Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys on the line.
I've got the great Sheldon Richman.
And guess what?
He wrote a new book and it just came out, published by the Libertarian Institute, where he is our executive editor.
It's called Coming to Palestine.
Congratulations, Sheldon.
Well, thank you very much.
And I got to doubly thank you, not just for the congratulations, because as I've told you many times, and I say in the book, and let me say this now publicly on your air, there wouldn't have been this book without you.
But thank you very much.
Yeah, I was happy to do it.
Listen, you wrote all the things.
All I did was just cram them together and ask other people to help me.
You did the hard work.
You did the hard work.
I did edit the thing.
But it's really good.
It's called Coming to Palestine.
And so now tell us about these essays.
You got them kind of in two big batches, right?
Yeah, I've been writing about this subject.
I started writing about the subject in about 1988.
So that's 30 years ago, right?
31 years ago.
I was a columnist for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
This is pre-Internet days, of course.
I wrote for a journal called Middle East Policy, which was previously called American Arab Affairs.
And I've written for the Institute for Palestine Studies, Journal of Palestine Studies.
And so I was writing and getting interested in this subject for the Cato Institute.
Before I joined the staff in 1991, I wrote a very long paper for them called Ancient History, which had as a subtitle something like U.S. intervention in the Middle East since World War II.
That was not just about Palestine and Israel.
That was about the whole Middle East.
And it was a pretty thick paper.
I think to that point, it was the longest policy paper, what they call policy analysis they had ever published.
Then because of the work I was doing, which a lot of it was oriented toward domestic policy, I wasn't writing about this subject.
In fact, I think you pointed out, you said, hey, there's like a 20-year gap here because I started writing again for the Libertarian Institute and also for my own blog, Free Association, and that was before the Libertarian Institute was even formed.
Last year, I started writing in great depth on this again.
And I'm not sure if I wrote anything this year or not, but certainly we had a bunch of stuff.
But you said, surely there's not a 20-year gap.
It must be other articles.
And I thought about it, and I looked, and I said, no, I was busy with other things.
I was editing The Freeman and doing other things.
And so I drifted away from it, not by any deliberate decision.
So that's the way it is.
But as it turns out, there's 40 chapters, not very long.
The whole book, including two introductions, is about 200 pages.
It's not an intimidating book.
I think anybody can pick it up and read it.
And you can start at any chapter you want, really, because it's not, like I said, it's not a unified book in the sense of I sat down, wrote a beginning and a middle and an end with a story and a punchline and a climax and all that stuff.
You can start anywhere you want.
You can go down the table of contents and say, oh, that topic interests me, the Golan Heights or Gaza or the 1967 war or whatever, and then you can jump to that.
You can do it any way you want.
Read it backwards if you want.
Anyway, that's the story.
30 years of work with a bit of a gap in between.
And finally, you know, at your prodding, we decided to make a book out of it.
Coming to Palestine's number one new release in War and Peace right now on Amazon.com, which I'm kind of mad at you because you kicked my book out of the number one position.
The great Ron Paul, the Scott Horton Show interviews, which we just put out two weeks ago, was sitting in that spot.
It comes and goes.
You dethroned me, but I'm happy to help.
I bought 10,000 copies.
I thought it was worth it to dethrone you.
I'm only seeing number six.
I don't know where you get number one.
Well, there's a big orange badge at the top.
New release in War and Peace.
And if you click on it, it has them ranked and they update this page all the time.
And there you are, number one coming to Palestine.
Now I'm in number three.
I didn't notice that.
I'm in three and five.
Now at the bottom of the page, lower on the page where it says number six, that gets updated less often.
Okay.
That's what I was looking at.
I didn't know.
You're right.
I didn't see that banner.
You're rocking it, man.
This thing is so good.
I'm so proud of this book and your effort that you've put into this thing over all these years in explaining this stuff to everybody.
And, you know, we had this talk the other day about being a secondhand dealer in ideas, and you're not claiming to be the PhD or the investigative journalist here, but you're surveying all of the most important work to put together the most important narrative here.
So what is that all about anyway?
Every one of these essays was written to—and this is the way I like to approach any issue.
Let's say I ended up in an elevator with someone who was interested in the topic but didn't know a lot about it and was just asking questions.
I am addressing that person.
So that's right.
I haven't used primary sources.
I have not gone through the Israeli archives or Palestinian archives or the British archives regarding the mandate of Palestine after World War I.
No, that's not what I've done.
What I do is I read a lot in a wide area of the literature, books and papers and articles and all kinds of stuff like that, and then I try to synthesize it.
I'll tell you about how I came to my point of view, but I approach it with a point of view.
I'm not saying I don't have a point of view.
I certainly do.
But I be as fair as I possibly can, and people can judge and people can check other sources to see how fair I've been.
So that's what I'm presenting.
The story is, and as we kind of say in the summary on Amazon, if you took the standard version that most people get from osmosis— most Americans, let's say, get from osmosis just by the culture, what's in the newspapers, what they watch on the network TV and whatnot, whatever their sources of news are and commentary.
If you take that version of the story of Palestine and the formation of Israel, the declaration of Israel's independence in 1948, if you took that story and— I'm only exaggerating a little bit.
If you turn it upside down, you will be much closer to the truth.
You'll be extremely close to the truth, which shows you how badly distorted the standard story is.
And I set out to demonstrate that in the book, and I hope people will see that's what I'm doing.
In other words, well, I mean, to sum it up then, what's the— if you could put the usual narrative and then yours in a couple sentences.
The usual narrative is Israel is this tiny little sliver of land.
This is what my parents always told me.
This tiny little sliver of land that Jews seeking refuge from Europe after World War II have settled and made bloom.
You turn it into this lush, green place.
It's a desert, essentially, without a lot of water.
And they're in this angry sea of Arabs and, you know, largely Muslims.
And often it's not acknowledged that there are Christian Arabs.
They get forgotten, unfortunately, a lot.
Anyway, so Israel's in this, like, tiny sliver of a little island, sliver of an island in this angry, angry sea.
And the phrase that's always used, and I've heard it a million times growing up, is that the Arabs wanted one thing, to drive the Jews into the sea.
And the Jews were just innocently, you know, minding their own business and turning that little sliver into this booming place.
Green, you know, with great farm products and, you know, industry and whatnot.
And how did Israel—how did the Jews get there?
They got there because most of the settlers, most of the early settlers in the late 19th century and then, you know, into the 20th century, and certainly the leaders were all Europeans.
