Dave Smith and Robbie Bernstein dissect Ben Shapiro's "Four Myths," critiquing his dismissal of the 1948 Nakba's 750,000 displaced Palestinians and the U.S.-fueled 1979 Egypt peace treaty. They challenge Shapiro's claim that Israel expelled all Arabs by contrasting the 800,000 Jews absorbed from Arab lands against nations refusing Palestinian refugees, while debating whether controlling Gaza constitutes apartheid despite equal rights for Arab citizens. Ultimately, they reject moral objectivism that excuses one side's violence, urging a real peace deal to avoid World War III rather than accepting inherent evil as an excuse for conflict. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Historical Record vs Modern Morality00:13:43
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the gas digital network.
Here's your host, Dave Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Heart of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith.
He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
We are just a few days away from taking off, leaving on a jet plane, going on over to Europe, London, Glasgow, Belfast, Amsterdam, comicdave Smith.com.
There are still some tickets available.
Come on out to these shows.
They're going to be legendary.
It's not just us.
We're also there with the real ass podcast boys, Louis J. Gomez and Zach Amico.
This is going to be a lot of fun.
So come check us out there.
Comicdavesmith.com.
And me and Rob got a bunch of stuff coming up after that.
Rob's got a bunch of dates all over the place.
He'll be all over the West Coast.
RobbieTheFire.com for all those tickets.
And yeah, let's get into it.
Anything else you want to plug before we jump into Phoenix?
Because I didn't have enough Vegas.
Tucson and Phoenix.
All right.
There you go.
Rob is going to die like Evan Tanner in the desert.
That is his plan in life.
By the way, R.I.P. Evan Tanner, solid middleweight fighter, former champion, died in the desert.
If you don't know the story, go look into it.
Anyway, okay.
So, Rob, I have another Ben Shapiro video that I wanted to respond to on today's episode.
And Rob was suggesting that this is our shark week, basically.
This is our Israel goes to war.
It's Ben Shapiro's shark week.
We're going to respond to a lot of his stuff.
But you know what?
He's got all these clips and they're going super viral.
And it's hard to talk about anything else except this like war that looks like it could potentially be like one of the biggest wars of our lifetime.
So it's hard not to respond to it.
People keep giving us so much content to break down.
We're going to get a little Yamaka out of the water.
That's pretty good.
That's why we need more resources.
We'll put that together in person.
Ah, there's a Ben Shapiro shark in the water.
Everyone, get out.
All right.
So Ben Shapiro, this video, I believe, is something I saw just on Twitter.
It had like 7 million views.
I'm sure it's up on YouTube and other places too.
So there's probably, there's got to be at least in the over 10 million views, probably total on all of the different platforms, that Ben Shapiro put out this video about the lies that you've been told about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
So I thought we'd play it and kind of go through it and try to be as fair as we can here.
Is this as cartoonish as like one of those biblical drawings?
And it's like, and then the Jews tried to bring them bread and they killed their kids.
So I'm afraid of the Jews came back with soup.
I think it's not far off.
There was a Dennis Prager had a video years ago that was like this type of thing.
It was like one of those type of, you know, the videos where it's like a guy like drawing with a pencil?
Yeah.
You know, and like, and like, and he's basically like, here's the conflict.
One side wants peace and the other side wants the other side dead.
You know, like that's like basically the whole takeaway from the whole thing.
Anyway, this is probably not far off from that, but let's jump into it and see what Ben Shapiro had to say and try to be as fair as we can.
The things that we've been seeing on our screens from Hamas are atrocities, obviously.
But the media have said that these atrocities, they're really missing context.
The context they are providing on that context is a bunch of lies.
There are four myths generally propagated by the left around the history of Israel and the Palestinians.
These myths matter because they lead people into a peculiar moral relativism whereby attempted murder or successful murder of Jews is excused.
And meanwhile, the evil human rights violations of the Palestinians are minimized.
Okay, let's pause it right now.
Okay, so Ben Shapiro is claiming that there are a lot of lies that are told to us about this conflict and that the missing context that is often alluded to is just lies.
So one of the things that I think is very interesting right away is that Ben Shapiro talks about moral relativism.
I hear this from a lot of the pro-Israeli side.
That as if you talk about the fact that if you go, hey, look, this is so evil what Hamas did to the Israeli people, and not just Israeli people, I guess, and Taurus and stuff too.
And then someone is to say, well, look, that's true, but it's also really evil what Israel has done to Palestine.
They'll say, oh, that's moral relativism, which is very strange because it's actually the exact opposite of moral relativism.
Moral relativism would be the denial of an objective standard of morals.
But the opposite of that would be saying, well, look, we have an objective standard of morality and we're going to apply it to both sides.
You can't just apply it to one side.
It would seem that moral relativism would more accurately define saying, hey, look, the atrocities of one side are outrageous, but the other side are completely permissible.
That would be the definition of moral relativism.
So that right away just kind of jumps out at me.
And of course, right away, Ben Shapiro says, look, we've seen these horrific, you know, acts of Hamas.
No doubt true, a horrific terrorist attack.
But I think, you know, I don't know, Rob, if you've been on social media, there's also been another side to this.
And that is something that I think is legitimate to bring up.
We've also seen lots of pictures of dead Palestinians just from this last week.
And in fact, I mean, the numbers are certainly going to be far more higher on the Palestinian side of innocent dead people than on the Israeli side.
They're probably already, but they certainly will be by the end of all of this.
Okay.
All right.
Let's keep playing.
So there's, he says there's four lies.
We're going to go through them.
Here's the first.
Israel is historically Muslim territory.
This is a pure and absolute lie.
Israel is historically Jewish territory.
