Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, we're killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our names, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Alright, you guys, Scott Horton here with Sheldon Richman and me and him and Jared LaBelle.
We run the Libertarian Institute here at libertarianinstitute.org.
Of course, he's a great libertarian intellectual for decades now.
Has written 10 million great articles on every subject under the sun for a very long time.
And now for the Libertarian Institute, has his Friday article, TGIF, The Goal is Freedom.
And a little bit of a double thing there.
It's also a restaurant with potato skins.
And listen, as you guys know, Sheldon has had this great series lately about Israel and Judaism and Zionism and all of these things.
And with lots of different takes and lots of history and lots of really great stuff.
I hope you guys will go back and look at it all.
And I just want to say real quick, too, that this is going to be a regular Friday thing now.
You know, as a feature of the Libertarian Institute where, with rare exceptions, I hope, where we get to go over the TGIF article here in audio format for you guys, too.
So welcome to the show.
Man, I should have muted my phone before.
Welcome back, Sheldon.
Good to talk to you.
Thanks.
Thanks for having me back.
I'm looking forward to doing this on a regular basis.
Always great to talk to you.
Yeah.
People have no idea.
We talk on the phone all the time.
We probably should record all of them.
Why wouldn't we?
All right.
So listen, this one is called Separation, Not Association, Requires Force.
And so, in other words, everybody else is getting this wrong and you're setting them straight.
So who is it that says otherwise, first of all?
Well, I've noticed when I publish about Israel and Palestine and related issues that I get reaction on Facebook and other places, but mostly Facebook, from people who say no, people – in effect, people saying no, people want to be – keep to themselves.
There's nothing wrong with that.
It's natural.
It's sort of the same thing you see with the anti-immigration people and even including some people who regard themselves as libertarians, which is most – especially uncomfortable for you and me because you have people who call themselves libertarians criticizing we pro-immigration libertarians on the grounds that, well, maybe there's something to be said for protection of the culture and stuff like that, which always gives me the creeps.
But it also comes up in this issue because if you believe the state or – I don't know who else would do it, but if you believe the state should be protecting the culture from outsiders, then it seems to me whatever you may think about Jews, you're probably going to like Israel.
In fact, as I point out in my article, Richard Spencer, the alt-right leader who was caught on – I remember caught at that rally.
Was it after the election?
I forget.
Giving the Hitler salute saying hail Trump.
Everybody remembers that.
Spencer himself is a fan of Israel's.
I don't know what he thinks about Jews as a religion or as individuals, but he calls himself a white Zionist.
The links are in my piece.
He also says that Israel is the most revolutionary – most important and perhaps most revolutionary ethno-state, and it's one that, quote, that I turn to for guidance.
And that's perfectly consistent.
Actually, I appreciate that he's so honest.
Well, let me add just one anecdote, little story to that for people who hadn't heard it.
I think it's so telling and it's astonishing, but only for a second because then it's like, yeah, shrug, of course.
He went to Texas A&M and gave a talk there and was confronted by a liberal rabbi who said, no, we are for inclusion and tolerance and this and that and the other thing.
And he goes, oh, yeah, you're going to have open immigration to Tel Aviv and the right of return?
And the rabbi didn't say a word.
He didn't even try to say anything.
He just went silent and was just took completely by Richard Spencer, the Nazi.
So this is the reaction I get when I am critical of Israel as an ethno-state.
And let me add that it's actually a pseudo-ethno-state because this is a subject we could maybe go into some other time, but there's really no – No, we do have time here today.
Let's do a whole hour because we got a few different articles to talk about.
So take whatever tangents you want.
We can get back to it if you want to.
OK.
I mean I call it a pseudo-ethno-state because in effect there's no ethnic group called Jews.
Jews live all over the world and are in many different cultures and many ethnicities.
A Yemenite Jew is not like an American-born Los Angeles Jew in terms of culture or national origin or anything.
So it's very – Judaism is a religious community as the reform movement always liked to say.
And so it's made up of people from many different cultures and many different ethnic groups.
So it's not a single ethnic group and therefore Israel is not a – it's not an ethno-Jewish state.
Now Israel itself has a culture because it's been around now since 1948 and it has a language and food and cinema and stuff like that.
But it does exclude to a very large extent of course non-Jews and particularly Arabs, Arab Muslims and Christians do not have the same rights inside Israel, the pre-'67 borders.
And they have no rights at all in the occupied territories and the open-air prison known as the Gaza Strip.
So it's no coincidence that Spencer and probably a lot of alt-right types admire Israel even if they don't like Jews or Judaism because they could say, well, that's the kind of state we want too.
But our group would be a different group from Jewish.
They would be saying we want white – who knows what they want, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants to be the privileged ethnic group.
So that's why I decided to write this.
I wanted to argue that they seem to – what the anti-immigrationists and these types like to say is that they like to call immigration forced integration.
You often see this.
I've seen this from Hans Hoppe and the people around him who are – don't like immigration and want restrictions on immigration or they – they may not call for state restrictions because they say they're against the state.
But they envision a day when all property is private, and then they think you're going to have outsiders excluded because it's going to be private property and the owners of the property aren't going to want the other coming in.
That's all nonsense, of course.
But that's what they say.
So they say that it's – association is forced by the state through immigration laws, and they act like sort of segregation is sort of the natural way because we all want to – we all really know we want to keep to our own kind.
Well, I'm just trying to turn that on its head, looking at it historically and sociologically and just observing people around me.
It's restrictionism.
It's segregation.
It's particularism that needs the force of the state because the natural way when people are left alone is association, greater and greater levels of association.
Mises pointed out or speculated that this got going very early in the history of mankind because people saw that there were potential benefits from trade and the division of labor.
So groups that – clans, families, small groups that were one time distrustful of any strangers thinking they're just going to come knock us on the heads and take our stuff, so we better go knock them on the head and take their stuff first.
Some bright person said, hey, hang on a second.
We might be able to exchange with these people.
They have stuff that we want and we have stuff that they want, so instead of knocking each other on the head, let's exchange.
So that's how trust begins to build in the beginning in Mises' story.
But we know from fact and fiction that love also breaks down those barriers, and I tell the story.
I mentioned Romeo and Juliet and of course West Side Story, which was drawn from Romeo and Juliet, and there's countless stories about two members from some kind of warring faction.
Maybe it's a family, but maybe it's a bigger group, but two members, a boy and a girl, are secretly in love and want to get married and they're afraid to tell their families because the families are going to forbid it.
This is an old, old story, and then I turn to my more – my lengthier discussion is – and I think there's some sort of poetic justice in this – Fiddler on the Roof, which of course is about a Jewish Yiddish village in the Russian Empire in the late 19th century and into the early 20th century in the Pale of Settlement where Jews had to live.
And about how the protagonist, the dairyman, Tevye the dairyman, begins by talking about how important tradition is.
Tradition means – and I even say this in one of the prayers – keeping their children from the stranger's ways.
He takes this hardcore position that tradition is what – without their tradition, their life would be as shaky as a fiddler on the roof.
This is where the name comes from.
Except the story is about the breaking down of the traditions.
Who's breaking them down?
The outsiders?
The Russians?
No.
The young people.
And this is my point.
The young people will always be looking at these taboos, these traditions, these prohibitions on separation with fresh eyes and they won't stand for it.
Some will.
Some are more passive in the new generation.
But many are going to be on the cutting edge and they're going to say, no, we're not going to – I'm going to love whoever I want.
I don't care if his name is Montague or Capulet or he's a shark or he's a Puerto Rican or he's a New Yorker or he's a – or even if he's a Russian Gentile, as the youngest marriable daughter of Tevye says.