There were Poles, there were Russians.
They were from, you know, central Europe and points east, eastern European, and then, like I say, the Russian Empire.
Well, we're not really told how they got there.
Sometimes you hear that, well, they bought the land, but just somehow naturally they have it by right, and it's only irrational, hateful Arabs, Muslims, who don't like this.
They can't stand it because they're anti-Semites.
They hate Jews and want to kill them and drive them into the sea.
That's the standard story.
We can go into details, but in fact, it's just not true.
And I show in the book, it's documented in the book, number one, the way that most of the land was acquired by European Jewish Zionists was by force, by driving people off the land, including some massacres, dispossessing people, buying land from absentee feudal landlords and kicking off the people who had been farming it and whose families had been farming it for, you know, 1,000 years, more than 1,000 years.
It's known as the Nakba, which is Arabic for catastrophe.
It's openly talked about these days even by defenders of Israel as ethnic cleansing.
There are historians who got into the documents, the government archives in the 1980s, Jewish-Israeli historians, who wrote a bunch of books, I discussed them in my book, calling it ethnic cleansing.
Some of them said, yeah, it's unfortunate the ethnic cleansing didn't go far enough, stuff like that.
So that's what I mean when I say the version that people absorb from the culture is pretty much directly opposite of the truth.
It's also not true that the Arabs were an angry sea of anti-Semites.
They weren't anti-Semites.
First of all, Jews and Arabs and Muslim Arabs lived peacefully in Palestine and that area for a very long time.
They lived peacefully.
There's an old Jewish community in Jerusalem and other parts of what's Israel today.
There was no trouble.
They were known as Palestinian Jews and they got along very well.
The trouble only begins, as my grandfather told me back in about 1967, with the Zionist movement.
And it seems to me if someone who's claiming to be Jewish comes on your land and kicks you off and you get mad, that doesn't sound like anti-Semitism to me because the material fact is not that the person is Jewish or claims to be Jewish.
That's even debatable.
It's that they're kicking you off your land that you and your family lived on for 1,000 years, 2,000 years.
Again, I'm going back to the biblical times, to the land of Canaan.
We used to say Canaan in Hebrew.
So Arabs made repeated efforts to live peacefully with Israel from the very start, even though the U.N. recommended partition without consulting the Arabs.
The Arabs were the majority population.
Jews at best had bought 6 percent of the land of historic Palestine.
And Arabs made repeated efforts, including Nasser.
I grew up learning that Nasser was the new Hitler.
There's always a new Hitler, right?
Nasser is the new Hitler.
He was making repeated efforts, including using an American Quaker intermediary, trying to make peace with Israel in the 50s, in the early 50s, pre-55.
Israel doesn't become a nation until 48.
That's not very long after.
And so you can find it in the book.
It's all in the book.
It's just about everything you hear in the establishment version is wrong.
Hey guys, Scott here.
I've got some books you should read.
A great history of the early Cold War.
How to run your computer business like a good libertarian.
Oh yeah, and don't forget Fool's Errand.
Time to end the war in Afghanistan, by me.
Hey y'all, here's the thing.
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Well, and also there's the whole current circumstance too, which you write about in there, of the situation that the Palestinians are in.
Did you see this?
I actually have it here because I posted it in our little message thingy to you the other day.
This quote from Ariel Sharon that I saw over at mondoweiss.net, Sharon in 2003, saying, The idea that we can continue holding under occupation, and it is occupation.
You might not like this word, but it's really an occupation.
To hold 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation is, in my opinion, a very bad thing for us and for them.
Right.
And he's, of course, not the first high-ranking Israeli government person to say things like that.
In 67, when that war occurred and the West Bank and Gaza Strip were seized, although they weren't attacked by Palestinians from the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, Israel did the attacking, and then they did the attacking on a couple of surrounding countries.
Ben-Gurion, the retired first prime minister, was also concerned for the very same reasons, not so much out of kindness for the Palestinians.
I mean, he oversaw the driving out of 750,000 Palestinians in 1947 and 48, but he realized that this was a time bomb because what do you do?
I mean, that's people talking about that today.
What do you do with all these people?
They don't have any rights.
They're under basically military rule in the West Bank, and it's basically a prison in Gaza with the Israeli government controlling entry and exit by any means of people and goods from Gaza.
So you can't just sit on that forever because they're not going to take it, and world opinion and American opinion will start to turn against you.
So some of the more savvy, let's call them pragmatic, leaders understood that, and what that leads you to, we should understand, is that some of the people who favor a two-state solution don't do it for really positive reasons because they're afraid of a one-state solution where Arabs will shortly, if it hasn't already happened, if you take all the Palestinian Arabs that are in the occupied territories and Israel itself, they'll outnumber the Jews.
So if you have a truly liberal democratic society with equal rights for everybody, how can you call it a Jewish state if the Jews are in the minority and religious law doesn't prevail?
Especially if they invite all the refugees home.
Well, then there's also the millions of refugees who are in other countries.
Some of them would want to come home.
I don't know if they all do, but some of them would want to come home.
So it's a demographic time bomb, and some of the more pragmatic and savvy Israelis have understood that.
Others are holding out hope that somehow they're going to come up with a way to transfer the Palestinians out of the territories into neighboring countries, and that way the Jews can have those territories free of Arabs, of Palestinians.
Yeah, they need that breathing room.
Yeah.
I mean, the question is, what do you do in the meantime?
And I think the politicians have a real problem on their hands because any way they move, they see a bad outcome.
So they couldn't transfer.
It would be very difficult for them to try to pull off a transfer today.
The world, I don't think, would put up with it, and the Arab countries that would be expected to receive the Palestinians from this transfer would be protesting.
And, of course, the Palestinians themselves would protest.
So they can't do that, but on the other hand, what can they do?
William Kristol is about the only guy who I heard say on TV in the last year or so, oh, no, the status quo is a perfectly good option.
I don't know why people say there's only two alternatives.
No, the status quo is the third alternative, and it's perfectly practical.
He's the only one I've ever heard say that.
Maybe there are other people that believe that.
But I don't know what he means by that.
How can he think that that's a good long-term solution?
Yeah, well, they're just kicking the can down the road, right?
Like pulling out of Afghanistan.
No one wants to be the one.
Well, and, you know, years ago I interviewed Noam Chomsky, and he emphasized what they call establishing facts on the ground.
