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 us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Sheldon Richman, my padna at the Libertarian Institute.
He is our executive editor, actually, and the author of the brand new book, Coming to Palestine, and published by the Libertarian Institute.
And it's really great.
It's a collection of essays that he's written over, say, 30 years or so on the subject of Israel and Palestine.
And now he has a new Friday article at the Institute from last Friday, and it ran at Antiwar.com this week as well.
To be or not to be a Jewish state?
That is the question.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Sheldon?
Well, thanks for having me back.
I'm doing fine.
Always glad to chat with you.
So listen, last weekend, I went to the Texas Book Fair, and it was kind of a bust just because they put me all the way at the very end of the thing.
So if I had had a better position there with real foot traffic, it might have been a whole different experience.
But anyways, I did get to see some fans came out, and I got to meet some people and stuff, so it was cool.
But then also the lady across from me was selling some science fiction, but she came over to talk to me and wanted to know about the book Coming to Palestine.
So I explained it to her, and she was a Jewish Zionist and I think like a center-left liberal.
And man, she did not like the things I was saying, and so we kind of had a little back and forth there for a while.
But then she kept coming back over, and we kept talking about it more.
And at first she refused to take your book, and then she came back and said, okay, I'll take it and read it.
And so we had a nice little chat and a conversation.
And what it really came down to, Sheldon, was I says to her, I says, listen, why do you think so many American Jews are anti-Zionists?
They have no reason to be at all, except that there's something wrong.
You know, come on.
And she's like, well, they're just ignorant of history.
And I'm like, you know, maybe that's not what it is.
Maybe it's that they know enough that they're just saying that, listen, what's happening to the Palestinians here, it just isn't fair.
Maybe it's that.
Maybe you ought to give the other side another fair shake.
Oh, and of course, I said, because you're a libertarian, not a leftist.
So maybe she's only heard a leftist point of view, and maybe she needs to learn a libertarian one.
And maybe she'd have a different take after that.
But anyway, I wish you'd been there, kind of.
But I've been wondering all week about whether she's read the book and what she thinks of it.
And trying to remember and think if there's really any weaknesses that I overlooked that she might try to really grab on to, you know, anything like that.
Anyway, it's just interesting.
So just to let you know, I've been kind of preoccupied with that.
So I guess we'll see what happens if she emails back.
She has my card.
I'd rather be you than me.
I really don't like those kinds of confrontations.
Well, I told her, listen, if Sheldon was here, you'd love him.
He's such a nice guy.
He's way nicer than me.
You know, I'm a terrible person.
This guy, you would hit it off, of course, and you would come quickly to see his point of view.
Anyway, so let's talk about that point of view of yours.
The Jewish state, I mean, from her point of view, for example.
Like, come on, man.
Try being a Jew in Russia or a Jew in Eastern Europe or Western Europe.
It's really tough going historically.
They need their own state.
They finally got one in the aftermath of the worst thing that ever happened to them.
And so, you know, come on.
How about that to start?
Well, when Peter Herzl picked up the idea of the Jews moving somewhere and having their own state.
And in the beginning, he didn't think it had to be Palestine.
He wasn't attached to that area.
He thought of other places.
I mean, places were mentioned like Uganda and a few other places, even, I think, Argentina.
But the people around him then started insisting, no, it had to be Palestine.
I mean, it was an attempted answer.
I'm not the first to point this out, to a real problem.
And you already alluded to it.
You know, as the 19th century was coming to a close, this is when Herzl was becoming active and forming his organization.
It was not a happy time for the Jews of Europe.
Christian Europe had a very tough time from Russia, you know, all the way to the Western part.
And, you know, and even before Napoleon, Jews didn't have anything like individual rights.
Not that anybody really had individual rights back then.
But Jews were seen as they had sort of a corporate existence.
In other words, the regime, like Russia, Poland and other places, treated the Jews as a sort of self-contained community and dealt with their leaders, you know, the rabbis, in order to, you know, for administrative purposes and tax the community.
So you didn't exist.
An individual, a Jewish individual didn't have sort of a one-to-one relationship with the state.
You know, there's obviously a downside to having a one-to-one relationship with the state.
But there's a downside to the other kind of system, too, where you're – you know, the rabbi in your town who could rule with an iron hand was the intermediary between you and the state.
So one thing Napoleon accomplished, and if we're going to look for pluses and minuses, Napoleon emancipated the Jews of Europe beginning in France and then heading east for a while.
Of course, he didn't succeed in the end because he got driven back.
But the Jews then, to the extent he did succeed, then had – you know, were seen as individuals.
In fact, I think he even says to Jews as individuals, everything – in other words, to Jews as citizens, everything, to Jews as Jews, nothing.
He saw people as individuals.
But the old rabbis weren't happy about that.
They liked the old system where they ruled their little villages with an iron hand, and then they collected the taxes and sent – kept a cut and sent some on to the central government.
So it was – people were looking for some solution, Jews were especially, about what can we do.
So there were three different approaches.
One was let's fight for individual rights of Jews in Europe, in other words, emancipation.
Another answer was let's get out of here.
Let's go to America or someplace else.
But then Herzl came up with his own answer in the Zionist movement.
Let's reconstitute Palestine.
Let's bring back the ancient kingdom of Judea.
Earlier – in an earlier time, in biblical times, it was Israel and – which then split into Israel and Judah, and then later on under the Maccabees, it was – it became known as Judea before the Romans came and destroyed the second temple.
So you had three different approaches.
The Zionist approach, which was to go to Palestine and set up a state, was not very popular with Jews, with most Jews.
I mean you said you told the woman that why are most Jews in America anti-Zionist.
I would say they're not anti-Zionist.
Oh, no, I didn't say most.
No, no, no.
I just said so many.
Well, so many.
Okay.
No, but it wasn't the number that I was thinking of here.
It was the word.
I don't – I wouldn't call them anti-Zionist.
I think they're simply non-Zionist.
They have no desire to move to Israel.
They don't think all Jews around the world, no matter how they're doing in their own countries right now, should move.
The ones that you're thinking of are critical of the occupation and the way the Palestinians get treated, but I don't think that makes them anti-Zionist.
I think most of them still favor the idea of a Jewish state, whatever that means.
They just are – they're just not willing to shut up about their own personal moral judgment that they don't like what the Israeli government is doing.
So I would call them non-Zionist in that sense, except they still believe there ought to be a Jewish state, which – so they're not antagonistic to Zionism.