According to the Bible and certain interpretations of contemporaneous archaeology, Joshua entered the land of Israel in 1400 BC.
The kingdom of David was founded around 1000 BC.
The first Temple of Solomon was built in approximately 957 BC.
The second temple was built in approximately 515 BC.
The Hasmone dynasty was founded in 166 BC.
Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 BC, and the Jews exiled from Israel in 136 CE after the defeat of the Bar Kakhba revolt.
The Romans, in an attempt to shame the Jews, renamed the area Palestine as an insult after the Jews' historic enemy, the Philistines.
Even during the exile, there was continuous Jewish presence in the land.
Islam, which is the religion of the Palestinian Arabs, was not even founded until the 7th century CE or AD.
No independent Arab state has ever existed in the area known as Palestine.
Myth number two.
Okay, hold on.
Let's pause it there.
Okay.
The first one to me is just very strange, Rob.
I know you grew up in a very religious Jewish family.
This is something that a lot of Jews, I'm also Jewish, although I didn't grow up as religious as you did.
This is something a lot of them hold on to, but this is very strange for Ben Japir to start with.
Well, the first myth is that this has historically been a Muslim land.
Well, that's not true at all because in the year 2000 BC, the Bible says that the Jews were the, I don't think anybody has ever really disputed the fact that Judaism started in this area.
I don't think that's really when people say it was historically Muslim, I think they mean that like before the creation of Israel, a lot of Muslims lived on the land that is now Israel.
I think that's more what they're saying.
And the idea that you'd go that there is this weird thing that Zionists as Israel, Israeli advocates do, where they go like, well, the land was ours as promised to us by God, you know, 4,000 years ago.
And so we have a right to this land.
But it's, it's kind of a ridiculous claim if you think about it, that someone could come in and go like, hey, you know, this country that is populated by your people.
Well, my great, great, grandfather lived here.
So get the hell out.
It's all mine.
Like that, that just doesn't make sense in any like modern context of property rights.
That is just like bonkers and makes no sense.
And if anybody else were to do it, we would kind of like laugh that off as just absolutely ridiculous.
So anyway, I don't know what myth that's exactly shattering.
Another thing I would mention is people really should read.
Sheldon Richmond wrote a book called Coming to Palestine, really great book on the history of Israel.
And he kind of goes through this where this whole concept of the Romans exiling all of the Jews out of Israel is, let's just say, historically very dubious that it ever happened at all.
But anyway, to me, it's neither here nor there.
Like who really cares in the year 60, you know, CE or whatever you call it, 60 AD, however you, whatever term you like to use.
Just really to me bears no weight on what the modern conflict is.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah.
Well, I agree with you that the in modern times to go, hey, read the Bible, it was promised to the Jews.
So we're going to go take it.
That doesn't really work in modern times for most people.
I mean, I guess if, listen, if your claim is I've got this holy book and it says that I'm supposed to have this, and so I'm allowed to go slaughter everyone and go take it, then that's the argument that you're making.
And you better hope that God actually does exist.
And I guess if that God does exist and you're fulfilling his will, he'll probably protect you.
You don't have to worry about the fact that everyone thinks that you're wrong because you've got your holy book.
The holy book gave your instructions.
You're following your instructions.
Then go do that.
Right.
But then you can't exist in our framework and go, no, no, but what I'm doing is moral by your standards of property rights.
No, you're claiming that you're above the morality that we all have a property rights because you got your divine instructions from God.
However, it sounds to me what he's trying to say, and there might even be spin in this is just there's a historical record of the Jews living here and Jews have always lived here.
So the idea that the Muslims have, I think he's saying by property right terms, and it might be dubious when he says that there's never been a Muslim nation here as opposed to, yeah, but they were living there.
So I think there's gamemanship, but it sounds like the argument he's making is not the, we've got a holy book as much as he's saying there's been a historical record and Jews have always been here.
Well, look, and that much is true.
I just don't think anyone's actually disputing that Jews lived in Israel 5,000 years ago.
I don't think that's ever actually what the dispute is.
And then I'm glad you brought that up because I kind of was going to miss mentioning that.
But the idea of saying like, look, there's never been an official Muslim state in this area is that is true, but what does that really matter?
I mean, like, if you're going to sit here and say, it's almost like if you were to say, let's say there are some Christians who own a bunch of land in some community, and then you just steal all of their land from them and go, well, listen, America was never an officially Christian nation.
So whatever.
Like, okay, fine, but like, what, what?
What does that have to do with anything?
Like, this was their land.
This was their property.
So that's, again, this is just not accurate.
It's the truth is that before the UN partition proclamation, about 80% of the land was owned by Palestinians.
And so I don't care whether it was the British Empire or the Ottoman Empire or whoever it was who technically was in charge of the nation state.
The point is that for, particularly for libertarians, but I think just for decent people in general, we don't really like care about that.
Like if Washington, D.C. fell and then someone went like, oh, we're going to take your house away from you.
You'd be like, hey, this is my house.
And you'd be like, well, it's never been like you never really ran the nation.
It's like, okay, yeah, but that's not how modern people conceive of morality, right?
It's like, no, that's still like, it still was your house.
Okay, let's, that's the first one.
Doesn't seem to be really tearing down much of a myth that's been told.
The Lie of Declared Independence00:17:12
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Let's go to number two.
Myth number two, Israel is the cause of the failure of land partition in the Middle East.
This is, again, a pure lie.
In 1917, the British promised the Jews the entire area of Palestine.
At the time, Israel and Transjordan, which is today's Jordan.
In 1920, the Arabs began pogroms, a mass murder of Jews, in Jerusalem as a sign of anger at the British mandate in Palestine.
