• 1:22:33
  just have some understanding of the context and have some proportionality in what you
• 1:22:39
  agitate for because you currently are on the same side as for example Bashar al-Assad in Syria
• 1:22:49
  who gave a speech the other day denouncing Israel and saying how dare they do what they're doing in
• 1:22:56
  Gaza I don't know if you know but in October Bashar al-Assad unleashed a wave of horror on the
• 1:23:06
  city of Idlib while everyone's attention was distracted by Gaza and these are the same people
• 1:23:14
  as I said ethnically culturally I mean you know his country literally borders the West Bank
• 1:23:19
  and here are two populations almost identical in culture and ethnicity being pounded by bombs
• 1:23:30
  was there any evidence of what was happening to the people in Idlib on your social media feed
• 1:23:36
  it was 10% of it about that was 5% of it about that how much of your social media feed was about
• 1:23:45
  Pakistan why would it be about Pakistan you say well let me do the job which amazingly the
• 1:23:53
  algorithms at meta which were written by 22 year old dudes skateboarding around Menlo Park in
• 1:24:01
  California unbelievably those algorithms which are tailored for the profit of the social media
• 1:24:07
  company did not down to show you because they thought you'd be bored by it and you'd swipe past it
• 1:24:12
  which you would have they may not have shown you that Pakistan is currently evicting 1.1 million
• 1:24:19
  Muslims back into the horror of Taliban ruled Afghanistan these are refugees these are people
• 1:24:26
  leading shitty lives already in Pakistan who will now lead even shitty lives in Afghanistan
• 1:24:32
  if they're not killed by the Taliban like how much of our attention should go to the Muslims who
• 1:24:40
  are being expropriated bullied demeaned threatened and killed in Central Asia versus the amount that
• 1:24:53
  we're allocating to Gaza I don't know but it strikes me as weird that it's 100% to Gaza
• 1:25:04
  don't be a sheep stop it
• 1:25:14
  well just say two things to end with one is it may seem morally obvious that a ceasefire
• 1:25:22
  is that we should at least agitate for and I think that's probably true I sometimes wonder
• 1:25:30
  whether Israel could have done something completely different Thomas Friedman wrote shortly after
• 1:25:35
  October 7th couldn't you do something like show that you're the humanitarian good guys by
• 1:25:40
  opening Gaza up creating a huge open air sort of mini territory north of Gaza where all the women
• 1:25:48
  and children could go and the old people and anyone else who's a male of military age can try
• 1:25:57
  to prove that they're peaceful and if they want to be peaceful and give up their weapons and come
• 1:26:02
  over they can come as well and then you just leave the rest of Gaza to Hamas and you wait a
• 1:26:12
  minute maybe you flood the tunnels so they can't hide in the tunnels and you starve them out
• 1:26:21
  when they get desperate enough they can put their weapons down and they can come out and they
• 1:26:25
  can face justice in Israeli court I love that idea would have been a lot better PR wise wouldn't it
• 1:26:34
  so do I feel like Israel has blundered like they're doing this the stupid way the way that the
• 1:26:44
  United States did after 9-11 you've all know a Harari the writer has a great line which is a little
• 1:26:54
  bee cannot destroy a China shop full of Chinese vases but a little bee can get inside the ear
• 1:27:07
  of a bull and then the bull can destroy the China shop for the bee
• 1:27:15
  so Hamas and al-Qaeda on 9-11 are the bee and America and Israel are the bull
• 1:27:23
  and the China shop is whoever is unfortunate enough to get in their way and I certainly have sympathy
• 1:27:28
  enormous sympathy for everyone in Palestine I have enormous sympathy for my friend in Beirut
• 1:27:34
  who's a Palestinian stateless refugee I don't have tremendous sympathy for people who cloak
• 1:27:43
  themselves in the Palestinian flag in western countries to gain a moral high ground to signal their
• 1:27:51
  virtue to feel like they're on the right side of history I mean just remember this is the point I
• 1:27:58
  made before but we have a laudable instinct in the west to trust our post-colonial guilt
• 1:28:05
  you know given the barbarism of colonization we we have a sort of heuristic running in the background
• 1:28:11
  which is you know the the poor shadow upon person of color is probably in the right and the
