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Oh, because we're a team now. That's a nice story. The Devil Wears brought it to, in theaters Friday. I'm Tom Billu, and welcome to Impact Theory.
Let's dive right back into part two with Omar Badar. What would you do if you stepped inside the Israeli frame of reference, meaning their frame of reference as reported, not the frame of reference you have of them, but the frame of reference as they reported themselves, how would you negotiate maintaining a Jewish state? If so, I'm arguing on behalf of a Jewish state. Yeah, I want, so for me, this is where we start getting into the real meat and potatoes of why we are stuck here.
So in fact, me draw a parallel real fast. So my wife's family got caught up in the invasion of Cyprus by the Turks. And her stepmom was one of the people that was forcibly evicted from her home. She thought she was going to be gone for a weekend, and she ended up being gone for whatever 40 years.
And surprise, you've now been evicted. And they drew a line on the island, and everybody's gotten along with their business. Of course, Greece will occasionally ask like, hey, we want some help, we want to resolve this. But the reason that's not going to go anywhere is you've now had 40-ish years.
I don't remember the exact number of people living there in those homes. And so while it is absolutely gut-wrenching, that my stepmother-in-law, and you can make her cry just by bringing it up. I mean, for her, it's still very fresh. But she's never going back.
Like, now you're just going to revisit that trauma on whoever has grown up there and raised their kids and, you know, four years a long ass time. And for whatever reason, for the most part, Cyprus has just got on with life. It was like, yep, we just lost half of our island, and that really sucked. They had the military power.
I'm sure they would have fought back right then and there. But they didn't. And so they said, cool. We don't want an eternity of bloodshed.
And they just rolled with it. So when I look at this conflict, like there is some sticking point that isn't about injustice from where I'm sitting. This is about something else that I don't know that we've gotten to yet. I don't even know that I understand yet.
But when I step inside the Israeli frame of reference as reported, and I don't just assume that secretly they want to take everything, I go, I have a tiger by the tail. And some part of me knows, I can't hold on to this tiger forever. It's no way for me to live. It's no way for the tiger to live.
But I grabbed a tiger by the tail. And even if you just start the story with me grabbing the tiger, they're pissed off now because I've grabbed their tail. And they're not going to be good with that. But if I let go, I get bitten.
And so I'm now in a quandary. How do I let go of the tail in a way that is responsible? Now, we live in a fantasy land here where, hey, we're all human. So we can just say, I would like to let go.
But please don't bite me. Largely because there's a thousand people here with guns. And if you bite me, they're all going to shoot you. And in that, there's some sticking point that still makes it impossible for both sides to be like, yeah, cool.
Like let go here are the things that we're going to be good with. And so the reason I was asking, is this a land dispute or is this a moral quandary? If this is a moral quandary and a question of a cultural belief in justice, people will do crazy things to get justice. And now you're going to have, if both sides see it that way, it's going to be endless tip for tap because we're here for justice.
Also, if this is a religious thing and if this is really about what God wants for each of us, who, again, going to be intractable? But if on the other hand, this is people that don't yet see a clear vision for how they make their children's lives better than theirs, but that's what they really want, then it's solvable. But there is, that's so obvious. I know that question has been asked a gazillion times.
I don't even need to hear it. I know. So it's obviously dismissed. It never comes up in debates.
Nobody ever talks about it. I feel like a lone voice in the wilderness going, hey, why are we not asking the question of how do you get both sides to say, what's better for my children? And then let's do that. And then we get lost in the weeds.
Now, again, I said this earlier, but I think it bears repeating for people to understand my position. The reason getting lost in the weeds to me is fruitless at a definitional level is that people will look at the same thing and they will see something different. And if we don't share a view of the facts, which is extremely easy, if we don't share a view of the facts, then we'll just sit there and debate the facts endlessly, people will break even deeper into tribes. Researching you has been so eye-opening to see, like, oh, people just get into encampments and you can watch the comments and people are just like, it is as if they're watching a sporting match.
And it's like, well, if they're on team Omar, then whatever you say, they're just stoked for it. They already believe in it. They're cheering for you. Like you either did good or bad.
Like you dunked on him here, you embarrassed in there. And the other side is doing the exact same thing. And I'm like, wow, this isn't a sport by allowing yourself to engage with this like a sport is going to leave us here. But again, bringing it back to Cyprus and many other places that have had a similar thing, I'm not saying it's good.
I'm not saying that there weren't tragedies stacked on tragedies. I'm just saying, what is it about this one? I wish I had a note, a paper in Pentu, because I had so many things that, it's all right at this point. I had so many things as you were talking about things that I would like to address.
Look, in terms, I don't think that people see eye to eye on the conflicts that have been solved. That's not the point of contrast. It's not as if everybody agreed about Cyprus and Turkey and Greece and that's why that has been solved. I think there's still going to be diverging perspectives.
For me, what's wrong with Palestine and Israel and why it feels intractable? It's still ongoing, right? You can talk about refugee situations that happened so many years ago. If the conflict is settled, then yes, all you have is memories and remembering what it's like to have lived once in this village when you don't anymore, and it's a little sad, but it's not a continuous source of tension.
The problem is that we have not resolved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I come back to the fact that the reason why we have not resolved it is because there is an imbalance of power that keeps it from being resolved. Compromise happens when both sides have a reason to compromise. What you have right now is one side destroying the other and paying a relatively minimal price.
That's what was unique about October 7th, is that Israel for the first time in a very, very long time paid a significant cost for the fact that they are denying Palestinians freedom and human rights. For the most part, the way Israel has existed, for most of the past several decades, is U.S. provided impunity. And U.S.
provided immunity means they get to do whatever the hell they want to at minimal cost and that creates a dynamic in which you cannot solve the problem. You've had negotiators from the American team, Aaron David Miller, during the peace process negotiations, who's complained to us far too often, we behaved like Israel's lawyer. Those were his words. And the U.S.
is not being a reasonable mediator that's trying to bring two sides together. They're saying they're constantly the pressures on one side. The idea that what Israel wants is reasonable about Palestinian ones. Oh, come on, it's too much.