So I just think Herzl and that group – well, it was right to be looking for an answer because it was a horrible history.
This is – don't forget, this is pre-Nazi, so it was horrible before the Nazis.
So you can imagine it becomes 1,000 times, 10,000 times, 100,000 times more horrible with the Nazis.
The problem is that the West was not interested in letting the Jews out and coming to the United States or England.
There's a chapter in my book about this.
In 1905, the British put in an anti-immigration law that Lord Balfour, whose name became famous later for the Balfour Declaration, which was in favor of the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.
In 1905, he's behind an act of parliament that basically shut the Jews of Europe out of Great Britain.
This lady herself, she invoked FDR turning them away and said this is the reason for Israel is you can't even count on America.
And FDR did that because in 1924, the U.S. government, the Congress and Calvin Coolidge passed and signed an anti-immigration bill, which so slashed the numbers that could come in from Eastern Europe to like a percentage of what was coming in in 1890.
This is 1924.
So there were very, very strict quotas, and very few Jews could get in from Eastern Europe.
It also kept out Southern Europeans.
Apparently, when they're too hot about Italians and Greeks coming in for some reason, but it certainly kept out Jews.
And Calvin Coolidge, who some libertarians think is one of the least bad presidents, said something like we have to maintain the purity of America.
That's why I'm signing this bill.
I write about that in my book.
So, yeah, there was a problem.
But here, instead of there being a great radical liberal movement, including Jews, saying open up the gates, America, reopen Ellis Island, get rid of these quotas.
Instead of there putting a huge rush on the government to get that changed, not just Jews, but all liberal-minded people, the Zionists were discouraging that.
They wanted the Jews to have only one place to go, namely Palestine.
If they could go to the U.S., England, Canada, South America, a lot of them did go to South America.
Some were still coming into the U.S.
They didn't want to go to Palestine.
But if they had a place to go other than Palestine, that would take the pressure off of the Zionist movement.
And the Zionists did not want that.
So they were not willing to join a movement to open immigration in the advanced Western countries.
And so we don't know what would have happened.
Maybe if that 24 Act hadn't gotten passed or if it had been quickly repealed or something like that, maybe there wouldn't have been a Holocaust.
Maybe so many Jews would have gotten out that Hitler couldn't have carried out his evil project.
And the Nazis in the very beginning, in the early 30s, are trying to get the Jews out, not kill them.
Eichmann goes to Palestine, tours Palestine with another Nazi official.
What year was it that the ship was turned back from the port in Miami?
Oh, yeah, I don't know when that was.
Late 30s?
It was before 1940, right?
Because the U.S. is not in the war yet.
This is at least, what, three, four years at least before the Holocaust really began in 1942, right?
Yeah, maybe it's 40 or 39.
Yeah, I'm not sure of the exact year.
You're right.
That ship is within, you know, people can see people's faces at the port there.
They're looking back and forth at each other.
That's the St. Louis, the British, sorry, the German ship.
And it gets sent back, and I think all those people end up being killed.
They actually trace the people.
I guess they have a manifest.
They know who was on that ship.
There have been articles about what happened to those people.
So we don't know what would have happened.
If there had been, you know, a uniting of liberal voices and made the case in England and the United States and other places to open the doors, things might have been very different.
There also would not have been an Israel, most likely, because here's what happens.
People forget because their memory, if they have any memory at all, it only goes back to right after World War II.
But before the war and before the Nazis, it was very clear the Zionist movement was not about refugees or displaced people.
It was a project to get all Jews everywhere to Palestine.
When Herzl and then the people who succeed him in that movement get going, they're making appeals to the anti-Semitic governments about how, you know, look, we agree with you, they say to the anti-Semites.
And the German Zionists were saying this even to the early Nazi regime in 1933 when they first come in.
They're saying, look, we agree with you.
You're racist, and we are a race.
OK, we agree with that.
Number two, you don't think we belong here.
We don't think we belong here.
We're strangers anywhere but except in our own homeland.
So help us get to our own homeland.
And the early Nazi policy was, OK, let's look into this.
And they actually cut deals to help Jews and money get to Palestine.
The Nazis started cutting the money.
But there was actually cooperation there.
This has been a scandal, because any time it's brought out, other people denounce it, saying, how dare you say Jews work with Nazis.
But if you look at Lenny Brenner's book, which is now through two editions, Lenny Brenner has this great book called Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, where he has this fully documented.
And he only recently, if it lasts for years, put out a book called 51 Documents, which is an edited volume.
It's the documents.
In the first book, he just quotes the documents.
In the second book, he's got the documents about the deals being cut between early Zionists and not that early.
We're talking about early 30s.
The Zionists in the early days and first few years of Nazi Germany and the Nazi officials, because the first plan was not extermination but to just get them out.
Things changed later, and Hitler might have been busy with other things, but he was letting his officials do these deals, and the deals were being made.
So you can find interviews with Lenny Brenner on YouTube where he discusses this at great length.
It's kind of his life's work.
So anyway, I don't know what this woman or the individuals who take her position, how they would see that.
And then the irony is today, advocates of Israel talk about how unsafe it is for the Israeli Jews.
Well, wait a second.
Israel was supposed to be the safe haven, so I guess it didn't work out too well.
The other problem is, of course, there were people living there, as the critics of Zionism said.
Oh, I finished my story.
Up to World War II, it was not about refugees.
All Jews were supposed to go.
Most Jews around the world said, I don't want to go to Palestine.
I'm an American.
I like being in America.
It was the freest place.
And then the same with Jews other places.
They didn't want to go to Palestine.
Palestine was like a foreign part of the world.
They didn't relate.
They were much more related to, say, the U.S. or the West.
I rewatched the movie Exodus recently, which came out in 1960 as a kid.
I was taken to see it with my Hebrew school class.
It was a big, big deal.
This was the story of the effort to get the U.N. to recommend partition and get Jews and guns into Israel so Jews would have a safe place after World War II.
And there's a young girl who's a survivor of the Nazis who's talking to an American, not a Jewish woman, but an American, who says to this young girl, I could take you back to America.
I mean, I could adopt you.
I could take you back to America.
And she says, amazingly, I couldn't believe it, she says, I'd love to come to America.
We all want to go to America.
And this is a movie that's supposed to be a – this was based on Leon Uris's novel.
He was an ardent American Zionist.
I'm surprised they would have a line like that in there because, you know, I was too young, but I should have been thinking, wait a second, they want to go to America.
So I thought this was a movie about how great Israel is.
So they didn't want to go to Israel.