In 1922, the British government, in response, announced in a white paper that the Transjordan area, 70% of Palestine, would be sliced off and made an Arab state.
Okay, so let's pause right here.
So all of that history is accurate.
And like there were these like vicious, horrific, and inexcusable pogroms.
And violence has worked for the Muslims forever?
Yeah, right.
So that's, so all of that is true and it is horrible.
And it is a noteworthy point in history.
But again, it's not, again, it's not excusing or justifying any of that.
It's horrible.
But you can also see, even as Ben Shapiro here is laying it out, that the British Empire just decided to tell the Jews that you can have it all.
It's all yours.
And of course, now, again, not excusing the violence against Jewish people, but you can understand that there was like, what a stupid thing for the British Empire to do and really in many ways screwed over Jewish people there because you just told this huge group of Muslims that all of your land, like your homes and villages and your entire land isn't yours anymore.
We're handing it over to someone else.
And so they had this violent revolt against that.
And okay, like that's the violence.
The whole point of everything we say here is that the violence against innocent people is never excusable.
But at least if you're even as Ben Shapiro is laying it out, can't you kind of in your mind go, oh yeah, but like it's not justified, but I get where that reaction was provoked.
Like, oh, you just announced to a nation's worth of people that you're handing over all of their land to a different group.
So that's what happened.
The British Empire said, all of this is for the Jews now.
You all have to presumably get out.
And there was a violent uprising as a response to that.
Horrible all around.
I don't know what to say.
All right, let's keep playing.
Would become Jordan.
In 1937, the Peel Commission recommended a rump state for the Jews, in which the British would retain control over Jaffa and Jerusalem.
The Arabs would get the entire Negev and nearly the entirety of Judea and Samaria.
And the Jews would get a tiny swath of territory along the coast, including Tel Aviv and Haifa.
In 1939, the British, in response again to Arab pressure, restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine, just as the Nazis began World War II and just before the Holocaust.
Nonetheless, the Jews sided with the Brits.
The Arabs sided with Hitler.
In 1948, the British mandate ended and Israel declared its independence.
David Ben-Gurion read the proclamation of independence to 13 other members of the Israel Provisional National Council.
Israel had taken its place among the nations of the world.
In 1964.
Okay, let's pause it right there.
So that's, this is all.
So, okay, so you know, in a court of law where they'll say, before you swear in to testify, Rob, what do they say to you?
They say, do you swear to tell the truth?
Nothing but the truth.
Well, but there's a middle part in there.
They go, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, right?
And the reason why that's the oath you have to take before you testify is because lies by omission are every bit as much of a lie as just blatantly telling a lie.
And so the fact that all Ben Shapiro has to say about 1948 is that like, yeah, then the Jews declared their independence.
That's it.
That's all that happened there.
The Jews declared their independence in 1948.
He doesn't even mention anything about the UN partition plan.
He doesn't mention anything about this little detail called the Nakba, which, you know, the Muslims also call the catastrophe.
And, you know, it's funny because just this last week, the head of the Israeli military in response to this horrific Hamas attack, this Hamas terrorist attack, said, we need a Nakba 2.0.
So it's not as if they don't acknowledge that this is a thing, right?
So here's what happened.
And here's what Ben Shapiro literally just has a couple sentences to say about 1948 and then moves on right to the 60s as if there was nothing bigger that happened there.
But so, okay, in 1947, the Jews owned about roughly 10% of the land in what is now Israel.
So they owned about 10%.
And the UN decided in their partition plan that there should be a Jewish state and a Palestinian state.
And they assigned to the Jews 56% of the land.
Okay.
So the Jews who owned 10% of the land, they said, under this plan now, you automatically own 56% of the land.
And shocker, the Jews accepted it and the Arabs rejected it.
The Arabs were like, no, what?
This is ridiculous.
And it makes perfect sense why one side accepted that and the other side rejected that, right?
Like, it's like you own 10% of the land.
No, you don't just get 56% of the land.
So they said no.
And then the Israelis were what comes to be the Israelis.
This is before they declared their independence because the UN partition plan was either nine or 10 months before this Israeli, before this Israeli independence.
And so then a war broke out over this.
And in the process of before and during this war, the Israelis forced 750,000, three quarters of a million Muslims off of their property, never to have it again.
And then, yes, other Muslim nations attacked, they fought a war, and the Israelis won.
Again, this is the pre-Israelis, whatever you want to call them, the Jews who were attempting to establish Israel.
And they won the war.
But to just yada yada over all of that, as if that wasn't an important part of the history, and that wasn't to this day a huge part of the grievance.
You know, when they talk about, when the Muslims talk about the catastrophe or they talk about the right to return or any of these things, this is what they're referring to.
Okay.
So you can just say, if you go like, oh, there's all these lies that are told to you about the history of Israel and Palestine.
But whenever you have one of these like slick edited videos and the whole message of the thing is that our side was always right and their side was always wrong, you can immediately kind of know this is bullshit.
And I'm not saying you have to even be, I'm not saying you have to be the mirror image of that and say that the Jews were always wrong and the Muslims were always right or something like that.
But let's be real.
There is more to this story than just what Ben Shapiro is talking about here.
There was a whole period in there where there was this huge war fought over the fact that the locals, and you can say, well, it was never officially a nation or, hey, they claim this was historically Muslim land, but I have this story from 2000 BC that says something different.
But at the time, for a very long time, Arab Muslim Palestinians had owned this land and the Jews only owned like 10% of the land.
And then the UN, some group that had been around for a couple of years who had no authority to just start deciding what nations are and aren't, decided the Jews get the majority of the land.
And the Arabs there said, no, absolutely not.
They rejected that.