Why don't you guys just settle for this? Shouldn't you be happy that we're giving you something? There's a constant attitude that Palestinians ought to be happy with crumbs while enabling Israel to do whatever it wants that keeps this conflict from being solved. On the question of sports and comments, by the way, I think that's a really fascinating conversation because I do think that this is one of the ways in which social media has kind of ruined our discourse in one of many ways, really.
And the idea is that we trivialize these things to the point where people, that's how they engage with them, that you end the search for solutions, for serious meaningful engagements. For me, and that's my criticism, for example, of somebody like Destiny, is Destiny, from my perspective, is not particularly well-informed on this topic. And yet, one of the most difficult and challenging opponents I've ever debated on this topic. He's just really good at it.
It's a natural talent. I think you've described him at some point as having high intellectual horsepower, which I think is correct. But it does not feel like there's investment. There's a huge consumption of Israeli talking points and a way to throw these things back at you in order to win an argument.
The human shield is being an obvious one. If the Israeli Supreme Court is citing against Israeli military on this practice, they're calling it human shields, and they're saying it's wrong. It needs to stop. What's the incentive for somebody like Destiny to go, oh, no, actually, it's not so bad.
It's just fine siding with Israeli military against Israeli Supreme Court. From my perspective, it seems like if you're engaging with this in good faith, that's an easy one to say, OK, fine, you're right about that. But some people do argue for the sake of arguing. It does feel like it's about teams, and I'm going to prove that I'm going to win this argument by owning you and shutting you down and dunking on you and so on.
And that has manifested in a way that I think is really, really unhelpful. And you see people sometimes even talk about politics in a way that is similar to sports of which here for the different teams, but then after the game, we're just still pals in high five. And for me, genocide and Gaza is not the kind of thing in which we can just have a small minor disagreement and, oh, yeah, we debated and everything is great. Like, for me, this is really meaningful and consequential.
And nothing comes as important to the topic of the mass slaughter of a people. And that, to me, is not something that you can overcome as the way that you would talk about, just cheering for two different teams at a sporting event and just getting along afterwards. As much as I try to say that I think we have too much polarization and division, but for me, also part of it, there ought to be fundamental human decency that there's a wide range of topics in which I can disagree with someone who can still be friends. One of my closest friends is obsessed with the Second Amendment and thinks owning our 15th is really important.
I don't agree at all, but it's not a problem between us that we can have this disagreement because for me, there isn't fundamental indecency at the core of somebody who believes certain things in a way that, for me, to be morally fine with what's happening in Gaza feels like something much, much, much more serious that it's more difficult for me to kind of overlook and treat like a sport. Okay. Have you ever run the thought exercise of, have you ever heard of loving kindness meditation? I have not.
It's actually, it sounds dumb, but it is so useful. So, loving kindness meditation is where you sit and you meditate and you imagine yourself pushing a bubble of love out. Every time I explain this sounds like dumb, but it really works. First, it's a bubble that envelopes you and you have love for yourself and then your family and then your friends and then your neighbors and then eventually try to push the bubble out to the whole world.
I would love a man understands this conflict as well as you do to find threads of connection to a well-intentioned person that has the like die-hard Israel mentality because if, you know, sort of the great men of history, so arguably my greatest hero is Nelson Mandela. And what I found fascinating about Nelson Mandela was when he came out of prison, this whole thing was about unity and you wanted to bring people together. And so, it is going to take people on both sides that see a path together. And right now what I see are really smart people on both sides that see why the other side is an asshole.
That's trivial. Why the other side is hell bent on killing and death and that the other side is so wrong-headed and wants to kill us that we can never truly find peace. And I hear that coming out of both sides. So, I know how naive and cheesy this sounds, but I actually don't know.
I don't know that there's another way. There's a very mechanistic way, which is if you can get a human to believe that tomorrow will be better than today, and if they take a certain set of actions, they can bring that about. There's hard-wiring in the human mind that will pull you forward on that. Now, the only thing I don't understand, the religions on either side enough to know, if that normal injection point breaks.
And so, my stepmother-in-law, for instance, gets kicked out of her home, becomes a refugee. She ends up moving to England, studying, finding love, having kids. And she just was like, I'm just going to focus on the future. I'm going to focus on beautiful things, and I'm not going to think about that.
And they lost everything. So, it's like, that would have been brutal, but she switched her view to something more positive. And so, I would love for somebody of your knowledge and wisdom to find those points of connection. So, as a CEO, you end up mediating for these incredible humans that you have on your team, but you're watching them and you're like, how dumb can one human act?
This is really crazy. What the fuck are you guys doing? And I have learned that you have to find a way for them to have what I call an exit ramp. People talk a lot about this with Putin, but you never hear people, or at least I don't.
Never hear people talking about this with the Israeli-pousing conflict. And it goes something like this. You have a worldview. I'm not going to convince you to see my worldview.
I know that. So, now, I need to figure out how I find an offering for you where you don't look like an asshole in front of your constituents. And that has to happen on both sides, and so that everybody can feel good moving forward. And every time I try to imagine that, I keep running into what, even after hearing your arguments and even being able to articulate your arguments back to you, it feels like there's an invisible thing that I have not hit yet.
At this point in the conversation, I suspect it's religious in nature, but I don't know that. And so, no one wants the off-ramp. Now, I took a note a minute ago, this could be the most naive question that I've asked in a series of naive questions. Is this really all just about the Aloxamask and the West Bank, and that's really the game?
And until we settle that, everything else is a charade? So, I don't think so. I think that religion amplifies the tensions a little bit, but I don't think that this is the fundamental issue at the end of the day. By the way, just for the record, Palestinian Christians are just as oppressed as Palestinian Muslims.
So, this is not like a uniquely Muslim-Jewish thing. I know some people try to paint it that way. But some of the most prominent people advocating for Palestinian rights are Palestinian Christians. Edward Said, Hanan Ashrawi, even in the United States.
Somebody quit the Biden administration over it. Biden's policy towards Iran-Palestine. It was a guy by the name of Ta'an Ashrawi, who was Christian. So, I don't think that religion really is at the core of this, but obviously, it inflames tensions a little bit more.
I think that it is ultimately about a future in which people can envision their children having a way to live in that land, dignity, and freedom. I think that is ultimately at a score. And it's a status quo in which one people get that and the other don't, and we're trying to figure out how to get past that. Now, you bring up a love thing, which I don't think is cheesy at all, by the way.