She falls in love and marries a Gentile.
And even Tevye, who says absolutely no to this, in the end nevertheless sends his blessing to that daughter.
His love trumped – and I hate that Donald has kind of messed up that word – has trumped – trumps the fear and the fear of the other and suspicion and hatred and that's my point.
So the natural way is association.
Therefore it takes the state or at least some sort of force to interfere with association and assimilation and all those good things that liberals have talked about from the beginning.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
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Alright, thanks.
Well and you know this is such an important narrative I think for these times too.
You know I had an old friend of mine I talked to on the phone and he was just really anxious about the future and how things are looking.
And everybody hates each other so much and all the racial divisions and all this stuff.
And there's so much to it.
I mean I don't want to downplay any of it.
And yet at the same time I'm like man have you ever recently been to say a little kid's birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese or something.
Because what you'll find is that all this racial hatred is on Twitter but in real life nobody cares about this stuff at all dude.
Nobody cares.
You go to Chuck E. Cheese and you have to have race on your brain to even really stop and take notice.
But then if you do you'll see Mexicans and blacks and Indians and the other kind of Indians and whatever the hell all over the place.
And nobody cares dude.
Everybody's just having fun and eating pizza.
And so I think that's you know.
And look I'm from Austin Texas which is a really nice town.
There are towns in America where things you know there's a lot worse strife and division and whatever.
Again I don't want to downplay that kind of thing.
But just in terms of what's the natural order of things.
The natural order of things is hey how you doing.
Not hey let's fight.
That's right.
Look you live in pretty cosmopolitan Austin.
It's a big university town.
I live in Little Rock which you know is not living in some little village in rural Arkansas.
I mean it's the big the big city.
But it's come a very long way and you see the direction.
You see you see all the things you're talking about interracial couples interracial groups of friends all kinds of people.
There's no there's no sense of this what these people are talking about like you said.
That's that's obviously what people want.
They see the benefits of it both in material terms in terms of commerce.
But because you know let's get back to basic free market economics.
You want customers and your job is to please customers because that's how you do better for yourself.
So you can see how that's already creating or sowing the seeds of trust that goes beyond commerce and material things.
It just easily slides into trade of spiritual values of non material values ideas.
Ideas get passed around just by trading with people.
But also then those other things because respect then begins you know can build into admiration good friends romantic love etc marriage etc.
So you know you see where it goes.
That's the natural way.
And it may take longer in some places.
Of course governments you know a lot of places had to put barriers Jim Crow laws and things like that had to create barriers.
That's my point.
It takes the state to create the barriers.
Leave people alone and they overcome this stuff.
You know with a good help from liberal propagandizing.
Right.
In other words liberals passing the word and telling people it's a better way to be.
There are benefits to this.
And so that's what happens when you leave people free.
Well and which brings us back to libertarians.
You know it's I've always thought never mind libertarians for me.
I've always thought just for regular Americans.
If somebody is a right winger or a left winger and their main reason is because they hate and fear the other side more so they must be on this side.
Then I'm always very forgiving of that because I think it's very understandable why anyone would think the left is worse than the right or vice versa.
You know just depending on a point of view.
But like I would agree with all your points about each side and whatever.
So it makes sense to me.
But so yeah it makes a lot of sense to me why libertarians too would be right wing or left wing depending on which side repels them the most.
Certainly there's a lot about the left and especially liberals to be reactionary against these days.
And so but that kind of obscures the fact that at the at the end of the day the bottom line is libertarianism is liberalism perfected.
Socialism as a horrible deviation from true liberalism which is individualism property rights natural rights.
John Locke and etc. from there Rothbard.
But so but a lot of times we end up agreeing with right wingers on a lot of things and seeing things and a lot of libertarians come from the right.
And you know they do as you say frame issues like any of these policies that they don't necessarily feel like they agree with.
They see it as being forced on them by the left where in some cases maybe it is in terms of the law going from say enforced Jim Crow to then enforced anti-discrimination without a break in between or that kind of thing.
But but yeah no I mean like you say and like you have this great Mises quote that this is even if you ask you know Hoppe or the most kind of right wing libertarians that at the end of the day what's so great about libertarianism.
Is this how people who don't know each other don't necessarily need to like each other can get along nonviolently and even prosper together in peace.
That's what's great about it is this really is the most forward thinking ideology of all.
But the funny thing is they often get to start to like each other.
Nira Badwar who's a very good philosopher in the Aristotelian and liberal libertarian tradition has a and I link to it has a very good article paper about friendship and commerce and she's answering the the leftist critics non-libertarian leftist critics who say that commerce and friendship and things like friendship even more intense forms are incompatible.
Because we look we look at each other as objects right.
It's the objectification of the consumer.
And so you don't view if you're a seller you don't view the consumer as a human being.
He's just a customer.
And she shows that that's total nonsense.
And she just she gives like a very common example where you know imagine every day you stop at a little hot dog stand in the park in the park on you know for lunch or on your way somewhere.
And you kind of do that every day.
And then you hear that the guy behind the counter his daughter is sick.
I mean it's going to be commonplace for the person to say oh how's your daughter doing.
How I heard that she's sick.
How's it going.
And then the next day you catch up.
Any word any improvement.
I mean so that's when you begin with commerce it goes from there to the kinds of things you're talking about.
So even if it doesn't start with love and friendship it ends up with with friendship that whole spectrum ending with you know perhaps romantic love and marriage that whole thing of that whole spectrum.
And all that follows from the peaceful cooperation that is trade.
Yeah.
So you're absolutely right about that.
Well look I mean in my experience too and I know there's a hell of a lot of government in Southern California.
I don't want to pretend there isn't.
But I mean if if anyone has never you got to fly in to L.A. at night.
And just I mean this is some pretty awesome advanced civilization out the window there to see.
It's just it really is incredible to behold.
And then you go there and I think there's a huge exception with the oppression of you know where the law basically states blacks better stay south of the 10 or else.
Which is just it's crazy again and that's state enforced and I've seen it firsthand state enforced by that LAPD.
You know the way it is out there.
But everybody else at least you know they have their own little neighborhoods more or less that are obviously very fuzzy lines not real borders of any kind.
But there's Korea town and there's even Brazil town and whatever little neighborhoods for all the different Armenians and whatever ethnicities from all around the world.
Where everybody goes home at night to watch the same TV shows I guess.
But in the daytime everybody's just an American.
Nobody cares where anybody is from other than oh that's interesting.
But never like an oh no it's an Armenian or whatever you know what I mean.
Nobody cares.
Nobody and everybody just gets along all day long.
I hate to admit that probably part of it is they all share the same currency.
U.S. dollars should be bitcoins or something else I guess.
But anyway silver coins.
But anyway they all use the same currency.
They more or less all speak English.
And everybody needs things from each other.
And so everybody is engaging in mutually beneficial exchanges with each other all day long.
And drive down the road.
And you know another thing I really like about L.A. is you don't see like the Red Roof Inn everywhere or whatever.
There's 10,000 little mom and pop motels everywhere.
Or hardware stores or pizza joints.
It's not like Pizza Hut, Pizza Hut, Pizza Hut.
It's you know Manny's Pizza Joint on the corner everywhere.
And it's just great man.
It's as anarchic as hell in spite of all the government.
Not because of it.
Absolutely.
It just shows you the people that sort of want the culture to kind of remain pure is such an idiotic thing.
For one thing there are no pure cultures.
Cultures have been mixing and it doesn't just take recent globalism to bring this about or the internet.
