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Nov. 17, 2023 - Candace Owens
01:15:29
Israel vs. Palestine with Norman Finkelstein
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All right, ladies and gentlemen. Wow, this is going to be the last episode before I go on maternity leave.
You're going to miss me. I'm going to miss you.
So what are we going to get into? Well, I just wanted to kind of put a clean button on the issue of Israel versus Palestine.
Last week, I was super honored to have Ami Kozak on the show.
He's a wonderful comedian. Go follow him.
He's amazing. He's pro-Israel.
And I just wanted to hear his position clearly.
And I was...
I'm very happy with the response.
Everybody that was commenting and saying that this is what there needs to be, just more civil conversation, less name-calling.
And I think that he stated the pro-Israel position very well.
I wanted to also yield some time on the show to what I would describe as a pro-Palestinian position by welcoming a Jewish guest, actually.
Similarly Jewish, his family, both of his parents' pardons survived the Holocaust.
And yet he does not support the state of Israel, which is really Fascinating and confusing for some people, so why not dive into it and allow Norman Finkelstein to explain what he thinks and why he thinks it.
That's what's coming up today on Candace Owens.
If not, I look forward to introducing you to him today.
Norman is a political scientist and activist whose primary fields of research are the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust.
His parents are Holocaust survivors.
We're going to get into that later.
And in 2020, he was named the fifth most influential political scientist in the world.
Today he is joining us from Brooklyn, New York, to discuss the current Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, which has been renewed, obviously, following the attacks on October 7th.
And I at first want to introduce my audience to him in the same way that I came about him.
I happened upon a clip on Twitter years ago, and it was quite interesting to hear a Jewish
man take this perspective when questioned by a pro-Israel student at the University
of Waterloo.
Take a listen.
Go ahead.
Hi. During your speech, you made a lot of references to Jewish people, as well as certain people in your audience, not Jewish people in general, but certain people, especially in your audience, to Nazis.
Now, that is extremely offensive when certain people are German, and they're also extremely offensive to people who have actually suffered under Nazi rule.
I don't respect that anymore.
I really don't.
I don't like and I don't respect the crocodile tears To the crocodile tier.
No. Folks, allow me to finish.
Allow me to finish.
Listen, sir. Allow me to finish.
Sir, sir, I don't like to play, I don't like to play before an audience the Holocaust card.
But since now I feel compelled to, My late father was in Auschwitz.
My late mother, please shut up!
My late father was in Auschwitz.
My late mother was in my diamond concentration camp.
Every single member of my family on my father's side On my father's side, my late father was in Auschwitz concentration camp, my late mother was in Maidana concentration camp.
Every single member of my family on both sides was exterminated.
Both of my parents were in the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
And it's precisely and exactly because of the lessons my parents taught me and my two siblings that I will not be silent when Israel commits its crimes against the Palestinians.
And I consider nothing more despicable than to use their suffering and their martyrdom To try to justify the torture, the brutalization, the demolition of homes that Israel daily commits against the Palestinians.
So I refuse any longer to be intimidated or browbeating by the tears.
If you had any heart in you, you would be crying for the Palestinians, not for what she's done.
Norman, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for joining today.
Well, thank you for having me.
So that's a very powerful clip.
It's a stunning clip.
If you are somebody like me who has admitted to not knowing much about this conflict and suddenly being compelled to immediately pretend that you know everything about this conflict, I think the thing that is most interesting is to see these fractured perceptions of the conflict Um, amongst the Jewish population in America.
And I wanted to yield my time to the pro-Israel lobby.
Last week I had a comedian, Ami Kozak, who was very fired up talking about how Israel has a right to exist, Israel has a right to defend itself, and talking about his horror, um, just the pain that he experiences daily in not understanding why more people are not coming over to the pro-Israel side.
So I just want to ask you to first and foremost unpack your bio a bit.
I think it's great to have you here because you are an academic and so people immediately kind of use the authoritative argument.
You don't know what you're talking about. You're not educated about this.
You are incredibly educated.
And what brought you to as a person who was raised by concentration camp survivors to the pro-Palestinian side?
Well, I don't want to quibble over terminology, but sometimes if the terminology is wrong at the outset, then it confuses things moving forward.
I'm not pro-Palestinian.
I'm not pro-Israeli.
I'm pro-truth and I'm pro-justice.
If the truth is on the Israeli side, I will support Israel.
If justice is Is on the Israeli side.
I'll support Israel.
And the same thing goes for the Palestinians.
I've spent the greater part of my adult life, you can say beginning 1982, so it's more than four decades, researching, studying the Israel-Palestine conflict.
And it's my conclusion at the end of that research, but already early on, That the case that Israel makes for its crimes are in large part fabrications, misrepresentations, and distortions. And on the other hand, the Palestinian case is very strongly supported by the evidence.
And when I speak about evidence, I'm not talking about what Hamas says.
Any more than when I speak about Israel, I care much about what the government says.
If you're serious about these sorts of things, the first thing you do is you try to search out sources which have a certain amount of credibility.
