Hey y'all, Scott here.
Here's how to support the show.
Patreon.com slash scotthortonshow if you want to donate per interview.
And also scotthorton.org slash donate.
Anyone who donates $20 gets a copy of the audiobook of Fool's Errand.
Anyone who donates $50, that'll get you a signed copy of the paperback in the mail there.
And anyone who donates $100 gets either a QR code commodity disc or a lifetime subscription.
And only for $100, not two, a lifetime subscription to Listen and Think audiobooks, Libertarian audiobooks, listenandthink.com there.
So check out all that stuff.
And of course we take all your different digital currencies, especially Zen Cash and all the different kinds of Bitcoins and whatever's are all there at scotthorton.org slash donate.
And get the book Fool's Errand and give it a good review on Amazon if you read it and you liked it and review the show on, uh, you know, iTunes and Stitcher and that kind of thing if you want.
All right.
Thanks.
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.
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 the great Sheldon Richman, my partner at the Libertarian Institute and author of 10 million articles about every libertarian thing and great books about government school and about the welfare state and guns and all kinds of things.
He writes every Friday at the Libertarian Institute, TGIF, The Goal is Freedom.
Welcome back to the show.
How's it going?
Things are going very well, Scott.
Great always to be with you.
Sorry, I'm not in the studio there with you, but that's okay.
This is second best.
Yeah, that's true.
I miss you too, man.
Although it's only been a little while.
So listen, you wrote this really important article and they're all really great, but this is a really important one.
Well, you know what?
I don't know how to say the first word or the third word in the thing, which is your grandfather's name.
And I don't want to pronounce things wrong.
So you go ahead and say it.
Well, that's not his name.
His name was Sam Richman.
Oh, right.
That's his.
What is that?
That's like the Yiddish word for grandfather or something.
Yes.
We always said Zaydi.
Zaydi is kids growing up and Bubby.
Bubby was the grandmother.
That's fine.
We were just talking with Nasser Arabi about the Zaydi Shia, but that's different.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
It probably was pronounced in the old country as Zayda and Bubba.
Not to be confused with the people that voted for Clinton down here in Arkansas, you know, the Bubba vote.
But we knew them as Zaydi and Bubba.
So yeah, that's my grandfather, my paternal grandfather, who was Lithuanian by birth, came to the United States before World War I.
So he was kind of early.
He didn't come after World War II or between the wars.
And was an Orthodox Jew, but a very joyous and tolerant Orthodox Jew, unlike some Orthodox Jews who aren't so tolerant.
He was a great guy.
He was kind of a little guy.
He died in 1974.
So we got to spend a good bit of time with him.
And I would see him every Saturday.
He in his professional life had been a painter, house painter, you know, paper hanger.
But then in later years, when he was long retired, he ran a little synagogue.
He was the sextant, you know, kind of the guy that maintained, on the religious side of things, maintained the synagogue in Hebrew or Yiddish known as a shamas.
Anyway, I learned a lot from him over the years.
Very cool.
All right.
And now, so this article was originally published in 1989 in Wormia, the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, which there's some great guys.
They were the ones who had me out to give that talk in D.C. recently.
Great magazine.
It's been around a long time.
Great magazine.
The managing editor is Janet McMahon, who's a great person.
And it was founded originally by two former State Department guys, Andrew Kilgore and Richard Curtis, both of whom have unfortunately passed away.
But they were upset with, you know, the U.S. policy regarding Palestine and Israel.
And they, I don't know if they exactly left the State Department over that, but they left the State Department and decided they wanted to educate Americans on this issue.
And so they set up this magazine, it's part of the, I think it's called the American Educational Trust.
They have a great book selection.
You can go to their website.
Great.
But if you have trouble finding books that have, you know, what I regard as the real history of the foundation of Israel and related matters, that's the place to look if you can't find it on Amazon or somewhere else.
Yeah.
I went to their bookstore in D.C. where I gave that speech on YouTube there a few months back.
