SIO396: "This Didn't Happen In A Vacuum"

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:16 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 396. I'm Thomas Smith, and yes, my voice still sounds like this for now. Thank you so much for listening. This is part two. If your podcast player is weird and you missed part one, go back one episode, please. This is part 2 about the current Israel Hamas war, you've seen the title. This Doesn't Happen in a Vacuum. I wonder what your reaction to that is. I think it's nothing I didn't already express in part one. So I suppose if you're here, that means you didn't overreact too much to that statement. This doesn't happen in a vacuum. The reason I ask is the UN secretary general said this did not happen in vacuum. And a lot of people lost their fucking minds.

0:01:03 Thomas: Israel accused the UN chief of justifying terrorism. Foreign minister Eli Cohen canceled a scheduled meeting with Guterres as a result of this, saying, I will not meet with the UN Secretary General after the October 7th massacre. There is no place for a balanced approach. Hamas must be erased off the face of the planet. Israel's envoy to the UN, Gilad Erdan, called for Guterres' resignation, saying Israel must rethink its relations with the world body. Quote, we will refuse to grant visas to U.N. representatives. We have already refused to give one to Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths, Erdan told Army Radio, accusing Guterres of justifying a slaughter. It's time to teach them a lesson. Again, this is all for saying this did not happen in a vacuum.

0:01:54 Thomas: So, did this happen in a vacuum? Why don't I take a quick, annoying auto ad break, which patrons at patreon.com/seriouspod do not have to hear. And then I'll come back after that. So I want to say a couple of things at the outset here. Once again, I cannot reiterate enough that I am not an expert on this, but what I plan to do here does not require me to be. But I also want to to say something that I observed. I want to tell you something because while I'm obviously not an expert, I consumed a massive amount of expert words on this because obviously that's what I do. I get hooked on it and I consume as much information as I can. And again, I'm not doing this to say that means I'm anything like an expert. I'm 1 million percent not. But I have noticed, especially after watching several heated debates among experts, and I watched a lot of of stuff, by the way, I consumed a lot of stuff that predates this attack because I wanted to get a sense of more of the history.

0:02:50 Thomas: I mean, there's always something going on, but like more of history prior to this incredibly heated moment. I have gotten a feeling that when I hear somebody say, say, you can't just waltz in here and have a point of view on this without looking at the decades, if not a century of history of this specific region and these people. There's so much history there that you don't know. It becomes a bit of a contest to disqualify the other person you're debating, like quizzing them until they don't Know something. And in I value expert opinion. I value expertise.

Part of me thinks that in situations like this, with Bret Stephens, who I have, name I'm sure you know, I watched a whole debate with Bret Stephens, who I, by all accounts, is an expert on something, is an expertise on this, was stationed there for a while. And he utilized that dynamic of like, you got to know the history, you gotta know all the history gotta know what's going on. In my mind, in a way that I started to see this as, oh, I think I know what's happening here. I think when you look at the situation, that is a group of people, Palestinians living stateless in basically an open air prison, in some cases, in horrible horrible conditions, basically in apartheid, a lot of really awful stuff, to be honest with you.

0:04:16 Thomas: When you look at that with your eyeballs, you say, well, that's not okay. I don't know. I'm just not even making any judgment as to who or what or why or how or what, not even getting to that. I look at that and I say, well, that's not okay! What do we do? What can we do, what do we do about that?

And then, in particular, in this Bret Stephens debate, lot of that so-called called expertise, knowing all the history, at his case translated to, oh no, no, you've got to know all my makeshift justifications for why this is okay, or why this, if not okay, at least it's inevitable, we can't do anything about it, there's nothing to do.

Truly think that's a significant portion of this dynamic, because if you listen to people like Brett Stevens, they have a massive list of reasons why nothing can be done, as and it boils down to, honestly, the Palestinians can maybe have a state of their own, or at least something that they can control and have political power in, maybe if they show enough good behavior, which I think is just fucking laughable. That is a major sentiment expressed. Well, you see, there's all these reasons.

Well, we tried to do this deal, and, you know, there was an attack, so, you know, that didn't work, and we tried it, and it's honestly, in my mind, it's just so much excuse making what is objectively an awful state of affairs that something needs to be done about.