So when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict, let's say the human rights dimension, you look at what respected human rights organizations have to say, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the B'Tselem, the main Israeli information center for the occupied territories.
You look at what the evidence shows, not based on biased sources or naturally biased sources, but on the available evidence.
And I tried to be a strict adherent of the two principles of truth and justice, and that's where I landed.
And I think that's frankly where most of the world has landed.
And it's also, incidentally, but not trivially, it's where a large part of the young Jewish population has landed.
If you go to the demonstrations now, the ones that have garnered the headlines.
Say the one in Grand Central Station was overwhelmingly Jewish.
It was organized by Jewish organizations.
Young people, mostly, but not entirely.
The Statue of Liberty demonstration, again, it was Jewish young people who organized the demonstration.
So this idea that it's somehow polarized ethnically is belied by the facts.
Now, I will wholeheartedly admit that when I first started out, We were a handful of people, Jewish Jews, who opposed what Israel was doing.
But the spectrum has radically changed in recent years.
I'm just one among a large number, a sea of Jews who oppose what's going on, not because they're self-hating, not because they're indifferent to the fate of Israelis, But because the evidence is overwhelming.
It's impossible.
You start out by saying you're not knowledgeable about the topic.
Fair enough. There are 10,000 topics I'm not knowledgeable about and where you have much more knowledge.
I'm quite certain of that.
But this is not a particularly complicated situation right now.
The Israeli government is openly, unabashedly, flagrantly, blatantly, it's declared a war of genocide on the people of Gaza.
That's not exaggerated language.
The Prime Minister of Israel said in a speech which has been reproduced everywhere, He said, this is a war against Amalek, referring to the Old Testament.
And what's a war against Amalek?
Well, just open up the Old Testament.
It obliges Israel to kill every man, woman, and child.
That's what it means to invoke Israel.
Can there be any doubt in the minds of any objective observer when Israel declares a policy of prohibiting any food, water, Fuel or electricity from entering Gaza, if that's their declared policy.
Now, I know that you're an expectant mother, so bear in mind what that means to you.
Now, Ms.
Owens, I'm not sure if you are aware that one half of the population of Gaza Its total population is 2.3 million.
About 1.15 million are children.
They're like the child that you have and the child that you are expecting.
Now some people will say, I'm playing on people's emotions.
But I do not believe that you as a mother would say it's manipulative, it's demagogic for me to say it is not a complicated question when a country has a declared policy Of denying a population food, water, fuel, electricity.
That is not complicated.
So I won't even allow for the option of saying, well, I'm ignorant.
I don't know.
Sorry. It doesn't require a lot of knowledge.
And at the risk of offending some of your listeners, if you saw Jews being shoved into gas chambers, it would not require a lot more knowledge to know there's something awry here.
Something very egregiously, horribly wrong going on.
Every hospital, every hospital in Gaza now has been disabled.
Every hospital has been disabled.
You're an expectant mother Do you really have doubts, questions, reservations, qualms about whether that is right?
Every few years, literally every few years, Israel has a policy of what it calls mowing the lawn in Gaza.
I've written quite a lot on those mowings of the lawn.
But I have a question for you.
And I do not believe these are rhetorical questions.
These are factual questions.
How do you react?
You as a human being?
As a woman?
As a mother?
How would you react to the usage of that phrase, mowing the lawn of a people when 1.1 million of those people are children?
Do you get that?
Mowing the lawn of 1.15 million children.
Now, that may be the first time you've heard that expression.
It is. But I've heard it for years and years and years.
And nobody even bats an eyelash at that expression.
To mow the lawn in Gaza.
In 2008-2009, Operation Cast Lead, they mowed the lawn, killed 350 children.
2014, Operation Protective Edge, they mowed the lawn again, killed 550 children.
And now they're mowing the lawn again and have killed 4,000 to date.
4,500 children.
They make up these stories that we have to turn off the incubators in the hospitals Because there's a Hamas command and control center in the basement, say, most recently, of Al-Shifa Hospital.
And then the spokesperson for our U.S. Department of Defense, John Kirby, he gives a news conference three days ago And he says, we have intelligence information confirming that there is a Hamas command and control center.
And that justifies in the minds of the public opinion that then it's okay to deny fuel to the incubators.
Imagine you, Candice, your child is born prematurely and is put in an incubator where the fuel is cut off and your child that you've been carrying for nine months suffocates to death.
Was there a Hamas command and control center in Gaza?
Answer, no.
Was Hamas' leadership in the basement of Al-Shifa Hospital?
Answer, no.
Were there hostages beneath Al-Shifa Hospital?
Answer, no.
You just get the lies and more lies and more lies and more lies.
An attendant upon those non-stop lies are the cessation, the termination of life.
Because of the lies, the termination of life of thousands of Palestinian children.
Is that complicated?
Does it require a PhD in Middle East studies to figure these things out?
In my book, at the risk of offending some people in the audience, And maybe that's why I react as I do when I see these things unfold before my eyes.
It's as complicated as Jews, like my parents' mother, Mother on both sides, father on both sides, sisters and brothers on both sides.
It's as complicated as my family, except for my mother and my father, being shoved into gas chambers.