They didn't want to go to Palestine.
And the Orthodox and the Reform in particular said, get out of here.
The Orthodox said to the Zionists who were atheists for the most part, like Ben-Gurion, the Eastern Europeans, Herzl from Hungary and Vienna, he was not religious.
He didn't believe in God.
He had a Christmas tree in his house.
They'd say, you're not the Messiah.
We're supposed to wait for the Messiah.
The Reform, on the other hand, said, look, we're not – we can't recreate Israel from 2,000 years ago or more, and we won't want to anyway.
We're not a diaspora, they said.
We are settled in America and other places, and we like where we are.
We have our rights.
We can practice our religion, but otherwise we're part of civil society, and stop messing with it.
And they warned that if you create a state and claim it's our state, aren't people going to look at us and say, hey, what's your state?
What are you doing here?
I thought that's your state.
And that undermines their security in America and other places.
And today you see this dual loyalty business raised.
Well, the war changes everything.
With the war and the Holocaust, you have the survivors in a terribly wretched condition.
Obviously they went through hell, and the ones that managed to survive maybe didn't want to be hanging around Europe.
And so they recast the public presentation of Zionism into a refugee program.
Let's get these poor people, and they were – it was pathetic, of course.
Let's get them to a safe place where they will be – have Nazi Germany behind them and start new lives.
And, of course, that won a huge amount of sympathy with people who never understood the original Zionist project, which was to get all Jews there.
It was called the in-gathering of exiles.
In other words, all Jews everywhere were exiles, and now it's time to go home, despite the fact there are people living there for thousands of years and there hadn't been an ancient Israel for all that time.
So that won a lot of sympathy, and that really propelled the founding of Israel.
The UN recommends a partition.
The UN had no power to partition any land and certainly had no power to tell a population, hey, give your land – give half your land or more than half your land to this other group who only constitute a 30-year population, and we're not even going to consult you.
We're just telling you – we're just recommending here's what ought to be done.
Basically, they were recommending to the British.
They said to the British, you partition the land.
The heck with the opinion of the Arabs or the Palestinians.
And that's what's happened ever since.
I mean so you've had wars and you've had – if you listen to Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders, constant threats of annihilation.
I thought Israel was supposed to be the safe place.
So I don't see this case that they needed Israel for safety.
They needed a liberal movement to open up America and England and other more enlightened countries.
Hang on just one second.
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Well, you know, one thing she said was – one thing I wish I had said was the Thomas Jefferson quote.
Because this is essentially her position was about, you know, well, we can't have – they say one – between the river and the sea, Palestine will be free, meaning they're going to destroy Israel and kill all of us.
And I'm like, well, that's not what they're saying.
They're just saying they want equal rights with you, not that.
But her position is essentially we have the wolf by the ears and now we can neither safely hold him nor let him go, as Jefferson said about the slaves.
The whole point is that they're not wolves.
They're human men, and you have no right to hold them by the ears or any other place.
So you're just going to have to take your licks.
If it comes down to that, you have to let them go.
You have no right to hold them.
Yeah, I guess – I mean, I've talked to men and women who take her position.
I mean, I have family who take that position.
I'm familiar with that position.
But, you know, when I hear something like that, I just want to say, well, whose fault is that?
Who chose – Yeah, exactly.
The Palestinians didn't say, hey, Jews, come here and set up a home, and then they double-crossed them.
Once they got there, they started, you know, assaulting them or killing them.
That's not what happened.
The Zionist movement moved in on people who had been living there and their families and working on that land for many, many, many generations.
Look, the evidence is extremely strong that the Palestinians are in part the descendants of the early Israelites and even the Canaanites before that.
Of course, lots of other people have come through Palestine over the many generations, Greece, Persia.
So, you know, the individuals there are – you know, have very mixed ancestry.
But part of that ancestry are the early Israelites, the Judeans.
And, you know, look, Israeli historians, including Zionist historians and other Zionists like Ben-Gurion, totally conceded this.
In 1918, David Ben-Gurion, who had become the first prime minister of Israel, and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who was a historian who had become the second president of Israel, wrote a book, first in Hebrew and then in Yiddish.
I don't think it's ever been published in English, pointing out, claiming, and pointing to things like names and linguistic features and various, you know, various things, pointing out, claiming that the Palestinians were the descendants or are brethren, the Zionists said.
They are the descendants of the Israelites.
Because they thought, okay, maybe they could win them over to the project, and then they wouldn't cause, you know, they wouldn't cause a problem, and it would ease the way for the creation of a modern state of Israel with an overwhelming majority.
Well, I mean, that's really huge.
This is something that's not really discussed.
The idea was, hey, if we just acknowledge the fact that these are the descendants of the ancient Israelites too, then maybe we can just get them to endorse our project to build a new state here.
Later that was decided against, but it wasn't that, hey, let's make that up as a lie to try to win them over.
It was, let's go ahead and acknowledge the reality of that and see if we can use that to persuade them.
Well, and also the plan would be that the immigration of Jews from Europe would so overwhelm, they probably thought the Jews in the Arab countries would also come in, would so overwhelm the Arab population that it would be a minority and they could still have it as a Jewish state because they'd be able to have a vote, you know, be able to dictate policy.
The problem is people don't like getting thrown off their land, right?
So the Palestinians in the 20s and into the 30s began to resist, and they didn't like being, you know, people don't like being thrown off their land.
It's not that they don't like the Jews throwing them off their land, they don't like anybody throwing them off their land.
So it wasn't the religion, it was what was happening to them.
And once that happened, once Arab nationalism began to arise and Palestinian sort of nationalism began to bubble up in response to this, which is typical what happens if an outside group begins to impinge on you, you're going to get like a group consciousness that maybe didn't exist as strongly before.
So once that happened, the Ben-Gurion types, they flushed that book down the toilet and said, okay, that's an inconvenient truth, let's not talk about that anymore.
And they didn't talk about it anymore because it didn't work.
The strategy didn't work.
But here's the interesting question.
You know, the narrative is Jews have been wandering the world since the year 70, right?
When the Romans conquered, destroyed the Second Temple, put down a major Jewish revolt and took the Jews to Rome, the Roman Empire, and from there they just scattered around the world, and that's why we have Jews all over the place.
The fact is that story is not true.
There's no evidence whatever, no books or anything, that there was ever an exile by the Romans.
I mean, zero.
That will be a shock to people, but if you read Shlomo San's book, which I've mentioned many times, The Invention of the Jewish People, he's not by far the first person to say this.