So yeah, I'm not a fucking expert, but I want to share with you some of the reasons why this did not happen in a vacuum, and I don't need to be an expert to do that, I just need to read reliable sources and give you an accurate picture of some

0:05:59 Thomas: Of the history. Doesn't mean it's a full picture, I want to make very clear. You could listen to what I have to say and and still be like, well, yeah, I side with Israel for whatever reasons. And that's the thing, I'm not seeking to you into thinking I've done some complete 100% examination of all the historical facts and telling you a conclusion to come to.

But I am telling you these are things that happened that you might not know about, or that don't at least get talked about that much. And in my mind, it's pretty fucking clear that this is anything but a vacuum, vacuum. So I guess I'm going to outline, I'll just be upfront with it. I, I'm, think I've been pretty upfront with all of this, but I'm an outline what my thesis is here, so, so therefore, like what I'm kind of trying to prove.

And that is basically this, I mean, there's obviously a lot to this, but the mindset in order to fully support whatever Israel is doing here seems to me to be the only explanation for intense hatred that Palestinians, some Palestinians, I don't know how many, but any number of them might feel for Israel, real, the only explanation for that can be anti-Semitism and an intense hatred that is incurable, essentially. And so therefore renders that entire side kind of invalid, it's a racist, genocidal, anti-Semitic hate. To me, that just seems awfully convenient, convenient.

I've, I literally had a listener, someone I've, whose name I recognize, I've interacted with listeners for a long time, over a decade, I recognize this person's name going back a long time, they instantly rage quit my podcasts and sent me a flurry of messages about it right when I published that first episode, and this is their reasoning, I, that this is an incurable hatred, and that

0:07:49 Thomas: Terrorist attack is a sign of what they would do if they could. And Israel is always acting in a state of self-defense against the next Holocaust, sort of. Whereas what I see is that, am I fundamentally unable to understand at what point Palestinians should have just been okay with their situation. Truly don't understand that. Can understand how very quickly wrongs, especially if they are never fixed, never addressed, especially if they have left you obviously and visibly at a huge disadvantage relative to the other party, can see how that would, the course of years, morph into just a completely, don't want to say irrational, but like an inconsolable hatred.

0:08:40 Thomas: I can understand how that would happen. Know how humans work. When the hatred is there, the justifications follow. More the in-group needs to hate the out-group, the more those justifications will morph and reinforce themselves, etc., etc. And so there seems to be this idea that unless and until all resistance to Israel from Palestinians is done so in a completely rational and non-hateful way, unless that is true, then it's invalid, valid. And I don't see that as realistic way of looking at human nature. At what point should Palestinians have just been okay with what happened to them?

0:09:30 Thomas: I obviously can't go through the whole history, broad strokes, I don'T understand it. Like what year, like when should it have been that they would just be like, well, it's been long enough. I guess it's okay. Here's some of the history the broad strokes of which are not in dispute. Obviously, there's nothing but dispute over the narrative, the historical narrative here. It's actually really interesting to look at the different narratives. But broadly speaking, starting in World War I, I know you could go back forever with these things, but roughly World War One, there's the McMahon-Hussein correspondence. And that is the United Kingdom essentially trying to incentivize an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire. This is something that I feel like has happened numerous times throughout history.

0:10:16 Thomas: It's just another tactic in an effort to win the broader war. So they promise to recognize Arab independence in the region, and there's specifics about borders and such, in exchange for launching a revolt against the Ottoman Empire. And honestly, I might as well just read you this because I'm not going to be able to put it in any better words. Words just the first part of the mandatory Palestine Wikipedia entry because I think it pretty much explains what I'm trying to say for these purposes so we have that McMahon Hussein correspondence there is an Arab uprising it is actually successful but then here I'll just read but in the end the United Kingdom and France divided the area under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, an act of betrayal in the eyes of Arabs.

0:11:03 Thomas: Further complicating the issue was the Balfour Declaration of 1917 in which Britain promised its support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. At the war's end, the British and French formed a joint occupied enemy territory administration in what had been Ottoman Syria. The British achieved legitimacy by obtaining a mandate from the League of Nations in June 1922. One objective of the League of Nations mandate system was to administer areas of the defunct Ottoman Empire until such time as they're able to stand alone. During the mandate, the area saw successive waves of Jewish immigration and the rise of nationalist movements, both in the Jewish and Arab communities. This is truly an incredibly fascinating chapter of history, and there's so much going on here.