• 1:28:18
  person with lighter skin who is dressed in a fancy suit and speaks good English and went to a
• 1:28:24
  western university is probably the oppressor you know in this case it just doesn't work
• 1:28:30
  that simply it doesn't cleave off that way right now in this instant yes you take a snapshot of
• 1:28:36
  the world obviously the person in Gaza is being shot upon obviously the person in Israel is
• 1:28:40
  better off but wind the clock back a little zoom out a little see that there's this tiny minority
• 1:28:47
  of 16 million Jews surrounded by a world in which there are a billion Muslims terrifyingly high
• 1:28:53
  numbers of which hate them alarmingly high numbers of non-Muslims also seem to not be that crazy
• 1:28:59
  about Jews once you scratch the surface in moments like this and sure you can say that might be
• 1:29:06
  partly Jewish paranoia where we always think that everybody hates us but when you see zero protests
• 1:29:14
  about the Pakistan eviction of Muslims you see zero protests I mean how many times you marched
• 1:29:19
  about what Bashar al-Assad is doing to Arabs and Muslims zero times or did you march once in 2012
• 1:29:28
  when President Obama tried to do something about the Syrian humanitarian crisis after Assad used
• 1:29:36
  chemical weapons on his own people yeah I mean Yankee bombs are almost as bad as Jew bombs
• 1:29:45
  according to social media so that might have been one time when you marched in defense of the
• 1:29:49
  Syrians but I'd be surprised if you have ever since and this is not a game of what about
• 1:29:54
  ism of saying like oh we should absolve Israel because all of these other people are also doing bad
• 1:29:57
  things it's about us it's about us here in Australia in America it's about our cohesion as a society
• 1:30:05
  it's about our feeling that we are a demos together that we're creating a nation for ourselves for
• 1:30:11
  all communities here that's welcoming to everybody it's about us being mindful of our own blind
• 1:30:16
  spots of our own echo chambers and just turning the volume down a little on exhibitions of moral
• 1:30:23
  piety that could be misconstrued by the people who were trying to build this country with who
• 1:30:30
  were trying to live alongside if the Palestinian flag means peace and justice and harmony for all
• 1:30:38
  to you great don't fly the fucking thing it doesn't mean that to everybody it's about as stupid as
• 1:30:45
  the Americans marching into Baghdad and flying the American flag thinking that the Iraqis are going
• 1:30:49
  to see that as freedom they won't they don't it doesn't mean that to them semiotics matters symbolism
• 1:30:58
  matters words matter from the river to the sea that might mean something delightful to you it's not
• 1:31:06
  it doesn't sound delightful to everybody it sounds no more delightful to most Jews than when an
• 1:31:13
  Israeli right-winger says from the river to the sea Israel will control all of Palestinian territory
• 1:31:19
  sounds to a Palestinian it sounds fucking hostile so go on go on to social media and continue
• 1:31:29
  chanting continue marching hold up the banners by any means necessary from the river to the sea
• 1:31:39
  go on enlighten me about how bad bombing babies is I await your next
• 1:31:47
  scintillating eye-opening post about this moral calculus that I've somehow missed
• 1:31:53
  as if the number of bodybags is the only way for determining morality you know at the risk of
• 1:32:00
  unpacking a horrid uninventive cliche and breaching Godwin's law I should say as I've said I don't
• 1:32:12
  support the way that Israel has responded to this I'm not sure what other options there are I'm sure
• 1:32:17
  there are more humanitarian there were more humanitarian options however the end game has to be
• 1:32:22
  that jihadists don't rule territory neighboring Israel so whatever they do it wasn't possible to do
• 1:32:29
  it in a half-baked way and then have jihadists come back to power excuse me however I would just say
• 1:32:38
  that even though I'm extremely uncomfortable with the amount of carnage that's going on in Gaza
• 1:32:44
  I would also say that that is not prima facie evidence that Israel is in the wrong and that
• 1:32:51
  the garsens are in the right I mean of course it depends who you're talking about I remember one
• 1:32:57
  Israeli general said it's not us against them it's some of us and some of them against some of them
• 1:33:02