Cultures have been mixing.
People have been on the move and intermarrying from time immemorial.
So there's no pure culture.
But second of all even if you say OK there may not be a pure culture but let's freeze it the way it is right now.
That's going to be a loser.
There's no way even if you thought that was desirable, which it isn't, you couldn't do it anyway.
I mean culture is not the kind of thing that can be controlled.
It's a living, breathing, spontaneously changing thing.
And of course with the internet and global communication being so cheap it's just more so.
So these people, I don't know why they want to run into a brick wall but that's what they're doing by this crazy objective of somehow preserving the culture.
Whether it's from immigrants or foreign goods or whatever the case may be.
But it's just ridiculous.
I mean this idea of go back to this line, keep them from the stranger's ways.
Hayek or somebody might say why do you want to do that?
Maybe the stranger has better ways.
At least in some respects.
Let's find out.
And how do we know what's better?
Well we need competition.
And I don't mean competition in a strictly business sense but competition in ideas.
This is John Stuart Mill's point on liberty.
The way we find out what works or what's best or what's true is through ideas clashing with each other in the free marketplace of ideas.
So we may find there are better ways.
But I don't know what somebody's doing somewhere else and I won't know if the government is in the way.
So it's such a narrow thing.
And then there's also Matt Ridley's point about ideas mixing.
As Matt likes to put it, ideas have sex.
One person has an idea.
Someone else has an idea.
They somehow exchange thoughts on the matter whether it's in person or indirectly through just floating around on the internet.
The idea kind of gives birth to a new idea.
Right?
It's the idea.
That's Ridley's point.
The idea is kind of mate.
And something new that was unpredictable comes from it.
More often than not, it's going to be something good.
It may not be a great idea.
It may not work out.
But think of all the great ideas we've had simply by accident.
So this shutting off is just a loser on every level.
What could anybody possibly say in favor of this sort of shutting things down?
All right.
Well, so before we get back to Israel and the point about their situation and this situation, the Palestinian situation, I think the most common argument I see among more right-leaning libertarians about immigration is, yeah, but all the immigrants are basically socialists.
They're all coming from socialist countries.
And they are all just going to vote Democrat until America is completely bankrupt to death?
Not that the Republicans are fiscal conservatives, Sheldon, but you know the line.
And that kind of does make sense, right?
That, you know, Americans aren't even libertarians.
And so why would people to the left of them coming into the country move America in anything but a more statist direction?
It's by no means obvious that if large numbers of immigrants were coming in that they would all be voting for, you know, big government or welfare state or state-controlled industry or business.
Immigrants tend to be the go-getters, the most dynamic people.
They're doing something that people historically have not done, which is move a long way from their home, uproot themselves from the culture that they were born into, the language and all those things, you know, that's attached to, and put themselves into a strange land.
Those are going to tend to be entrepreneurial people.
How should we respond to that?
We should say, okay, this just reinforces our argument against government control of our economic activities.
Let's have free trade domestically as well as, you know, at the global level.
We should use it.
The other thing is, you know, Milton Friedman said, and the anti-immigration types, at least among the libertarians, like to quote this that Milton Friedman said, you know, we can't have open borders until we get rid of the welfare state.
My answer to that has long been because I heard that he had said that a long time ago.
If you save the welfare state from all the stresses and strains, you're never going to get rid of the welfare state.
In other words, you want it to be stressed.
So let people come in.
That will show the stresses and reinforce our arguments against it.
If you save it, if you coddle the welfare state, how are we going to get rid of it?
And on the other hand, if I think, you know, the Independent Institute has different studies and other people have done studies where they say immigrants pay way more in taxes than they take compared to regular Americans, then that undermines the whole argument.
Then anyway, from that side, so.
Right, and they're incarcerated at a lower rate.
What can you say?
And if you care about Social Security, you ought to want young immigrants coming in.
All right.
So there's a great writer at the Libertarian Institute that we've got, Craig Cantoni from Arizona.
I just love this guy, man.
He's a friend of Charles Goyette, in fact, is where we got him.
And so one day and you know, this is some of this stuff is talked about pretty often in libertarian circles.
It's not really my thing.
But one day I went to the site and I saw that Craig had written a new blog and the title was Why Asians Are More Successful.
Whatever something.
I forgot exactly what the title was, but it made me go, oh, no.
Like, I hope this isn't some right wing take like about race and IQ and this kind of stuff that I hate, you know.
And I click on it and it's all just, of course, about bourgeois family values, as he puts it.
They're like, how come poor Indians from India, Indians come here to the United States and now own all the motels in the South?
And the answer is because they stay married.
They don't drink all day like you, dummy.
And they work hard and they decided they wanted to own some motels, so they bought them.
Why did they run them?
Because you don't.
And why don't you?
Because you never got around to it.
And why not?
Because you gave up all your values.
And you stopped putting success first and taking care of business and being responsible first.
And so now look at you.
And now you're mad that the Indians own the motel down the block?
Shut the fuck up.
And like, I just love that guy.
He's a great writer, really funny writer, too.
And then, so that was his whole thing was like, man, if you really don't like it, quit drinking and read a book, you know?
I never read about an Indian stealing a convenience store from a white person.
Right.
I never read that.
Sometimes they buy them.
Where are they getting these stores?
Who's giving them?
Is the government handing out convenience stores to people only from India or Pakistan or someplace?
I mean, I didn't read about that.
Maybe it's happening.
All right, man.
So now let's talk about Israel.
You know, Stanley Cohen, he's not a libertarian, but he's a civil libertarian.
Jewish left wing civil liberties lawyer from New York City.
The very best kind of TV stereotype of that that you could think of with the great beard and everything.
And he's just a great writer and a great advocate and great advocate for the rights of Palestinians, I should say.
And the thing is about that guy, too, is I've talked to him a few times and he's a very optimistic guy.
And I love his attitude about, you know, yeah, but gee, Stanley Cohen, what if we tore down the wall over there?
There's this massive separation barrier.
People aren't familiar.
Put in your Google images, Israel separation barrier, and look at what they're doing to steal property from the people on the West Bank, from the Palestinian people there.
And of course, as we've talked about in other interviews and as it's going on, the siege in the Gaza Strip and all of this.
And they're all refugees there.
Eighty percent of them are refugees there in the first place.
And so, hey, Stanley Cohen, but but what if I dream a genie just tore down the wall and then made it one state and what have you?
And he says it'd be fine.
There's no reason there'd have to be a civil war over Israel giving up its Jewish super duper majority rule over the Palestinians there.
That basically all that has to happen is you protect everybody's rights and then you let them do business with each other and then you let them marry each other and and get along and they'll forge relationships and it'll be just fine.
Well, the problem is that the Israeli public, the Jewish part of the Israeli public, has had anti-Arab racism drilled into them in schools and the media and it's reinforced by the government.
And as far as I understand, the Israeli public, the Israeli Jewish public does not like Arabs and would like them out.
There's a difference I point out in this article or maybe it's the yeah, this article that we refer to Israel as an apartheid state.
But there's a big difference between Israel and what South Africa was.
This is a point made by Shulmos Sand, who I discuss in this in this piece, too.
No, I guess it was in last week's piece.
But the point is, in South Africa, the whites didn't want to kick the blacks out.
They needed the blacks.
They needed the blacks to do the correct jobs, you know, to clean the toilets.
So while they had all that legal separation and the blacks didn't have rights, they didn't want to kick them out.
In Israel, from the beginning, they wanted the Palestinians out.
They wanted the Arabs out.
They don't need they didn't need them to do the, you know, the clean the bathrooms and stuff like that.
