Palestine Part 2 – The Nakba to Apartheid | Office Hours

[Music] Welcome to Office Hours. You're here with Roy and Jeremy. We are hanging out talking about all kinds of things. This is part two of our discussion about Palestine, and we're going to get back into it here in a little bit.

Uh, but first, a couple of announcements. One, we have a podcast out now. So, this is optimized for audio only. Uh, we've taken out a lot of the kind of "ums," Roy clearing his throat, and stuff. You know, the things he does. So, if you enjoy listening to Roy, if you want to listen to Roy while you're driving, going for a jog, cleaning the house, or what have you, all the different things we do when we're listening to podcasts, uh, now you can. We have three episodes out now. They're, we're just using lectures for now that we've already put up on YouTube. So, we're starting with the first three of his lectures from, uh, at the Museum of the Future. Uh, so go give it a listen. Uh, rate it on wherever you listen to podcasts, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, what have you, and, uh, so more people can find it. Thank you.

Uh, quick question for you, Roy, that I've seen over and over and over. Are you ever going to do the World War II video?

>> Okay, I'm dying to do the rest of the World War II series. Um, the problem I have right now, and this is why it's, I haven't done another one, is the venue I'm using, which is the Museum of the Future. Um, they're trying to keep things kind of upbeat, and they're worried about how close things are to World War II, that they're worried that if we talk about World War II, it'll be triggering for people. And I get it. I get it. The, you know, the Museum of the Future is, is, is a, we see the world through possibilities and in innovation. That's, that's their theme. And so, uh, they don't want to have a Debbie Downer kind of video, which is what the World War II ones will be. So, I just need to find a different venue. And, uh, I'm working on it. There's actually, uh, a possibility there's a university I might ask if they'll let me, let me do some talks there, and we'll see. So, because universities don't mind being Debbie Downers.

>> I mean, part of it, it's a Debbie Downer, but also, like, that's just the nature of it. So, if we can be the Debbie Downer that persuades the world, like, maybe we shouldn't do World War II because it's going to be pretty bleak.

>> It. I don't know if, >> people have really looked in depth, but the, the death toll is quite high.

>> It's, >> Yeah. The world population kind of goes down a little bit. It's not great.

>> Yeah. I mean, it was 65 million people at a time when there were two billion people on the planet. So, if you, if you look at it that way, it's 8 million people dying a year. You know, right? Because World War II starts in '37. I, I know everybody was taught it started in '39, but that's, that's because you were taught that people from Asia aren't human. Uh, when Japan attacks China on July 7, 1937, that's what triggers the eight years of World War II. And, you know, 65 million people is, is a brutal thing, but then think of the technology they had at the time. Like, I, I wouldn't be shocked if World War II is, you know, a quarter billion people in two years. Um, and I'm, I don't think there'll be nukes right away because there's no reason to do nukes. Uh, the side that's losing would just simply say, "Hey, we're losing so badly now. We've decided we're going to nuke everybody." And then you go to the negotiating tables and the war ends. But because they have the nuke, literally nobody can lose. So, all you will end up doing if you trigger World War II is you will cause mass starvation because it'll immediately shut down most of the trade networks. And we've become so interdependent on food deliveries that the, that'll be the number one killer is mass starvation. Um, so, yeah, I don't think it's a good idea. So, World War II created some really nice epic stories. I don't see World War II creating the kind of epic stories, uh, just simply because it's going to be such a starvation event.

>> So, >> Yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. I think a lot, a lot of people don't consider that because a lot of people don't know how to to survive on their own. We don't have that type of infrastructure anymore.

>> No, I mean, we've, we've completely made ourselves dependent on this grocery store model. And there's, in any given city, at any given moment, there's maybe two weeks' worth of food in it. So, if the trade network shuts down, I, I don't see how we're, we're going to be okay. And then, of course, some cities are much more vulnerable than others. But, you know, like, uh, the least vulnerable place would probably be Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa. North Africa probably be pretty vulnerable. Europe will be a disaster. Japan will be a disaster. I, I suspect the United States can cushion itself a little bit because it has a huge agricultural output. Canada would be okay, too. You know, Mexico would be okay. But, but, you know, uh, I, I, I would think you're, you're, you're going to see really large-scale suffering in the biggest cities in the most technologically advanced places as a general rule.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> Well, on that positive note, let's get into, you know, post,

>> I also don't like civil wars, in case that was a question people were thinking about too. Yeah, they're really bad. Don't do them.

>> Yeah. So, as a, as a, I just want to make a clear statement here before we rehash and get back into our our conversation on Palestine and Israel and the Levant area in general and getting up to, uh, closer to our current day circumstances. Uh, Roy and I abhor and oppose any sort of violence. So, any sides, I, it's, it's, it feels obvious to make these kind of statements, right? So, like the, the attacks on Israel, anytime anyone is hurting someone else for whatever reason, it's wrong, wrong, every time. Like, that's just not what we should be doing as, as humans. The, I, it's like 95% or more, whenever an act of violence is committed, it just creates more violence. That's just the way that happens. Uh, that said, I mean, this is why we're, we're talking about this. We're against violence. We're against what's going on, uh, to the Palestinian people, whether or not it's starvation or, uh, deliberate attacks. Uh, Israel just launched an attack on some Hamas leaders in Qatar. Um, at first, my thought was, these are militant leaders. I don't think that was the case. I think one was, uh, a negotiation team.

>> Yeah, this is a negotiation team.

>> Okay.

>> Yeah.

>> Uh, so this just kind of, go ahead.

>> No, I was just going to say, by the international conventions, you don't attack negotiators who are trying to end a conflict, and they were in the middle of negotiating a ceasefire.

>> Yeah. So, this is, it brings me back. So, you know, this, Roy, I, I, I'm a United States Air Force veteran. I served for six years. I got out over a decade ago. Uh, this, I, I joined post, after the post-9/11 fervor here in the United States. I'm like, let's go, let's go get them terrorists. I don't know who them terrorists are yet. Um, but we were trained as to who the terrorists were. They were the enemy. They were evil. These sorts of things. And, uh, once I was in, you know, you heard the very familiar phrase, "We don't negotiate with terrorists." This is from George Bush Jr., right? And, and then I got confused when I would see negotiations between, you know, our presidents and leaders from Hamas and the Taliban and these, these groups that we were trained were the enemy, uh, that were terrorists. So, we're going to talk about that. Yeah, we're going to get into the Palestinian Liberation Organization because I know some people are like, "Hey, what about this and that? You know, Hamas, what about Hamas? They're a terrorist group." Hamas is, it depends on where you're from, from, right? So, here in America, were we not terrorists to the British and the American Revolution? Like, these are, we, Roy will talk about it later. You guys aren't here to listen to me ramble on. This is just something that I think we need to talk about in this conversation. Um, so, let's, let's get back to where we were last time. We, we went back to ancient Levant people, uh, kind of how they evolved, the, the struggle, the constant struggle, the pilgrims of, of the Jewish people into the Holocaust, and, and how all that led up to post-World War II.

>> Um,

>> Actually, should we, should we actually do the Qatar attack first?

>> You want to go more into the Qatar attack?

>> Yeah. And get that. Yeah, go for it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just, just for to understand the situation a little bit from a larger scale, because I think,

>> I don't think people fully grasp how significant this was. So, Israel attacks a negotiating team there. And so, you have to first of all ask why. And the answer is pretty obvious. The, the government doesn't want there to be a ceasefire. And I think the fear was that the United States and Hamas were going to make a deal, and then that would force Israel to go along. So, the way to interrupt that would be to launch this attack. As a general rule, you don't attack places where you're having negotiations, peace negotiations, just because you need a neutral space, right? Even in World War II, we, we kept Switzerland open as a place where you could have conversation with the other side. You don't ever want to be in a situation where you can't talk to the other side at all. And, and so this, it's a really interesting thing to do this because Qatar plays that role frequently. When, when, um, Trump was negotiating the surrender to the Taliban, we surrendered in Qatar because that was where the negotiation was taking place. Uh, Qatar, I don't know if you all know this, is a US ally. We, we have a military base in Qatar. Qatar basically pays us $1 billion dollars a year to prevent attacks on Qatar. That, that's the deal. We get to use them as a base. We get to secure the flow of oil in the Persian Gulf, and in return, uh, if anybody tries to attack Qatar, we will intercept the attack. We will prevent the attack. Well, Qatar has been attacked twice this year. Once by Iran, and now, now by Israel. And so, if you're a Qatari, you're, you're a policy maker right now, you have to be thinking, why are we wasting a billion dollars a year on this? If we get nothing out of it, in fact, you know, Iran attacked Qatar because they were trying to hit the US military base. Like, if the only thing they're getting out of it is a target drawn on their back, then they, then they maybe they need to start looking elsewhere for their security guarantees, like, for example, the PRC.

>> Right. Even Iran gave ample time like, "Hey, we're going to have a, you know,

>> a retaliatory attack on this base. Please get everyone out. This is just, you know, for,

>> Exactly."