He will show you that even the major Jewish historians, the scholarly historians, not popularizers, but the scholarly historians, even when they're pro-Zionist, never claimed there was an exile.
There's no Roman records.
There was no means of transport for that kind of mass of people.
Plus, they didn't want to get rid of the taxpayers and the farmers anyway, and it's not what the Romans did.
So in other words, the people were there in place.
They didn't leave because, first of all, 60 years later, you have another major Jewish revolt against the Romans led by the famous Simon Bar Kokhba, very famous, especially if you're a Jewish kid growing up and learning Jewish history.
He leads a major revolt in like year 132.
So that's like 60 years after the year 70.
Now, Bar Kokhba, as I understand it, was under the impression that he was leading a Jewish revolt, but if all the Jews, except him apparently, were exiled in 70, who was he leading?
He thought they were Jews, but I guess they weren't Jews if there was an exile.
Well, the fact is there wasn't an exile, so he could lead a revolt.
And when the Arabs and the Muslims came from the Arabian Peninsula, came to Palestine in the 600s in the 7th century, they were met with Jews.
Actually, the Jews were pretty welcoming to them because they were having a hard time with the Christians, and they had more in common with the Muslims than the Christians, right, because neither one of them believed that Jesus was the son of God, and the Muslims were not accusing the Jews of being Christ killers because to them Jesus was not the son of God.
He was a prophet, but he wasn't divine.
So they actually welcomed the Arabs, and a lot of them converted because there were various benefits to converting.
For one thing, you got tax exempt.
I think I've mentioned this before in your program.
So here's the upshot.
The Jews never left Palestine.
They might have converted to Christianity or Islam over the many, many years, but they're still the descendants of the people from back then.
So it wasn't a land without a people.
So who's the people that didn't have a land?
Well, and also the whole theory that natural rights of whoever used to be a farmer there is one thing, but the supernatural right of God gave this land to us, turns out, ironically, that applies to the people who already live there too.
And obviously far more than a Russian, Lithuanian, or American Jew claiming that birthright at the expense of the people whose land it actually is.
See, the exile story gets going mainly by Christians who later want to say the Jews got kicked out because they sinned, and among the sins was killing Jesus.
This was a story cooked up by Christians, the exile, not by Jews.
But then the Jews adopted it because it seemed to also work in their favor.
That's funny.
I didn't know that.
That's interesting.
But then, as you've said before, the real explanation for the reason that there were Jews scattered all around the world is that unlike today, back then Judaism was a proselytizing religion.
Yes.
That's the next thing I was going to say.
Who were all these Jews then in Europe and in the Arab countries?
And they were in Spain.
Who are they?
If they're not the descendants of the people who got kicked out of Palestine, because they didn't get kicked out of Palestine, then who are they?
Well, they didn't come down from alien ships.
They didn't just sort of spring spontaneously out of the soil.
They're the offspring mostly of converts.
Judaism was a very—and again, I never heard any of this growing up.
We always heard Judaism really discourages conversion.
You've got to really want it bad, and they're going to throw every obstacle in your way to keep you from converting so that if you get over all those obstacles, okay, that means you really want it and we'll take you.
But man, we're going to make it tough.
That's the way we always heard it.
Well, that might be—that's true in sort of modern—true, you know, little before modern time.
The proselytizing kind of started coming to an end when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire because they had a lot of power and they didn't really take kindly to Jews trying to convert people.
But before that, from about 200 of BCE, in other words, before the birth of Jesus, 200, to about 200 afterwards, Judaism was a very vigorous missionary religion.
And they won converts all over, all around the Mediterranean, in the Roman Empire.
It wasn't Christian yet.
In the Arab world, major kingdom in what's today Yemen, major conversions in the Maghreb, which is that, you know, that group of countries in northern Africa.
The Berbers are like sort of the big group that were native to northern Africa.
They weren't Arabs until the Arabs came in with Muhammad and conquered that area.
Gaddafi, who was the ruler of Libya for so long, was a Berber.
He was not an Arab.
Chances are very good he had Jewish ancestors because the Berbers converted to Judaism and actually went to Spain with the Arab Muslims to conquer Spain because, you know, the Jews had a tough time with the Christians, you know, in Europe.
So they welcomed the—they teamed up with the Arabs.
So they're converts.
I can put myself in that group because my grandparents were Ashkenazi from Lithuania.
But one of the big conversions came a little bit later, like in the 8th century, south of Russia between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
This is the famous Khazar Empire, which was large and very powerful.
I mean, they controlled Kiev before the Russians got there.
The Rus became the Russians.
They controlled—at some point Armenia was in their sphere, Azerbaijan, Georgia.
That whole area in the Caucasus was a Khazar area before the rise of Russia.
And their king converted and the population converted, and Jews also converted slaves.
That's one thing.
If you owned a slave and you converted, then you converted your slave, which is pretty painful if it's a male slave and you understand what it means to convert to Judaism, especially when you're not given a choice.
And then the Khazars, when that kingdom finally eroded in the 10th century or so with the Mongols' invasion from the east, they moved westward.
They moved to Italy and then further west into Europe, and those are the Ashkenazi Jews.
So their roots are not Palestine.
And by the way, DNA and genetic evidence now is beginning to confirm this, because there's a comparison going on of DNA from Ashkenazi Jews and the bones of ancient— the remains of people from ancient times.
I mean, they've dug up bones from people buried back in those times, and they're not finding similarities.
The finding similarities between the Ashkenazi Jews, the European Jews, and people in the area of the Black Sea or, say, northeastern Turkey and into Iran and Greeks and Slavs, it's not going back to Palestine.
So, you know, this is all very interesting history, but I think you already kind of got to the main point.
Even if that story is all wrong and the mainline story is true, you can't go back 2,000 years and say, we're going to start up our country from 2,000 years ago, my ancestor's country.
You can't just show up in Palestine and say, oh, by the way, I'm back.
My ancient ancestors, you know, 2,000 years ago and more lived here, and now I'm coming back, so get out.
Could everybody do that?
Look, there was just a story the other day about how all of mankind, they have evidence now, came from Botswana, right, where we all derive from people in Botswana.
Can I go back to Botswana and say, I'm back, get out of here?
I mean, you can't do that.
So even if the mainstream story is correct, which I don't believe it is, the evidence is overwhelming, I think, against it, it doesn't make the political point that you can kick people off their land that they've been working for, you know, 2,000 years.
Yeah, well, it makes a great story.
It's a great story.