They already had the Arab Jews.
Those are the Jews who came from Arab lands, Iraq and other places and Africa.
Later, some black Africans from Ethiopia.
So they had people to do the dirty jobs.
They didn't need the Arabs.
They didn't want the Arabs.
They were redeeming the land.
Don't forget, they were redeeming the land for the Jewish people.
That was the language they used.
And not just the Jewish people living there, but the Jewish people all over the world.
It's an odd state because it's not, you know, in theory, a republic is supposed to belong.
Now, libertarians can criticize this, of course, but in theory, a republic belongs to the citizens.
That's the idea.
It comes from the res public matters, public matters.
It's about the public.
It's about the citizens who live there.
Israel's not the, quote, property, even in theory, of the citizens who live in Israel.
I'm talking now pre-'67 borders.
I'm not talking about the territories.
It belongs to Jews, both Jews in the state of Israel and Jews everywhere else.
And then, of course, opens the question of who's a Jew, which has been a fight in Israel from the very beginning.
Who counts as a Jew?
A Jew is supposed to be able to go to Israel.
They want you to go to Israel, and you can become a citizen in a day or two if you're Jewish.
But the question is then, you know, who's Jewish?
And so that's a whole other subject.
But that's the point.
It's not the state of the citizens of the state.
In your identity card, under citizenship, it doesn't say Israeli or under nationality.
It doesn't say Israeli.
It says Arab or Jew or other if you're, you know, not an Arab and not a Jew.
You're a Russian Christian.
It'll say other.
So it's a very weird situation.
It stands out.
And what makes it important to Americans, I think, is that, number one, it claims, you know, everybody likes to say it's the only democracy in the Middle East.
And, of course, it gets all that money from the American taxpayer.
And American administrations, Republican and Democrats, stand by Israel no matter what, no matter what atrocities are committed.
And that's one reason it matters.
It would matter just as a matter of justice.
But it matters extra specially because Americans have been, you know, hitched to Israel against their will and on the basis of lies and propaganda for many, many years, since 1948.
Well, I mean, but Israelis are also propagandized all day long with the idea that all the Palestinians want to do is just cut all their throats.
When, in fact, the Palestinians are just saying they want to come home.
They're not saying they were going to push all the Jews into the sea or any of that crap.
That's all made up crap.
In fact, that phrase was coined by a Mossad agent in Egypt back when I learned one time.
I'll have to find it.
But anyway, so that's the thing of it, right?
Is that, OK, Gideon Levy in his recent speech at the Grant Smith's Israel Lobby Conference, he said, you know, one, he, as you said before, the Israeli public, therefore, this policy.
Therefore, this policy of apartheid.
Absolutely.
And taking it all one day and what have you.
And there's no turning back for them.
But he also said if the American people change their minds about this, the Israeli government will change its policy overnight because that's it.
The USA is the only thing.
This is an important point, Americans.
The USA is the only thing that's allowing them to continue to get away with what they're doing with the occupations on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the rest of this.
And so he said if the Americans just said, listen, we're done with this and we really mean it this time, then the policy would really change.
And therefore, sort of like when the Supreme Court struck down Jim Crow, like, look, you guys might be terrified of what's going to happen, but we're going to see because we're not letting you keep this system anymore.
If that happened, then back to your point and back to Stanley Cohen's point, do you think that the Israeli Jews would be surprised to find out that the Palestinians are all right and that they can all get along in one state with equal rights anyway?
I wish I could share that optimism.
That does not strike me as the likely prospect.
If the U.S. were to end all military aid and other aid to Israel, I don't buy that.
I mean, I just don't see it.
Yeah, but what about your article about association and separation?
Now, if we stop forcing the separation, don't you think, you know, cooperation will be natural like we're talking about for the first half hour here?
If you had thrown in the words someday or the word, I guess it's one word, someday, then I would agree with you.
But someday, it seems to me, given all that's happened, is way into the future.
There is a deep, visceral hatred against Arabs and non-Jews.
And I don't believe that's going to go away if the U.S. pulls all the aid and they're going to say, well, I guess we're on our own now.
I guess we should start getting along.
Things don't change that fast, given all this buildup.
And so I just can't share that optimism.
It's going to take more time than that.
You know, Shlomo Sand likes to say, you know, he might prefer a single secular state, but he doesn't think the Israelis are ever going to agree to a system, a single state in which the Jews are a minority, because, you know, the total number of Palestinian Arabs and Muslims outnumber, if you're counting the West Bank and Gaza, outnumber them.
They won't go for that.
But you might be able to get them to go for a military withdrawal from the occupied territories, leaving two states.
Now, when he says two states, he doesn't say a Jewish state and a Palestinian state.
He says a Palestinian state and an Israeli state.
In other words, a secular state that doesn't tilt the playing field in the direction of Jews.
Any citizen there, and anybody could become a citizen in his view through normal processes, would have full rights.
So two secular states.
You know, I don't know what the best fix is for all this.
There's so much going on, and there's such deep-seated animosity on the Israeli side, because, you know, even secular Jews still, whatever that means, that's a whole other subject, but still have this sort of religious premise that, no, this is ours.
And you say, well, you know, if you don't believe in God, what do you mean it's ours?
Well, the Bible's a history book, so it's ours.
I mean, it's nonsense.
But there's something very deep there.
And I don't think pulling American aid out is going to suddenly make them say, oh, let's all get along now.
That changed everything.
I just don't see that.
I'd like to believe that, but I don't see it.
I mean, I want to end the aid, but I don't see that happening.
I'll have to read more of Levi and see his case.
Yeah, well, you know, Norman Finkelstein and Yuri Avnery and others, too, who are, you know, very pro-freedom for the Palestinians, they are also very firmly two-state people, because they say the alternative is basically the status quo.
Forget about it, because the one-state thing, you know, they'll have another war first, basically.
They'll never accept it, and they're the ones, the Israeli side, have all the power.
And yet, I don't know, man.
I got to say, when I interviewed Max Blumenthal and Dan, well, it's not the interview, Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal, they made this movie, Killing Gaza.
I don't know if you got a chance to look at it.
I have not seen it yet.
So the thing is, you know, we use the phrase apartheid and Jim Crow and this and that all the time.
I do.
That's my frame of reference for all this.
That's the reality on the ground there, the total totalitarian foreign military occupation and subjugation of these people.
It's just criminal.
But then you, well, I always, I hate it when people talk in second person.
For some reason on this, I switched to second person.
Well, I'm looking at that video, and I'm watching these people, it's just interviews of the average Joe Palestinian saying, yeah, so this is what happened to me today, pal, and talking about the 2014 war and this kind of thing.
And it really hit home all over again what I already know, but in just a much more real way.
That no, this really is, it's just like the very worst of Alabama and Mississippi in the days of the 1930s Jim Crow or whatever.
You know, lynchings every week or whatever.
This just absolute outlaw, merciless regime against these people.
And it's going on right now every day.
And nobody's doing a goddamn thing about it.
This is permanent.
It would be like if we had Jim Crow in the South right now, and it was still the law, and also no one was changing it.
And this is just the thing.
This is how we're doing it.
That's the reality of how horrible the situation is for the occupation of these people.
And so then that makes me think that no, man, this has got to change.
It's going to change.
This is absolutely untenable that it continue to go on like this.
Something's going to happen.
BDS or something else is going to make this different.
This siege of the Gaza Strip, I mean, this cannot maintain.
So I don't know, man.
And let's not neglect the Palestinians, the Arabs, Muslims, and Christians inside what they call the green line.
