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June 16, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
14:08
Episode 66 - The Mental Problem that is the Middle East
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Time Text
Good morning everybody!
Come on in. Grab a seat.
We still have some space here.
A little bit over there.
Over here. Alright, filling up fast.
And I think for the early birds, it's time for...
The morning. Simultaneous sip.
Grab your beverages.
I hope it's coffee.
Ooh.
Now admit it, it tastes better when you do it at the same time.
*sigh* You know it does.
Alright, I would like to start today's discussion with a confession.
And an apology.
I confess that I am completely ignorant about events in the Middle East.
Completely ignorant.
I apologize for all the things I'm going to say wrong about the Middle East and for all the things I have said wrong about the Middle East.
The only thing that's different between me And everyone else in the world is that sometimes the other people in the world don't realize that they also don't know anything about the Middle East.
Some kind of way ahead of most of you, in the sense that at least I know I don't know enough to really understand the region.
But, that said, there are some things I do understand in the world in general, and persuasion is one of those things that is my special hobby.
And so, let's talk about the persuasion, psychological, mental part of the Middle East, and see if we can get any more Maybe a little greater insight.
Maybe some of you will get up to speed, learn a little bit about the area.
Here's the thing that's been bugging me lately.
What does it mean that God said you own the land?
Let's say you had two groups.
Let's call them the Jews and the Muslims.
Let's say that God said...
This land is yours, and the Jews thought that meant them, and the Muslims thought that meant them.
So let's say you have a situation where they both think they own the same land, and that land is now called Israel.
What does it mean when God gives you land?
What does that mean?
Let's say God...
Gave the land in the Middle East to blonde white guys with glasses, let's say.
And, you know, I'm bald at the moment.
Let's make that bald guys.
Let's say God gave the land in the Middle East to bald guys with glasses who wear blue shirts.
Does that mean that I personally own some land in the Middle East?
No. No.
Doesn't work that way.
Even if God said, I give this land to bald guys with glasses who have a blue shirt, do I go over there and build my house?
I do not.
Do you know why? Because another bald guy with glasses and a blue shirt already owns that land.
I can't build a land where he already built his house.
So if God says, I give this land to Muslims, Does that help Bob the Muslim?
He doesn't get any land.
Other Muslims have it.
So the first thing you have to understand is that giving land to your people doesn't help you at all, right?
Unless there's some reason you can't own any land there.
Now if you're prohibited from having land, Well then, that's the problem, right?
If God said, you can have this land, and then somebody like Israel says, no, you can't have this land, well then that's the problem.
But is that the situation?
I'm looking at Quora, and I'm reading a little bit about Israel land rights.
And the question was, are Palestinians allowed to buy land in Israel?
Do you know the answer to that question?
No Googling. Before I tell you the answer, are Palestinians allowed to own land in Israel?
Go! Now look at the answers going by.
You've got some yeses.
Now that would be unusual, wouldn't it?
And you've got a bunch of no's.
But most of them are yes.
The answer is yes.
The answer is yes. If you're a Palestinian, and you have money, and you are not a resident of Israel, you can buy real estate in Israel.
Moreover, 80% of all the land in Israel is owned by the government of Israel, and apparently it will lease this land.
Now, if you're a Palestinian, can you lease land the same as an Israeli citizen can, the land that's owned by the government?
Yep, you can.
So what is the difference between a Palestinian who lives anywhere and an Israeli citizen in terms of owning the land that God gave them?
What's the difference? Now, some would argue that no, that's not good because the government of Israel is who owns the land and the government of Israel is sort of controlling it.
But what's a government?
A government isn't a person.
Government can't really Own land the way a person does.
And when God said, I give this land to whoever you think they gave it to, can't each individual have as much a right to the land as any other individual?
Yes. They all have access to the land.
Now, of course, there's a financial difference.
The financial difference is that there might be more money with the Israelis, etc.
But imagine if you could translate the problem over there from a religious whatever problem to an economic problem.
Suppose the only problem that the Palestinians had is that they don't have money.