And then 750,000 of them were violently driven out of their homes and into these essential ghetto areas.
Okay.
So like, you can't just skip that part.
Like if your whole thing is like debunking lies that are told, it comes off pretty dishonest.
Look, in the same way in a court of law, the reason why they say in a court of law that you have to tell, you have to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, is that you could say, if you were like, hey, I saw this guy shoot someone else, but you don't mention that the other guy put a gun to his head first and said, I'm going to kill you.
You're technically not lying, but you're not telling the whole truth.
And lies by omission are just as bad as making things up.
They're just as bad as blatant lies.
Because if you leave that out, then the part, right?
Like if I just say, I saw Mr. Anderson shoot Mr. Cooper in the face, and I don't mention that Mr. Cooper had a gun pointed to him and said, I'm going to kill you, then it leaves you with the impression that Mr. Anderson's a murderer, whereas actually he acted in self-defense, right?
So if you're going to like say you're slapping down these lies, then you have to give the whole truth or at least attempt to do that.
And this is crazy how Ben Shapiro just goes, ah, the story of 1948.
You know, Israel declared their independence, yada, yada, yada.
So now we're in the 60s.
And that's, that's it.
All right.
I love the Ben-Gurion just kapui salute.
That kapui.
I don't know.
It was a pretty, it was quite a Jewish salute.
It was like a variation of the Nazi salute with a, but with less effort even.
The Nazis were stiffer.
He was real loose.
I've given zero thought to any of the establishment of Israel as you're bringing these things up.
I'm remembering at one point in third and fourth grade with the, we got it because the Balfour Declaration and this Declaration and whatever.
I don't know.
But I'm just laughing now thinking about this literally for the first time as an adult that you think about the English empire and the monarch and what they did to the Indians and like the fact that they just have the moral authority, I guess, to just go, well, this is for these people now.
It just kind of seems like ridiculous origin to go, hey, we've got a rightful claim to this.
Yeah.
It's pretty, it's pretty wild.
All right.
Let's keep playing as Ben Shapiro gets into the 60s.
In 1964, with the Arabs still in full control of the Gaza Strip and West Bank, the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded, calling for the destruction of Israel.
Here is a contemporaneous British report on the first chairman of the Palestine Liberation.
By the way, so just pause it for a second, right?
So again, this is what happens when you're unwilling to give at least even try to give the full context, right?
And like, say, so understand now, now knowing the stuff that we filled in that Ben Shapiro's left out, right?
So originally the Jews owned 10% of the land.
And you can go, this is all like historical fact.
Like even like Wikipedia or official like bullshit sites like that will admit this, but they're like, yeah, about 10% of the land deeds were owned by Jewish people.
And the UN plan gave them 56% of the land, right?
And then the Arabs rejected that.
And then after the Nakba, after the war is over, the Jews take over not only 56% of the land, but it's something like 70-something percent of the land.
So now they went from way, way more than what the Arabs had already rejected.
But hey, they want a war.
So that's what they get to do.
But so now when you go, okay, 20 years later, these Muslims are still furious.
You know, it's like when you left out that whole context, you'd be like, geez, these Muslims seem like dicks, right?
Like they're still pissed.
But when you actually look at what happened here, it's like, well, yeah, they never accepted the fact that you just took over this entire piece of land that was already inhabited by people who owned property there and that you drove 750,000 of them out of their homes.
So I'm not, again, I'm not justifying either side.
If there's anything you know, and this is not moral relativism, this is moral objectivism to say that all of these sides have done things that are wrong.
But if you want to understand it and you want to have some type of objective moral understanding of what's happening here, this is why there was still so much resentment 20 years later.
20 years is not that long.
You know what I mean?
Like 20 years is 9-11 was more than 20 years ago.
You know what I mean?
Right.
I got to ask when you say like deeds, I mean, I spent a fair amount of time in Israel.
There's just a lot of vacant land, like a lot of vacant land.
Like it's mostly vacant land.
Like it's almost weird the way they build that you're just surrounded by vacant land and they just give you a tiny lot and you're like, can I not be stacked on top of people?
Like they pretend like everything's New York City, that there's no land, but then surrounded by vacant land, you're like, well, can I just go over there and put up a nice house?
There's like all this land here.
So and that's that's current.
You know, that's, that's in modern day Israel.
So when we're saying that 90% was owned by deeds, is that just, I mean, not that you can just take someone's vacant territory, but like.
No, what we're talking about at this point.
Yeah.
And I'm sure the majority of it at that point was, or not, maybe not the majority, but a lot of it was kind of like unbuilt, unhomesteaded land.
Although I'm sure there were some people who owned like, cause, you know, all of this stuff was always like real crony stuff.
I mean, particularly back to like the Ottoman Empire, where they'd have people who just like owned plots of land and you probably only owned that because you bribed some guy in the Ottoman Empire off to get that.
But in terms of the property that had ownership, this is what they can trace it back to.
Like, you know, so I take, take from that what you might, but that's about the best historians can come up with.
So I got a fair point, though.
I don't know.
I don't know exactly like what that, what percentage of that property ownership represented in land ownership.
I'm not exactly sure.
But I know that there were approximately 750,000 Muslims who were forced out, either fled or were violently forced out of their homes.
And even when they fled, hoped to return.
And when violently forced out, hoped to return and never were allowed to return.
War of Choice and Forced Displacement00:15:43
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All right, let's get back into the show.
So anyway, cut to the 60s.
These Muslims are pissed.
One of the most extreme anti-Israeli politicians in the Arab world, Ahmed El-Shukir, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, as the spokesman for 1 million Palestine refugees, he's found the flames of hatred for Israel with unflagging energy.
In 1967, the Arab League announced the three no's.