That's how complicated it is in my eyes.
That government in Israel, in cahoots...
With our own government, spread the lies about Hamas's command and control center to justify denying the fuel for the incubators.
Now, I'll tell you something, Candice.
I live in an apartment building.
I go into my elevator, and there will be a parent with the kids.
And I look at the kids and like an old man that I am, I say hello to the kids, you know, smile to the kids.
And all of a sudden, I get overcome with this sick feeling because I look at the kid and then I see those pictures from Gaza.
I see those incubators.
With all due regard, So your audience, sorry, not complicated.
So I just want to say in defense of my audience, they are very receptive to conversation.
I have built this platform talking about different sides.
I mean, I take a lot of contrarian positions and I think my audience, I'm constantly covering, you know, past CIA operations where the public was lied to.
I have, you know, critiqued even our own response and the killing of, you know, a million Iraqi civilians over perceived weapons of mass destruction that were never found.
So I do just want to say that my audience is not one way or the other.
They're very open to conversation just in defense of my audience.
The second thing I want to say is that I didn't mention your academic credentials at the top of the show because I felt that people needed to go, oh, well, he's allowed to say what he's allowed to say.
I actually said that to push back against people saying that I wasn't educated and I wasn't allowed to ask questions.
And so I'm saying, okay, well, he's educated.
He's Jewish. Is he allowed to ask questions and present a different side?
Just to let us skip through that process, not to say that people require...
I mean, I don't know.
At Israelis, when you see a dead Israeli child, you don't feel something.
And I do not understand why people need to, as I said yesterday on Tucker's program, button the issue of saying, when you see a dead Palestinian child, oh, but it was a human shield.
That's not my reaction. I had a very emotional reaction to seeing a dead Palestinian Christian child pull from the rubble, and she looked like my daughter, and I cried.
So I am not beyond my humanity here.
I don't need a PhD to feel that humanity, and it is why I said that I wanted to make sure that That both sides are being represented here.
Now, what I do want to ask you is, you talked about mowing the lawn, you said an Israeli government policy.
What do you mean by an Israeli government policy?
What specifically are you talking about?
Because that is something that I am ignorant of, and I would just like you to explain where that comes from.
Okay. Now, I've been accused of going on and on and on and on, so you'll have to at some point say, okay, you explained that enough, let's move on.
The basic picture is this, and I admit everybody has an arbitrary starting point, so people may not agree with my starting point.
So let me just give you the very basic picture as I see it.
In 2006, our government, it was then President Bush, it was in that period you might recall what was called democracy promotion.
And one of the instances of democracy promotion was he told the Palestinians to hold an election in the West Bank and Gaza.
They hold an election.
Hamas wins the election.
Okay? Hamas didn't want to participate, ended up being convinced to participate, put up a party, and it won the election.
Jimmy Carter, who you know because you're from the South and former president, he monitored the election and he said, completely honest and fair election.
I'm quoting him word for word.
Hillary Clinton, she said later, United States made a mistake because it didn't rig the election.
That's what she said. The wrong party won.
We made a mistake. We should have rigged the election.
Hamas comes to power.
What's the first thing the United States does?
What is the first thing Israel does?
They impose sanctions on Gaza.
Brutal economic sanctions.
First of all, before I get to those sanctions and rush to the present, your audience has to know, or should know, and would probably want to know, what is Gaza?
Gaza is 25 miles long.
For those in your audience who are joggers or runners, Gaza's length is less than a marathon.
Its width is five miles.
And even in my old age, I jog five miles every day.
It's not a long distance.
Gaza is five miles by 25 miles.
Okay. It's among the most densely populated places on God's earth, more populated than Tokyo.
70% of the people of Gaza, 70%, are refugees.
They were expelled from Israel in 1948, and they and their descendants ended up in Gaza.
50% are children.
That's Gaza.
Among the most densely populated places on God's earth, a tiny parcel of land overwhelmingly composed of refugees and their descendants and children.
That's Gaza. So, a brutal blockade is imposed on Gaza in 2006.
What does that blockade look like or what does it mean?
It means nobody can go into Gaza and nobody can leave Gaza.
With the rarest of exceptions.
What do you mean by that?
Sorry, I'm really sorry for being ignorant.
You should ask. Because people don't understand that.
Hamas was voted into power in 2006 by the Gazans.
It was the parliamentary elections, yes.
So if they are the government, what do you mean that despite this, Gazans can't leave or enter that territory?
Candice, if you have the time...
I appreciate the questions.
Because if you don't know, then 95% of Americans don't know.
And so we need to go through it.
Israel controls the exit and the entry to Gaza.
Israel controls the airspace.
Israel controls the waterways.
Israel controls everything, what goes in.
There was a period When Israel denied chocolate, as in bonbons, couldn't...
No, it's very serious.
Couldn't go into Gaza. Wouldn't allow baby chicks to go into Gaza.
It wouldn't allow potato chips to go into Gaza.
There was a period when Israel had an explicit policy Of giving Gazans, it was calculated, a starvation plus diet.
A diet that's just hovered above starvation.