>> And, and so, uh, at the end of the day, it's not just that Qatar was attacked and the United States failed to stop it. Qatar was attacked by the United States's ally in the Middle East. And so, you know, at that point, you're thinking, "We gave you this airplane. We give you this money. We allow, we, we help you coordinate with your strategic concerns. We help you negotiate surrenders when you need it done." You know what I mean? Like, there's this all this stuff that Qatar does for the United States. I don't, for the life of me, can't figure out why Qatar would work with the United States going forward. And then, of course, it makes the entire GCC, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, and Oman think, why would we want to work with an an ally that that behaves like this? Especially because, uh, at the end of the day, they, they have done the, you know, UAE's done the Abraham Accords. There's been this huge attempt to try and bridge the gap with Israel. There's, there's the, the mantra is, Israel exists. We're not going to fight against it. We're just trying to figure out how we can save the Palestinians from genocide. And now there's this question like, uh, Israel is this rogue state that attacks all its neighbors. It's relentlessly attacking all its neighbors, and it doesn't follow international law, and the United States protects it even at the expense of its other allies. And so, I think the, I think this is kind of a moment of truth and reckoning. And the interesting thing is, of course, the Trump administration doesn't know this. I don't think the Trump administration knows anything. So, they sure as hell don't know anything about how to have an operating foreign policy. So, they don't, I don't think they have any clue about how seriously this is being taken in the region. Um, the League of Arab States will get together. They're going to meet. There's going to be a lot of, you know, angry talk. Usually, that doesn't result in anything. But I think in this particular instance, I wouldn't be surprised if you see some serious policy changes. This is, this was a setback for US foreign policy, especially now that Israel is saying they're thinking of attacking again.

>> Right. Yeah. I think they, they had that meeting and, you know, Netanyahu just kind of said, "Ah, whatever. We're probably going to do it again."

>> Right. Which is, as a, as a state, why would they be doing this?

>> This is a really interesting question because, uh, if I was Israel, an Israeli policy maker, I would be trying to figure out how to, how to create a, a surrender, a set of surrender terms. Israel will always be in the state that it's in, which is a state of permanent war with all of its neighbors. Even, you know, even though there's a treaty with Egypt and there's a treaty with Jordan, the reality is that Israel is a rogue state that attacks and bombs its neighbors on a regular basis. It doesn't care about treaties. It doesn't care about human rights. It doesn't care about, uh, international conventions. It commits war crimes. It commits genocide. It is. Imagine if in Europe, Germany went nuts and began bombing the hell out of its neighbors on a regular basis for decades. The world would be outraged. I mean, look at, Oh, wait. Imagine if Russia did this. Imagine if Russia attacked Ukraine and Georgia, uh, and carved off a chunk of Moldova and called it Transnistria. And, oh, I know what would happen. NATO would lose its mind and would start spending billions of dollars trying to defend. Oh, so I get it. So, if it's a white person being attacked, it's horrible and it's a crime against humanity. But if it's a brown person, uh, go Israel. That, that's how it looks. That's the optics of this. And right now, Europe just looks like a bunch of racist hypocrites. United States just looks like a bunch of racist hypocrites. I mean, we created the Geneva Conventions, and it's routinely ignored for the most part. I mean, Israel has been coming up with legal excuses that these don't apply to them for decades for for all the things that they're doing. And everyone's just kind of like,

>> Okay.

>> Okay.

>> And not to mention everything, you know, all the horrific events and genocides that happen in Africa that no one even pays attention to over the years. So, I think this one is, what's happening in Palestine now tends to be more egregious because of the connection to the US, connection to Britain in the past. Uh, and I think for, to a certain extent, social media, 'cause it's, it's well captured and it just keeps going and it keeps growing and it keeps getting worse and worse, and there's so much contention behind it because even though it seems such a horrific event, people are still defending it, which is just shocking. Right. Um, so, that's, I think that's the hard part. And we have incidents like Qatar, and, you know, this, the state of Israel, the governing body of Israel, keeps pushing these somewhat outrageous things, which the US government is doing also with a lot of its decisions. So, it's, it's a hard thing to wrap our our heads around. So,

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> It, it looks like the government of Israel just wants permanent war for all eternity, and, um, you know, that sucks if you're Israel's neighbors, and that's probably not great for the Israelis either, for that matter. So,

>> Yeah.

>> Especially there's, they have compulsory service in their military as well. And so, to a certain extent, that has an aspect of indoctrination, but it also has an an aspect of, uh, disillusionment too, because you can see firsthand the different things. So, it might be a make or break moment for individuals, but as a culture and as a society, it's, it's hard to say which direction that's going because some of them just leave. Also, Israelis are propagandized in the same way that people in the US are propagandized. And there's a whole segment of Israeli, uh, the Israeli society that doesn't fully grasp what's happened to the Palestinians or who they even are. You know, there's, there's this like disconnect. Some of it is cognitive dissonance because they should know. And there's some of it is just the fact that Israeli news media is very careful never to show Palestinian suffering. Israeli, uh, news media always shows the Israelis as the good guys. The Palestinians are just these crazy lunatic terrorists, and we don't even know why they're attacking us. They just hate us because we're Jewish or something. And, you know, at the end of the day, that's, that's a bizarre oversimplification. It's worth pointing out that the Palestinians, when they were Jewish, and they were stuck throwing rocks at the Roman Empire and fighting against the Roman Empire, they didn't surrender then. There's no reason to think that they're going to surrender now just because they've converted to Islam and and Christianity. And so, I, I, you know, the, the irony of this, of course, is that there's this continuous line of Palestinian resistance against European invaders, uh, because the centuries of dealing with the Roman Empire, and in the end, the, the Roman Empire is gone, and the, the Palestinian people still survived.

>> Mhm.

>> I think, Do you think it's just a matter of survival then?

>> Yeah. I mean, I think that's the, the, the most incredible form of resistance the Palestinians can do is survive. And that's, that's basically the mantra is just get through to the other side. And, you know, the hope is that at some point, the Israelis will realize, what are we doing? Uh, yeah, I'm part German. My, my German ancestors left Germany in 1904. So, uh, we had nothing to do with the Holocaust. I still feel guilt. I still feel shame. And I, I, I identify as German. I'm proud to be part German. I, I speak German. I speak very bad German, but I still speak German. I lived in Germany. Like, it's, it's a, it's very much a part of who I am. And, but, but there's that shame. And that shame never will go away. And that's what's going to happen to the Israelis when they finally go, "Oh my God, what did we just do for 77 years?" And, you know, when you think about it, that's a legacy you probably don't want to carry forward. Um, I was talking to a white South African just the other day. Uh, he was, he was saying something very similar to this. He was like, you know, as a white South African, I, I have this legacy of shame that I've inherited from apartheid, and I'm hoping the Israelis can figure out a way to get past this because, you know, his mind, this is the same thing. Anyway.

>> For sure. Yeah. I mean, that's a hard psychological thing for one person to deal with, let alone a society. We're still doing dealing with that in the US. I think it's become part of the culture war here is that, you know, we will not feel shame for the things that we've done, which is, it's not necessarily a healthy thing. I think that's feeling like something wrong has been done is the only way that we can make things better. Otherwise, you're just blinding yourself to continue doing the wrong thing over and over.

>> I mean, 12-step program. How many times do you have to go and apologize and and admit you did something wrong? Like, as a, as a country of materialist addicts, we need to go and make it right to the African-American and Native American populations that we really screwed over. But you're right, like that is part of the culture war. There's a segment of the population that's like, "No, I didn't have anything to do with that. I'm an innocent victim here." And then there, and then there's the other part that's like, well, I'm personally innocent, but I'm the beneficiary of this this event. It's like waking up one day and discovering that you live in a nice house and you, you know, you went to a great school 'cause your parents were able to pay the tuition, and that your father was a mob boss and he was murdering people and had an illegal prostitution ring and was a drug dealer, and you, you should feel some shame. You should go, "Oh, wow. Maybe maybe the wealth that I'm enjoying right now sucks a little bit. It should feel dirty. It should have a bitter taste in your mouth."

>> Yeah. I think, I think a lot of us don't quite understand the generational impact of our past, right?

>> Yeah.

>> So, like, there are things that our, our ancestors have done that have put us where we are today, not just genetically, but exactly what you're saying. I mean, we're talking about the idea of privilege now at this point, but, but it's, it's not just a term that's that's used in a, in a culture war. It's an actual thing. I mean, there's certain things that happen in our lives and in our parents' lives and and our grandparents' lives that affect our current life situation 100%. And I think people just don't want to think about it. Going back to, like, a lot of the people in, in Israel, it's the same thing in the United States. We are trapped in our comfort and our convenience.

>> Yeah, it's true.

>> And as soon as that's removed, we start paying attention. But as, as long as we can maintain our comfort and convenience,

>> We don't really care about much.

>> Yeah. Which is unfortunate.

>> It is.

>> Yeah. There have been moments where we breached it without being made uncomfortable, like materialistically uncomfortable. That, that's what the '60s was, right? That there was a moment where a bunch of people who were materialistically comfortable went, "Yeah, you know what? I do care about black civil rights and women's rights and Native American rights and migrant farmworker rights, and I do care about the fact that we're committing genocide in Vietnam. I am going to go in the streets. I am going to put my body on the line, and I am going to protest." Um, but those events in US history since the '60s have been extremely rare. Prior to the '60s, we were very much a protesting society. Um, we have a history of protests that that go back to our founding, but since, you know, since January 1st, 1970, it's like the patient may be dead, but maybe they're just in a coma. Um, oh, wait, was that life? No, no, it was just Occupy Wall Street.