It's all perfectly good, and especially in the aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II and all of that, except for the pesky fact that that was private property.
It was already owned by somebody else.
So tell the people about the Palestinians.
Not just literally ethnically cleansed off of their property, they've been kind of completely erased from the story.
If anything, they're these ungrateful terrorists who are always trying to hurt poor innocent Israelis, but nobody ever knows anything else about them, at least, you know, until you look into it.
But I'm just saying, if you're just a regular person watching TV, living in this country, you just don't get to know about them or who they are or what they're about, other than maybe Hamas.
Here's a picture of a kid with a green thing on his face who's going to grow up to be a terrorist one day.
Well, we didn't hear much about them growing up.
You know, one thing I need to say in answer, going back to your earlier point about the woman saying, look, given all the horrors of Europe, you know, what could have been done?
Here's something else that could have been done that people were saying at the time.
The people, the Arabs living in Palestine, the Palestinians of the day, you know, there was a real society, and it had the sort of same sort of stratification that societies often have.
There was an intellectual class, there was a merchant class, there was, you know, sort of middle class, then there were farmers, peasants.
You had all that in that society.
And when Jews were individually going over there to live, mostly older Jews who just wanted to die there because these were Orthodox Jews and they thought, you know, they wanted to be there on Judgment Day when the dead are raised.
They must have thought they'd be first in line if they were buried there.
So Jews were there and they lived peacefully.
The communities might not have had that much interaction.
They kept to themselves.
But there wasn't friction because, you know, you compare the life in the Muslim world for a Jew versus the Christian Europe, it's like it's night and day.
If when things heated up, especially pre-Nazi, if Jews, even as an organization, were saying to organized Palestinians over there, isn't there a way that we can begin to bring people here just to live peacefully and get out of this European trap?
There were people saying, yeah, that's fine.
But there's a big difference between showing up in another country and saying, you know, can I have sanctuary?
Can I live here peacefully?
You know, all I want to do is live safely.
And showing up with a whole organization saying we want to set up a state in this place and we want to turn it into a Jewish state.
There's a big difference between those two things.
They didn't try the other thing.
So that's one answer to someone who says, well, you know, what could have we done as the Nazis were coming along and as things were getting worse?
Didn't we need Israel?
No, you didn't need Israel.
But why couldn't you have tried just going there and saying, we just want to be normal immigrants?
You know, when people come to the United States as immigrants, they don't say, oh, I'm coming with a political movement to change the whole nature of the country into, you know, an Irish state or an Italian state or whatever, whatever it may be, a Catholic state.
They don't do that.
They just come and say, I want to live here.
I'm not going to bother anybody.
I just want to live here.
So that's the alternative.
We didn't hear much about the Palestinians.
All we heard growing up was, I don't think I ever heard the word Palestinian.
Palestine, I think, was almost a dirty word.
If you saw Exodus, then of course they're using the word Palestine because it was back then it was known as Palestine.
And Israel wasn't formed because the movie's occurring in 47, 48, before the U.N. vote, before the Declaration of Independence by the Israelis.
All we heard was there's this angry sea of Arabs that want to drive the Jews into the sea.
There's this angry, you know, this little, my mother would say, it's just a little sliver of land.
That's all I want, this little sliver of land.
There's Arabs, angry Arabs all over who want to drive them into the sea.
Nasser, who was the president of Egypt, was the new Hitler.
We didn't hear about Palestinians.
I had no sense whether there were other people there.
All I knew was there are Jews there, they're trying to just live and be safe, and there's all these angry Arabs around them.
That's the extent that I learned about this.
It wasn't until later when I started reading.
Interestingly, you know, if you go back and watch that movie Exodus, there's some amazing concessions in there that I'm surprised, I'm surprised that they took us to see it.
Because I was too young to catch it.
But there's a lot, there's a line in there where the head of the, one of the chief guys in the Irgun, which is one of the Zionist terrorist organizations, is talking to Paul Newman, who was the lead, right?
He was born in Palestine.
His father brought him there like in, you know, much earlier than 47.
So he's one of the leaders now of the Zionist movement to get a state.
And he's talking to his very militant uncle, who's a big guy in the Irgun, which was a Begun, Menachem Begun's organization that slaughtered people.
Anyway, he, Paul Newman invokes justice, and they have the Irgun guy saying, ah, justice, yeah, let me tell you something about justice.
The Arabs can make justice, make a case for justice, you know, a justice case for this land as well as we can.
I'm amazed that they even made that concession in the movie.
I don't know if that's in the original book, but that's certainly in the movie.
We never heard anything like that.
We were just told Jews are minding their own business in this little sliver of land, and there's all these angry people around and we want to kill them.
Why, you know, why is that?
Because they're anti-Semitic.
This is just, you know, this is typical.
This is the way the Jews always had it.
And it goes back to, you know, and they name all the ancient enemies from the very beginning.
That's all.
I had to go out and do my own reading, except for, you know, and I've told the story before, except for my grandfather, who was from Lithuania, which means he probably had his roots in the Khazar kingdom, orthodox, modern orthodox.
He wasn't orthodox with the, you know, the long coat and the long, long beard.
He had a very short crop beard, very tolerant guy, but very religious.
Around the time of the 67 war, I heard him say to my parents, it's the Jews in Israel who are causing all the trouble.
And they just were flabbergasted that he said that.
But that was the first thing I heard.
And I didn't know enough to ask questions.
I can't believe, I'd like to, if I could time travel, I'd go back and ask questions.
I can't believe I didn't ask questions.
I mean, the thing is, though, is it isn't just you.
And it's important that you were raised in Hebrew school and kind of indoctrinated on all this stuff.
Y'all went and saw Exodus at the theater together and all these things.
But regular Americans are under that exact same impression that, well, there's Israel, and then there's the Arabs, the terrible Muslim enemy somewhere.
And let's not discriminate and talk about who's who.
And how come the Palestinians want this land?
Does it belong to them or something like that?
Or no, no question.
That was all left very unclear.
I might have heard, well, they bought the land.
So I had maybe some vague idea that, okay, they bought the land.
So then as I became a libertarian, as the 60s wore on, I must have, I was thinking, I remember thinking, well, if they bought the land, I believe in property rights.
But it wasn't until later that I actually started looking into it.
And they only bought, you know, less than 7% of the land.
So how does that work out?
And they were, you know, only a third of the population in 1947.
And yet the UN didn't even talk to the Arabs.
And they said they recommended this partition.
