The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - Israel⧸Palestine： The History and What’s Real？ Opposing Views with Norman Finkelstein and David Brog

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, I did an Opposing Views on the Israel-Palestine conflict, coming up now,

00:00:05.580 where I speak to two people on each side of a controversial issue.

00:00:09.380 First off, I'm not the person to go to to get wisdom on this war.

00:00:14.060 My opinion shouldn't really matter to people because I don't have the historical knowledge needed

00:00:18.000 to have an intelligent perspective on what's going on.

00:00:20.780 I know what I've read and seen online, but I don't know how skewed that is in either direction

00:00:24.700 or how much of it is straight up propaganda.

00:00:27.900 Just because I have a platform, or anyone has a platform,

00:00:30.980 doesn't mean they're an expert on whatever the newest topic is.

00:00:34.560 All I really have to say is I don't trust the mainstream media on anything,

00:00:38.040 so it's hard to figure out what's going on.

00:00:40.240 A few days ago, a hospital was bombed in Gaza, and a lot of innocent people died.

00:00:44.960 Initially, a bunch of media articles came out saying it was Israel.

00:00:48.300 Then a bunch of media articles came out saying,

00:00:50.280 no, it was Hamas misfiring.

00:00:52.880 Literally impossible to know what's going on.

00:00:54.800 and if the media has lied to us about everything else for the last at minimum five years why are

00:01:00.560 they telling the truth now anyway either way the situation is horrible people are really hurting

00:01:06.600 and very angry all over the world i've experienced thousands of actual threats in the last week from

00:01:12.620 people telling me i want babies dead mostly from being my dad's daughter and not listening to his

00:01:18.740 actual perspective on the war this is happening even though i haven't commented on the topic at

00:01:23.600 all. If you don't comment, you get people telling you you need to comment because you have a

00:01:27.840 platform. If you do comment, you get told you don't know what you're talking about, and if you comment

00:01:32.740 and it's not what someone wants to hear, then you get told you should go to hell. Anyway, I have

00:01:38.060 friends on both sides of this, and all I know for sure is it's terribly sad. I don't usually know

00:01:43.840 much about the opposing views episodes I host, which is why I find them interesting, although I

00:01:47.760 had my suspicions for the COVID episode. I believe conversation and talking to people is the only way

00:01:53.180 to figure things out. And I wanted to know more about this horrible conflict. So I spoke with

00:01:58.180 David Brog, who gave his perspective on the Israel side. He spoke about the current and historical

00:02:03.280 events that led to this. And I spoke to Norman Finkelstein on the Palestinian side, where he

00:02:09.920 spoke about the same events from a different perspective. I'd recommend listening to both

00:02:14.160 if you're interested in this conflict. Norman's conversation is right after David's. Hope you

00:02:19.000 guys are okay. This has been an insane couple of weeks and I do hope it gets better soon. Although

00:02:25.240 that seems naively optimistic. Life's already so hard without multiple wars, political instability

00:02:32.480 and massive health and mental health crises basically worldwide. Obviously I'm grateful to

00:02:38.920 have never actually experienced war. So take it easy on yourselves and try not to burden yourself

00:02:43.580 with the news if you can't handle it. If the news is ruining your life and there's really nothing

00:02:48.440 you can do about what you're seeing anyway take a break get off of social media don't let it impact

00:02:54.120 your personal lives and the lives of your family especially if you can't do anything about it

00:02:58.240 anyway being educated about what's going on in the world is one thing but becoming angry and

00:03:03.360 hateful because of that and impacting the people around you and yourselves negatively isn't good

00:03:07.900 for anyone social media can be horrible that way and remember tiktok doesn't show you the truth it

00:03:15.040 shows you more of what you already watch, which is likely what horrifies you right now. You can

00:03:20.000 easily get into an algorithm and only see half of a story because it thinks that's what you want to

00:03:24.080 see. Anyway, here's the episode. Apologies for the lengthy intro. And apologies if I stumbled

00:03:30.440 through questions or didn't address things properly. I tried my best. Here's the episode.

00:03:36.340 David Brog, welcome to the podcast.

00:03:38.800 Thanks so much for having me, Kal. Appreciate it.

00:03:41.320 So, I think we should get started by, can you give me a brief background, can be brief, about what's led up to the war today, going back, I mean, as far as you see fit, whether that's 2000 years or back to the 40s, whatever you think explains it the best.

00:04:06.020 Sure, sure.

00:04:06.940 A lot of history here, but I would actually go back to the beginning of the Zionist project in the late 1800s.

00:04:18.320 Jews had been returning home to their homeland, to the little piece of God's green earth to which they are indigenous ever since the Roman exile began in 70 AD.

00:04:30.560 But that return accelerated with the birth of the Zionist movement in the late 1800s.

00:04:35.620 And then when the British conquered this territory from the Ottoman Empire, that return accelerated.

00:04:42.440 Early on, patterns were established that continue to this day.

00:04:47.940 And the pattern was as follows.

00:04:50.040 Jews wanting to build their country in their homeland to which their indigenous recognized that there were other people living in this land.

00:04:57.740 Arabic-speaking people living in this land who had not yet identified themselves as Arabs.

00:05:03.540 They had yet to develop a national consciousness, but that came in the early 1900s.

00:05:08.360 And then later, they developed a more narrow national consciousness.

00:05:12.980 They started calling themselves Palestinians.

00:05:15.360 But early on, from day one, the Zionists understood there were other people in this land.

00:05:19.640 And so they said, we need to find a way to live with them and accommodate them.

00:05:23.140 And so from early times, there was the Zionist movement said, we need to find a way to split the land. Two people claiming the same land with powerful claims. The only way to peace is to split the land and to have two homelands for two peoples.

00:05:40.420 from day one the arabs of palestine rejected that idea from day one they said no there are

00:05:51.020 not two valid claims to this land there's only one valid claim our claim and so we see this

00:05:57.220 pattern and and to summarize for ease of summary there are five points in history i like to point

00:06:02.180 to when an author was put on the table to split the land to create a jewish homeland

00:06:07.740 and a homeland for the Arabs of Palestine

00:06:11.260 who later called themselves Palestinians.

00:06:14.240 1937, 1947, 1967, 2000, and 2008

00:06:21.040 are the five main examples.

00:06:23.440 Each of these times, the Jews of Palestine,

00:06:26.580 later the Israelis, said, let's split the land.

00:06:30.220 The earliest offers were the Jews got 30%,

00:06:32.640 the Arabs got 70%.

00:06:34.380 And each of these times, the Arabs of Palestine

00:06:37.360 Later, the Palestinians rejected the offer. When they rejected the offer with words, that was a good day. Very often, they rejected the offer with violence and sustained violence that took thousands of victims.

00:06:51.280 The offer made in 2000 by Prime Minister Ehud Barak to Yasser Arafat or the PLO to split the land, have a Palestinian state side by side with the Jewish Israeli state, was rejected not only in word, but indeed.

00:07:05.860 It started this violent intifada in which the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, and we're going to get to Hamas in a second, competed with each other to see who could blow up more Israelis.

00:07:17.860 And this was the response to an unprecedented offer by Prime Minister Barak.

00:07:23.780 And so this is the pattern.

00:07:26.260 The Palestinians, since their birth as a people, as a separate people, have only had three leaders.

00:07:34.180 The first leader was the Mufti of Jerusalem, who was their leader before and during and after World War II.

00:07:40.900 The Muftis spent World War II in Berlin, sending out Nazi propaganda to the Arab world.

00:07:47.880 And his main mission while there was to plead with the Nazis to please take the final solution

00:07:52.200 to the Jewish communities of North Africa when they conquered North Africa,

00:07:56.620 and then hopefully to Palestine when they conquered Palestine.

00:08:00.140 After him was Yasser Arafat, an unrepentant terrorist whose final act was to reject peace

00:08:05.500 and to engage in a sustained terrorist campaign against the Israelis.

00:08:09.040 and now Mahmoud Abbas. None of them ever recognized the Jewish claim to the land.

00:08:16.280 Therefore, they have to refuse. They cannot acknowledge there was a Jewish temple in

00:08:20.520 Jerusalem. They won't acknowledge that Jewish connection. They cannot acknowledge that Jesus

00:08:25.280 was Jewish because that would be a Jewish connection. To this day, they insist that

00:08:30.180 Jews are just European interlopers in their land. They even reject the fact that most Jews in Israel

00:08:35.840 don't come from Europe. They are Jewish refugees from the Muslim Middle East who were thrown out

00:08:41.800 of their homes after the birth of Israel in 1948. So in this big background, Hamas comes to continue

00:08:48.620 that tradition. And Hamas comes to oppose violently any chance of peace in the region

00:08:55.920 and to fulfill their charter, which says very clearly at the outset of their charter,

00:09:01.560 It sets forth their goal. It says, Israel will exist until Islam obliterates it.

00:09:08.480 Later in the charter, it invokes a hadith, a saying of the prophet Muhammad calling for the

00:09:13.740 killing of all Jews. So this is part of this pattern of Jews looking for peace, hoping for

00:09:20.300 peace, willing to make tremendous compromises for peace, and rejectionists taking control of the

00:09:26.200 Palestinian side and ensuring that there is no peace, but rather a full rejection of the Jewish

00:09:31.720 claim, full rejection of Jewish rights, full rejection of a Jewish connection to this land,

00:09:36.760 which has led to so much tragedy and is leading now to one of the greatest spikes in murder and

00:09:43.660 death we've seen in the conflict. Okay. Well, that summed it up pretty succinctly.

00:09:48.720 Um, the Palestinian side is claiming that in 1947, the offer put forth, uh, offered Israelis

00:09:57.840 56% of this area.

00:10:00.100 Is that accurate?

00:10:02.020 Um, I, I would say my understanding was around 52%, however, 52, 56%, 70% of that was desert.

00:10:11.000 That was the Jewish 50, 50, 52, 56% was overwhelmingly desert and negative desert.

00:10:18.720 The Arab 50% was the beautiful highlands of Judea, Samaria, Galilee.

00:10:25.760 It was a very good offer.

00:10:27.780 Jerusalem, with its Jewish majority, Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since the mid-1800s, was not given to the Jewish state.

00:10:36.300 So this was an offer that could have ended the conflict.

00:10:40.820 But instead of accepting the offer, splitting the land, working together to develop their respective countries and the entire Middle East.

00:10:49.420 And by the way, throughout this period, there have been Palestinians who've wanted peace.

00:10:54.560 Throughout this period, there have been Palestinians who wanted compromise, who wanted to work together, build together, live together.

00:11:00.420 Unfortunately, none of them lasted very long when they got to positions of leadership because the Palestinian national movement has been dominated by three leaders who I mentioned.

00:11:09.100 all of whom were violent rejectionists who refused to compromise and refused to live in peace.

00:11:15.320 So when I speak about the Palestinians, I want to be clear. I'm talking about their leadership.

00:11:20.460 I personally know Palestinians I love. Palestinians who would love, they see what Israel's doing. They

00:11:27.380 see what Israel's doing now with the Gulf states to develop their economies, to create this new

00:11:31.420 high-tech startup Middle East. They want to be a part of that. But they are cursed by a leadership

00:11:37.660 that refuses to embrace the path of building a future together and constantly dredges up

00:11:43.300 complaints, mostly false about the past, to justify violence in the present.

00:11:52.140 Okay. And then for the current situation for Hamas, the Palestinian side is claiming that

00:12:02.460 they're freedom fighters, right? And that their story, if I can sum it up badly, is they're

00:12:07.220 fighting back against the, this is Israeli power that's slowly forcing them, them into smaller and

00:12:14.340 smaller areas. That's, that's what that side is, is saying. And I looked at the stats about how

00:12:21.740 people in America, who I don't think are very, like, I'm certainly not educated in this matter

00:12:26.440 at all. When it started, I had almost no background information about what was going on.

00:12:32.220 It was just, you know, chaos online and you're getting thrown different stories from both sides.

00:12:39.020 What is Gaza like for people who live there?

00:12:42.280 Because from what I've been told, Israel's kind of separated this area and landlocked it.

00:12:49.980 And it's horrible for people there.

00:12:51.900 You're out.

00:12:53.900 First of all, those people complaining about the map need to take some responsibility.

00:13:00.680 Palestinians rarely take responsibility for their mistakes, the decisions their leaders made.

00:13:07.240 They could have had a state that would have been 70% of this land in 1937.

00:13:11.300 They rejected it and rejected it violently, murdering hundreds, if not thousands of Jews.