>> I think we were more connected then, too, right? So, like, there was more social pressure from friends and family and colleagues and like, "Hey, this is something that's going on," and like, "Oh, now I am uncomfortable because this person next to me has an issue with how I'm thinking," and now we, we can just turn that off, right? Because we're, we're in our tribe already. We've been, we've been established. We only communicate in our own echo chambers. So,

>> You realize what you've just said. We, we were more connected back then when we didn't have all these devices that connect us together. I 100% agree with you, but it's so jarring. Like, wait a minute. I'm, you're in the US right now. I'm in the UAE right now. We're having a conversation like we're in the same room. But the reality is, is in this really strange way, we're less connected to each other as a community than we were in the '50s and '60s.

>> Yeah. It seems completely counterintuitive.

>> Completely counterintuitive and very upsetting.

>> Yes. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it's crazy.

>> All right, let's, let's, let's re, let's, uh, let's go back over, um, where we left off last time. Um, we, World War II had just ended, partition had just taken place. Um, do you want to talk a little bit about, we talked about the end of last time? So, the Arab-Israeli war, the, uh, Nakba, Anakba, >> and 1948, and just the,

>> Just, I'll, I'll let you take it from there.

>> Okay. So, the UN votes for partition in '47. Um, the, the Arab states and the Palestinian people reject this. And the reason they reject it is they didn't, they didn't understand why the Israelis were getting 55% of the land where they owned 7%. They didn't understand why there was, there was, there was a separate Jewish-only state being created when you could have just simply created a single secular state with guarantees for Christians, Muslims, and Jews. And so, in principle, they, they rejected it for principal reasons. This is, this was basic human rights reasons, you know, like, if you own 7% of the land and you're getting 55%, what happens to the other 48%? Like, are you going to ethnically cleanse the place? Are you going to do, you know, to, uh, Palestine, what you were upset Germany had done to Poland? Like, what is, how does this manifest? And so, they rejected it. So, Israel attacks in 1948. Uh, they, they literally invade. They declare their independence. They invade and they, they begin a sequence of conquest events that the Palestinians call the Nakba, which means catastrophe. And one of the things that they did was they did a massacre at a place called Deir Yassin, where they literally just pulled out machetes and began chopping Palestinians to death. And the reason, of course, for doing this was to create panic, and it works. And a huge, uh, event unfolds then where Palestinians are fleeing their homes out of fear that there will be more of these hacking to death events. Um, there are definitely crimes against humanity that are being committed in this, uh, there are massacres that are taking place. There's plenty of documentation about this. There's, this is, this is an established fact. And the reason that they do this is because their goal is 80% Jewish, 20% Arab. Um, and they're not going to be able to get that unless they can somehow convince the Arab population to leave the land. And they do. They end up conquering 78% of Palestine. So, they don't get 55%, they get 78%. The, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are all that's left of the Arab enclaves, and, um, they're, they're, they're too small a chunk of land that, and separated, and they, they were in no position to rule themselves. So, you know, what we were talking about last time was the British realized they weren't going to prevent Israel from forming. So, their goal at that point was just the consolation prize is, at least we can stop Palestine from forming. And that's exactly what happens. Um, the, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip both become basically giant refugee camps because the pal, the majority of the Palestinians living in both chunks of land were not from there. They were from other parts of Palestine and and ended up fleeing to there. A lot of Palestinians, of course, flee to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt as well. Um, so, there, there's refugee camps being set up in those places, and, uh, Jordan annexes the West Bank, and Egypt annexes the Gaza Strip. And the thinking, the justification for both states to do this is, somebody needs to run those territories. We have the infrastructure. We have the ability to do it. So, let's just do it. Um, it is kind of a weird thing to do, to be honest, right? You know, like, your, your neighbor and ally just collapsed and ceased to exist, and you're like, "Oh, we'll just annex them." Um, I have, my mother went to Jerusalem, uh, I want to say in 1964, somewhere around there, and she, she brought back some souvenirs, and they say, "Jerusalem, Jordan." Doesn't roll off the tongue, but Jerusalem was in Jordan, the Kingdom of Jordan. And so, uh, the West Bank gets annexed, and, and then UNRWA is created. So, UNRWA is the UN organization that was established for dealing with the Palestinian refugee crisis with the understanding that this is a permanent refugee crisis that will never be resolved, that the Palestinians are going to for all eternity remain in the state of permanent homelessness. They will not have a state. They will not have, uh, passports. They will not have, they will not be recognized as as a nation, and they're just going to be stuck in this. Um, to mitigate it, they use Arab law. So, they, they sort of used Arab law against Arabs, um, in, in most Arab states. I don't know if it's all, so I'm saying most, it might be all. Um, your father determines what you are. So, for example, in Lebanon, um, marrying cross-religion, it's totally legitimate in Lebanon. It happens all the time. Um, so, like, let's say you were, you know, one quarter Druze, one quarter Shia, one quarter Sunni, and one quarter Maronite. So, you're from four, you have four grandparents from four different religions. Whatever your father is, that's your religion. Done. So, if your father was a Maronite, you're a Maronite. The fact that you're three-quarters Muslim doesn't matter. You're a Maronite. You're now, you're now Catholic because your dad was Catholic. End of story. So, UNRWA is set up so that it only recognizes Palestinians who are born to a Palestinian father. Everybody else is considered to no longer be Palestinian. So, if you're, if you're, you know, uh, 63, 64ths Palestinian, but your dad, your dad's lineage, your dad's dad's dad's dad's dad's dad's dad wasn't Palestinian, you're not Palestinian. That, it's just that simple, according to UNRWA, anyway. I, I bet there's a way to fix this, but in any case, that was the, the, the arrangement that the world basically made was, okay, Israel exists. Palestine, you're dirt. Uh, you're dust in the wind. No one cares about you. Good luck. Uh, enjoy your refugee status that the world has no plan for. Um, if it was so important to create a homeland for Israel, why isn't it important to create a homeland for the Palestinians? Like, I have a suggestion. Here's what I think we should do. We're punishing the Palestinians because Germany elected Hitler in 1932. So, turnabout is fair play. Why don't we give Palestine a big chunk of Germany? You know what I mean? And like, maybe Bavaria or something, and we can rename Munich, Jerusalem, or New Jerusalem, or North Jerusalem, whatever you want. And we just, uh, force the German population into, like, concentration camps and ghettos and wall them off. Uh, you know, like, we could do, I, we could, I, I know what we could do with, like, everything south of the Danube. We could call it the South Bank, and then we could just have little Palestinian colonies go in there and carve off chunks. And, no. Does this, does this feel bad to you, Jeremy?

>> Yeah.

>> I used to live in Bavaria, so Bavaria is near and dear to me. So, I, I went after a thing that I love.

>> Let's continue the cycle.

>> And let's, Yeah. Oh my God, you're right. Because then the Bavarians are going to need a homeland. Uh, I, why not New York? We could just move all the Bavarians to New York and give them New York state, and then they could rename New York, Munich, or New Munich, or whatever, Mun, and it'll be, it'll be great, and they could like, make everybody, forcibly make everybody wear lederhosen, and it'll be, no. And then, then we'll have to figure out what to do with the New Yorkers. Hey, there's a lot of space in upstate New York, so maybe,

>> Yeah, I, I remember one time driving through upstate New York and seeing a Confederate flag and thinking, "Oh, not here, dude. You're in the wrong place. Alabama's way to the south." Like, h how did you get this confused? Bless your heart. It was like that time when I was in North Dakota and a guy walked in with cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. I was like, "No, dude. This is North Dakota. You don't get to wear that. That's for the West. You're in the Midwest." We're going to get a lot of hate on that one.

>> Maybe. Hey, all cultures can do whatever they want.

>> No, not restrictions.

>> Not whatever you want. Yes. Yes. I get a, I mean,

>> I, No, you cannot have, uh, cowboy hats if you're in North Dakota. That, that, I'm drawing the line. That's not acceptable.

>> What if you're riding a horse, Roy?

>> You're going to have to do it like a fedora or something.

>> Oh my gosh. I can't even imagine someone on a horse riding wearing a fedora. Wearing a fedora. This is, now I need, I need someone to link a picture of someone on horseback with a fedora. That's insane. Okay. So, this is all happening, um, and it leads in '48. So, this leads to a system of apartheid.

>> Yes.

>> And,

>> And,

>> Yeah, and it,

>> Go, go.