The General Assembly recommended, and I stress recommended, because people think that the UN actually created Israel and partitioned Palestine.
But as Jeremy Hammond shows so well in an essay you can find online, a little booklet, the UN has no power to do that under its bylaws.
And this is, you know, the UN is only, what, less than two years old at this point.
What if the UN General Assembly recommended that the USA give back the Mexican Cession?
You can recommend anything.
Anybody can recommend anything, right?
You can see the USA saying, okay, sure, you guys can have it back, forget it.
Right.
And they didn't even talk to the Arabs.
You know, they set up a special committee, but they didn't care about the, the Arabs didn't matter.
The British didn't care about the Arabs.
They only started restricting Jewish immigration, you know, in the 40s after the war.
Because the Zionist militia groups were getting violent and the Arabs were resisting, the Palestinians were resisting, and the British didn't like the headaches of having to manage all this, which is why they then said, hey, we're getting out of here, UN.
You settle this.
They threw it in the lap of the UN and said, we're out of here, and, you know, we're getting out of here in May of 48.
It gave them a year or less than a year to figure things out.
So you get this only, it's only a recommendation, and the Arabs, you know, the Palestinians, and I guess they had other Arab spokesmen outside of Palestine were saying, we don't accept this.
Well, that was turned into, you know, intransigence.
Look, they won't even accept a partition.
Yeah, 57% to one-third of the population in some of the best land, the most arable land, and the remainder to the two-thirds population, the non-Jewish communities, as the Balfour Declaration put it.
But they were then made to be, right then, they were made to be the bad guys because they wouldn't accept partitioning what they saw as their country, and they had been longing for independence, you know, certainly since World War I when the British promised the Arabs independence and then double-crossed them after the war and took over the Levant, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine and Jordan.
So, of course, they didn't want to accept the partition idea.
But on May 15th of 1948, after that UN vote, Ben-Gurion and his group declared independence.
So Israel didn't, I mean, the UN didn't create Israel.
Israel created Israel.
The Zionists created Israel, declared independence.
Meanwhile, they had already been driving Palestinians off their land.
You know, half of the 750,000 that got expelled, half of that group were expelled before the Declaration of Independence.
So even before the so-called War of Independence in 1948, the Arab governments start to get involved, and they had very badly organized and badly armed armies, and they make a half-hearted attempt to try to protect the Palestinians.
They didn't even want to do that, but some of their own population was saying, how can we just stand by while our brother Arabs are getting thrown off their land in Palestine?
And so there was some effort, which, you know, Israel had no trouble with because Israel had more men, believe it or not, better trained and more arms.
A lot of arms poured in from American Jews in the U.S. and other places.
It wasn't so much government.
It wasn't government aid.
It was private, but a huge amount of money was raised.
They were very well, you know, equipped and trained, and so there was no danger they were going to get wiped out by the Arabs.
And meanwhile, one of the best organized armies was the Jordan, the Jordanian army, but Israel had already cut a deal with the king of Jordan.
Golda Meir negotiated with the government of Jordan, the monarchy, and said, look, you don't want a Palestinian state.
We don't want a Palestinian state.
So for the time being, I'm sure they were thinking of the words for the time being.
They weren't.
They didn't say this.
They said, look, you take you, King Abdullah, you take the West Bank.
And again, they were thinking we'll get it later, but you can have it for now.
And that way there won't be a Palestinian state.
And we don't have to worry about a Palestinian state.
Abdullah wanted to be the leader of all Arabs.
He was happy to grab it and make sure there was no independent Palestinian state.
So that's why the West Bank was in Jordan's hands until the 1967 war, when the Israelis then grabbed it in that war.
Meanwhile, the Gaza Strip was taken by Egypt, where it was until the 1967 war.
But it was never annexed by Egypt, never annexed the Gaza Strip.
I think they always had it in their mind that this was not their property.
So it's a mess.
And as I always put it, the mainstream story is basically upside down.
Turn it around, you're going to be much closer to the truth.
This doesn't mean every action taken by an Arab or Palestinian has been good and virtuous.
No, of course it doesn't mean that.
There have been people who have committed inexcusable violence.
But the big picture is the Palestinians are the aggrieved party.
I mean, that's the only way we can put it.
And if a real peace with justice process is to get going, then Israel has to acknowledge that.
I know people don't want to hear that.
But the Palestinians are the aggrieved party.
And that has to be acknowledged by the Israelis.
Then we can go from there.
No one says the people who now live in Israel should have to leave.
So the story is not whether Israel has a right to exist.
The people have a right to exist.
The question is what should be the nature of that society.
Should it be a discriminatory society that's based on basically racism or ethnic prejudice?
Or should it be an open society where everybody has equal rights?
And whether it's one state or two states, I mean, my preference, of course, is a zero state.
But that's not on the menu at the moment.
That's not up to me to decide.
But the key thing is that the individuals there are free.
I mean, Israel has been around 70 years now.
It's got its own culture, not a Jewish culture, an Israeli culture.
It has a language.
It has food.
It has cinema.
It has music.
It has stuff that cultures have.
So it's been around long enough to actually be a real society.
But as Shlomo San likes to say, it's not a Jewish society.
It's an Israeli society.
Some people are religious and some people aren't religious over there among the people who are called Jews.
They shouldn't have special rights.
That's the only thing.
That's the main thing.
They shouldn't have special rights.
They should have individual rights, and all other individuals there should have individual rights.
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And thanks.
And so, okay, here's a narrative that, well, I guess I don't necessarily believe in anymore.
But it seemed to me, I guess, I don't know.
It's just an opinion.
How about the idea that, look, whatever happened in the aftermath of World War II is essentially set in stone as far as that goes.
And of course, there's, what, six or seven million Jews live in Israel now.
They're not going anywhere.
The whole thing is what it is.
But how about that the real problem here is, and just in a descriptive sense, not a moral one, that the Nakba worked.
That moving, force marching all these people off their property created this 80-20 super duper majority Jewish country.
But then after 67, they really, and especially in hindsight now, who could deny that they annexed the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
And the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as well as the Golan Heights.
But they did that, but they didn't do another Nakba and force all the Palestinians into the river or whatever.
Which, not that I'm saying that would have been the right thing to do.
But I'm just saying what they did instead was they took possession of all the people who were remaining on the 22% that was left of Palestine.
And now they have them under this military occupation for 53 years or whatever it is now.
So this is the real problem.