I do think that it's one of the primary critiques that I have of, I think it's our political discourse in general, but certainly exists within my camp as well, is kind of seeing people who disagree with us or who are uninformed as the enemy in some way. And for me, I think that disinformation and misinformation are the enemy, and sure, there are powers that propagate that intentionally, and for me, that's the opponent. But ultimately, when I think of your average uninformed person who just doesn't know enough and gets it wrong, just because that's the media that is available in the mainstream, frankly, that's what people consume, to me, it is absolutely critical to reach to those people with love and kindness, and that does extend to people who are on the other side of this issue. And there is a way in which I've seen it, a close personal friend of mine is Russian Jewish guy who's talking to a lot of his family members who are Israeli, and he's having that struggle internally and trying to figure out how he can convince them that Israel is on the wrong track, and that Israeli policy is wrong, and so on.
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He's within the community. He's not an outsider of his community. And so I don't think that this is really the dividing line, that I'm simply at the point where, while I completely acknowledge that approaching the things with our common humanity and decency and the kindness that we show one another in interactions is incredibly helpful of resolving personal tensions and you can't absolutely get to a place to wear with people that you have very, very strong political moral, whatever disagreements with you can get to a place to where you see each other's humanity really well. The scale of what we're witnessing in Palestine and Israel cannot wait for these kinds of personal connections to eventually develop into something.
To me, this is a moment of international accountability. So I'm, for what it's worth, by the way, personally, I've identified as agnostic. I don't believe in anything anymore. And I just keep coming back to the fact that we have a situation in which to try to resolve this through love and kindness is possible, but there is an urgency to ending what is unfolding right now that can't wait for us to naturally develop positive feelings and let things fly out and see how we can do this through personal connections.
This is an apartheid regime condemned by every major human rights organization in the world, human rights watch and international Israeli human rights organizations critical of their own government, the United Nations Human Rights Council, you name it, consensus on the fact that this is an apartheid regime practicing illegal occupation and committing whether you want to agree on the word genocide or not, certainly unspeakable war crimes and crimes against humanity. That's not a dispute. And there's a question right now whether we should continue arming them or not. That just, there is a time for love and personal connection, but there's an urgency to saying we have to put an end to this.
And you put an end to it by making sure that you don't have the weapons to carry on these atrocities anymore. And then after that is settled, after you put an end to the emergency that is unfolding, when we no longer have thousands of people being killed on a regular basis, then we can sit down and talk about how to build a meaningful connection between Israel and Palestinians. I keep going back to apartheid South Africa because I think that's a really, really important example of truth and reconciliation came after apartheid fell. Mandela became a uniting figure after the political injustice was undone and he led by example of how to be uniting and not to regurgitate old traumas and hatred and so on.
And you have a scale of an injustice that is unfolding before our eyes. It is simply premature to be talking about building personal connections and understanding each other in the face of something this horrific that is unfolding. And just on the question of genocide, I know that the name that the word invokes a lot of feelings and people dispute it. To me, there's Arianaire.
His family fled the Holocaust. He's Jewish was born in Germany. Founded human rights watch. Headed the ACLU for a while.
And kind of just the respect that people have for him as an authority on these kinds of issues is unparalleled. And he said at the beginning of this, I thought Israel was only committing war crimes in Gaza. I thought that they were reckless in the way they were targeting civilians. But after examining this a little bit more closely and seeing the systematic starvation and destruction of society in Gaza, I can't help but conclude that this is a genocide.
I know this is one person's opinion, but it's not a random person. Somebody who is Jewish is an authority on these kinds of issues and started with sympathy for Israel and wanting to make excuses for Israel's conduct and could not help by looking at the fact what conclude that Israel is systematically destroying society, housing society in Gaza. Well, now let's really complicate the issue and go back to what you were saying about this is a moment for international intervention. I have a hypothesis as a layman that that isn't going to work.
And the reason I don't think that that's going to work is it hasn't worked so far. And Israel seems like they are more than prepared to continue to escalate. And Iran is lurking somewhere in the background. So I think it is necessary to confront the Iran of it all.
What is Iran's role in this moment? I will push back just on your setup and I'll get to Iran real quick. I don't think we've ever tried meaningful pressure on Israel. There have been a few occasions in the distant past.
There was a time in which Ronald Reagan warned Israel to instantly put an end to their bombing of Beirut and Lebanon because they were causing MS casualties. And it's crazy to think that talk about how much our political discourse shifted. Reagan compared to the Holocaust and said you have to put an end to it. And Israel immediately pulled the plug because they understood that Reagan was really putting his foot down in a very serious way.
So we've been in this situation since the end of World War II effectively. So literally in whatever 70 years. But we need consistency. That's the thing, right?
We have the individual instances. But if the US puts this down. So this is why nations build alliances that I'm sure there are things that Israel has to offer to other people that makes them not want to abandon their allies. So for whatever reason, which admittedly on this, I literally know nothing.
But if I look at the way that they're being treated, I say, okay, well clearly, there's a mutually beneficial relationship even if I don't understand it. Yes and no. So when you think of why their relationship became what it was, the special relationship. It came on the back of the 1967 war in which Israel defeated Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in six days.
And just like blew everybody out of the water, captured all this massive territory, they tripled their size. And I think the US was interested in being allies with a country that is that powerful. And so they thought this is a good, you know, the US had different countries in different parts of the world that play regional cop, basically local cops. And having Israel be that for the United States seemed like a no brainer.
And so Israeli military funding, US military funding for Israel jumped a hundredfold very, very quickly after that. And that is the natural alliance is that you have a region that is strategically important. They've got a lot of oil in the region, very important resource for the world. And you want to be allied with the government, which in contrast to other, like for example, the Saudi government is allied with the US.
But the government does not represent its people. It's an authoritarian regime. And so there's a possibility of them being overthrown and things could switch overnight the way they happened in Iran. There was an Iranian dictator that was close with the United States.
We actually overthrew an Iranian Democratic prime minister, Musadak back in the 1950s, installed the Shah who was brutal. And then there was this Islamic revolution more recently that overthrew the US back dictator. So there's a fear that this thing could happen when we ally ourselves exclusively with authoritarian governments and not really represent their people. And Israel offered a unique opportunity for us to be allied with a government that effectively does represent these people.