It controls everything in Gaza.
There are people with severe medical conditions.
Who want to go to better hospitals and say, Jordan, they cannot leave.
They can not leave.
Gaza is half the population.
Suffers what international humanitarian organizations call, quote, severe food insecurity.
Which is to say half the population of Gaza never felt what it was like to have a full stomach.
You've been to Gaza.
Half the population of Gaza is unemployed.
Among youth, it's 70%.
Highest unemployment rate of any area in the world.
That's the facts, the discrete, the separate facts.
Have you been to Gaza, Norm?
Yes, I've been to Gaza.
Yeah, I think I read that in your bio.
You spent some summers there?
No, I spent summers in the West Bank.
Okay, so not in Gaza, but in the West Bank.
I took two trips... Two trips, I think, to Gaza.
But you know, at my age, I can't even remember how many times I was there, but I think I was there two or three times.
Yeah, three times. In any event, if you take all the facts together, what do you get?
David Cameron, the former conservative prime minister of the UK, he described Gaza as an open-air prison.
One of the senior officials, I would like your audience to listen, planted in your mind, one of Israel's senior security officials, Giora Eiland, E-I-L-A-N-D, still a very prominent figure in Israeli security establishment.
In 2004, before the blockade, he described Gaza as, quote, A huge concentration camp.
That didn't come from some Hamas propaganda leaflet.
That was and is a senior official in Israel's security establishment.
In March 2004, he described Gaza as a huge concentration camp.
Now, I want to bring it up to the present.
Number one, it's not just a concentration camp.
It's a killing field.
Because every few years, as I've already said, Israel goes in and mows the lawn in Gaza.
Kills in Operation Cast Lead, 1,400 people.
Operation Protective Edge, 2,200 people.
And that's leaving aside a slew of other operations.
So, what's the bottom line to bring us up to the present?
The bottom line is, you know those young folks who crashed the gates of Gaza on October 7th?
Those young men, probably down to the last, had been born into that concentration camp.
All they had to do, those young men, for 20 years was to pace the perimeter of Gaza No jobs, no food, no past, no present, no future.
That's Gaza.
Now, you might say, okay, he's trying to make an apology for those young men.
I'm not going to make an apology.
I'm stating the facts.
Now, you know, Candace, In our own history, we had the slave rebellions.
Okay? Take the case of Nat Turner.
I was recently reading about Nat Turner.
Actually a very interesting guy.
He was a brilliant fellow, you know.
He had this prodigious knowledge of the Bible.
White folks acknowledged Nat Turner was a very smart guy.
One of his biographers says that Nat Turner was consumed by rage because of, and I'm quoting the biographer now, because of the prodigious chasm between what he possessed in intelligence, maybe even genius, The aspirations he harbored on the one hand, and then on the other hand, he was born into slavery.
No past, no present, and what caused the rage inside him, says his biographer, no future.
So, when Nat Turner and his Confederates erupt In rebellion, truth be told, the order he gave was kill all whites.
That's what they said.
And they did. It was only a two-day rampage, but they beheaded babies.
They did terrible things. No question about it.
But nowadays, the story only begins with October 7th.
Do you think it's right, Candace, When discussing Nat Turner, not to ask any question except isn't Nat Turner a human animal because of what he did on the rampage?
That's the beginning?
Not to mention that Nat Turner was born into slavery?
Isn't that a relevant fact?
When you try to gauge and understand what happened in the Nat Turner rebellion?
To mention, but we're not allowed to mention anything before October 7th.
We are not allowed to say that those young men were born in a concentration camp.
By definition and description of a senior person in Israel's security establishment.
We have to start with October 7th and whiteout, to use the current lingo, to cancel and erase their existence before October 7th.
And just as it's morally depraved to forget that Nat Turner was a slave, and the very smart one at that, it's equally morally depraved to forget where these young men came from.
I would concede your point about Nat Turner and if we were talking about the spectrum of what he did to not mention the fact that he was born a slave and the things that he lived through.
When I had Ami on the show and he was sort of discussing, I was saying that in the media aftermath, you know, we've had people that are being called anti-Semitic even for questioning, you know, the IDF's response and how long it took them to respond to what was going on.
And those people being castigated as anti-Semitic to me doesn't seem fair.
But one thing that Ami did say, and I think that this also holds some credence, is when you find out that your family member just died or was beheaded, obviously you are in an emotional state.
So when the first instinct, rather than understanding that people are in a period of grief, is to say, well, like the Harvard kids, this didn't happen in a vacuum, it becomes more of a timing thing more than anything else.
And I think that in the immediate aftermath, And to discuss things as wide and academically as you're trying to discuss it, people are not keen to listen to that.
They want you to just acknowledge that there's hurt and that there are innocent people in Israel that were killed, and they weren't the ones that enforced any of these past policies that you're talking about.
So I think that's fair.
I totally think that's fair.
And I have never said atrocities weren't committed to By all evidence, atrocities were committed.
Were there beheadings?
At this point, doubtful, but I won't say for certain.
Were there rapes?
At this point, doubtful, but I won't say for certain.