00:13:18.200 Holocaust happens.

00:13:19.920 The United Nations gets involved, decides this time we're going to make another two-state offer.

00:13:24.440 This time we're going to give the Jews 50%, the Arabs 50%, although, like I said, the Jews 50%

00:13:29.340 was 70% desert. They could have said yes. Instead, they said no. And the very next day,

00:13:36.840 they launched a war of annihilation against the Jews of Palestine. They like to complain about

00:13:42.160 the Nakba, the disaster of 48. They never take responsibility for the fact that they were the

00:13:47.520 ones who rejected the offer of a state. And they launched a violent attack against their Jewish

00:13:52.580 neighbors the very next day. This was a war Israel did not want. This was a war Israel did not seek.

00:13:58.420 They wanted to just rescue the people in displaced persons camps in Europe and bring them into a state to build.

00:14:05.420 Instead, these people came off a boat, often wearing their Auschwitz uniforms.

00:14:11.020 It was the only clothes they had.

00:14:13.000 And then right to the front, a third of Israel's dead in that War of Independence were Holocaust survivors.

00:14:18.160 They didn't want the war to seek the war.

00:14:20.280 It was imposed upon them by Palestinian Arabs who rejected the offer of a state.

00:14:24.380 So again, they want to complain about the results of their old aggression. You know, I look back in history and I think, you know, Germany did terrible things in World War II. Japan did terrible things in World War II. But after the fact, after the United States defeated them, they never came back and blamed the United States for their suffering.

00:14:45.300 They at least had the decency to say this was the outcome of a war we chose and we started.

00:14:50.620 But the Palestinians will never admit to having made these terrible, tragic, violent errors

00:14:56.240 and instead like to blame the Israelis for the suffering that came from the wars they

00:15:02.000 chose and could have been avoided.

00:15:04.880 You know, just as an aside, during this period when Jews were returning to Israel under the

00:15:11.200 British mandate. The highest years of Jewish immigration were from 1914 to 1937. The highest

00:15:22.940 years of Jewish immigration when the British were letting Jews in. Jews were coming in by the

00:15:27.160 hundreds of thousands. Do you know what happened to the Arab population of Palestine during this

00:15:31.880 period? Did Jews have to kick them out to take their homes? Did Jews have to kick them out to

00:15:37.120 take their fields, did the Arab population plummet? It grew dramatically. It was a population

00:15:44.060 explosion. The population only exploded in those areas to which Jews were returning.

00:15:51.120 So if you look during this period, the population of Jaffa, to which Jews were returning,

00:15:55.360 grew by something like 120%. The Jewish population of Haifa, to which Jews were returning,

00:16:00.640 grew by something like 130% of the Arab population of these places.

00:16:07.520 The Arab population of cities to which Jews were not returned, like Bethlehem or Nablus,

00:16:13.120 grew by like 30% natural increase.

00:16:16.300 What was happening was the Jews were creating economic opportunities and Arabs were immigrating

00:16:21.560 into Palestine and migrating from the Arab areas to the Jewish areas.

00:16:26.920 So it was the beginning of what could have been a wonderful partnership, a wonderful partnership where Jews brought economic opportunity, Arabs streamed in, and together they built a modern, beautiful state.

00:16:38.880 It was a choice to reject this.

00:16:41.540 It was a choice to instead launch a war of annihilation.

00:16:45.280 And the people who made that choice need to step up and bear some of their responsibility.

00:16:49.780 By the way, in none of this, am I saying the Israelis are perfect?

00:16:54.220 The Israelis never made mistakes?

00:16:56.920 What I'm saying, though, is there is a clear pattern over the history of offer after offer, Jews saying yes, Arabs saying no, quite often violently.

00:17:07.100 So to get back to your asking about Gaza, Israel was attacked in 1948.

00:17:15.420 The Arabs rejected the state and attacked Israel.

00:17:19.100 The Palestinian Arabs started the war, but then the neighboring Arab countries joined in that war to destroy Israel.

00:17:25.900 And they announced the war of annihilation. We'll throw the Jews into the sea.

00:17:31.000 Egypt conquered some land in the British. What was the British mandate for Palestine? That wasn't Egypt. And that's called Gaza. They conquered the strip along the coast next to Egypt.

00:17:43.620 Jordan conquered land called the West Bank, Judea and Samaria.

00:17:47.880 They didn't create a Palestinian state in this land.

00:17:51.440 They conquered it.

00:17:52.300 They annexed it.

00:17:53.420 Egypt stayed in Gaza and Jordan stayed in the West Bank.

00:17:57.280 When they attacked Israel again in 1967, in an effort to destroy Israel again in 1967,

00:18:05.340 Israel once again defended itself.

00:18:07.760 And in this war of self-defense, Israel took Gaza and Israel took the West Bank.

00:18:11.760 And then there's question emerged of what do we do with these territories?

00:18:16.500 In 1967, the Palestinians, for the first time, a majority of them started to feel that they

00:18:24.400 weren't just members of the larger Arab nation that spans from Morocco to Iraq.

00:18:29.880 They started to feel that they were a separate people and they started to call themselves

00:18:33.680 Palestinians.

00:18:34.940 So after Israel liberated this land from Jordan and Egypt in 1967, and we're trying to debate

00:18:40.560 what to do with it.

00:18:41.760 The Israeli cabinet actually split. Half the Israeli cabinet said, we should give the West

00:18:47.140 Bank back to Jordan in exchange for peace. But another half said, no, no, let's not give it to

00:18:53.320 Jordan. Let's give it to the Arabs who actually live there, who are starting to call themselves

00:18:57.880 Palestinians. And they actually found Palestinians living in the land who said, sure, we would like

00:19:03.240 to be independent. We'll take your offer of independence. And that's when the Arab League

00:19:08.300 met in Khartoum, Sudan, and issued its infamous three no's, no peace with Israel, no negotiation

00:19:14.560 with Israel, no recognition of Israel. Those same Palestinian interlocutors got back to Israel and

00:19:20.720 said, the Arab League has spoken. We can't talk to you. We'll be killed. So Israel stayed in control

00:19:26.360 of this land. And Israel stayed in control of this land until another peace effort was made

00:19:31.400 in 2000, where they brought the Palestinian authority in and gave them autonomy in the West

00:19:37.160 Bank and autonomy in Gaza. And the Palestinian Authority ruled in Gaza until Hamas staged a

00:19:42.420 bloody coup and Hamas took it over. And so that's more or less the story of Gaza and how we have

00:19:49.640 the situation today, where you have these two pieces of land that were proposed as a Palestinian

00:19:54.940 state that could have been a Palestinian state, but it was rejected by the Palestinians repeatedly.

00:20:00.260 So now the Palestinian Authority rules the West Bank's autonomy, and Hamas rules Gaza completely.

00:20:08.640 They could have turned it into a Singapore of the Middle East.

00:20:11.900 Israel was ready to work with them, build with them, construct with them.

00:20:16.240 They chose instead to turn it into a large terror base.

00:20:19.500 Their choice, like every other bad choice, the Palestinian leadership has made.

00:20:26.320 What a mess.

00:20:27.400 So, I've heard online that the reason that Israel's bombing civilian areas like hospitals, etc., is because Hamas is actually hiding weapons in these areas.

00:20:42.920 Is that true?

00:20:44.680 Yeah.

00:20:46.220 Hamas has a strategy.

00:20:49.040 Hamas doesn't think it can defeat Israel militarily.

00:20:52.260 It wants to defeat Israel in the court of international opinion.

00:20:55.880 So it is a very clear strategy to attack Israel and provoke a response.

00:21:01.820 But then Hamas chooses to operate out of fire missiles, out of hide arms within civilian areas.

00:21:09.820 So double war crime.

00:21:11.500 When they attack Israeli civilians with their missiles or when they massacre over a thousand like they just did, clear war crime.

00:21:19.460 But then when they hide in civilian areas and operate out of civilian areas, it's another war crime.

00:21:25.740 So Israel has three choices.

00:21:28.200 When Hamas attacks them like this, it has to do what every other country on earth would do in an attack like this.

00:21:35.180 It has to defend its citizens.

00:21:37.340 So it has three choices.

00:21:39.640 One, one extreme, it could say, oh, no, Hamas is smart.

00:21:45.320 They're operating out of civilian areas.

00:21:47.400 If we go in and try to pinpoint and take out Hamas, we may harm civilians, and we don't want to harm civilians.

00:21:52.680 Therefore, well played, Hamas. Fire as many rockets at us as you want. Murder as many of

00:21:59.200 our civilians as you want. Our hands are tied because we don't want to harm civilians. That's

00:22:03.100 one option. It's an unacceptable option. No country on the face of the earth will let a

00:22:08.320 terrorist organization murder its civilians and not fight back. That's option one. Option three,

00:22:13.840 let's go to the other extreme. Chechnya, Russia. Israel has the ability to wipe out every single

00:22:20.840 building and every single human being in Gaza, just destroy it. Pound it into the Stone Age,

00:22:26.780 teach them a lesson. That's what Russia did in Grozny to stop the Chechen rebellion.

00:22:32.980 Unacceptable if you care about international law and human rights. You are not allowed to

00:22:38.400 target civilians. That's what separates the Hamas terrorists, who intentionally, gleefully target

00:22:44.700 civilians, from a moral army that targets the terrorists. You're not allowed to target civilians.

00:22:50.160 You're not allowed to indiscriminately bomb, and Israel refuses to do that.

00:22:54.800 So it leaves Israel with the middle option, choice number two, and this is how Israel

00:22:58.180 behaved in every one of its wars up till today, and this is how Israel will behave in this

00:23:03.760 war, and that is they will do everything possible to go after the terrorists of Hamas while

00:23:09.740 protecting the innocent Palestinian civilians of Gaza.

00:23:13.260 This means giving warnings like they've been doing to three areas into which the Israeli

00:23:17.620 army will enter.

00:23:18.900 This means when they want to bomb a specific building, calling everyone in that building

00:23:22.680 and saying, please leave, we're coming.

00:23:25.940 This means if you know that some people have not left the building, they do what's called

00:23:29.380 roof knocking.

00:23:30.060 They drop a bomb on the roof that makes a very loud, scary sound, but doesn't kill anyone

00:23:34.680 to let everyone know we're serious, we're coming.

00:23:37.820 And then when they see that all the civilians have left, they will destroy the building.

00:23:41.860 They will do everything.

00:23:42.780 And by the way, in doing this, they give up the element of surprise.

00:23:45.340 in doing this, in protecting Palestinian civilians, Israel puts its own civilians at risk.

00:23:50.800 Because what happens when you drop leaflets saying we're coming? What happens when you

00:23:54.200 call a building saying we're coming? What happens when you drop that knock on the roof?

00:23:58.560 The civilians know to flee, but so too do the terrorists. And they do flee. And they do take

00:24:03.660 missiles with them. And they live to fight another day. And that means more missiles will be fired

00:24:08.740 on Israel, more attacks will be made against Israel. Every time Israel does this, it knows

00:24:13.040 it's taking a risk on its own civilians. But it does this because it doesn't want to harm

00:24:18.900 innocent Palestinian civilians. It goes to enormous lengths to avoid Palestinian civilian

00:24:24.520 deaths. But it can't go so far as to say we're not going to fight Hamas. So if Hamas attacks us,

00:24:30.940 and it attacks us from civilian areas and fires from civilian areas, we'll do our best.

00:24:36.560 But if there are civilian deaths, that is on Hamas and its double war crime of attacking

00:24:42.000 Israeli civilians from Palestinian civilian areas.

00:24:45.540 I want to quote a friend of mine, Richard Kemp, he was the British commander of British

00:24:50.180 forces in Afghanistan, who witnessed a lot of this, studied it, and he said, in the history

00:24:54.960 of warfare, there has never been an army as moral as Israel's army that goes to greater

00:25:01.020 lengths than Israel's army to protect innocent civilians on the other side.

00:25:06.020 It's really quite amazing what Israel does and has done to avoid the civilian deaths.

00:25:10.760 But they happen. They will happen, I'm afraid, in this conflict. And everyone will be quick to blame Israel and ignore the provocation, the intentional slaughter, rape, decapitation of over 1,200 Israelis by Hamas.