And it's just a cheap magazine.
I think it comes out every other month.
Just great stuff that you're not going to find other places.
That lady, Janet McMahon, very great lady too.
Okay.
So this is really a cool story, man.
I really like it.
It's the story of young Sheldon Richmond, growing up where you grew up and your parents and your family and your grandfather here and all their different takes on Zionism and your evolving understanding of the situation and everything.
So go ahead, man.
Let them have it.
Well, as you said, it was published in 1989.
They were running a series and they had different people contributing to it called Seeing the Light.
And it was about individuals' odysseys, you know, from sort of the conventional narrative that people just absorb by osmosis or from their communities or parents or school to seeing the Middle East, specifically Israel-Palestine, in a different way.
What I would regard as the more historically accurate way and morally accurate way.
So they would, you know, ask various people.
I was already writing a column for the Washington Report and had written some standalone articles too.
So they asked me, I don't know, maybe either I offered or they asked me to write a piece and that was the piece.
And then I compiled them in a book, by the way, which you can find at the bookstore you just mentioned in the book, their website, the book section called Seeing the Light.
And it's a compilation, I guess, of all the pieces.
And I'm very honored to have been included in that.
So the story was about how when I was growing up, I grew up in a very pro-Israel home.
I grew up in a conservative Jewish home.
So my parents weren't, you know.
And where are you from again?
Sorry?
Where are you from again?
Philadelphia.
Okay.
I grew up in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, northeast of Philadelphia.
And we were a member of a conservative congregation.
Sort of that middle ground between the Orthodox, of course, there are also various strains of Orthodoxy, but Orthodox on one side, which are the most observant, and then they had Reform on the other side, which had tried to modernize and in some ways Americanize Judaism.
They, you know, they kind of threw out the Hebrew during the religious services and went to Old English.
But in the middle position was this conservative strain of Judaism, which really was a reaction to the Reform.
It was a way of saying, whoa, you've gone too far.
We want to conserve some stuff, like Hebrew, in the religious services.
And so that's what we grew up in, even though my father and mother were conservative.
But my father's parents were Orthodox.
But they were, as I say, very tolerant.
They never were angry that, you know, my father wasn't as observant as they were.
I mean, he kept kosher in the house and stuff like that.
But we'd eat out at restaurants, things that my grandparents would not do.
Anyway, so part of that, of course, was being pro-Israel.
This is, I'm talking about the 50s and into the 60s, especially at the time of the 1967 war, which was like a shot of steroids into the American Jewish community.
When that war happened, American Jews were really feeling their oats.
There was a vicarious, you know, glory and joy, as if somehow this reflected on them themselves, as if they had fought the battles.
So all I heard in Hebrew school and from my larger family and from my parents in the synagogue all the time was pro-Israel, right?
Israel is this tiny sliver of the land in the Middle East surrounded by hostile Arabs who are anti-Semites.
They hate Jews for being Jews.
And you know, why can't there be peace?
Israel wants peace.
Everybody knows that line.
There was one dissenting voice in this, very strangely enough, that I'd hear very often on Saturday afternoons.
We'd go over to my grandparents' little apartment, it wasn't very far from where we lived, after Saturday Sabbath services, or what in Hebrew is known as Shabbos or Shabbat.
And sometimes politics would come up once in a while.
And Israel would come up.
And that was the only time I ever heard somebody say, the Jews are the cause of all the strife in Israel.
The Arabs want peace.
It's the Jews.
This is coming from my little old Zeta with the beard and, you know, he wasn't the Orthodox that wore the long black coat and the broad hats and had the very long beard and the little side locks that go behind the ear, the peyas.
He wasn't that.
He was more or less ultra-Orthodox, but nevertheless Orthodox.
I mean, he prayed.
He went to services three times a day, did all that stuff, always had his head covered, but he wasn't what we think of as the ultra-Orthodox.
But he'd be railing against Israel, and my mother would say, how can you say that?