0:11:50 Thomas: But But I think what strikes me is West obviously using the area for its purposes that suited it at the time. And they promised to the Arabs in exchange for the uprising against the Ottoman Empire. Arabs hold up their end of the bargain and the West doesn't. The UK doesn't and simultaneously it's like the land is being promised other ways. By different countries because, the West, broadly speaking, ends up with custody over it after World War I and the Balfour Declaration, as I read. So Britain had promised support for the establishment of a Jewish national home. And as years go on and that ultimately, of course, lead to World War II and the Holocaust cost and everything, lead to more and more Jewish immigration to the area, things get more and more tense.

0:12:42 Thomas: Here's what I want to say. Forget everything else for the moment, because this is all, these are all arguments over maps essentially. These are arguments over what will be on a map, what will a nation be called, where would the lines be, etc., etc. If you think about this in terms of physically who is living there, then Palestine, so the region that essentially we're talking about here in this entire conflict with some, obviously some border changes here and there, minor things, but largely speaking, that area, the people who physically lived there, like as in who had houses there, overwhelmingly, it was the Arabs. Now, it strikes me as a pretty tough moral issue here, because obviously in the wake of the Holocaust, was a certain amount of nobility to the idea of the West backing Jewish state for survival reasons.

0:13:35 Thomas: But it ultimately strikes me as pretty fucking weird to say, you know, you deserve a state here, we'll give you someone else's. Is the fundamental thing. I don't understand why Palestinians are supposed to have been okay with. 1947, a year before, you know, Israel is officially founded, here there is a UN General Assembly resolution to kind of do the two-state solution, and this is often pointed at as like, well, they were gonna do the three-state resolution and Jewish people at the time agreed and the Arabs didn't, so there you have it, that's pointed at often as like, well, fundamentally, you know, they They tried and the Arabs wouldn't play ball. So, yeah, no choice.

0:14:21 Thomas: And therefore, all of the rest of the thing is history. But again, think about it in terms of who is living physically in the houses that are in the villages there. And I like this quote in the Wikipedia by Eugene Rogan from the Arabs of History. It is not hard to understand the Palestinian Arab position. By 1947, the Arabs of Palestine constituted a two-thirds majority with over 1.2 million people compared to 600,000 Jews in Palestine. Many towns and cities with Palestinian Arab majorities like Haifa were allotted to the Jewish state. Jaffa, though nominally a part of the Arab state, was an isolated enclave surrounded by the Jewish State. Moreover, Arabs owned 94% of the total land area of Palestine and some 80% of The Arable farmland of the country.

0:15:13 Thomas: Based on these facts, Palestinian Arabs refused to confer on the United Nations the authority to split their country and give half of it away. You know, I think about what I've heard a lot of times about the Russia-Ukraine war, where you see people asking, like, well, maybe there can be some sort of peace. And Ukrainians are like, Well, how much of your country would you be willing to just give away to somebody else who attacked you? I don't know why we would expect Palestinian Arabs in 1947 would agree to a UN plan that just gives away their land. Expect, why would anyone expect that they would agree with that? This is really fascinating to look at because there's actually good records on this. Essentially due to, you know, colonialism.

0:15:59 Thomas: But, you know, because this was obviously a very disputed topic and the UN, I think, commissioned a survey. Anyway, there's a very detailed survey of Palestine from 1943, and you can actually see just the percentage of land ownership, or rather in square kilometers. And Arab non-Jewish ownership is 24,670 square kilometers, Jewish ownership is 1,514. Again, this is in 1943, and it says by the end of 1946, that had increased to 1,624, but that is incredibly marginal, again, relative to the 24,670 that was Arab-owned.

0:16:48 Thomas: So again, you can talk about lines on a map, and you can talking about who was overseeing what, and what mandatory Palestine was, and who controlled, all that stuff. But in terms of just who fucking lived there, Arabs did. Palestinian Arabs. And then what happened? Well, this part is really, I actually kind of want to read more about this because what strikes me as really interesting is all that I just read you, you would have thought that in a conflict, given the numbers, that Arabs would have been able to defeat Jews in that area. But that's not what happened. It's fascinating. I, this again, this is not something I'm claiming any expertise on. I'm just trying to give the broad strokes to illustrate my points. But this is something I want, I, to find a book on or something, because there's a lot of weird politics here. There's the fact that, like, because the Arabs wouldn't agree to the United Nations resolution that I told you, for reasons that seem completely fucking understandable to me.

