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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
56:33
The Truth About Israel and Palestine
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Hello everybody, my name is Stefan Molyneux.
I'm the host of Freedom Aid Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world.
This is the truth about Israel and Palestine.
Now, it's rather late in the game for philosophy to provide a short-term solution to such a long-term conflict, but my graduate school training was as a historian, and a combination of history and philosophy, I believe, I strongly believe, and will make the case for, Can help heal this problem in the long run and most importantly prevent recurrences in other cultures as well.
So let's look at some of the deep history and philosophy behind this conflict.
Current events have driven this to the forefront of everyone's minds.
July 8th, 2014, Israel launched Operation Protective Edge, carrying out airstrikes on 50 cities in the Palestinian Gaza Strip.
The Israeli government claimed this was in retaliation against rockets fired from Palestinian territories controlled by the Islamic political movement, Hamas.
This was the beginning of a conflict that has already taken the lives of more than 1,200 Palestinians as well as 48 Israeli soldiers.
The fighting continues despite the UN President Obama and other Western leaders calling for an immediate ceasefire.
The July events are the latest of a series of bloody attacks between Israel and Palestine.
The well-armed Israeli forces, who are supplied of course and armed to a large degree by the United States taxpayer and those who will inherit the national debt, typically go up against urban guerrillas, which means innocent civilians are usually the ones who suffer.
As you know, Palestine has no military, no former military of any kind.
Islamic groups have used suicide bombers to carry out numerous attacks against Israel since the 1990s.
The stated goal of Hamas is the destruction of Israel.
We'll look at the Israeli Agenda with regards to Palestine as we go through this presentation, but it's irreconcilable win-lose stances to say the least.
Human rights organizations have consistently accused Israel of violating international laws of armed conflict and the rights of the entire Palestinian population.
The Israel-Palestine conflict has been raging for decades and there seems to be no end in sight.
What is or what are the root causes of all of this violence and why are both sides so committed to it?
Let's go back to The origins of modern Judaism.
So prior to the Age of Enlightenment, which can be broadly thought of as sandwiched between the end of the late Middle Ages and the Age of Reason, the Age of Enlightenment, Jews were organized in what some described as rabbinical dictatorships, tight-knit communities where rabbis had absolute control over the lives of Jews.
With the help of bribes, many European countries assisted rabbis in capturing, imprisoning, and executing Jews who didn't conform to Judaism.
One of the bigotries and anti-Semitism embedded in late medieval Christianity was forbidding Jews to hold property.
And as a result, a lot of Jews, of course, went into more intellectual professions, developed their human capital because they couldn't basically develop their real estate capital, which meant, of course, going into doctors, lawyers, financiers, bankers, and so on.
And then, of course, they got involved in funding all of the destructive habits of the Western European aristocracy and their endless pursuits of religious and secular warfare.
For example, the famous Austro-Hungarian Rabbi Moshe Sofer claimed, quote, Here in Bratislava, when I am told that a Jewish shopkeeper dared to open his shop during the Lesser Holidays, I immediately send a policeman to imprison him.
Israeli scholar Israel Shahak stated, quote, This was the most important social fact of Jewish existence before the Advent.
of the modern state.
Observance of the religious laws of Judaism, as well as their inculcation through education, were enforced on Jews by physical coercion, from which one could only escape by conversion to the religion of the majority, amounting, in the circumstance, to a total social break, and for that reason very impracticable, except during a religious crisis.
So it basically was a very violent cult that used the power of non-Jewish secular authorities to imprison and kill non-compliant Jews.
So a pretty terrifying situation to be in.
Shahak also writes, it is important to note that all the supposedly Jewish characteristics, by which I mean the traits such as humor, love of learning, and entrepreneurship, which vulgar so-called intellectuals in the West attribute to the Jews, are modern.
Characteristics quite unknown during most of Jewish history and appeared only when the totalitarian Jewish community began to lose its power.
He goes on to say, the Jewish religion governed the details of daily behavior in all aspects of life, both social and private, amongst the Jews themselves, as well as in their relation to non-Jews.
It was then literally true that a Jew could not even drink a glass of water in the home of a non-Jew.
Remember, of course, the Jews view themselves as the chosen people, the chosen race of God.
And their view, at least the textual view, of Non-Jews is not, I guess you could say, rabidly flattering, which we'll get to in a bit.
The Lurianic Kabbalah was a school of Jewish mysticism that dominated Judaism and Madonna from the late 16th to the early 19th century.
And one of its basic tenets is the absolute superiority of the Jewish soul and body over the non-Jewish soul and body.
All right, so the Enlightenment movement, which was really, it had a lot to do with a lot of complicated things which I've gone into in other shows, but it spread the concepts of rationality, reason, empiricism, and individualism, as well as the Baconianly developed scientific method throughout Europe.
And it challenged a lot of religious traditions in the process.
It spread Deism, which was the belief that there was a divine creator, but he basically started the motor and then let the lawnmower run itself and took off somewhere else.
And it spread agnosticism and outright atheism and was a great challenge to the mystical power of the religious authorities.
This, of course, included Judaism.
The rabbi stranglehold still prevented Jews from exploring these new ideas.
Very, very briefly, one of the things that happened was in the 11th and 12th centuries, they came up with some really impressive improvements in farming methods.