You should go and see what's going on there, what they've done, and he said, I wouldn't go there ever, never, I will never go there.
He would also officiate at our Passover dinner.
There's a big Passover dinner the first two nights known as the Seder, where you read the story of the exodus from Egypt and stuff like that, and you go through this book which is known as the Haggadah, which is telling the story, and it's all about persecution and how basically never again, that sort of thing.
You get to a line, and then there's a big meal afterwards, you get to a line where you're supposed to say, next year in Jerusalem.
This is like a climactic point of the Seder.
And my grandfather, every time, would, with a twinkle in his eye, say, next year in Philadelphia, which of course is where we were already.
And everybody would laugh.
And I think they were just saying, ah, Zedek, Shloim, as he was known, Shlomo is Hebrew or Jewish for Samuel, he's being funny, he's got a sense of humor, ha ha ha.
But only later did I realize, he wasn't, it wasn't a joke.
The tongue was not planted fully in cheek, maybe it was partly there, but not fully.
He was making a comment.
He had no intention of being there next year, even spiritually, being in Jerusalem.
And it wasn't until years later that I did enough reading to know what he meant, and unfortunately, he was already gone by then.
And I didn't ever really get to sit down with him one-on-one and have a serious conversation.
But that was extremely influential.
And now, so you talk a little bit in here about a religious view, an Orthodox religious view of Zionism that makes it sort of revolutionary against Judaism.
Can you talk about that a little bit?
And I think, as you already said, that wasn't your grandfather's point.
His point was about the reality of who wants peace and who does not.
Both points are interesting.
People need some historical perspective here, which I don't think most people have.
When the Zionist movement formally gets started in 1890s by Theodor Herzl, and by the way, just a quick biographical note on him, Herzl was a completely secularized Jewish journalist who was from Austria-Hungary, lived in Vienna, but I don't believe he was actually born in Vienna.
I think he was born in Hungary.
He was completely secular.
He used to have a Christmas tree in his house.
I think his kids were not raised in a Jewish way.
But he witnessed, he covered the Dreyfus trial in France.
And as people will recall, that was a case where a Jewish army officer in France was framed as a spy, basically, leaking secrets.
And it was a framed job, and he'd been convicted.
But then Emil Zola wrote the famous Jacques Hughes, where he exposed it all, and I think eventually Dreyfus was cleared.
But this had a big effect on Herzl, not that he became a religious Jew at all, but he became what you might think of as a Jewish nationalist, or he started believing in the Jewish people.
And he said, it's the anti-Semites that make us Jewish.
That's pretty much a direct quote, which is a very interesting and revealing quotation.
So he decides he needs to do something to solve what was known as the Jewish question, because he basically accepted the idea that Jews were aliens in any country, anywhere.
And his first proposal, for people who don't know, was to approach the Catholic authorities in Austria and offer a mass conversion of Jews to Catholicism in Austria.
He thought that would be a way to solve the Jewish question.
That was turned down.
So he starts looking for another alternative, and he hits on, and this idea had been floated before Herzl, but he hits on the idea of a Jewish state somewhere.
Palestine was one option, but yet there are other places where, you know, thought about, like in Argentina, or I think either Mauritania or Mauritius, I always get them confused.
So it was just the idea of the Jews need their own state.
Don't forget, this is the age of nationalism, right?
After the French Revolution, this idea of nationalism comes in and peoples should have their own states.
So he just tied into that.
But he was complete secularist, so when the movement gets going, it's run by secularists and, you know, atheists.
Ben-Gurion, who was a leader of this movement and became the first prime minister of Israel, was an atheist.
He was a socialist, he was a European atheist.
And the religious Jews of the day, the Orthodox of that time, knew it, and they denounced the movement.
It was a minority movement.
It was considered a bunch of freaks, basically, because in the Orthodox view, it was presumptuous for mere mortals to decide that the Jews will go back or go to, however you want to think of it, to the Holy Land.
They were expelled.