>> I was going to say, about 25% of the population of the people that end up in Israel are in fact Arab, and they are given Israeli citizenship. So, they didn't get the 80% that they were aiming for, but they got 75%. So, I guess they figured it was close enough. And so, Israel ends up with this kind of interesting situation where there's this significant minority. Like, just to put it in perspective, blacks are 13.5% of the US population. So, the, you know, the Palestinian to Israeli ratio is about twice the size of the African-American ratio to the rest of the United States. Um, so, uh, lots of literature pops up, lots of poetry, lots of lamenting. Uh, there's an attempt to try to make sense of this. I think the, the initial part of this for the Palestinian population, the majority of what I think was being experienced by Arabs everywhere was shock. There was a sense of, um, how could the world do this to the Palestinians after World War II? Like, how didn't the world learn the lesson from Germany's attempted genocide in Poland, Germany's attempted genocide in Russia and Ukraine? You know, like, how did the world not learn from Japan's attempted genocide in China? The, the cruelty that Japan inflicted in the Philippines and in Indonesia? Like, how was it that we hadn't learned from this, and now we're doing it to another people on purpose? Like, it's a UN mandate to do it. And I think there, there was this period of time where nobody knew what to do. Nobody could understand the situation. There was also another part of the shock, which was Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq all sent soldiers, Jordan to fight to stop Israel from being created to begin with, and it was just one incompetent military disaster after the other. So, that, you know, in the end, the attempt to save the Palestinians from this fate was such an epic fail, and at some level, it looked like these corrupt, incompetent governments just simply couldn't perform militarily. Like, they just, they didn't have, like, the Egyptian military had weapons that didn't fire and tanks that were half functioning, and so, you know, they brought tanks, but you're like, the, the poor soldiers probably would have been better off on foot, um, with hand grenade bundles trying to throw them on the back of the Israeli tanks. And so, in the end, in the end, there's this period of grief and shock and dismay and confusion that slowly starts to percolate into an armed resistance, and Palestinian organizations begin to form. And the problem is, is right, it's David and Goliath, except in, in this particular case, you know, uh, the Palestinians, David up against Goliath, they don't actually even really have the ability to throw, to use a sling. This isn't, it's way past David and Goliath. It's like Goliath is behind a wall. Not literally. It is today literally, but back then it wasn't literally, but militarily, so that the Palestinians couldn't get to the, the Israeli military apparatus in any meaningful way. Um, and, and the idea of doing stone-throwing protests hadn't been formed yet, right? That isn't until the first Intifada, which is decades out. So, there's this, this idea of, uh, how to do it and what to do, slowly starts to turn into, let's hijack airplanes, and, uh, let's, let's do attacks on Israel that are, that maybe bring attention to the plight of the Palestinian people. The problem was is it was easy to villainize those, those attempts, um, because they looked, they looked like kidnapping. They looked like, uh, ugly violence against innocent people. And so, the, that type of resistance had a really negative impact on the public, the global opinion of the Palestinians, even though the Palestinians were attempting to do some form of armed resistance. Any person who's fair and rational and reasonable knows that when your country is invaded and conquered, it is, it's not your right to resist militarily. It is your duty to resist militarily because it is an, not only an unjust thing, but it has put your, your community in a position of subservience, conquest, exploitation, right? Like, you have to do armed resistance. You don't have a choice. And it became, I, I don't want to say incompetent, but it, it wasn't effective, the resistance that they were doing in the beginning. One of the problems that the Palestinians had also was that there were many different organizations, right? There were communists and socialists and nationalists and, and, uh, people who are Muslim fundamentalists. And so, what Nasser did was he hosted these different Palestinian organizations, and they, together with Yasser Arafat, created the PLO, and the PLO became an umbrella organization and brought all these other Palestinian organizations into it. And one of the interesting things about the PLO is how democratic it was. It had fair elections. They were pretty clean. There were, you know, serious attempts to to, uh, empower women and bring women into the movement and, and make women, you know, I wouldn't say equal, but at least on a, or more equal footing, and, uh, so in many ways, there was this, there was sort of this talk of, wow, the most democratic, most inclusive institution in the Arab world is actually the PLO. Um, and it, and, and because it was ideologically made up of so many different organizations, it also had this kind of democratic sense in that these organizations that normally would have been shouting at each other and arguing with each other were listening to each other and trying to cooperate. And, you know, it wasn't always very effective, but it was certainly better than what they had before the creation of the PLO. And so, you know, you ended up with organizations like the PFLP and, uh, Fatah, and they, they're, they're now working together, at least to a degree. And, and then comes 1956. So, just 8 years after Israel has conquered Palestine, um, Egypt finds itself in a really interesting situation. So, in 1952, the monarchy is overthrown. There's a series of protests that take place in Tahrir Square. It destabilizes the government. The military steps in, and they end the monarchy. The, the, the king and the royal family are allowed to leave Egypt with whatever they can carry. So, they leave with a bunch of gold and jewelry, and, you know, they're doing fine. Um, but now Egypt is going to have to transition over into becoming a republic. And one of the things Egypt was really keen to do was create a military force that would make it so that it could defend itself going forward. But to do that, they needed money, and, uh, they needed a person to buy the weapon systems from. And they had, they had another problem, and that was the Nile floods. Egypt really felt that having your country flood once a year made you look like you were some backwards third-world country. And so, there was this, this psychological need on the part of the Egyptians to control the flood. And, um, so, the, the goal was to build the Aswan High Dam. The problem is, Egypt didn't have the technical know-how to build the Aswan High Dam, and didn't have the money to build the Aswan High Dam. So, they, they weren't, they weren't in a position to do that, and they, they're, they're going through this revolutionary process. They're thinking about, okay, we're going to need a constitution. What kind of a state do we want to have? Do we want to have, you know, a democracy? Do we want to have a socialist state? Like, they're trying to figure all of this out. And the first president of Egypt, um, Muhammad Naguib, uh, gets found out that the CIA is trying to bribe him. And so, he just disappears. That's the solution to that. I think he was president for a year before he disappears. Um, and, and then Nasser basically takes over formally at that point. He, he had been sort of the puppet master prior to that. And so, Nasser starts working on a deal. The Germans come to him, and the Germans go, "We'll design the Aswan High Dam, and that'll give you the ability to to control the flood." And so, Nasser's like, "Okay, so when do you start building it?" And Germany goes, "Oh, we can't, this, we, we can design it for you, but we can't build it for you." And, and Nasser's like, "Well, how much are you going to charge us to to to design it?" And Germany is like, "No, no, this is for free. We're giving Israel billions of dollars in reparations." So, one of the dumbest things that happened in this story was at the end of World War II, Germany was ordered to pay reparations to to the Jewish people. That part, I, I totally believe in. Germany needed to pay reparations to the Jewish people. The part that's dumb is Germany was told, just give the money to Israel. Well, most of the Israelis weren't victims of the Holocaust. What they needed to do is find the victims of the Holocaust, the survivors of the Holocaust, and give the money to them. And that, that would have been the correct thing to do. But instead, the money goes to this brand new state that has just stolen its country and has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in, in a similar fashion to what Germany had done. And now Germany's funding it. So, out of pure raw guilt, Germany goes to Egypt and says, "We know we've just created a monster in the region. We know that they're going to cause you all sorts of suffering and harm in the future. We have no money left. Paying Israel the reparations bankrupted us. Our cities are in rubble. We're not in a position to, we've been chopped in two. The Russians have, you know, 30% of our land. Um, we're not in a position to offer you any meaningful foreign aid to compensate for what's coming, what Israel is going to do to Egypt in the future, but we'll, we'll give you the designs for the Aswan High Dam. It's the best we can do." So, Nasser's like, "Okay, great." And he, he goes to the British and the United States and says, "Will you, will you help fund building this thing?" And Britain and the United States both agree they will help do this because you got to remember, Egypt is still technically, uh, part of the British Empire in a way. So, officially, Egypt had a revolution in 1919, and in 1920 was given independence on paper, but in reality, Egypt is still a protectorate of the British Empire. It's still connected. And so, the United States and Great Britain are like, "Okay, yeah, we'll fund the, the construction of the Aswan High Dam." Nasser then goes to the British and says, "I want to buy weapon systems from you." The British are worried that if Egypt is militarized, it will eventually throw them out. And the British want to control the Suez Canal. Like, they believe that the control of the Suez Canal is paramount for the functioning of what's left of the British Empire, right? Because India is already independent. Pakistan is already independent. So, they, they're losing major pieces of the empire, but they still have this dream that they'll hold on to some fraction of it. And so, the British go, "No, we're not going to sell you weapon systems. You're on your own." And so, Egypt found somebody who would. It was Czechoslovakia, communist Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia had amazing factories in World War II that the Germans kept.

Operating, and they were literally making tanks. And so at the end of World War II, the Czechs had all these Czech and German leftover tanks from the war. And so Nasser starts buying those weapon systems from communist Czechoslovakia. England pretends to be outraged. "You traitor! How could you work with them? And you're buying Nazi equipment? You're awful!" And so England declares it will not fund construction of the Aswan High Dam.

Nasser goes to the Americans. Eisenhower is president, right? And says, "Are you going to still give you give us your half?" And Eisenhower said, "Why? There's no point in building half a dam." And so the United States pulls out its funding. So Nasser is baffled. He doesn't know what to do. He comes up with a solution. He's going to nationalize the Suez Canal. He's going to take possession of the Suez Canal so that every time a ship passes through, Egypt will charge it money, and then that money will go to build the Aswan High Dam. He nationalizes the Suez Canal.