They discovered how to plant and nurture winter crops, which meant you didn't basically have to half-starve to death during the winter, so they grew turnips and stuff in the winter.
They also invented a shoulder harness for the horses and cattle.
Before there was a harness that the more weight they pulled, they'd choke.
So the shoulder harness allowed them to pull more plows and so on to dig the crops deeper, keep them safer from birds.
So in some places in Europe you saw a 5 to 10 to 15 fold times increase in crop production and this meant fewer people were needed on the farms and it also produced and provided the excess food that is necessary for the development of cities.
When you start developing cities you lay down the potential.
for industrialization because you have an excess labor force, some of whom are there voluntarily because they are not needed on the farm, and some of them are there involuntarily because their lands would be basically stolen by aristocrats during the enclosure movement.
Now, when you start to have the growth of the cities, you start to get the growth of the intellectuals, you revive book culture, and there was a refocus and reemphasizing on the Greco-Roman texts of law and philosophy that had been lost to the West and held by the Muslims for many centuries.
And one of the important ideas was equality before the law.
And this idea began to take hold in many European countries.
And at the same time, after Luther nailed his thesis to the church door in Wittenberg, there was hundreds of years of religious warfare as the various sects of Christianity, of course there was the main Catholic group and then there was the divided up Protestant groups, there's the Evangelians, the Calvinists, the Anabaptists, the Lutherans, and so on.
And they all tried to gain control of the state in order to impose their will on others.
And this is where the separation of church and state basically came from.
It's after hundreds of years of a general religious slaughterhouse and pretty much seppuku by religion on the part of the Western states They began to think of maybe we should have a separation of church and state.
And the same thing will happen eventually once we suffer enough of the separation of state and economics, but that's perhaps a topic for another time.
So once the Greco-Roman ideas of equality before the law began to take hold, and the separation of church and state began to take hold, states began to refuse to collaborate with the rabbis.
Not only did they refuse to collaborate with the rabbis and imprison or kill non-compliant Jews, but religious persecutions were now discouraged and sometimes actively prohibited.
And this, of course, is very bad for the priestly class, right?
The priestly class, the rabbi class, they develop their skills in conjunction with secular powers to have intellectual and moral and mystical domination over a particular tribe.
And they don't give up, of course, without a fight, as we'll see.
Even the notorious Nicholas I of Russia, who was known for persecuting Jews, began to actively undermine the rabbinical dictatorships.
In the late 1830s, for example, the holy rabbi of a small Jewish town in Ukraine was severely punished for ordering the murder of a heretic.
The rabbi and his men threw the victim in the boiling water of the local baths, expecting to get away with it.
As they normally would, but the legal authorities of Russia refused to turn the other way.
In other words, rather than killing people for non-compliance or having them in prison for non-compliance, which in the later Middle Ages and Enlightenment was pretty much a death sentence, you actually had to try and convince people of the quality of your ideas through debate and argument rather than through indoctrination and intimidation.
And it doesn't work so well for people who are not rational, let's say.
So as the rabbis began to lose the power, because they couldn't basically order hits on non-compliant members, as the rabbis began to lose their power, fears of assimilation and cultural breakdown began to spread in Jewish communities.
Without force, without violence, without the sword of the state, what was to stop Jews from rejecting Judaism and exploring Enlightenment ideas?
So, once they began to be free of the threat of coercion, some Jews decided to challenge the tenets of Orthodox Judaism.
They started to learn modern languages and pursued secular education.
The movement of Jewish emancipation brought about a split in the traditionally terrified and cohesive Jewish settlements.
Many Jews from Western Europe embraced the idea of cultural and social integration, while Eastern European Jewish communities largely retained their religious structure.
Russia, broadly speaking, Russia and Germany did not go through the Enlightenment for a variety of reasons.
In Russia the power of the ruling class was so strong and in Germany there was just non-stop religious warfare.
They didn't really go through the Enlightenment and this is one of the reasons why they ended up as the two great dictatorships of the 20th century, National Socialism and Communism.
So there were two primary trends among the more secular Jews of the West.
Many of the descendants of rabbis, such as Karl Marx, Moses Hess, and Rosa Luxemburg, developed the theoretical foundations of communism and socialism, while Jews coming from poor and underprivileged We're typically more attracted to accumulating wealth in the growing free market.
So you can sort of think of one of the great Jewish descendant oppositions is Karl Marx versus Ayn Rand.
And Ayn Rand was the daughter of course of a bourgeoisie who had his livelihood and income stolen by communists.
And Karl Marx was the descendant of a rabbi who converted to Christianity for survival reasons.
And this blowback is important.
I'll talk about this at the end of the presentation, but when you start taking away the power of the exquisitely well-tuned verbal abusers known as the priestly class, they can morph and they can change to still have dominance in other
Language-based cloud castles of imprisonment so you can easily fairly easily switch from religiosity to Communism which is one of the reasons why communism opposed religiosity so strongly because it was a direct competitor it's like one mafia group opposing another mafia group and This is one of the things that happens to you always forget everyone forgets about the playback.
It's like blowback It's like yay age of reason.
It's like oh no now we have totalitarianism of the 20th century and So, what really was the birth of what is called modern Zionism?