That was God's design, and it was the Messiah who would lead the Jews back to Palestine or Israel.
And so they denounced it.
It was not well-received.
And so, you know, he had to fight against that.
So he had to fight against those people.
In fact, the way he and his colleagues who led this movement talk, if you go back and read the quotes, and you can easily find them looking on the internet, if someone today were saying that, you'd say that person must be an anti-Semite.
These were the original self-hating Jews.
They belittled the Orthodox, the people that did wear the long black coats and the broad hats and prayed three times a day.
They belittled them as superstitious, as dirty, I mean, really horrible stuff.
I don't know that David Duca said stuff as bad as that.
And they promoted this idea, which will sound familiar, picked up by some other pernicious movements, that the Jews were inevitably aliens in any place but their own homeland, wherever that may end up being, although Palestine was becoming, I guess, the favored place.
Of course, the problem was, you know, how to get clearance to go to Palestine, because the Ottoman Empire was ruling it at the time.
Anyway, I call them the first self-hating Jews, and the rhetoric sounds clearly anti-Semitic, because these were secularists, atheists, they saw themselves as modern, and they thought the Jews could only be a normal people, they actually put it in those terms, could only be a normal people by being in their own, having their own country, their own state.
But it was a very small minority of Jews.
Now later, as the 19th century came to a close, in the early 20th century, Reform Judaism, which had started in Germany but really caught on in America, because I think it had that spirit of America we think of, modern, forward-looking, not fond of superstition, you know, that sort of individualistic idea, Reform Judaism was thriving.
And when they met their first sort of Congress to organize and made their declaration of what Reform Judaism was, it specifically said, we are not a people, Jews are not a people, they're a religious community comprising many peoples, peoples of many, all lands, you know, almost all lands around the world, and that we denounce the idea of a state.
A state is sacrilegious, has nothing to do with Judaism, and it would also compromise the rights of citizens of the United States, of Jewish citizens of the United States, because you'd have this dual, they foresaw it, the dual loyalty problem.
You know, what's your state, is it Israel or America?
They didn't want Jews to be subjected to that, and they were outright against it.
And so you had the so-called extremes, the Reform and the Orthodox, denouncing Zionism and this whole project, and they weren't against individual Jews, if they could peacefully move to Palestine, and there were Jews there.
There was this very small Jewish community, very small minority, that lived there peacefully with Arabs for a long time, farmers or whatever, artisans, and they weren't against people individually moving there, and some old Jews wanted to go and die in Jerusalem, and they went at the end of their lives.
But the idea of an organized statehood project was anathema to them, and they wanted nothing to do with it.
And that was carried on by the Reform Jews for a very long time.
Now, it ended up getting very watered down and basically compromised, but that's a whole story that maybe we can save for another time.
Hey, let me tell you about the sponsors of this show.
First of all, Mike Swanson.
He is the author of the great book, The War State, about the permanence of America's World War II military empire through the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations, the rise of the new right military-industrial complex after World War II.
The War State by Mike Swanson.
And also, get his great investment advice to protect your financial future there at WallStreetWindow.com.
He has a great understanding of what the hell is going on in these financial markets.
WallStreetWindow.com.
And listen, I know he'll tell you, you've got to have at least some of your savings.
You must know.
Some of your savings, however much it is, you've got to have metals.
And so, what you do is, you go to Roberts & Roberts Brokerage, Inc.
Gold, silver, platinum, palladium.
They have a very small brokerage fee in order to process for you and get you the very best deal.
And if you buy with Bitcoin, there's no premium at all for your purchases of gold, silver, platinum, palladium.
So, check those guys out.
Roberts & Roberts Brokerage, Inc. at rrbi.co.
You ever play baseball?rrbi.co.
And as I mentioned, Zencash is a great new digital currency.
It's also an encrypted method of internet messaging and document transfer and all kinds of things for your business, for your secret conspiracies.
Zencash.com.
Check that out at zensystem.io.
You can read all about how it works, every last detail, of course, at zensystem.io.