Because they, you know, the defenders of Israel will say, oh, what's your complaint?
They have the right to vote.
They have parties.
They have representation in the Knesset.
Well, it's true, but it's extremely limited.
Just as there was this week where a bill was introduced in the Knesset to declare equality of all citizens.
Now, this is nothing about the occupied territories, right?
Equality of all Israeli citizens.
Right.
And it gets, it couldn't even come to the floor.
Because there's what they call the basic law in Israel that you can't change by the democratic vote in the Knesset.
It's beyond the reach of those, you know, few Arabs and Arab parties in the society.
So it's marginally better for Arabs inside the green line than it is for occupied territories.
You know, until the 60s, until 66, those, this was before there were occupied territories, except they were occupied by Jordan and Egypt.
But they weren't Israeli held yet.
But the Arabs inside Israel were under military rule until 1966.
From 48 to 66, they were ruled by the military inside of Israel.
It was only, you know, with time that they needed the resources.
In fact, 66, no coincidence, that was a year before the 67 war.
And they already had their eye on those territories, and they needed the military resources for that.
So they decided to then institute civil rule, civilian rule over the Arabs inside.
So they could then use those military resources in the territories they intended to acquire, in which eventually they did acquire in the 67 war.
Those were territories they wanted in 48.
But they, because of contingencies and, you know, realism and they couldn't get everything at once, they settled for less.
But they, it was always on the agenda.
Don't forget, when Israel declared independence in 48, they did not declare their borders.
I'm so glad you mentioned that because someone was asking me recently, what does that even mean?
Because it was open-ended.
They didn't know how much they were going to grab in 48.
And if they, whatever they didn't grab in 48, they knew they'd get later on.
Don't forget they attacked Egypt.
Israel attacked Egypt along with France and England in 1956, hoping to unseat Nasser.
And they took the Sinai.
It was only, you know, U.S. leaned on them.
Eisenhower wasn't happy about this, and he leaned on them, and they had to back off.
And it was a big embarrassment.
But then they wonder why Nasser was suspicious of Israel.
As they go to 67, he's made out to be the warmonger.
And they try to knock him out in 56.
Nobody ever looks, you know, people are always walking into the middle of a movie, and they think they understand it.
They look at the 67 war.
What do they do?
They start on, what, June 1st, May 30th, and say, oh, let's look at the causes.
I'll start on May 30th, 1967.
Uh-uh.
You've got to go back to 48, if actually earlier than that.
But 48, okay, that's not a bad starting point.
Take a look at what happened there.
Take a look at Israeli attacks on Egypt in the 50s and Syria in 65 and Jordan in 66.
I mean, look at all those things that are going on, if you want to understand 67.
Don't tell me what happened on June 1st, 67, and say, you know, you understand the causes of that war.
It's ridiculous.
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Now, somewhere in there, you briefly mentioned Iraqi Jews.
You mentioned it in the context of them being treated as kind of second-class citizens, I think, inside Israel anyway.
But you have this recent article, a very important one, The Abused Jews of Iraq.
I think the last I read, there were eight Jews left in Baghdad.
But even that may be outdated now.
Well, I wasn't talking about those, and of course I wasn't saying that the Iraqis were abusing the Jews.
As you know, it was a come on.
I was trying to hook people on the article through confirmation bias, which they then turned against a lot of the readers.
The point is that there was an old Iraq.
Look, Iraq is Babylon, is Babylonia, right?
So when the Hebrews, the Israelites, had to leave in, oh, whatever year that was, B.C., or before the common era, B.C.E., you have the Babylonian exile, where Judaism actually flourished.
And the prophets said, make your homes here, be at peace with everybody, get along.
In other words, don't think about going back anywhere.
This is our new home.
And so there was an old Jewish community going back to that time.
When we get into modern times, in 48, there's still a Jewish community.
These are Arab Jews.
And they're doing very well.
It's been told countless times that the Arabs and the Jews in the Middle East and in Spain lived together quite well.
Was it perfect?
No, but nothing's perfect.
But there wasn't pogroms, nothing like you saw in Europe, pogroms and worse.
They got along.
As everybody knows, Islam sees the Jews and Christians as people of the book.
They see a continuity.
They think Muhammad was the last prophet, but they see him in a line, beginning with Moses or whoever is regarded as the first prophet.
The god is supposed to be one god in their view.
Muslims don't have like a separate god who's better than their god.
It's the same god.
So this gives some context here.
They didn't persecute the Jews the way Christians did for so many years.
So the Arab Jewish community is a prosperous community.
They're high-ranking in commerce and different lines of work.
You can find stuff.
You can find interviews with people on YouTube about this.
Once Israel's independence comes in 48, in 1950, the Jewish community still – I mean the Zionists are trying to get the Iraqis and all other Jews to move to Israel.
We've got to remember that.
I keep jumping around, but everything is connected to everything else.
Israel, after the World War II because of the horrors of Nazism, was portrayed to Westerners especially as a refugee, humanitarian refugee project, a rescue project.
Let's get these poor displaced Jews from Germany and Europe to some new home, some safe place.
But that's not what Zionism was, and it never really changed.
That was public relations.
It was always about the ingathering of all Jews to Palestine, to this homeland, because as Herzl and others like to say, they agreed with the anti-Semites.
The Jew is going to be alien anywhere but his own homeland.
Now, liberal Jews, reformed Jews, were outraged by this.
When they were appealed to in America, they'd say, we have a homeland.
It's called the United States of America.
We love the Declaration of Independence.
We love all this stuff.
We don't – we're not Jewish.
We're not American Jews.
We're Jewish Americans.
That's what the reform – the reform was founded in opposition to Zionism.
So they tried to also get Iraqi Jews, Yemenite Jews, Egyptian Jews to move to Israel.
They didn't want to move to Israel.
They were in their homes for a very long time, and they were happy in their society.
Suddenly, in 1950, bombs start going off in Baghdad near Jews, near – outside of a synagogue, in a community center, outside a U.S. information center where Iraqi Jews hung out and read.
They had access, I guess, to books and magazines.
And there's a suspicion going around that there's some Arab organization that hates Jews and is trying to drive the Jews out.
And a whole bunch of them left because of that.
They panicked.
They panicked.
And there was some – and this is not – this can't be defended.
There was rising Arab nationalism, much of it in response to the formation of Israel.
And they – some people took it out on the local Iraqi Jews, which was despicable.
They should have never done that.
They should have made a distinction between Zionists who were European imperialists coming in and Jews who had lived there for generations and were perfectly fine.
I mean, so I don't condone that whatsoever.
But Jews in great numbers from Iraq ended up going to Israel.
And today you'll hear – if you condemn Israel's ethnic cleansing in 1948, you'll hear defenders of Israel say – I hear it almost all the time – what about what the Iraqis did?
How about the Jews that got driven out of their Arab homes?
Well, in Iraq it turns out that it wasn't Muslim or Arab Christian.
They weren't non-Jewish Arabs trying to drive the Jews out.
Those were – that was a homegrown Zionist organization called the Movement.
This is all on the record.
Participants have confessed.
There were trials where people explained the whole thing.
This was a combination of Israeli Zionist agents and Iraqi Jewish agents working for Zionism to try to scare the Iraqi Jews out of Iraq to get them to Israel.
They needed the bodies.
They needed the workers.
They needed the people to do what – clean the toilets and stuff because the Arabic Jews got treated very badly.
They were like the blacks.
The Palestinians were below that.
The Arab Palestinians were even below that.
They were third class or worse.
The second class citizens were the Arab Jews, the Jews that came from Arab lands.
They're sometimes called Sephardim.