Well, facing virtual extinction, or at least the destruction of their power and authority over their subjects, the Jewish rabbis scrambled to find a way to maintain some sense of power and authority.
So they needed a powerful mission, a call to arms idea, to keep people under their control, and something which would appeal to the growing secularism among the Jews.
In other words, it couldn't be specifically mystical or religious.
Now, in 1861, the renowned Rabbi Zweihirsch Kalischer published a book called Quest for Zion, where he advocated immediate reclamation of the Holy Land, because salvation of the Jews, as foretold by the prophets, could only come about in the natural way, by self-help, and did not need the advent of the Messiah.
So, of course, the Jews are waiting to return to the Holy Land, where they were expelled many millennia ago.
They're waiting for the Messiah.
to come back.
And the rabbis, fearing that they were losing their power and experiencing the loss of their power, decided to create a mission.
And the mission was, let's go get the Holy Land back.
We don't need to wait for no Messiah.
This is going to be our new gig, and this is what's going to keep us all together, and this is going to be the mission which we can be in charge of.
Other influential rabbis quickly adopted this idea and established numerous Lovers of Zion organizations throughout Eastern Europe.
The purpose of these organizations was to encourage Jews to immigrate to Palestine.
Despite its religious roots, the Lovers of Zion movement would later become foundational in the more secular Zionism, a nationalist ideology that promoted the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
The Promised Land was now promised to be within reach by this new group of rabbis, and many Jews found its powerful symbolism enthralling.
Not only did rabbis remain relevant, but the possibility of establishing a Jewish nation or state would further solidify their authority.
Moreover, religious Jews no longer had to fear assimilation into European societies.
Now, this of course created yet another split, as ideas tend to do in mystical communities.
Orthodox Jews saw it as a gross violation of the oath their ancient ancestors made to God, which was to wait for the Messiah to take them back to the Promised Land.
Jews weren't supposed to migrate to Israel until a holy Messiah leads them back from exile.
Ignoring this promise was a fundamental sin against Judaism.
Now, also there were, and this is something that when you study history is always kind of jaw-dropping, there were native Palestinian Jews who'd lived peacefully among Arabs for centuries.
And they also opposed this new movement, seeing it as a threat to the stability of the region.
There had been only one small conflict between Arabs and Jews since the 11th century.
Some native Jews were even assassinated by Jewish militias for trying to undermine the Zionist movement, right?
So you've got a bunch of Jews living in Palestine peacefully with the Arabs and they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, don't come here with your promised land stuff because, you know, we're getting along fine and we have for hundreds and hundreds of years.
So the idea that the Jews and the Arabs can't coexist peacefully is falsified, is proven as false by centuries of peaceful coexistence history.
The core ideas of Zionism began to spread among secular Jews as well.
Moses Hess, a friend and collaborator of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, became interested in the creation of a Jewish state, supposedly as a reaction to German anti-Semitism.
He used his influence as a founder of socialism to promote the idea of Labour Zionism.
So the crossover between the descendants of rabbis, the sons of rabbis, socialism, communism, and Zionism, or Jewish nationalism, is quite a complicated and potent group.
So Hess, alongside other labor Zionists, believed Jewish bankers would be able to bribe the Turks into allowing Jewish settlers in Palestine, because the Turks were in charge, thus enabling a Jewish proletariat to slowly construct a nation-state.
Within several decades, the labor Zionist movement eclipsed all other organizations and became incredibly influential in the establishment of Israel.
And you can read Alan Dershowitz's The Case for Israel.
To find out more about the program of buying up land.
Now, of course, buying up land in most countries does not give you the right to create your own state.
Otherwise, I'd have an anarchic state of my house.
So, the buying up of land with the purpose of creating your own state is not taken particularly well by the local secular authorities.
So, it's important to know about Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian journalist and writer who's considered to be the father of modern political Zionism.
Even though he was an atheist, Herzl quickly recognized the importance of religion in promoting Zionism.
After securing the support of influential rabbis from the Lovers of Zion movement, he appealed to the largely leftist Jewish intellectuals, as well as rich Jewish businessmen who had the money to finance the colonization of Israel.
To reconcile the differences between these two groups, Herzl proposed a compromise between socialism and capitalism.
So the lefty Jewish intellectuals are really great at spreading the message and rousing people and framing it in a way that motivates More and more secular Jews, but they don't have a lot of money because, you know, leftist.
Just look at Marx.
As his mother said, I wish he were better at accumulating capital than just writing about it.
So you need the businessmen to get the money to pursue your political agenda.
And so to the socialists, he said, we'll have a welfare state.
And to the capitalists, he said, we're going to have a capitalist system.
And this has a lot to do with the foundation of the modern mixed economy, where you have the remnants of a free market system with an increasingly growing welfare state.
By which, of course, I mean the military-industrial complex, as well as that which benefits the poorer classes.
So the core strategy of political Zionists consisted of Jewish intellectuals pressuring European states to support their movement, while rich Jews provided the funding necessary for lobbying and buying up land in Palestine.
Lastly, religious groups supplied the human resources necessary for the colonization of Palestine.
Not a huge number of people are like, ooh, desert, really?
Arabs all around?
Jews I've never met who have a completely different society?
I think I'm quite comfortable where I am, right?
So a lot of... To get the people to go buy the land and live there, you needed to get the Jewish religious groups interested as well.