Israel invades Egypt. Israel does a paradrop in the Sinai and marches across the border, goes into the Sinai with the hope in 1956 with the hope that the Egyptian army will be lured into the Sinai to defend the Sinai from Israel. That's the goal. Israel's the bait. And Nasser doesn't take the bait. The goal that the French and the British had was once the Egyptian army was in the Sinai, they were going to capture the Suez Canal, trapping the Egyptian army on the wrong side of the canal and then force it to surrender. But since Nasser doesn't take the bait, uh, when the British and the French invade, they invade at Port Said. Their plan can't work. There is no way to capture the Egyptian army. And Egyptian civilians pour into the streets and make any military operation impossible.

Eisenhower then uses this as a perfect opportunity to knock Britain and France down a notch. And he basically goes to the UN and turns this into a UN thing. And they actually send UN troops, Norwegians with blue helmets, to go to Port Said with the goal of attacking the British and French if they're still there. And the British and French have to do everything they can to scramble and get out. And they get out in time. The northern regions come in, and then a UN force is deployed into the Sinai. The UN force was supposed to be deployed on the other side of the border in Israel, but Israel said, "Under no circumstances will we allow a UN army into, uh, Israel." So there's so it only gets half deployed in the Sinai, and, uh, that's the end of the 1956 war.

So politically, it's a victory for Egypt. There's no military victory for Egypt because Egypt didn't fight it. They just stayed out of the war and let the Israelis, the British, and the French run around, not ineffectively, uh, doing a military operation that was then leading to UN intervention because of the United States. Uh, Eisenhower, of course, was thrilled because he just knocked the British and French down a notch. But it planted a seed in everybody's head. And that is, Israel wants to play with the big boys, the big white boys. And as a result, maybe you, the US and Europe, might be able to use Israel in the future in war in some capacity. Like, Israel just might be a really useful venture. It's not just a racist one in that we're going to get rid of this brown population and replace it with a white population. It, uh, also might have some sort of strategic value. And then as time goes by, they're going to realize it has an even better strategic value than that. Um, it can be a disruptive force, a force to generate chaos in the Middle East.

So, uh, Egypt sets up postal service for for Gaza. They, you know, build hospitals, set up schools. They make it so that any university that operates in Egypt must give the Palestinians free tuition. So, the American University in Cairo becomes free for Palestinians. Right? A little bit of a jab to the United States for, you know, creating the situation to begin with. And, uh, and then in the meantime, Egypt gets big bridges. It's starting to think under Nasser that it can create a United Arab Republic that at some point down the road, everything from Morocco to Iraq is going to be unified into a single state. And Nasser, in Nasser's mind, you start with a confederacy. He was going to call it United Arab States. And then as time goes by, the member states can then join the republic and seed their autonomy and become like the United States. So the United Arab Republic was supposed to be like the United States, and the United Arab States was supposed to be like what the European Union is today. And, uh, Yemen joins the United Arab States, and Syria joins the United Arab Republic. Lebanon and Iraq are debating joining the United Arab States or the United Arab Republic. And there's a big political argument taking place in Lebanon. There's a big political argument taking place in Iraq. Iraq has just had a revolution. And the United States intervenes militarily into Lebanon, claiming that there's a civil war that they're trying to disrupt. What there was was they didn't want Lebanon to join. Egypt and Syria have already joined. So Lebanon joining in would have made a contiguous, you know, it would have given Syria's coastline back to this larger Arab state. And then the United States threatened to nuke Iraq. So there's this like multi-cos event with the United States in 1958 in the Middle East.

Uh, Nasser's experiment with Syria collapses in '61. The Syrian military pulls Syria out of the United Arab Republic, but Yemen stays in the United Arab States, and Yemen ends up in a civil war. Saudi Arabia, Israel, Great Britain, and the United States back the monarchists. Egypt backs the socialists who are trying to create a secular republic. And so it becomes Egypt and Yemen versus Saudi Arabia, the United States, Israel, and Great Britain. And what's crazy is, uh, some of the, it's Egypt's Vietnam because the Egyptians, the Egyptian soldiers actually deploy into Yemen. They can't tell the Yemenese monarchists apart from the Yemenese Republicans. Like, they, it's just chaos. Uh, the Egyptian military isn't equipped to have this kind of a war, but it's doing it anyway.

And then in 1967, tensions start to rise. Israel begins doing raids into the West Bank. And Israel is attacking Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank. And the King of Jordan, King Hussein, is embarrassed. He's humiliated by this. So he starts pushing Egypt to do something about this. And Nasser can't do anything militarily about it. He can't attack Israel. That's not an option. So Nasser is trying to figure out what to do. And he feels like he's being shamed by King Hussein because King Hussein is making public demands that Egypt somehow stop Israel from crossing over into Jordan and attacking Jordanian territory. So Nasser comes up with kind of a compromise. Sometimes you have to be really careful with compromises. Very often it's better to either do A or C. Doing B is frequently exactly the worst option because you've split your attention. So he doesn't want to pull out of the Yemen civil war because he really wants Yemen to come through on the other side as a secular socialist republic. And, um, and at the same time, he needs to do something to support King Hussein. So he decides to go for a symbolic gesture.

The Straits of Tiran are the point where the Sinai and Saudi Arabia almost touch. They get really close to each other. And Israel had the city of Eilat, which is, uh, in the Gulf of Aqaba. It, Israel comes to a little point and barely touches the Gulf of Aqaba, but it does. And there's a little town there. And Israel is getting 1 or 2% of all its imports into Eilat. The other 98% of its imports went to a Mediterranean town like Acre or Haifa or Jaffa or Tel Aviv. So, uh, Nasser decides a way to do something, it, it'll only be a symbolic gesture, is to shut down the Straits of Tiran and to say no Israeli shipping can go through the Straits of Tiran to Eilat. And then he doesn't do anything to enforce it. So, if you had a ship heading there, you could just simply go through the Straits of Tiran. It was purely a symbolic gesture. But even if he had, he would have only disrupted 2% of Israeli imports. Like, it, this wasn't a make or break thing for Israel. And so he shuts down the straits on paper, and Israel goes, "You cut off the lifeblood of Israel. Israel can't function like this. We're, we're screwed."

And Nasser starts, Nasser does an epic, disastrous mistake. He orders the UN forces out of the Sinai. I, to this day, I can't figure out why he does this. Like, okay, you're going to do this really weak symbolic gesture. Why are you ordering the UN troops out? Well, like, what's the point in this? He orders the UN troops out. And then he starts listening to Israeli rhetoric and he starts thinking, "My God, they sound like they're, they're going to attack us over the straits, the Straits of Tiran." So, he calls up President Lyndon Baines Johnson and says, "Hey, is Israel going to attack?" And Johnson goes, "No, I promise you, under no circumstances will Israel attack." And of course, Israel attacks, and it's the infamous Six-Day War in 1967.

The Israelis, in six days, completely humiliate, rout the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian army simultaneously. Blitzkrieg-style warfare that the German military in World War II would have been proud of. Like, it was Blitz on the Heinz Guderian level. Uh, absolute, like, if you hate Egyptians and you meet them, just go, "Six-Day War," they'll immediately start to weep. Uh, if the Egyptians could, could redo the number system, they would just simply get rid of the number 67. There would only be 99 numbers in the first 100 numbers, uh, just because it was such an awful, humiliating defeat. In six days, the Israelis blew up every single Egyptian Air Force airplane on the runway. The Egyptians didn't even get one of them into the air so it could be shot down. Like, how humiliating is that? And then to make matters worse, the bulk of the Egyptian army is in Yemen. Like, it can't even respond. Like, there's nothing they can do.

In the aftermath, Nasser is humiliated out of his mind. He actually walks into the middle of Midan Tahrir. There's a mob of people in the street in the in the square. And he says, "I failed you. I, I deserve whatever fate you give me. If you want to, you can execute me right now, and I will accept it." And they raise him onto their shoulders and they parade him around and say, "You're our president." And he'll, he'll be president of Egypt for another three years until, uh, he gets, I think it was three heart attacks. The third one kills him.

Um, in the aftermath of this, the Israel, or during this, the battle, the Israelis sank ships in the Suez Canal, and now the Suez Canal is the effective border between Egypt and Israel. And as a result, nobody knows how to clear the ships out of the Suez Canal because it's a military zone. It's the front line of a battlefield. Because even though Israel and Egypt are no longer actively shooting at each other, the Israelis don't want the Suez Canal cleared out. So they're not going to let the Egyptians do it. So it kills Egypt's ability to then charge for ships going through, but it also ends Europe's ability to use the Suez Canal. It's a, it's taken out of the global system for trade, which was a disaster for Europe. But Europe's willing to do anything to kill Arabs. Like that is, as long as you're murdering Palestinians and Egyptians, Europe's thrilled. So they're willing to disrupt Christmas over this.