In other words, let all the politicians and all the TV cameras discuss whatever they want, and in the meantime we will slowly annex the West Bank piece by piece, settlement by settlement, block by block, and then, again, at some point kicking the can down the road.
At some point the Palestinians in the way are just going to disappear.
At some point they'll annex enough of it that they'll just have to, I guess, give up or something.
Again, I don't know.
We'll see how it works out, but in the meantime, colonize as much of the West Bank as you possibly can under any excuse.
Right.
And not too fast to create a backlash like you're warning, you know.
The facts on the ground idea dates back to the very initial land grabs and the establishment of Israel.
They did it with the 47-48 offensive against the Palestinians, and when they declared independence in May of 48, they didn't declare their borders because, and this was self-conscious on Ben-Gurion and the parts of the others, they didn't want to commit themselves.
They thought they could get more.
Even during the armistice or the ceasefire, they kept encroaching in Golan and other places.
In 67, they grabbed the rest of it.
They grabbed, again, the West Bank and Gaza, and they built settlements.
And even in the Golan, they built settlements.
They said they needed the Golan for a security buffer, and what did they do?
They built settlements there.
Well, what kind of security buffer if you're putting civilians there?
So the idea was, no, once it's established, the world is not going to make us take them out.
And that's been the thinking, get the fact established on the ground.
And, you know, when they talk about negotiations with the Palestinians, the Israelis will often say, no preconditions, no preconditions.
And when the Palestinians say, well, stop building settlements then, because you're building settlements on the very land we're supposed to be negotiating, and they say, no, sorry, that's a precondition.
That's the precondition, building settlements.
No stopping settlements would be a precondition.
But, you know, it's been compared many times to two people, you know, going in on a pizza and sitting down, and while they begin to talk about how to divide up the pizza, the other guy is eating the pizza.
So it's a mockery.
They make a mockery of it.
There's no real peace process.
And besides, we don't need just a peace process.
We need a peace and justice process, because the Israelis have always offered the most, you know, stripped down thing.
It's never – they never – they can never demand too many concessions from the Palestinians.
And every time they make an offer, it's the – you know, the media in America and the American leaders and much of the world says how generous Israel has been.
The Palestinians are never portrayed as generous, even though they've backed down.
They're willing to – they've been willing to accept 22 percent of Palestine for their own second state, and that's never considered generous.
When Arafat at some point decided, okay, there's not going to be one state.
We'll recognize Israel and, you know, let us have the West Bank and Gaza.
That's the 22 percent.
Nobody called that generous.
So the whole way that this is portrayed to the American public and beyond America is rigged against the Palestinians and in favor of the Israelis because the Israelis are more Western.
You know, a lot of them who get on US TV don't even have accents.
A lot of them grew up in the United States.
My cousin went to high school with Netanyahu, grew up in the US.
There's a business – they worked in business with Mitt Romney before going back to Israel.
A lot of them have dual citizenship.
So they can speak as if they're Americans.
Then they put an Arab on who's got a heavy accent, and he's dark-skinned, and a lot of Americans are going to say, oh, yeah, that's those – they're terrorists.
We know them.
They're terrorists.
Yeah, of course, as you were mentioning before, it's scarcely mentioned that a fifth of the Palestinians are Christians.
So that kind of would be – if it was part of the conversation, it would be a little bit of a gray area in this black-and-white, so to speak, sort of racist narrative where the Israeli Jews are whiter, so we prefer them to the Palestinians.
Well, hey, but some of the Palestinians are Christians, like the super majority of the population of the United States.
So does that change your mind at all, or do they count as half a human or something?
If an Arab is a Christian, what about that?
When ISIS blows them up, Americans cry crocodile tears, even though it's their anti-Iran policy that led to it.
But anyway, they care when ISIS is killing Christians.
So what about when Israeli Jews are doing it?
Well, of course, they're not white either, the Christians, the Palestinian Christians, because they're most recently Arab, but even – I mean this is an issue I'll bring up quickly.
We don't need to pursue it.
We call them Arabs, and they're part Arab, but the fact is the people who live in Palestine, not the Europeans, but the non-Europeans who have been in Palestine, are the descendants of people who you can trace all the way back to the early days.
I'm talking about pre-Joshua, conquering Canaan, because there were always people there.
Now they got conquered by different people, and then people – new people would be there, and they would mix because people intermarry.
That's what they end up doing.
They intermarry.
They have children.
So you have this amalgamation of a population that is really the descendants of many, many people who have passed through Palestine.
That's one of the essays in the beginning of the book, chapter two or three, is depopulating Palestine and dehumanizing the Palestinians.
In fact, I quote some Israeli leader, I forget who it is now, who says – Ben-Gurion.
I think I got it from Shlomo Sand.
Well, yeah, I'll mention that book in a second, but there's someone else who says something like – because a more current person says something like, you know, the Palestinians have the best claim to this land because they do go all the way back.
Now, you mentioned Ben-Gurion.
True.
In 1918, Ben-Gurion, who would become 30 years later the first prime minister of Israel, along with Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who would become the second president of Israel – they have prime minister system, parliament system – they wrote a book.
I believe it was never translated into English.
It's available in Hebrew.
I don't know if it's still in print, but it was in Hebrew.
And that book argued that the Palestinian Arabs and the Palestinian Jews – in other words, the people that were already there pre-Zionist movement – are descendants, according to Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi, are descendants of the original Israelites.
And I didn't mention the Canaanites, but the original Israelites.
Now, the reason they did that, their agenda – I mean, it was true, and Zvi was a historian.
Ben-Gurion wasn't, but Zvi actually had credentials in this area.
The reason they wrote about it, it was true.
That's one reason, but the reason, you know, just because something's true, you don't have to write about it and promote it.
The reason they promoted it was they – in 1918, they thought they could win the Palestinians over to the Zionist cause.
They'd rather have a friendly population there than a hostile population.
Obviously, it's easier.
So that was the strategy.
They said, hey, these are our brothers.
Look at the names of towns.
They sound like ancient names that go back to the biblical times and the days of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
It was very open to that.
In the 20s, when the Zionist program becomes clear and Arabs are getting kicked off farmland they farmed for a long time and weren't able to get employed because the Jews wouldn't employ them because they only wanted to employ Jews, they started – in other words, when the Palestinians saw the program and got nervous about it and even hostile and there were cases of violence, which is certainly to be condemned, indiscriminate violence, Ben-Gurion basically flushed that book down the memory hole because it was no longer a convenient truth.