Now, Herzl was very critical of what he called assimilated Jews, because outside of financial and political support, they refused to fully commit to Zionism by colonizing Palestine.
It's like, oh, it's really hot there if there's no air conditioning for at least a hundred years, so I think I'll just sit here on my ottoman by the banks of the river and wait for the Messiah to come lead us back, because maybe he'll come with some air conditioning.
He claimed that many an apparent friend of the Jews turns out on careful inspection to be nothing more than an anti-Semite of Jewish origin disguised as a philanthropist.
Assimilated Jews saw no reason to leave the comforts of Europe to live a rural life in Palestine.
Indeed, most Jewish settlers in Palestine were poor socialists or religious Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia.
I guess if you live in Russia, the desert doesn't look all too bad in February.
So let's look at the second rise of Judaism.
Mixing secular nationalism and Judaism created an explosive environment, and as the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, as I mentioned, who'd lived there peacefully for centuries, feared it destabilized Jewish relationships with the Arabs.
Abraham, aptly named Cook, Cooke, Abraham Cooke, the Chief Rabbi of Palestine between 1920 and 1935, stated that the difference between a Jewish soul and the souls of non-Jews, all of them in all different levels, is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.
To get this, I mean, to really process this, you know, it's important to see groups as their enemies, see them when you're trying to figure out a conflict.
It doesn't mean that the enemies are right.
It just means that you need to understand what the enemies want, uh, and what they're seeing in order to help resolve the conflict.
So, um, I guess if you're over 40, you probably remember the, um, the hell of apartheid in South Africa where you have the largely white ruling class and a largely black underclass.
Well, I don't remember anyone in the white government saying that the difference between a white soul and the souls of non-whites is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.
In other words, I don't believe that they were viewed post-slavery in the West.
Blacks were viewed as livestock and so on.
So this is some pretty strong stuff.
Of course, if you are one of the People to whom the label livestock has been applied, you may not particularly welcome an incursion of this ideology into your neck of the woods.
Rabbi Kook attempted to reconcile Zionism with Orthodox Judaism, and his teachings were based on the Lurianic Kabbalah.
Kook's work became foundational through the development of Religious Zionism, a movement that grew rapidly after the establishment of Israel and still shapes the politics of the country.
Now, once they got the, let's head back to the Holy Land, screw the Messiah, once they got their power back through that program, rabbis and their followers sought to recreate the pre-enlightenment Jewish communities.
This desire still represents a powerful undercurrent in the Israeli society, right?
So the pre-enlightenment were rabbinical, as they were described, rabbinical dictatorships enforced through violence.
As Israel Shahak points out, quote, many of the motives behind Israeli politics which so bewilder the poor confused Western friends of Israel are perfectly explicable once they are seen simply as reaction.
Reaction in the political sense, which this word has had for the last 200 years.
A forced and in many respects innovative and therefore illusory return to the closed society of the Jewish past.
In other words, the rabbis are seeking to regain their violent and coercive control over other Jews.
An article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz echoed a similar sentiment.
Quote, between Stockholm and Tehran, Israel of 2009 is much closer to Tehran.
From birth to death, from circumcision to funeral, from the establishment of the state to the establishment of the last of the illegal outposts in the West Bank, we are operating in the shadow of the commandments of religion.
We should be honest with ourselves and admit already, this country, the country, Israel, is too religious.
Please understand I'm not trying to say in any way shape or form that the Islamic societies that surround them are not religion.
There's no concept in Islam of the separation of church and state.
And I mean the only laws in a secular, sorry, the only laws in Islamic government that aren't governed by religious commandments are things like traffic signals and stuff that has no religious content.
So, but it's not as well known the degree to which this occurs in Israel.
Furthermore, secular Israeli intellectuals fear that the separation of church and state in Israel is no longer possible, given that the average birth rate of Orthodox Jews is nearly three times higher than the rest of the Israelis.
Indoctrination is easier than conversion, right?
So you basically, if you want to grow your movement, you breed children that you can indoctrinate with your value system, because children are helpless to resist indoctrination because they're so utterly dependent on their parents.
This is a challenge.
You can't separate church and state because the Orthodox Jews desperately want the power of the state to enforce conformity on their followers, and they're breeding like rabbits, I guess.
According to a Haaretz columnist, many young Israelis flee the country because it's become a xenophobic theocracy, with a government in which the politicians ask not what they can do for the citizenry, but what the citizenry can do for the state.
So with this background information in mind, certain aspects of current Israeli society begin to make a lot more sense.
So in 2009, you may remember, an Israeli rabbi published King's Torah, a controversial book that was described as a manual providing religious justifications and guidelines for killing non-Jews.
Leading Israeli rabbis held a conference to defend the author from public backlash.
Thou shalt not kill originally was Thou shalt not kill other Jews.
Everyone else was kind of Fair game, I guess.
An article by the Israeli newspaper Mariv provides an overview of the book.
Quote, In a chapter entitled Deliberate Harm to Innocents, the book explains that a war is directly mainly against the pursuers, but those who belong to the enemy nation are also considered the enemy because they are assisting murderers.
A chilling quote from the book states, there is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately and not only during combat with adults.
And generally, when you're talking about baby murder, it may be time to take a pause in your movement, but that has not happened to some, of course, of the rabbis.