It's more or less democratic for its Jewish population. And there was some level of stability and military power that came together that made sense for us to be close with them. Now, I've examined it. Interestingly, this is what I wrote my master thesis on.
It's sort of like because you have a lot of arguments of people saying the US doesn't benefit anything from Israel. Israel's taking advantage of the US is the tail wagging the dog. It's a backwards relationship. And you've had many other people on the other side of this saying, no, no, no, no.
The Israel is there to serve US interests. That's why there is an alliance and the US as an imperial force benefits from having Israel. And I wanted to resolve what that relationship was and how it actually works. And I noticed that there's a contrast between what Israel does in Palestine versus when Israel oversteps on major significant US or TD interests.
So when they tried to sell military technology to China back in 2005, George W. Bush took a stance. Very aggressive one refused to meet with Israeli diplomats and told them they need to back off. And they backed off and they issued a public apology so you can see that the US is in charge when it matters.
But then when it comes to how Israel treats the Palestinians, there isn't an overriding strategic reason why the US cares about Palestinians. And this is where you see the Israel lobby in the US bully, the US administration on multiple occasions. You had it in 2002. You have it with the building of settlements in general.
You constantly have the US telling Israel you need to stop these provocative acts of building settlements and put an end to it. And Israel just constantly kicks stands in the US face and just keeps expanding settlements. They did not run up against a collection of US or TD interests that would come together to push the Israel lobby down. So in a way, I can admit that Israel is useful to the US in some ways.
But I'll say that what Israel is doing in Palestine is 100% harmful to US interests. There's no reason to back it up. And we've just, this is where the Israel lobby has an outside, an outside influence. They have a ton of money.
They're not afraid to show it. They brag about it. There was a time in which somebody who worked at APAC talking to Jeffrey Goldberg, a pro-Israel journalist at the Atlantic, pulled up an Afghan off the table and said, see this napkin within 24 hours, I can get the signatures of 70 senators on it. Just kind of bragging of the fact that they can get their way.
And that's because they do spend their money and they push their weight around in Washington. They oust members of Congress who are critical of Israel and they try to support people who are. Their power has diminished slightly. There's a change in public opinion in America where young people really diverge from the older generation and they're beginning to really push back on the Israel lobby in some ways.
But to me, that dynamic on why we back them when they do what they do in the West Bank and Gaza, that is absolutely not an America's interest. And that is the Israel lobby bullying American politicians to going along with it. To the point to where we've created a political culture in the US, where it just, our politicians sound like robots. No matter what you ask them.
It's like, I support Israel has the right to defend itself to a state solution. It's just an empty slogan that doesn't mean anything. They just say it in response to anything that they're asked about, like kind of glitching bots. And that's kind of where you can tell that this is not, you know, this isn't driven by any kind of American strategy where we have a vision of where we want to go and not.
And by them keeps leaking to the press that he has frustrations with Netanyahu and why won't he do this and why won't he do that. And he tells them you're bombing in Gaza and it goes too far. And Rafa is a red line. And time and again Netanyahu disregards him.
And you have a US administration that is basically worried about picking a fight with Israel lobby. And what that looks like is the Israel lobby mobilizing pro Israel members of Congress to attack the administration for quote unquote being too hard on Israel. They just don't want to deal with it. The Palestinians don't seem like a significant enough reason to invest this political capital.
Like in defense of Palestinians, let's not have despite we have other national priorities. And that's how that's part of how Israel keeps moving in a more extreme direction. We keep indulging it when it doesn't really serve American interests, even if fundamentally there is an alliance there that makes sense in a different set of circumstances. I think that the whether they serve America's interest is going to come down to look at some of this could just be money in politics.
So setting that aside for now, but serving America's interest again coming back to Iran. Sorry, I missed your question. No, no, not at all. But I do want to better understand that.
So you've got Iran that's obviously been pushing for years to try and become a nuclear power, which less nuclear powers would be better, not more. For what it's worth not nuclear weapons. It seems like everybody was investigated. Iran have said that they're not in the process of developing nuclear weapons.
They are developing peaceful nuclear energy that then has the potential of being shifted into weapons capacity. But there's been zero evidence of the fact that they're developing nuclear weapons. I just think that that's a note that is worth raising simply because Israel is a nuclear country. And we constantly have this discourse about how our friend can have it.
But our foes can't. And that's a double standard that we ought to question as well. Well, I mean, now just speaking as somebody that lives in America. Yes, our friends can have what they want and our foes get nothing.
That I think would be weird to approach any other way. But going back to, okay, so one, if you're looking sideways at Iran, which I suppose I am in as much as it makes me tense the tensions between the US and Iran. So I'm always a little skeptical, but I don't know enough about Iran. So I'm certainly on exploratory mission here.
But it doesn't seem crazy to think that you develop as much of your program as you can under the guise of energy. And then if you get a chance, you switch over to the weapons. So I've heard it said that what's really going on with Israel and Lebanon, what's going on with Israel and Gaza is actually about Iran trying to create a seven or eight front war against Israel to weaken them so that they can, I don't know, at some point launch a lot of offensive, take them over, eliminate them as a state. What's your take on that?
Is that just crazy talk or? It's got elements that are accurate, but the cohesive picture I think is not. And I think that here's a way to think about it. Just think of the relationship between the US and Israel.
It's an alliance. There's a patron. The US is the patron. We're the ones who give them all the money and weapons, but that doesn't mean that Israel does whatever the US wants.
It doesn't mean that everything time Israel does something that that's the US moving them. Let's talk about the most powerful force in wealth building compounding. There's a reason that people have talked about this forever. You put an asset to work.
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And there's a similar relationship between Iran and a bunch of groups in the region. And again, just the history that I recounted is relevant because this all started with the US overthrowing a democratic government in Iran. Installing a brutal dictator and then this revolution that came, a religious revolution that overthrew the US back dictator. And extreme hostility towards the US and the hostage crisis and all that, obviously, were familiar with the history.