Um, so the Gaza Strip and West Bank then get absorbed into the Israeli, uh, state, but not annexed. So Israel now has full possession, but Israel doesn't annex. And the reason is simple. It is, if you annex them, you would suddenly have a population that was, uh, 45% Palestinian. And if your goal is 20% and you're at 25%, right, you're then 45% is going the wrong direction. Um, and that, that assumes no right of return. So that, that means that the Palestinians in Syria and Lebanon and Egypt and Jordan and Australia and the United States and in Germany aren't coming back. It'll be 55%. And then that also, you know, the Israelis probably were pretty good at math. The Palestinians had a higher birth rate. So it was inevitable if they annexed the West Bank and Gaza Strip that at some point down the road, maybe, you know, as early as the 1990s, they would become a minority in their state. So that, that wasn't an option for them. They couldn't annex. So that's why it becomes the occupied territories.

Um, and then the Golan Heights gets annexed from Syria. So that is, according to Israel, part of Israel. No, that is fully annexed. They ethnically cleansed, uh, the Syrian population out of the Golan Heights and then set up colonies. They began doing the same in Egypt as well, in the Sinai. So, um, when the Israeli army attacked in '67, they, they conducted massacres and they were genociding villages in the Sinai, just killing thousands of Egyptians because they were planning to annex the Sinai. That was their goal. And they, they were, they began actually building colonies. They began setting up settlements as part of their settler colonial project in the Sinai. Um, and then of course, they have their eye on doing the same to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

In that moment, though, there's this confusion because on the one hand, Israel's become an empire, right? It's more than double its size now because it has the Sinai, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Israel that it stole in 1948, and the Golan Heights. And it's, it's feeling like it's on top of the world, like it's unstoppable. And, and then there's a population of Israelis who thought that the Palestinians were in a position of subservience in Egypt and Jordan, that they were, they were mistreated. So there was a population of Israelis who thought, "Oh, this is a moment for us to create some kind of justice for the Palestinians." And so they, they thought, "Oh, we can, you know," they, I don't think they had an understanding of how to do this, but there was on the part of some Israelis a hope that this was actually a liberation moment for the Palestinian people.

Um, the reality, of course, was that the majority of the Israelis saw this as a cheap labor source. They would pay them slave wages, and then it, and then the Palestinians could build things on the land that the Israelis had stolen from them. And so that it would be like this kind of cruel, sadistic, "Yeah, I'm going to pay you $3 a day for you to build a house on the land that used to have your olive trees on, but we bulldozed those olive trees, and now it's going to be a residential area." And so that's, that was what the reality the Israelis had imposed on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. It wasn't a liberation moment.

Um, the PLO doesn't know what to do, right? Hijacking airplanes is not working the way they want it to. Attacking the Olympics in Munich is not a great idea. Like, they're doing things that are optically very easy for the Israelis to villainize. They're ineffective. They, you know, the hijacking the plane that ends up in Uganda, the Entebbe raid makes the Israelis look heroic. And then the Israelis have a problem. They, they have to figure out how to make this make sense to Europe and the United States, right? They don't, they don't care about how people feel about this in Brazil or Argentina. They don't care about how people feel about this in Zimbabwe and Nigeria or Thailand and Indonesia. They just need, they feel like they just need to make this make sense in Germany, the United States, the UK, Italy, France, maybe Spain, just Canada. And so they need to somehow villainize the Arabs. The Arabs have to be the bad guy because, right, we live in a world where the average person wants to believe there's a good guy and a bad guy. That, we, right, this is this stupid oversimplification. So if US imperialism is evil, then Putin must be a good guy. It's like, no, he could just be another evil guy. There's no reason to believe that he has to be the good guy just because the United States misbehaves.

Um, and this, this need to have a good guy and this need to have a bad guy, the Israelis realized the Arabs had to be the bad guy. And so they began an active campaign of trying to regularly portray Arabs as barbaric, misogynistic, backwards, savage, corrupt, um, and anti-Semitic, which was of course incredibly ironic since Arabs are Semites, right? And it, so all you had to do was just get Europe and the United States to believe that anti-Semitism only applied to Jews. It didn't apply to Arabs. It was a singular ideology like for the Jewish people. And, and then portray the Arabs as, well, they, we're fighting for our survival because the Arabs hate us, which is nonsense. They're not fighting for their survival. They are fighting to keep the land they stole. If they were really interested in survival, they could do two really effective things to make that work. Leave, right? If they're really in peril, they could just always leave. The other one is go make a peace deal. Make it so that the Palestinians have human rights. That would end the struggle instantaneously.

I was in Mexico City. This is a long time ago, got my, 20 years ago, and there was a film festival going on, and I met this Israeli woman. I don't remember her name. Um, and she said, "I know the way to make peace." And I'm like, "Wow, I just can't wait to hear this." Like, what, what does that look like? And she said, "One side has to surrender. Either the Palestinians have to surrender or we have to surrender." And I go, "Well, how do you think, how do you think that looks?" And she said, "You know, my preference is that Israel surrenders." Uh, but, but if the Palestinians did it, that would also solve the problem." It never made full sense to me that what does Palestinian surrender look like? That they accept that they're going to be permanent refugees for all eternity, stuck in the Gaza Strip, ghettoized in the Gaza Strip, ghettoized in the West Bank.

Uh, the Israelis, of course, started building a wall system inside the West Bank. If you look at the wall, the map of the walls, like the cities are completely encircled, and then there are these corridors that the, that the Palestinians have to travel through if you want to get from one end of the West Bank to another. It's like 70 miles. Is that right? It's, it's, it's a tiny distance. The 70 doesn't sound right, but from north to south, and the West Bank is a tiny, we're not talking a large chunk of land. And there, I don't remember how many checkpoints a Palestinian has to go through to get from one end to the other. So, you know, if, if 70 miles should be, or if the distance that it takes to get from one end to the other, it should be a two-hour drive, let's say, it'll take you all day plus part of the next day because of all the checkpoints you have to go through. In the meantime, the Israelis have Israeli-only freeways that are built through the West Bank. So they can just zip around. And like, when we say apartheid, like, even the roads are segregated. It's not that in the West Bank, in the Palestinian territory that's supposed to become the basis for a Palestinian state there, there are Israeli-only freeways, and the Palestinians are stuck in these walled-off ghettos. And so, um, the Palestinian population finds itself villainized everywhere.

And the, I remember watching movies in the 1980s, and whenever Arabs were portrayed, they were almost always the actors were Indian, and I mean Asian Indian. And they're always portrayed as dumb, zombie-like, evil religious fanatics. And you're like, "Chuck Norris is beating up more of these Arab terrorists who look like they're from like Lahore and Kolkata." Like, that's so weird. Uh, they don't look like they're from the Middle East anyway. Americans, of course, don't know the difference. It's just a bunch of brown people.

>> Right? A lot of times we just use, you know, our Hispanic actors.

>> Yes, that's true. Although sometimes that's amazing. Like Anthony Quinn in Lawrence of Arabia, brilliant casting. There's no Arab who's ever gone, "God, I can't believe how racist that was. That half-Irish, half-Mexican actor who portrayed us." Every Arab's like, "Yes, Anthony Quinn." That's so funny.

>> So, do you think, do you think this was more of an anti-Arab thing? What, at what point did it become like a creation of Islamophobia, do you think? Was that more after 9/11, or was that starting to creep in between?

>> I, I don't, I don't know if it was an ethnic divide or religious divide. Yeah, it's so the answer is, the anti-Islamic stuff is centuries old. It, I mean, it was built into European culture. I don't know if we talked about this before, but it,

>> We were talking about Crusades and stuff.

>> Yeah, I do. We talked about the origin of whiteness in Spain. So,

>> I, I, go ahead. We were going to have to, because I don't remember, and honestly, repetition is good for learning anyway. So the basis for this idea of whiteness actually originated in Spain during the Catholic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. So it's worth remembering there wasn't a Spain yet, right? Because Isabella creates Spain. So Spain comes into being at, on Isabella's death, and then her daughter Joanna becomes the first queen of, of Spain. So Spain is, you know, a little bit less than 500 years old. Um, it's a lot older than Italy, which is 165 years old, and Germany, which is 144 years old. But it's, uh, the United States is 95 years older than Germany, to kind of keep things in perspective. But Spain is less than 500 years old. So, oh no, I guess it's just over 500 years old. Um, so when I say Spain, I, I would, you know what, to make it clear, I'll just say Iberian Peninsula. That way, I'm not messing this up, right? Castile, Leon, Navarre, uh, Aragon, Granada, Portugal. Those are the states that are in the Iberian Peninsula at the time. And there, as the, as the intolerant religious fanatic Christians in the north are conquering Muslim-ruled south. So I'm saying Muslim-ruled because the south was actually majority Christian. It was probably, uh, 60% Christian, you know, 35% Muslim, and 5% Jewish, maybe a little bit less Jewish, but in those, the numbers are in those ballparks. And but, but they were, but the south was ruled by Muslims. And in the south, the goal was tolerance and coexistence and peace and trade and, you know, just working together. In the north, the goal was to get rid of the Jewish and Muslim populations. But in the process, because human beings like pecking orders, were like chickens that way, um, they wanted to come up with some mechanism to differentiate whether a person had a lot of Jewish and Muslim ancestors. And, you know, it wasn't like they were keeping careful records. So it wasn't like you could go through the genealogy and go, "Oh yeah, look, you can trace my ancestry back 200 years and you won't find a single Jew or Muslim." So what they came up with to compensate for their missing genealogical records was skin color. The whiter you were, the less Muslim and Jewish ancestors you were assumed to have. The darker you were, the more Jewish and Muslim ancestors you assumed to have. So then the, the, the ideal of striving for light-colored skin merged out of this anti-Islamic, uh, movement that the Reconquista represented. And by the way, anti-Semitic because it was also anti-Jewish. So it was this convergence of anti-Islamic and anti-Jewish hatred that was manifesting itself in race terms with skin color. And, uh, and it spread. It spread from Spain and it infested Europe like a little cancerous brain disease. And by the time Europe was done fully embracing this, right, there became this north-south divide, right? Because Spaniards and Italians and Greeks are very dark. They, they're definitely not white white. They're, are clearly off-white. But by contrast, the Irish, the Scottish, and the Swedish, and the Finns are like so lovely. They're like elves. They just missing the pointed ears.