Were there atrocities?
At this point, yes.
I'm not going to...
I have a credo in life.
Never quarrel with facts.
Never quarrel with facts.
That's my credo.
I made some errors in previous interviews.
People send me emails.
They said, you're an error there.
Of course, nobody likes to have to admit an error, but I had to fight my own ego and say, you You're correct.
Thank you. I won't make that same error in the future.
Yeah. So I'm not going to quarrel with the facts.
So it goes back to that human element of the first thing that you say when somebody loses a relative, right?
And sometimes the timing of, even like I said, with the Palestinian children, they're like, well, Habas.
I'm like, that seems so inhumane to me that you are saying this is a human shield, not recognizing that someone is holding your child crying.
And I think the same, you know, like I said, I want to give credence to the fact that immediately following it, when the first thing you say is, oh, well, I know that your Israeli child is missing or dead, but, you know, let me humanize the people that did this to them.
I think that that gets a little, like, for some people, and then it kind of sparks this mass confusion, because in the same way that I have said that every single person that is showing up to a pro-Palestine I think it's actually sloppy to say that when you see that many protesters anywhere.
I would also say that when we just saw this march in Washington, the pro-Israel protest, that whether you believe that these people are not educated or you believe that what's happening is wrong, the majority of those people that showed up, do you, and I'll ask the question to you, Really believe that each and every one of those people that were in D.C. wants the Palestinians to be genocided?
Or do you think that they believe that they are fighting for a just cause?
Okay. Israel has made not one, not two, not ten, not twenty in its various leadership capacities genocidal statements in the last seven weeks That's number one.
Okay? I have two friends, Yaniv Kogan and Jamie Sternweiner.
They compiled this list of pages and pages of statements by the Israeli government the past seven weeks, which are genocidal in content and in intent and in result.
Number two.
I have to ask you the question, and I'm willing to hear you out.
Okay? If you have a declared policy, no food, water, fuel, electricity, and part of the purpose of the ceasefire is to allow fuel to come in.
If the people in Washington do not support the access of the people of Gaza They oppose the access of people in Gaza to food, water, fuel, and electricity.
How would you describe that policy?
They're against the ceasefire.
They're against the humanitarian cause.
When Van Jones, yesterday at the rally, when Van Jones He said he was for the ceasefire.
He didn't use the word ceasefire, but it was clearly implied he wanted some break in the hostilities.
Preservation of civilian life, I think.
Right. He got booed down.
He got booed down.
So you're asking me a question about whether in each of their minds...
They fantasized about the extermination of every person in Gaza, to which I say I can't read their mind.
What I can say is they attended a rally in Washington which supported the government's policy of denying food Electricity, fuel, and water to the people of Gaza.
That again, in my mind, but you can disagree with me, is not a complicated question.
That is a very rational decision To support genocide.
That's a rational decision to support genocide.
It does not require, as I said...
What do you make of their arguments, well, if they just turn over the terrorists, then they would have everything back?
If they just turned over...
If the terrorists, pardon me, I misspoke.
If the terrorists just turned over the hostages, they would have everything back.
Well, there are two answers to that.
And again, I'm going to encourage you to keep asking me the questions.
Number one, that's not Israel's declared policy.
Its declared policy is to wipe out or expel the population of Gaza.
Israel has repeatedly said, we do not accept the distinction between the civilian population and Hamas.
They have repeatedly said, we are going to flatten everything in Gaza and turn it into a tent city.
You can find numerous statements.
So it's not true that the goal now is to return the hostages.
But for argument's sake, for argument's sake, let's agree that is the goal.
I'm all for freeing the hostages.
However, all the hostages, the 240 Israelis being held hostage, and the 2.3 million people of Gaza who have been held hostage.
For 20 years.
Yes. Free the hostages.
Free all the hostages.
By international law, that blockade of Gaza is a crime against humanity.
Under international law, there are three kinds of crimes.
One, you of course know war crimes.
And then there's a second kind called crimes against humanity.
And then the third crime, which you of course know, genocide.
What's happening now in Gaza hovers between a crime against humanity and a genocide.
A couple of questions I want to ask you, just to push back on your point about a genocide.
I had actually sent a tweet a while ago.
I was actually referring to Brian Mast's commentary in Congress, which I found to be unacceptable.
The concept that there's no such thing as innocent civilian life on one side of the conflict to me is abhorrent language.
I covered it on my show. And I think it sets the stage.
I think what he said, I hadn't heard the Israeli government say that, but because I'm always responding to American politics, it was dehumanizing and it makes a justification for killing everyone.
But what I want to ask you about your perspective, and it is a genocide, first and foremost, what would be the upside, if you were the Israeli government, to committing a genocide against the Palestinian people?
I'm just playing devil's advocate here.
Hmm. You see people protesting all around.
Why would you think this is something that you're going to get away with if that is in fact the goal with everybody watching?
Okay. If you'll allow me, there are two separate questions.
The first question is whether it's a genocide or And as I said, at the risk of boring the audience, if you deny food, water, electricity, and fuel, it's a genocide.
That to me is a no-brainer.