And now you have, in the region, really three teams, if you want to think about it, but there are two main teams. One is the US team, and that's Israel and other governments that are allied in one form or another with the US. That's the Egyptian government, the Jordanian government, the Saudi government, the Emirate government, and so on. And you have then an access that what they call themselves the access of resistance, which is resistance to US empire and hegemony in the region.
And that is Iran and its allies in Iraq, in Syria, in Lebanon, and in Yemen right now as kind of like the counterforce. And they have narratives. I mean, ultimately, this is about geopolitics. This is about countries that want to spread their influence in the region.
And Iran has a pretty powerful narrative that is built on the injustice that Palestinians are suffering. And it gives them enormous leverage in a region that is deeply frustrated with the way Israel is getting away with treating Palestinians the way it does. And this is a major point of weakness for the United States, that we talk all this lofty rhetoric about freedom and democracy and human rights. And yet we're arming and funding the destruction of Palestinian society with the most horrible abuses and the narrow freedom for Palestinians.
That speaking out of both sides of our mouths has not gone unnoticed on the region. And so even the populations of rulers that are pro-US, they're terrified of their populations on this particular question. So you have the Egyptian government, the rhetoric is anti-Israel, even though the policy is effectively pro-Israel. The same thing with Jordan, the majority of people who live in Jordan are of Palestinian origin.
And the US is putting its allies in the region in a very, very difficult spot where they want to be allied with the US, but the price is so high in terms of public opinion. And Iran is capitalizing on that in a very, very aggressive way. And so they do have a patronage, a patronage relationship with some of the powers like Hezbollah and the Houthis where they supply them with weapons and money. But I think it would be wrong to describe these as simply an extension of Iran or tools of Iran.
Hezbollah and Lebanon is an authentic Lebanese organization and political movement and they represent a significant portion of the Lebanese society. The same thing with the Houthis in Yemen, they represent a significant portion of the Yemeni population. And because they're willing to take a more antagonistic role with Israel and the United States and the Saudi government and so on, Iran is more than happy to jump on that and provide backing and assistance. So it's a natural alliance in a sense of these two axes.
And if you want to weaken, again, you keep coming back to the same issue, which is that if you're interested in weakening violent political movements in Palestine, that are saying liberation can only come through violence, if you want to weaken your regional foes, resolving the issue of Palestine is an obvious low-hanging fruit. And day in and day out, the US says we support a two-state solution, the UN takes a vote on the two-state solution, the US intervenes and vetoes. And Iran says, look, they're hypocrites, it's just all lofty American rhetoric. But when push comes to shove, they're more than happy to arm and continue and defend the apartheid regime that rules Israel and all the crimes that they are committing.
And that's a very, very important thing. So from a purely geopolitical perspective, no denying that Iran does play a role in the fact that they are the major power in that axis that is defined towards the US and Israel. A way to undermine them would be to take away the biggest grievance that the region has, which is the question of Palestine and lack of freedom for Palestinians. Okay, if for Hamas to stay in place and us actually solve this so we could remove from Iran their biggest weapon, could peace ever happen with Hamas still in place?
I believe so. And that's a reference. I mean, I don't know how long it will take at this point. Obviously, things are in a very, very different place.
But it's that signaling towards moderation that happened when they won the election in 2006, Jimmy Carter was in talks with Hamas and reported back that he sees that there's potential to work with them, verify that the election was democratic and that they're basically willing to moderate and play ball. We're many, many years removed from that. So I can't tell you that you can snap your finger and everything goes back to normal. But to me, rather, you know, this obsession with removing Hamas from power, I think is extremely misguided.
If we say that groups that commit mass atrocities must be eliminated for peace to move forward, the obvious logical conclusion of that is you have to eliminate the Israeli government because no party in this entire region between the river and the sea in Palestine has committed greater atrocities than the Israeli military has. But we don't think that's a reasonable starting point. If you say you have to decapitate the Israeli government, then we can talk peace. You accept that this is an existing structure.
And part of what you do is that you have to make peace with unsavory characters and that means sitting down and talking. I think it's very similar. I think that there is reasonable reservations that people have on Hamas. It's not crazy to think that they're not the most prone towards flexibility and negotiation or anything like that.
But at the same time, they're the structure that exists. And I think that engaging them as a step towards trying to find the solution of peaceful solution, I think, is a reasonable way to do. How do you deal with the fact that they've said we'll do October 7 over and over and over? Oh boy, if I wanted to recount to you how many genocidal Israeli statements have been made by Israeli leaders, the list is endless.
It's not about what rhetoric people use at any given point. I think it's about whether you think that there's room to move people or not. And starting with something as simple as a ceasefire, they're saying we'll give up all the hostages just end the war. And then Netanyahu found a reason to say no to that.
He insisted on a temporary ceasefire. And then finally Hamas buckled under American pressure on the culture government and said, okay, fine, temporary six weeks ceasefire and we'll give you back the hostages. And Israel still found a reason to say no because they said they want to leave troops in Gaza to control this corridor and that corridor and what have you. So I think you start with, again, ending the onslaught, getting a basic and simple agreement as a ceasefire.
And then we can see where we can go from there towards building some kind of comprehensive peace agreement. But along the way in which this has been promising, the primary obstacle has always been the Israeli government. It has been for decades now that they are the primary impediment towards resolving the conflict and you see it in the UN votes. That's where it's a major demonstration.
The UN General Assembly votes on the question of Palestine. It's always the entire world on one side saying Israel has to withdraw from the occupied territories. And then the US and Israel and a couple of tiny countries that they've bullied into voting along with them. There's a sharp contrast between the way the way people around the world view this.
And we really are an outlier in our insistence on Israel blocking the possibility of a peaceful solution and insisting that the only way, the American rhetoric, the only way there's going to be peace is through negotiations. Well, you've got an imbalance of power between two parties and you've watched what it looks like when they negotiate. Palestinians were never consulted when Israel was created. They never had to okay it.
Why is it that Israel has to okay a Palestinian state? Why is that a requirement from one side or not the other? And instead we just keep funding this occupation indefinitely and saying only when Israel feels good about having those talks and having them lead somewhere is when something could happen. Yeah, this is where I think your worldview of this is largely not exclusively but this is largely a moral question and they need to do the right thing runs into real politic that this is Israel is in a much stronger position, both militarily and in an alliance perspective.