  and some of us so you know we have to be talking in ways that create the largest amount of overlap
• 1:33:09
  in the ven diagrams between the thems and the uss and a call to action from creatives for Palestine
• 1:33:14
  petition does the exact opposite posting in unnauanced ways about fucking Zionists being baby killers
• 1:33:22
  and having their whiteness wearing their whiteness on their sleeve and talking about their bloody
• 1:33:27
  exceptionalism all the time does not enhance the prospect of finding common ground between Arabs and
• 1:33:36
  Jews and going back to Godwin's law we don't decide the morality of world war two by counting up
• 1:33:47
  the number of babies who were killed in the firebombing of Dresden or the incineration of Nagasaki
• 1:33:52
  and putting that on a tally and comparing it to the number of babies killed by the other side
• 1:33:59
  you know there are bigger forces at play that the moral victory should not just go to whoever
• 1:34:06
  manages to make life as shitty as possible for their own civilians and get as many of them killed
• 1:34:13
  because I mean sometimes that actually is the strategy if you're living under a shitty
• 1:34:17
  g-hardest dictatorship as the poor people in Gaza have been then your government Hamas is literally
• 1:34:25
  in the game of making your life shitty and endangering your life and putting you in harm's way
• 1:34:30
  and placing you between Israeli rockets and them so it's a weird moral inversion to think that
• 1:34:38
  it's a sort of easy moral calculus to just see the baby being pulled out of the rubble and go I
• 1:34:43
  can't believe that Josh isn't saying something against this and writing letters to the foreign
• 1:34:47
  minister well maybe the foreign minister knows more than you do about the complexity of the situation
• 1:34:52
  a shot up and go back to posting about toothpaste
• 1:35:00
  a final thing that came to my attention was an article that was being favorably quoted by one
• 1:35:07
  of Australia's most prominent newsreaders and journalists she's retired now but it was her
• 1:35:16
  Twitter feed that brought it to my attention it's an article in Mondo Weiss which is news and opinion
• 1:35:21
  about Palestine is around in the United States called tearing down the wall and it's
• 1:35:26
  ostensibly a review of a new movie which I haven't seen yet called the Zone of Interest
• 1:35:30
  about a family of Nazis who are living right against the walls of Auschwitz
• 1:35:36
  and the journalist says the thought of course said in motion an obvious but taboo moral question
• 1:35:43
  in my mind about one of the most pressing matters of our time and this is the quote that the Australian
• 1:35:50
  journalist reposted is it understandable why people in Gaza similarly trapped behind a wall
• 1:35:57
  in a concentration camp and experiencing genocide would kill or take hostage people they found
• 1:36:03
  partying on the other side of the wall holding them in and then the writer turns their attention
• 1:36:10
  to the question of whether or not the people at the at the rave in southern israel who were
• 1:36:16
  mutilated and hunted by jihadists were actually blameless the writer says despite not being
• 1:36:22
  active duty soldiers on that day the ravers at the Nova music festival were hardly people living
• 1:36:28
  outside of politics who were partying on neutral land they were dancing on the site of raised
• 1:36:33
  villages partying about three miles from the apartheid wall and in closing forcibly removed
• 1:36:39
  Palestinians in the world's largest prison for the revelers who were Israeli citizens they're
• 1:36:44
  right to party with an expectation of peace where they were dancing cannot be separated from the
• 1:36:49
  necro political power the Israeli state holds over everyone in Gaza and the west bank not being in
• 1:36:55
  those spaces I find that strangely sort of compelling in an intuitive way at the same time as I
• 1:37:05
  find it macabre it is the logic of some have been laden or of the terrorist basically that like
• 1:37:13
  there is no such thing as a civilian because we are all beneficiaries I mean the people in the twin
• 1:37:17
  towers were people who worked in finance they were implicated in the American in the system of
• 1:37:22
  American capitalism they voted for leaders in a democracy who enacted all of the horrors that
• 1:37:28
  have some have been laden believes lay at the light the feet of American foreign policy from its