They always said, okay, these people aren't going to be our allies, so let's stop talking about them as being our brethren, our distant relatives.
Shlomo Sand's book, The Invention of the Jewish People, goes into this in great detail, and I quote him, I draw a huge amount on him because his work is extremely good and it has withstood the criticism of reviewers, hostile reviewers.
Well, and this is not to give too much of your great new book away, but this is an important part of that where it's a revealing anecdote here, right?
Where Shlomo Sand goes to, I forget which university there.
Sand, I think he may be emeritus now, retired.
He was in the history department at Tel Aviv University.
He has a history of Europe.
He has a history of Europe.
So when he's writing his book, he gets to the exile, the Roman exile in 70 of the Common Era.
Christians call it 70 AD.
Anyway, 70 CE, let's call it.
So the story is the Romans conquered Palestine and shipped, you know, exiled all the Jews to Rome, and that's where we get the wandering Jews.
That's where they've been.
Jews have been in the diaspora ever since, right, wandering around, hoping for the day they can go back.
That's the story.
So Sand gets to that point where he's, okay, I've got to write about this.
He goes through the Tel Aviv University Library, his university.
He expects to find, he says there are books about obscure individual shtetls in Russia, whole books.
So he figured there's going to be a whole wall of books about the exile.
This is a big deal.
He doesn't find one book.
The only book he finds that's the least bit relevant was a reverse exile.
In other words, after the Romans conquered, they kicked some Jews out of Rome and sent them to Palestine.
So he goes to the Department of Jewish History, by the way, which is separate from the Department of History.
That's true of Israeli universities, according to Sand.
They don't integrate Jewish history into history.
He goes to the Department of Jewish History and talks to the experts there.
It's Tel Aviv University.
It's not some podunk, you know, little state college or community college.
He says, how come no books on the exile?
And he's told, and you can find his lectures on YouTube.
They're wonderful.
I love the accent.
I love the Israeli accent.
Sorry.
He's told it wasn't exactly an exile.
There's no exile.
Now, that's not the only story.
Well, importantly, for people who aren't familiar with the line here, the story is that screw all the Palestinians because the Bible says all this land belongs to the Jews.
So even if it's been 2000 years of exile, if they're from Lithuania or if they're from Morocco or if they're from Ethiopia, they have, or if they're from New York City or Austin, Texas, then they have more right to that land than the people who are from there because of this all powerful supernatural override of regular natural rights.
But then this raises the all important point that actually these are the descendants of those that even under the myth were promised this land, not a bunch of Lithuanians or Poles or Russians or Americans.
The Jews weren't kicked out.
No, I think they took away some intellectuals or some of the leaders to get them out of there.
Maybe they thought they'd be troublemakers, but they needed the farmers and the taxpayers.
As Sam points out, the Romans needed them.
You don't go empty.
And they didn't tend to do that, empty a place.
First of all, they didn't have the transportation means to empty a place.
It wasn't just a few people.
It was like, I don't know, some hundreds of thousands of people.
So you can't just, what do you do?
Put them on a train?
They didn't have trains.
So they couldn't get rid of them.
And they didn't want to get rid of them.
They needed the tax money.
So they had this idea that since they were exiled, they're wandering around.
So the question then is, oh, here's the other thing.
It's not even consistent with the main story of the exile.
There's a glaring contradiction.
If all the Jews, the Hebrews, got exiled, if all of them got kicked out, how was there the Bar Kokhba revolt, which is a major revolt?
It's as big as the revolt against the Romans some 60 years later.
And then there was another big revolt after that.
And then there are accounts of how Jews resisted the Arab invasion in the, what, 7th century.
Where would those Jews come from?
They got kicked out in the 70s.
How are they fighting in the 7th or 8th century the Arab invasion and the Muslim invasion?
It doesn't make any sense.
Sure, people came in and conquered.
And then some of those early Jews converted to Christianity.
Let's face it, some did.
First of all, Jesus was a Jew, right?
So some number converted.
When the Muslims came along, some converted to Islam.
San says one incentive to convert to Islam was it got you a tax exemption.
Apparently a lot of Jews and Christians found that irresistible.
Hey, I'll change religions if I don't have to pay any taxes.
You know, the U.S. government wants to call me up and offer me that.
I'll think about it.
So they're the same people.
They're the descendants of those people.
So you might say, and it makes sense to ask, well, then where did all the European Jews come from?
And the Jews of other places.
How did Jews get to Iraq and Yemen and Iran and Turkey?
And that area in the Caucasus south of Russia between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea, like the Republic of Georgia.
Where did those Jews come from?
They're converts.
See, Judaism these days is not a proselytizing religion.
When I was growing up, I was constantly told we Jews aren't looking for converts.
We discourage converts.
You've got to really want to get in to be a convert.
That's how we learned it.
But that's not historically true.
In the early centuries of the BCE and in the first several centuries of the Common Era, Jews converted kingdoms, whole kingdoms, whole tribes in Yemen, in western Turkey, in that area called Khazaria between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea, in Iraq, in northern Africa.
The Berbers were converted.
Guess who was a Berber?
Gaddafi.
Gaddafi was an Arab.
He was a Berber.
Berbers were native to northern Africa and then they got conquered by Arabs and Muslims.
That's how Egypt wasn't always an Arab-Muslim place.
Neither were the other, that other in that top tier of countries, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco.
So it's very possible Gaddafi has Jewish ancestors because Berbers were converted.
And in those days, if a king converted, that meant everybody converted.
Everybody became Jewish.
And the king of Khazaria, who was caught between the Arab empire, Muslim empire on one side to the east and Christendom to the west, decided to play it safe and converted to Judaism.
No kidding.
You can read this in the book.
Arthur Kessler wrote a book called The Thirteenth Tribe about this in the 70s.
I'm sure we've learned a lot more since then, so it may not be correct in every detail.
But this story about the Khazars, which was a large kingdom, was a powerful kingdom.
I read, I checked the major mainstream Jewish histories many years ago, like the 80s.
I went to a library of a Jewish day school and looked through the leading works of history and they all talk about the Khazars having converted.
These days it gets played down because it's a threat to the program, right?
What you're saying is, hey, see, then those people moved west.
The Khazars got driven.
That kingdom fell when there was an invasion from the east and those people fled westward.
That's how they ended up in the area of Germany and further points west.
So that's a threatening story now to the Zionist program because what you're saying is the Ashkenazi Jews can't trace blood back to Palestine.