However, there is the question that you just raised, a perfectly reasonable question.
And the reasonable question is, why?
Is it something in the Israeli DNA? No, I don't think so.
Because Gaza, for them, For Israel has always been a problem.
Because they refuse, if I can put it this way, they refuse to just languish and die in a concentration camp.
They refuse.
And so periodically, you know the famous expression, wherever there's oppression, there's resistance.
So periodically, there is resistance, and Israel mows the lawn.
But after October 7th, it decided, number one, this was obviously a resistance of a much higher magnitude, what happened on October 7th.
And also, it was an opportunity.
It was an opportunity to solve the Gaza question.
Now, during the first week, and we're not talking about ancient history now, we're talking about five weeks ago, six weeks ago.
During the first week, they were hoping to expel all the Palestinians to Egypt and ethnic cleansing, just clean out Gaza.
That was the goal. It didn't work because the head of state of Egypt says, no, Gaza is your problem, not ours.
You're not going to put all these people in the Sinai desert, and it's going to become our problem.
So that option was no longer available.
With that option no longer available, how do you solve the Gaza question?
You destroy Gaza.
You make it uninhabitable.
You turn it into a howling wilderness.
And you kill off as many people as you can get away with.
Given international public opinion, which always acts as a constraint.
And you have to acknowledge that Israel has been quite successful.
Do you know that more children have been killed in Gaza in the past five weeks or six weeks?
More children have been killed Than in every other war zone in the world combined in the years 2020, 2021, and 2022. Okay, so I had somebody, Dave Rubin, actually, when I just made the blanket statement that genocide is, any aspirations or dehumanizing talk is always wrong, again, in reference to Brian Maas' speech in Congress.
Uh... And he pushed back on this, thinking that I was talking about the Israeli government.
I wasn't. But he did share a chart in which he showed that, you know, since Israel has been its own sovereign nation, that the Palestinian population has grown.
And I think his intent in sharing that was to say, well, if they were trying to commit a genocide, why would they allow the population to grow?
So, and I don't have the exact numbers available to me.
I'll try to splice this in after so people can see it.
What do you say to that?
Israel's policy, as I said, was it was a concentration camp.
Not unlike, for example, the Japanese during World War II. We called them internment camps.
It was a concentration camp.
As I said, Israel had a policy of a very controlled diet.
A starvation plus diet.
However, we have to acknowledge something seriously different happened after October 7th in terms of the avowed Israeli intention.
Up until October 7th, the Israeli intention was to just keep these people confined in the concentration camp and leave them there to languish and die.
But after October 7th, if you look at the avowed aims, it's clear that now they believe that they have a pretext, or at least they believed in October 7th.
They now had a pretext and an opportunity.
Because of the leeway given them by the European and American international community, they now had a pretext and an opportunity to solve the question altogether.
And originally, it's true, they weren't aiming directly at a genocide, they were aiming at an ethnic cleansing.
And they were very open about it.
In fact, Benjamin Netanyahu and our Secretary of State Blinken We're going around trying to forgive some of the loans to Egypt from like the International Monetary Fund because Egypt's economy is in shambles, heavily in debt. Half of its national income goes towards servicing the debt.
So Secretary of State Blinken Benjamin Netanyahu, they were trying to tempt the Egyptian government.
If you take in the Gazans, then we'll get your loans forgiven.
It didn't work.
Egypt said, thanks, but no thanks.
And then at that point, Israel was presented with a dilemma.
What are we going to do?
We want to solve this problem.
And we have to say they're well on their way.
You know, 50% of the homes in Gaza, 50% have been either flattened or severely damaged.
50%. Now, Candace, I'm going to again ask you.
I'm not going to ask you from a technical point of view, from the point of view of scholarly competence.
How would you feel?
70% of those people already lost their home.
They lost it in 1948 when they were expelled from Israel.
They and their descendants.
They live in refugee camps.
They never had a home. And now for the second time, half the population has nothing to go back to.
Do you know what it means?
Actually, that's a rhetorical question because of course you know what it means.
Do you know what it means to go back to your neighborhood and your neighborhood It's flattened.
You can't even figure out where did I live?
There's nothing there.
There are entire neighborhoods, towns in northern Gaza.
They have been annihilated.
They've been vaporized.
No, that's literally true.
They've been vaporized.
There's nothing to go back to.
You can't even know Where you were, where you lived.
So, Israel is, you know, well on its way to achieving its goal.
Whether it can? No, probably not.
In my opinion, for what it's worth.
The propaganda disaster with Al-Shifa Hospital the past couple of days is going to cause Israel a lot of problems, because now nobody's going to believe a single word it says.
It was such a big story, the Hamas Command and Control Center in Al-Shifa Hospital, and it all turned out to be a farce.
I knew it was a farce.
I mean, I've studied it. If you go back and look at my tweets beginning 10 days ago, I said, this is all nonsense.
There's no Hamas command and control center in Al Shifa hospital.
But now the lies have been exposed to the whole world.
All those babies, all those babies in those incubators died, suffocated because of the big lies.