But Sephardim means from Spain and these people were not from Spain.
So it's really not a good – it's not a good term for them.
You can find a great interview on YouTube with Naim Giladi.
He died in the late 90s.
This is from the 90s.
He was an Iraqi Jew who worked with the Zionists to try to get – scare Iraqi Jews into leaving.
He then moves to Israel and within a short period of time becomes a journalist.
He becomes an anti-Zionist and an advocate.
He ran an organization called the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries or Islamic Countries, Islamic Countries.
He calls them Islamic Jews.
In other words, Jews who hailed from Islamic countries.
So it's a terrible story that people don't know about and yet it's not just fringe groups saying, oh, I think this is what happened.
There were trials.
People got convicted.
There were trials that were regarded as legitimate trials and there were weapons being stockpiled in synagogues that were being smuggled in to create trouble.
A similar thing happened in Egypt.
You had Israeli agents going into Egypt.
You had the famous Levant Affair where they were attacking American facilities to try to drive a wedge between the Egyptian government and – this is early 50s – and the Americans and also scare any Jews there out and get them to Israel.
The idea was to get all the Jews to Israel.
Man.
And, I mean, you think about the absurdity.
I keep going back to this.
I know that you're from a Jewish family and you don't identify as Jewish because, as you like to make the distinction, that it's a religious belief.
It's not something that you can inherit from somebody really anyway other than in terms of what you're taught as a child kind of a thing.
And so, I mean, I'm even further removed from Judaism than that.
I have Jewish ancestors in my family and that kind of thing.
But then, by technicality, even though if I have a tribe at all, it's punk-ass northwest Austin skateboarders, right, or something like that, that I have the birthright to colonize some Palestinian's olive tree orchard and make it my own on the West Bank by some birthright, by some magic supernatural right to his property.
And he does not have a right to resist me.
That's the deal.
Even though I have virtually no connection to Israel whatsoever.
But under their technicality, hey, they need warm bodies to help colonize this land and take it from the people who actually own it.
And see, the problem was, you know, as the 20th century wore on, it was a more and more secular age.
So you have a lot of people who identify as Jews who don't believe in God and don't practice the religion.
And yet they still they may, you know, celebrate holidays and they would call themselves secular Jews.
So there's a problem because, you know, what does it mean to be a secular Jew?
Shlomo San likes to say, how does somebody become a secular Jew?
If you need to have a Jewish mother, well, how do you get a Jewish mother?
I actually gave him an answer to that.
You get your mother to convert.
That way you have a Jewish mother.
I don't know if that counts, but it's one potential path out of it.
It's not a class.
It's the ultimate in restricted clubs, right?
Secular Jew.
There's no way to convert to secular Jew.
Someone else suggested, well, you convert to Judaism and then you denounce, you know, renounce the religion.
So then you're a secular Jew.
I don't think any of those things actually work.
So what does it mean?
So what's the point is there's nothing to hang your hat on.
Because there's no secular Jewish culture.
Like I said, Jews are of many cultures.
They have religious culture because if they all go to the synagogue, they all put on, you know, cover their heads.
So there's a religious culture.
But there's no secular, there's no worldwide secular Jewish culture.
Because Jews in different lands eat different food, respond to different humor, have different movies, you know, all that stuff, different cuisine.
So there's no secular Jewish culture.
So what's a secular Jew mean?
Well, what's happening, and this has been happening in Israel now, I guess, for a few decades, they're being driven to look for the Jewish DNA, Jewish blood.
Now, this is really funny.
In the 1930s, if you said there was a Jewish race, you'd be denounced as an anti-Semite.
Today, if you deny there's such a thing as a Jewish race, you are condemned as an anti-Semite.
Look how things have turned around.
Hitler was looking, insisted there was a Jewish race, and they were measuring people's noses and heads.
Remember all that stuff?
They would have said there's Jewish blood.
In fact, that was the test.
If you have one drop of Jewish blood, you're Jew.
Today, it's the Israelis and the Zionists who are arguing, no, in effect, they're saying Hitler was right, there is Jewish blood.
But, of course, there isn't.
The studies are nonsense.
There's plenty of studies going the other way.
Jews in the early centuries of the common era converted large kingdoms of people in where Iraq is today, in Yemen, in the Maghreb, in Libya.
The Berbers, many of the Berbers were converted.
Ethiopia too, right?
Ethiopia.
But guess who was a Berber?
Gaddafi was a Berber.
Gaddafi might have had a Jewish grandmother for all I know.
But these were converts.
And then they moved.
And sort of the big prize was the kingdom of Khazaria, which is north of the Caucasus Mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
So it's now Russia, but it's north of the Caucasus, not below where Georgia and Armenia and Azerbaijan are.
That was a big kingdom that was caught between the Muslims to the east and the Christians to the right.
So the king said, okay, I'll be a Jew.
He figured he'd be neutral.
He wouldn't antagonize one or the other.
Who knew he would antagonize both by doing that?
But he didn't know that.
So when he converts, the whole kingdom converts, right?
He's the king.
It's good to be the king.
Eventually they get defeated.
That kingdom lasts for 300 or 400 years.
This is no fly-by-night kingdom.
This is a Jewish kingdom.
There are many observers of the time saying that these people were Jews.
Then I think the Mongols, somebody comes in from the east, and it destroys the kingdom after lots of fights, and they disperse to the west, into Western Europe.
So there's a very likely story that a good number of maybe the overwhelming majority, maybe most of the Ashkenazi Jews, which are the European Jews, are Khazars, which means – and this has no political relevance, by the way – which means they can't trace their lineage back to the Holy Land.
Because their lineage goes back to Khazaria, the kingdom of the Khazars, or possibly Western Turkey.
There was a converted group in Western Turkey, I think, that helped convert the Khazars.
The point is all those lines have been broken.
But like I say, it's politically irrelevant.
I mean this is kind of interesting.
Well, I mean on that point, I mean they would say – and I've heard this before.
I mean you have your opinion about the studies, but I've read that – no, there's a study that showed that there must have been at least – I read one a few years ago, I think.
I'm almost certain it said there must have been at least two Jewish women who were on the matriarchal line on the chromosomes and whatever that trace back all the way to ancient Hebrew stand on the eastern shore there.
But I mean the point being at that – like yes, so what?
What's so magical about that anyway, right?
If when the king converted, he took a Jewish wife and that made a difference, then – but what difference did it make?
Well, let me divide this in two parts.
First on the actual merits of this genetic claim, there's serious work being done by Aaron L. Haig, who's at the Johns Hopkins Medical School.
He's got this DNA project and they're doing very serious work in comparing the DNA of Ashkenazi Jews to the DNA taken from bones of ancient people buried in the Holy Land.
This has not been done before.
So that's one thing.
It strengthens not just the Khazar thesis because Arthur Kessler, of course, wrote a book about the Khazars in the 70s called The 13th Tribe.
But what he didn't know, because we know so much more both in terms of history and genetics and archaeology and anthropology, was there was this group of converts in Turkey, western Turkey, who went to Khazaria.
So you may not – I may not be able to trace my line back to the Khazars.
They may be the Turks.
There's evidence now that Yiddish didn't originate in Germany, which is what people think, but rather in an area closer to Turkey, western Turkey, partly in Khazar with a lot of Slavic influence.
OK, so there's that one point.
So this is not a crazy thesis.
In fact, back in the 70s or 80s, I went to a Jewish day school that some relative of mine must have been going to, and I went into the library because I was first hearing about this thesis.
I went into the library there and looked at the five or six standard histories of the Jewish people in that library.