And then, there's this book about how to run your technology business like a libertarian.
It's called No Dev, No Ops, No IT.
And each of those is one word, three words, you know, get it?
No Dev, No Ops, No IT.
It's by Hussain Badakhshani, and it's about how to run your business right in a libertarian way.
LibertyStickers.com.
And Tom Woods Liberty Classroom.
If you like learning things, I'll get a commission if you sign up by way of the link on my website.
And listen, if you want a new...and the reason my website is down is my own broken servers.
But if you want a new good-looking website like the one I do have when it's up and running at scotthorton.org, then check out expanddesigns.com slash scott, expanddesigns.com slash scott, and you will save $500 on your new website.
Well, I mean, what changed everything was World War II, right?
Well, that's right.
And since you bring it up, I'll say something about that.
Yes, you have the horror, you know, just the terrible crimes, genocide of World War II.
And that gave the leaders of the Zionist movement an opportunity to, at least in public terms of public perception, change the outward appearance of Zionism.
So it went from a project in which all Jews were supposed to be urged to move, I mean, that was really the original program, right?
Jews could only be at home in their own state, Jews should move to Palestine.
That didn't go over very big, you know, you didn't have big numbers of Jews moving there.
And it became, at least in the public perception, it's a refugee project for the, you know, for the displaced persons, I think that was the term, of Europe, the Jews from Europe who didn't want to stay in Germany or had been driven from their homes or had been in the camps and were liberated.
And that, of course, won a whole lot of support.
And you can understand why, it was a horrible thing.
And that was a better sales pitch.
And it picked up from there.
And of course, you have America supporting that, you have the UN General Assembly recommending partition.
By the way, and Jeremy Hammond has a very good piece on this, which people should look up.
It's like the myth of the UN creation of Israel.
The UN did not create Israel.
The UN has no power to create a state.
The General Assembly, and I say the General Assembly, not the Security Council, General Assembly voted to recommend the partition because they had done a study.
That's the most it could do, is recommend it.
And they recommended it to the Security Council, but the Security Council has no power to do that either.
Israel then took it, and while they weren't totally happy with the division of the land, although they got the bulk of the land and they got the best land, they declared their independence on, what was it, May 15th, we're celebrating the anniversary now, 1948.
That's also what the Palestinians called Nakba Day, Nakba meaning disaster, because that was when 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes by Zionist, proto-Israeli military forces.
And that included massacres, most notoriously the village of Deir Yassin, where 354 men, women, and children were slaughtered by Menachem Begum, Begum and his Irgun, Begum, of course, future Prime Minister of Israel.
400 Palestinian villages just disappeared as a result of that.
They were just taken over, leveled, and rebuilt as Jewish villages.
And just to mention now, to bring it up to date, 70% or so of the people who are imprisoned in the Gaza Strip, and it is a prison, are refugees from those villages nearby who were driven out into Gaza.
They're either refugees or they're the children of refugees.
And so if anyone wonders why they're mad at Israelis and why some people sometimes lob rockets toward one of those villages down there, I don't defend throwing rockets into civilian areas, but it's at least comprehensible.
They used to live there.
They were driven out by militias.
Well, another fun fact, the majority of Gazans are minors, or in fact, the majority there are under 18.
So when it comes to collective guilt, I mean, these are people who couldn't possibly have been participating in any pseudo popular sovereignty when Hamas was elected in 2006.
And anyway, never mind the Gaza bombshell coup disaster and all that.
But yeah, might as well throw that in there.
And yeah, you know, constantly, as all of the slaughter against the Gaza protesters has gone on, I see references.
I saw one this morning, too.
This is like Mexicans trying to invade the United States when, no, it's really a lot more like an Indian reservation that the U.S. Union Army has under complete and total siege and is lobbing artillery at them, constantly bombing them and attacking them.
They dare to try to break out of their pen.
It's not like Gaza is a sovereign nation.
That's sort of the whole point, is that they're not.