While Muslims are known for their religious fanaticism, Judaic fundamentalism is largely invisible outside Israel's borders.
So what are some of the commandments in the Jewish text that cause concern to the Muslims and to the non-Jews, and of course to the Christians.
And we've got sources for all of this, of course, in the low bar to the video and in the notes of the podcast.
So here's one.
If a heathen smites a Jew, he is worthy of death.
He who smites an Israelite on the jaw is as though he had thus assaulted the divine presence.
Right?
So the death penalty for hitting a Jew is commanded.
Any heathen or a heathen who studies the Torah deserves death.
He is guilty as one who violates a betrothed maiden who is stoned.
So you stone to death anyone who cracks open the Torah and reads it.
If a Jew has coitus, making the beast with two backs as Shakespeare said, if a Jew has coitus with a Gentile woman, whether she be a child of three or an adult, whether married or unmarried, and even if he is a minor aged only nine years and one day, because he had willful coitus with her, she must be killed.
As is the case with the Beast, because through her a Jew got into trouble, right?
So if you rape a child, I guess this would include W. Allen, if you rape a child, then the child must be put to death because the child got a Jew into trouble.
I'm not sure a lot of feminists have been really complaining about, you know, blaming the victim in this situation.
A booklet published by the Central Region Command of the Israeli army stated, When our forces come across civilians during a war or in hot pursuit or in a raid, so long as there is no certainty that those civilians are incapable of harming our forces, then according to the Halakha, they may and even should be killed.
Under no circumstances should an Arab be trusted, even if he makes an impression of being civilized.
In war, when our forces storm the enemy, they are allowed and even enjoined by the Halakha to kill even good civilians, that is, civilians who are ostensibly good.
And of course this is all well known to the Arabs and the Palestinians, that basically this view of non-Jews by the Jews is well known.
Alright, so what is the agenda?
And it's really not that much of a secret agenda.
What is the agenda of the Zionist movement?
Psychologist and Judaic scholar Baelus Thomas wrote, quote, The political Zionists made three assumptions.
One, that the assimilation of Jews was an illusion because anti-Semitism was eternal and universal.
The solution being sanctuary in a sovereign state for Jews.
So, Jews can't be assimilated because they're just, you know, anti-semitism is a permanent and universal aspect of any society that they're in and therefore, according to this, views of the political Zionists, you need a sovereign state for Jews.
Two, that diaspora Jewry, diaspora means the Jews scattered, right?
The 50 million Jews or however many it is, still not in Israel, the Jews scattered throughout the world.
That diaspora Jewry would see themselves as objects of pity and welcomed the Zionist cure.
And three, that the use of force to dispossess the indigenous Arab population in Palestine was acceptable.
Right?
So, again, this is not to describe the belief of Jews.
I mean, I've got some lovely Jewish people in my life, and they don't believe any of this stuff.
But, I've done a heavy job of criticizing Christians for some of the commandments within the Christian texts.
I don't see any reason, because I'm an egalitarian, to deny the Jews the same privilege of examination.
Which is that, according to the Jewish texts, again this does not mean the beliefs of all the Jews, but according to the Jewish texts, If the farmer wants to build a house and there's cattle in the way, you drive the cattle off.
And if the wolves are in the way, you drive the wolves off.
And if the wolves attack you, you shoot them.
Because, according to the text and according to some of the more fundamentalist Jews, they are cattle.
Now the last point, that the use of force to dispossess the indigenous Arab population is acceptable is fully supported by the writings of influential Zionist leaders.
In an 1895 diary, our friend Theodor Herzl wrote, quote, We shall endeavor to expel the poor population across the border unnoticed, procuring employment for it in the transit countries, but denying it any employment in our own country.
He went on to say that both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.
Herzl's position was widely accepted by most Zionists.
Ze'ev Jabotinsky, an influential Zionist leader in Russia, wrote the following in a 1923 essay called The Iron Wall.
Quote, Indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement, i.e.
the Jews.
This is how the Arabs will behave and go on behaving so long as they possess a gleam of hope that they can prevent Palestine from becoming the land of Israel.
Nothing in the world can cause them to relinquish this hope, precisely because they are not a rabble, but a living people.
All colonization must continue in defiance of the will of the native population.
Therefore, it can continue and develop only under the shield of force, which comprises an iron wall through which the local population can never break through.
Now, this is what the Zionist plan was in Palestine under the Turks when they began to move the Jewish settlers in.
But, where did they get a hold of this overwhelming force in order to create Israel?
Well, Britain at the time was the greatest imperial power in the world.
Yay, ancestors!
Ah, you bastards.
And so it became the focal point of Zionist efforts.
As Herzl wrote in 1898, from the first moment I entered the Zionist movement, my eyes were directed towards England, because I saw that by reason of the general situation of things there, it was the Archimedean point where the lever could be applied.
Right?
Archimedes said, give me a lever big enough and I can move the world.
So, World War I, the greatest catastrophe ever before the world.
In 1916, Germany was getting close to winning the war.
The British population was starving.
They had like a week or two of food left because the Germans had the first time submarine encirclement of the British Isles.
And France, of course, was a complete wreck because that's where most of the fighting on the Western Front was taking place.