Well, and here's the thing, right?
This is almost like arguing that Saddam doesn't really have weapons of mass destruction.
So what if he does?
You still don't have the right to start a war.
And so it's sort of the same thing here, that even if they are descendants from their great-to-the-tenth-power grandma, exile doesn't mean they have the right to persecute anyone or steal anything.
So all American, Italian immigrants have the right to invade Sicily and conquer it and drive everyone who still lives there off their land?
That's crazy.
That's certainly true, but I don't want to distract from this point because I think it's a very important point because it has driven the narrative.
When the Reform Jewish movement got going in the U.S. in the 1880s, they said we no longer regard ourselves as a diaspora.
They rejected this very idea of a diaspora.
We no longer look to the days when the laws of Aaron will be restored in Israel, as they put it, the laws of Aaron, Moses' brother.
They rejected all that.
They took it out of the prayer books.
That was the Reform movement, and the Reform movement was anti-Zionist from the get-go.
It was being set up around the time that Herzl was getting his movement going, and there were Reform types as well as Orthodox.
Most of the Orthodox had no time for Zionism.
It was terrible.
When Herzl wanted to hold his first international meeting in Munich, Germany, the rabbis rose up and insisted that they not be allowed to hold the meeting there, so he had to go to Basel, Switzerland.
It was a very, very small minority movement.
The Orthodox said it's counterfeit Judaism.
They said, you're not Jews.
We're supposed to wait for the Messiah.
Who are you?
You're atheist, secular types who don't even observe.
I mean Herzl had a Christmas tree and didn't circumcise his son and once proposed that the way to solve the Jewish question in Austria was to have all the Jews convert to Catholicism.
The church wasn't crazy about that, so he moved on to plan B, Zionism.
That's the truth.
And the Reform rejected it because they said, who cares?
What happened in ancient Israel and Judah, you know, well, longer than 2,000 years ago, but sorry, shorter than 1,000 years BCE, that's roughly the date of the monarchy begins.
He says, who cares what happened back then?
Who cares?
That law is not relevant anymore.
That whole story is not relevant anymore, even if it's true.
And doubt was cast on the veracity of it anyway, and archaeology has not supported that story at all.
The archaeologists have been very cruel to the Bible, I have to say, the Old Testament and the New Testament too, but I haven't paid attention to that for this story.
So that all falls apart.
Now, you're right.
You can say, even if all that were true, you can't 2,000 years later or slightly less than 2,000 years later say, we're back.
Get out of here.
Because imagine, what if that happened everywhere?
There's no way you can put that genie back in the bottle without creating a whole new set of injustices, which is what happened.
If you look at 47 and 48, when 750,000 people are being driven off their land with several hundred actually being slaughtered, men, women, and children, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.
And that's where we are today.
Yep.
And as you're saying, the toothpaste in this case never really left the tube, so pretty hollow excuse on the part of the cavity creep.
You're right.
You're right.
Ultimately, you're right.
It wouldn't justify it anyway, but it isn't true.
And people, you know, all peoples in creating peoples, and Sand emphasizes this in his book, are based on mythology.
I mean, Italy is an example, right?
Italy was once a bunch of city-states.
They weren't Italy.
They spoke—their languages were so different, and a lot of times they couldn't understand each other.
The dialects were so different.
When Italy was united under, what is it, Garibaldi in the 19th century, they said—in fact, one of his aides says, okay, we have Italy.
Now we need Italians.
Because the people didn't have Italian consciousness.
They were from Sicily or from Rome or from, you know, whatever the various areas are, city-states.
But the politicians who want to consolidate their central power start creating, through mythology and storytelling and all that stuff, a national consciousness.
And over time, it eventually works.
You know, you attach benefits to it, of course, too, state benefits.
Well, the same thing.
There's no single Jewish people.
There are Jews of every race, every culture.
And by culture, I mean music, food, language.
I mean, what does a Yemeni Jew have in common with a Brooklyn Jew or even an Iranian Jew, aside from religious practices?
Yeah, they have that in common.
But they have, like, nothing else in common.
Would a Yemeni Jew be laughing at a Woody Allen movie?
You know, unless they already had a lot of exposure to Western humor and Western culture.
Probably not, because that comes from Yiddish, the Yiddish culture to some extent.
And Yiddish is not just a synonym for Jewish.
Yiddish is a specific thing.
Eastern, you know, Eastern Europe and, you know, into Russia in the 19th century and, you know, into the 20th century.
It's very specific.
So, you know, like I said, a Chinese—they're Jews in India.
The Jews were converted in India and other places.
You think they would understand, you know, one of the stand-up comics in the Borscht Belt?
They wouldn't.
They're totally—they don't have the—so they're not the same ethnicity, et cetera.
It's not a bloodline.
It's not a people in the sense of an ethnic group.
It's only a people, as the Reform like to say, it's a worldwide religious community.
Other than that, they're Americans.
They're Yemenis.
They're Iranians.
They were Iraqis.
There were a lot of Jews in Iraq.
Well, here's the thing, though, right, is none of this matters if we were talking about a land without people, which is amazing that anyone ever got away with pushing that fable.
That what, the eastern shore of the Mediterranean had yet to be settled in the 1940s?
But hey.
I heard that growing up.
Yeah.
You know, Eric Margulies tells the story.
Eric Margulies' mom reported on what had happened in the Nakba and all the refugees in the West Bank and stuff.
And she was threatened, and Eric Margulies as a young boy, they threatened his life.
You know, I don't know if it was the JDL or the equivalent back then or whatever, threatened to kill young Eric Margulies for his mom reporting that these Palestinians were real humans.
They existed in time and space.
You could find them if you went there.
And Herzl knew it.
Herzl sent emissaries to Palestine, and they came back and said, guess what?
It's not a land without a people.
But here's an important point I want to make.
The reform, the reform movement, which really was centered in the U.S.
There were some in Germany and Central Europe, but it didn't catch on the way it caught on in the United States.
They would have been against Zionism even if it had truly been an empty land, because they thought the idea of a state of the Jewish people violated Judaism.
They thought it was idolatry.
Look how they worship.
They're worshiping the land.
Do they want the temple restored?
You know, in those days, in biblical days, the temple was the only place you could go to sacrifice an animal for God.
You couldn't do it somewhere else.
I thought God was everywhere.
The reform threw that out altogether.
So they wouldn't support a state movement even if it truly had been an empty land, or if it was some island somewhere that there was not a single person on it, they still would have been against the movement.