0:17:45 Thomas: In fact, yeah, here's another quote about that that I find interesting. The Arabs rejected the partition, not because it was supposedly unfair, but because their leaders rejected any form of partition. They held, quote, that the rule of Palestine should revert to its inhabitants in accordance with the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations, end quote. And then the, uh, Wikipedia goes on, according to article 73b of the charter, the UN should develop self-government of the peoples in a territory under its administration. So right after this UN declaration that, again, Arabs didn't agree to, that's kind of the first phase of the 1947 1948 war, and it's sort of initially, you warfare, it's small militias, its clashes between Jews and Arabs. It becomes more and more formalized until what would soon become the first kind of leaders of Israel declared a Jewish state, I don't know with what authority, if any, but they did.

0:18:41 Thomas: And then here's the very weird, quirky, in a historical sense thing, 11 minutes later, the U.S. government recognized Israel. This is a fascinating chapter of history. I'm going to read a paragraph out of a Washington Post kind of historical article about it. The first announcement, which coincided with the end of the contentious British mandate over Palestine, was widely expected. The second was not, even for American officials. Some members of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations were so surprised by President Harry Truman's decision that they broke into laughter. Why would Truman, a pronounced anti-Semite, choose to become the American godfather of Israeli statehood? And the answer is, I mean, I think Truman would say it was a noble, you know, after seeing the horrors of the Holocaust, Jewish people deserve to stay, that kind of thing.

0:19:32 Thomas: I think more cynically, it was a political calculation. There were a lot of Jewish voters in key states and Truman wanted to win the election in 1948. So that's kind of, especially since he was an anti-Semite, that's what I would assume was more of the motivating factor. And also Stalin recognized the new state. And so that's basically the two superpowers of the time acknowledging the state of Israel, don't know what material effect this had, but all I know is Israel won the war. By all accounts, everything I've read you so far, I mean, they were fewer in number by quite a bit, but they won the War. Oh, side note, if we're going to talk about things like terrorism and and unforgivable war crimes, etc., etc.

0:20:17 Thomas: During the 1948 war, Israel conducted a biological warfare operation codenamed Cast Thy Bread. According they used typhoid bacteria to contaminate water wells in newly cleared Arab villages to prevent the population, including militiamen, from returning. Later, the biological warfare campaign expanded to include Jewish settlements that were in imminent danger of being captured by Arab troops and inhabited Arab towns not slated for capture. There was also plans to expand the biological warfare campaign into other Arab states, including Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria, but they were not carried out. I'll leave you to judge what you think of that. There were also plenty of war crimes, the usual fucking awful war crimes that basically all humans do in war during this. And that leads to the Nakba.

0:21:04 Thomas: And this is pretty crucial. Once again, I'm just going to read you some key paragraphs, and I think you don't need to know that much to get a sense of what happened. The Nakba, also known as the Palestinian Catastrophe, was the 1948 displacement of a majority of Palestinian Arabs. The term is used to describe both the events of 1948, as well as the ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and persecution and displacement of Palestinians throughout the region.

The foundational events of the Nakba took place during and shortly after the 1948 Palestine War, including 78% of mandatory Palestine being declared as Israel, the expulsion and flight of 700,000 Palestinians, the related depopulation and destruction of over 500 Palestinian villages by Zionist militias and later the Israeli army, and subsequent geographical erasure, the denial of Palestinian right of return, the creation of permanent Palestinian refugees, and the shattering of Palestinian society. If you're wondering what geographical erosure sounds like, here, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion had decided on the importance of renaming in the area earlier in the year, writing in his diary, we must give Hebrew names to all these places, ancient names if there are, and if not, new ones. We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state.

Just as we do not recognize the Arabs' political proprietorship of the land, so also we do NOT recognize their spiritual proprietorship and their names. So, geographical erasure, I guess what it sounds like, renaming everything from Arabic names to Hebrew names. Continuing a key paragraph again on the Nakba Wikipedia, The expulsion of the Palestinians has since been described by some historians as ethnic cleansing, but disputed by other historians.