And the British government most likely would have ended in revolution if they lost the war because so many millions of British and French and of course German young men had been slaughtered.
In fact, in my ancestry, three out of four brothers died in the First World War.
We were a fighting family, really just a dying family as most fighting families were at that time.
And so England was desperate to not, of course, lose the war, which would have toppled the British aristocracy and the British government, I would imagine, at the time.
So, beginning in 1916, as Britain's resources were nearing exhaustion while fighting the Central Powers in World War I, it became apparent that new forces needed to join the Allies for the war to be won by England and France.
British politicians realized that both the money and political influence of Jews were necessary to get America and Russia into the war.
So they decided to help the Zionist movement establish their Jewish homeland.
Right?
So this is important and if you read up on Hitler, crazy evil lunatic, but again it's important to understand the enemies so that you know what they want so that you can try and find some way to resolve the dispute.
This is what Hitler called the stab in the back and was one of the reasons why he became such an anti-Semite.
The British support for Zionism became official with the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, which took the form of a letter sent by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Baron Walter Rothschild.
Following the declaration, the British Empire occupied the lands of Palestine and established a mandatory government.
Of course, the Jews pressured and encouraged America, of course, to get into the war as Woodrow Wilson did in 1917 after being elected, I think, a year earlier with the promise to stay out of the European conflict.
In a 1918 petition sent to the government of Mandatory Palestine, Arab political organizations in Palestine expressed strong disapproval of the Balfour Declaration.
Quote, We always sympathize profoundly with the persecuted Jews and their misfortunes in other countries, but there is wide difference between such sympathy and the acceptance of such a nation ruling over us and disposing of our affairs.
So, we understand that the blacks in Africa resented white rule.
Of course we understand it, because the whites treated them as less than equals.
They did not openly declare them to have the souls of cattle, right?
So, the Arabs were well acquainted with the Jewish writings about their views towards non-Jews and didn't want them ruling over them.
After surveying the Arab public opinion, President Woodrow Wilson's King Crane Commission stated in 1919 that, quote, the Zionists look forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine.
Of course, this sentiment was strongly opposed by Palestinian Arabs, who comprised about 90% of the population.
The Commission recommended Zionists abandon the goal of a Jewish state and limit Jewish immigration to the area.
This is one of the great and horrible ironies of history, of course, that when America came into the First World War, it gave the British and the French enough power to impose the Treaty of Versailles on Germany, which really set the stage for the Second World War.
The King Crane Report, despite its startling findings, had no effect on international policies regarding Palestine, since when have empires cared much about the indigenous population who has no resources to offer them compared to people who can offer them resources, money, credit and loans?
Lord Balfour expressed his views of Arab protests in a 1919 memorandum, quote, In Palestine, we do not even propose to consult the inhabitants of the country.
The four great powers have made commitments to Zionism.
And Zionism, whether it is good or bad, right or wrong, has its roots in ancient tradition, in immediate needs, and in hopes for the future that are much more important than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who presently inhabit Palestine.
Listen to that 700,000 number.
It will tragically return all too soon.
The failure of peaceful protests and an increase in ethnic tensions contributed to the 1920 Arab riots in Jerusalem, where four Jews and five Arabs died, after living in peace side by side for hundreds of years.
Tasked with finding the reasons behind the riots, the British Commission concluded, quote, The Balfour Declaration is undoubtedly the starting point of the whole trouble.
The Commission predicted further escalation in the conflict, but its report was ignored.
Much like what happened with the King Crane Commission.
Ah!
Nothing more fertile for intellectual achievement than being on a government commission.
Violent conflicts continued to escalate and culminated in the bloodiest Arab uprising in the history of Mandatory Palestine.
In 1936, Arabs protesting against British colonial rule and mass Jewish immigration were threatened with martial law.
This triggered a violent revolt that lasted for three years and was ultimately crushed with considerable brutality by the British Army.
This was the missing sword of the state that the Rabbis lost control of during the Enlightenment.
They had it back through their arrangements with the British.
Approximately 5,000 Arabs died during the conflict and thousands more were injured.
Out of a population of 700,000, that's quite a lot.
That means that pretty much somebody in your extended family or your neighbor's extended family was murdered or injured during this conflict.
This would be the equivalent of millions of Americans being killed.
David Ben-Gurion, hailed as Israel's main founder and the state's first Prime Minister, expressed the Zionist point of view in a 1938 address.
In our political argument abroad, we minimize Arab opposition to us, but let us not ignore the truth among ourselves.
When we say that the Arabs are the aggressors and we defend ourselves, this is only half the truth.
Who initiated the occupation and invasion and imposition of a state?
It was not the Palestinians.
It was not the Arabs.
It was the British sword and the Jewish rabbis.
Ethnic fighting is only one aspect Sorry, the quote continues.
Ethnic fighting is only one aspect of the conflict, which is in its essence a political one.
And politically, we are the aggressors and they defend themselves.
Militarily, it is we who are on the defensive who have the upper hand.
But in the political sphere, they are superior.
Right?
Politically, says the founder of Israel and his first prime minister.
Politically, we the Jews are the aggressors and they the Palestinians defend themselves.
He said, the country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country, while we are still outside.
With the help of the British, the Jewish population in Palestine had increased from about 8% in 1917 to about 30% in 1947.