00:25:29.940 and they'll be quick to overlook the fact that Hamas is now operating from civilian areas,

00:25:35.920 hiding in civilian areas. And when Israel warns civilians to leave North Gaza, Hamas is telling

00:25:40.620 them not to leave. Hamas does not want them to leave. Hamas wants them to be in harm's way

00:25:45.440 because they know when civilians are killed, they'll be able, with no shame, to claim this

00:25:52.720 is Israel's fault. And two-thirds of the world will believe them and never bother to look into

00:25:58.160 who started this and who's causing this. None of this would have happened if Hamas didn't wake up

00:26:04.080 a week ago and say, hey, let's go into Israel and start slaughtering kids at a music festival,

00:26:10.460 going door to door in communities and shooting women, children, their husbands. They chose this

00:26:16.920 war. Israel has no option but to respond. They'll be careful. They'll be as careful as possible,

00:26:22.920 but there will be civilian deaths and that's on the moss okay okay so just one follow-up for that

00:26:30.180 area so uh what i've read is that and like i said i don't trust anything i read online just

00:26:39.720 generally speaking because everybody has an opinion and they're all different so it's so

00:26:44.860 hard to to understand what's going on especially if you don't have a historical firsthand perspective

00:26:51.500 um when when Israel gives out warnings to say hey we're going after this one building or this

00:26:57.820 is where we're going to go what I've read uh two things one that Hamas will say no stay there

00:27:04.660 um and two that the people in there actually have no place to go to because there's a lack

00:27:12.540 of bomb shelters etc in that area so what do you think about that let's be clear Hamas is

00:27:20.380 filled with bomb shelters, filled with a network of safe tunnels underground.

00:27:24.940 Unfortunately, Hamas uses that for itself. It doesn't give its

00:27:28.440 civilians access to that. Israel has

00:27:32.360 always made safe corridors, like now. Safe corridor,

00:27:36.340 here are the hours when you can leave on the safe corridor, and here are times

00:27:40.380 when you can go. Hamas is small, Hamas is

00:27:44.280 narrow, but there's still plenty of places to go if your building is being

00:27:48.300 targeted. It's a tragedy, right? If I were a Palestinian living in a building and Hamas moved

00:27:55.700 into my building and started firing missiles from my building and started hiding missiles in my

00:27:59.660 building or using it as a command center, I'd be very upset. I feel for people, innocent people

00:28:08.080 caught in this situation. But it doesn't mean that it's Israel's fault. It's Hamas's fault that

00:28:17.180 And it chose to operate from a civilian building and did so because it wants the Palestinian deaths, because it knows it will earn the sympathy of the world with the Palestinian deaths, because it knows the world is never going to bother to look at who started it and will never bother to look at how well Israel conducts its counterterrorism operations compared to Britain and the United States, let alone compared to a monster like Russia.

00:28:39.940 And so it creates these tragedies.

00:28:43.260 It wants these tragedies.

00:28:46.040 Yeah.

00:28:46.140 So that makes sense.

00:28:47.760 And if someone doesn't believe that, well, what else did Hamas hope to accomplish when it sent over 1,500 troops, Hamas terrorists across the border with explicit instructions to slaughter Israeli civilians?

00:29:01.100 What else did they want to accomplish other than to force Israel to respond?

00:29:06.560 Was there some other military objective there?

00:29:09.980 There was no valid military objection.

00:29:11.560 By the way, I should add, Israel abides by the international law of war. Hamas does. You're not allowed to target civilians. Hamas, that's all they do is target civilians. But when you defend yourself, you are allowed to target military targets, legitimate military targets, even if there will be civilian casualties.

00:29:35.820 Everyone talks about proportionality. Oh, Israel's response has to be proportional. The only time the international law of war speaks of proportionality is to say that in any operation you conduct, the number of civilians killed has to be proportional to, not in excess of, your legitimate military expectation of that operation. That's what it says. These are the international rules of law.

00:30:00.080 If Israel ever targeted a civilian with the goal of killing a civilian, it would be in

00:30:05.940 violation of international law.

00:30:07.520 It would be a terrorist like Hamas, and people like me would never defend it.

00:30:13.360 But Israel doesn't do that.

00:30:15.120 Israel only targets military targets, legitimate military targets.

00:30:20.200 And in the process, there are sometimes civilian casualties.

00:30:23.380 The international laws of war allow for that, recognize that, permit that.

00:30:27.460 Otherwise, you'd never be able to defend yourself from a terrorist entity like Hamas.

00:30:33.340 Okay. I mean, all that's pretty clear.

00:30:37.520 One of the questions I had on here is, were Israel's security measures,

00:30:43.780 such as the West Bank barrier and its blockade on Gaza, justified?

00:30:48.020 Because part of what I'm hearing in the news is, so there's been this blockade on Gaza,

00:30:52.620 and it's in order to protect Israeli citizens from Hamas,

00:30:56.200 But it's isolating all the people in Gaza and creating this, you know, two million person resentment pile that's just building up and, I mean, has exploded recently.

00:31:08.260 Was there, was this like, that was the only thing, that was the only option, basically?

00:31:14.260 Yeah.

00:31:14.780 They love to confuse cause and effect.

00:31:17.960 And so Israel's blockade of Gaza was not the cause of Hamas terrorism.

00:31:24.780 It was the effect of Hamas terrorism.

00:31:27.400 There was no blockade until Hamas took over Gaza and started using Gaza to attack Israel

00:31:32.660 and fire missiles into Israel.

00:31:34.380 And at that point, Israel did what it is allowed to do under international law, what any other

00:31:38.680 country on God's green earth would do.

00:31:40.680 It said, you know, we're not so sure we want to let you get material to build more of these

00:31:44.840 weapons and bombs.

00:31:46.140 And they put a blockade around it.

00:31:47.640 People criticize Israel's security fence around the West Bank.

00:31:50.900 They say this is what causes unhappiness in the West Bank.

00:31:53.900 It wasn't the cause of terrorism and unhappiness. It was a response to terrorism. The border between Israel and the West Bank was more open than the border between the United States and Canada. I used to spend a lot of time on an Israeli shop right on the border. You wouldn't even know. You were now in an Arab village, Abla, right across in the West Bank. There was no border.

00:32:16.360 And Palestinians came in by the hundreds of thousands to work in Israel.

00:32:20.180 Israelis went into the Palestinian territories to shop, to eat at restaurants, to go to the

00:32:25.800 dentists, which were less expensive than the West Bank.

00:32:28.420 They used to go to Gaza too for dentists, which were less expensive.

00:32:31.440 There was no fence until Arafat rejected Ehud Barak's offer of a Palestinian state in the

00:32:37.780 West Bank.

00:32:38.240 Did so violently with the Second Intifada.

00:32:41.500 Suicide bombers came in and blew up over a thousand Israelis.

00:32:45.840 And then finally, belatedly, Israel said, gee, we might need to do something to stop these suicide bombers from coming in and blowing up our civilians.

00:32:54.340 Then they built the fence.

00:32:56.200 So it's stupendous, the gall of trying to crime victim and trying to claim that what Israel was forced to do by your terrorism is the cause of your terrorism.

00:33:09.960 Again, the tragedy here, Michaela, is that none of this had to be.

00:33:15.660 There could have been a very different Middle East.

00:33:17.720 And what we see emerging now through the Abraham Accords with Israel and the Gulf states and the investment and the cooperation, that could have been from day one.

00:33:27.740 Back in the day when hundreds of thousands of Arabs were streaming into Palestine to be closer to Jewish cities with Jewish economic opportunities, it was a win-win.

00:33:38.680 Jewish businesses, Arab labor, Arab enterprise, Jewish investors, it all could have created

00:33:46.040 this wonderful new country.

00:33:47.980 But instead, Palestinians got leaders determined to reject the Jewish presence, reject peace

00:33:55.440 with the Jews, reject partnership with the Jews, and insist instead on wars of annihilation

00:34:00.620 and created this new reality.

00:34:02.540 And to this very day, Gaza used to have an open border with Israel too.

00:34:07.580 Hundreds of thousands of Gazans used to work in Israel, and there were better wages in

00:34:11.180 Israel than Gaza.

00:34:12.800 Israelis used to go into Gaza all the time, and it only stopped tragically, not because

00:34:18.800 Israel wanted a wall, not because Israel wanted a barrier, but because Hamas' terror forced

00:34:24.240 Israel's hand.

00:34:25.980 And by the way, something else I'll add, when I speak about Palestinian terror, I don't

00:34:31.920 call the victims Jews like many people do.

00:34:34.700 Yeah.

00:34:35.080 95% are Jews.

00:34:36.740 but they're Israelis. You know, during the second intifada, when Arafat rejected Barack's offer

00:34:41.420 for a Palestinian state, one of the restaurants they blew up was a restaurant in Haifa. Haifa

00:34:47.080 is a mixed Arab Jewish city. It was one of these cities that flourished with Arab immigration

00:34:51.940 until Palestinian leaders rejected the Jewish state and attacked it in 1947.

00:34:59.820 So there's still a mixed city, still a lot of Arabs and Jews. And there's a restaurant there

00:35:03.420 known for the fact that it's a mixed restaurant. Jews and Arabs like to get together and eat

00:35:07.740 hummus and falafel there. Palestinian terrorists blew that restaurant up during the Second Intifada

00:35:13.280 and they targeted it on purpose because it represents everything they're against. It

00:35:16.380 represents tolerance, coexistence, and a future together. One of the people killed by Hamas

00:35:22.400 rocket fire at Jerusalem two days ago, it fell short and hit the Arab city of Abu Ghosh. Abu Ghosh

00:35:28.800 always had wonderful relationships with Jewish leaders. It stayed there. It's a big, thriving

00:35:34.260 Arab city next to Jerusalem. Arab resident of Abu Ghosh, his whole life ahead of him,

00:35:41.200 was just killed by Palestinian rocket fire. One of the people they slaughtered the other day

00:35:46.080 was an Arab ambulance worker who went with his colleagues in the ambulance squad

00:35:50.880 to take care of all the injured at the music festival. They slaughtered him too.

00:35:56.520 So the people killed are not just Jews. I think it would be a lot easier for the world that these were just Jews. I'm sorry, world. They're not just Jews. They're also Arab Muslims and Arab Christians, all people who have decided on a different path than Hamas, people who want to live together, work together, thrive together, build together.

00:36:16.040 Hamas has chosen a different way. Why do we give them a veto? Why do we give them our sympathy?

00:36:21.420 Why do we let their disgusting tactics work? Why do we let them shift the blame to Israel?

00:36:26.540 They're the ones who have rejected peace. They're the ones who rejected statehood. They're the ones

00:36:30.460 who rejected coexistence. They should bear the blame. But the world is so quick to listen to

00:36:36.300 their cries and buy the nonsense that the only reason they're targeting Israel is because Israel

00:36:43.400 took some action. I will remind you what the Hamas charter says. The Hamas charter, their

00:36:49.420 founding document says Israel will exist until Islam will obliterate it. They don't want a two

00:36:54.940 state solution. They want to destroy Israel. And it cites the Hadith, the saying of the Prophet

00:36:59.800 Muhammad calling for Muslims to kill all Jews. It has nothing to do with the blockade Israel

00:37:07.160 imposed after Hamas started its terror campaign. The terror campaign was the point behind Hamas

00:37:12.580 in the first place.

00:37:15.540 And, you know,

00:37:16.460 it's not just Jews who suffer.

00:37:18.240 It is peace-loving Arabs

00:37:19.460 who suffer on both sides of that law.

00:37:23.060 So does this all kind of chalk up

00:37:25.420 to just a religious war

00:37:28.120 and it's just manifested

00:37:29.520 in this way now?

00:37:31.160 Like, is it a fundamental disagreement

00:37:32.680 between certain,

00:37:34.260 not all Muslims,

00:37:35.220 but certain Muslims?

00:37:37.820 Well, yeah,

00:37:38.700 I think that's fair to say

00:37:40.740 The Palestinian national movement started as a secular movement.

00:37:46.060 It was a secular nationalist movement under Yasser Arafat that embraced terrorism as a tactic.

00:37:52.580 So rejectionism, we reject that Jews have any right to be in their ancestral homeland.

00:37:57.960 Jews among all people on earth do not have the right to self-determination.

00:38:03.480 And our tactic in rejecting Jewish self-determination will be terrorism.

00:38:07.800 And they pioneered terrorism, the intentional targeting and murder of innocent civilians. And that was their goal. And that's how they proceeded until they found rivals from Islamic movements. And that main rival is Hamas.

00:38:26.480 And Hamas opposes this from a more Islamic perspective, an extreme Islamic perspective.

00:38:31.900 A lot of my Muslim friends are very adamant.