Right, right.
Anyway, people just make up whatever they want and believe whatever they want.
But anyway, so this is kind of the thing, too.
And this is the important part of your story, right?
Is that you went from being raised on Israel, except with your one wise old grandfather, always having a little something to say, which was enough, I guess, to get your curiosity, Pete.
But then he grew up and you learned some things.
And so what was it exactly?
You mentioned these massacres and the Nakba.
I know the 750,000 driven out of their homes were probably not part of your upbringing there.
But so was that what did the trick for you?
Or can you talk about what it was you learned and when you learned in the context of how your position changed on this?
Yeah, and I'm going to elaborate on this in this week's TGIF.
Number one, I'm going to reprint the original 89 article.
And then I'm going to have an afterword, which will fill in some gaps.
I didn't, I wasn't able to tell the whole story in that piece.
So I want to, I'll flesh it out.
The next sort of stage in my education was I was at a conference, a seminar, summer seminar in 1978.
It was the first of the old Cato summer seminars.
They don't do these kinds of seminars anymore.
And one of the lecturers was the great Roy A. Childs, Jr.
And if your listeners don't know that name, I really urge them to become acquainted with it by Googling him and read, reading his classic essays.
He was, you know, he was only about my age, but he was an extremely well-read.
He was an autodidact, kind of read everything, was a great inspiration and teacher to many, many libertarians.
And he was for a long time, he was the editor of the old Libertarian Review, great magazine.
But then after that, he became the editorial director of the old Laissez-Faire books, which was a great libertarian book service that was then run by Andrea Millen-Rich.
And he reviewed the books.
He recommended the books that they would sell and he would review them.
And everybody of my generation in the movement learned so much from Roy.
He made authors known and available to people that might have had trouble, pre-internet, of course, had trouble getting any attention.
So he was extremely important.
And he lectured at this seminar and was talking about feudalism, best as I recall now, he was talking about feudalism and the difference between absentee feudal ownership and Lockean ownership.
In other words, Lockean ownership by means of mixing one's labor, the homesteading principle, which so many libertarians are attached to.
This idea that the way you take a piece of land from the unowned state in which we find it to an owned state is for a person to mark it off and mix his labor with it, to use Locke's phrase.
And so there's a difference between, you know, somebody acquiring land by tilling the soil, you know, a farmer who then goes to virgin land and turns it into a farm and someone getting land because the state grants the land, just like Henry VIII did when he confiscated the monasteries, the church properties, and gave them to cronies.
Or it was done, this kind of thing was done over and over again throughout history, all kinds of different countries.
And so the difference between a Lockean owner and a feudal owner who's gotten a whole bunch of land, much more than he could have mixed his labor with, and he gets it as a grant from the king or the sultan or whoever's in charge.
And then sometimes they would sell it off, that land.
And meanwhile, there'd be people working the land, right?
There'd be the peasants that would have to pay rent to what I would call illegitimate feudal owner.
And very, and what happened a lot in Palestine was Jews would buy land off of these absentee landlords, Jews who wanted to create the state of Israel, would buy, a lot of them were Turkish, right?
Because the Ottoman Empire, these absentee landlords were living in Turkey, but they were collecting, you know, rents from, or taxes really, from the people working the land.
But then somebody would make an offer and buy land from them and then kick off the Palestinians, the Arabs who were working the land, who had worked the land for generations and kicked them out.
This is way before 1948.
This is, you know, throughout the early 20th century and probably beginning of the 19th century.
This was part of the way to form the state of Israel.
So I learned about this through Roy.
This distinction was something I hadn't yet encountered, was still thinking about, talking about 1978.
And I talked to him and he recommended that I read David Hurst's book, The Gun and the Olive Branch, History of the Roots, sorry, The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, which I recommend to everybody today.
It's undergone a few different editions, so it's pretty up to date.
Very good book.
I can remember being in the laissez-faire offices photocopying chapters, and this is pre-internet, pre-Amazon, pre-Kindle, photocopying chapters to take home with me.