No peace, no recognition, no negotiations.
With all of Israel's enemies mobilizing against it, Israel launched a preemptive strike on the Egyptian Air Force, inaugurating the 1967 six-day war.
This ended right there.
So now, of course, Ben Shapiro, you know, again, only telling one side of the story.
So he'll say that, you know, the three no's, no recognition, no peace, all this stuff, right?
He'll talk about all the things, all of the kind of provocative, escalatory rhetoric of the Muslim side.
And all of that is true, by the way.
But he's completely leaving out all of the kind of like over-the-top aggressive rhetoric of the Israeli side.
And then how many of them were talking about how you can go back and find all of the quotes of this stuff?
How many of them were talking about how they're going to conquer the rest of Palestine, how they're going to drive all these people out, how they're all just animals and dogs and all of this shit.
But even he has to, he has to set it up by only talking about what the fucked up things that Muslims were saying and how they said they wouldn't recognize Israel and they wouldn't have peace with Israel because of course they wanted their land back, but whatever, talk about all the fucked up things they said and then go, and they started mobilizing.
So in response to this, Israel launched, in his own words, a preemptive strike.
Because that's actually the story of the 1967 war, that Israel decided to fucking go to war, to strike Egypt first.
And in response, they were at war now.
And in fact, there's even been, I think there was a former Israeli prime minister.
I apologize, I'm blanking on the name because I do get some of these names confused, but who even like later admitted that this was a war of choice, that yes, they were mobilizing against us, but we could have seen what they were going to do.
And we decided to aggressively, you know, like preemptively start this war.
So yes, then Israel goes to war in 1967, the Six-Day War.
All right, let's continue.
Inaugurating the 1967 Six-Day War.
This ended with Israel gaining miraculously the Sinai Desert, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, Judea and Samaria, now known as the West Bank, as well as the entirety of Jerusalem.
In 1973, Israel preemptively launched a war in 1967 and they won.
And then they took even more territory, even more territory from the, not just where you start with the UN partition plan, where they were getting way more territory than they had, not just after the 1948 war, where they get way more territory than that, but now in 1967, they take over almost everything, almost the entire area of Israel.
And because they won it then, it's theirs, I guess, is the logical conclusion.
Let's keep going to the war in 73.
In 1973, the Arabs launched all-out war again, this time on Yom Kippur.
Israel survived and gained territory.
In 1979, Israel gave the Sinai back to Egypt in return for peace.
In 1993.
Okay, let's pause it right there.
Okay, pause it right there because this is as much as they will.
Again, it's like these things.
So in 1979, Israel gave all this land back to Egypt for peace.
That's it.
That's as much as you need to know about 1979.
Let's move on.
You know, like that's it.
But of course, that's the, well, the actual story is that the U.S. under Jimmy Carter, they worked out a deal where they bribed both Egypt and Israel to not go to war with each other.
And they gave them, I believe it was $3 billion a year each to make this deal.
And so it's not like Israel just gave up land for peace.
Israel gave up land for money and the promise of Israel being bought, excuse me, the promise of Egypt being bought off.
So that's the real story of 1979, which however you feel about that, like that's what happened.
It's not as if it was just like, as Ben Shapiro is trying to make you think or at least leave you to assume that it was just like out of the goodness of their heart, they were like, hey, take all this land and let's have peace.
But what's funny about that is that even if that's what you're supposed to believe, then I don't know, wouldn't it weirdly almost lead to the conclusion of being like, oh, so like these Muslims aren't so crazy that you can't just give them some land and then have peace with them, right?
Isn't it kind of strange that you're like, oh, so this could totally work with Egypt?
Because the kind of Israeli perspective is like, look, we'd love to just have peace, but these Muslims are so goddamn crazy that you can't just like have a peace deal with them.
And yet even Ben Shapiro here is kind of claiming, oh, we just gave them land and then we had peace.
And by the way, Israel and Egypt have had peace ever since.
Now, that's not the entirety of the story.
It was U.S. tax dollars bribing both of them.
But even so, you're like, so why is it that you can have peace with this whole broader Muslim world, but just not this little strip here of Gaza and this strip of the West Bank?
Those are the one part of the Muslim world.
Are they so much more radical than the rest of the Muslim world?
Is that the reason?
Why can't you also give them some land and have peace?
That part never seems to get answered.
But anyway, okay, let's keep playing.
In 1979, Israel gave the Sinai back to Egypt in return for peace.
In 1993, Israel agreed to the Oslo Accords, which promised a step-by-step process to establish a Palestinian state.
In 1998, Israel conceded yet more territory to the Palestinian Authority under the prime ministership of Benjamin Netanyahu in 2000.
So let's just as obviously Ben Shapiro is just going through these things, like Israel agreed to this, Israel agreed to that.
This is not true.
And you can go back and look at this.
There were even people within the deal, Americans, who acknowledged that like, yeah, no deal was, nothing was even really offered to Yasser Arafat in this deal.
There's a there's there's a secret referring to the Oslo Accords.
There's, do you ever see this, Rob?
Where there's a, um, like Netanyahu was on a secret video.
Like he basically was in some home.
I think, you know, double check me on this.
I think it was in one of the settlements, but I might be wrong about that.
But he was in a home with some Israelis.
And I guess they like turned on a video camera and just secretly recorded Netanyahu.
But he's talking about the Oslo Accords and he's bragging about how basically he put so many poison pills in that deal that it was never even a real deal.
I had heard, is the Oslo Accords the Camp David incident with Clinton?
So I had heard that it was essentially Clinton called them both up.
I'm kind of paraphrasing my own summary here, but he went, you know what?
I need a nice picture.