I mean, the real state of the controversy now is not the existence of the Jewish state or prejudice and second-tier citizen status for Palestinian Arabs, pardon me, Arab citizens of Israel or however you call them, Palestinian citizens of Israel.
But the, you know, beyond martial law, foreign military occupation of the people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with no hope of, you know, with a ruse of a two-state solution that never comes.
And no hope of a one-state solution coming either really doesn't seem like.
Yeah, well, there's a real division among Jewish or people of Jewish ancestry that may actually be practicing Jews or believing Jews.
I've seen, you know, lots of discussion in YouTube lectures.
You've got one group that's for what they call the, what is it, the ODS, One Democratic State.
Gideon Levy and Ilan Pape is a great historian who now is in London or England.
They support one democratic state on the grounds that look, there's already one state, kind of what you're saying.
And the way the Israelis have treated the West Bank now with the wall and the settlements and all this, that a two-state has long ago lost any viability.
You couldn't do it.
So why don't we just say it's one state.
Everybody should have the same rights.
It wouldn't be a Jewish state.
It would be one state, one secular democratic state.
That's how they put it.
Now, on the other side, you got Shlomo Sanders takes this position, Norman Finkelstein.
They say, look, that's not feasible because the Israeli Jews are never going to go for a system in which they will very shortly become the minority population.
Because if you count the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, I think you got about a 50-50 split in the population now.
Right?
Like you say, it's 80-20.
Actually, there's another 5%.
It's like 75-20.
And then there's a 5% that's not Jewish but not Arab either.
So they're not going to willingly go into a system where they become the minority.
So they say, we want to get something done.
We want something feasible.
And so Finkelstein and Sands say, what's much more feasible doesn't mean it's easy.
But what's more feasible, it's comparative, is ending the occupation.
In other words, a two-state solution.
It's going to be easier, although not easy, to get the Israelis to get out of the West Bank and to free up Gaza than to create one single state where Jews would have to agree to become the minority population very soon because the Arabs have a higher birth rate.
That's how they lay it out.
I think both sides make a good point.
I mean, there are arguments on both sides.
And the thing is, what can you get in the near term that's going to move us toward justice?
I mean people have been suffering a long time.
The people in the West Bank and Gaza have been in this situation for 52 years, 52 years without rights.
That's intolerable.
So should it wait until a one-state solution?
If people have to wait until a one-state solution somehow becomes feasible, or should a lesser measure that will at least give them some rights or complete rights, should we go for that?
I mean these are all very hard questions.
And of course it all depends on the willingness on the Israeli side to finally face the music.
So I don't want to – I feel presumptuous about my stating what I think should happen.
I don't live there.
It's not for me to choose.
But I do call on the Israelis to finally be candid about what happened in the history of the Palestinians and how they are the agreed party and start to talk.
And let's start easing up at least with the situation with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
But let's not forget the Palestinians inside Israel because they're not full citizens.
They may have citizenship.
Wait, hold that thought for just one second because, I mean, really the plan for the West Bank is that just, I don't know, someday the Palestinians will just give up and get up and leave or something, which is not really part of the plan.
It's just that you would need that to be part of the plan for it to make any sense.
And so instead it's just this ridiculous kind of status quo.
Not ridiculous in the ha-ha sense but in the completely untenable sense.
Well, and look what the Israelis have tried to do.
They go into the Oslo agreement in the early 90s and with the leadership – the leadership of the Palestinians has not always served the Palestinians well.
They've been corrupt and maybe lost some early idealism and just cutting good deals for themselves.
So under Oslo the Palestinians didn't gain freedom.
So what they did gain was some – the elite of the Palestinians, Abbas and the Palestinian – what became the Palestinian Authority, people that succeeded Arafat, they did all right because they get money from the Israeli government except when the Israeli government is withholding it to punish them.
And they get to – but they get to do the dirty work.
They're getting paid in effect to be the henchmen to keep order in the Palestinian areas of the West Bank so that Israel doesn't have to do the dirty work and look bad on TV because everybody's got a video camera in their pocket these days.
The Israeli soldiers can get caught.
So they said, okay, let's just have Palestinians do the dirty work.
We'll pay their elite to do it.
So they got – that's what they got out of Oslo.
The Palestinians got – the regular people got nothing.
They have no rights.
They get cut off from their own farms.
There was just a story last – or this week in the news about they get blocked from access to their farms or their olive grows or trees get burned down or the Jewish-only roads.
They get water diverted from their farms so that the Jewish settlements can have swimming pools.
I mean it's terrible.
Apartheid is a nice term for it.
The only difference is, like you say, the Israelis would want the Arabs to leave.
The South African whites didn't want the blacks to leave.
They needed the blacks to clean the toilets and sweep the streets, so they didn't want them to go.
That's not the case in Israel.
I think they'd be very happy to wake up one day and see all the Arabs out of there.
But the Arabs are attached to their homes and their land, and they don't want to go.
So I don't know.
I was about to mention the Palestinians inside.
Ilan Pape has a book from a couple years ago called The Forgotten Palestinians, and they've really gotten overshadowed, the Palestinians inside, the ones that hold citizenship.
But you see – and see, when I do interviews, I'll often hear from people saying, oh, you're all wrong about the Palestinians.
They're citizens.
They can vote.
They have parties and representation in the Knesset, in the parliament.
And, of course, that's certainly true in a very technical sense.
But they don't – what they don't have is they may have citizenship, but they don't have Jewish nationality.
And what counts in Israel is nationality, not citizenship.
They have two – those are two concepts in Israel.
Everywhere else, every advanced country, every more or less enlightened country, nationality is the same as citizenship.
If you're an American citizen, you're an American national and vice versa.
In Israel, you're going to be an American citizen – sorry, you're going to be an Israeli citizen, but there's no such thing as Israeli national.
You're either Jewish, Arab, and then there's a whole bunch of other categories, Druze, Circassian, a bunch of other smaller ethnic groups that have been around for – since ancient times.
And that's what counts as far as various rights go and access to resources.
The government controls almost all the land.
Very little land is private in Israel.
It's controlled by either a government authority or the Jewish National Fund.
And to be able to get building permits or a permit to build a new community, a new village or town, Arabs – it's just impossible for Arabs to get that permission.
And then when they go ahead and build illegal – and the Bedouins who are semi-nomadic, they also have stationary existence where they live in particular areas.
They're constantly being thrown off their land.
When they try to build homes, they get demolished and they'll rebuild them.
They get demolished again.
They get cleared out because the Israeli government wants to make sure there's a Jewish majority in parts of the Negev and parts of the Galilee in the north.