However, despite their efforts to buy up land, Jews owned less than 6% of Palestine's territory.
Palestinians were pretty aware, and there was lots of social pressure to not sell the Jews, of course.
In September 1947, the British government announced that its mandate would end on May 15, 1948, ruling over the territory, and so the United Nations was entrusted with settling the territorial dispute between the Jews and Arabs.
In November 1947, the UN adopted a resolution that intended to partition Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state, with a significant Arab population.
Right?
So you got an Arab state, almost completely Arab, and a Jewish state with a significant Arab population.
Jerusalem, which of course the three major Old Testament religions find a particular real estate interest, Jerusalem was to become an international state.
Despite being the minority, Jews were to be given 56% of the territory.
Not overly shockingly, both sides refused to accept the UN resolution.
Jews wanted more of the land, while Arabs were refusing to let them get more than what the Jewish settlers already owned legally.
David Ben-Gurion expressed his disappointment with the UN plan, quote, There are 40% non-Jews in the areas allocated to the Jewish state.
This composition is not a solid basis for a Jewish state.
And we have to face this new reality.
With all its severity and distinctness, such a demographic balance questions our ability to maintain Jewish sovereignty.
Only a state with at least 80% Jews is a viable and stable state.
But given that Jews were owning 6% of the land, you can't possibly have a lot of land and a Jewish majority at the same time.
You could have a Jewish majority in a very tiny area, but of course that's not what they wanted.
So, David Ben-Gurion's statement alluded to a grim series of events that were about to unfold.
Now, you probably don't know all of this, but trust me, the Arabs do, the people in Palestine do, the Muslims do.
Deeply, and they know this like you know 9-11.
As the end of the British Mandate approached, the British Army started withdrawing from Palestine, allowing the Jews to execute Plan Dalet, the culmination of a carefully designed purge of Arabs that had been in development for decades.
Beginning in December 1947, several days after the UN Resolution was adopted, the Jewish Army started to attack Arab settlements, surrounding them on three flanks and leaving the fourth open for evacuation.
Massacres ensued whenever this tactic didn't work.
And evidence suggests that some of the slaughters were intentional.
Israel concealed these crimes for decades, but evidence slowly started leaking out of the state archives, fleshing out the testimonials of countless Palestinians.
However, Israeli scholars who exposed the truth about the ethnic cleansing were largely ignored by Western media, which loves to, of course, simplify everything it can get its claws on.
Israeli historian Ilan Pape described the massacre that took place in the village of Deir Yassin.
As they burst into the village, the Jewish soldiers sprayed the houses with machine gun fire, killing many of the inhabitants.
The remaining villagers were then gathered in one place and murdered in cold blood.
Their bodies abused while a number of the women were raped and then killed.
One of the survivors, twelve years old at the time, recalled the slaughter of his family.
They took us out one after the other, shot an old man, and when one of his daughters cried, she was shot too.
Then they called my brother Mohammed and shot him in front of us, and when my mother yelled, bending over him, carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her, they shot her too.
The grandson of a woman who survived the attack on the large village of Bassa described the events that took place.
My maternal grandmother was a teenager when Israeli troops entered Bassa and ordered all the young men to be lined up and executed in front of one of the churches.
My grandmother watched as two of her brothers, one 21, the other 22, and recently married, were executed by the Israeli soldiers.
Let's look at the percent of Jews in Palestine from the late 19th century through to the founding of Israel.
So you see less than 10 percent, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 percent and then it goes up.
Of course it's slowly creeping up and then after the British abandoned the UN, had this resolution and the Jews basically took over a bunch of stuff, it goes massively up.
So, what is often described as a civil war between the Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine, the British Mandatory Palestine in the past, was in fact little more than an ethnic cleansing campaign carried out by Zionists.
Jewish soldiers would sometimes fight small militias who were trying to defend their homes, not a bloodthirsty Arab army.
You need to process this to understand the perspective.
of the victims.
The results of the campaign were devastating for the Palestinians.
500 villages and 11 urban neighborhoods were burned to the ground.
Thousands of Arabs were massacred and 700,000 expelled from their homeland.
Right?
Thousands of Arabs massacred, given the population of Palestine at the time, would be the equivalent, if we just say it's 5,000, of more than 1,000,000 Americans murdered by an occupying force.
More than 1,000,000 Americans.
America went insane over thousands dead, 3,000 and change dead on 9-11.
It's a brutal attack and a horrible death count.
The Palestinians dealt with the American equivalent of millions killed, and the equivalent of 200 million Americans forced to leave America, which was 700,000 expelled from their homeland.
The equivalent of 200 million Americans forced to leave America.
Would you remember that?
Since 1946, Palestine has lost 75% of its original territory.
has lost 75% of its original territory.
So, to understand the Palestinian perspective, this would be the equivalent of 136 million Muslims immigrating to the United States, establishing an Arab country on its territory, and leaving only Alaska and Texas to and leaving only Alaska and Texas to the Americans.
And further, creating settlements and incursions into Alaska and Texas.
I don't think I need to describe to you what that would be like emotionally.
Israel declared independence on May 14th, 1948.
For the Palestinians, May 15th, the day after, became Nakba Day, or Day of the Catastrophe.
While Israeli Jews annually celebrate their independence day, Palestinians commemorate the tragic events that took place during the brutal ethnic cleansing.