>> They don't have sun.

>> They don't have sun. And so, um, that, that's actually the origins of this whole white supremacy conversation was actually this anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim thing that was going on in Spain, ironically enough.

>> Interesting. Yeah. And so, so when we talk about the anti-Arab hatred, it was already tied into this anti-Muslim thing that had been going on in Europe for centuries. Having so, in addition to the anti-Muslim thing, there was an anti-Arab thing that had also going on for centuries because it goes all the way back to even before the Crusades when the Arabs were conquering chunks of Europe. The Europeans began to hate it. So they were, they were intimately tied together. And I think the average American doesn't get that being Arab doesn't mean that you're Muslim, and being Muslim doesn't mean that you're Arab. That, uh, Arabs are a minority of the Muslim population. Arabs are about one-third of the Muslim population, maybe even a little bit less, 30%. And, and for that matter, you know, there are huge Christian minorities in Lebanon and Egypt. There are small Christian minorities in Iraq. I don't think there's much left. I think the United States purged them, but also Syria has a, a small Christian minority. But if you were to roll the clock back, that Christian minority, if you go back 200 years, that Christian minority was probably about 25% of the Middle East population. Uh, the Middle East has been hemorrhaging Christians for the last 200 years. And some of that was, you know, bad local policies. Uh, but, but a lot of that was just the effect of imperialism and the, what Europe was doing to the Middle East. Um, and a lot of those immigrants ended up in Texas, Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. Uh, some even ended up in Colombia. And so there was this huge North American and South American migration. If you go to, uh, Lebanon today, you can see signs of that, uh, Christian migration out because one of the things that's happened is some of them have gone back. And so, in Beirut, there's a statue of the Lebanese migrant to Mexico, and they have a Lebanese flag next to a Mexican flag. Uh, I was in Batroun. Yeah, I hope I'm not messing up the towns. I was in Batroun, which is, uh, in northern Lebanon, and we're walking through this, it's a gorgeous little town on the sea. And we walk around the corner and there's this Mexican church in front of me. And my mind is breaking because, you know, I've spent a little enough time in Mexico to know what a Mexican church looks like, also Texas. And I'm looking at it just confused. Then the Lebanese person I'm with goes, "This is a Mexican church." Confirming my confusion. And it, the Lebanese Mexican population had actually disassembled a church, brought it to Lebanon, and assembled it in an act of celebrating that this really strong connection between the two countries. And I just thought it was the sweetest thing.

>> It's really cool.

>> Yeah. So, so the, the twist in this is that a lot of this anti-Islamic hatred gets heaped on top of Christian Arabs, and for that matter, Jewish Arabs. And then, you know, some of the anti-Arab hatred just gets mindlessly dropped on the entire Muslim world. And so there's, it's a, it's a feedback loop with a lot of messiness intertwined in all of it.

>> Yeah, I think any, any time we try and simplify the, the villain, it becomes super, super frustrating because a lot of times, if we keep doing that, it eventually will lead back to ourselves and then, which case we have a complete existential crisis.

>> I mean, I totally agree. Especially if you do, you know, do 23 and Me and you find out, "Oh my gosh, I'm part Arab," or, you know, what have you.

>> Ariana Grande actually turns out she's part Moroccan. So if you hate Arabs, you need to start hating Ariana Grande. I suspect that a lot of the people in the United States who hate Arabs also probably hate Mexicans and people from Latin America in general. So I don't think it probably made a big difference in Ariana Grande's life.

>> That's fair. That's fair.

>> So, you talked a lot about like the PLO and kind of how their operations weren't working because they're easily villainized. How did that eventually evolve into Hamas?

>> Aha. So, okay. The United States and Israel were really keen to split the Palestinian movement. They really, really badly wanted to create some kind of counter movement within the Palestinian liberation movement to hurt the PLO. And so, uh, with a lot of money and some support, uh, Hamas was actually created by its presumed enemies, you know, co-founded with Israel, United States, and of course, worked very effectively. Hamas not only turned on the PLO, currently runs Gaza separate from the PLO, which runs the West Bank. So effectively, there's, you know, people are talking about the two-state solution. The two-state solution is already in effect. Like, if you're waiting for the two-state solution, it's like waiting for the Battle of Armageddon. The Battle of Armageddon took place 3,500 years ago. Spoiler alert. The Hittites and their Semitic allies were defeated by the Egyptian army led by Thutmose III. You, you're waiting for something that's already in the past. I am so sorry. Like, and this is, this is not conspiracy or anything. It's just that's how it is. Um, and, um, that's, that's effectively what the result was today, right? We are already in the two-state solution, only a three-state solution, because Gaza and the West Bank aren't operating as a single state. They are operating as two separate states. So in the '80s, early '80s, Hamas is created. It's funded by the United States. It's funded by Israel. It, it got a lot of funding from Qatar as well. Uh, there's always this, "Oh, Iran, Iran, Iran." Iran definitely sends it money. I don't want to diminish Iran's support for Hamas, but at the end of the day, Hamas gets more of its support from the US and its allies than it does from Iran. So like, if, if the US and its allies cut off the funding of Hamas, it would have run out of money a long time ago. But we wanted, you know, this opposition force against the PLO, especially one that was easy to villainize. So in Hamas's charter, it says it wants the destruction of Israel. So at that point, like there's no way to negotiate. So Hamas becomes the perfect permanent villain. They are Islamists, so they're Muslim fundamentalists. So that's easy to villainize as well, because built into every fundamentalist religious movement, whether it's Zionism or Islamic fundamentalism, is a profound intolerance for all other religious groups. And you know who likes those guys? Certainly not the people who aren't from that group. And so, uh, that's the basis for which the creation of Hamas was undertaken. And then of course, in by the time we get into the '80s, we end up with the first Intifada, which is an, it's a stonethrowing uprising against the Israeli state. And Hamas really takes off during that time period. It gets a lot of support. One of the things that drives fundamentalism everywhere on the planet is the economy. There have been multiple papers done about this. So like, for example, if you look at Egypt, when Egypt's economy is coming down, Islamic fundamentalism goes up. You could do this with the United States. If you go to the poorest parts of the United States, you will find they have the highest rates of Christian fundamentalism. The economy is inversely related to religious fanaticism and intolerance. And it's, part of the reason is, you know, you, you're literally going to the person and saying, "Look, I know this life sucks, but if you, if you do X, Y, and Z, uh, you're going to get a great heaven on the other end." So it gives the person a little bit of hope. So that's one reason it does this. Another one is the, the poor people think, well, I'm in this position because there's a corrupt government that put me in this position, corrupt policies that put me in this position. So how do I fight corruption? Well, if that person is religious and they really believe, they won't be corrupt because religious people are good people. And so, there's this, I mean, anybody who's studied history knows this is not the case. The world's great religious leaders are usually not the good people. And, but, you know, if you're poor, you probably don't spend a lot of time reading history and going through, "Oh, look what Pope Alexander VI was like." Um, you know, you're probably not like flipping through and going, "My God, he had his girlfriend on his knee when people were kissing his ring, when his kiss kissing his papal ring. Um, his son Cesare tried to conquer Italy for him." And you're like, "Wait a minute. The Pope had a son?" Yeah. I believe he had at least two sons and a daughter, to be honest. Um, so, um, there's, so there's this misalignment, right? This lack of information leads you to believe, ironically, because if you had any information, you know not to, that somehow religious fanatics are going to liberate you because they're not dirty and corrupt. And so Hamas does really well in, in the period of time when it becomes clear that Palestinians are going to have no home, no jobs, no economy, that they're stuck in these ghettos and they're, they're trapped.

Um, it's worth pointing out that Israel attacks Lebanon in '78 and then withdraws but leaves a force in South Lebanon. And then Israel attacks Lebanon in '82 and conducts a full-on war and goes all the way to Beirut and enters Beirut. And at that point, the whole Arab world is freaking out because Israel is, is basically, you know, like they're slaughtering the Lebanese population, killing tens of thousands of Lebanese and wrecking Lebanese towns and cities, and it's all in pursuit of going after the PLO. So the PLO had relocated itself to Lebanon and was fighting, trying to fight Israel from Lebanon. The PLO had at one point,

>> Is this the origin of Hezbollah at this point?