And the other thing they said, and this is very relevant today, they said, look, if you set up a state and you say it's the state of the Jewish people, not just the state of the citizens who are there, again, let's assume it's even empty.
It's empty.
Some Jews go and say, okay, this is the Jewish state now.
We represent not just us who live here, but all Jews.
It's their homeland.
The reform said you are going to jeopardize every Jew who's a citizen in every other country because you're going to introduce the matter of loyalty, dual or even single, to the Jewish state.
And they condemned that.
But the Zionists thought that was fine, and they still do, right?
The more afraid Jews are, whatever they are, the more likely they are to just up and move to Israel.
Yeah, but the Zionists want it both ways.
They want dual loyalty.
Maybe they even want single loyalty.
I'll leave that open.
But as soon as someone else says it or even suggests it, like Omar or Tlaib, if you even get near that issue, then you're condemned as an anti-Semite.
So if the Jews cash in on this loyalty issue, that's fine.
Or the Zionists, I should say, because some Jews don't believe that.
There's still a reform movement today.
They're not really anti-Zionists, unfortunately.
They lost that.
But if a non-Jew in any way suggests that American Jews are also loyal to Israel, dual loyalty also means, by the way, let's be strict, dual loyalty.
Dual means two.
So they're not saying these people aren't loyal to America.
They're only loyal to Israel.
If they're saying there's a dual loyalty, that means they're loyal to both.
But that's the Jewish Zionist position.
You're supposed to be loyal to both.
I grew up going to Hebrew school.
That was my full-time school.
But twice a week after school on Sundays, I went to Hebrew school.
The Israeli flag was in the classroom.
The Israeli map was in the classroom.
I learned to sing the Israeli national anthem, the Hatikvah, in Hebrew school.
What does that mean?
And there's an Israeli national flag along with the American flag in every synagogue in the temple, in the main sanctuary on either side of the platform.
So there was always an American flag, too.
Don't get me wrong.
But it was both.
So why do some Zionists get so – why are they so sensitive whenever a non-Jew brings up this issue of loyalty?
That makes no sense.
It's having it both ways.
Yeah, well, because it just makes them sound disloyal when, after all, Israel's interests are entirely different than America's interests on almost everything.
And so, you know, they're worried about it looking like it is really one more than the other and the other more than the one, the foreign country more than the land that they're from.
They wouldn't concede that.
If you asked a really, you know, strong American Zionist, what would you do if there was a conflict or even a war between Israel and the United States over something?
The answer, I guarantee, will be that could never happen.
There can't be such a difference.
That's – I've heard it.
I heard it growing up.
And you would hear it today because they won't face that.
There can't be a difference.
We're committed to the same values.
You know how Obama and Biden and all the others talk about how we march in lockstep.
There's no light.
They always use these phrases, right?
There's no light between us, and they can't even conceive of it.
Now, you and I both know, and I know there's a few of us around who know, that there's – today there's conflict.
Netanyahu, the head of the Israeli government, wants to drag the U.S. into a war with Iran.
That's not in the interest of the American people.
Maybe in the interest of the military-industrial complex and some politicians, but it's not in the interest of regular people, regular Americans.
But Netanyahu must think it's good for Israel.
I don't know why he says it otherwise.
It's good for his political career maybe.
It's good for something, according to Netanyahu, but we know it's not good for us, normal Americans.
So there's a conflict.
So you like supporting anti-war radio hosts.
That makes sense.
Here's how you can do that.
You can go to scotthorton.org slash donate, and there's all kinds of options to do so and all kinds of different kickbacks at different levels.
Of course, take PayPal, Patreon, and all different kinds of digital currencies and all of those sorts of things.
And anybody who signs up by way of Patreon or PayPal to donate $5 a month to the show will automatically get keys to the Reddit room, my own private Reddit group that I have.
Quite a few members now and lots of fun in there every day.
So check out all about that at scotthorton.org slash donate.
And thanks.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, in my lifetime, when I was young, anti-Semitism was essentially unheard of in my suburbs.
You know, essentially it was all post-South Park and post-Iraq War II, which was spearheaded by the neoconservative movement, which is essentially the vanguard of the Zionist movement in America.
And once they got control of the Pentagon and the national security apparatus as best as they could, the first thing they did was start a war against a country that never did anything to us and which, by the way, ruined everything.
And so that was probably the thing that did most to spur renewed anti-Semitism.
It's sort of like, well, I mean, there's been a lot of kind of backsliding on racial issues in America.
But I think really for a long time, I mean, honestly, I lived my whole life.
I never heard adults calling people the N-word or using the J-word in a negative way against innocent folk and stuff like that.
That kind of thing.
But, you know, I think the neoconservatives and the Israel lobby and the Zionist lobby in the United States has probably done more to re-engender that kind of anti-Semitism from my grandfather's era or something like that.
Not that he was an anti-Semite, but I just mean from the olden days.
Then, you know, there's nothing that has contributed to that more than the Zionist movement in America.
And, of course, invoking the name of all Jews as they do whatever they do and daring you to criticize them on penalty of being smeared as an anti-Semite.
Right.
And, of course, bad conduct by Israel and support by American Jews of bad conduct by Israel certainly doesn't justify the collectivist bigotry that anti-Semitism is because you're blaming every Jew for what some prominent Jews are doing or some powerful Jews are doing.
That's not so to say the whole group is manipulating the whole world.
That's just nuts.
But you're not really allowed to say—Norman Fickelstein brings this out in his book Beyond Chutzpah, and I talk about it a little bit in my book, and I cite him.
You're not allowed to say that any animosity toward Jewish people could be brought on by bad conduct by either Israel or some Jewish people.
If you suggest it's a result of bad actions by some Jews or Israel, you're going to get condemned as an anti-Semite.
Now, Fickelstein makes an interesting point.
First of all, there's two things going on.
On the one hand, if a non-Jew tries to separate in his words Israel from the Jewish people, you're going to get condemned as an anti-Semite.
Hey, don't you know Israel is the state of the Jewish people?
How dare you separate them?
If you say there's a difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, you're going to be told that's anti-Semitic.
On the other hand, if you don't separate, in other words, if you sound like you're holding Jews responsible for what Israel does, you're going to get accused of being an anti-Semite.
So it depends on what day or what word is being responded to.
Fickelstein also points out that while you're not allowed to say some bad activity, bad actions by Israel or by some particular Jewish people could create animosity toward Jews, you are allowed to say virtuous activity might bring on anti-Semitism.