Because Roy said, you really need to read this book.
So I was like furiously copying at least key chapters.
It's a very good book and it's a very even-handed book.
He doesn't overlook or downplay Arab violence against innocent Jews who had been living for a long, long time in Palestine.
He puts it into context because the statehood movement was going on and people could read the handwriting on the wall and were getting nervous, but that didn't keep some from taking out their wrath on people who were innocents.
So I think it's a very fair book, but on the other hand, it does put it in full context, I believe accurately, which means it makes, by and large, the Palestinians are the aggrieved party.
So that was very important.
I also encountered in 1991 an article in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, which I'll link to in my piece, by Stephen Holbrook called Alienation of a Homeland, a very important paper that people need to read if they care about this, because it has the details about the land sales and it's got numbers, it's got names, it's got the records.
Holbrook went to look at the records and you'll see that by the time that Israel declared independence, Jews had only purchased about 7% of the land of Palestine and most of those were, I would regard as non-legitimate, non-Lockean sales.
They were sales with, you know, purchases from the absentee landlords and the tillers of the soil, the Lockean owners, the homesteaders, were kicked off.
And so if you want the facts and figures, you'll find them in Holbrook's article.
The third step, which was so important to me, was I attended a libertarian, sort of an advanced libertarian conference in Maine in 1980 and I met a great guy by the name of, and I think you've known him, you know him, you've interviewed him, Dean Ahmad.
Dean Ahmad is an American libertarian whose parents are Palestinian.
He's a Muslim.
He has since gone on to set up a fabulous organization called the Minaret of Freedom Foundation, which is where he presents the case for a liberal, and I mean that, of course, in the best sense, liberal Islam and the tradition.
He draws on traditions in Islam that, of course, get very short shrift or are totally ignored in American culture and American media.
And he is a libertarian.
He and I were both active in the Libertarian Party at the same time.
We served on platform committees together.
He used to do a, he does a fantastic impression of Ayn Rand.
I mean, in full dress.
Fantastic.
Accent and all.
That's funny.
He's a wonderful guy and he knows a hell of a lot.
And from him, I heard the first, for the first time, I heard the phrase, Deir Yassin, Deir Yassin.
And he, because he had written a poignant song about it and he sang it at this conference and we were moved to tears, at least I was.
And I talked to him later and just to learn as much as I could learn.
Deir Yassin was a, was a village that in April of 1948, during this onslaught by the militias, the Zionist militias and the future, basically the future Israeli defense force, slaughtered 354 men, women, and children, drove the rest of them out.
There were about 750 people, people living there and destroyed it, drove them out.
And that was just one of the 400 so villages that were just taken over, made for Jews only.
And the Palestinians were driven away and they, they scattered.
That's the part of the Nakba, the disaster that is observed.
And they were never allowed to come back either.
They're not allowed to come back.
And of course, part of the protests today in the Gaza Strip are, is, is on the right of return.
The people still carry around keys, keys to homes they once lived in that are either had been leveled or lived in by Jews today in places like Jaffa and other places, Tel Aviv.
So that was really then, Deir Yassin was the key to then understanding the rest of the Nakba and the fact of the 750,000.
Yes, that really drove home, because what Dean provided to me that they didn't get from the other things, which was more abstract, was the real human cost.
I mean, I should have thought of it myself, but to hear someone who had stories from parents and relatives and friends, you know, he, he's my age.
So he, he wasn't born in 1948.
Well, it's not just the Gaza prison, right?
It's still the occupation of the West Bank and millions of refugees now in Syria, in Jordan.
And the Palestinians in Israel itself, who didn't leave, I mean, not all of them were driven out, are third class citizens, not even second class citizens.
They're treated very differently.
People will say, oh, but they get to vote in the parliament.
Yeah, but there are so many limits on what they could possibly do.
Yeah, and they're part of no coalition ever.
So they have no power.
And they're cheated out of public services.