0:23:00 Thomas: The Palestinian national narrative views the Nakba as a collective trauma that defines their national identity and political aspirations, which the Israeli national narrative rejects and views it as a war of independence that established Zionist aspirations for statehood and sovereignty. Sovereignty. So again, with a million apologies for the amateurish history lesson, that I have no sense of how much of that you needed, I, I think it's pretty useful, as much as that's an amateurish non-expert reading of history, it is in broad strokes what happened. There's no getting around the main fundamental events here. And what I cannot wrap my head around is how anyone in the world would think Palestinians should ever have been okay with this.

0:23:46 Thomas: I don't know how you justify that. I know how people try to justify it. I actually watched a Ben Shapiro video on this. It was a couple of years old, but it was about his version of the Israel-Palestine conflict. And And it's what you would expect. I mean, it strikes me as a real whitewashing of history, if that's the right word. I don't know if it is.

So Israel apologists look at it and they say, well, okay, it's not as though Jewish people came and stole the land. There's always been Jewish people there. And they point to like, yeah, Jewish people have always lived in that region. It's like they always had dibs. They never gave up their dibs, they'd always lived there. As though that fucking matters. It's such a weird logic to say, well, because Jewish people always live there in some way, therefore, sure, they had the right to, I just read you, expel 700,000 Palestinians who live there and depopulate and destroy 500 Palestinian villages. Privileges, even if you want to grant as much as you want the nobility, the, of the cause, of a Jewish state, and that's up to you, I don't know, I have a lot of conflicting thoughts on that, but I don't even really think that matters. We, I can just for argument's sake say that the cause of creating the state of Israel is like the most noble, just cause possible.

I do not understand how that makes it okay to steal land from another group of people. I truly don't get it. The Nakba was horrible. And once again, I don't know how you could ever expect the Palestinians, who are now forever refugees, refugees who've seen nothing but death and destruction this time.

0:25:33 Thomas: I don't know how you could expect them, even if you think they're like wrong, I don'T know how you would expect that they wouldn't some extreme hatreds of Israel over this. I DON'T actually think you can point to anti-Semitism as a moral justification for this original and expulsion and everything everything I just said. I'm not sure. I don't think that works. I think that's an after the fact to justify your actions. It's also painting with a really broad fucking brush. Like what percentage of these original, you know, 700,000 Palestinians who were expelled forcefully from their own houses and land, what percentage of them have to be guilty of what level of anti-Semitism for that to be okay.

0:26:23 Thomas: How the fuck would you even evaluate or prove that? I want you to think about Hamas's horrific terrorist attacks and some of the disgusting evil details. They are truly awful. But if you think that that level of evil is something that has only been displayed by Hamas only been directed toward Jewish people rather than by Jewish people. Let me read you this, I talk about the Nakba and the depopulation of these villages and the forced relocation of Palestinians, much of it was done by a series of massacres and atrocities. Let my read you, this is not, again, this not disputed. These are all events that are not even, like this is just, I'm reading from plain old fucking Wikipedia.

0:27:11 Thomas: This isn't like, ah, all of this could be fake. No, this all happened. You just don't learn about it. At least I didn't. Actually, before I read it, that is one interesting thing I came across. You know, they always say history is written by the victors.

That is massively true when it comes to Israel-Palestine, to the point where for 40 years there's a revisionist Israeli history, history that I'm, I, not even joking, says that actually the Palestinians left voluntarily because the surrounding Arab nations asked them to. And so they, they left.

I mean, stuff like that, that stood for 40 years, until, I think, because of maybe the first Intifada, there was some new history done, a lot like in the same way that we have had to reevaluate our history because of the whitewashing that white America has done regarding, I don't know, fucking everything. That same thing has gone on in Israel. And so let me read you this, again, this is not in dispute, this, this is one of the many massacres that made up the Nakba and forced Palestinians out of their houses, out of their villages. Content note, this is, not going to be fucking great. This is a massacre. The Deir Yassin massacre took place on April 9th, 1948, when around 130 fighters from the, the Zionist paramilitary groups killed at least 107 Palestinian Arab villagers, including women and children, in Deir Yassin, a village of roughly 600 people near Jerusalem, despite having earlier agreed to a peace pact.