In their book, Gaza in Crisis, Noam Chomsky and Hélène Pape provide insight into the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Quote, The ideology that produced the 1948 ethnic cleansing is one that keeps refugees in their camps today, discriminates against Palestinians inside Israel, and oppresses those under occupation in the West Bank and imprisonment in the Gaza Strip.
Seen from that perspective, a two-state solution is a small lid trying to cover a huge boiling pot, and whenever it is put on, it drowns.
The resolution of a conflict can only occur when such a lid can be put firmly on the past and bring its horrors and evils to a close.
However, if the horrors committed by the Nazis continue to live on in the minds of the Jews, how can we expect Palestinians to forget what was done to them?
I'm not equating the Jews with the Nazis, but from the standpoint of the victims, there are similarities.
One of Israel's most committed allies has always been the United States.
President Truman officially recognized the creation of the State of Israel on the same day Jews announced their Declaration of Independence.
Adjusted for inflation, the United States has provided Israel with over one quarter of a trillion dollars, $233.7 billion since the country was founded in 1948, making it the largest recipient of U.S.
economic and military assistance since World War II.
On average, Israel annually receives more than $4.3 billion in foreign assistance, about 2% of Israel's GDP.
In recent years, military aid accounts for 75% of taxpayer money sent to Israel.
You can't morally force people to...
Anyway.
U.S. support for Israel has been one of the main drivers behind Muslim hostility towards Americans.
In his letter to America, Osama bin Laden claimed that this is one of the main reasons behind the 9-11 attack.
He wrote, the British handed over Palestine with your help and your support to the Jews who have occupied it for more than 50 years.
Years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction and devastation.
The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes and you are the leaders of its criminals.
This was Osama Bin Laden's letter to America.
So, Now we go to history and philosophy conclusion land and I hope that it's of some value to you and thank you of course for watching through the presentation.
Military aid should be stopped to Israel.
Of course.
You can't force people to support a regime that they oppose.
Foreign aid as a whole is a monstrous system of the redistribution, a forced redistribution of wealth.
So one thing that can occur of course is the end of the military aid.
I'd like you to just imagine the kind of conflict that is occurring between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
I'd like you to imagine that happening at a physics conference or at a biology conference or at a mathematics conference.
It's inconceivable that rocket mortars and landmines and airstrikes would be used to reconcile disputes in These fields.
Or someone who lost the contract to some other company blowing up their building.
This is not, this doesn't happen except in the realm of nationalism and religion.
Irrational and absolutist ideologies.
So you can have irrationality and get along with people.
Everybody, you know, you can believe in crazy stuff and generally get along in society.
But when you have irrationality plus moral absolutism, particularly when you have, you know, these eschatological end times, Armageddon, you know, save us, kill everyone else, nonsense going on, then you have irrationalism combined with absolutism.
These two are a deadly and toxic and permanent poison to the human constitution of the world.
Mysticism, irrationality, is a certainty without a rational methodology.
I am certain of X, I have no way to prove it.
I have no way to convince anyone else.
This is why the rabbis and the imams have to use force.
This is why the Christian leaders used to have to use force.
This is why we had the separation of church and state, to survive irrationality and absolutism combined.
And so If you have two groups confined together who have irrational absolutes and end times disasters imminent, then they are going to end up in conflict.
I mean you can see it all over the world.
You can see it in Northern Ireland.
You can see it in Iraq.
You can see it in Palestine and Israel.
You can see it all over the world.
The people who have both irrationalities and absolutes will fight until One or the other is vanquished and it never ever quite happens because the more pressure and force you apply to your victims, the more strongly they will fight to resist you and the more strongly they will call for the aid of others who will come running to be part of the great general suicidal drama of irrational absolutes that can literally engulf the entire world in flames.
So this is very, very important.
We have methodologies for resolving disputes.
We have the scientific method, we have reason, we have mathematical logic, we have does the building stand up for engineers, we have the free market and money for the allocation of resources.
We have great methodologies for resolving disputes.
They're just not part of religion and nationalism.
The third point I'd like to make is when you begin to spread rationality in the world, there's blowback from the verbal abuse parasitical class known as the priestly class.
I'm going to be perfectly frank here.
I am a strong atheist and this is my argument.
That there are the whole class of people who have dedicated themselves to dominating other people through language and force.
And some of them are secular and some of them are religious.
And when you start to increase rationality, everyone's happy to flee these communities or flee these mindsets.
But we really need to continue to work on spreading rationality throughout the world and opposing.
To be a good man means to oppose immoral people.
To be a good woman means to oppose immoral people.
To be a good doctor means to oppose illness.
You can't be a good doctor if you're not opposing illness.
To be a good person means to fight against using words and reason and evidence to fight against the irrationalities of the world that consume propagandized adults and propagandized helpless children.
So there's always this kind of blowback to this kind of irrationality.
My little pitch, of course, is that I run this big philosophy show with your help and support.
You can help out this conversation at fdrural.com slash donate.
But most importantly, I hope that you will take the opportunity to have a look at my podcasts and my interviews and my books.
They're all free, no ads whatsoever.
So I hope that I will see you on the sunny side of reason and we can help pull as many people as we can out of the dank and historical and frankly,
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