You know, as libertarians, we say that ought to be privatized, of course, but at the moment, it's not privatized, water and all that stuff.
It's under the control of government and they slight the Palestinian communities.
And in the West Bank, there are, of course, are horrible stories about swimming pools in the Jewish settlements, which keep expanding.
And meanwhile, Palestinians in their little towns are, you know, struggling for water, which, of course, the Middle East, water is pretty important.
So that should give you a picture of what's going on.
So that kind of rounded out my education sort of face to face with people.
And then I've just gone on to read and read and read.
And, you know, I only throw this in as a historical event of a historical interest.
Of a historical interest.
Most of my sources are Jewish sources, people who had Jewish upbringings and some of them still religious.
I was on I was a friend of some of the great reform leaders in the United States who were vehement anti-Zionists.
And the names that immediately come to mind are Rabbi Elmer Berger.
And I'll put links to books about him in my piece.
Jack Ross has a book called Outcast Rabbi about him.
He was one of the he's dead now for many years, but he was he was probably the last great, you know, rabbi lion of the American reform movement.
I mean, just a magnificent guy, fiery.
Murray Rothbard knew him.
That's how I got to know him.
I think occasionally referred to himself as a libertarian, but and he's got many, many books.
Last one's probably called I think is the last one is probably Memoirs of an Anti-Zionist Jew.
Alfred Lilienthal is another another person I knew who published a newsletter for a very long time, who traveled the world, spent a lot of time in the Middle East.
You know, hardcore anti-Zionist.
Alan Brownfeld, who's still active today because still running an organization which was set up in the late 40s with Berger's help, called the American Council for Judaism.
You can look up their site.
I mean, Brownfeld is still publishing a newsletter with great stuff, giving the full story of Israel and Palestine.
He's a man who's been dedicated all his life, very active in conservative politics, by the way.
He's not a libertarian.
He's certainly not a liberal in the Democratic sense, the Democratic Party sense.
He's a movement conservative.
You know, he knew Buckley and all those people, but he is fantastic and courageous and steadfast on this issue.
Well, you mentioned Murray Rothbard there.
Of course, a lot of libertarians look to him as a North Star on a lot of these issues.
What was his position?
Rothbard was in this line of thinking.
I got that.
I knew Murray and I talked with Murray occasionally about this.
I don't know that we ever had one long, in-depth discussion of all this, but he'd written some stuff in the old Libertarian Forum and probably other places.
Of course, he published Halbrook's paper, Alienation of a Homeland, in the journal Libertarian Studies.
He took the same position as—no, Murray was secular.
You know, Rabbi Berger and Lilienthal, they were Reform Jews.
I mean, they would claim—they would say they were theists.
Murray was an atheist, and yet he cared about this issue a great deal.
He sided with the Palestinians, and he knew how Israel fit into US foreign policy, which just is another, you know, argument for us in our case, because it's a tool used by the American power structure to govern the world and especially govern a very important region because of oil and other things, the way to counter Russia, et cetera.
So Murray saw that whole picture, and Murray wrote about it now and then over the years.
Yeah.
Man, I'm sorry we're out of time.
I've got to go into this other interview, but this has been great, and I like your ideas, so we're agreed.
We're going to do a regular kind of Friday discussion, you know, probably on the topic of your article for the week, because I'm lazy.
But I'm really looking forward to getting back into doing regular audio with you here, and great to have you on for this one.
Really good stuff.
And the article, again, of course, is LibertarianInstitute.org, Sheldon Richman.
By the time this is posted, the article will have been.
It's called Shabbats with Zaydi.
Great.
The TGIF.
Thank you, Sheldon.
Appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Anytime, Scott.
I look forward to it.
All right.
So you guys know the deal.
FoolsErin.us for the book.
ScottHorton.org and YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show for all the interviews.
4,500 of them now, going back to 2003 for you there.
Read what I want you to read at AntiWar.com and at LibertarianInstitute.org, and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