And so if you guys can both come to the table with a nice picture, we can basically sign documents that say that neither has any intention to do anything.
And I'll make it worth your while so I can have this picture.
I remember, I remember being a kid and watching this on the news.
And I must have been like, I mean, I don't know, I was 12 maybe or something like that when this was happening.
And I remember seeing it on the news.
And, you know, like when you're a kid and you're dumb enough that you still believe politicians are real human beings.
And so I remember just watching it and they were like, Clinton signs historic Middle East peace deal.
And I was like, good for him.
Good for him.
All right.
One problem taken care of.
Now let's move on to the next one.
He's been assassinated.
Yes.
Yitzhak Rabin, who was the guy who signed the, he was the Israeli prime minister.
He signed that whatever agreement that meant nothing and then was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli who was furious that he would make a deal with the Palestinians.
But anyway, in this video, Netanyahu brags about how within the agreement, there was like what could be determined as military zones and how Israel got the final say on what a military zone is.
And then he goes, I define the whole West Bank as a military zone.
And he's like bragging about how he pushed Clinton around and how it was all nonsense.
So, you know, just this narrative, which on its face should make you question it, right?
The narrative is that we offered them everything and they didn't want it.
Well, because it was, I guess it was a Jew offer of, look, I'm giving you everything.
But then on the back end, it goes, uh, uh-huh.
Well, nothing.
I gave you nothing.
Well, right.
So you got kind of Eastern European there, but I do.
If one thing I thought you'd be able to pull off was a Jewish accent, but you'd be more like, I gave you nothing.
Anyway, you don't know the way Israelis talked.
Come on.
No, you're right.
That is.
And Netanyahu does have a much more of a like, and then I gave him the list.
And then the pirate.
Yeah.
And then, and then, but I didn't really give him the vet, even though I told him I'd give him the vet.
Oh, no, that.
But, but, right?
Isn't this just on its face?
Even if you think these are the craziest Muslims ever, blah, blah, blah.
It's like when you offered Egypt all of this land, they took it, right?
Do you really think if you were offering the Palestinians, go, hey, do you guys want to have way more power and control?
And they'd go, no, we don't.
We'd rather live under your domination.
It just doesn't make any sense.
And that's not what happened.
If you care to like go back and look at it, there was a lot of what Ben Shapiro is just, he's rattling off a couple quick lines here.
And yes, that was the propaganda of the day, but that's actually not what happened.
It is just not true that Israel offered them everything they want and they still turned it down.
It's just not true.
Anyway, let's keep playing.
In 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat, the terrorist leader of the Palestinian Authority, 91% control over the West Bank in contiguous territory and an Israeli security presence along 15% of the border with Jordan.
Arafat walked away from the table and began the second intifada, a massive terror wave that ended with the death of thousands of Jews.
In 2005, Israel unilaterally...
There's no talk of how many Muslims died.
It's just, you'll talk about this one event where Jews died.
But throughout all of this, throughout all of this, Ben Shapiro has never once mentioned any event where Muslims died.
And by the way, you can just go look up the numbers.
It's not as if like, oh, like say a thousand Jews died and 200 Muslims died and he never mentioned those 200.
I'm saying the Muslim casualties have been enormously higher than the Jewish casualties and none of that ever gets mentioned.
In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip.
Hamas immediately took it over and began using it as a base for terrorist activity.
That continues until this day.
In 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmer offered more than withdrawal.
It's another thing that they talk about a lot is that in 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza.
That is true that briefly Israel withdrew from Gaza.
They also, it was the Bush administration that really pushed the elections on Gaza.
This was in the middle of the whole kind of like, you know, remember we were going to sweep the whole Muslim world with democracy.
And at the same time, Israel propped up and very purposely and consciously had a policy of funding and helping Hamas.
And they helped Hamas win that election because as Netanyahu is on record saying over and over again, that this was, he thought, would be the perfect strategy to divide the West Bank against Gaza and to have the face of his enemy be these radical Islamists who would never get world recognition under statehood.
So they pulled out.
They insisted on these elections.
They helped Hamas win the elections and then they reinvaded and reoccupied the area briefly afterward.
So that's actually what happened.
In 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmer offered even more than Barak in terms of territory with some land swaps to maintain Jewish populated areas in exchange for some Israeli territory.
Olmer even offered to relinquish Israeli sovereignty at the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, as well as the entire old city of Jerusalem to a five-member non-sovereign international trusteeship comprising Israel, the PA, Jordan, the U.S., and Saudi Arabia.
PA head Mahmoud Abbas walked away without a counteroffer.
Myth number three, Israel expelled all Palestinian Arabs from British Mandate Palestine.
This is, again, a lie.
Israel's founding documents asked Arabs to stay.
Israel's declaration of independence in the middle of an ongoing war with Arab nations reads, quote, we appeal in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months to the Arab inhabitants of the state of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the state on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.
Debate has raged for decades over how many Arabs left the nascent state of Israel thanks to expulsion and how many left because they were told to leave by their own leaders.
Founding Documents Asked Arabs to Stay00:03:16
An estimated 250,000 to 300,000 refugees left before their homes were even in a war zone.
We didn't compel them to leave.
They left on their own will, or rather on the will of Arab leaders, who advised them, even before trouble started.
The collapse of Arab society during the 1947-48 war, leaving many Arabs without a means of support, has been well documented.
Israel will do everything in its power to help the resettlement of these refugees by paying compensation and by other rules.
Hundreds of thousands of these refugees ended up in the West Bank and Gaza, which remained Arab territory until 1967.
Furthermore, Arab nations refused to take in hundreds of thousands of Arabs, turning their co-religionists into refugees who have maintained that status for literally decades, a situation unparalleled in human history.