And so I imagine some of this is just they're not going to give up something that they don't absolutely need to give up again. I'm not defending it. I'm just saying this is where that's the thing. I think what you're saying is absolutely correct, which is where the two state solution compromise came from.
For a lot of Palestinians, two states where they only get the West Bank gods and East Jerusalem is just, you know, such they, a lot of people are considered unacceptable. They think it's way too far compromised that you give up the overwhelming majority of historic Palestine that Palestinian is where I think the cleanse from. And yet it was the position of the Palestinian leadership and have the support of public opinion of Palestinians who lived in the occupied territories. For a reason, it is that recognition of the fact that there is an imbalance of power and we have to compromise.
It just can't be you live in a cage. That's the compromise Palestinians are not willing to go for. They're willing to go for a reasonable two-state solution based on the 67 borders, even though that is seating a lot. That is a major Palestinian compromise.
So, all right, let's say that we could convince Israel, guys, this is done. You've been fighting over this for a very long time. If you have a secret desire, you're going to take everything over. We America are going to pull out.
Never going to let it happen. So now it's time for you guys to, you have to end the blockade. You've got to let these guys start doing their own thing, building a life for themselves. And let's fantasy, fantasy, fantasy land.
America says, Israel, we love you to death. And we are so glad that you're our special partner, but we are now a big hammer. And if you, if either one of you messes with the other, we smash down on whoever did the bad thing. And what do you think would happen at that point?
Because let's say that the floodgates of aid unlock again and they're flowing into Palestine. What makes me nervous is if you have Hamas in control, whenever you're hiring somebody, you always say the most, the best predictor of future success is past success. So what did Hamas do with the funds that they got before? They built these incredible tunnels.
They are really incredible. But obviously, all military all the time, they didn't even let civilians in there when civilians had no place to go during the bombings. So it's like, that doesn't feel like a good use of funds that that feels like and feels the right word. It feels like from my perspective, somebody who is here for justice and they are not interested in actually getting their state.
So I worry that given that they did not get what they wanted, which I still have a clear definition, like if they get Gaza as Gaza stands today, no new settlements, maybe even a couple of quick land swaps so that they're not intermingled and you just draw a line and say, Yeah, some of us are not an issue in Gaza right now. Like when Israel withdrew the settlers, like that was in the West Bank problem. The West Bank is a huge problem because very, very deeply embedded to the point where there is almost no way to extricate them at this point. Alright, let's forget that for a second because I want to speak about this.
So do you trust, I know you have huge trust issues with Israel because you believe that they won it all and that's just the whole game. But remember, in this fantasy, America is going to act as a hammer. So if they make a move for it, boom. Do you think that Palestine would take that aid and build a thriving economy?
Or are we going to find ourselves with more military buildup? I think we would have, and again, I'm sorry if I keep going back to this, but I think it's just a demonstrable example of the beginning of the peace process. What the Palestinian Authority was focused on is institution building and trying to make life as normal as possible. That is where the energy was focused.
And I have no doubt. And again, what happened also during that time is you had individual acts of violence. You had Jewish extremists go into a mosque and massacre 30 people. You had Hamas sitting off suicide bombings.
So you're not going to eliminate that complete link course, but the bulk of the way these societies are going to function. If there's a genuine prospect for freedom, I think it's going to be to normalize life because we talked about this a second ago. What's the core of this? I don't think this is religious.
I don't think this is about an abstract idea of justice. I think people want to have a better future for their children. That's what this is about. And what you're describing would open the door to that.
And then it would be similar to your story with Cyprus. Yes, I'm not going to say that people are never going to think and dream of what the past used to be like and when Palestinians could go everywhere they wanted to and so on. But you can get to a point where the primary focus of these societies is going to be a better future for their children. And when the risk of further military confrontation with Israel means that you're otherwise free and prosperous children are now going to be reduced to rubble again.
Nobody wants that. The problem with Gaza right now is that there's such a level of despair over what life has been like for decades that it didn't seem that crazy for him has to be able to recruit that many people who were up to just cause trouble and see what happens. So are you ever going to get everybody to go along with an idea of a two-state solution? Probably not.
You're going to get a lot of upset people. But at the same time, by offering people the chance for a better life, I have no doubt that from there you're on much better ground to start negotiating towards a better future and building slowly towards it and dealing with security problems as security problems rather than a fundamental issue of injustice that has to be resolved. That's a fun fantasy. Now let me drag us back into the filthy muck of reality.
I saw Rabbi wrote his name down. Rabbi Fleischer on Piers Morgan said something along the lines of this is a wild paraphrase, but something along the lines of the way that a war ends is one side wins and the other side loses. And Israel is going to win. We are going to defeat Hamas.
And when we do, we are going to take security control over Gaza. We are going to run it with other players in the region, Egypt. I don't remember if he said Jordan's definitely said Saudi Arabia. And we're going to help rebuild Gaza and end up with a Gaza that is tear free.
And it will end up being wonderful. So in that vision, which I know you find wildly unjust and absolutely horrifying. Not just that, by the way, just that he's fundamentally dishonest because his track record is extremely lengthy about saying that Israel should take control of all the land and that it should be occupied Gaza and permanently take it over. In no uncertain terms, the only difference I would say is he was making it sound like and what I saw that this would be done with other nations in the region and that the goal would be to build it back up and have something.
He didn't say to state, but that was what I chose to read into it. Certainly not. No, he's fundamentally opposed to the idea of a Palestinian state and for him Israel should be control of everything. And it is that formula.
Control of everything forever. From the river to the sea forever. This is Israel's land. He has a very religious take on it.
Believe it or not, the first time I debated him was back in 2011 or something. It's a wild bag and at this firm. Yeah. He's got very, very deep religious convictions that this can all be done through strength and it should all be Israeli conquest of the entire land.
And frankly, I'm almost convinced that he thinks of October 7th as a great opportunity for Israel to finally do what he's always wanted to do, which is to reconquer Gaza. So that is a nightmare scenario for you, even if Gaza is rebuilt back into something beautiful and many players in the region are overseeing everything. To me, it's Palestinian freedom. That's what we want at the end of it, right?
You could have that. Now, you don't need to go through this entire charade. Just Palestinians deserve to have freedom. They should rule themselves.