I hear Shlomo Sand say several times that there are areas in the Galilee up north that have majority Arab – Palestinian Arab population.
And he said, what if one day a separatist movement arises there?
I mean that's really interesting.
I never heard anybody talk about that.
What if one day they said, you know what?
We are going – we want to secede from Israel.
What the heck is going to happen?
It's not going to be pretty.
But they get moved out because there's a policy of Judaization.
And that's their term, not my term.
That's Israeli term where you want to make sure there are Jewish majorities throughout the Galilee and throughout the Negev.
And people are getting pushed off land even to this day.
And they're citizens.
They're getting pushed off.
They can't – they're not just an occupied population like the West Bank.
They're in Israel as it was in 1949.
Well, and the Bedouins especially are mistreated, right?
Yeah, terribly.
They wanted to locate – they uprooted a whole bunch of Bedouins and wanted to locate them near a garbage dump.
Remember that from last year or the year before?
I wrote about it.
It's in my book.
I discuss it.
Somewhere near – it's relatively close to Jerusalem.
So they said, hey, you're going to be in the suburb of Jerusalem.
Yeah, like right next to this smelly landfill basically.
And that group had been driven off land more than once, which is true of the Bedouin.
The Bedouin have been given a very bad time.
Culturally, they're different from the other – the Palestinians because, like I say, they do some moving around.
They're semi-nomadic.
But they do have villages and homes.
They don't just live in tents, which they then take down and take with them.
They have permanent structures.
All right.
Well, listen, we're already over an hour, so let me go ahead and say it.
But Hamas, Hamas, Hamas, Hamas, Hamas, Hamas.
Well, you know, the most general point I can make is when you victimize a people like this, you are going to get the emergence of extreme – extremes and radicals who – they'll say, look, we've tried moderate means.
We've tried diplomacy.
We've tried talking.
Nothing's working.
Nothing's any good.
There's only one thing our oppressors understand.
So you're inviting the worst kind of extremism.
So to blame Hamas, you know, look in a mirror if you want to know where Hamas came from.
And then it actually – and it was helped along by the Israelis very directly because in the late – what is it?
The late 70s and 80s, they wanted a religious rival to the secular PLO and Fatah, which was the leading organization within this PLO, which was a coalition.
Then it was Arafat's organization.
He was a secularist.
You know, if you think back to Arafat or go back and read his stuff, there's no jihadi stuff, right?
He's not been like bin Laden or Zawahiri or – what's his name?
Al-Baghdadi.
He wasn't a religious fanatic.
He was a secular – it was a secular movement.
So Israel got this bright idea.
The leaders got this bright idea.
Hey, let's help along this group.
It already existed.
It was an offshoot, I think, of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Let's help this group along because it will draw away some of the support the Fatah has, and that will mean it will be easier to deal with.
Divide and conquer.
Fragment the opposition.
Then, of course, they said we can't deal with the Palestinians because, look, they don't even speak with a unified voice.
So no matter what – and then when they joined together, once in a while Hamas says, okay, we're going to join with the Palestinian Authority and join in a coalition.
We can't talk to people who have Hamas in their organization.
I mean it's another – you get the pattern here?
They can't talk to the Palestinians no matter what.
In the late 70s, Arafat said, okay, look, two states is fine.
We'll take two states.
We'll take 22 percent.
You keep the 78.
That's what happened after 67.
Originally, he was for one democratic state when he spoke to the UN in 74, but later on he said, look, okay, give us the 22.
We'll all be happy with the 22.
No, did they ever get – did he ever get praised for concession?
It's only Israel that gets praised for concessions when it makes a minor little tweaking of its hard line.
And then when the Arabs – when the Palestinians say we can't accept that because we don't get a real state out of this.
We're not even able to be in charge of our own security.
We can't take this or we want changes.
The whole world – the U.S. administration and the Israelis then say, see, it's the Arabs.
We can't talk to them.
They're intransigent.
That's their favorite word, right?
We can't talk to them.
They're not interested in peace.
The whole system has been rigged on behalf of Israel because the U.S. is in their corner.
The U.S. has never been an honest broker.
So it's a mess.
And I don't have a solution to it.
Yeah.
Well, you know – and that is one part.
In fact, that was where my conversation with her started, where she said, well, what does he say the solution is?
And I says, well, he's really pessimistic about that.
There are huge obstacles to any real resolution here, and most of those obstacles being the Israelis have all the power and have the USA behind them, and they refuse to give in on anything.
And so we're kind of stuck here, you know?
And now they have a Saudi ally because the Saudis, I can't believe they're actually afraid of Iran, but it's useful to be – to portray Iran as an enemy, and that's true of Netanyahu and the Israeli government too.
So they have a common apparent enemy or convenient enemy, and so they're on the same side, and the Saudis don't care about the Palestinians.
They'll use them when it's to their benefit.
They'll champion them when they can get something out of it, but they don't care.
And now we've got the Jared Kushner plan that's coming along, the plan of the century, that's going to, what, try to buy off the Palestinians by getting, what, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to put some money in for some jobs and some infrastructure, and that's it.
And the Palestinians are supposed to say, oh, great, we're going to have a better life.
Thank you.
That's all we need.
That's nonsense, and nobody believes that's going to succeed.
But that's where things stand.
Nobody really cares about the Palestinians.
Yeah, that's their best shot that they have is some PR stunt that's just set up to make them look ungrateful for being unreasonable for accepting an unreasonable – or refusing to accept an unreasonable offer.
So, yeah, par for the course at the end of the 20 teens here.
Okay, well, listen, thank you very much for writing this book.
I think it's so important, and I think the word, once it starts getting out, about just how great it is.
I think this will really take its place as the libertarian take on the Israel-Palestine issue.
I think you did such a great job on it.
And I love talking with you, and I'm so grateful that you let me record it to play back later for strangers.
I am, too.
I'm glad you recorded it.
And thank you for all your help on the book and working on the book and also publicizing the book.
Yeah, any time.
I hope it opens some people's eyes.
I mean, I don't know what those people then do after that, once their eyes are open, but it can't hurt to have their eyes open.
Yep.
Well, it's all ripples in a pond and things like that.
All right.
Thanks again, Sheldon.
Appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Any time.
Bye-bye.
All right, you guys.
That's the great Sheldon Richman.
He is at the Libertarian Institute.
He is executive editor there, libertarianinstitute.org.
And he is a contributing editor also at antiwar.com.
To be or not to be a Jewish state, that is the question.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