We were told we had to deny them fuel for the incubators because of that Hamas command and control center.
That's the reason that was given.
That's why we denied the fuel for the incubators.
A lie upon a lie upon a lie upon a lie.
Do you know what my last book consists of?
Chronicling across 450 pages the lies and lies and lies about Gaza.
The only difference is, in the case, for example, of Nat Turner, if you had a conscience, you saw the system of slavery in your face every day.
The degradation, the humiliation, the laceration.
Every day you saw it in the streets.
You saw it at the auction blocks.
And that's why people like the abolitionists, the white abolitionists, people like Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, They said what Nat Turner did was horrible.
I mean, no, not what he did was horrible.
The results were horrible, but they wouldn't condemn Nat Turner because they understood, to use the expression, where he was coming from.
But with Gaza, nobody can see it.
It's all walled in.
So unless you do what I do, I spent 40 years, my whole adult life, just pouring over those human rights reports about what's been done to those people.
But if you didn't do what I do, you really wouldn't know.
That's why everybody thinks Yeah, we should start with October 7th.
That's when the story begins.
But you know what?
That's not when the story begins.
That's where the story climaxed after being born into a concentration camp and living in that inferno for 20 years.
They finally resolved to revenge the curse of That had been inflicted on their lives.
That's the difference with the slavery.
The slavery, you saw it.
But not with Gaza.
Nobody knows.
The world's most best concealed secret.
As Baruch Kimmerling, the Hebrew University sociologist, he said, quote, Gaza is the biggest concentration camp ever to exist.
The biggest concentration camp ever to exist.
But everybody wants us to believe.
The whole story begins on October 7th.
Okay, so you can understand, first and foremost, that if you're a Jewish person and you're watching this and you're watching posters being pulled down in New York City and you're listening to a Jewish person give what sounds like a justification for October 7th, but I don't want to put words into your mouth, but how would you say what you're describing?
Candace, I'm just going to throw the ball back in your court.
If you said, if you said that, well, yeah, what he did, what happened in that Turner rebellion was horrible.
60 white people, they were, you know, decapitated, hacked.
And you said, yeah, but you know what?
You can't forget the fact that Turner was a slave.
Is that making an excuse?
You are banned from Israel, is that correct?
Twice. The first time I was not allowed in was 1988.
However, I was quickly able to land on my feet and get in through another entry point.
And then in 2004, I was banned for 10 years, but it was renewable.
And so I knew I would never get back in because the Israeli governments are moving more to the right, more to the right, more to the right.
So if they banned me in 2004, they weren't about to let me in 2014 or 2024.
So what do you make of the people, and this was something that Ami was saying to me, that he's been to Israel many times, I've only been once, that say that the Arabs and the Christians and the Jews are living happily together in Israel as evidence that what's happening in Gaza is unique because of Hamas and their terrorism.
As I said to you at the very outset, there are two ways to view the problem.
Repeat the statements of your side, or to look for human rights organizations, humanitarian organizations, and see what they see.
The main Israeli information center for the occupied territories, human rights organizations, called B'Tselem.
About two years ago, B'Tselem put out a report.
It said there's only one state from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.
There's one state.
It includes Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.
And they said that one state is anchored in the principle of Jewish supremacy.
That's what they use.
That's not my term. They say anchored in the principle of Jewish supremacy.
Another human rights organization, Amnesty International, it put out a report about 250 pages.
And it said Israel is an apartheid state.
That's Amnesty, not me.
It's an apartheid state.
So I'm going to ask you a simple question.
Do you think Arabs living in a Jewish supremacist state That's what B'Tselem called it.
Or Arabs living in an apartheid state.
Do you think it's credible on its face without knowing any other facts?
Do you think it's credible that the non-Jews are happy there?
Is that believable to you?
Well, I was very honest with Ami when I had him on my show that when I went to Jerusalem, you could feel the tension in the air when I walked through the Muslim quarters.
You could feel that these people hate each other and that it felt weird to me walking through the Muslim quarters.
And you know the civil rights era.
Do you remember what the South always said?
That our darkies are very happy here and it's only those northern agitators That are causing the troubles.
They're very happy. I actually did correlate it and said that that's why I felt weird walking through the Muslim quarters and then they called me stupid and said that I didn't understand.
Unless you agree with them, you're stupid.
Unless you agree with them, you have to deny all of your experiential And academic knowledge.
Otherwise, you're either stupid or an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew.
There are all these labels.
Now, you can be a self-hating Jew, you can be an anti-Semite, you can be anything for all I care, but that doesn't change the facts.
I don't care what motivates you.
I'm interested in truth.
And I do not believe it's credible That Arabs living in a Jewish state that's based on the principle of Jewish supremacy, or Arabs living in an apartheid state, are happy.
And I would say that's as credible as Black people in the South We're happy during the Jim Crow era or even the era of slavery where they said, you know, these people are children.
They're not yet competent to govern their own lives.
So we are doing them a favor by enslaving them and preparing them for civilization.
Is that credible?
Is it credible that a slave...
Would be happy in that condition?
Is it credible that somebody living in a Jewish supremacist state would be happy?