0:28:48 Thomas: The massacre occurred while Jewish militia sought to relieve the blockade of Jerusalem during the civil war that preceded the end of British rule in Palestine. The village put up stiffer resistance than the Jewish militias had expected, and they suffered casualties, but it fell after house-to-house fighting. Some of the Palestinian Arab villagers were killed in the course of the battle, while others were massacred by the Jewish militias while trying to flee or surrender. Render. A number of Palestinian Arab prisoners were executed, some after being paraded in West Jerusalem, where they were jeered, spat at, stoned, looted, and eventually murdered. In addition to the killing and widespread looting, there may have been cases of mutilation and rape.

0:29:34 Thomas: Despite an original boast by the Jewish victors that 254 had been killed, modern scholarship puts the death toll at far fewer. Palestinian historian Aref Al Aref counted 117 victims, seven in combat and the rest in their homes. The number of wounded is estimated between 12 and 50. Five of the attackers were killed and a dozen wounded. I want to once again reiterate that this is not at all an attempt to cast Arab side of this as 100% innocent and great and the Jewish side of it as evil.

0:30:07 Thomas: That's, that's not the point. The point is that the opposite is not true, theory of the entire conflict that Israel has always acted in self-defense, nobly, against anti-Semitic evil religious nut jobs who would wipe it off the face of the earth if they could and they've, they've had no choice but to defend themselves. Like, that's just bullshit. That's wrong. This is, is what I mean. And I imagine this is what the UN chief guy meant when he said, this does not happen in a vacuum. Imagine what it's like to grow up Palestinian. I could go on and on about the shitty conditions that they mostly live in, and I might, imagine that's your family history.

0:30:56 Thomas: That's your legacy. That's not even that long ago, by way, it's one lifetime, perhaps your parents or your grandparents, who maybe you knew, they're still alive, were witness to some of these atrocities, were run out of your homes and are now a permanent refugee without a state. And imagine the hatred that could brew as a result of that. I think it would be pretty justifiable. Now, again, there's a lot of hatred that's probably justifiable the the other way, and this is once again, not to, I'm not saying one side is fine and the other isn't. The point is hatred and resistance of Israel strikes me as quite a predictable and in some cases, maybe even rational response.

0:31:42 Thomas: Now, what hardcore supporters of Israel need us to is that, well, okay, but if that hatred and resistance takes the form of terrorism and anti-Semitism, the whole Palestinian cause is invalid. And I just don't see that as true. I see this as the classic that I think we've learned more and more to be critical of, And that is needing a perfect victim, especially when hatred and zealotry and fundamentalism, all that stuff thrives in shitty conditions where education is difficult to obtain and there's poverty. And there's all that, precisely the conditions that Palestinians are, I do not expect all of their and anger and hatred toward Israel will be expressed a perfectly acceptable way.

0:32:36 Thomas: Add on to that the creation of more and more settlements settler violence is particularly, Particularly, again, you talk about not a vacuum. I mean, if you just look at one side, if You just look at this Hamas terrorist attack, yeah, it looks fucking evil. It is evil. I'm not saying it's not evil, but if the information you are missing is that Palestinians themselves have been the subject of particularly evil attacks, then it starts to look less like a particular specific specific evil problem of these people and their horrendous anti-Semitic religion. And it starts to look more and more like, oh, no, there's a horrible, bitter, decades-long conflict where both sides have committed atrocities.

0:33:24 Thomas: And this latest round of atrocities does not disqualify one side from legitimacy. Settler violence, I imagine, if I were Palestinian, that would be particularly hard to stomach, because that is more and more and more of your land being forcefully taken by Israeli citizens. These settlers are killing Palestinians. They're doing atrocities, and they are not held to account by anyone. Something like only 9% of them are ever punished for this. If you are a Palestinian and you are seeing this your whole life, I don't understand how you would not hate Israel in some form. Let me read you a recent incident of settler violence, think about how you might feel if you were a Palestinian involved or witnessing this.