Gratz, I forget the names of the authors.
Every one of them acknowledged the Khazar thesis, that the Khazars was a great kingdom that converted.
And by the way, it wasn't a nice kingdom.
They forced conversion on other people.
And you know what I mean when I say forced conversion?
It means some surgical procedure we might not want to talk about.
It's a serious thing.
So I'm not saying these were nice folks, but they did convert.
And Jewish historians never hesitated to acknowledge this and talk about it.
It's only later when it became politically inconvenient, and then it got denounced as an anti-Semitic lie.
But it was all in the major histories.
Now, the political subject, you're right.
Let's say the Khazar thing and the convert thing is total nonsense, and anybody who has a Jewish mother today can trace his DNA back to the Holy Land.
There's no property rights.
No property rights come out of that, right?
I can't go to Israel tomorrow and say, you know, look at some Palestinian who's living in a house and say, hey, you know, 2,000 years ago, some relative of mine lived there, so you out, I'm in.
I mean, that's nonsense.
So you're right.
Politically, it doesn't matter.
It's interesting, but politically, it wouldn't matter how that ends up.
Yeah, it always seemed like such a kind of hollow point.
And, you know, I mean, I don't know.
It's funny the difference between the reality and the narrative or the reality and, you know, the way it's perceived by people in general in the United States.
I mean, I guess it's kind of a matter of cognitive dissonance, right?
It's on one hand, a bunch of Russians and Poles and God knows who from Europe, German Jews who came as refugees after World War II, and they settled this land.
And so and they haven't made a very smooth transition, dude, by all accounts.
Right.
So on one hand, that means that this really isn't working without these massive doses of violence all the time.
And so, geez, maybe there's something else could happen.
But at the same time, on the other hand, is, hey, they're whiter.
So let them do whatever the hell they want, because who cares about a bunch of sand and words anyway, right?
And so that's the American that's that's the well.
And of course, there's all the right wing born again Christians who are trying to force Jesus to come back sooner and all this crap, too.
But the basic bottom line of it is that, you know, even is one last gasp for white colonialism in the browner parts of the world.
And and to Americans like, you know, they basically identify with it.
You know, it's a settler colony, the Palestinians or the Indians.
What do you got to do if you're going to have your country?
You got to get rid of your Indians, don't you?
Isn't that the way?
Yeah, I mean, it's good you mentioned the word, you know, colonialism or imperialism, because I have to remember that the the Israel is, as I put it on Facebook recently, Israel is the child, the offspring of nationalism and imperialism, which seem to be at odds.
Right, because national groups will revolt against imperialists who want to rule.
But that's what happened.
It's Jewish nationalism arises.
Zionism, in other words, arises in the age of nationalism in the 19th century when Italy is unifying.
You know, Germany is unifying.
So Herzl says, hey, we're a nation, too.
On the other hand, as we know from our reading about World War One and everybody ought to read about this, because if you want to get if you want to come to really hate the state, read, read about World War One in detail.
France and England wanted to make sure that they were going to be ruling the Middle East.
And so they they kept they made promises.
They knew they knew they would never be able to keep or fully keep.
They certainly couldn't keep all of them.
So they told the Arabs revolt against the Turks because the Turks were aligned with Germany and the central powers in World War One.
You you revolt and you'll get your your your independence, which you've long wanted.
You don't want to be under the thumb of the Turks.
And the the you know, the the Arabs didn't were pretty sure they couldn't trust the British.
But they said, what the hell?
It's better than staying under the Ottomans.
Let's take a chance.
So they agreed.
Meanwhile, the British want to win over Jewish support, particularly American Jewish support for their effort in World War One.
Don't forget, most American Jews were German.
Their sympathies originally in that war were for with Germany.
Don't forget, it wasn't the Nazis.
It was the Kaiser.
I mean, there was anti-Semitism in Germany, but it wasn't it wasn't the Nazis.
So their first sympathy was with the land they their their parents had come from, Germany.
So the British put on this campaign to win over.
They thought the they thought the American Jews were extremely powerful.
They weren't.
But they thought if we can win over the Jews in America for the war effort, Wilson will get in the war.
Right.
This is before Wilson gets in the war.
So they they issue the Balfour Declaration, which says we'll we'll allow you to have a national home.
They use the national homeland or national home.
They use this euphemism.
The Jews meant state and the Zionists meant state.
But when I say the Jews, I'm really got to be careful because most Jews despised Zionism.
The Orthodox hated Zionism and the reform hated Zionism.
Go away.
Get away from us.
When they went to the reform, when a Zionist goes to went to an Orthodox Jew, he'd say no.
Let me start it this way.
When they go to when they went to reform American reform, the Americans would say we have a homeland.
It's called the United States.
They said America's our Zion.
Get out of here.
If you went if they went to an Orthodox, the Orthodox would say who died and made you the Messiah.
In other words, man, the Jews weren't going back to the Holy Land until the Messiah came.
Not Ben-Gurion.
Ben-Gurion was an atheist.
Herzl was a simulated secularist.
They mocked the Eastern Jews.
They mocked the Orthodox Jews.
They thought the Orthodox Jews were superstitious and dirty.
They hardly wanted them in Israel.
I mean, I realized they had to have them, but they didn't like them.
So Zionism was a very small sect in those days before World War I.
And yet somehow the British thought if we issue the Balfour Declaration, this is going to win the Jews over to World War I.
Of course, Wilson didn't need Jewish support to get into World War I, and he did it anyway.
My point is Israel is the result of imperialism, British and French imperialism, and nationalism.
This idea that Jews somehow constituted a nation.
You know, talk about having two ill-founded parents, a nationalist and an imperialist.
It had to go bad.
Yeah, well, so I don't know.
I mean, I've always kind of been of the opinion, although, you know, not that it's really my business, but it's interesting.
It seems like, well, you know what, and maybe you and I have talked about this once upon a time.
M.J. Rosenberg wrote this great article way back when, which is lost to history because it was on the Media Matters website of all places, and they deleted it.
But it was this great history that he did about how ever since the creation of Israel anyway, if you take 48 for a given and all that, that at every major turning point of violent conflict with the Palestinians and with the neighbors and what have you, that there were powerful and influential Israelis who knew better, who were in the government at the height of their power, who said, wait, no, don't do this, guys, and then they did it anyway.
And then he just cites over and over and over, example after example after example, about the Israelis in his frame just digging themselves a deeper and deeper pit here, with the counter-narrative being that, man, not that it would have been utopia, but that if they had had the attitude all along that, OK, yeah, we stole 78% of Palestine and everything, but now let's try and make peace, now let's try to have constructive relationships with the neighbors and with the Palestinians and let them have their independence and get along, that actually that was a perfectly possible route to take.
They weren't forced into all these situations.
They take advantage and start wars.
As we've seen in 67, we just talked about with Ray McGovern on the show a minute ago here before you, and this kind of thing.
So the counterfactual, it seems not perfect, but there seems to be a narrative there where the Israelis, if they had just taken their fait accompli of 48 and they got away with that and then tried to play it cool since then as the new guy in the neighborhood, who's after all planning on staying around for a long time, that they could be all right.
But instead this whole time they've said no, like you said, they refused to even define their borders.
One day all your cities will belong to us.
That wasn't the program.
I mean, to say if only they had just realized, OK, we got this, let's just settle into a normal state.
That would have meant the whole program was for naught.
I mean, people don't act like that.
That was never the plan.
So there's no way that was going to happen.
But this is a really shit plan too, right?
The permanent occupations and the refugees in camps all over the place and all this.
All this controversy constantly.