>> Okay. So you're right. Um, Iran has the Islamic Revolution in '79. Hezbollah was one of the major forces in the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Hez means party. Allah is God. So, Party of God. And, um, a few members of Hezbollah go to Lebanon because Iran has decided it's going to help train the Shia population in Lebanon. The, uh, the Shia are the larger portion of the Muslim population, and Lebanon by the '80s was probably about 55% Muslim. Um, you know, it's probably 30, 35% Shia. So Iran thought, "How do we protect that Shia population?" They send the, the Iranians send a group of volunteers to Lebanon to start training and helping those Shia Lebanese develop a coherent militia, a militia that can resist, uh, Israel. It can resist the Palestinians, for that matter. It can resist anybody. It'll, it'll protect the Shia population inside Lebanon. And of course, when Israel attacks in '82, the Shia can't wait to get that kind of support from Iran. And I don't remember what they originally called the organization. They didn't call it Hezbollah in the beginning. And, uh, and then what ends up happening is when Israel invades Beirut, the United States panics. And the United States goes, "Oh my God, no. You've gone too far. This is too messy." So Reagan comes up with a solution. The United States, Great Britain, France, and Italy will invade Beirut. And we'll do Israel's dirty work for Israel in Beirut. And because you have to remember, Lebanon's been in a civil war from '75. So at this point, it's been in seven years of civil war. So, so the Lebanese are busy killing each other. The Israelis are coming in, killing the Lebanese and the Palestinians. The Palestinians are also involved in the civil war. And, and so the United States, France, Great Britain, and Italy are going to go, go invade, do Israel's dirty work in Beirut, and then act like we're peacekeepers. And that way, Israel can keep its hands from getting too dirty. And so the Israelis agree. We invade, we divide the city up into four quadrants. The Italians refuse to do combat missions. They're basically just going in with a bunch of hospital personnel, and they're running around treating wounded Lebanese and wounded Palestinians. And Reagan's like, "No, no, no. You need to send a combat force." And Italy goes, "Screw you." And withdraws. So it ends up just being the British, the French, and the Americans. And, um, a communist, that's how I remember it. I hope I'm not screwing this up. Communist attacks, uh, the US embassy in, basically a suicide attack. And that kind of plants the idea, "Wait a minute, we need to be fighting the US embassy and the US forces." And then eventually, of course, that leads to another attack on the US embassy, which was much bigger and much more deadly. And then there's the attack on the US Marines and the French peacekeeping force. And I don't remember the, the death tolls in those three, those three big attacks. But it's, it's enough that the US and the French really lose their taste for this.

One of the reasons why Reagan was so keen to invade Beirut was he thought he could do another 1958 like Eisenhower did when he invaded Lebanon. He, he also believed that there was a disease that had taken over the American mind, and he called it the Vietnam Syndrome. And it was this unhealthy aversion to war. That, that the humiliating rout that the United States had experienced in Vietnam had pushed the American public into sort of like a pacifist, anti-war place. And Reagan believed that if, if the United States could get a good win somewhere, that it would help the American public overcome the Vietnam Syndrome. So he thought Beirut would be his big win. Um, you know, it's, US population was what, probably 250 million people. I, I'm guessing Lebanon's population at the time was 4 million people. It's always a fair match when you outnumber the other side 60 to 1 and have a GDP that's a thousand times bigger. So, of course, the American public's going to end up with enormous pride from this. After the bombing happens, and I think it was like 300 Marines die, um, Reagan had reinforcements heading towards the Mediterranean to go to Lebanon. He turns them around and sends them to Grenada, and we invade Grenada to distract the American public, but also to get a win. I think Grenada has a total population of like 70,000 people at the time. So, you know, like, and we do, we get this crazy win. And of course, our argument is that it's a domino. It's falling to the communists. What happened was Grenada wanted to expand its tourist industry. To do that, it needed a bigger, build a bigger airport, and they basically put out bids. They asked for bids, and a Cuban and East German company were the lowest bidders. So the United States went in there and started taking shots at bulldozers to stop communists from building an airport. And, you know, we made a big deal out of it because we had a bunch of those, there was a quack medical school that doesn't actually teach you medicine, but you'll get an MD after your name, and there was a group of Americans there getting the substandard education. So we pretended we were, we were protecting these medical students instead of sending them to prison. We, we evacuated them out of the country and had the cameras rolling, and it looked glorious. And Reagan's like, "Yeah, people are chanting USA, USA." And it's like, "Really? For this?" Like, I'm ashamed telling the story.

>> I'm still stuck on we attacked. So these, these are communists who participated in, uh, the free market.

>> Yeah. You'd think we'd be proud of them. Go Cuba, East Germany. Yeah. Way to under us.

>> Oh my gosh. Oh, the irony. But

>> The irony.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. When humans stop being hypocrites, it, I'm, I'm pretty sure it's just we went extinct. Like, I don't, I don't know how that would, I don't know how that would happen.

>> Oh, I think, I think we'd live in, in a, if we practiced humility and grace, uh, we'd live in an entirely different existence than any, any of us have ever experienced, I think.

>> Oh, yeah. I agree. Would that's, we'd be back in, in, in the garden, so to speak.

>> Yeah, it would be amazing. Like, imagine, like, I don't know the answer to everything if people would just say that every once in a while. That would be just so helpful. And then, yeah, I don't know what that person's going through. I'm just going to give them the grace and assume they're doing the best they can in this moment instead of judging them. Like, wow, what a weird world it would be.

>> Yeah.

>> Oh man.

>> Oh man. Fun.

>> I think there's, there's a lot that you covered. You covered a lot of things that I want to talk about. Uh, you just, you were just going, and I didn't want to interrupt you. Uh, we can, we can continue. I think this is, uh, quite a bit for now.

>> Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I'm burnt out.

>> And, uh, and we'll end on that happy note of of grace and humility and, and, you know, loving our neighbors rather than immediately judging them and hating them. Actually, what's interesting is I'm going to talk about an event, a leader, an event, uh, that's grace and humility. I, I forgot what we call the event. Uh, it's, it's not the one in September, it's the one in October. Um, might be grace and tolerance, I think.

>> Grace and tolerance.

>> Yeah. And I think the goal of that was

>> To create a series where I talk about grace and tolerant events. Grace and Tolerance and History, October 23rd.

>> Yeah, that's it. And, uh, I am

>> Tickets are still available. So if you want to go and watch Roy live at the Museum of the Future, you can. Also, if the tickets say that they're sold out, they're always pulling in more chairs. So

>> Yeah, we're supposed to do 50 chairs, and I think we regularly have a hundred. So

>> Which is funny for those of you who don't know, the early videos that we have on YouTube, when you see like just like 10 students and stuff, and it's like, man, this is the amount

>> They were there for extra credit, they weren't there for fun.

>> Well, so that was post-COVID when we were having like 10 people. Pre-COVID, we used to have big turnouts.

>> Well, I mean, when I started with you, it was pretty low sometimes, but true. We had good, we had good times. Yeah, there were some big events that we had too.

>> I don't think many of those got recorded though, honestly. I think you started recording like Cal Jillson's talk. We packed the house for him.

>> Yeah, I was going to say most of the most of the talks were not. You, I think I think there were others because our video started as we wanted to have other lecturers come in and talk and

>> Yeah, we had a Carl Marx talk with, uh, Harry Clever, and that was a huge turnout for that. Clever was awesome. He deserved big talks, uh, or big turnouts.

>> Big talks and big turnouts.

>> Yeah.

>> All right. So, thanks everyone for watching. And next time, we'll get back into this. Um, we might go more into, I didn't even, we didn't even get to talk about the origins of, you know, terrorism in terms of the, the, the word and the use of it as a security term and political term, which I, next time.

>> Okay. I think it's from the Reign of Terror from the French Revolution.

>> Is my guess. I feel like the French Revolution, uh, started a whole new way in in contemporary everything in the world. You get nationalism, you get terrorism, you get the fall of, fall of the monarchies. It's a lot of stuff going on there.

>> You get beautiful art. All kinds. Look, the French Revolution was many things, but one of them that it was was it flipped everything upside down. It upended everything. The French knew they knew how to do revolution. There are very few revolutions in the world that were that earth-shattering.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. And maybe next, maybe next talk, we will get to, I don't know if this is going to be three parts or four parts, but I would like to end on a helpful note of like, what, you know, what hope looks like, what can be done for those who are looking to begin, whether it's, you know, peaceful aid or a solution of some sort, um, or if there even is one. But anyway, I don't know if that's next time or the time after. And, uh, anyway.

>> Okay, but next time we're going to start with terrorism. We're going to end on a good note and start the next one on, uh, what sounds really bad, because it can be, but it can also be a manipulative tool.

>> It's everything, right?

>> Spell.

>> Okay.

>> Yeah.

>> Thank you, Roy. Thank you everyone for listening. Uh, we'll catch you next time. Um, as always, please comment. Um, we, we read some of them. You guys comment a lot. We appreciate that. We love the discussions. Uh, we like to sometimes we see, we'll implement what you have said into our talks. Anyway, thanks for listening to Office Hours and Roy's lectures. Again, uh, check out the podcast and rate it and, uh, talk to you next time. Bye bye. [Music]