00:38:34.600 Don't you dare let them take my Islam.

00:38:37.120 Don't you dare let them discredit my Islam.

00:38:40.240 My Islam is not a religion that celebrates decapitating babies and raping women.

00:38:46.780 Don't let them steal my Islam.

00:38:48.160 But this is what they do in the name of Islam, Hamas.

00:38:52.360 And so today, I would argue the dominant strain of rejectionism, the dominant strain of terror within the Palestinian camp is from this religious perspective.

00:39:04.260 Again, it's an abuse of Islam, much like ISIS was an abuse of Islam, much like the mullahs in Iran are abuse of Islam.

00:39:12.080 This is not the interpretation of Islam that many Muslims have.

00:39:16.240 But unfortunately, there are many who share it, many who embrace it, many who will tilt for it, and many who will happily die for it.

00:39:26.220 I think we should touch briefly on the Abraham Accords, because you mentioned them earlier, and I think they're important.

00:39:32.600 And I think a lot of Americans don't even know that they exist or that they were going to exist.

00:39:38.300 Could you describe what they are, what their goal was, and whether or not that's even a possibility now?

00:39:44.440 Yeah. So, you know, like I was saying before, when the Jews, you know, there were waves of return throughout history. Jews never, you know, the Romans exiled the Jews in 70 AD, but it wasn't a very successful exile. There were always Jews living there.

00:40:01.480 They were probably the majority until 500, the plurality until 1,000.

00:40:06.780 And whenever local rulers would let Jews come back, they streamed back.

00:40:12.060 So when Jews started streaming back in this latest wave, they reached out to the king of Jordan, King Abdullah, the grandfather of the current king.

00:40:20.400 And they spoke about, hey, we Jews want to build our homeland and our ancestral home.

00:40:25.440 We're Jewish nationalists who want to build a home here.

00:40:28.240 You're an Arab nationalist.

00:40:29.320 do you want to build an Arab homeland in your country? Don't you think we should do this

00:40:33.320 together? Don't you think together we can build something even better? And King Abdullah at first

00:40:40.200 embraced that. And there was lots of talk about together building this new Middle East. And then

00:40:44.780 there was a violent rejection of that by Palestinian leaders. And King Abdullah turned

00:40:50.440 his back on that. And this idea of Jews and Arabs joining hands to build a new Middle East was put

00:40:56.660 on ice. It was always the dream of the early Zionists. It was put on ice through war after

00:41:03.560 war after war of annihilation until the Abraham Accords. And the Abraham Accords was sort of the

00:41:09.220 taking out of the freezer, this original dream. It was a beautiful dream where Arabs and Jews

00:41:14.760 look at each other and say, we're both the children of Abraham. You know, we're cousins,

00:41:19.160 really. Arabic and Hebrew are similar Semitic languages. Jews and Arabs are similar Semitic

00:41:24.700 people. Here we are, Jews back in the Middle East to which we're indigenous, Arabs having achieved

00:41:30.060 independence in the Middle East. Let's do this together. Let's build this together. Let's be

00:41:35.460 the brothers we were meant to be. Let's be the kindred spirits we were meant to be.

00:41:39.840 And so the Abraham, of course, was this beautiful realization of this ancient Zionist dream.

00:41:44.900 And it was going so well with the United Arab Emirates, with Bahrain, Morocco.

00:41:50.000 All of a sudden, they were getting together, trying to solve the region's problems. Can we

00:41:54.080 solve the problem of too little water in the region? Can we solve the problem of too few jobs

00:42:00.800 in parts of the region? Can we build companies together, infrastructure together? And it was

00:42:06.240 going so well, and it was pointing the way towards the new Middle East, but there's a problem with

00:42:10.180 that new Middle East. There are those in the region who don't want to see peace, who don't

00:42:15.540 want to see cooperation, who don't want to see coexistence, and they are led by Iran.

00:42:19.580 I haven't mentioned Iran up till now, but we need to understand Hamas is an Iran client.

00:42:25.240 Hezbollah is an Iran client.

00:42:26.940 They are funded by Iran, trained by Iran, and directed by Iran.

00:42:30.860 Iran is afraid of peace in the region.

00:42:32.640 It wants to destroy Israel, and it wants to destroy Saudi Arabia, and it wants to destroy

00:42:37.860 the Emirates.

00:42:38.660 And so when it saw this block forming, this peace block with the potential for all this

00:42:43.160 economic development and everything that came with it, it decided it needed to stop it.

00:42:48.800 And if you ask me, why did they decide to slaughter over a thousand Israelis last week? It was to stop this peace process once again. And I'm so sad to say that it seems to have had that intended effect.

00:43:04.440 Before, two weeks ago, peace with Saudi Arabia was only a matter of months, if not weeks. It was going to happen and transform the region. Saudi Arabia announced yesterday it's putting the peace on hold.

00:43:18.800 They knew what they were doing. They knew if they could provoke Israel to respond, if they could show Palestinian dead, it would intimidate Saudi Arabia into abandoning peace, and it might even show the Abraham Accords.

00:43:30.860 So once again, in our day, the same extremists that stopped peace in 37, that stopped peace in 47, that stopped peace in 67, that stopped peace in 2000, that stopped peace in 2008, have once again stopped peace in 2023.

00:43:47.920 And they do it through the same means each and every time, by targeting civilians, by slaughtering civilians, by murdering civilians.

00:43:54.720 It's very sad to see because a lot of us saw a little light at the end of the tunnel of the Abraham Accords.

00:44:02.280 One thing I want to note, too, this investment didn't just go outside.

00:44:07.880 There's an entrepreneur who started investing a lot of money in building startups with Palestinian partners in Ramallah.

00:44:16.760 And the goal is to turn Ramallah, which is the capital of the Palestinian Authority, Moes Bank, into a little Tel Aviv.

00:44:22.600 And this Israeli entrepreneur was investing a lot of time and effort to help Palestinian entrepreneurs do this.

00:44:29.460 So maybe finally the Palestinians would give up these old grievances that are mostly made up anyway, and clinging to the past and start looking towards the future and build it.

00:44:40.380 His daughter was just murdered at that music festival, this entrepreneur.

00:44:44.360 Oh, man.

00:44:45.160 Visions clash.

00:44:46.480 So, Michaela, you're going to hear a lot of people saying, well, there's two sides here. Israel blockaded Gaza. Israel killed civilians. True, Israel blockaded Gaza. But again, why did it do it? Why? They wouldn't have done it if Hamas wouldn't have used Gaza to hit Israel with terror.

00:45:11.740 Israel does kill civilians.

00:45:12.960 Why?

00:45:14.400 Because Israel is provoked to defending itself by Hamas rakah fire or by Hamas slaughters.

00:45:21.080 And though it is better than any other army on the face of the earth at targeting the

00:45:25.340 guilty and sparing the innocent, it cannot do it perfectly when Hamas hides among the

00:45:29.600 innocent.

00:45:30.620 So these things are true, but the context is key.

00:45:33.320 And I will tell you this.

00:45:34.260 I am confident that anyone who comes with a complaint about Israel, if you peel back,

00:45:38.860 If you look behind it, you'll find that the driving force behind all of this is the tragic leadership of the Palestinians who are bent on stopping peace any way possible, including primarily the slaughter of civilians called terrorists.

00:45:55.540 Do you think the Abraham Accords, so that was something that was done under the Trump administration.

00:46:00.240 So years ago, right, that this was kind of organized.

00:46:02.980 Is there a reason that it wasn't finalized sooner?

00:46:07.920 seems a little urgent. Well, I think for years, Arabs were hostage, just like the Arabs of

00:46:18.920 Palestine. Daz and West Bank are hostage to this Palestinian leadership that's really not

00:46:24.040 interested in peace and compromise. The Arab world was hostage to them too. They were afraid

00:46:29.680 to make peace with Israel when they could be accused of having betrayed or abandoned the

00:46:34.360 Palestinian cause. But after time, after the Palestinians kept rejecting offers,

00:46:41.180 after the Palestinians kept resorting to terror, to intentionally slaughtering innocents,

00:46:48.320 Palestinian civilians, many of them got tired of their leadership and many leaders of the Arab

00:46:52.420 world got tired and said, we're no longer going to be held hostage to this Palestinian leadership

00:46:57.340 that has no interest in peace and no interest in coexistence. And so finally it took a push.

00:47:03.400 But finally, they said, yeah, we are willing to make peace with Israel.

00:47:06.380 We are willing to join hands with Israel because ultimately governments are responsible to

00:47:11.540 their own people and their safety and their prosperity.

00:47:14.600 And the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and Morocco and Sudan all said, you know what?

00:47:19.980 This development will help create economic opportunity for our citizens.

00:47:24.860 And this alliance will create defense for our citizens.

00:47:27.840 And then the final piece, of course, is Iran.

00:47:29.660 Iran looms out there as a power bent on the destruction of Israel and the dominance, Shiite dominance of Sunni kingdoms like Saudi Arabia and like the United Arab Emirates.

00:47:43.320 And finally, it was that fear of Iran that helped them overcome any fear of being accused of abandoning the Palestinians to say, no, we're going to act now to defend our people and ensure the prosperity of our people, and we're going to move forward.

00:47:57.600 Iran is pulling the strings behind all this, which once again, those who get too called up in the idea that somehow this is a response to some Israeli grievance, they're missing the big picture.

00:48:09.440 The only grievance Iran has with Israel is its very existence.

00:48:13.680 And they don't mince words.

00:48:15.120 They say it constantly.

00:48:16.300 We will wipe Israel off the mat.

00:48:18.380 We will destroy Israel.

00:48:19.960 We will obliterate Israel.

00:48:21.180 And they need it.

00:48:21.860 and so they're the ones who armed Hamas, trained Hamas, and gave Hamas this order.

00:48:27.780 If war breaks out with Hezbollah in the north, it won't be because of any grievance on the border

00:48:32.140 with Lebanon. Israel took out every last civilian, soldier, and any presence in Gaza back in 2005.

00:48:41.780 Israel withdrew every last trip from Lebanon before that. This is not anything to do with

00:48:48.180 any made-up grievance. This is a direct order

00:48:50.260 from Iran as an overriding

00:48:52.140 geostrategic goal

00:48:54.140 of dominating the region and destroying

00:48:56.320 Israel.

00:48:59.460 Okay.

00:49:00.600 Like I say, I have a lot of dear

00:49:02.240 Palestinian friends who suffer

00:49:04.300 under Hamas and who suffer

00:49:06.160 under the PA and would like

00:49:08.280 to have different Palestinian leadership.

00:49:10.180 It makes their blood boil

00:49:11.740 when these people

00:49:13.580 don't sit in Gaza and suffer.

00:49:15.920 sit outside in some Western academic institution and rationalize the leadership that has ruined

00:49:24.220 their lives. Nothing makes them angrier than some apologist getting on the show and saying,

00:49:29.120 oh, you have to understand this is Israel's fault. So these people are out there, but we all need to

00:49:34.820 think critically. Everyone needs to think critically about everything I've said. Everyone

00:49:38.580 needs to think critically about everything people from the other side say. But the guarantee I make

00:49:43.160 to people is if you study this history if you take the time and learn this history you will

00:49:47.700 see this pattern emerge and you'll find that every excuse every rationalization given for the murder

00:49:55.140 of innocence melts away under under further scrutiny there is no rationalization for

00:50:01.920 intentionally slaughtering cedones to begin with there is no rationalization of justification but

00:50:08.320 even if you want to claim one, that melts away. Last thing too, Israel's blockade to Gaza

00:50:13.840 that it installed only after terrorism. Everyone forgets Gaza has a very long border with Egypt.

00:50:22.620 Egypt closed that border too. I wonder why. They were exporting terror to Egypt as well,

00:50:27.520 but no one seems to blame Egypt for closing the border and trying to stop terrorism.

00:50:31.800 Only Israel gets blamed when it dares to defend itself, when it dares to survive.

00:50:36.780 And this double standard also gets a little tired. No one ever defends other people and then defend

00:50:42.840 them, criticizes other people and then defend themselves from terrorism. It's natural. It's

00:50:47.640 accepted. When Russia obliterated half of Grozny, Chechnya, which was a war crime, which did target

00:50:54.200 civilians, which Israel would never do, where were the complaints on college campuses in America?

00:51:00.320 China today is perpetrating a real genocide against the Muslim Uyghurs in its west, a

00:51:07.820 real genocide, putting them into camps.

00:51:10.340 We don't hear anyone complaining, but only when Israel dares to defend itself and say,

00:51:15.400 we will not be slaughtered like sheep.