Fully 62% of such refugees live outside the West Bank and Gaza Strip, according to the UNRWA.
Meanwhile, Israel, tiny Israel, took in over 800,000 Jews expelled from Arab lands between 1948 and 1951 and never asked for land to be returned to those Jews.
Okay, so let's pause it here for a second.
I mean, look, you can go and look into the history of this.
But yes, the Jews said, we're going to take care of you.
We don't want you to leave.
That's our official doctrine that we're going to help you out.
But that's not what actually happened.
And a huge percentage of them were violently driven out.
Now, the point that Ben Shapiro makes here, where he says, these other Muslim countries wouldn't take in a lot of these Palestinians, yet Israel took in the Jews from all over.
That is absolutely true.
I can't argue with that, right?
It is true that these other Muslim countries will not take in the Palestinians, but Israel really is loyal to anybody who's Jewish.
That's the truth.
In fact, everybody who's Jewish, no matter where you're from, I believe has the, what's it called, Rob?
You have a free trip to Israel?
Well, with the birth.
Yeah, but that's not, I think you're guaranteed citizenship, maybe.
Maybe there's a lot of people.
I think you can get citizenship if you ask for it, but you also have birthright.
Is that what it's called?
That's not an Israeli thing.
That's some wealthy American benefactor who, if you've never taken a trip, will bring you there for a week.
Okay.
Fair enough.
Have sex on a bus and advocate for it in the future.
Sure.
Not sex country.
Right, right.
Or both.
I didn't get to fornicate on a bus.
I'm just telling you what I feel like I missed.
What it is for other people.
But I will say that, yes, it is absolutely true that Israel has more concern for anybody who's a Jew anywhere than these other Muslim countries have for anyone who's a Muslim anywhere.
And they are definitely not taking in these Palestinians.
That's a fair point.
That also doesn't mean that therefore those people have no rights.
Or therefore you're allowed to do whatever you want to these people.
And in fact, it is like an incredibly tribal way of looking at things that it's like, hey, we took in our Jews.
You should have taken in your Muslims.
And if not, then we're going to do whatever we want to these people.
Fair Point on Jewish Concerns00:02:20
So it is true.
And sometimes people will make the point.
Pro-Israel types all the time make the point.
They go, well, how come Egypt doesn't take all of them in?
Or how come these people don't take all of them?
And it's like, okay, yeah, maybe they should, but they don't.
But that also doesn't mean that they just have to get the hell off their land and go to like some other place.
Like that doesn't follow.
I mean, even say with the borders we currently have, with all the other previously Palestinian owned land being seized from them, even just in today, what is Gaza and the West Bank?
Like, why exactly do those people have to leave still?
Why?
Isn't that theirs?
At least now, at least this little sliver that's left for them?
Why exactly do they have to go to Egypt?
So, it's again, I'm not saying there's no truth to the point Ben Shapiro is making here, but it doesn't exactly absolve you of any guilt in violating people's rights.
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Myth of Full Rights for All00:10:52
Myth number four: Israel is an apartheid state.
Israel is most certainly not an apartheid state.
Arab citizens of Israel have the same rights as Jewish citizens.
20% of all citizens of Israel are Arab.
The vast majority of Palestinians live under Palestinian rule in the West Bank.
All Arabs in the Gaza Strip lived under Hamas rule.
Israel's population, again, is 20% Arab.
Arab parties have sat in the Israeli government, and Arab sits on Israel's Supreme Court.
There are zero Jews living under Palestinian rule.
The only apartheid state is any state of Palestine.
All of these myths have consequences.
All of these lies have consequences.
They lead to a pseudo-sophisticated context that allows for the murder of Jews.
Okay, let's pause it right there for a second because I think this is actually kind of interesting.
And I think this does get into what is a fair point that Ben Shapiro is making.
Okay.
And it is a fair point to say that, look, Israel is like a first world country.
And the neighboring countries and Palestine are not.
And so the Muslims who live in Israel probably have a better life than they would have living in any of these other Muslim countries.
And certainly than they would have living in Palestine.
I mean, aside from like if they were royalty or something like that in some other Muslim country, right?
Now, it's not true when he says they have full rights.
They don't have the same full rights that Jews have, but it is still true that they live a better life.
And that's that's not nothing.
Like there's a point to that.
You know what I mean?
Like there, there's a point.
Now, part of the reason why they would have a much worse life if they lived in, say, Gaza is because it's occupied by Israel and because Israel propped up Hamas, that is now the rulers of Gaza or quasi-rulers of Gaza, kind of like Hamas is they're almost like the most powerful gang in a prison, you know, like they don't really run the fucking place.
The prison warden runs the place, but they are like a powerful gang within that.
So yes, and certainly a Jew who was just living in Gaza, obviously there are none, but if there was a Jew living in Gaza, they'd be much more mistreated than a Muslim living in Israel.
So that's a fair enough point.
But that still doesn't just excuse that you can treat these people in any way you want to.
And the idea of saying Israel is an apartheid state is not just a comment on the fact that how the Muslims within Israel are treated or what rights they have or what voting rights they have or anything like that.
It's more a fact that, look, even the Israelis will say publicly, They'll say to the international community, like Benjamin Netanyahu will say to the international community, we favor a two-state solution at some point under these preconditions, right?
Now, privately to his Likud party members, he'll say, we're never going to have a two-state solution and we're undermining that effort every chance we can.
But even if let's take what he says to the international community at face value, he's saying at some point there could be two states.
Well, then what is there right now?
But by his own admission, there's not two states right now, right?
So what is it?
It's one state right now.
So Israel has complete control of Gaza and the West Bank as we speak right now.