0:34:12 Thomas: So there's a village called Kusra that is surrounded by six settlements from the southern and eastern sides. So a large number of settlers storm a house of, actually, a Palestinian they killed in 2017, and that Palestinian's son climbed on the roof to call for support from the other residents in the village. As people arrived, the settlers and Israeli soldiers started shooting at them. They injured at least 12, including children, and they killed four others. Now, that's bad enough. Here's what happened next. The settlers then waited for the funeral, funeral, they put car tires in the street to block the funeral procession, and when people went to remove it, the settlers shot a father and son and killed them.

0:34:58 Thomas: So settlers killed four, waited for the funeral, and then killed a father-and-son at the funeral. So again, I ask you, if you were a Palestinian, if you had the bad fortune to be born a permanent refugee, how much, how of that would you have to see then be perhaps recruitable by a terrorist group like Hamas? You know, I came across a "break their bones" policy just casually referred to during the first intifada. And that was, it sounds like, there was a policy to, as a punishment and to try to deter Palestinians, they would break their bonds with rocks. Another thing I came across was there's an organization called Save the Children. It's a hundred year old organization. And they did a report about the state of, of being a child in Palestine.

0:35:47 Thomas: And there's some things I want to read from it. Quote, eight out of 10 people have to rely on humanitarian aid to survive. Five, the air, land, and sea blockade means most schools operate on double or even triple shifts with overcrowded classrooms, high student-to-teacher ratios, and learning hours of just 4.5 hours a day. Another quote, in May 2021, Israeli forces damaged 186 schools and 122 kindergartens. Children suffered from severe emotional distress and depression as a result of the airstrikes and the sleepless nights.

May 2021, the number of children suffering from conflict-related trauma rose from 33% to 91%. Save the Children's own interviews and focus groups with Gaza's children revealed that the economic crisis resulting from the blockade and the frequent escalations are the main factors resulting in lower academic performance and them dropping out of school. School. Many Palestinian schools are located in Area C, which comprises 60% of the total area of the West Bank and is controlled by the government of Israel. In Area C Palestinians are generally not allowed to build homes, schools, or other essential structures, and they are issued demolition orders by the Israeli authorities. In most cases, the justification given by Israeli Israeli authorities for demolishing structures is a lack of Israeli-issued permits through a planning system that severely limits Palestinian construction. Another quote, just a couple more here. Since no schools are allowed to be built, Palestinians usually rely on makeshift structures as spaces to educate their children. There are currently 55 schools under a threat of demolition. That's over 5,400 children at the risk of losing their school.

0:37:34 Thomas: If you're still, still resistant to this point, I don't know. Maybe you're thinking of the particular brutality and evil of these Hamas attacks, and I don't blame you. There was a story of how one of the terrorists called their parents and was proudly boasting about having killed Jews in a horrifying manner. That's horrible, evil stuff. But let me tell you, Hamas does not have a monopoly, monopoly on disgusting, evil rhetoric. And once again, Hamas is a terrorist organization. Palestinians do not necessarily support Hamas. I think Israelis like to just claim that all of Palestinians support Hamass so that it's easier to justify killing them all. But we don't know how many of them actually support Hamás. We don't know that. Whereas contrast that, I'll match the disgusting evil of a literal terrorist organization, Hamas, I'll mash that against quotes from Israeli politicians who are in power right now.

0:38:29 Thomas: Israeli politician Mirav Ben-Ari said, quote, the children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves, end quote. Can you imagine saying that the children of anything have brought this upon themselves? Selves? President Isaac Herzog said, unequivocally, it is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It's not true, this rhetoric about civilians not aware or not involved. It is absolutely not true. They could have risen up and they could have fought against the evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d'etat. I just want to remind you, after hearing that quote about how they could've risen up that 44% of Palestinians are children.

You might have heard the quote from maybe you think, oh, this is justified by how evil the terrorist attacks were. Well, that person's predecessor, so a previous defense minister from 2016 to 2018, Avigdor Lieberman, advocated the decapitation with an axe of Palestinians who are disloyal and suggested that Palestinian prisoners be drowned in the Dead Sea. He also called Palestinian-Israeli lawmaker Hanin Zawabi a terrorist for partaking in the Mavi Marmara Freedom Flotilla. And that person's predecessor, Moshe Yalon, said that the Palestinian, quote, threat is like a cancer and that at the moment, the army chief of staff, he was applying chemotherapy. A deputy defense minister, Eli Ben-Dahan, said the Palestinians are, quote, like animals.