00:51:17.020 We will do what any other people on God's green earth would do.

00:51:21.100 Is there this outrage?

00:51:22.940 That's why so much of this outrage to me is false.

00:51:25.740 Doesn't ring true.

00:51:27.000 Doesn't ring sincere.

00:51:29.640 um why do you think this has permeated the college campus so effectively like i saw in

00:51:37.540 new york times square and in toronto where i'm from there are pro-palestinian protests yeah

00:51:43.500 like downtown why is it working why is the propaganda if it's propaganda working so well

00:51:50.220 here well i think again at the very superficial level this plugs very well into a woke mindset

00:51:57.480 I was on college campuses today. If you're a victim, you're innocent. If you're not a victim, you're guilty. People of color are considered to be innocent victims. If you're considered white, not so. And indigenous people are, of course, valuating if you're from outside of a region, come to that region unless so.

00:52:22.740 So there is a popular anti-Israel narrative that has come to dominate woke circles in these spaces on college campuses. None of it's true. So I'm going to say the narrative now. None of it's true. But the narrative is that a group of Jews in Europe with no connection to the land of Israel, Jews have no connection to the land of Israel, said, hey, that's some nice land there. Let's go take it.

00:52:46.280 And they went to a nation called Palestine, and they expelled all the Arabs that were living there in Palestine and took it over for themselves.

00:52:54.460 And so you have the oppression of indigenous people, people of color by white Europeans.

00:53:00.240 And since they're suffering, their cause is just, and the Israelis are the oppressors, so their cause is unjust.

00:53:08.040 Now, that's wrong on every level, of course.

00:53:09.680 the european jews who came back to their ancestral homeland which they are indigenous

00:53:15.260 came came to a length in which they have the deepest of connections they were never considered

00:53:20.940 white in europe they were considered another race that's why they were slaughtered by the nazis

00:53:24.600 because they weren't white they were another race they were submitted for centuries jews

00:53:29.360 living in europe were told go back to israel go back to palestine so they did but the majority

00:53:36.260 of Israelis don't come from Europe. There are refugees from the Muslim Middle East because

00:53:40.480 after Israel dared to survive the War of Annihilation in 1947 and 1948, every Arab country

00:53:47.120 kicked out its Jews. Jews used to be between a third and a half of Baghdad, all expelled.

00:53:52.740 My father-in-law, who I'm here with right now, was expelled from Tripoli, Libya.

00:53:57.120 Palestinians complain about what happened to them after the war they started in 1948.

00:54:02.300 My father-in-law's family was extraordinarily wealthy in Libya.

00:54:06.460 When they were kicked out, they ended up living 10 brothers and sisters and two parents in a one-room apartment.

00:54:13.640 They lived in utter poverty.

00:54:15.340 There are complaints on both sides.

00:54:18.100 The difference is Israel doesn't live in the past and nurse these grievances and dream of revenge one day.

00:54:23.500 From day one, the Israelis have tried to build a future and get over the past.

00:54:27.920 And the Palestinians have gone in a different direction.

00:54:30.260 So this is a myth that Jews are from Europe and have no connection to the land.

00:54:35.780 It's a myth that they came in and kicked anyone out.

00:54:37.880 Like I said, the Palestinian and the Arab population of this land did not decrease when

00:54:42.960 Jews came back.

00:54:43.800 It exploded when Jews came back.

00:54:47.060 And then the whole refugee crisis was not because Israel started a war to kick them

00:54:51.100 out.

00:54:51.700 It was because the Arabs lost the war of annihilation that they started to drive the Jews out.

00:54:56.240 But not knowing all of this, this fits very well into the Western imagination, the victim mentality. They see the Palestinians are victims of a settler colonial genocidal Israeli regime. And they do what I would do if that narrative were true. If this narrative were true, I'd be protesting Israel too. It's just not true. It's the opposite of the truth.

00:55:20.120 And by the way, one of the things I do in my day job is I run a group called the Maccabee Task Force.

00:55:25.760 And we bring college leaders to Israel.

00:55:29.360 And we try to bring people who dominate campus politics, which means these days, on most American campuses, these are people of the left.

00:55:36.840 And they're all Israel skeptical, if not outright Israel critical.

00:55:41.440 And we bring them to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, by the way.

00:55:44.860 We want them to see both sides.

00:55:46.180 the amazing thing is how this trip changes them and transform them because what they see is that

00:55:53.940 their reality of israel is starkly at odds with the anti-israel narrative they were fed

00:55:59.160 and so this trip changes them um and again a lot of them don't don't come back waving the israel

00:56:06.100 flag but almost all of them will say you know what this is a lot more complex than i was led

00:56:11.100 to believe and the answer is not to single out and scapegoat israel as i was told to do

00:56:15.780 The answer lies elsewhere, and the answer lies where it always lies, in trying to talk to one another, trying to understand one another, recognizing the humanity of one another, and in daring to dream of a region where Jews and Arabs are not enemies, but these cousins, these Semitic peoples join hands and build a Middle East that's more dynamic and prosperous than any other regime in the globe.

00:56:40.800 It was the dream since day one, the Zionist dream, the dream we just tasted during the Abraham Accords.

00:56:47.980 But at every turn, including today, extremists, violent extremists, have killed the dream.

00:56:54.300 My only hope for the future is that the dream will live, that this too shall pass, that Israel will defend itself, will dismantle Hamas,

00:57:01.580 and that one day the Palestinians may get leaders who don't want to murder and destroy Israel, but actually want to build Palestine.

00:57:10.800 that's the day there'll be peace.

00:57:12.760 That's the day there'll be prosperity.

00:57:14.680 That's the day when the Zionist vision will come to pass

00:57:17.180 and the region will become what it always should have been.

00:57:22.300 Okay.

00:57:23.080 Well, thank you for joining me.

00:57:25.220 That was very informative.

00:57:26.980 Much appreciated.

00:57:28.320 Thanks for having me.

00:57:29.120 I appreciate the opportunity.

00:57:32.020 Norman Finkelstein, welcome to my podcast.

00:57:35.080 Thank you for having me on.

00:57:36.540 So, I wanted to bring you on to get a different perspective of what's going on in the Middle

00:57:44.160 East.

00:57:45.160 I'm not educated in this area at all, so I have a list of questions to ask you, but let's

00:57:53.880 get started.

00:57:54.880 I think we should start with just a brief background of the history of the Israeli and

00:58:00.460 Palestine conflict and what led to today.

00:58:06.540 Obviously, when you try to give a background story of a conflict, the question is always,

00:58:14.020 where do you begin? Because depending on where you begin, it can be seen as a partisan issue.

00:58:22.980 I will take where we begin at 1948, the indigenous population of Palestine numbered about 1,300,000, what were called back then the Zionist settlers, namely Jews who came to Palestine roughly from the beginning of the 20th century on.

00:58:52.980 they numbered roughly 600,000. By 1947, there was an irreconcilable conflict

00:59:03.580 between the indigenous Arab population and the Zionist Jewish settlers. That conflict was then

00:59:14.540 thrown into the hands of the newly created United Nations. And the UN was, its designated

00:59:23.660 responsibility was to try to work out a resolution, a settlement of the conflict,

00:59:32.060 not necessarily applying the highest principles of justice, but trying to combine, as in most

00:59:39.100 conflicts, principles of justice with practicality, what's possible. The United Nations General

00:59:48.660 Assembly, in what's called UN Resolution 181, it divided Palestine, or proposed that Palestine be

00:59:58.380 divided into two states, an Arab state, which would comprise approximately 44% of Palestine,

01:00:09.960 and a Jewish state, which would comprise approximately 56% of Palestine.

01:00:18.160 The Arab side did not accept that recommendation for two main reasons. One, they were the indigenous population. And number two, that, and therefore, their rights should have priority, or their desires and aspirations should have priority.

01:00:43.900 and number two, because the division did not remotely correlate with the demographic balance

01:00:53.100 in Palestine. The 600,000 Jews were allocated 56 percent. The Palestinian Arabs were allocated 44

01:01:03.920 percent. A conflict then ensued, what's called the First Arab-Israeli War, in which neighboring

01:01:12.820 Arab states also intervened. By the end of the war, Israel had absorbed not the 56% that was

01:01:24.380 allocated in the partition resolution 181, but they absorbed 80% of Palestine. Two areas were

01:01:37.140 not absorbed by Israel. Number one, the Gaza Strip, which came under Egyptian administrative

01:01:46.660 control, and what came to be called the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, which came under

01:01:57.660 Jordanian control. In the course of Israel's creation in 1948, it expelled about 90%

01:02:07.660 of the population within the border, 90% of the indigenous population within the borders that

01:02:16.840 became Israel. Of those 90%, roughly 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from the area that

01:02:27.340 became Israel. Of those 750,000, about 250,000 to 290,000, they fled to Gaza. And they are

01:02:42.380 the origins of the Gaza population today. The population of Gaza at the time was about

01:02:50.920 80,000. So now that population of Gaza was swamped by the refugees who were expelled

01:03:00.740 in 1948 without wanting to anticipate too much of what's going to come in a few moments.

01:03:09.900 So those refugees and their descendants now constitute, now meaning today, they constitute approximately 70% of the population of Gaza.

01:03:27.800 So when we hear today about the population of Gaza, roughly now 2.2 million people, of those 2.2 million people, approximately 70% constitute refugees and their descendants.

01:03:49.220 Now, to go back to where we were in the very condensed historical record, in 1967, there was another war between Israel and the neighboring Arab states.

01:04:06.440 And in the course of that war, two things happened.

01:04:11.040 It was the second, if you want, if the term can be used, it was the second great expulsion.

01:04:19.400 About 300,000 Palestinians were expelled from the areas that Israel now conquered.

01:04:29.340 And the areas Israel now conquered were the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

01:04:37.740 So the bottom line is, in 1900, Palestine was, the population was about 90% Palestinian Arab.

01:04:52.420 In 1947, the population was about 1,300,000 Palestinian Arabs and 600,000 Jews.

01:05:07.740 And in 1947, before the partition plan, Israelis owned about 6% of the land in Palestine.

01:05:21.580 The partition resolution awarded the newly created state of Israel 56% of Palestine.

01:05:30.280 By the end of the war of 1948, Israel controlled 80% of Palestine.

01:05:39.180 After the June 1967 war, Israel now controlled all of Palestine.

01:05:49.460 The whole of Palestine had now come under Israeli control.

01:05:53.280 Under international law, because these territories were conquered by Israel in the course of the war, under international law, they weren't part of Israel as a legal fact.

01:06:12.460 They constituted what under international law is called Occupied Territories, and the abbreviation that eventually came to be used was OPT, Occupied Palestinian Territories.

01:06:30.200 In addition to the West Bank and Gaza, in the course of the 1967 war, Israel also occupied the Syrian Golan Heights and the Egyptian Sinai.

01:06:46.780 Once again, the question of how to resolve this seemingly intractable problem was thrown into the court of the United Nations.

01:06:59.000 And there were very protracted deliberations, both in the General Assembly and subsequently in the Security Council.

01:07:11.940 And the proposal put forth by the Security Council, it was embodied in probably the most famous resolution in the United Nations history.

01:07:23.720 It's called UN Resolution 242.

01:07:27.860 And the essence of UN Resolution 242 is very simple. It's based on UN principles, international law principles, and the principles of the UN Charter.

01:07:43.800 Those principles are number one, which is spelled out in the preamble to UN Resolution 242.

01:07:53.520 The first principle is it's inadmissible to conquer territory by war.

01:08:00.640 It's inadmissible to conquer territory by war.

01:08:05.300 However, Israel acquired the West Bank, Gaza, Egyptian Sinai, the Syrian Golan Heights in the course of a war.

01:08:18.600 And therefore, according to international law and UN principles, Israel had no title to those territories.

01:08:27.300 That was the first prong of UN Resolution 242.

01:08:32.320 The second throng was that Israel as a state had the right under the UN Charter to live at peace with its neighbors.

01:08:46.880 And therefore, the Arab states, the neighboring Arab states, and any other parties to the conflict, had a legal obligation to accept Israel as a state in the region.

01:09:03.840 That came to be called the land for peace, land for peace solution to the conflict.

01:09:14.760 Namely, Israel had to relinquish control of the West Bank in Gaza.

01:09:22.480 Now I'm talking strictly about the Palestinian-Israeli dimension, because there's, of course, still the Egyptian dimension with the Sinai Desert, the Syrian dimension with the Golan Heights.