Because if they did have money, they could buy land.
And then they would own the land that God said is theirs.
And they could buy up the Israelis' land if they wanted to.
And they would have the same rights that everybody else does.
Now, for those of you who didn't know, and by the way, I didn't know it.
I had to look it up. If you didn't know that Palestinians have the same rights to own land...
Oh, and by the way, it gets better.
Here's also from Korah.
I'll assume that nothing I say is absolute until it's double-checked, but it says when it comes to residential lands, Arabs often have more favorable terms than Israeli Jews do.
In other words, if you're...
If you're an Arab and you want to buy land in Israel, you often get better terms.
I didn't know that.
You get better terms if you're leasing it from the government.
So in other words, there's already a...
Can we call it a...
Reparations built into the system.
So the government of Israel controls 80% of the land, but they will lease it to both Israeli Jews and to anybody else who's got money.
And if you're an Arab and you're buying that land, you get some kind of a discount in many cases, which looks a little like reparations, even though it's not the same people necessarily that were involved with the original dislocation.
So that's interesting. Now, ask me this.
Or answer me this.
If the problem over there...
Let me give you some context.
When I look at the Palestinians who were protesting, the big protests recently, I ask myself, if you were to talk to each of those protesters, would they have the same reasons for protesting and being angry?
In other words, Are they all out there for literally exactly the same reason?
Or if you talk to them, would some of them say, ah, it's about economics, you know, Israel is squeezing the life out of us.
Or would some of them say, it's about God, I don't care about economics, it's just, you know, God gave us the land.
Or is it because they're mad, revenge-wise, because Israel did bad things to them?
Is it nationalism? Yeah.
What exactly are their reasons?
Because if you don't know their reasons, you don't know how to find an answer.
But if the reason is that God gave them the land, maybe we should do a little bit more convincing them that they can have all they want.
On exactly the same terms, no, better terms than an Israeli who lives there.
Suppose you had two situations.
One is that an Israeli Jew living in Israel can buy land, because, you know, it's their country, they can buy land, or they can lease land that the government owns.
No restrictions. Now suppose that you are not an Israeli citizen, but you are a Palestinian or whatever, and you could also buy or lease that same land for better terms.
In that case, would you say that God gave it to the people who had the better terms for the land, or did God give it to the people whose government, a theoretical concept, owns it, but the actual Israeli Jews can't buy it at the same price?
So there's that.
Now the next thing is, I keep hearing that Israel is sort of the Holy Land, but that's just a mistake.
Because it seems to me that the Holy Land is the larger area.
I believe it's between the Euphrates and maybe the Nile.
Somebody has to give me a little help on the geography, but I believe the biblical Holy Land was sort of vaguely described as between the Euphrates and in some part of Egypt, I think the Nile or something.
And Israel's in the middle of that, but it includes a lot of stuff, including everywhere that the Palestinians are outside of Israel proper.
So it's all the Holy Land.
It's just that the Israeli nation has the holy sites or some of them.
But everybody has access to them.
So as long as everybody has access to them and everybody can buy land...
Why exactly would you want a two-state solution versus a one-state solution?
And I'm not saying that as making a point.
I'm saying that as displaying my ignorance in this topic because I don't know exactly what the two-world solution versus the one buys you.
Because let's say just tomorrow that Israel says, okay, let's not decide Who God gave the land to.
Let's just not decide that.
Let's just say it's all Israel.
We'll just expand our border.
We'll absorb the Palestinians.
We'll have some kind of rules in place for who can do what.
But it's just all one state.
How many problems does that solve?
Trying to understand exactly what problem you're trying to solve over there might be the biggest issue.
Yeah, and then there's the issue of what is Zionism versus what is anything else.
Yes.
Alright, that's all I have to say for today, is that it seems to me there ought to be a solution here, because you can work out the God part by the fact that anybody can buy land there.
And I think everybody can be, or to put it another way, yes, as somebody said, you can run both movies on the same screen over there.
I'm pretty sure that both of them can get what they want with a little tweaking.
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