Is it credible that someone living in an apartheid state would be happy?
That's not credible. So you, just really quickly, first off, why were you banned from Israel?
Oh, they don't tell you.
They're not obliged. You know, it's a sovereign state.
They can say, you're not coming in.
Yeah, the same way that if I apply for a visa to China, they can say, you can't come in.
Yes, well, I can't deny them that any sovereign state has the right.
In this particular case, they didn't say so.
As a final question to you, I know that we're running up against time.
Do you deny that the Jewish people have, that there is an existential crisis facing Jewish people right now, and that they have a right to exist, that the Jewish state has to exist because of past discriminations against Jews being exiled throughout history?
What is your take on that?
Candice, I'm not flippant In my beliefs, and I have to weigh all the evidence.
In response to that question, I would say I will answer it as my late mother answered it.
She said after what the Jews experienced during World War II, Where nobody wanted them.
It wasn't just a problem of the extermination itself.
It was the fact that nobody else wanted the Jews.
She was emphatic in her belief that the Jews needed some kind of homeland.
On the other hand, it would be inconceivable To my parents, after what they endured not just during World War II, but before World War II, that they would justify a state that discriminated in all its aspects against a particular minority.
Which my parents were before the war when they lived in Poland where there was a formidable anti-Semitism.
So my view is that one has to figure out a way to reconcile what seems like contradictory positions.
The I won't call it the right.
I would call it the consideration of a place where Jews feel a place of refuge with the absolute equality of rights between all citizens of that country.
It is inconceivable to me, in light of my family history, to support a Jewish supremacist state in exactly the same way I am certain you could not imagine Candace In any shape, manner, or form, in any circumstance, ever supporting a white supremacist state.
I don't know you from...
I only saw you once when you were on with Dr.
Cornel West. That's it.
I'm not a web person.
It's not my thing. Okay?
I'm old-fashioned. I'm a book person.
But without knowing anything about you, I still will say it's inconceivable that any way you would concede any ground to a white supremacist state.
And so it would be utterly unconscionable for me, in particular given my family history, To concede any ground, a jot, an iota of ground, to a Jewish supremacist state.
Now, I said I recognize there is a tension In the two statements I made about the Jewish need for some kind of refuge.
And yes, we have to work out that tension.
I don't think it's unsolvable.
It can be figured out how to, you know, reconcile what might be considered opposites.
But there has to be a reconciliation which does not concede any ground, not a jot, not an iota, to a Jewish supremacist state.
That is a repugnant idea to me.
It's a repugnant vision to me.
Just as I said, I can tell without any doubt you would not concede any ground to a white supremacist state.
Well, Norman, we are out of time, and I hope that you feel that your positions, I've given you all the time to present it in the same way that I allowed only Kozak to present his positions.
You were absolutely wonderful, and the more aggressively you challenge me, the more the truth comes out.
And the goal has to always be truth, and on the foundation of truth, justice.
And I'm a big believer in times like this.
I thank you for having me on.
And I look forward to seeing you again.
Thank you so much, Norm. And guys, I just want to say in conclusion, I hope that I asked the right questions here.
I hope that you guys understand that I am trying to be considerate to both sides, that if I believe that people are being well-meaning in their intentions, by having Ami Kozak on as somebody who is pro-Israel, by having Norm on as somebody who doesn't describe himself as pro-Palestine, but has a different perspective as a Jewish person, I have allowed both sides of the Jewish equation to present
their arguments without smears, without yelling.
I believe in times like this, especially when there's high tension, we need more speech,
not less.
No libeling, no smearing, but genuine conversation.
As I have said since the beginning of all of this, we are all being demanded to take
a side.
If you aren't educated about it, it's okay.
It's okay to ask questions.
It's okay not to like the answers you hear.
It's okay to go down, and you should 100% with everything that he said.
Go fact check it.
Go listen to it.
Don't just believe because he said it, but go on your own pursuit of knowledge.
And the same for things that Ami Kozak said.
Ladies and gentlemen, I just want to remind you that's all the time that we have for today, but also this is my last show before I go on maternity leave.
And so I was just trying to get everything in there.
And hopefully you guys feel that we have been genuine in our pursuits, even though I am sure that this will be taken and torn apart and people will not want to hear different perspectives because that's what happens when people become tribal citizens.
But the more we listen, the more we understand, the more that we are able to come and formulate our own opinions based on fact and not based on immediate emotions.
So, you guys, with that said, next time I see you, I will have another child.
I will be a mother of three, which seems absolutely crazy to me.
It's happened so fast.
What an amazing blessing.
I am so grateful to all of you guys for this wonderful year that we've had, the first full year of the podcast being out.
Everybody who has subscribed to this channel, and I hope you subscribe to it because you see that even if I don't get it right all the time, that from the bottom of my heart I am honest and really trying to understand all of the issues that are happening around the world.
I could not be here without you guys and your tremendous support of me always, everywhere, always having my back, always being willing to listen.
And so as we head into the Thanksgiving holiday, I want to just say how grateful I am to each and every one of you for the platform that I have, for the continued platform that I had.
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