This is why they're able to cut off food, water, and medical supplies and electricity to Gaza when they decide to go to war with them, right?
Because they have control of all of that.
So if you view it as one state right now, then it's an apartheid state.
Then you have a state where there are these entire large pockets with millions of people in them that have absolutely no rights, absolutely no say over the government that governs them, which is Israel.
So I think that's kind of the heart of the matter.
It's not that there's nothing to what Ben Shapiro is saying.
There is something to that.
Look, you could also say, for example, to try to make this clear, when he says that Muslims who live in Israel are treated better than anywhere else in the Muslim world.
I think that's true.
Okay.
I will totally grant that.
And that's not nothing.
That's really something to think about, especially for, say, libertarians.
I think that's really something to think about.
And I think too many, too often people who are critical of Israel don't recognize that point and that there's really something very fair to that point.
However, in, let's say, 1952 in Birmingham, Alabama, you could have said, hey, the black people who live in the American South live better than any black people in Africa.
Again, short of like royalty or, you know, kings or presidents or anything like that.
But that would have more or less been true.
It would have more or less been true that they are living in a better, higher standard of life than almost all of Africa.
But that still doesn't make segregation right.
You know what I mean?
Like that still doesn't mean that it's like justified what you're doing to them.
I'm like, yes, okay, this is a first world and that's the third world.
So yes, in many ways, you're better off being here than you are being there.
But that still doesn't mean that there's not a moral issue with what you're doing here in Birmingham, Alabama in the 50s.
Does that make sense?
Makes sense to me.
All right.
Here, let's play the little end of this and then we'll wrap up the show.
Allows people in the West to believe that the grievances that are openly articulated by the Palestinian authority, Islamic Jihad and Hamas are actually about territory.
Hamas openly calls for the murder of every Jew in the region.
The Palestinian Authority gives actual bounties to the families of terrorists.
Islamic Jihad has the same exact goals as Hamas.
When evil people say they want to wipe Jews off the face of the earth, we ought to listen, not make up silly excuses as to why they don't actually mean what they say.
The consequences of buying your own lies, not even their lies, your own lies is dead Jews.
The world has witnessed the heinous attack by Hamas terrorists against innocent Israeli citizens.
This massive and devastating attack killed over a thousand Israeli men, women, children, babies.
Thousands more were injured, kidnapped, held hostage.
This sworn enemy of Israel will stop at nothing to slaughter every single Jew and claim Israel. as their own.
But there is a beacon of hope amidst the chaos.
The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews is on the ground.
Okay, we can pause it there.
By the way, at least one of those pictures that he showed in there was a SWAT team that had nothing to do with Hamas that I saw that got blown up and was like of a whole different thing.
Yeah, he, you know, look, it's just what's he leaving out there?
He says, well, Hamas has, you know, in their charter that they're going to like, you know, get rid of all Jews.
And it's like, well, what does the Likud party have in their charter?
Go look into that.
It has that they're going to kick all of the Palestinians out of all of the remaining Palestinian land.
And of course, when he goes, this week we've seen Jews killed by that.
It's like, yes, but this week we've also seen what in the response to that.
We've also seen images of dead Palestinian children and grandmothers and shit like that.
Then that's not moral relativism.
That's moral objectivism.
That's having an objective standard of morality.
Moral relativism would be only applying it to one side.
So we don't need two different standards.
Let's just have one standard and apply it to both sides.
I think that ultimately has been my argument for this entire week and will continue to be.
Rob, any final thoughts before we wrap this one up?
There's something so odd.
I never really thought about it, but the Arab-Israelis, and you got like other people.
You got the, I don't even know who they are, but the Druze.
I remember we used to have this Drew who is a security guard.
But there's just something so it's like there is a mechanism here for you guys getting, even I guess it's not great that they're second-class citizens, but I guess it's better than being the Palestinians in Gaza.
So like, how do you just start solving for that?
How do you start treating more Palestinians like the Arab Israelis?
There's a framework here.
Like, why is it that the Arab-Israelis seem to be doing all right?
And the Palestinians seem to, I don't know, do you inch the wall?
Like, do you start moving the wall back and just including more Palestinians into Israel and seeing if they like they like having the 80-20 split.
They feel like that's what gives them the super majority and keeps, you know, Israel as a Jewish state.
But I'd also even, I'd more stress the fact that, look, if Israel was able to make peace with, and I'm not saying everything's perfect, but they were able to at least make peace to the point that they're not going to war anymore with Egypt and with Jordan and with Saudi Arabia and with these areas that have some just needs to bribe more people.
If America started giving more money directly to the Palestinians, also listen, forget that's what it is.
It's Jews on both sides of the wall.
They got a racket going.
Well, there you go.
But I'm just saying, forget even being bribed with taxpayers.
I'm just saying there are some pretty radical Muslims in Saudi Arabia, some pretty radical Muslims in Egypt, some pretty radical forces there in Jordan.
Why is it that this can't be worked out with the Palestinians too?
Because Hamas, I just, I don't buy that.
And look, even way, someone, I was tweeting back and forth to some Jewish girl very briefly where she was like, you don't understand.
If Hamas would just go away, everyone could have peace, but it's Hamas's fault.
And you're like, you realize there wasn't peace before Hamas existed, right?
So it's not just that simple.
It's like, no, yeah, there could be peace, but there'd have to be like a real, a real peace deal worked out and on a real peace deal, not these ones that they just claim they offered them in the 90s and in the year 2000 that were bullshit.
So anyway, it's look, it doesn't look like that's coming anytime soon, but it's not anybody who's just convincing themselves that that's impossible because one side is evil and one side is pure good.
That's bullshit.
And we got to get past that if we're not going to get into World War III here.