They should have control of their own borders. If Israel is attached to the idea of holding on to the entire territory, fine, but then you have to give Palestinians equal rights. You can't have them held there as subjects who don't get to vote for the government that rules them. So having it both ways is the problem of no state and no freedom.
Let's run then the other thought experiment where they're given rights in that tiered system that you were talking about. No longer an open-air prison. Israel is putting a ton of money into rebuilding international aid is flowing in like crazy, but there's no more Hamas because they were soundly defeated. Money's pouring in.
It's a coalition government for lack of better works. I don't want it. In the thought experiment, I don't want it to be just Israel. That feels bad.
So it's a coalition government and we're rebuilding Gaza. They have equal rights in this new tiered rights just to make it a little more complicated, a little more realistic. So you're describing basically everybody in the occupied territories as being currently Palestinian citizens of Israel. That tiered is that dire, tragic, nothing good, or is it still bad, but boy oh boy is it better than what we have?
It would be substantially better and the biggest obstacle to that would be Israel would never allow it to happen. That's where we are. If you can imagine, if everybody in the occupied territories has full voting rights now, the way Palestinians citizens of Israel do, Israel can no longer basically make decisions in advance of one particular group. You know, there's a vote that happens in the Israeli-Knesset, the Israeli parliament every once in a while, in which Palestinian members of the Israeli-Knesset, Palestinian citizens of Israel, put forward the bill that says, let's define Israel as a country of all its citizens.
So that's not even the occupied territories. It's just defining it as a country of all the citizens and the parliament shoots it down every single time. Sometimes they don't even let it come to a vote because they don't think the Palestinian citizens of Israel that this is their country. They're kind of like a tolerated people within the citizens of Israel.
Do you think a Jewish superiority position? Oh, explicitly. There's something called the Israel Nation state law in which it says the right to self-determination in Israel is unique to the Jewish people. That's explicit.
So they don't have a constitution in Israel. You could read that not as like because we're better, but knowing a bit of the history about why they suddenly felt so compelled to have a state, it's like we've had pogroms, pogroms for however long. That's going to set a thing in your psyche. We just had the Holocaust.
We're starting a nation. We will do whatever the fuck it takes. And I'm sure not all of it was good, but we end up getting our state. Now, I'm like, I am not going to let anybody mess this up.
And if that means that I've got to tear my system, I'm going to tear my system. But I'm even going to put into words that like self-determination is only for the Jewish people. That way, I just don't have to worry. Like if we end up getting outnumbered one day, it is what it is.
Like the constitution, I guess, not that, but whatever their founding document is, says that it's just for us to make decisions. Yeah. I get why they would want that. I also get why.
But here's like a key. Yeah, it's two things, right? There's the motivation of why they're doing it and there's just the reality that they've created with that. Smoltrich, who's currently part of Netanyahu's government, his view, by the way, interestingly enough, he calls himself a homophobic fascist or a fascist homophobe.
I remember which word. This is his own self-scription ensemble. I'm not sure what we're wearing there, but okay. His position is we need to separate Palestinian citizens of Israel from Jewish babies and maternity wards.
Wait, sit down, Wommersheim? He wants to separate Arab and Jewish babies and maternity wards. He just doesn't want them in the same room? Yes.
So you can tell it comes from very defracism and the idea that we're not the same people. So like those are people currently in government. The guy in charge of Israeli national security, Ben Veer. He was convicted and it just tells you also again about the slide of the Israeli mindset over time.
He was convicted by an Israeli court of terrorism and anti-Arab incitement. And currently he's serving in this government as the head of national security. Things have moved in a very, very dark and ugly direction in terms of anti-Palestinian sentiment. So like that's the driving force for a lot of that.
It's the idea that these people are not equal to us and therefore we should find ways to get rid of them or confine them or if they want to stay here, fine, just you don't have rights and you have to take it. That is the attitude with which they view Palestinians. So all of it is geared towards reducing their rights and, yeah, at every turn, it's an apartheid regime through and through and public opinion is not shifting in a better direction but a worse one. So I know nothing about the things you're describing right now, but I know humans well enough to know that just like in America, you can fix it.
I go paths. They're not usually in charge of government, though. The people who express views, obviously we have a ton of racist people in this country. Are you kidding?
Fair enough. Fair enough. I mean this in this way. Half of the country thinks that Donald Trump is the next killer.
So what I'm getting at is you've got, literally, America is good people on both sides, okay? So I've got Rad and Blue and boy, oh boy, do I not agree with a lot of them. But it is interesting at the deepest level that half of these incredible people can look at Trump and say this is the next coming of Hitler and we're making jokes when he almost got assassinated. And then the other half looks at him as the savior and is the only thing saving our country from certain demise.
I get whiplash. As somebody who is constitutionally center, I get whiplash seeing that. But I understand that even from within my own country, people will look left into the right and see just insanity. Like they just, they can't believe that these people have to be stopped at all costs.
So I understand how in a democracy you're going to get this kind of thing. So I don't doubt for one second that inside of Israel are people who are like, you need to separate these babies because they are beneath us, they're horrible, get them away. But I've got to believe that there is also a huge swath of people that are, I want beautiful things for everybody that comes in contact with Israel and that this is really a question of assimilation and I need to look at the tiered system because I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that. But I get the, the protectionary impulse in practice.
It just may be too gross, but I understand how again with all the persecution that they've had for thousands of years, I get how you're like, okay, line in the sand. But my gut instinct is that it, again, I am, I am not educated in this. This is just me speaking about what I know to be true about humans, that I have a feeling that it's not all one side or the other, that there are going to be people that want to see everybody united, but assimilation will be important. Yeah.
There's, there's a line between, right, it's never, you don't want to view things in black and white, good people and bad people and all that stuff. There's no strict dividing line, but there are injustices of a scale where it does require you to take that kind of position. Like for me, if you were to look back at Jim Crow and think, oh, the black, white conflict in America is so awful, but there are good people on both sides and if you can only get together and whatever, yes, like maybe there are good individual people on both sides, sure. But we're not talking about that.
We're talking about the fact that there is a political injustice. And that's what we're describing here is that of course there are tons of good Israelis who are well-intentioned and so on, public opinion shifting in a negative direction. So there's more of the ones who don't view Palestinians as equals fundamentally. But nonetheless, of course, there are good people, but we are looking at a fundamental injustice.