I'm sure they didn't want a permanent occupation.
They wanted to, quote, transfer the non-Jewish communities, as they're called in the Balfour Declaration, out of the place to somewhere else, to Jordan, to somewhere else.
So they didn't want to be permanent occupiers.
They didn't want anybody to occupy.
That's supposed to all just become, quote, Jewish land.
I think, again, I mentioned one other thing, and then there's this point from the article from last week we got to talk about, which is the 1924 American immigration law.
But the one thing I want to mention about the Balfour Declaration, there was one opponent in the Cabinet against the Balfour Declaration.
He was the Secretary of State for India.
He was the only Jew in the Cabinet, right?
Edwin Montague, very distinguished family.
He denounced the Balfour Declaration as anti-Semitic.
He said, all you people who want to pack the Jews up and send them off to Israel or Palestine, you're anti-Semites.
Of course you want to pack the bags and say, hey, let me help you.
Let me help you with your bags there.
You want to kick them out.
You want to get them out of Britain.
He was the only one, at least the only one that prominent, who saw what the heck was going on.
And that's the way the American reform reacted to it.
But the other key thing, and, you know, I first was alerted to this by Shlomo Sand.
He says the Balfour Declaration is not what really started Israel.
What started Israel was a bill signed by Calvin Coolidge, passed overwhelmingly by the Congress in 1924, and then also a similar bill passed by the British Parliament in 1905, which puts very strict, put very strict quotas on people, in the American case, on people from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe.
So it was directed at Jews and Catholics.
Everybody knew that at the time.
It was a racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic law.
Overwhelmingly passed in the Congress.
It's called the Johnson-Reed Act, and signed by Calvin Coolidge as an aside.
Calvin Coolidge, for some weird reason, is a president that some libertarians like, or at least think, you know, he's the least bad president because he was pro-business.
That's usually the way it works.
But he signs this law saying we must, you know, keep America American.
That's your great Calvin Coolidge signing the bill.
This law put very strict quotas on.
This is 1924.
It meant that you could only, I think every year you could have only 2% from these countries, 2% of the census from 1890, right?
In 1924 they're saying look at the 1890 census, and then you can see how many, you know, additional people can come in.
It's a trickle.
You may remember the stories of 1939 when the German ship St. Louis almost got to Miami with almost 1,000 Jews trying to escape Hitler, 1939.
Post-Kristallnacht and all that.
The Roosevelt administration turns away the ship.
They can see the faces of the people on the port waiting for them to land.
They see the lights.
And Roosevelt says no.
Why?
On the authority of this 1924 law.
The point is if that 1924 law had not been passed and we had generally open immigration like Ellis Island like we had in the 19th century or even better, there wouldn't have been an Israel because the Jews would have come here or to England.
You mentioned that ship.
Those particular Jews, many of them were killed in Auschwitz.
I've read about that.
They were sent back to Germany.
Roosevelt, the great hero.
But it's not just him.
We shouldn't just blame him.
The point is, Sand's point is that there would not have been Israel without that.
There also might not have been a Holocaust or a very scaled down Holocaust because most of the Jews would have gotten out.
In 1924, if you don't have these quotas and if England hasn't passed its thing in 1905, Jews, they didn't want to go to Palestine.
They wanted to go to the West.
They loved America.
They liked America.
They had the shining vision.
Or they would have gone to England or Canada.
If they could have gotten in, there would have been hardly any Jews from the West to channel to Israel.
The shame of the Zionist movement is they wanted all the safety valves shut off except the one to Palestine.
They wanted only one place to go, and that's to Palestine.
And so they weren't agitating for opening up.
I doubt if they opposed this bill.
And in the 30s and 40s, they weren't putting pressure on Roosevelt to let Jews in even on an emergency basis.
Oh, they said things like, oh, we don't want to incite anti-Semitism.
That may have been part of the reason.
But a big part of the story is they wanted the Jews to have only one place to go because they were looking ahead to the establishment of Israel as the Jewish state.
And it's not a very pretty story in the history of Zionism.
In a pretty sordid history altogether, that's one of the worst aspects of it.
Yeah.
So, you know, I read recently again, I had always forgotten who said this first, but it was the king of Saudi Arabia when he met with Franklin Roosevelt.
He said, don't give them Palestine, give them the best part of Germany.
Well, that sounds reasonable.
I mean, if anybody's ever been collectively guilty of anything and need their property rights violated, screw them.
You know, let them go live under Soviet communism and let the Jews have the western half of Germany.
That would at least be fair.
And they're Europeans after all.
So that makes more sense.
And the Palestinians didn't do a damn thing to them.
The point was, though, that the Palestinians, in the words of Lord Gray and all the rest of them, were just N-words and their lives don't matter to know how anyway.
They were never consulted on any of this, Balfour or anything else.
You're right.
It was a reasonable response by the king, even Saud.
However, even that wasn't right, because I have a feeling most of the German Jews and the other European Jews wouldn't have wanted to stay there.
Their horrible memories, and even though that was their homes, they would have come to America.
That's the thing.
Or perhaps England or some other places.
But America was going to be the big magnet.
So they should have been allowed in.
And I don't mean just Jews.
I mean, we should have open immigration.
But if you do that, to repeat this point, you don't get Israel because there's no people pouring into Israel, into Palestine.
And, of course, again, we're going back to 1924, so we're talking about pre-Nazis.
You don't get a Holocaust.
I mean, there aren't going to be that many people around to do it.
And don't forget, initially the Germans were interested in driving the Jews out, not just wholesale killing them, at least the German Jews.
So think of how different the world would have been had Coolidge not signed that and had Americans welcomed immigrants with open arms, as they did to a very large extent.
And we all remember the stories of Ellis Island.
Almost anybody could get in.
If you had a communicable disease, they quarantined you for, what, a couple of weeks, and then they sent you into New York.
If we had only done that and kept doing that through the 20s, the world would be so different.
Because think of what happens if you don't have all this tension in the Middle East.
Now, the imperial powers still would be interested in oil.
That's certainly true.
But you wouldn't get this.
You don't even get 9-11 because of this.
Because you don't have Israel attacking Lebanon and influencing, what's his name, Atta to break out his will and fly into a building in New York.
I mean, the whole world changes.
I'm not saying everything is then perfect and sweetness and light, but a huge source of tension is removed.
Because Jews are living happily where they'd rather be, America or England.
All right.
Well, word to the people of the Gaza Strip out there doing their massive civil disobedience demonstration.
They're marching on that fence.
It's not a border.
I saw a Twitter friend said that that's the one silver lining of this whole current protest going on, is that the Israelis have had to admit that they have a border, which has never happened before.
They keep calling this a border fence in order to make their actions sound defensive.
But they're accidentally conceding far too much of the truth of at least how it's supposed to be there.
So, interesting point, at least.
Maybe we should leave it there, Shalom, I think.
Yeah.
So, I'm glad that this went over long.
I hope that people liked it.
You've written some really fascinating stuff here in this recent series.
And before that, of course, it's all at LibertarianInstitute.org.
We're running it all at AntiWar.com as well, of course.
And it does get reprinted, some of this stuff, from place to place.
The Great Shell of Richmond.
So, here's a few of the most recent ones.
How an anti-Semitic American law created the state of Israel and a whole lot of trouble.
The abused Jews of Iraq.
Before that, Shabbos with Zaidi, which we talked about before in the most recent interview.
And then the brand new one today, TGIF.
Separation, not association, requires force.
Thanks again, Sheldon, appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Talk to you next week.
All right, you guys, that's the Scott and Sheldon Show.
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