And he gives us an example in the 50s when Jews were very prominent in the civil rights movement.
And there was some, in other words, along with the anti-Black activity, there was, I guess, anti-Semitic vandalism and worse, violence.
And Jewish leaders, and he quotes them, Fickelstein quotes them, there were Jewish leaders saying, oh yes, that's brought on by our being in the forefront of the civil rights movement.
So in other words, you can say that the good virtuous activity stimulates anti-Semitism, but don't you dare suggest that vicious activity could stimulate anti-Semitism.
There's a problem there.
I mean, if one can, why can't the other one?
And again, there's no justification for anti-Semitism.
I don't know how many times I need to say that.
And certainly when it turns into violence, vandalism and violence against personal property.
No excuse for that.
There was a very good article, I wish I could remember the author, I wasn't prepared for this, on Armando Weiss just the last couple of weeks.
These days what's being said by people like Barry Weiss, who's a New York Times op-ed editor and sometimes writer, and people that ilk who are promoting Zionism, they'll say conceptually you can distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism, but in the real world, it doesn't really get separated.
That's the line they want to take.
They'll concede, oh sure, in concept, theoretically, you can see that it's two different things, but in any given individual, if a person's criticizing Israel, it's like Jeff Foxworthy, you probably are an anti-Semite, right?
So the new thing is to say, while they say that, they make that distinction, theoretical distinction, Barry Weiss or somebody like that will say, but Israel is so much a part of Jewish identity, that when you criticize Israel, you're attacking a Jew's identity, and that's wrong.
That should not be done.
In other words, it's like that snowflake, right?
You need safe haven, what do they call that on campus, where you've got to run to be safe.
Yeah, when you criticize the North Jersey mob, you are hurting my feelings, because I know somebody who's Sicilian, you know.
Well, no, that wouldn't count, because you only know somebody, but if you were Sicilian.
So this author, Amanda Weiss, it's a brilliant article, and I'll try to track it down, if anybody wants to know.
You know what, any honest observer can see that this is all just a Zionist playing with categories in order to try to make things something other than they are.
There's no real wisdom there, there's no real argument there.
What the slider shows very carefully, and it's a brilliant article, I wrote him and said this is a brilliant article.
He shows that all of this is clearly designed to inoculate Zionism and Israel from all criticism, because you can't even talk about it publicly, because you're attacking a person's very core identity.
Well, you know, the real problem with that is that other than you and me and a few other libertarians who really prioritize this, the only people who are good on this are leftists.
And a lot of them are Jewish.
And their whole thing is they're essentially the inheritors of that very much Jewish, you know, led and participated in civil rights movement that you talked about earlier.
And they really, they might be collectivists, but essentially they're left collectivists.
So in other words, they're international collectivists who want to include everyone, rights for everyone.
They're not exclusive collectivists saying our tribe over your tribe.
They're saying, they're looking at the Palestinians and saying, well, these guys are getting stomped all over.
That's unfair.
It doesn't matter if you're Jewish or not.
If you're a human being and they're human beings, then what's happening to them is wrong.
Right.
I mean, I go back to, you know, the question is, what is Judaism?
That's not a settled question.
It ought to be a settled question.
But I thought at the very base, before you get to anything else, it's monotheistic.
And the whole idea of monotheism, I thought, was to say to the whole world, in other words, it's universalism, right?
Instead of tribes each having their own gods, and therefore codes of ethics, which only applied internally to that tribe.
You could trash the next tribe, but be nice to the brothers in your own tribe.
The whole idea and appeal of monotheism was, no, no, no, no.
Each tribe doesn't have its own gods and its own code of ethics.
I'm an atheist, but this is the story, right?
And it has merit to this extent.
There's only one God for the whole world, for all people, and only one moral code for all the people.
So you've got to treat everybody the same.
You've got to be nice to everybody.
You've got to love, walk humbly.
What's the famous statement by the prophet Micah?
Walk humbly, practice mercy, walk humbly with God.
That was supposed to apply to everybody, but Zionism threw that away.
And this is the reform in the Orthodox criticism of Zionism.
It's counterfeit Judaism.
It's idolatry.
You're worshiping a wall, a Western wall.
What do you worship at a wall for?
How is that different from the golden calf, except it's made of stone rather than gold?
I mean, if you're going to worship something, you might as well worship gold.
You've got to be there to be close to God.
I thought God was everywhere.
He only hangs out in Jerusalem?
It doesn't make any sense.
It's counterfeit, and the Orthodox and the reform said so.
All right, now here's the deal.
Let's end on the Palestinians again.
Why this matters.
The original title for the book, turns out there's already one called this, was Why Palestine Matters, because this isn't just trivia about ancient history and how to criticize Jews without being anti-Jewish.
That's not what this is about.
This is about the rights of the Palestinians that are being denied by the millions for decades on end here.
Right.
Palestine matters because Palestinians are not insignificant subhumans.
They're people.
Now the other side will say, oh, but there's people being oppressed everywhere.
How can we only talk about Israel?
Well, people on my side of things talk about, and you, talk about oppression all over the place.
Now, and this is coming right out of my paycheck, and it's done in my name, and their soldiers carry M-16s and fly F-16s, and so it matters to America in a way that China's occupation of Tibet just doesn't.
Sorry.
Americans are forced enablers and financiers because of U.S. government policy, which has been solidly bipartisan on this issue.
Also, it's the place where a world war could start.
And if not a total world war, then a really still bad war.
And so it's a spark.
It can be where the spark goes very easily.
And so there's multiple reasons why this issue matters.
And I don't have to take a backseat to that.
Now, some people will say to me, how can you say that?
You have a Jewish background.
How can you be doing that?
And I say, that's the reason.
That's the reason.
Because I grew up being a typical American Zionist.
By typical, I mean my parents and I had no desire to move to Israel.
My parents would never let go visit, and they'd give money to send other Jews to move to Israel.
But they weren't leaving Philadelphia.
They wouldn't move.
That was true of most American Jews and true of Jews worldwide.
People don't understand this.
The Zionist project was not a refugee project as it became, at least publicly, after World War II.
Then it became, oh, the poor survivors of the Holocaust, the displaced persons needed a place to go.
Yeah, because the United States wouldn't let them in.
So lots of people came, lots of Jews who were anti-Zionist before the war became pro-Zionist in the sense of, yes, we've got to have a state there because those people have to go someplace.