We are at a juncture right now in which you have a historic atrocity being committed. We've seen those being committed before, where they're good Germans and Nazi Germany. Of course there were, where they're good Russians in Stalin's Russia in the Soviet Union. Of course there were, but you're confronting a massive atrocity right now where it's not about finding common ground.
It is about putting an end to an absolute horror that is unfolding. And that's the thing that I keep going back to. You know, when we were talking earlier, you mentioned something about, of course, our friend, we were talking about it in the context of Iran and Israel. Of course our friend gets out of what they want and our opponents don't.
But we're trying to preach an international order that we want everybody to come together under. That's the idea after World War II, that we created the UN and the international institutions and the Nuremberg trials and the ideas from now on, the same rules apply for everyone. And it's a fundamental principle, I think it's called the principle of moral universality, which is if something is right for me, it's right for you. If I can say you can't do it, then by definition I also should not be able to do it as an international order.
And running the world the way the US currently wants to, which is our friends get to do whatever they want, including carry out genocide. And it's not a big deal. We'll just softly tell them, can you please tone it down? But then our opponents, the second they step out of line in any direction, we're mobilizing our military and getting ready to shut them down.
That's, you're running it like a mafia, you're not running a just world. And for me, looking at it from the perspective of we're trying to build a world in which we don't have as much death and suffering and injustice and misery. That has to be a world in which we say the same rules apply across the board for everyone. And in the case of Israel Palestine, it has to mean in some fashion that Palestinians get what Israelis get.
My personal preference is a one state in which everybody was together. I understand that that might be very difficult to get to because of Israeli society feeling insecure about the possibility of being a Jewish minority and so on. There's an alternative to that, which is that you end the occupation. And for me, it is utterly inexcusable that somebody can simultaneously say we're too afraid to give Palestinians equality while insisting on ruling over them and never letting them have their own state and their own freedom because of the way you feel.
Feelings are valid. It's fine that you feel the way you feel. You're not entitled based on your feelings to go and violate somebody else's rights and deny them. If I don't like my neighbor, if I'm suspicious about my neighbor might be doing inside their home, I have the right to feel that.
I don't have the right to go install cameras in his house and say, I don't know what you're doing. I don't feel safe with you next to me. There's a line that has to be drawn somewhere and we can't build our international relations based on the feelings of people within our country. We have to say you don't get to oppress other people and deny them the rights because of the way you feel.
That ought to be a clear line that we draw on this end. All right. Fully acknowledging that you believe that what happened on October the 7th was because Israel made it very clear. You guys have no other options.
You will never taste freedom again. This is forever. How should Israel have responded to that invasion? Yeah.
Where do you want to put on it? I think it's a major attack. And again, had it been, I know we've, I've niche arguments about the justification for the attack or not. Had it been exclusively on the Israeli military bases, I think there could have been an argument to be made.
That this is an act of resistance. It's a foreign occupation army. By the way, on a technicality, the siege, the UN and many human rights organizations considered the continuation of the occupation, even though they withdrew from within, just because they're effectively in control of all of Gaza. Had this been an attack exclusively on the Israeli military, I think you could have said that this is an act of resistance.
But because it included an attack on Israeli civilians as well, it's just transparently not justified and there's no way to justify it. But if our Israel's leader the day, it happened and you said, what would you do now? For me, it's really easy. I would come, take on the podium and say, we've realized that we've created a situation that is untenable.
It is making everybody insecure and unsafe. And so we are going to end the unlawful blockade and end the illegal occupation. And in exchange, we want justice for what happened. So we want every person who has participated in the October 7 attacks, particularly the ones targeting Israeli civilians, to hand themselves over for war crimes trial.
I think that's what my closest approximation to justice. Is it anywhere near realistic? Is this anywhere in the vicinity of something like that happening? We are not.
And it is only going to come about when Israel feels that it feels that sense that they can't behave and do whatever they want with impunity. Like really going back to where we started, which is that you can do that through American diplomatic and financial pressure, or you can allow untold death and suffering to occur in a major, regional war that's going to escalate and take many different shapes before Israel ultimately comes to that conclusion. I think that that is the end result is that because situations of injustice are inherently in a state of disequilibrium because not everybody's satisfied and therefore they're not going to put up with it forever, we're going to end up in a situation in which there is equilibrium. And that could be, I guess, theoretically, if you want to be really morbid, the complete elimination of one side or the other, or achieving a balance in which both sides have paid such a heavy cost that they're both prepared to come to a compromise, and my problem with the current dynamic is that the Palestinians have paid an incredible cost and therefore have demonstrated a willingness to compromise and be flexible while Israel has seen nothing but impunity for many, many years, and therefore there is that entitlement to just do whatever they want and keep finding Palestinians in smaller places and thinking that you can pummel Palestinians into submission despite endless history proving that to not be the case.
All right. We're coming up on the election. Who do you think is going to be better for resolving this conflict, Kamala Harris or Trump? So I think they're both awful on this particular issue.
Sorry. It's funny because I've always been my personal politics lean more towards Bernie Sanders on domestic issues, on foreign policy, I think the entire political establishment's kind of skewed on this. I'm to the left of the Democratic Party. And I've always believed that election day is about harm reduction.
And therefore you vote for the person who's going to reduce harm as much as possible. And for me, that has been for most of my going in life feeling like I need to vote Democrats because they're better on, even though their foreign policies are very similar and they're not going to drastically change anything on this question on issues of, you know, labor rights and the environment and so on, the Democrats seem to be a little bit more willing to challenge corporate power. They're both ultimately serving the corporate class. And yet there's some level of reform possible under Democrats in a way that I think with Republicans from my perspective, it's just been way too accommodating for big business denial of climate change, massive tax breaks for the wealthy and so on.
And it felt like that's leading us towards a less just society for the first time now. And by the way, when it was time for the last election, I felt very strongly about getting Trump out of office. I thought he had been dangerous for our democracy proved it so on January 6th and beyond. And I made a video talking about even though I think Biden is going to be bad on Palestine, when you consider all the other ways that Trump is more harmful, it's important to get Trump out of office and to vote for Biden.