• 1:37:32
  alliance with Saudi Arabia to its invasion of foreign lands and the the dispoiling of holy sites
• 1:37:39
  by stationing infidel peacekeepers in holy lands and so on so like there's a kind of a network
• 1:37:46
  of complicity that you can always rationalize to justify terrorism but there's something
• 1:37:54
  deeply morally confused about the analogy with Auschwitz like let's let's try to imagine
• 1:38:03
  a history in which that analogy makes sense so for a start the Jews of Europe in the 1930s
• 1:38:15
  had been trying to drive the Germans into the sea ever since Germany was founded
• 1:38:22
  the Jews ran all the countries surrounding Germany and outnumbered Germans 50 fold
• 1:38:30
  and the Jews in Europe in the 30s were committed to the annihilation of the German state and they'd
• 1:38:35
  tried to pull that off repeatedly by invading Germany from the crowded seaside enclave where they
• 1:38:44
  lived let's call it Jew town and the Germans had pursued various peace processes they'd offered
• 1:38:52
  the Jews a state several times the offers weren't very good so the Jews hadn't taken it but the
• 1:38:57
  Jews had never counter offered and many Jewish leaders were quite openly committed to wiping the
• 1:39:04
  Germans out of the region and taking over Germany and they said so they said that they wanted the
• 1:39:10
  Jews to be free from the river to the sea from the Rhine to the Baltic and when the Germans
• 1:39:17
  withdrew from Jew town the seaside enclave and the Jews elected a radical terrorist group to
• 1:39:24
  power let's call the group hummus and the Germans reacted to the rise of hummus the radical
• 1:39:33
  terrorists by blockading Jew town the seaside enclave and building an iron dome missile defense
• 1:39:42
  system to defend innocent Germans from constant Jewish rocket attacks although of course the Germans
• 1:39:50
  tiny innocent as we just read and then when the peace process fell apart and the Jews living
• 1:39:57
  under hummus found themselves victims of their own overreach and stuck in squalid refugee camps
• 1:40:04
  oppressed what choice did they have but to escape this self-administered autonomous Jewish
• 1:40:15
  territory which the Jews had elected terrorists to run called Auschwitz and so then they had to
• 1:40:22
  attack an outdoor German youth and Deutsche Danzen boom boom party and who can blame who can blame the
• 1:40:30
  Jews for raping and slaughtering and beheading and mutilating and kidnapping hundreds bond hundreds
• 1:40:35
  of hundreds of German civilians in a frenzied fanatical delusional religious fever dream I mean
• 1:40:41
  wouldn't you do just the same if you were imprisoned in a fatuous analogy remarkable for its
• 1:40:50
  historical ignorance and moral confusion I mean I know I would try to break out
• 1:40:56
  let's all try to break out of such stupid comparisons altogether shall we?
• 1:41:03
  whether we are a retired journalist a creative who signed the call to action from creatives for Palestine
• 1:41:10
  a Jewish Zionist who wants no talk of a Palestinian state or just a passerby who is watching this
• 1:41:21
  madness and division unfold on social media so to my friends and colleagues who ask why I'm not
• 1:41:31
  posting about Gaza and marching for Gaza and signing the call to action for Palestine it's not
• 1:41:41
  because I don't care about Palestinians I do care about Palestinians Palestinians have been
• 1:41:49
  backed into a corner and betrayed by Israel and Lebanon and Jordan and Syria and Egypt and their
• 1:41:58
  own leaders and especially by Hamas I am skeptical that their long-term interests are served by
• 1:42:06
  jumping on to social media social justice bandwagans when they are upped on Instagram and I am
• 1:42:14
  certain that doing so in this case jumping on this bandwagon signing petitions feeling self-righteous
• 1:42:22
  posting about it every day on Instagram chanting chanting chanting so's division makes a long-term
• 1:42:33
  piece less likely betrays the Palestinian people as well as Jews empowers theocrats in Tehran
• 1:42:45
  empowers tyrants in Arab countries empowers skinned heads in the West empowers jihadists
• 1:42:51
  across the world jihadists whose number one victim is Muslims and undermines us as a society
• 1:43:00
  so enjoy your anti-Israel protest marches I look forward to your next scintillating Instagram
• 1:43:04
  story about how heartbroken you are by Zionist evils in Gaza so nuanced so brave see you next time