0:40:16 Thomas: They aren't human. That's a different defense minister than the other one I already said. And finally, Ayelet Shaked, who was a minister of justice from 2015 to 2019 and was a member of the Knesset, posted the text of an article by the late Israeli writer that referred to Palestinian children as little snakes and appeared to justify the mass punishment of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. These are Israel's leaders, are not like a tiny sect of Israeli terrorists or something, these are the leaders in Israel. And I often hear this argument being made as just, I guess, a general justification for the situation, that the difference between Hamas and Israel is that if Hamas had the power, they would wipe Israel off the map.

0:41:07 Thomas: If Israel had the power, they would do what they're doing now because they do have all the power, so that's proof that they're better. First things first, I don't see how we can characterize an entire population of people like the Palestinians and assume they all share the beliefs of Hamas. That is not acceptable in my book, Facebook. Setting that aside, refrain I've heard a lot, they're like, well, see, it's proof that Israel could wipe out the Palestinians at any moment and they haven't. And that means they're good. Well, I don't really know that that's true. This idea that there are no constraints on Israel, know that it's proven that Israel wouldn't wipe out Palestinians if they could. And Israel, I shouldn't say all of Israel, again, the people in power in Israel.

0:41:56 Thomas: I've read you some of the quotes. They're not super cool with Palestinians. It just ignores political realities. Like if you just state emphatically that, oh, well, they could eradicate Palestinians at any moment and they don't. So that means they're great. Well, yeah, but not without a bunch of consequences from the world. If anything, I actually think what's happening now is proof that that might be the opposite of true, because I think Israel is using this terrorist attack kill a whole shitload of Palestinians and displace nearly all of them, at least in Gaza. So I think they've been constrained by political reality. And when that, political license was given, this is what they're doing with it.

0:42:43 Thomas: They're killing massively disproportionate number of Palestinians. And that's another thing to note. I know I've thrown a lot at you, but coming to a close, I didn't find any one source that tried to tally like the all time casualties of each side through the entire conflict, which would be interesting. Thing. I bet you could do it. But there are many that have started, you know, in the 2000s and more recently. And the ratio of deaths in this conflict is something like 23 Palestinians for every one Israeli. So in coming to a close here, point of all of this and all this stuff I've told you, Again, it's not to present one side as completely great, amazing, and the other side as evil.

0:43:34 Thomas: That's not it at all. There are a lot of atrocities to go around, but that's precisely the point. If the atrocities carried out by Hamas in this attack disqualified that entire side of the argument as being legitimate, then the atrocity of the Nakba in the founding of Israel would have disqualified Israel from the very beginning. And I just invite you to imagine if you grew up as a Palestinian, as a permanent refugee. Any number of times you've seen people around you die, you've been attacked. Maybe you yourself have been pretty gruesomely injured. Maybe your house has been burned down. Maybe you've had your school destroyed. You or your family been shot by settlers who face no consequences.

0:44:23 Thomas: Consequences, the land that you occupy is shrinking and shrinking, and there seems to be no force going against that, and there seem to be end in the horizon to that process. Imagine the family history you might have, imagine the atrocities you've witnessed and heard about over the years committed against you, do you think you would feel, you sit here and tell me that you don't think you would be prone to terrorist recruiting, potentially? Isn't this something we all learned? I say we all, I shouldn't say that. Isn't there something that those who paid attention learned after 9-11? You can't blow up terrorists into submission. You can subjugate a population, take away their dignity, their control over their own destiny, take away so much of what makes life worth living.

0:45:18 Thomas: Them in a constant state of desperation with a lack of food, water, heat, fuel, all that stuff, you can't just do that forever and expect good results. You can't just sit there and say, well, as soon as they start behaving then maybe, you know, then maybe we can consider bitter, giving them some better treatment. That's just not how humans work. You cannot expect meet no resistance and you cannot expect the resistance you meet to always be perfectly rational. I mean, you've burned down their fucking schools for one. You've made it almost impossible for them to learn things like critical thinking skills. So I guess what I'm saying is evil and horrific as these Hamas terrorist attacks were, and they were, they did not happen in a vacuum.