01:09:38.140 But from here on in, I'm going to put them to the side, because obviously we're talking about this topic now in light of the most recent events.

01:09:49.460 So right at this point, I'm going to hone in just on that Palestine-Israel dimension of the conflict.

01:09:59.740 Having said that, the terms of UN Resolution 242 were very straightforward.

01:10:05.900 straightforward. Number one, Israel had to withdraw from all the Palestinian territories

01:10:14.960 it acquired during the 1967 war, what I referred to a moment ago as the Occupied Palestinian

01:10:25.040 territories, the OTT. And in turn, the Palestinians were obliged to recognize

01:10:34.320 Israel as a legal state, a member of the United Nations. And as a member of the United Nations,

01:10:43.700 here I'm referring to the state of Israel, it had all the rights and responsibilities,

01:10:49.780 all the rights and all the duties of any other member state.

01:10:57.320 And that was, and strange as it may sound to you,

01:11:02.800 it's already more than 50 years later, a half century,

01:11:06.420 it's more than a half century later,

01:11:08.920 those have remained the turns for settling the conflict.

01:11:13.840 And now the question becomes, which side has been the obstacle to that settlement of the conflict?

01:11:25.920 It could be one side, it could be the other side, and of course it could be both sides.

01:11:33.540 On the Palestinian side, the leadership that emerged to represent the Palestinians soon after the June 1967 war, a leadership was called the Palestine Liberation Organization, or the PLO.

01:11:53.540 And that was led by a fellow who may be familiar to your listeners, namely Yasser Arafat.

01:12:00.540 Arafat. Beginning in the mid-1970s, so once again, we're talking about a half century ago,

01:12:11.500 beginning in the mid-1970s, the Palestinians accepted the terms of UN Resolution 242.

01:12:21.420 Those terms I spelled out to you a moment ago.

01:12:26.780 Full withdrawal in exchange for full recognition.

01:12:32.160 The Palestinians accepted those terms.

01:12:35.840 Israel did not.

01:12:38.740 Israel was not prepared to relinquish control over the territories or, at any rate, parts of the territories.

01:12:50.280 that they had conquered in the 1967 war.

01:12:55.860 Their attitude after 1967 was the same as their attitude after 1948.

01:13:04.540 You will recall, I said, the UN Resolution 181 allocated 56% of Palestine to the Israelis.

01:13:17.320 They conquered 80%. And by holding fast to that 80%, the international community eventually acquiesced, accepted the Israeli fait accompli.

01:13:36.320 So the expectation of the Israelis after 1967 was, if we hold fast, we can retain control over the whole of what they call, the Israelis call, the land of Israel, namely the West Bank, Gaza, and so forth.

01:13:58.240 So Israel was determined not to relinquish control over a large part of the territory, let alone recognize a Palestinian state living side by side with it.

01:14:20.960 Come 1982, what one very good Israeli political scientist, Avner Yaniv, by 1982, Israel faced a very big problem, and Avner Yaniv called it the Palestinian peace offensive.

01:14:43.900 Namely, the PLO was determined, with the support of the international community, to gain recognition, support, and eventually the application of pressure to force Israel to accept the terms of international law and the UN Charter.

01:15:10.360 Israel, faced with the escalating pressure on it, then provoked the Palestinians or attempted to provoke the Palestinians into a war, what was called the 1982 Lebanon War.

01:15:33.340 Sometimes it's called the First Lebanon War.

01:15:37.300 And at that point, the Palestinian leadership was headquartered, mostly refugees, no, entirely refugees, excuse me, headquartered in Lebanon.

01:15:49.520 Israel launched the war, and in the course of the war, Israel killed roughly 15,000 to 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, overwhelmingly civilians.

01:16:07.320 It's worth noting for your listeners that actually the Israeli death or kill rate back in 1982 was actually much higher than any of the recent Israeli assaults on Gaza or any of the recent Israeli armed conflicts with its neighbors.

01:16:31.240 After the 1982 war, the Palestinians were defeated.

01:16:35.240 In the course of that war, as I said, about 20,000 Palestinian and Israelis were killed, overwhelmingly civilians, and the PLO went into exile in Tunis.

01:16:49.180 At this point, the Palestinians in the West Bank in Gaza, who were under occupation, realized that nothing is going to happen externally in order to abet their aspirations to statehood, independence, self-determination.

01:17:14.820 And so in 1987, the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank went into civil revolt, overwhelmingly nonviolent.

01:17:29.340 It was called, you are listeners who are not old enough to remember, it came to be called

01:17:37.340 the First Intifada, I-N-T-I-F-A-D-A, a civil, nonviolent civil revolt.

01:17:47.140 I happened to be there during that civil revolt.

01:17:51.340 I lived in a Palestinian Christian village outside Bethlehem called Beit Sohor.

01:17:59.340 And I lived in a Palestinian refugee camp, or right across the street from a Palestinian refugee camp, in Hebron, called Fawar Camp.

01:18:11.920 And that first intifada, Israel exerted a huge amount of violent force, and that too suffered a defeat.

01:18:25.220 And that defeat climaxed in what came to be called the Oslo Accord.

01:18:33.900 So your listeners, I think at this point, have gotten the key dates and numbers.

01:18:42.000 They'll remember when conversation comes up, UN Resolution 181, that's 1947.

01:18:48.660 UN Resolution 242, that's 1967, and they'll now remember another term that constantly comes up,

01:18:57.740 namely the Oslo Accord. Now, under the terms of the Oslo Accord, it was signed between the Israeli

01:19:05.480 Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the head of the PLO, Yasser Arafat, and it was presided over by

01:19:14.720 U.S. President Bill Clinton. Some of your listeners and viewers will recall what's come to be called

01:19:21.920 the Great Handshake on the White House lawn when President Clinton is flanked by the Israeli and

01:19:29.760 Palestinian leaders. The essence of the Oslo Accord, there is a written accord, but then there is a

01:19:36.700 political reality. The Palestinians, as a result of that accord, were not granted a state or even

01:19:47.840 the right to a state. What they were granted was a five-year interim period that was the climax in

01:19:58.760 1999, in the course of which some sort of settlement would be worked out. And in return,

01:20:09.320 the Palestinians gave Israel that full recognition. So as your listeners by now will, I think,

01:20:17.560 gather, the Palestinian responsibility under UN Resolution 242 was fulfilled to allow Palestinians

01:20:30.300 to exercise their right of self-determination and statehood in the 20% of Palestine that

01:20:39.700 remained, namely the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and Gaza.

01:20:45.780 Well, the Palestinians never got that from Oslo.

01:20:50.900 In fact, they didn't get anything from Oslo.

01:20:55.640 In fact, they got the reverse, because in the course of those years, from 1993 on,

01:21:05.020 Israel started to annex territories in the West Bank by creating another term, which will now

01:21:17.920 enlighten your listeners, by creating Jewish settlements in the West Bank. And the settlements

01:21:26.020 came to occupy more and more territory in the West Bank. Israel confiscated more and more land

01:21:34.880 in the West Bank until about half of the West Bank was now under Israeli control, effectively

01:21:47.240 annexed to Israel. And so nothing came of that Oslo Accord on the Palestinian side.

01:21:59.040 And then in 2000, September 2000, for reasons which time will not allow me, a new uprising occurred in the occupied Palestinian territories, what came to be called the Second Intifada.

01:22:22.680 And the Second Intifada began just as the First Intifada in 1987.

01:22:31.840 It was overwhelmingly nonviolent, but Israel, fearful of a second protracted civil revolt akin to the first intifada, they then exerted maximum amount of violent force to repress it, to use the cliche, to nip it in the bud.

01:22:58.620 So just in the first few days of that second intifada, just in the first few days, Israel fired approximately 1 million rounds of ammunition to repress that second nonviolent civil revolt.

01:23:20.300 And that second nonviolent civil revolt then quickly spun out of control, and it became quite violent on both sides.

01:23:33.200 The kill ratio that first three weeks of the Second Intifada was about 20 Palestinians to each Israeli, 20 to 1.

01:23:46.960 As it happened, I lived there at the time, not a long period, but I was there.

01:23:53.180 And on one of my visits, I did meet with the then head of Hamas.

01:24:00.720 His name was Dr. Rantisi.

01:24:03.980 Now, I want to be careful.

01:24:06.960 My memory is not perfect on these things, so it's pretty good.

01:24:10.980 I don't know if he was the fall head or he was one of the leaders.

01:24:17.500 He was eventually assassinated by the Israelis.

01:24:22.420 In that event, I did meet with him, as with all of those leaders at the time.

01:24:28.680 I don't want to speak about later.

01:24:30.360 A very simple life, very humble guy.

01:24:32.840 he would say his kitchen or his home looked like what we would say in the United States,

01:24:40.780 a tenement from the 1930s. And when I talked to him about the situation, it had already gotten

01:24:49.720 quite violent on both sides. I do remember when I asked him about what was going on,

01:24:59.140 I said, do you think this is the right strategy, your strategy?

01:25:04.960 And he said to me, when the first Antifada began, the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed was 20 to 1.

01:25:18.660 And then he said, now it's, I think, don't get, I could be wrong.

01:25:26.300 I try to be very, I'm a stickler for facts.

01:25:29.140 I think he said now it's down to six to one.

01:25:33.980 And I remember thinking at the time and commenting to Palestinian friends,

01:25:40.300 I thought to myself, this wasn't really a political strategy.

01:25:46.500 It was just eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.

01:25:55.120 He was calculating the efficacy of the strategy he chose, or Hamas chose, just in terms of trying to establish an equality, not of human life, but an equality of death or corpses.

01:26:18.800 I, of course, can understand that it's not for no reason that we have God saying an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, is still part of our moral vocabulary, even though many people repudiate it.

01:26:38.160 It still rings loudly, it resonates for a large number of people.

01:26:44.240 And so I didn't think then it was political.

01:26:53.240 It was a kind of neural calculus.

01:26:58.860 In any event, Israel once again exerted massive death and destruction

01:27:07.020 of the Palestinians, destroying huge amounts of land, homes, incarcerating thousands of

01:27:20.500 Palestinians, in fact, carrying out a pattern of systematic, massive torture of Palestinian

01:27:32.200 detainees, somewhere on the order of tens of thousands, were being systematically and

01:27:40.260 methodically tortured by the Israeli prison guards and professional torturers. And by

01:27:50.940 By 2006, 2005, we will say, the Second Intifada had been defeated.

01:28:01.860 Come 2006, there were elections held in the West Bank and Gaza.

01:28:10.980 Israel had set up in the occupied Palestinian territories after the September 1993 Oslo Accord.

01:28:24.240 They had set up a Palestinian administrative government in the occupied Palestinian territories.

01:28:35.200 It came to be called the PA, the Palestinian Authority.

01:28:41.560 You will recall earlier, I referred to the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization.

01:28:48.920 The PLO pretty much now disappeared from the scene, and it was replaced by what came to be called the Palestinian Authority.

01:28:58.640 And elections were held.

01:29:01.480 And, surprisingly for everybody, Hamas agreed to participate in the elections, and, surprisingly to everybody, they won, because the Palestinian Authority, this administrative unit set up by Israel, was very corrupt and self-serving.

01:29:28.480 serving. And so the Palestinians, hoping for a government that represented them and not

01:29:38.460 individuals, simply cashing in on their new status of executors of Israeli policy. They

01:29:48.100 came to be called Israel's subcontractors. Hamas won. And that's where the story really

01:29:57.760 begins, which I'll try to bring up to the present now.

01:30:02.300 The United States had urged

01:30:05.580 Palestinians, including Hamas, to

01:30:09.960 participate in the election.

01:30:13.780 But the United States and

01:30:17.840 Israel were not pleased with the

01:30:21.760 outcome. Former President Jimmy Carter

01:30:25.520 was in the occupied territories to monitor the elections,

01:30:30.480 and he pronounced them, and now I'm quoting you,

01:30:36.000 completely honest and fair elections.

01:30:42.080 When Hamas won, Israel immediately imposed

01:30:49.680 a brutal economic blockade on Gaza.

01:30:54.440 So that blockade was then supported by the United States and the European Union.

01:31:10.880 Palestinians were never given a chance. Hamas was never given a chance.

01:31:16.580 The moment the results came in, the screws were turned in the hope and expectation that the Palestinians, knowing that the screws would not be unturned,

01:31:36.580 until they disposed of Hamas and reinstated the Palestinian Authority

01:31:46.260 under the control of the preferred authorities of the United States

01:31:54.160 or the preferred figures of the United States.