But that's not what the movement was originally about.
I mean, without Hitler, I think Zionism would have totally fizzled away.
Because the Zionist movement was a call to all Jews to leave wherever they were, no matter how happy they were, how content, how settled, how free, America, England, Canada, all over the place, and move to Israel.
It was called the in-gathering of exiles, and they would preach what the Nazis later preached.
Jews are aliens everywhere except Israel.
Jews cannot be normal people in other societies.
That's what Herzl and the others taught, and they disparaged the Eastern Jews, you know, in the black hats and the long side locks and the long black coats and the long beards.
They made fun of those people.
They didn't even want those people to come to Israel.
They were old.
They said, ah, they're old, they're sick, they're weak.
That's not who we want.
We want the new Jew.
They were the original self-hating Jews, the early Zionists.
They wanted to shed all of that and go and create the new, what they called the Sabra, right, the strong person who farms and this and that.
It was like Mr. Clean, basically.
They were trying to create the new Jew.
Well, who's the self-hating Jew if you need to create a new Jew?
And so the Reform and the Orthodox were disgusted by it.
Now those two movements became in the end pro-Israel post-World War II for the reason I already said because they just – I think they thought in the wake of Hitler, well, we've got to back the state of Israel now.
But not everybody did.
Rabbi Elmer Berger and the American Council for Judaism and lots of other American Jews who were both Reform and Orthodox never let go of that original position.
And today you can find ultra-Orthodox Jews in the tori karta.
You can find them on the internet, Torah Jews.
They protest all the time in Israel and in New York saying give this land back to the Palestinians because in their view – the theme song from the movie Exodus, which I was taken to see with all my brothers and sisters and all our friends from the synagogue in 1960.
We went downtown to the big cinemascope, whatever it was, Panavision.
And the opening song, the theme song is, and the words are, and we used to sing it, this land is mine, God gave this land to me.
The Orthodox would say, well, actually God sort of just lent it to us and then he kicked us out.
The exile is supposed to be the original Babylonian exile, not the Roman, but the way earlier Babylonian exile, which did happen because we know there was lots of Jewish activity like writing the Talmud in Babylonia, which is today Iraq, parts of Iraq, a part of Iraq.
The idea was the exile was punishment for sinning.
And the deal was you're not going to get back until the Messiah comes.
The Messiah is the sign that it's time to go back.
So the Orthodox were saying, what the hell is this Zionist movement?
Who made Ben-Gurion the Messiah?
Nobody told us and they rejected it.
That's a fascinating story.
I don't know about Jewish anti-Zionists.
When I tell people, they say, I never heard of that.
They had no idea there were Jewish anti-Zionists and still are.
When the Orthodox in Torah Karta and the Torah Jews hold their rallies outside the UN, I think whenever Netanyahu comes, he didn't come this year because of his election problems, they'll hold protests and they do it in Israel too.
Some of them live in Israel.
They say this is the Palestinian, they wear the Palestinian flag on their lapels, and they say this land needs to be given back.
It was unjustly taken from the Palestinians.
There you go.
They know that there's current oppression going on.
They're not just talking about biblical times.
They're talking about today and they think it's an injustice that has to be rectified.
I don't know if that means they want all the European Jews to leave and come back home to America or wherever they started from, England or Germany or other places, or whether they want some kind of coexistence.
I'm not sure what their entire program is.
I'm not sure they have an entire program.
But the point is they know there's a core injustice in the founding of the state.
I want to correct one more thing because it's so widely misunderstood, and I thank you to Jeremy R. Hammond for this because he wrote a nice little booklet about it.
You can find it online for free, I'm pretty sure.
It's called The Myth that the UN Created Israel.
The UN Security Council, the UN General Assembly did not partition.
That's the word always used, right, partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state or Palestinian state, which never came about.
All the General Assembly did, well, no, number one, for one good reason.
The UN has no power to create states or to divide territories.
Imagine a bunch of right-wing Americans claiming that the UN does have the power to decide who's a state and who's not.
It's not in the bylaws.
At what time?
Right.
And the General Assembly no less, but anyway.
He amply quotes the bylaws.
There's no power.
So what did the General Assembly do?
Yeah, there was a famous vote in November 47, which was what the Soviet Union approved of, like the U.S. approved of, on the same side, about a partition, which gave like 57 percent to the Jews who were one-third of the population and the best land, and the remainder to the two-thirds majority, super-majority population of the non-Jewish communities, as the Balfour Declaration called it.
So what did the UN General Assembly do?
It recommended partition.
That's very different from partitioning.
I can recommend the partition of anything.
I can recommend we partition the moon into the side that has green cheese and the side that doesn't have green cheese.
Great.
You can recommend from now till the cows come home.
But they couldn't partition.
Israel unilaterally, about a year later, right after the British left because they were running things after World War I, the Israelis who had already been running – they weren't Israelis yet.
They were still the Zionist militias.
They were terrorist groups really, Irgun and Sterngang.
After running about half of the 750,000 Palestinian Arabs off the land, declared independence, and then they ran the rest of the 750,000 out of the land.
They just unilaterally declared independence.
That's how Israel was formed.
It was not created by the United Nations.
Well, and even for people who know that, believe me, in this book you'll see it's worse than you think.
You get a pretty good handle on who was stealing what in 1947 and 1948.
And that only begins to touch on this thing.
As you mentioned, there's 40 chapters in it on all kinds of topics.
But it's going to be really eye-opening, I think, for people.
The fact that it's written by you means a lot, and I think it's going to mean a lot for staking the claim of what is the libertarian position on this complicated issue.
You need to know this is the book.
It's right here.
It's Coming to Palestine by Sheldon Richman.
It's on sale now, paperback and Kindle on Amazon.
And, of course, find the link at libertarianinstitute.org.
And you know what?
I think I'll have you back, and we'll talk some more about this sometime soon.
What do you think about that?
You know where to find me.
Good times.
All right, you guys.
That's the great Sheldon Richman.
Coming to Palestine.
What did you say now?
I said I never sleep.
Oh, good.
Well, and you have my show to listen to.
I recorded 6 or 8 today, so that should work, including this one.
So, yeah.
Yeah, for all you insomniacs.
ScottHorton.org.
Sign up for the podcast feed there.
Coming to Palestine by Sheldon Richman.
Brand new out.
Libertarianinstitute.org.
Thanks again, man.
Thank you.
In every respect, thank you.
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.