01:31:57.840 In fact, Hillary Clinton at the time, she was the senator from New York,

01:32:03.800 she said, we made a big mistake by not rigging the election. That's what she said. We made a big

01:32:13.380 mistake by not rigging the election. Wow. So the Palestinians were now faced

01:32:23.720 with a brutal blockade.

01:32:29.100 Gaza is five miles wide and 25 miles long,

01:32:36.680 or at least it was that until today

01:32:40.680 when it seems it's going to be cut in half again.

01:32:44.940 But I'll get to that in a moment.

01:32:48.220 What does five miles by 25 miles mean?

01:32:52.500 I'll just give you my personal mental image of what that means.

01:32:59.100 I jog five miles along the Coney Island seashore every morning.

01:33:05.100 So it's the distance a person nearing 70, he jogs in the morning at the beach.

01:33:13.660 What's the length of Gaza?

01:33:16.400 It's less than a marathon.

01:33:18.920 A marathon is 26.2 miles, and Gaza is about the size of a marathon, Gaza, just a little less.

01:33:34.280 And in that territory, there are 2.1 million people, or 2.2.

01:33:40.040 That's some give or take on the action number.

01:33:42.620 And that makes Gaza among the most densely populated places on God's earth.

01:33:50.280 It's more populated than Tokyo.

01:33:55.440 I don't want to anticipate too much.

01:33:58.020 Now, Israel says it's going to take control of the northern half of Gaza, which means among the most densely populated places on Gaza will now be twice as densely populated after the current bloodletting.

01:34:25.340 on nobody's allowed nobody for 20 years, nobody with the rarest of exceptions.

01:34:35.800 Nobody was allowed in, and nobody was allowed out.

01:34:42.080 So for the purposes of today's conversation, it means most of those Palestinians

01:34:49.740 who crashed through the gates of Gaza.

01:34:52.980 It was their first time ever leaving Gaza.

01:34:56.860 They were in their 20s.

01:34:59.240 They had never seen anything except via the web.

01:35:06.020 They had never seen anything of the outside world.

01:35:10.300 They had been confined to this space for 20 years.

01:35:17.400 That's not hyperbole.

01:35:20.500 That's not exaggeration.

01:35:23.940 About half of Gaza, half the population, for the past 20 years has been unemployed.

01:35:32.640 That figure or that percentage rises to 60% when you look at the youth.

01:35:41.380 So now your audience should ponder, here is a population where a large part has been left for 20 years to just pace back and forth in an area that's among the bestest, most densely popular in the world,

01:36:09.960 with nothing whatsoever else to look forward to.

01:36:18.280 That's a fact.

01:36:20.680 You get up each morning, there's no work, there's nowhere to go.

01:36:28.160 You can't even try to look, emigrating, see what happens.

01:36:35.500 Come to the United States, come to France.

01:36:38.280 At Lee. That's why David Cameron, the former British conservative prime minister, he described Gaza as an open-air prison.

01:36:55.280 prison. Baruch Camerlain, a respected Israeli sociologist at the Hebrew University, he

01:37:08.540 described Gaza as the world's largest concentration camp, the largest concentration camp ever.

01:37:20.600 most of the water in Gaza

01:37:25.180 is undrinkable

01:37:27.760 non-potable

01:37:29.800 the

01:37:33.660 of Gaza

01:37:36.760 is by international humanitarian

01:37:41.720 agencies

01:37:42.660 it's labeled

01:37:45.080 severely

01:37:46.860 strong and secure

01:37:49.980 Now, collect all these facts with one other fact.

01:37:57.080 Every listener should remember, as Israel is now proceeding to annihilate, by their own admission, to annihilate all human lives, all breathing lives, in the northern sector of Gaza, that half of Gaza comprises children.

01:38:27.080 One half of Gaza are children.

01:38:32.260 If you can imagine the accumulated rage, the accumulated anger at being trapped, being born into the largest concentration camp ever.

01:38:58.140 And then, after 20 years, they have that moment where they can exact revenge on October 27th.

01:39:17.720 Excuse me, October 7th.

01:39:21.080 But that's still not the full picture.

01:39:23.140 In fact, as ghastly as that picture is, it doesn't even begin to touch the surface of the reality, because periodically, Israel launches these high-tech massacres on Gaza.

01:39:49.440 And in the course of which, they kill very large numbers of civilians in Operation Cast Lead from December 26, 2008, to January 17, 2009.

01:40:16.600 They killed about 1,400 Palestinians, 350 of them children, and demolished, leveled, flattened, 6,000 homes.

01:40:37.720 That was called Operation Cast Lead.

01:40:43.580 And I'll skip a large number of other operations because time doesn't allow it.

01:40:53.240 I will only say that try as I may, I can never remember the names of even half those murderous high-tech destructions.

01:41:13.580 visited on Gaza. What Amnesty International called—it's not my title, bear in mind—after

01:41:23.380 Operation Cass Lead, they issued a mammoth report titled, 22 Days of Death and Destruction.

01:41:36.200 In 2014, July-August 2014, Israel initiated Operation Protective Edge.

01:41:52.740 In the course of Protective Edge, it killed about 550 Palestinian children.

01:42:02.520 It demolished 18,000 homes.

01:42:10.260 The head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Peter Maurer, is his name, M-A-U-R-E-R, for those of you listeners who wanted to check what I'm saying now, it's the ICRC, International Committee of the Red Cross, Peter Maurer.

01:42:27.560 He went to Gaza after Operation Protective Edge, as the Israelis called it, and he said, quote,

01:42:38.840 In all of my life, I have never witnessed destruction on the scale that I've now observed in Gaza.

01:42:55.160 That's quite a statement.

01:42:57.560 Just as Baruch Kimmerling describing Gaza as the largest concentration camp ever is quite a statement, but from a very responsible sociologist, Peter Moore describing the destruction as the most, the magnitude of the destruction.

01:43:25.200 Remember, the job of the president of the ICR is to visit war zones.

01:43:30.040 So he must have visited an awful lot.

01:43:33.820 And he said he had never seen the magnitude of destruction in Gaza.

01:43:39.600 Which means, and here for the first time, for the first time in everything I just told you,

01:43:46.220 I'm happy to present the documentation for every word I said.

01:43:51.020 I wrote a book called Gaza, an inquest into its martyrdom, which nobody has ever faulted for lack of not just documentation, but voluminous documentation.

01:44:13.020 from reading through thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of human rights reports.

01:44:24.220 I started in 1982.

01:44:27.620 It's 40 years later.

01:44:30.020 And I don't say it with pride.

01:44:32.460 Indeed, I say it with a little bit of embarrassment.

01:44:35.440 That's all I did with my life.

01:44:38.400 Document what happened there.

01:44:41.120 So I'm quite confident that every claim I just made can be documented not by one source, but by voluminous sources.

01:44:55.340 With that as a side note, let me get to my one point of speculation.

01:45:02.340 Every one of those youths who crashed through the gates of Gaza, I would bet every dollar I owe, every dollar, that everyone, because they knew they weren't going to come back, there was nowhere to hide in Israel.

01:45:27.660 Even if they managed to escape, they were going to be tracked down.

01:45:36.180 They knew that.

01:45:37.720 They knew it was going to be their last day on God's earth.

01:45:42.800 And the night before they left Gaza, I would guess everyone of them kissed their mother goodbye.

01:45:55.300 kissed her father goodbye

01:45:59.120 and inside of them

01:46:02.380 inside of them

01:46:05.420 they vow

01:46:07.280 to revenge

01:46:11.780 not only

01:46:14.080 the life of misery

01:46:17.260 agony

01:46:18.740 anguish and torment

01:46:21.940 that they experienced from the day of their birth

01:46:29.520 because they were born into that concentration camp,

01:46:33.480 but they also vowed to revenge the death of their brother,

01:46:44.840 their sister, their niece, their nephew, all those persons who perished, whose bodies

01:46:59.220 were incinerated, mangled, and destroyed during Israel's operations, as they like to call

01:47:12.640 in Gaza.

01:47:14.980 So, and this is where I'll leave off,

01:47:19.840 am I shocked by what happened

01:47:22.980 on October 7th?

01:47:27.100 I cannot say I was.

01:47:31.800 I cannot.

01:47:33.800 I was shocked by the ingenuity

01:47:37.840 displayed by the people of Gaza

01:47:42.120 Gaza was probably the most surveilled place on earth.

01:47:49.380 Israel has a very sophisticated, not just external security system, but also internal.

01:47:58.720 There are many collaborators with Israel inside Gaza, many.

01:48:03.820 And that the people of Gaza eluded it.

01:48:08.200 It's very impressive.

01:48:09.760 Israelis are now stunned. How could that have happened? So that part surprised me. However,

01:48:21.060 even as I was surprised, I don't want to claim to be any kind of clairvoyant.

01:48:27.400 I was surprised by the magnitude of the deaths. Yes, for sure.

01:48:34.080 Or was I surprised on reflection at the vengeance that inspired those killings?

01:48:47.780 No, I can't say so.

01:48:50.300 And I will leave you with one last thought, and then you take over, because I've taken more than probably what might be called a generous amount of time.

01:48:59.500 I want to be clear about this.

01:49:02.460 I hope your program has a wide reach, and we have an opportunity to discuss these things.

01:49:11.880 I'm going to just tell you something personal, which I've not said to anybody.

01:49:15.440 This was a very hard week for me.

01:49:18.360 I'm good at assembling facts.

01:49:21.380 I'm good at putting them in a logical, coherent order.

01:49:26.700 I can't say I have the greatest moral judgment.

01:49:32.460 It's not bad, but moral judgment is like any other faculty.

01:49:35.920 It requires study, reflection, you know, it means knowing the whole of moral philosophy.

01:49:44.200 And I'm not competent in that area.

01:49:47.320 And most of my adult life, I was a kind of, you might call, acolyte, disciple of Noam Chomsky.

01:49:56.620 I think it's fair to say he was for 40 years a very close friend of mine.

01:50:02.460 For reasons which I can't get into now, he wasn't available for moral judgment.

01:50:09.600 Not the facts, the facts I feel confident about, but the moral judgment.

01:50:14.260 How does one, if I can use the expression, position oneself morally in light of what happened October 7th?

01:50:24.140 I really didn't know.

01:50:26.160 I was very confused.

01:50:28.120 When people ask me, how are you doing? I would say, well, physically, I'm very tired, but morally, I'm much more tired. I'm struggling with it.

01:50:39.020 So I went back to American history. I went back to American history.

01:50:46.700 I went to see what was, just briefly for your listeners, because I don't know how, whether it's an American audience or an international audience.

01:50:57.780 So in the American context, we had slave revolts.

01:51:02.500 And the slave revolts were quite bloody.

01:51:06.040 So, for example, the best-known slave revolt in the U.S., or the largest, was Nat Turner in 1831, the Nat Turner Rebellion.

01:51:16.980 Now, Nat Turner was a religious—he was Black, obviously.

01:51:20.080 He was a religious synatic.

01:51:22.200 He was a zealot.

01:51:22.980 He was convinced that this rebellion was inspired by God, and all of his actions were sanctioned, approved by God.

01:51:34.540 He gave the order to his Confederates to kill all white people.

01:51:40.320 Kill all white people in your path.

01:51:42.100 and

01:51:45.240 a lot of white people were killed

01:51:48.680 scores of white people were killed

01:51:50.860 by current terminology

01:51:52.740 you would call them innocents

01:51:54.760 were killed

01:51:56.140 I wanted

01:51:58.920 to know

01:51:59.580 how did the abolitionists

01:52:02.460 those who opposed slavery

01:52:04.380 what kind

01:52:07.060 of moral judgment did they

01:52:08.800 render on Nat Turner

01:52:10.080 And so I went back. One of the greatest of the abolitionists, White, was a fellow named William Lloyd Garrison. He was the editor of a newspaper called The Liberator.

01:52:24.380 And I went to see, what did he write?

01:52:28.800 And I have to say to me, I have to say to you, it was very consoling to me because he did what I did after Gaza.

01:52:41.980 Number one, he said, I told you so.

01:52:47.080 We warned you and warned you and warned you and warned you.

01:52:52.060 We mean the abolitionists.

01:52:53.520 this was going to happen.

01:52:56.600 Number two,

01:52:59.460 he denounced all the hypocrites,

01:53:02.400 the pious, self-righteous hypocrites

01:53:05.980 who were denouncing

01:53:10.280 what happened in Matt Turner's rebellion.

01:53:15.360 And number three,

01:53:17.540 and I hope your listeners will pay close attention,

01:53:21.440 number three,

01:53:23.520 Even though he said what happened during the Nat Turner revolt was horrible,

01:53:30.060 it was very clear he never once condemned the slave revolt.

01:53:40.660 He did not.

01:53:42.820 He did not.

01:53:45.140 I posted on my substack.

01:53:47.700 I posted on my Twitter account the full statement by William Lloyd Garrison.

01:53:57.780 He did not.

01:54:01.680 And the Nat Turner Rebellion, and I described it to you just a moment ago quite accurately,

01:54:09.340 it now occupies an honored place in American history.

01:54:14.320 It does.

01:54:15.140 and

01:54:17.000 William Lloyd Garrison

01:54:19.200 is a revered

01:54:21.780 figure. There were three

01:54:23.260 there were basically William Lloyd Garrison

01:54:25.920 Charles Sumner

01:54:27.060 Valdeus Stevens

01:54:29.480 and Garrett Smith

01:54:31.520 there are a few but he's one of the revered

01:54:33.700 figures of the abolitionist

01:54:35.940 movement to end slavery

01:54:37.240 so

01:54:39.160 I felt

01:54:41.480 assured even in the

01:54:43.760 absence

01:54:44.460 of my mentor, Professor Chomsky, I felt confident that I had a ploy, even though my moral faculty

01:54:58.020 is not finely owned. I applied the right judgment in this situation. I've gotten some very ugly

01:55:10.540 backlash

01:55:12.940 some people who

01:55:16.500 meant a lot to me

01:55:18.720 in life

01:55:19.780 however

01:55:22.940 I

01:55:24.760 if the judgment

01:55:27.240 is right

01:55:28.120 I won't retreat

01:55:30.840 okay

01:55:35.680 that was

01:55:38.420 heavy

01:55:40.200 let me see if i can cobble together some follow-up questions to that

01:55:48.180 um i just have a few i think going back to 1948 um if we go before that was the idea that

01:56:02.060 jewish people had originally been displaced from that area so they were already entitled to that

01:56:09.500 area in 1948 and that's why the un ruled to give them the 56 okay okay that's a completely fair

01:56:21.020 question and since i'm speaking before an audience that she doesn't know much of the history

01:56:25.780 and is not obliged to it's a tiny corner of the map i will do as best as i can to answer these

01:56:33.780 what you would call elementary questions, because people just don't know.

01:56:41.340 Israel staked a claim to Palestine, or I should say the Zionist movement,

01:56:49.360 staked a claim to Palestine on many grounds.

01:56:53.180 One ground was that's the homeland of the Jewish people from 3,000 or 2,000 years ago.

01:57:01.120 Another claim was made that Palestine was basically empty.

01:57:06.000 Another claim that was made was, well, the people in Palestine, they're Arabs,

01:57:11.600 and there are all these other Arabs all over what's called the Arab world.

01:57:16.040 And so it's no big deal to tell the ones in Palestine to move and make room for us.

01:57:22.520 There were various kinds of claims.

01:57:24.560 When it came before the United Nations, I think it's fair to say that they, which climaxed in that 1947, Resolution 181, I've read the record closely.

01:57:38.900 I would say they didn't really try to make moral sense of who had title or who had the deed to what.

01:57:53.440 They were faced with a practical problem, or they conceived it as a practical problem.

01:58:00.900 There are two substantial populations living in the same parcel of land.

01:58:06.860 It doesn't seem like these two populations can live together, and so we're going to divide up the land.

01:58:17.040 Now, you might ask, why was it so unequally divided?

01:58:23.620 especially in light of the demographic balance at the time.

01:58:28.380 As far as one can guess, remember, this is after World War II.

01:58:34.640 It's 1947, and there are Jewish refugees in Europe.

01:58:41.460 And so there was some expectation that a large proportion of those Jewish refugees

01:58:49.340 would come to Palestine, and so the land was unequally divided to accommodate the Jews

01:58:58.820 who would eventually come to Palestine from the refugee camps in Europe.

01:59:06.440 That makes sense. That answers that. And then I think just one more question. So you're talking

01:59:13.180 about missile strikes that have just been throughout this period of time. From what you

01:59:21.160 read online, this is what I've read online anyway, is that Hamas is hiding their weapons in civilian

01:59:29.680 areas and that the Israelis are targeting those areas and the casualties are because Hamas is

01:59:37.620 hiding behind their civilians. So what do you think? What are your thoughts on that?

01:59:44.960 Well, my answer to that is pretty simple. I don't think we should believe anything that Hamas says.

01:59:53.860 I don't think we should believe anything that Israel says. I think because they're obviously

02:00:00.980 partisan and their claims are worthless unless they make a claim, which is in legal terms called

02:00:10.180 a claim against interest. That is to say, they say something that doesn't serve their interest,

02:00:16.200 then that claim obviously carries more value than a claim that you say with your interest.

02:00:23.080 If you say, I didn't steal that money, obviously that claim has no value. If you say, well, yeah,

02:00:30.460 I did steal that money. Well, that kind of does have value. So we make a distinction between

02:00:36.060 evidence based on interest and evidence against interest. And we attach a lot more value to

02:00:42.600 evidence against interest. So leaving aside the interested parties, there are a third place we

02:00:53.740 can look. And the place most people normally look is human rights organizations. We have

02:01:02.360 Israeli human rights organizations like B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights

02:01:09.100 in the Occupied Territories. We have Amnesty International. We have Human Rights Watch.

02:01:16.200 And we had, in the past, some Israeli reservists, namely those who fought, put out publications in which they documented what was done in Gaza.

02:01:33.300 And the main organization was called Breaking the Silence.

02:01:37.660 It was Israeli soldiers who documented in reports the horrors they observed in the course of the Israeli operations.

02:01:50.680 I should note that most of those who gave testimony to the Breaking the Silence group, they were not peaceniks.

02:02:00.880 They were not leftists.

02:02:02.780 They just matter-of-factly described, yes, this is what happened, that's what happened.

02:02:07.660 And my conclusions are based on and were reached on the basis of reading those human rights reports.

02:02:23.260 And right now, I haven't looked at the Gaza book in three years, and I have to now refresh my memory.

02:02:33.480 My memory is pretty good.

02:02:35.180 There is no evidence that Hamas used Palestinians as what's called human shields.

02:02:47.040 There's no evidence of that.

02:02:50.840 What there is voluminous evidence of is that Israel used Palestinians as human shields.

02:03:02.120 For that, there's a large amount of documentation.

02:03:06.740 Now, for those of you listeners who doubt what I have to say, and I think you should doubt,

02:03:13.360 you should always question authority, however authoritative the authority.

02:03:19.740 You should always leave a corner of your mind open to the possibility that the authority is either dishonest

02:03:28.580 or simply wrong. I would simply recommend, show me evidence from the authoritative human rights

02:03:40.780 organizations, from the authoritative UN investigative bodies that looked at the evidence.

02:03:50.560 show me the evidence that there was human shielding by Hamas. So far as I know,

02:03:58.540 remember, I'm limiting myself to a separate category. I'm not saying what Israeli government

02:04:04.420 officials alleged, what the Israeli military alleged, what various organs that repeat

02:04:16.060 what the Israeli government and the military say. I look at what most people do when they're trying

02:04:24.420 to assess the factual situation in combat zones. They look at what reputable human rights

02:04:33.760 organizations say. And there is, so far as I know, and I, as I said, I went through thousands and

02:04:42.520 thousands and thousands of pages and years and years and years of my life now in four

02:04:50.800 decades going through it.

02:04:54.200 There isn't evidence in that.

02:04:58.160 What are your thoughts on the Abraham Accords?

02:05:03.240 And do you think that matters?

02:05:05.840 And is that still a possibility or are those doomed now?

02:05:12.520 I think we should, in terms of what's unfolding now, we should try to place them in the context.

02:05:20.880 As I told you earlier, after Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the Palestinian leadership was forced into exile, and the Palestinian people were left to their own devices.

02:05:40.600 When I say the Palestinian people, I mean the West Bank and Gaza.

02:05:44.340 They were left to their own devices.

02:05:46.860 And that's when the first intifada began, when the Palestinian people realized there was no one to count on, no one to help us.

02:05:56.800 God helps those who help themselves.

02:05:59.820 We have to take our faith and future into our own hands.

02:06:03.180 Now, in the present situation, the Palestinians realized that what the United States and Israel were doing was trying to create agreements and settle the conflict outside them.

02:06:29.180 them. So Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, they would all make agreements with

02:06:40.060 Israel. And the Palestinians in Gaza, as well as the West Bank, but right now we're focusing on

02:06:48.700 Gaza, would be left to languish and die.

02:06:53.720 So I would say, I would speculate that this attempt at what's called normalization between

02:07:08.780 the Arab states and Israel was perceived by Gazans as one more nail in the coffin,

02:07:22.580 that it meant that the whole, quote-unquote, Israel-Arab conflict would be resolved,

02:07:32.460 And except for the Palestinian people would be left to die.

02:07:41.660 So I think that was a factor in what happened.

02:07:53.380 Okay, I guess last question then.

02:07:55.700 Is there any way forward for peace, or is this going to get a lot nastier?

02:08:04.500 Like, what do you see ahead?

02:08:06.600 I know you're not a clairvoyant, but for the next five years, are things going to get worse, or is there any way to resolve it?

02:08:15.300 Well, right now we're entering the stage of the third great expulsion.

02:08:20.220 There was the explosion in 1948, about 750,000 Palestinians were expelled.

02:08:29.140 1967, between 300,000 and 400,000 Palestinians were expelled after the 1967 war.

02:08:37.440 And now about a million or more Palestinians in Gaza will be expelled from half of Gaza that will be annexed to Israel, about half of Gaza, as its new, quote unquote, the term they use is security zone.

02:09:00.440 zone, and probably the international pressure will become overwhelming on Egypt to open

02:09:12.060 the border with Gaza, and about half the population will be forced into exile again.

02:09:22.640 That's my guess.

02:09:24.440 It does not at this point seem that the international community will stop Israel from carrying on its next great explosion, the one that's unfolding now.

02:09:42.900 And then the next item on Israel's agenda will be to carry out a mass expulsion in the West Bank of Palestinian Arabs

02:09:59.920 and that thereby solve the Palestinian, or as they call it, the Arab problem,

02:10:11.040 and send the Palestinians into exile again.

02:10:19.820 And do you think, so I guess I have one more question, then I'll let you go, I promise.

02:10:26.180 Do you think the response from Israel could be warranted from Hamas bombing them on occasion throughout this period of time?

02:10:38.820 Or do you think it's something more?

02:10:42.440 What happened on October 7th was a slave revolt.

02:10:48.680 And then you have to ask the question, you know, after the Nat Turner revolt,

02:10:54.940 the whites went completely mad they went berserk they were on a homicidal rage

02:11:07.900 killing black people in the south left and right when you get off the air it would be useful for

02:11:15.180 you. Go look at what they did to Nat Turner's body. You can't even conceive it. So then

02:11:25.260 I tried to weigh what was the right response. You know, Nat Turner said, kill all the whites.

02:11:37.060 And I thought I would look to the highest moral authorities, that they being the abolitionists,

02:11:44.500 the white abolitionists who gave over their lives

02:11:47.620 to fighting slavery,

02:11:49.600 to trying to abolish slavery.

02:11:52.580 You go read what Garrison wrote.

02:11:55.680 I posted on my website, posted a whole article

02:11:58.640 in his magazine called The Liberator.

02:12:03.460 He did, he heaped ridicule.

02:12:08.820 He he discussed

02:12:10.620 at all those who attacked Matt Turner.

02:12:16.820 And even though he expressed shock at what happened,

02:12:22.580 you can read the article from the first word to the last.

02:12:29.300 He never condemned the revolt.

02:12:32.520 That took a lot of moral courage

02:12:35.780 because you can imagine the abolitionists

02:12:40.440 were not the most popular guys in town

02:12:43.260 or refusing to denounce the revolt.

02:12:47.880 Those are inspiring historical figures

02:12:52.060 who have been vindicated by history.

02:12:57.960 Thank you again for coming on.

02:12:59.960 My pleasure, and I wish you the best.

02:13:10.440 You

The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - October 20, 2023

Israel⧸Palestine： The History and What’s Real？ Opposing Views with Norman Finkelstein and David Brog

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